Remember Thomas Kohnstamm? Well, he’s in the news again. His claims that Lonely Planet guides are not entirely trustworthy have irked a number of people, including, er, Lonely Planet. On their site, they address his charges, although they respond to one of his biggest complaints in a fairly vague manner:

5. Thomas claims he was not paid enough by Lonely Planet to do the job without shortcuts. While we ask a lot of our authors, we lead the industry in the fees we pay, and are committed to a yearly review of author fees. 

Yes, but what if no one in the travel-guide industry pays their correspondents enough to do a thorough job? Wouldn’t that be an interesting story? (And hardly unimaginable: many freelancing gigs pay so poorly that they rely on the notion of writers doing the work for free/for fun/for their resumes….)

There’s plenty of chatter at the Lonely Planet forums.

BBC, which owns 75% of Lonely Planet, reports on the foofaraw (”Lonely Planet rebuts ‘fake’ claim“), and–hey, this is interesting:

Other travel writers, while not endorsing Mr Kohnstamm’s methods, said he was reporting genuine failures in the travel-writing industry - that writers are poorly paid, have to cover their own costs, and were expected to check a vast amount of detail.

As for myself, when Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? came across my desk, I had a strong feeling of deja vu, given that I had recently published a short story about a Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe travel writer (”If You Should Have Any Need at All“) in the Chicago Reader last December.

I’ve avoided mentioning the latest Harry Potter news–primarily because my fingers fight back when I try to type “J. K. Rowling”–but I must force them to obey. If you haven’t been following it, Rowling and Warner Brothers are suing tiny publisher RDR Books for RDR’s plan to publish Steven Vander Ark’s book, The Harry Potter Lexicon, based on his website of the same name.

RDR claims they’re operating in the long-lived tradition of literary companions, while Rowling calls it “wholesale theft.” RDR says they’ve paid the author a tiny advance for a small print run; Rowling clearly feels it sets a dangerous precedent.

Reasonable people, of course, can disagree on these matters, although reasonable people also might feel that a billionaire author could find some accommodation with a thousandaire publisher and an author who is quite clearly one of the author’s biggest fans. Pottermania would have happened without The Harry Potter Lexicon, of course, but it’s precisely that kind of effort that helped the phenomenon along.

But this besieged billionaire now finds herself forced to leave her castle and defend her very right to earn a living. The stress of fending off earnest lexicographers has forced the juggernaut of youth fantasy fiction to a standstill (”Rowling Testifies against Lexicon Author,” by Anemona Hartocollis, New York Times):

It has been so difficult, she said, that her normal writing life has been all but paralyzed by “stress and heartache.”

“It has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month,” she testified, at least once stoically holding back tears as she talked about the Potter books as if they were her children.

“You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again,” she said.

Really, Ms. Hartocollis, stoically?

And now Ms. Rowling is making Mr. Vander Ark, a former librarian, cry (”Sued by Harry Potter’s Creator, Lexicographer Breaks Down on the Stand,” by Anemona Hartocollis, NYT):

Then he burst out crying. “Sorry,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s been difficult because there’s been a lot of criticism, obviously, and that was never the intention.”

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

One of RDR’s lawyers makes a reasonable guess as to why Rowling is really pulling out the hammer and tongs (”Rowling to Testify in Trial Over Potter Lexicon,” by Motoko Rich, NYT):

David Hammer, another lawyer representing RDR Books, said he believed that Ms. Rowling was acting out of vanity. “She wants to be the only one to write this encyclopedia about Harry Potter,” he said. “She’s determined to write it, and she doesn’t want competitors.”

But, personally, based on the following remark, I think it boils down to aesthetics:

She also objected to what she called the book’s “facetious asides,” like a comment about whether Hagrid could fit into a booth at McDonald’s.

“I think it’s dire,” she said. “I think it’s atrocious.”

Coinciding with our Spotlight on Historical Fiction (REaD ALERT!), Robert Alexander, author of The Kitchen Boy (2003) and Rasputin’s Daughter (2006), is using a “live book club” to promote his newest novel, The Romanov Bride (2008). The Web, of course, offers authors a lot of ways to bring their work–and themselves–directly to the fans, and this strikes me as a pretty forward-thinking approach.

One humble suggestion, however: I’m not sure that a commercial for the broadcast merits its own blooper reel. (Follow the link, you’ll see what I mean.) In fact, I hope I never again see another blooper reel over the credits of anything, unless the footage features Jackie Chan falling off of something.

But Alexander’s work has been praised pretty highly by Booklist, so if his visual sensibility isn’t quite as finely tuned as his literary sensibility, I’ll cut him some slack.

I seem to remember a book written by 13 authors…oh, yes: Naked Came the Manatee (1997). And, in fact, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, et al appropriated the concept from a practical joke called Naked Came the Stranger (1969). Now there’s an Internet start-up that’s hoping to turn a hoax and a lark into a business model. According to Publishers Weekly (”WEbook Launches Collaborative Book-Writing Site,” by Lynn Andriani), WEbook “is hoping to do for novel writing what American Idol did for music and what Wikipedia did for information.”

