News & Notes – 10/21/2017

October 21, 2017 Lark_Bookwyrm News & Notes 4

News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff

Book News

Man Booker Prize goes to George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (The Guardian) It’s the second year in a row that an American novel has won the prize.
Revolution Books Weathers Harrassment Campaign by Alt Right Activists. (Publishers Weekly)
Diverse YA Books Just Got A Little Easier To Find, Thanks To Kirkus Collections (Bustle) Kirkus introduces a useful tool for librarians, teachers, parents, and YA readers looking for books featuring characters of diverse races/ethnicities/cultural/religious backgrounds, LBGTQIA characters, and characters with disabilities.
The TS Eliot Prize shortlist for British poetry is out, and show a sad lack of diversity in a year which saw many British BAME poets published. (BAME stands for “black, Asian, and minority ethnic,” the British semi-equivalent of the US-English term “POC,” or “people of color.”) (The Guardian)
Self-Published ISBNs Hit 786,935 in 2016, with a small increase in print ISBNs and a slight decrease in ebook ISBNS. (Publishers Weekly)
The Audible app adds “car mode” with bigger play and pause buttons. (But seriously — don’t mess with your phone while you’re driving. It’s not worth your life.) (Book Riot)
Australian Booksellers Wary of Amazon’s Arrival (Shelf Awareness, with link to in-depth NYT article)

Worth Reading/Viewing

Sexual Harrassment Is a Problem in Publishing. (Publishers Weekly) It’s also a field in which female employees outnumber males, but the power and money are concentrated in the hands of men.
Vida study finds men still dominate book review publications as both reviewers/critics and authors. (The Guardian. You can read the full report at Vida’s website.)
Santa Rosa kids affected by the California wildfires need school supplies to replace those lost in the fires, and you can help. Donate through Book Riot. Note: Kelly Jensen, one of the founders of Book Riot’s “Fund ‘Em Friday” campaigns and author of this week’s campaign, is a teacher at the Santa Rosa school in need of assistance.
Reading John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down as a Nerdfighter is Emily Polson’s eloquent attempt to describe why she connected so deeply to Turtles. (Book Riot)

Harry Potter everywhere

October is the perfect month for all things Harry Potter, so here are some links to get you in the wizarding mood:

The British Museum’s Harry Potter exhibit is open, and The Guardian reviews it.
The museum also has a treasure trove of Rowling’s early notes and drafts — great material for Potter fans and aspiring writers alike, since they show how Rowling developed the world, and how her ideas and characters changed as she did so. (The Guardian)