COVID was going to save books except now it's killing the paperback industry. They've had to delay Britney's memoir because of a lack of paper, they can't get it out in January, there have been strikes in paper plants, which doesn't shock me. You acted like paperbacks would die in the wake of ebooks but people love books the way they love vinyl. People want something they can get signed. So, nobody treated the poor people in the paper industry well, they walked off the job, nobody's making paper. Rightly so. When Britney announced she was writing a book about a girl trapped in a tower, or something, I just cringed thinking of her writing her story as a fictional novel and not a memoir. I think it's important she does an actual memoir, but I'm curious as to how edited it would be given she's very stream of consciousness with her Instagram posts. Just talking to a new psych of something I've bottled up makes me seem more unhinged when I elaborate, but I can still speak coherently even if I felt silenced before. I don't think she has that ability to write this down without it being like a ramble and so much of that has to do with being kept silent, so I hope someone went through it and tightened it up without censoring her.
Anyway, looks like the demand for books probably won't die in light of the paper industry going on strike.
Anyway again, it's late 2023 and the book is out. And the audiobook is not read by Ms B, which I completely appreciate. I've already bitched on here about my attitude to audiobooks, why I'll never do one, how my publisher managed to make this experience infuriating for me. I did find one book of theirs they attempted to launch, ironically it was by the professional musician who could obviously make something decent and who also had stage presence and performance abilities to facilitate this. And all of this was hilarious considering how badly she hated Amazon. The struggle I have to sell print books makes audiobooks look so useless to me. I still don't have it in me to release Kindle versions of everything online. I think about it then I think of the stress of it having any sort of hiccups or hold ups. Britney read the forward explaining how she couldn't read her book. There are probably the conspiracy theorists who believe she wasn't allowed to so they could monitor its contents as they did with the book, so she couldn't point out missing pieces. Of course, she needed a ghostwriter. I wish people had enough common sense to realise most of these fucking things are done with ghostwriters. I know Chelsea slogged away at hers, and recorded the audiobook at home. I think a lot was done during COVID. I really wish people would listen to the interviews famous people do after they release a book because they seem to invariably complain about how hard it was despite thinking it'd be easy. Everyone wants a book deal, nobody wants to write the damn thing. Not really. Not as much as they believe.
