INTERVIEWS

Selected articles, interviews, and guest posts about CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, and SEX AND THE AUSTEN GIRL, the web series inspired by the books:

Wall Street Journal
“Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen’s universe and obsessive fandom ‘is normal to them.’

“‘It’s true,’ she says. ‘We are a little crazy.'”

 
USA Today
“She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,” says author Laurie Viera Rigler. “To me, it’s as if she’s a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch.”

 
The Times of London
“Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict leads the field”

 
Futurebook
“Bloomsbury & Babelgum paired up for Sex and the Austen Girl –a new web series to air weekly over 20 webisodes – providing great publicity for the lead up to the publication of Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict in Feb 2011.”

 
Library Journal
“Janites will adore the underlying P&P story and romantic comedy tropes, while all readers will enjoy the honest, nitty-gritty details of early 19th-century life.”

 
USA Today
“Laurie Viera Rigler… says fans never tire of new interpretations. ‘Jane Austen wrote just six books, and they want more, more, more.'”

Authorlink
“I found out that not knowing is the best place for me to be. If you can embrace not knowing in a playful manner wondrous, magical things can happen.”

 
Macleans
“Being a woman, especially a single woman in the contemporary world can be quite confusing,” says Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. “There are no rules. Who’s supposed to pay? What do sex and dating and monogamy mean? Looking back and putting our own modern nostalgic construction on Jane Austen’s world, the rules were very clear, and I think people long for that.”

 
Stephanie’s Written Word (guest post)
“Though a man may appear to be in love (or pretty close to it) prior to making love, the woman may never hear from him again after the deed is done. In that respect, things have not changed at all since 1813.”

 
San Gabriel Valley Newspapers
How do relationships compare then and now?

“I love the freedom that I have as a woman today, but I think that Jane Austen was also lobbying very heavily for that freedom herself in her books. She was a big advocate in her novels and in her own personal life of marrying for love, but at the same time she was a practical woman and she understood that people have to have something to live on.”

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Wall Street Journal

In Jane Austen 2.0, the Heroines And Heroes Friend Each Other
The Young Seek ‘Sense and Sensibility’ On Dating, ‘Crazy Parents’ Via the Web

By ARDEN DALE And MARY PILON

Ben Kemper, 19, plans to wear a frock coat with cuffs to the annual Jane Austen birthday tea in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.

Watch the faux movie trailer “Jane Austen’s Fight Club,” a creation of Austen-fans Emily Janice Card, Keith Paugh and Jeff Dickson.

The outfit will be “the whole shebang,” says Mr. Kemper, who hopes to scare up some yard work so he can pay for the new threads. He says his costume may include riding boots, a cane, gloves and a buttoned vest.

Mr. Kemper is among an unlikely set of fans of the long-dead Ms. Austen—young people. The English novelist best known for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility” has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as “Janeites” who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen’s tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA.

Other renowned English authors aren’t so posthumously popular—at least among the Web set. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen’s work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of “Jane Austen for Dummies.” They may be “trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right,” says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. “You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines.”

Jennifer Potter, 24, a member of JASNA’s New York chapter, says Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” feels antiquated. She finds Jane Austen’s writing more relevant to her life. “Marrying for money, crazy parents, dating—these are all basic themes,” Ms. Potter said, sipping tea near the sandwich table at a recent Austen meeting that drew 200 members.

Lindsey Hanlon, 22, is part of an Austen group at the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, in which members sit for hours over dinner discussing the author’s work and give each other quizzes. Earlier this year, during spring break, they traveled to England for a visit of old Austen haunts, including Bath, where some of her characters disported themselves.

“Every girl in the world has had a crush on an inappropriate suitor or the man she sees as above her, or even the local bad boy,” says Ms. Hanlon. “Whoever you are, there is a love story for you in Austen.”

Ms. Olay, 66, is trying to tap into that passion to ensure that the Austen Society, formed in 1979, endures. In 2008, at the suggestion of member Cattleya Concepcion, 27, Ms. Olay set up a Facebook page. She quickly found that the Web was already a hotbed of Austen activity.

A scene from a mock movie trailer called ‘Jane Austen’s Fight Club,’ made by Austen fans Emily Janice Card, Keith Paugh and Jeff Dickson.

“Using the Web and Facebook, we were able to reach younger members,” says Ms. Olay. “They are forming friendships and learning how to plan events.”

DeeDee Baldwin, 31, of Starkville, Miss., created in 2008 “AustenBook,” a Web spoof of Facebook that digitally chronicles the happenings of Elizabeth Bennet and the other characters in “Pride and Prejudice.” “When you read her books, you feel like the characters could be with you right now,” says Ms. Baldwin.

The Austen Society is reaching young people in other ways, too. For the past three years the group has bought space at the Brooklyn Book Festival, making Ms. Austen the only deceased author with her own booth at the ultra-hip event.

Jaclyn Green-Stock, 23, co-heads the New York “Juvenilia” chapter of the Austen Society, a 50-member group of Janeites in their 20s and 30s. Ms. Green-Stock is also writing a screenplay about gentrification in New York, using “Persuasion” as her chief inspiration.

