Whenever some technology scold says:

"Smartphones & social media are a scourge on society"

I like to remember how people in power used to view novels. As a scourge on society.

This is what 'The Youth's Religious Instructor' said about children's books in 1820. Headline 2018: SOCIAL MEDIA IS AS ADDICTIVE AS CRACK

Headline 1930: BOOKWORMS ARE LIKE ALCOHOLICS

Book Twitter!

It’s Thursday! It’s raining! It’s #bookloversday

So let’s play a game of…

Choose your own HOT DEAD GIRL thriller

First, choose your corpse. How young and hot will yours be? But before we know anything about your HOT DEAD GIRL we need to know her hair colour.

Why?

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe you’re going to use it as lazy character determinism.

So her hair will be…

Okaaaaaaaaaay, since this controversy is raging again.

A short thread about 'readers', and why we should be careful about applying a zero-sum logic to book-buying. There are 20.1 million people in the UK who self-identify as 'readers'.

Just over half of them bought a book in the last month.

So @NPR has just published some research on smart speakers in the US, and it's a fascinating snapshot of how they're shaping a deeper relationship with audio.

(Audio publishers & marketers take note. Some great stuff in here.)

nationalpublicmedia.com/smart-audio-re… 1. Who owns smart speakers?

The over 45s, and women.

With my marketer's hat on, I find this super-interesting. It can be terribly hard to reach the 45+ audience via digital channels.

This happened today.

I have a lot of time for The Works. They sell books to under-catered for consumers in unpretentious, accessible settings.

It's not *just* this that makes it an interesting deal though...

thebookseller.com/news/works-flo… The Works used to be owned by a private equity house.

Earlier this year, Waterstones was bought by a... private equity house.

https://twitter.com/cmccrudden/status/989486823029305349

Publishing people! The latest @PublishersAssoc yearbook is out!

Underneath these bland headlines there is some

☕️STEAMING
🔥HOT
🍵TEA

On the state of the UK book business. Hold me, I'm going in...

publishers.org.uk/news/press-rel… 1. Export-driven growth

5% is okay growth for a mature market sector like publishing, but that 60% of revenues are exports alarms me BECAUSE BREXIT.

If we crash out without a deal, what happens to more than HALF of the book trade?

Showgirls. Keep Elizabeth Berkeley.

https://twitter.com/CoryjTaylor/status/1018383575253520384

Starring...

MISS PIGGY AS CRISTAL CONNORS

Okay! I'm an author (1st novel out in September), I used to work in publishing, I'm a @Soc_of_Authors member.

I've thought long and hard about this problem and I disagree with both the SoA and publishers' positions on it.

Here's why...

societyofauthors.org/News/News/2018… Author earnings fall every year (they've never been high), and large publishers' profitabilities are stable or growing (slowly).

But it isn't because publishers are swindling authors. It's because the book industry is in long-term structural decline.

So since the world is a tyre fire AGAIN today, who wants a thread of adorable animals from the Danum Valley National Park in Borneo?

Oh you do.... so here we go.

The red ❤️ leaf 🍃 monkey 🐒 Red leaf monkeys move in small troupes through the forest. They live mainly on leaves and they are totally adorable.

🚨🚨TRUTH BOMB INCOMING🚨🚨

So the always amazing @DrDaveOBrien @markrt & @OrianBrook have dropped 44 pages worth of receipts on the Creative Industries attitudes to:

🔹Social class
🔹Cultural taste
🔹Inequality

Hold me, I'm going in.

createlondon.org/wp-content/upl… Inequality in the arts can feel like a trivial issue. I mean, the arts are the fluffy stuff of life, right?

No.

The arts are how we see ourselves reflected in culture, so...

🔹The unrepresented go unseen.
🔹The over-represented. assume their experience is 'universal;

Ok Nadine, here we go...

The pantos you remember from your idealised childhood were local productions.

Many of them were produced by locally owned and managed theatres or by municipal theatres funded by local authorities.

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Many of these municipal theatres experienced big funding cuts in the 80s, because the Conservative government was a group of heartless Philistines hell-bent on stripping civic pride and identity from working class communities.

I'll say this again.

BUSINESSES DON'T HAVE A RIGHT TO EXIST. THEY MUST MAKE A CLEAR, COHERENT CASE FOR YOUR MONEY.

uk.businessinsider.com/millennials-ar… 1. Napkins - Well, what did you think would happen when you premiumised paper towels? You made another category of product obsolete.