Chrysalis Revisions Blog

A blog dedicated to books, writing, and the publishing industry. Curated by Kate Thomas, a freelance book editor and all-around nerd.

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The Reluctant Memoirist

An investigative journalist returns from an undercover mission in North Korea—only to face her critics.

I did not wish that my book were Eat, Pray, Love. As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, but one familiar to professional women from all walks of life. I was being moved from a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel?

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A World Without Barnes & Noble Would Be a Disaster for Book Lovers

Why the publishing industry—and American culture as a whole—needs the ailing retailer.

Even on the brink of closing, Barnes & Noble still accounts for as much as 30 percent of all sales for some publishing houses.... Without Barnes & Noble, it would become much harder for publishers to turn books into best-sellers....

[Mike Shatzkin says,] “Publishers are going to have to adjust to a model where they print what they know will sell rather than what they hope will sell.”

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[Writing] is a dangerous pursuit…. But it's one of the most important things that human beings do.

<a href=http://www.elle.com/culture/books/a37207/toni-morrison-writing-is-dangerous/" target="_blank">Toni Morrison

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Trust me.

Go visit http://firstwefeelthenwefall.com.

If you must know more, read the tags or click here.

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How Syfy is Leading The Charge With Imagining Diverse Futures

Despite being set in the future, science fiction television has often been stubbornly stuck in the past. With its latest lineup, however, the Syfy channel has demonstrated that a proactive approach can create lasting change.

In 2013, the Syfy channel underwent some changes, with programming changes that brought along its current slate of programming. With these new shows came a new focus on presenting a diverse cast. Some of the network’s latest offerings, such as Twelve Monkeys, The Expanse, Dark Matter, Killjoys, and Wynonna Earp each prominently feature women and a diverse cast. It’s a positive and progressive step forward within science fiction television, but their actions show that this isn’t something that happens by accident: it’s a deliberate series of decisions that are made to make this happen.

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From "5 Strangest Books Ever Written" by Paul Ratner for Big Think

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Hong Kong bookseller: China TV confession was 'forced'

One of five Hong Kong booksellers who disappeared last year says he was forced by Chinese agents into a confession of "illegal trading".

"Lam Wing Kee has blown apart the Chinese authorities' story," Mabel Au, director of Amnesty International Hong Kong, said.

"He has exposed what many have suspected all along - that this was a concerted operation by the Chinese authorities to go after the booksellers."

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These Erotica Author Portraits Reveal The Women Behind The Pen Names

"I can be a rock star one week, a celebrity chef the next, and a grubby, shirtless werewolf the next. And how many people can say that?"

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In case you can’t tell (or guess), that line making a swan dive from the top left into the x-axis is the newspaper industry, the obnoxiously green line self-righteously ascending from the bottom left is internet publishing and broadcasting, and the other two, morosely drifting into obscurity, are the periodical (dark green) and book (red) publishing industries.

So there’s good news and bad news here for book publishers. The good news is they’re not in the newspaper business. The bad news is that they’re in the book business.

From "Book publishers have shed 25,000 jobs over the last two decades, but hey, at least we’re not newspapers" by Simon Reichley for Melville House's MobyLives

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An Urban Oasis in Valencia

The design for Ricart House in Valencia by Sanz & Gradolí has a very simple concept, let the house revolve around a courtyard, a small urban oasis, providing all the spaces in the house with a view of nature and access to natural light. The architects complete their serene getaway creating texture and warmth in the interior design by using a very limited palette of materials: brick, wood, concrete and books.

Images via

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Beautiful. I bet it costs your firstborn child—maybe the second kid, too.

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I may finally buy an adult coloring book.

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Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.

From "Sorry, You Can't Speed Read" by Jeffrey M. Sachs and Rebecca Treiman for The New York Times

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What’s your favourite book so far this year?

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From a man: The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

From a woman: When the Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi

And lots of others, really.

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So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.

N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society

(via to-write-my-book)

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New Chapter for Classic Paris Bookstore: Books Printed on Demand

Les Puf, which shut about 10 years ago because of falling profits and soaring rent, has a new location and business model: books printed before customers’ eyes in five minutes.

There are books, but they are not delivered in advance from wholesalers. They are printed on request, before the customer’s very eyes, on an Espresso Book Machine. On Demand Books, the American company that manufactures the machine, chose the name as a nod to an activity you can complete in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee.

Labeled, not so modestly, the “Gutenberg press of the 21st century” by its creators, the machine sits in a back corner of the shop, humming as it turns PDFs into paperbacks. Customers use tablets to select the titles for print — adding, if they want to, their own handwritten inscriptions — while sipping coffee in the light and airy storefront in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

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I spoke at length to one moderately successful self-published Canadian author about what distinguishes this literary world from the one you hear discussed on the book shows on the CBC. Tudor Robins, who lives in Ottawa, has a burbling cottage industry writing, promoting and selling young-adult books about horses. The stories are set in posh stables and at shows, and involve teenage girls dealing with first love, the loss of favourite horses and the occasional eating disorder. They are replete with technical details about riding. There is an element of romance to them, although they are demure in their sexuality. In other words, they fit a very narrow genre, but one with a widespread audience, particularly in the United States....

Can she live on the proceeds of her writing? No, but neither can we. Her best-selling books have sold in the thousands of copies (just like ours); her income from them is a few thousand dollars a year. Very similar numbers to those of respected, critically acclaimed mid-list authors who appear on The Next Chapter, if you average out their good and fallow years (they might make $20,000 in one year and none for the next two).

From "Self-published authors may be no worse off than the rest of us" by Russell Smith for The Globe and Mail

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How Much Money Are Authors Making?

AuthorEarnings, a company that uses data services “to call for change within the publishing community for better pay and fairer terms in all contracts,” has issued a May report that it calls “the definitive million-title study of US author earnings.” Among the report’s findings is data on the infamous “dark pool” of books that “appear on no category best-seller lists at all.”

The study admits that “[m]ore than 50 [percent] of all traditionally-published book sales of any format in the US now happen on Amazon.com” — which would leave out 50% of traditional book sales (in, say, brick and mortar stores) — but it also points out that “roughly 85% of all non-traditionally published book sales of any format in the US also happen on Amazon.com.” It’s impossible to ignore Amazon, in other words, if you want a broad view of how much authors are earning.

So how much are authors being paid for books sold on Amazon? The numbers are either dismal or inspiring depending (of course) on your point of view. To begin with, around 9,900 writers are earning $10,000 or more from Amazon, which, as AuthorEarnings points out, is “a nontrivial supplementary income.” But it’s important to remember that this number includes authors making more than $10,000. It’s also important to point out that independent authors generally outperform those published by the Big 5 publishers, especially if you consider authors published in more recent years. This pattern would seem to confirm our earlier report that says Big Publishing’s market share is in decline.