The Juvenilia members take walking tours in lower Manhattan and gather at each other’s apartments to watch DVDs of Austen-themed movies such as a Bollywood version of “Sense and Sensibility” called “I Have Found It.”

Media companies are tapping into the Austen craze as well. Quirk Books in Philadelphia in 2008 commissioned author Seth Grahame-Smith to write “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” a work that adds the undead to Ms. Austen’s classic novel. The book is slated to become a film next year.

The seeds of the Austen resurgence were sown during the 1990s. In 1995 came two big film and TV adaptations: the BBC miniseries of “Pride and Prejudice,” featuring actor Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy; and director Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility,” starring Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Kate Winslet. A year later Gwyneth Paltrow starred in “Emma.”

“Clueless,” a 1995 movie starring Alicia Silverstone and Paul Rudd, was a thinly disguised adaptation of “Emma,” set in modern-day California.

But while those movies stirred young people’s passions for Ms. Austen’s works, the Web is allowing fans to connect in new ways.

Among the Jane Austen Twitter feeds, blogs and chat rooms that have cropped up is “Jane Austen’s Fight Club,” a faux movie trailer that juxtaposes women in Austen-era frocks with the bruises and blood of the cult classic “Fight Club.” There’s also dwiggie.com, a hub of fan fiction overseen by Crystal Shih, 29. Ms. Shih and her college roommate discovered Ms. Austen a decade ago and began writing Austenesque prose in their Massachusetts Institute of Technology dorm room. Now her site boasts about 1,000 registered users. Everything from “Clueless” to Colin Firth is fair game for debate.

“The movie adaptations created a lot of fanatics,” says Ms. Shih, now doing postdoctoral work in biochemistry at MIT. “In some of the forums, there are throw-downs about who is their favorite Darcy…At one conference an 80-year-old said Laurence Olivier was the only one for her, but Colin Firth definitely propagates that Darcy image today.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Firth declined to comment.

Laurie Viera Rigler has written two Austen-theme novels, “Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict” and “Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict.” In May she launched “Sex and the Austen Girl,” a Web series at babelgum.com that plays on the differences between life today and in the Austen era.

The two-and-a-half minute webisodes include such titles as “The 200-Year-Old Virgin.”

Young people, says Ms. Viera Rigler, are deep into Austen’s universe and obsessive fandom “is normal to them.”

“It’s true,” she says. “We are a little crazy.”

Write to Arden Dale at arden.dale@dowjones.com and Mary Pilon at mary.pilon@wsj.com

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USA Today

Austen’s power: Jane addiction sweeps theaters, bookstores
By Carol Memmott and Claudia Puig, USA TODAY

Plain Jane is suddenly a babe.

There’s no denying that Jane Austen, brilliant early-19th-century spinster novelist, is Paris-Hilton hot, circa 2007.

She’s a smash in bookstores, nearly 200 years after her death. She’s a favorite of filmmakers, with five admired adaptations of her novels in the past 12 years and two new Austen-related films due in theaters in the coming weeks.

And in what may be the ultimate Hollywood makeover, she’s the romantic lead in Becoming Jane, a fictionalized biopic that opens Friday in 10 cities and expands nationwide next week.

Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) plays Austen as a comely 20-year-old who shares (improbable) passionate kisses with a dashing Irishman, Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy).

“I’m a huge fan,” Hathaway, 24, says of Austen. “She’s definitely on my list of five people who you want to have dinner with.”

Jane Austen (1775-1817) would have lots of dinner dates, were she still alive. It’s a modern-day romance whose roots go back centuries.

Long before chick lit, long before chick flicks, long before flicks, for that matter, readers in search of exquisite stories about love and all its wonders and follies turned to Austen.

Her six novels, with their legendary wordplay and witty one-liners, have never gone out of print. The most famous and widely read, Pride and Prejudice (1813), is a perennial top literary seller at national bookstore chains Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Austen is often cited as the mother of contemporary chick lit, starting in 1996 with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. And in recent years, a constant parade of Austen-related prequels, sequels and spinoffs have crammed bookstore shelves.

More Austen mania:

•The Jane Austen Book Club opens in New York and Los Angeles on Sept. 21. The film is based on Karen Joy Fowler’s best seller about six contemporary California women who read Austen’s books and stars Lynn Redgrave, Maria Bello and Emily Blunt.

•Beginning in January, PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre will broadcast adaptations of Austen’s novels and a new drama based on her life. The series, The Complete Jane Austen, includes new presentations of Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility.

•She’s the inspiration for several new novels this summer, including Austenland, Me and Mr. Darcy and Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, which feature modern heroines who connect with the Regency scribe.

Which raises the question: Why, in a Britney/Lindsay/Paris-saturated culture, does a lady novelist born in 18th-century England resonate so much with us today?

“I think there’s an excellence to Jane Austen that people crave,” says Hathaway. “Right now, I think it’s fair to say that mediocrity is being celebrated, and Austen will never stop being excellent. So it’s very reassuring.”

Of course, that hasn’t prevented the makers and cast of Becoming Jane from spicing up their story with a little sex appeal.

Though Becoming Jane character Tom Lefroy is based on a real man Austen was attracted to (according to letters to her sister), the film imagines a possible romance and how it influenced her literary work. It takes liberties with the details of her life but captures much of the sensibility of her novels with passion, wit and wisdom underlying a strict code of conduct.

