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Tim Park, who blogs for the New York Review of Books, had an interesting post recently about the pressure that writers (particularly non-American writers) feel to reach an international audience and the way this is affecting what and how they write:

There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon . . . [M]ore and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.

Park goes on to describe how this pressure has increased with the advent of electronic submissions, which enable an author to send a new work simultaneously to publishers all over the world, such that international rights may even be purchased before the writer has found a publisher in his or her own country:

An astute agent can then orchestrate the simultaneous launch of a work in many different countries using promotional strategies that we normally associate with multinational corporations. Thus a reader picking up a copy of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, or the latest Harry Potter, or indeed a work by Umberto Eco, or Haruki Murakami, or Ian McEwan, does so in the knowledge that this same work is being read now, all over the world . . . This perception adds to the book’s attraction.

In a surprising twist, it appears that Fox News’s Glenn Beck has helped to make a bestseller of The Coming Insurrection, an incendiary text written by French anarchists under the pseudonym “Invisible Committee,” whose call to arms “takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life.”

Written in the aftermath of the 2005 riots in the Paris suburbs and published by La Fabrique in 2007, L’insurrection qui vient was denounced by the French government as a terrorist manual. The text first gained significant attention in 2008, following the arrest of its alleged authors, a group of youths now known as the Tarnac 9, on charges of sabotaging French train lines.

If you’re worried about the fate of the literary magazine in this hectic new era of apps and tweets, you might find solace in Electric Literature, a bold new bimonthly with a plan to capture and convert a broad and highly mobile readership to literary fiction. Founded by Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, who met in the Brooklyn College MFA program, the magazine is available on every possible platform, including paper (printed on demand), Kindle, iPhone, and audiobook. Although many literary publications have begun to offer electronic delivery in some form or another, Electric Literature may be the first to blanket the whole field.

Storm clouds remain heavy over New York publishing, but the sun is shining in Austin, Texas, where Greenleaf Book Group is turning the industry’s traditional business model on its head: instead of counting on a few blockbuster titles to compensate for insufficient sales across much of their catalog, the company expects each title to earn its keep. Greenleaf offers no advances and requires authors to cover their own production costs. In exchange for assuming this risk, authors retain the rights to their work and receive a substantially bigger cut of the royalty on each copy sold. If a book sells well, the author wins; if it doesn’t, he or she absorbs the loss but is free to walk out the door.

Not just a glorified vanity press, Greenleaf has built a strong brand identity by accepting only about 3 percent of the submissions it receives. The lucky (and apparently promising) few benefit from Greenleaf’s reputedly excellent marketing and distribution services, selling on average between 3,000 and 5,000 copies in their first year. According to a profile in the September 7 issue of Forbes Magazine, the ten-year-old company saw revenues increase by 37 percent to $8.1 million in 2008 and is on course to exceed $9 million this year.

Check out the article to read how it all began in 1997, when founder Clint Greenleaf (then a rookie at Deloitte and Touche) decided to put out his own 30-page grooming handbook, Attention to Detail: A Gentlemen’s Guide to Appearance, to prove to his friends that writing a book is—well, just not that hard.

Who maintains the most popular Twitter feed on earth? Guess again, it’s Ashton Kutcher.

The Iowa-born actor came to fame playing Michael Kelso on the FOX sitcom That 70s Show. In 2003 he created a minor media sensation by hooking up with Demi Moore, who had launched her career on the ABC soap General Hospital when Kutcher was only 4. Also in 2003 he became the creator, executive producer, and host of the MTV series, Punk’d, in which hidden cameras catch celebrities at the receiving end of practical jokes.

Now Kutcher, whose Twitter handle is @aplusk, is becoming a star in the tech sector, too. In April of this year (just as Oprah was sending out her first Tweet), Kutcher won a much-publicized race with CNN to become the the first Twitterer with 1 million followers.  For a recap of the whole “feud,” see Kutcher’s 4/17 victory appearance on Larry King Live:

 

Some criticized Kutcher’s achievement as a little more than a PR stunt and questioned the means by which he’d amassed a million followers. Still, Kutcher seemed earnest about the democratic power of microblogging, telling King,

“We now live in an age in media that a single voice can have as much power and relevance on the Web, that is, as an entire media network.”

Kutcher also emphasized to King that the brilliance of Twitter is that it is not only a “send out” but also a “take in” medium, through which he is having a direct conversation with his fans.

Now approaching the 3 million followers mark, Kutcher highlighted the potential of Twitter’s “take in” feature recently when he sent out a Tweet asking followers to suggest a joke for a scene in his upcoming movie, The Killers. The jokes flooded in, and apparently one of them fit the bill. As reported by Fishbowl LA, Kutcher’s making no promises that the joke will survive the movie’s final cut. (Also, it remained to be seen whether the contributing fan would receive credit, or payment, for the joke.) Still, the incident must have made The Killers’s screenwriter(s), and perhaps writers everywhere, a little uneasy.

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