Inside Vision Publishing: February 2013

Welcome to the February State of the Thing. This month we're excited to announce a redo of LibraryThing Local—faster, better and with 10,000 upcoming events.

We also have a new version of our Readar iPhone app. Members have also raised more than $1,700 for needy readers so far by adding venues and events!

Also this month, some new helper badges and an invitation to join the 75 Books Challenge for 2013. We have author interviews with Robin Sloan and Christine Sneed. There are 3,781 free Early Reviewer books available in February.

You can "like" LibraryThing on Facebook, and follow @LibraryThing on Twitter for up-to-the-minute site news and updates.

LibraryThing Local Improvements

Speed. As more data was added to LT Local, pages got extremely large and slow to load, especially if you lived somewhere like New York City. New Local is much faster, with page-load times of a few seconds at most.

Bigger, better maps. You can now zoom, click and drag the maps and new venues will load in dynamically. (Before they just stopped outside the sample area.) Each map also has a full page mode, useful for planning bookish road trips!

Local Members. Local members, which shows members near you who've chosen to make their location public, has been thoroughly revamped and updated, with a pleasant checkerboard view. To add a public location, or remove yours, edit your profile. You also have a "private location," so you can find out what's going on in your town without telling anyone where that is.

Books for Ghana. By adding events to LT Local, members have raised more than $1,700 for needy readers, and we've extended the donation period through April 4, so keep adding! So far we've contributed $600 of that to Keith Goddard's Books4Ghana campaign on Indiegogo, putting that effort over the top. This will fund the shipping of several thousand books to the Bright Future School in Keta, Ghana this spring. We hope to work with Keith more going forward.

New version of Readar. We've updated our Readar app (formerly Local Books). If you haven't used it yet, Readar is a simple app for bookstores, libraries and bookish events near you. I use it all the time at home—every time I want to call a bookstore, they're all right there. And I use it whenever I go on a trip, so I know where to spend my free time.

Tell us what you think. See the blog post for more information about all the new LibraryThing Local features and changes, or come discuss them here.

Other News and Features

Up for a challenge? For the sixth year in a row, an intrepid group of LibraryThingers has started a 75 Books Challenge group, with more than 500 members so far. I've joined the fun again this year, and am having a grand time. With monthly themes, group reads, meetups and readathons, the challenge group's got something for everyone, and don't worry if you don't read 75 books in a year, (or if you read many more than 75) … it's really more about the fun of it than the numbers of books. For more information, check out the blog post, or visit the group page.

New helper badges! We've added a few new badges for LibraryThing helpers: Local Venue Matching, Exterminator, Work Relationships, Work Separations, CoverGuess, Tag Translations, and Tag Combinations. Badge notifications also have been added to your News Feed so you can share them on Facebook or Twitter. See the Talk post for the announcement and the criteria for each of the new badges, or the wiki page for the full rundown on badges.

Along with "New Local," we introduced a stats/memes page for Local contributions.

Profile changes. We moved a few sections around on profile pages to bring the "About me" and "About my library" sections up a bit, and added a "Favorite venues" link to your LT Local Favorites page. So far members have been mostly positive about the changes. Come discuss them on Talk.

Free books: Early Reviewers

Read and review free books, before they even hit the shelves! We've given out a grand total of 134,500 books so far through Early Reviewers.

The February batch of Early Reviewer books contains 3,781 copies of 110 different titles. The deadline to request a free book to read and review is February 25 at 6 p.m. EST. The March batch will be up during the second week of the month.

The list of books

The most requested books so far this month:

Interview with author Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan is an author and media inventor who has worked at Poynter, Current TV, and Twitter. His first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2012. Follow Robin on Twitter at @robinsloan.

The title of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore came from a tweet, right? Tell us where you got the idea, and how the book developed from the original short story into a full-length novel.

That's right: the germ of the idea was a tweet from my friend Rachel, way back in 2008, which read, "just misread '24hr bookdrop' as '24hr bookshop'. the disappointment is beyond words." I read it walking down the street in San Francisco, and it made me smile and wonder: what would a 24-hour bookstore be like, anyway? A few months later, when I sat down to start a new story, the question was still there, so I started to sketch it out. When it was finished, I published that story online, both in Amazon's Kindle Store and on my website, and it just took off like a rocket—somehow finding an audience much bigger and more vocal than any of my other stories before or since. So, that was a sign that maybe there was something there: some deeper potential, some larger story.