In one scene, Austen and Lefroy walk upstairs to meet his uncle, who needs to give his blessing to their proposed engagement. Lefroy reaches out and fondles Austen’s hand and sensuously fingers the folds of her satiny skirt.

“That was my idea,” Hathaway says. “I’m a hopeless romantic.”

Sadly, poor Jane Austen may have never gotten to first base in real life.

The seventh child of an English country clergyman, Austen was 35 in 1811 when she published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility.

Unlike her heroines, who always find Mr. Right after overcoming their own prideful natures, Austen lived with her family as an adult and never married. She died in 1817 at age 41 of undetermined causes, although Addison’s disease and breast cancer have been conjectured.

“She was a lot more free-spirited than she was given credit for,” says Hathaway, whose portrayal will help dispel the image of Austen as a stuffy spinster. “She was warm and complicated, sometimes graceful. She loved dancing. Like everyone, she wanted romance and happiness.”

Becoming Jane screenwriter Kevin Hood infused the story with restrained eroticism. He wrote a scene in which Austen subtly swoons as Lefroy verbally seduces her by reading a passage from a natural-history book about the sensual flight of a pair of birds.

“Jane’s is a very erotic world, it’s just coded and held back in reserve,” Hood says.

Colin Firth deserves the credit, or blame, for the modern sexualization of Austen. His portrayal of Mr. Darcy in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice had women panting and is cited by many Austen experts as a revelation.

“The most recent (Austen) surge really started in 1995 when Colin Firth emerged from that pond with his white shirt cleaving to his manly chest,” says Joan Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. “That immediately set off a wave of interest in Jane Austen.”

And Mr. Darcy. There is an entire sub-genre of sequels that bring Elizabeth Bennet’s husband into sharper focus. Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (2004) and Darcy & Elizabeth (2006), by Linda Berdoll, are the No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling Pride and Prejudice sequels, according to publisher Sourcebooks.

But it all begins, and ends, with Austen. “She’s almost eerily contemporary despite the bonnets, the balls and the carriages, because she’s so keen and hilarious an observer of human nature,” says author Laurie Viera Rigler. “To me, it’s as if she’s a modern-day psychotherapist who time-traveled back to the Regency period and writes a novel about everyone who spent time on her couch.”

Rigler and a growing number of other authors are riding the Austen wave. Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane AustenAddict (Dutton, $24.95), published today, is about an L.A. woman who tries to mend her broken heart by reading Austen.

There is an audience for new titles that keeps Austen’s eternal flame burning, booksellers say.

“People read Austen’s novels over and over again and just want to know what happens next,” says Deanna Parsi of Borders. New titles “Me and Mr. Darcy by Alexandra Potter and Austenland by Shannon Hale illustrate the timeless and universal appeal of Jane Austen. Her themes of society and love and relationships and family are still as relevant today as they were during her time.”

The first Austen sequel is believed to have been published in 1914. Old Friends and New Fancies by Sybil Brinton, newly reissued by Sourcebooks, involves some of Austen’s best-known characters. In the book, Elizabeth Bennet Darcy and Emma Woodhouse Knightley are close friends deeply involved in the business of matchmaking.

“I think Jane Austen simply didn’t leave a big enough body of work,” says Sourcebooks’ Deb Werksman. “So you read the six novels, two or three of which you can consider masterpieces, and you read them and then read them again and again. But after reading them 15 times, you just begin to want more. Anything that will evoke the work of Jane Austen becomes very appealing.”

Much of that appeal is comic. After all, Austen’s forte was the comedy of manners.

“Her humor is timeless: so insightful and complete and satisfying,” says Hathaway.

And who can resist a heroine like flawed-but-adorable Elizabeth Bennet, or Jane Austen herself?

As Becoming Jane director Julian Jarrold puts it: “Each generation finds something new in Austen. She’s really permeated our culture. I think people relate to the strong, feisty, independent-minded women she portrays and, to some extent, was herself. I think that speaks to us now.”

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The Times of London

Old Friends and New Fancies
By Sybil G. Brinton
Jane Austen fans take to the streets of Bath
Reviewed by Stephen McClarence

ALERT THE PAPARAZZI: Jane Austen has hit the celebrity circuit. “Plain Jane is suddenly a babe,” USA Today proclaims. “The brilliant early-19th century spinster novelist is Paris Hilton-hot, circa 2007.”

Films, television adaptations, societies, tours, conferences, tea towels and now Paris Hilton . . . the “Austen brand” is so broad and self-sustaining that it is easy to forget that it is built on just six-and-a-bit novels.

That branding started in 1913, when Sybil G. Brinton, an author of towering obscurity, wrote and published what is thought to be the first example of “fan-fiction”. Her Old Friends and New Fancies, which has just been republished in Britain, blazed the trail for an estimated 700 novels and stories that now owe their existence to Jane Austen’s books.

These “fan-fics” take many forms. Some are pastiche-like sequels, on the lines of What Darcy Did Next or Emma: The Omen 2. As Regency romances, they sometimes spice things up with an explicitness (“His torch of love was difficult to disregard . . .”) that is more Sex and Sexuality than Sense and Sensibility.

