This Week’s Insights: When theatre criticism goes away who will debate the art?… Amazon’s community-powered marketplace is making some authors rich… Cirque Du Soleil want to peel back the neuroscience behind awe… Giant science publisher cuts off its science audience… Movie-based plays and musicals sell five times as many tickets as original projects.
- What The End Of Theatre Criticism Means For Audiences: There’s been a long-running debate at newspapers over the years as to who the critic is writing for and how readers want to use reviews. Of course there’s the Consumer Reports aspect of the job – help the reader decide whether a show is worth seeing or not. But another important part of the job is conducting a public conversation about the art form – it’s issues and ideas and meaning. The best criticism engages in a debate with the art and its practitioners, helping to set agendas and evolve ideas. If the critical discourse goes away, where does that work continue?
- The Wealthy Amazon Authors: So you want to write a book. Do you go with the traditional publisher, who vets and edits and distributes to the bookstores and promotes the work? Or, do you self-publish on Amazon. Time was when self-publishing was scorned by serious people, but Amazon’s self-publishing platform has proved lucrative for a new generation of authors who are earning (often much) more than with traditional publishers. It is the preferred platform for some genres such as romance, and its how-to section brims with titles that have earned their authors small fortunes. Enormous communities of fans power the Amazon self-pub marketplace.
- Cirque Du Soleil Wants To Find The Science Of Awe: Okay, so the Cirque is already pretty good at wowing a crowd with spectacle (Just how did they do that??). But the master-circusers want to better understand the formula that produces the awed response. So they’re working with neuroscientists to see if they can “see” inside the brain when awe registers. “Twice each night for five nights, Lab of Misfits techs” – yes, that’s the name of the neuroscience research firm – wired six of us up with the headgear, and … they gave us iPads that prompted us throughout the show to answer questions about just how much awe and wonder we were feeling at that exact moment.”
- Giant Scientific Publisher Cuts Off Its Scientist-Audience: Scientists have been complaining for years over the high access fees they have to pay to read other scientists’ work. Particularly since scientists get no pay from the publishers for publishing. So Elsevier, the publisher, last week cut off all access to scientists in Germany and Sweden. Negotiators in Germany and Sweden want all their papers published in Elsevier journals to be open access as part of any new contracts. They have said that they will not pay more than they did previously for subscriptions.
- Name Recognition Counts – Musicals And Plays From Movies Sell 5 Times As Many Tickets: According to a report from Britain’s Publishers Association using data from the industry group UK Theatre, “in 2016, adaptations took, on average, three-and-a-half times more at the box office and sold 4.8 times as many tickets as original productions. … A family musical based on a film attracts more than six times the revenue of an original show. Page-to-stage adaptations were also more successful than original productions, particularly when analysing plays.” And notice anything about this list of hand-picked recommendations of books from Audible? This suggests that audiences have a high degree of need to know what they’re getting before they commit to buying.
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