You describe yourself as a media inventor: what do you mean by the term, and if you could invent any media type at all (cost and other logistics being no object), what would it look/feel like?

It's pretty simple: a media inventor is somebody who's interested in both the contentâ€”the words, the pictures, the ideasâ€”and the container. A good example is my essay Fish, which began as a blog post but quickly grew into something else: a sort of simple tap-by-tap presentation that plays out on an iPhone screen. The format is a crucial part of the experience; the same words, laid out flat as a blog post, wouldn't have the same impact. It's a small thing, but indicative of what I'm talking about. These days, with all these amazing screens at our disposal, there's an opportunity to be creative about not only the words themselves but also the way they're presented.

What was your research process like as you wrote this book? Were there sources on the early years of printing that you found particularly useful?

I love Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance, a historian's look at the publishing business circa 1400-1600. Basically the takeaway is this: it was just as competitive and chaotic as the internet industry is today. Probably more so.

I enjoyed the New York Times story about your recent visit to the Grolier Club in New York. What was the most interesting (or surprising) thing you saw there?

I got a chance to see some books printed by Aldus Manutius up close. He was basically the first great printer; his company produced the first printed editions of the classics—Aristotle, Homer, Ovid, all those guys. I'd read a lot about Manutius (he plays a role in Penumbra) but had never seen any of his books in the flesh. They were amazing to behold: these 500-year-old objects, still perfectly legible, still quite beautiful.

That article also notes that you originally wanted to have the book printed in a custom typeface. Had this been possible, what would the typeface have looked like?

Well, I don't want to give too much away, but there's a fictional typeface that plays a role in Penumbra's plot, and it would have been fun—and sort of recursive, I suppose—to print the book in some simulation of that very typeface. As it happens, the real typeface we used has similar roots. It all goes back to Manutius!

Read the rest of our interview with Robin Sloan.

Interview with author Christine Sneed

Christine Sneed teaches creative writing for Northwestern University's graduate writing program and for Pacific University's MFA program. Her stories have been published in many literary journals, and her book of short stories, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry, was awarded a 2010 Los Angeles Times book prize. Christine's first novel, Little Known Facts, will be published in early February by Bloomsbury.

For those who haven't yet had a chance to read it, give us the nutshell version of Little Known Facts, if you would.

This is a character-driven novel about a family in Hollywood; the person at the book's center is a successful film actor whose two adult children are struggling to step out from the large shadow he casts over their lives.

Do you recall what first gave you the idea to write a novel about Hollywood fame and its effects on both the famous person and those around him?

I remember wondering one day what it would be like to have a famous film actor as your father, especially if you are a young man—what sort of competition and envy would you feel? This is where the idea for the book began, but I'm not sure what triggered it.

You've written that Little Known Facts asks of its characters 'If you could have anything in the world, what would you choose?' How would you answer that question yourself?

Well, it will sound a little suspect, but it's nonetheless true: I would help friends and family pay debts, send their children to college, take fancy vacations in the sun. I'd want to be able to take fancy, sunny vacations too and spend more time in France, the country where I studied in college; it remains very close to my heart. I'd also like to see about four movies a week.

The first chapter of the novel was originally published as a standalone short story, I understand? Can you tell us a bit about the process of expanding that original story into a full book?

I wrote "Relations," the first chapter, in the fall of 2010, and in mid-March 2011, I realized that I was still very curious about Will, his father, his sister Anna, etc. and started to sketch out subsequent chapters. They seemed real to me, despite the rarefied plane on which they lived.

Tell us a bit about your writing process: how and when do you do much of your writing? Any particular hints or tips on writing that you'd like to share?

I usually write in the afternoons when I'm not teaching; I do sometimes write at night, but not as often. The writing advice I often give is that you can get a lot done in the interstices—even if you only have 30-45 minutes on a given day, sit down and at least make some notes. A book is written little by little, not in one marathon session.

Read the rest of our interview with Christine Sneed.

Author chats

Author Chat lets you talk to authors—ask questions, get answers, and find out more about how or why a book is written. The schedule of upcoming chats is posted too, so you can plan to read the author's book ahead of time.

Upcoming chats:

Michael Brown will discuss William & Lucy, from February 11-15.
Ellen Ekstrom will discuss Scarborough, from February 11-15.

Take me to the chats!

More free books: Member Giveaways

At any given time, there are hundreds of books available from our Member Giveaways program. Member Giveaways is like Early Reviewers, but isn't limited to select publishers—any author or member can post books. Request books, or offer your own!