Some recast the plots in modern settings. Kara Louise’s Drive and Determination, for instance, charts the adventures of an interior designer who clashes with the president of the Pemberleo Coffee company.

Some take a more detached view, with Shannon Hale’s Austenland neatly imagining a theme park where fans live like the books’ heroines. There are interactive novels urging readers to “create your own Jane Austen adventure”, and there’s even the occasional hint of subversive humour. Laurie Viera Rigler’s Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict leads the field here. It centres on a Los Angeles fan “who wakes up in a four-poster bed in Regency England and discovers . . . rampant body odour, sexual and class repression and bloodletting”.

Now, after many years out of print, there’s the return of Old Friends and New Fancies, which takes three dozen characters from the original novels, intertwines their lives and ties up the loose ends with three marital knots.

In an ideal literary world, the resulting jamboree would be full of wry irony. (“Isn’t that General Tilney over there? Didn’t we last meet him at Mansfield Park?” “I fear you are mistaken, my dear, we met him at Northanger Abbey.”) Brinton, however, does not do wryness. For all the ingenuity of her game of literary Consequences, the result is bland and, to nonaddicts (who can’t understand all the fuss about Jane) bewildering.

Addicts, of course, will want the book, for reasons well understood by Deb Werksman, editorial manager at the US-based Sourcebooks, its new publisher. “After 15 years of reading and rereading the six Austen novels, you realise there aren’t enough of them,” she says from her office in Connecticut. “That’s what has inspired all these adaptations, emulations, continuations and sequels.”

Werksman had published 20 other “fan-fics”, targeting “the Georgette Heyer type of market”, when she came across a reference to Old Friends. She tracked down a first edition for $3,000 (£1,500), read it (“very carefully; I didn’t take it in the bathtub”), found it delightful and confidently nominates it as the first example of fan-fiction.

“The authenticity of Brinton’s English voice is very appealing. She had the advantage of writing when language was more precise and education was better, because there was no television. She wasn’t writing a literary masterpiece but she was at least aspiring to competence.”

So did Werksman reprint it for its merit or its historical interest? “Given that it was the first one, it would have had to be pretty weak for me to eschew it all together, but I don’t think I could have published it if it hadn’t been worth reading. It helps to know the books, but you don’t need to know all the characters.”

Little is known about Sybil Grace Brinton herself. The daughter of a wealthy Kidderminster carpet manufacturer, she was born in 1874 at Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire, married in 1908, had no children, suffered from poor health all her life, and died in 1928, without writing another book.

John Adey, a genealogist who runs the Stourport-based Family History Research Ltd, could find out little more about her, despite weeks of searching. “There’s no known photograph of her,” he says. “And it’s odd that even now, the family can’t tell you much about her.”

Back with Deb Werksman in Connecticut, what’s the appeal of Jane Austen to so many American women? “Well, in the adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by your magnificent BBC, Colin Firth dives into a lake and comes out with a wet shirt. A large number of sequels were published after that.”

Werksman has also compiled the George W. Bush Out-of-Office Countdown Calendar, which has sold 250,000 copies. “It’s my small contribution to political satire,” she says. “We can only try to laugh.”

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Futurebook

Send out your dinghies & test the unchartered waters

Submitted by AlisonNorrington on Fri, 06/18/2010 – 09:46

There is a tradition and legacy that has upheld publishing houses for years – the ‘it’s worked great so far’ structure, architecture and acumen that comes with years of experience. Publishers could be seen as huge motherships, or even self-contained, branded cruiseliners, sailing through the familiar waters of acquiring content, filtering, shaping, branding and then navigating the route to distribution.

Cruiseliners smack of luxury, right? As a passenger you relax, oblivious to the hardworking crew that graft behind the scenes as they transport you from one fabulous location to another. You socialise in the bar or on deck, dance at the cabaret, relax in the pool, until you dock and disembark ready for the next adventure. Publishers operate on a similar frame – books, rather story, has the power to transport you from one fabulous location to another and as a reader/consumer of content you know what you like, you want it now and keep an eye out for the latest offering from your favourite author or genre – (not publisher – readers don’t care who the publishers are – they just want the content!) The thing with giant cruise ships though, is that they’re not going to zip you across to that little island where you saw the laughing crowds dancing and hula’ing on the white sands! The cruiseliner can’t swiftly change direction and try out a new route on unchartered waters just in case it’s the wrong decision. The crew would know how to sail to the island and the cruiseliner might eventually get you there, but will never move as quickly as a smaller, independent vessel. Here’s where you’d wish you could lower the ropes, hop into the dinghy and whizz off to check out the party.

There’s nothing new in reporting about nimble newcomers stealing a march on the big guys because they can’t adapt quickly enough and these are challenging, but exciting, times for publishers but by lowering the ropes and sending out their dinghies they can begin to experiment in a sea of digital opportunity, sail toward new horizons and ‘wave’ hello to potentially new audiences….

