Marisa: Podcast, The Worst Booksellers

Stumbled across this Boston based podcast, so I thought I'd share it:

 http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/

The name is The Worst Booksellers, and you can find it on Spotify as well. It's a bit long but each episode is entirely focused on a popular book and they do a pretty good dissection of each in my opinion.

The last episode was on After by Anna Todd, the Harry Styles fan-fiction-turned-novel that's now also a (soon to be released) movie and definitely not something I planned to see or read, still not something I want to see or read after hearing about and wouldn't recommend.

A tangent: I now feel like I know more than I ever wanted to know about After without having read it and really can't believe this is now a book or a movie, it sounds insane - it's somewhere between 50 Shades of Grey and the infamous My immortal fanfiction which I recently found has it's own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Immortal_(fan_fiction)

 I don't know if the podcast just makes it sound crazy or if it really is but the section they read from it sounded bad, so bad that I stopped listening because it's just too cringe worthy. On another note, coincidentally the main character is interested in publishing, is magically given her dream job in publishing and it's just all very unrealistic.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear about why what exactly makes it not really "good" even though it's very popular. Overall they made some good points and enough jokes that I think I'll keep listening- the next episode is supposed to be on a James Patterson novel so that's also vaguely related to class and I'm curious to hear what they have to say.

They also have this lovely note on their about page:

"Note to authors and publicists: If you are a publicist who wants us to review your client’s book, please think twice. If you are an author whose publicist is pitching your book to Worst Bestsellers, you might want to get a new publicist. (YES, this really happens.) If you are an aspiring author who wants us to review your manuscript–we’re flattered that you think our input would be valuable, but we just don’t have the time or the expertise for that. If you’re serious about getting a non-worst book published, we recommend you pay an actual editor for manuscript review. Good luck, and we hope none of your books ever end up subjects of our podcast!"