In praise of ... hubs

Where do you head for your daily fix? Can you hang on until the end of the day? Or do you find yourself suffering withdrawal symptoms, back there several times before lunch? What makes you return time and again?

I'm a bit of a news junkie. I can't help clicking on the BBC News site at least a couple of times every hour. And Guardian Unlimited. The NYT online. Sometimes, if things have got desperate, Economist.com. These places understand my craving and regularly feed new stories to their home pages to keep me coming back for more. Fiends or friends, I can't get enough of them. But news sites aren't the only places I visit regularly.

If, like me, you're bookish - and I'm guessing you must be, if you're here - there are plenty of places you can go to satisfy your addiction to stories about literary goings on. Whether it's gossip, news, reviews or interviews, there are plenty of people out there who've attached a nice tidbit of information to a slew of HTML code and nailed the rarely uncolourful result to the world wide noticeboard. And there are plenty of general sites out there like Bookslut, the Complete Review, the Bookseller, that operate not unlike many of the literary sections of newspapers or journals that try and cater for everyone and as a result of publishing's vast produce can only ever have a somewhat selective coverage of the book scene.

But what I want to talk about here are hubs - particularly those nodal places usually operated by unpaid enthusiasts that some of us go to to satisfy our genre needs that the mainstream media usually has neither the time nor space for, let alone the inclination to address. These places have flourished in the online world since, unlike a journal, newspaper or magazine, they don't need to operate to a fixed schedule, require little if any money to maintain and can exist purely on the sheer dedication of both readers and writers.

For example, if you like crime you can check out Shots, a British ezine. Packed with interviews, reviews, competitions, awards news, columns, short stories and even reports from book launches, it provides a public eye into the crime-writing fraternity. It might not look pretty and is a trifle irritating to navigate around, but you can't argue with the content. Reviewing the Evidence was set up in 2001 to review mystery and crime books and its group of reviewers have chalked up thousands of reviews to date. The site is clean, straightforward to navigate around and features plenty of words by people passionate about crime writing. Sarah Weinman's blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, is a good place to go for news and links to what's out there and what's going on in the mystery scene. Lastly, The Rap Sheet is a blog with multiple posters that is both nice to look at and packed with information on crime publishing from what's out there and who's who; the tone of The Rap Sheet is best summed up in this short extract from the current post: 'One interesting thing about crime fictionists such as Simms, Hayder, Mitchell, and Ramsay, is that while their stories might be dark and menacing, they’re actually the most genial people you’re likely ever to meet. They just kill and maim in their imaginations.'

If like me you prefer things a bit strange or out of this world, the 'net serves your science fiction and fantasy requirements rather well. In the US, SF&F's book-trade magazine Locus has a prominent online presence that has its own content plus is very good at linking to anywhere that has something interesting to say on matters SFnal. One of those places is The SF site. Packed with news, reviews, columns, interviews, lists and wot not else, this is an intelligent and passionate site that has pointed me in the direction of a number of authors and titles I might otherwise have missed. The enthusiasm of its literary critics is thrown into starker relief by a rather cynical TV column, which by comparison looks lazy while offering no insight whatsoever into its subject. Listings, of course, need be far from dull or purely functional as highlighted by the excellent British site UK SF Books News Network. This site depends on information fed to it by authors and publishers, but by engaging with the stuff they like is able to present it in such a way that it almost always fires my interest. Finally, SFRevu - like Shots, seemingly unconcerned with appearances - is committed to serious, thoughtful reviews of new and important books. It's not to be missed, so why not get over there and wish them a happy tenth birthday.

Lastly, I wanted to have a look at a genre sneered at in some quarters almost as much as science fiction - no really! This is that of popular young female fiction, or to use the term that many of its authors decry as being pejorative, but which is certainly in common use in publishing itself: chick lit. Despite women in their twenties apparently being the heaviest users of the Internet, there are only two sites I am aware of that are especially dedicated to chick lit: Shiny Media's Trashionista - their tag line is 'we read books like they're going out of fashion' and Candy Covered Books - a sort of review compilation site. That Trashionista is a commercial blog run by the company Shiny Media in the UK - meaning it is designed to make money - doesn't mean they haven't got plenty of content underneath the bright pink headlines. However, it surprises me that I haven't been able to find more chick-lit sites out there. Most of the big-name authors have their own or publisher websites, but where are the fans? What have I missed? Or do readers not want to read about these sorts of books, or about their authors? I can't believe that is the case, but the evidence - or lack of it - suggests the 'net isn't the place to go to find it.

Give us a shout about the places you go for your fixes.

Colin Brush, Senior Copywriter

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Comments

[Ariel]

Thank you for the mention Colin, very much appreciated... :)

A few more highly useful SF hubs for you:

SF Signal [www.sfsignal.com] is almost scarily prolific (probably helps that it's a group blog...) and Big Dumb Object [bigdumbobject.co.uk], Yatterings [www.yatterings.com], Velcro City Tourist Board [www.velcro-city.co.uk], The Antick Musings of GBH Hornswoggler, Gent [antickmusings.blogspot.com] and Joe Gordon's Forbidden Planet International Blog Log [www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/] are all superb resources - regularly updated, with plenty of round-ups of content from elsewhere.

[Eoin Purcell]

Colin,

I think you raise a really good point and one that suggests a route to profit and longevity for publishers.

Don't we have a certain responsibility to provide the type of service you describe? If we don't wont people like Shiny media steal our lunch (in the nicest possible way)?

Eoin

[Matthew da Silva]

Why do lists of litblogs always refer to Bookslut. IMHO it's a shit blog. Matilda, Edrants, Reading Matters are more my style.

[Mark Thwaite]

Have to agree with Matthew above -- I've never really understood why Bookslut always gets referenced. There are countless much, much better blogs out there.

You only have to read my blog at ReadySteadyBook or my Editor's Corner on The Book Depository website to know that I dislike the kind of books that Bookslut praises, but that isn't the issue. Its the generally poor quality of the writing and the sneering tone of Bookslut that now makes me avoid it at all costs ...