Sending out the dinghies isn’t restricted to publishers and isn’t fresh news, it’s called experimenting. Entertainment companies and ad agencies are beginning to fragment, forming ‘experimental’ departments, to pioneer new outputs and approaches, build new platforms through which brands can engage, and create new agency models to move forward. It’s not a dissimilar model to publishers imprints – a controlled, contained way of fragmenting, segregating and branding vertically – to market the work to different demographic consumer segments and now ‘niche’ publishing is working to fragment and embed brand into communities. The bottom line is that the consumer does not care who the publisher is, they simply want consumable, value content at the push of a (metaphorical) button.

So, you have your central hubs ‘on board’ the cruise liner – think of these as the bar or being on deck, where you hang out on the safe territory of the mothership and socialise. In terms of fragmenting – these are the Community Sites such as Harper Collins’ Authonomy and Cursor – where each community is also a publishing imprint. Richard Nash, founder of Cursor said, “I believe it is vital to seed and embed ideas and threads early on – so how about talking to journalists/bloggers/potential readers first – engaging with them to raise awareness. Then try gathering a series of mini communities using social media – likeminded readers/audience/writers. Listen to them. Engage with them. And THEN begin to strategically filter out your content. In bite sized chunks and interesting snippets. Make them hungry for more until they want the book. These community-focussed hubs subconsciously help determine demographics, audience behaviours and expectations which add huge value to any branding/marketing.

There’s no doubt that testing the water in these digital times with no ‘dead cert’ as to what will and won’t work can be scary, but let’s face it ‘media partner’ is the buzzword du jour and, I believe, the way forward. To hop off-board and jump into the dinghies on the deep waters might be less daunting with the security of a partner and here are a few examples of publishers that have sent out a dinghy or two:

· Bloomsbury & Babelgum paired up for Sex and the Austen Girl –a new web series to air weekly over 20 webisodes – providing great publicity for the lead up to the publication of Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict in Feb 2011. Their 20-part Babelgum Original Series “Sex and the Austen Girl” premiered on the broadband network’s comedy channel in May. The webseries is based on the best-selling novels Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and its parallel story/ sequel, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict are both published by Dutton & Plume, Penguin Books (USA) and Bloomsbury (UK). The series has its own URL as well as being featured on the comedy shuffle and the front page shuffle of the site. To raise awareness of the series it was tweeted about, with links to Babelgum and the videos were seeded on bloomsbury.com. With Babelgum itself getting 2 million unique users each month this hopes to create an excellent web presence for the series and the books.

· Harper Collins and Asos.com teamed up for the Hot Reads Campaign, which is perfect product placement and totally relevant to both audiences/consumers! HarperCollins announced a media partnership with ASOS.com, the online fashion store, to launch the Hot Reads campaign, highlighting six new summer titles perfect for ASOS’s young women’s market. ASOS.com has 7.5 million unique users a month and will support the six books via a microsite www.asos.com/hotreads which will highlight a must-have book every two weeks.

· Hachette Filipacchi, MSN and BermanBraun partnered to create Glo – a web-only brand with an original voice. The Microsoft-owned Web portal, the publisher, and the independent media company, respectively, described Glo as “a lifestyle site that focuses on style, beauty, living, and relationship content through a uniquely engaging and dynamic experience.” Hachette commented, H“like all publishers, we are exploring different ways to deliver content onto all platforms. We are very excited about creating a web-only brand with an original voice that fills an open position in the marketplace. Our collaboration with our two outstanding partners, MSN and BermanBraun, has been a rich one, with each team bringing distinct strengths and voices to the project”.

· Candace Bushnell, Meredith & Maybelline collaborated on The Broadroom – a four part series written by Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City). The four-part series—presented by Maybelline New York NEW Color Sensational lipcolor—featured an accomplished ensemble cast of women including Jennie Garth, Jennifer Esposito, Talia Balsam, Mary McCann and newcomer Lauren Devereux. The webisodes took a humorous look at women in the workplace.

If publishers can balance what the consumer wants, including accessibility and immediacy in this on-demand culture, with what the publisher wants – audience, fragmented/branded imprints, to sell content now and to acquire audiences, they will be perfectly positioned to embrace Mike Shatzkin’s Roadmap for the future – ‘6 suggestions for todays publishers that many can’t follow’ that include using content as bait and attracting eyeballs, being prepared to imitate new models, acquiring competitors or joining them, finding multiple ways to engage your audience and building multiple brands with meaning. Just don’t forget your oars, nobody said it was going to be easy!

Alison is a novelist & Transmedia PhD student who is currently writing her fifth novel –Loving NY – a transmedia rom com/chick lit that is already media-partnered with Skype and YourTango. She consults to publishers and authors on the strategy behind transmedia publishing.

(www.storycentralDIGITAL.wordpress.com)

Twitter: storycentral

E: alison.norrington@yahoo.co.uk

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Library Journal

The Reader’s Shelf: Lessons Learned: Strong Women Make the Story, June 1, 2011

Edited by Neal Wyatt
June 1, 2011

Life lessons are valuable, but they rarely come without unpleasant side effects such as self-doubt, regret, worry, and the potential for huge amounts of embarrassment. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn the lesson while avoiding the pitfalls? The heroines of these six novels each navigate particularly thorny problems, ranging from the wacky to the tragic, and as they make their way, they offer readers the chance for a variety of vicarious tutorials.