Essentially, WEbook hopes that people will come to its site to write books and then vote on which ones should be published.

Within the site, there are dozens of (mostly nonfiction) subject areas where members can start writing. Members can designate their work as "private," which allows them to keep the rights and share it only with their friends, or make it "public," which is where WEbook makes its money: if a book garners enough votes from the WEbook community, WEbook copyedits, typesets and publishes the book, giving the author and contributors a 5% royalty on sales.

Their first book, Pandora, a thriller with 17 authors (but 34 total contributors), came out last month. Is it any good? Sample chapters are available at WEbook. Sample paragraphs:

Pandora took a deep breath. "You know I love you, but I can’t be with someone I don’t trust," she exhaled. "Is there something I should know?"

Chris shook his head in disbelief. How could the woman resting in the next room, a woman he’d only met twice, know something that only five other people in the world knew? How had she divined the secret Chris had carefully guarded since he was eighteen? What the hell was her secret?

Oh look, here’s another one: Naked Came the Phoenix (2001).

I started reading Paul Theroux’s new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, this morning. On page four, he quotes Pedro Almodovar:

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I had to laugh.

Fans of mystery, sf, and romance know well the second-class status that’s routinely conferred on genre fiction. The big reviews and big awards go to literary fiction; meanwhile, genre fans are checking out, buying, and reading books in numbers that even National Book Award winners dream about. Writers like Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy, and even Philip Roth are helping to bridge the divide, but meanwhile, genre discrimination continues.

I just finished writing “Another Look at” Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon for Booklist’s Mystery Issue (coming May 1), and my Vintage paperback carries on its cover two of the most jaw-droppingly astonishing quotes:

“Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” –The Boston Globe

“The Maltese Falcon is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well written novel.” –The Times Literary Supplement (London)

Granted, these blurbs are almost certainly contemporary to the novel, and we have come a long way since then.

But.

But. But. But.

How can anyone, in any era, have written such things? Did other writers also master the detective novel while somehow remaining poor writers? Were other terrific detective stories somehow badly written?

Over at Book Group Buzz, Neil Hollands recently did a nice post called “Conquering Genrephobia.” Check it out.

Has it already been a year since the New York Times reported on podcasted novels? NPR talks to Scott Sigler, one of the PodNovelists (TM) profiled in that story. Now this is a fiction-delivery vehicle I can get behind.

Well, it beats cell-phone novels, but I still don’t think this is the fiction-delivery vehicle for me. From the Guardian (”New look for the short story,” by Joel Rickett):

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

I started reading “The 21 Steps” but abandoned it after the scrolling maps made me feel a bit seasick. It’s an odd sensation, really: simple words can evoke a world in our imaginations, but as soon as the words are married to real-world images, they lose much of their power. Similarly, it can be fun to look at a map and imagine what the places really look like, but here, the Google satellite view just made me frustrated because I wanted to see what the place really looks like at street level and inside the buildings.

Anyway, here’s the site for all six stories. Three have been published and three more are still to come. Maybe I’ll like the others better than Cumming’s. I’m sure that gamers are more likely to like the project than I am….

From the Australian, a story about the British Society of Authors‘ fears that Internet will kill writing as we know it (”Writers lament effects of internet“):

Ms Chevalier said the century-old model by which authors were paid a mix of cash advances and royalties, was finished.

“It is a dam that’s cracking,” she said. “We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically.

… 

“For a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less, but in the long run it’s going to ruin the information. People will stop writing.”

Fortunately for these worried writers, there’s a terrific precedent already in place: the music business, when threatened by peer-to-peer filesharing, also tried to “plug the holes with legislation and litigation” and now enjoys more robust health than ever.

I kid, people, I kid.

It’s a complicated issue, but it’s certainly not the same as the crisis facing the owners of the music industry. And as someone who is intimately acquainted with the going pay rates for writing, I can say definitively that poor pay will not cause writers to stop working. Writing pays more and more poorly and yet more and more people want to be writers. If people only wrote for the money, then we’d have a problem on our hands.

Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote nearly 100 books in 90 years (and let’s not forget 2001) is dead. From the New York Times (”Arthur C. Clarke, 90, Fiction Writer, Dies,” by Gerald Jonas):

Mr. Clarke’s reputation as a prophet of the space age rests on more than a few accurate predictions. His visions helped bring about the future he longed to see. His contributions to the space program were lauded by Charles Kohlhase, who planned NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and who said of Mr. Clarke, "When you dream what is possible, and add a knowledge of physics, you make it happen."

Read Roland Green’s starred review of Firstborn (cowritten by Clarke and Stephen Baxter).

Just last December, Clarke reflected on life at 90: