Monday Cup Of Links #71 - A Village Quitting India, Upsetting Stats From Publishing
Historic news article aesthetic
Happy Monday!
My novel is now at 90,000 words, which is an exciting milestone. I’m now writing the part where the bad guys close in and our heroes don’t know what hit them. I hate writing this part. There’s dead people. Mentors in prison and exile. Comrades getting the dreaded Sazaa-E-Kalapani. And, the worst part of it all, dead children. I might be writing this for two weeks at least.
Onto our links!
This news article about Savarkar’s great escape and rearrest, published in The Bengalee by Surendranath Bannerjee. I am fascinated with the aesthetic. Maybe a cover idea? Image through Sameer Kasture on Twitter.
Esuru in the Quit India Movement. A small village in Shivamogga district, Esuru, had its inhabitants enthusiastically take part in the Quit India movement. In the spirit of passive resistance, on Sep 28 1942, they refused to pay taxes to the British. They declared independence by putting up a board saying ‘Swaraj Sarkar’ (independent government) and hoisted the Indian flag. The link isn’t clear about the sequence of events (they seem to go back and forth and it’s confusing to me), but it led to a colossal massacre of women, children and elderly by the British.
Apparently of 58,000 titles published every year, about half don’t sell more than a dozen (yes, 12) copies. 90% of books don’t sell more than 2000 copies. 2000 is nothing to scoff at, but you’d think traditionally published books would sell more than that? And the dozen info is suspect. It’s based on this tweet, sourced from this link covering part of the Penguin Random House/Simon and Schuster merger trial, and I haven’t found any other sources reaffirming this statistic.
It used to be a depressing statistic to hear “the average selfpublished author sells less than 57 copies.” But maybe not anymore.
Now I want to watch the trial minute by minute to see if this statistic is really thrown there, maybe read trial transcripts if they are available.Artifact of the week: Krishna slaying Keshi, the asura who took the form of a horse. 5th century terracotta from the Gupta era. Now at the Met Museum in NYC.