In Confessions of a Jane Austen ­Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler (Plume: Penguin Group [USA]. 2008. ISBN 9780452289727. pap. $15), Courtney Stone lives a fairly typical life for a 30-year-old single woman in L.A. But after breaking off an engagement, Courtney decides to drown her sorrow in a seemingly innocent evening of pizza and reading Pride and Prejudice. But something goes wrong, and she finds herself in Regency England, surrounded by strangers calling her Jane Mansfield. Attempting to figure out how she took up residence in Jane’s person quickly becomes the least of Courtney’s worries, however. Two men vie for her attention, and she must choose wisely in order to create her own happy ending in this new time. Janites will adore the underlying P&P story and romantic comedy tropes, while all readers will enjoy the honest, nitty-gritty details of early 19th-century life.

In Sophie Kinsella’s funny and smart ­Twenties Girl (Dial: Random. 2010. ISBN 9780385342032. pap. $15), Londoner Lara Lington’s world is turned upside down when she suddenly begins seeing and hearing her recently deceased great-aunt Sadie. Why is Lara the only one who can see Sadie—now in the ghostly form of a young flapper? And why is Lara going on a date with a guy Sadie finds dashing? Navigating life in the company of a ghost with an agenda has its issues but quite a few benefits as well, as Lara begins to find bravery, daring, and love along the way.

The final (for now) book in Lisa Lutz’s Spellman series, The Spellmans Strike Again (S. & S. 2011. ISBN 9781416593416. pap. $15), is more of a beginning for Isabel “Izzy” Spellman. Izzy may be 32, but her acceptance of adulthood is haphazard at best. Now that she’s agreed to take over the family’s Spellman Investigations, Izzy is finding it even harder to balance her impulsive nature against her duty to do the right thing—and current cases aren’t making it any easier. With her family up to their usual unusual behavior, and Izzy’s dating issues taking on a life of their own—all seems in free fall. Luckily, the Spellmans are great at what they do—as is Lutz, in this sharp, endearing, and hilariously zany tale of ­detection.

Stephanie Gayle’s character-rich debut, MY Summer of Southern Discomfort (HarperCollins. 2008. ISBN 9780061236310. pap. $13.95), insightfully explores the hard fact that when love leads you astray, there’s only so much a girl can do to set things to rights. Natalie Goldberg is dazzled by the attentions of a partner at her law firm until he makes an error and pins the blame on her. Leaving Boston, she heads for a fresh start down South. The town of Macon, GA, might not be the obvious choice for an East Coast Jewish girl who leans hard to the left and liberal side of life, but unlikely friends, a job in the D.A.’s office, and the chance at an honest relationship all wait to be discovered in the heat and humidity of a Georgia summer.

When Jill Murray’s husband, Seth, leaves her and their three-year-old daughter to join the Peace Corps, Jill eventually adjusts and creates a new life for herself and now ten-year-old Anastasia in Claire Cook’s tender, humorous, and comforting novel of female strength, Seven Year Switch (Voice: Hyperion. 2011. ISBN 9781401341640. pap. $13.99). When Seth unexpectedly reappears, his presence deeply unsettles Jill. How does his return impact the life she has built and her relationship with the easygoing Billy? In classic Cook style, Jill must reinvent herself anew, navigating choices where no clear, or easy, answer awaits.

Holly Maguire is certain love has finally come her way—complete with an adorable child she longs to mother in Melissa Senate’s The Love Goddess’ Cooking School (Gallery: S. & S. 2010. ISBN 9781439107232. pap. $15). Unfortunately, it seems an odd prophecy told to her by her grandmother Camilla has once again come true, and love passes her by. Bereft, Holly returns to her grandmother’s home on Blue Crab Island, hoping for solace. What peace she finds is short-lived, however, as her grandmother soon dies, leaving Holly with a cooking school known for its magic—a magic Holly knows she did not inherit. But something is afoot as Holly slowly constructs a life for herself, helps friends new and old, and finds the possibility of a love that can overcome Camilla’s prediction. Rich in detail and atmosphere, Senate’s novel offers readers a lovely mix of light magical realism, recipes, and abiding friendship.

This column was contributed by Stacey Hayman, a librarian who enjoys suggesting books for readers of all ages and tastes at the Rocky River Public Library, OH

Author Information
Neal Wyatt compiles LJ’s online feature Wyatt’s World and is the author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007). She is a collection development and readers’ advisory librarian from Virginia. Those interested in contributing to The Reader’s Shelf should contact her directly at Readers_Shelf@comcast.net

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USA Today

Pride and parody: Writers vamp it up with Jane Austen
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Best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith’s send-up of the Jane Austen novel, has started a monster of a trend.
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Best-selling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith’s send-up of the Jane Austen novel, has started a monster of a trend.

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By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Jane Austen fans who got their pantaloons in a twist over Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Seth Grahame-Smith’s irreverent best seller that blends Austen’s 19th-century love story with a tale of the rampaging undead — brace yourselves.

The monster onslaught continues.

Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange (Sourcebooks) hits stores Aug. 11. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters, from Zombies publisher Quirk, is out Sept. 15.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a surprise summer hit, is No. 28 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list. There are 650,000 copies in print.

What is it about Austen and mythical creatures, anyway?
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Jane Austen | Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“It’s very appealing to see the very mannered, rigid society Jane lived in conflict with a very chaotic society,” Grange says from her home in Cheshire, England.

