Litblog Roundup 43

Litblog Roundup is a bi-weekly overview of topics, trends and highlights from the literary Internet. This roundup gathers together some new ways to look at books, with a Netflix for books, a Rotten Tomatoes for books, and more.

Netflix for Books

Genre fiction, like TV, increasingly depends upon serialized long-arc storytelling; it’s rare these days to see a science-fiction or fantasy novel that isn’t part of a trilogy (or longer). Yet, the book world historically has been unable to match the comparatively rollicking pace of television.

But publishing company Farrar Straus and Giroux believes the TV model can lend momentum to a book series. In a move that takes as much from Victorian novels as from limited-run Netflix series, the publisher’s FSG Originals imprint is experimenting with serialized fiction .

Rotten Tomatoes for Books

What if every book was worth reading? […] That’s the sense one gets from Book Marks, a new “Rotten Tomatoes for Books” launched Tuesday by the literary culture site Lit Hub. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, which determines if a review is “fresh” (red tomato) or “rotten” (splattered green tomato) and assigns a percentage score, Lit Hub uses an A-F grading system. But none of the books are remotely in danger of flunking .

Thanks for Help with the Books

When writing acknowledgments sections of their books, it seems that men and women do so differently , or they’re read differently, but what, if anything is the difference?

A “Definitive List” of Books

When you see the words “definitive list” in the headline, do you believe them? Maybe, maybe not, but surely you’d like to know whether this “definitive” list of 2016 poetry books matches up to your own?

More bucks for Shorter Books?

Mr. Patterson is after an even bigger audience. He wants to sell books to people who have abandoned reading for television, video games, movies and social media.

So how do you sell books to somebody who doesn’t normally read?

Mr. Patterson’s plan: make them shorter, cheaper, more plot-driven and more widely available .