Welcome back to Wednesday Links! I hope you all are doing well.
Over the weekend, my partner and I visited a giant anime store and a disappointing aquarium. You win some; you lose some. We also suspect that our new upholstered headboard from Wayfair came to use with a few…friends already hitching a ride.
So we’re dealing with that whole situation – wrapping our mattress in a plastic cover, steam cleaning everything, tossing furniture, etc.
We’re continuing our anime marathons and have started JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and wow…the name wasn’t kidding. So far, we’ve met characters named Robert E.O. Speedwagon, Baron Zeppeli, and Tonpetty.
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Tara: We did a bonus podcast episode recently talking to a couple of audiobook narrators/actors about the Hollywood strikes and how that intersects with the audiobook world, narration in general, and also their recent wedding.
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Joy Harris, the founder of Joyfully Reviewed, recently received a cancer diagnosis. A GoFundMe has been set up to help with medical costs.
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I was recently interviewed for an article on CNN about the controversy that surrounds Colleen Hoover’s books. My takeaway: romance has a marketing problem. But I loved talking to writer of the piece, AJ, and we had a good chat about romances. I love talking trends, especially when it comes to publishing, so hit me up anytime!
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Thank you to everyone who put this on our radar! Humble Bundle has a big bundle of Seanan McGuire urban fantasy.
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Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom recently wrote about the phenomenon of Bama Rush for The New York Times. To follow it up, she gifted us all with a free 10-minute lecture on Instagram on why people feel so compelled to watch it.
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Always love hearing from Dr. Cottom! I don’t do Instagram, so thanks for sharing. That last part was indeed heavy and will sit with me today as I’m dealing with the challenges of a new school for my autistic son. It took a phone call, an email and 2 in person visits just to find out who his teacher was going to be. And this was on. . . the Friday before school starts.
I could go on, but I won’t! Not here 😉
In addition to the gofundme, there a few items (t-shirt and mug) on a friend of Joy’s etsy page where 100% of the profits of the sale of those items go toward Joy.
https://www.etsy.com/shop/ProcrastiplannerEtc
I met Joy at a KissCon a decade ago, and she’s such a wonderful person and a valued friend of Romancelandia.
So much interesting stuff in the post today. I had only skimmed Anne Helen Petersen’s columns about the Bama Rush stuff because it struck me as a little weird, but Dr. Cottom’s column and the ‘gram lecture are the most lucid explanation of the phenomenon out there. I recently rewatched the Haley Mills movie Summer Magic, and was struck by how an otherwise charming movie hits a clunker note at the end with the song “Femininity,” but not in Tuscaloosa.
I read that CNN article on Colleen Hoover and found it interesting. Still, the whole phenomenon is puzzling to me. I got into romance a few years ago and felt like I had assembled a good set of websites and people to follow on social media, so I knew what was what in romance. None of my resources talked about her! I think only because she won an RWA award had I even heard the name. I found out people were reading her through my book club. They’re not romance readers. All I could do was shrug. Like, my romance connections were not talking about her at all! I have yet to read any her books. They don’t sound like they’re for me. And yet she’s being touted as this huge romance bestseller. It’s hard to explain to people outside romancelandia.
At the risk of sounding gatekeeper-y, I suspect Hoover’s “romances” may work best for people who don’t read much romance to begin with.