Grange, a popular author of romances inspired by Austen including Mr. Darcy’s Diary, came up with the idea for Vampyre years ago while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV. “The dynamics between Buffy and Angel reminded me of the dynamics of Lizzy (Bennet) and Darcy.”

Vampyre is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy must reveal his true nature. (Vampirism is the reason he’s so moody and brooding.) Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, is an enhanced retelling of the classic Austen tale.

In Sea Monsters, Sense and Sensibility’s Col. Brandon has been cursed by a sea witch and has tentacles growing out of his chin. The book’s “new” characters include two-headed sea serpents and giant lobsters.

Quirk hopes Austen and zombie fans will be drawn to Sea Monsters as well as new fans attracted by the novel’s other pop-culture elements.

“It’s not comic horror the way Zombies was. It’s more of a mystery adventure,” says Quirk’s Jason Rekulak. “It draws on different sources like Jules Verne, Celtic mythology, Lost, Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws.”

JaneAustenAddict.com creator Laurie Viera Rigler, author of the popular Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict and the new Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, which incorporate elements of time travel, says fans never tire of new interpretations. “Jane Austen wrote just six books, and they want more, more, more.”

Like raging zombies, there’s no stopping the Austen spinoffs.

Grange is working on a novel about Darcy the vampire that takes place before Pride and Prejudice. Coming in December: Darcy’s Hunger: A Vampire Retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Regina Jeffers and Jane Bites Back by Michael Thomas Ford.

Quirk is not ready to make a public announcement, but it is in final negotiations for a film version of Zombies.

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Authorlink

Author’s Obsession with Austen
Yields Successful Novels

By Ellen Birkett Morris

November 2009

Laurie Viera Rigler
Rude Awakenings
of a Jane Austen Addict

Like many women readers Laurie Viera Rigler had a thing for Jane Austen. She parlayed this interest into two novels in which her heroines travel between modern life and Regency England armed with Austen’s novels as a guide.

Austen’s novels have spawned movies, groups such as the Jane Austen Society of North America, and books ranging from zombie tales to Rigler’s two novels, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, a national bestseller, and the sequel released this year, RUDE AWAKENING OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT.

“I was really lucky that I happened to finish the first book at a time when the movie Becoming Jane was coming out and everything Jane Austen was hot again,” observed Rigler.

What does she think accounts for Austen’s enduring appeal?

“It is the timelessness of the stories. They combine satire of social hypocrisy and comment on human nature with this great search for love,” said Rigler. “I think of her books as self help books, as my characters do.”

Rigler was standing in her kitchen one day when pictured her protagonist Courtney Stone, a modern woman, waking up in a four poster bed in Regency England.

Her first book, CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUTEN ADDICT, follows Courtney as she finds herself inhabiting the body and life of Jane Mansfield, the daughter of a gentleman. Courtney’s struggles to adapt to the rigorous standards of behavior and her quest to find love make for a transporting read.

Her second novel, RUDE AWAKENING OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, chronicles Jane Mansfield’s travels to modern day to navigate a world of puzzling technology and alarming social norms.

Rigler initially thought that she would alternate between the two women’s stories but discovered that their journeys were so different that they needed to be told separately.

“I wrote Courtney’s story in Regency England first and trusted that I would know how to tell Jane’s story when the time came,” she said.

Rigler’s path to becoming a novelist was not a straight line. She started college at 16 with dreams of becoming a classics professor. She graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a B.A. in Classics. Then she worked as an advocate for victims of domestic violence, a legal secretary, and freelance book editor. She worked her way into film work from production coordinating features to producing short films. Two of the short films she produced were commissioned by Showtime. A third short, Blind Curve, was selected for the Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la Critique.

Before writing fiction, Rigler teamed with Richard Roeper of Ebert & Roeper fame to write a humorous, gender-specific guide to movie rentals entitled HE RENTS, SHE RENTS: THE ULTIMATE FILM GUIDE TO THE BEST WOMEN’S FILMS AND GUY MOVIES for St.Martin’s Press. She also coauthored POPPING THE QUESTION: REAL-LIFE STORIES OF MARRIAGE PROPOSALS, FROM THE ROMANTIC TO THE BIZARRE for Walker & Company.

The first novel took six years to complete. Rigler cited lack of confidence, fear of rejection, procrastination and getting immersed in research as the reasons why.

“I am a research nerd. I started with Austen’s texts, read books from that period and went to London and Bath to get a feel for it.” She made ample use of the internet, including articles, blogs and information from the Jane Austen Society. She also took lessons in English country dancing.

She described her writing style as “putting together a patchwork quilt.” She completed 10 to12 drafts of the book before she finished it. The second book was finished in two years, building on the research she had done for the first book.

“I wrote an outline for the first book, but the final product bore little resemblance to the outline. The outline was good because psychologically it gave me something to hang my hat on, but I allowed the story to unfold in its own way.”

She said that if she gets writer’s block she steps away from the story and asks her character to show her what happens next.

“I found out that not knowing is the best place for me to be. If you can embrace not knowing in a playful manner wondrous, magical things can happen.”

