I received an interesting email today, from Book Drum. It was an invitation to enter what they call a ‘tournament’ – a job advert masquerading as a sort of competition where you prepare a profile for them about a book that you like. First prize is £1000, second prize is £500, there are five runner-up prizes of £100 and they will be hiring some of the writers who submit entries to work for them full time. Quite different to preparing a CV for a job vacancy!
I find the concept that they’re promoting quite intriguing. There are samples at their site where you can see what they do: linking the book with ’images, music, maps, video, and all the other riches of the Internet’. As regular readers of this blog will know, I do all of these things from time to time, (e.g. the video of Rudolph Nureyev in my post about Colum McCann’s Dancer) but I admit that I’m not quite sure why I do it. It jazzes up the blog, and it might perhaps inspire someone to get hold of a copy of the book, or maybe clarify something for a younger reader who has never heard of e.g. Nureyev. But if someone is actually reading a book I can’t imagine anyone putting it down to check out multimedia stuff about it online as they read. Especially not if they mostly read in bed like I do, or in coffee shops, or at the breakfast table, or doctors’ waiting rooms.
I know also that a lot of people don’t like to read reviews online or anywhere else before reading a book. That’s not just because some reviewers are very careless about forewarning spoilers but also because these readers want to form their own impressions independently, before reading anything else about the book. I don’t think that they would warm to the Book Drum experience.
But maybe all those people who are *raving on* about their Kindles on 21st Century Fiction, or the iPhone apps enthusiasts read their books differently? Maybe ordinary old words on the page are not enough for them? It could be that this is the way books will be published in the future.
Quick, stock up with real ones for your old age, while you can!
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