Everything Readers Need: Commentary, Literary Tea, and Satire
Welcome to Our Bookish Blog
Authors: Brigitte and Maura
The case for readers.
Hello, effulgent readers!
Everyone talks about helping authors, but no one talks about the readers except in the context of how they can be used. Readers aren’t just consumers; we’re avid fans, passionate bookish folks, happy supporters, lenders of books, networkers, bloggers, street teams, parents, singles, extroverts, introverts, and inquisitive minds. Even the most introverted of us are interactive on a good day, enjoying a solid engagement over bookish glee.
We started talking about what we were seeing on social media. The most recent debacle involved a cabal of YA lit authors versus a graduate student, with Sarah Dessen spearheading it. Beginning on Twitter early last week, the drama spread to Reddit, Livejournal, Facebook, and national news. It became a discussion of whether misogyny or academic literature bias was more important than racial bias based on a single tongue in cheek quote someone else wrote in an article. The reality is, this isn’t new.
There are years of harassment and flame wars. It spills over into our inbox, it sometimes catches the eye of national news outlet, and it makes a profit for one certain stalking author. There is a subset of reader community that has been harangued, doxxed, and stalked for a long time. We see hundreds of misinformation and myths that are spread around to justify this type of behavior. More than anything, authors are their own worst enemy; they are the classic textbook case of user error blaming it on someone else for their failings. They parody themselves so that’s easy content for us.
On the other hand, some authors are their own best friend. Through excellent use of varying social media platforms, they develop and cultivate a following, which in turn, sells books. These are the authors readers flock to. They have created reader trust through authentic means without belittling any aspect of their audience. They respect their tried and true readers, their new readers, and those who are just around because they enjoy their social media content. Either way, this is what generates reader trust. (Not to be confused with intimate trust. Think of it as a public trust, that we as consumers have in various other products and companies.)
We are reader driven and we celebrate readers.
So, what do we offer?
If you’re already following us on Twitter, you’ve already seen some of the things we talk about. Psst, thank you for the support.
What Fools of Literature intends to provide is a space for #BadReaders. We call any questioning, curious, or critical reader a bad reader because they are anathema to the positive-only crowd of writers who despise Goodreads. There is tea, there is snark and parody, yes, but there is also a thoughtful analysis of fandom, book communities, and all of what that entails. We review social media behavior, blurbs, covers, and existing spaces for readers like Bookbub and Goodreads. We report literary news and discuss the industry. We ask what defines a good reader, which Brigitte will be covering in our very next blog post coming out on December 3rd.
Some of the other topics worthy of discussion include, but are not limited to:
Magical Cock
5 star reviews, best selling lists, and the readers who don’t care
Book shaming
Problematic authors
Problematic books
Are reviews a valid form of feedback to authors, or are they means for readers to discuss their thoughts on books amongst themselves?
Is there a such thing as a bad reader? (This is a big one. Might even be a 2 parter.)
What happens when readers are taken out of the equation of book selling?
BDSM and the problems it doesn’t solve
A good dicking, it doesn’t solve problems either
You can also expect to find little stories and meme series in your inbox. One of the upcoming projects is A Writer, Probably series, as well as the Day in the Life of a Reader (As Imagined by Writers). Another project is highlighting bloggers and reviewers in the community.
Okay, but why “Fools of Literature”?
Why not? We’re here with big and solid ideas, but the first main raison d’etre was to write about sh*tty behavior in literary circles. Take a glimpse of the hashtag Writing Community on Twitter and instantly you’ll see clowns discussing one star haters. Maura was tossing around name ideas like BadReaders (taken), Give All Stars (GAS), then used Fools of Literature as a placeholder for a better idea.
It works, so we’re keeping it. Fools always go rushing in and literature is a big world. Several other reasons include the lovely, convenient abbreviation ‘FOL’, as well as constant word play. There’s folgent (fulgent -> effulgent -> shining forth brilliantly, radiant), folminate (fulminate -> to criticize strongly), folgor (fulgor -> also bright), folsome (fulsome -> smarmy praise), folly, and folderol (foolishness, how perfect is that?).
Maybe it refers to our snarky selves, to readers, or more specifically, to badly behaving professionals in the book industry. The name is in the eye of the beholder.
Who are we to write this?
We are Brigitte and Maura. Between the both of us, we’ve had decades of reading, reviewing, and editing. Brigitte is the research queen, while Maura is the social media observer. We met over badly behaving author scandals while running in the same online circles, then bonded over data.
This is our passion. We are the self proclaimed and self aware mistresses of bad readers. We believe once a book is published and legally obtained, then the stories within are without a doubt for the reader to gush, swoon, pan, misunderstand, and take into their readerly soul to keep.
This is the entire underpinning of Fools of Literature and we hope you join us.
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