Her greatest challenge writing the books was fidelity to the language of Austen’s time period. “Every word became a question,” she noted. Rigler got a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary online and used Google’s book search to look at books from that period. She created a glossary of terms so that she wouldn’t end up duplicating her research.

Rigler pointed out that Jane in RUDE AWAKENINGS had a “language arc” throughout the book where her word usage changes the longer she stays in the present day.

Her advice to new writers who are daunted by the prospect of writing an entire novel is to look at it as a series of sentences strung together to create scenes and a series of scenes strung together to create the book.

“Also, I always kept my theme in mind. The first book was about transformation and the second was about awakening. Reminding myself of this helped me stay focused when a scene was wandering,” she advised.

She was helped along the way by a friend who read every draft of both books and gave her constructive criticism.

Rigler found her agent by paying attention to which agents were making deals for books like hers and by looking up key words to narrow down a list of agents that might be interested in her work. She wrote a query letter to agent Marly Rusoff of Marly Rusoff Literary Agency, who became her agent.

She received several offers on the book but went with a two-book deal with Dutton. Trena Keating edited the first book and Erika Imranyi edited the second.

“It can be disconcerting to get notes from an editor. It can be a knee jerk reaction to get defensive, but editors are so respectful and want to collaborate with you so try to take everything on a case by case basis,” advised Rigler.

Imranyi advised her to flesh out certain scenes and to enhance some “friendship issues” between certain characters. Rigler enjoyed the collaboration.

She is sharing her success by teaching writing workshops at Vroman’s, an independent bookstore in Southern California. Topics include keeping a consistent point of view, sensory description, how to write in scene not summary and writing sparkling dialogue.

Rigler cautioned new writers not to listen to naysayers and not to share their work with everyone, opening themselves to unwarranted criticism.

“A lot of finishing a book is sticking with it and having the vision. I credit what Ron Gottesman, a fellow author and friend, calls the three P’s, persistence, patience and postage,” said Rigler.

About the Author

Laurie Viera Rigler is the best-selling author of the novels CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT and RUDE AWAKENINGS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT, both published in North America by Dutton / Plume. CONFESSIONS OF A JANE AUSTEN ADDICT has also been published in the Netherlands (Archipel) and the UK (Bloomsbury), garnering enthusiastic reviews in The Guardian and The Observer and receiving a nomination for a Regency World Award for Best New Fiction.
About Regular Contributor
Ellen Birkett Morris

Ellen Birkett Morris is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in national print and online publications including The New York Times. She also writes for a number of literary, regional, trade, and business publications, and she has contributed to six published nonfiction books in the trade press. Ellen is a regular contributor to Authorlink, assigned to interview various New York Times bestselling authors and first-time novelists.

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Macleans

The opposite of sex

Why we’re obsessed with Jane Austen and Regency-era romance

LIANNE GEORGE

Last year, there was no dodging Marie Antoinette. No sooner had Sophia Coppola’s opulent biopic hit the screens than retailers began stocking their shelves with wallpaper, area rugs, wrap dresses, fountain pens and paper plates, all splattered with the ornate symmetry of Versailles.

This year, we’ve swapped one 18th-century feminine prototype for another, considerably less flamboyant, one. On Aug. 10, Becoming Jane, a film based very liberally on Jane Austen’s early life — starring Anne Hathaway as an implausibly sultry Jane — opens across North America. In the fall, an adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, about six people who meet to discuss Austen’s novels — and find surprising parallels in the plots of their own lives — will hit theatres. Masterpiece Theatre has announced it will air film versions of every Austen novel, in addition to a new drama based on the author’s private letters.

When she’s not appearing on screen, Austen is busily inspiring reams of new fiction. One theme is increasingly ubiquitous: contemporary women who, dissatisfied and over-worked, become obsessed with the cozy world Austen paints. For instance, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, due this fall, is the tale of a modern-day woman “nursing a broken engagement with Jane Austen novels and Absolut” who wakes up one morning to find she is inhabiting the body of an upper-class maiden in Regency England. Similarly, the recently released Austenland, by Shannon Hale, is about a thirtysomething woman who harbours an obsession with Fitzwilliam Darcy (as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), and acts out her fantasies in an Austen-themed resort. Adding to the mix are Lost in Austen, an “interactive” choose-your-own-adventure in which the reader’s mission is “to marry both prudently and for love” and Margaret C. Sullivans’s The Jane Austen Handbook, which offers Austenophiles “step-by-step instructions to proper comportment” in the author’s time.

When the first round of Austen-inspired romantic comedies — Clueless and, later, Bridget Jones’s Diary — emerged in the mid-’90s, critics complained that the creators wrongly attributed to Austen a brand of klutzy romanticism. More recently, the journalist Rebecca Traister, writing for Salon about this latest explosion of books and films, suggests modern fans have wildly misinterpreted Austen’s novels as boy-crazy and sentimental. “In the mad dash to find their Darcys,” she writes, “some readers and fans have forgotten that Austen regarded mushy female infatuation as side-splittingly funny … Her heroines are not so much breathless and overcome by their emotions as they are practical and genuine.”

But it is precisely because Austen is not a romantic that her stories resonate today. She’s a pragmatist, an economist. A stubborn adherence to arbitrary social rules has always been considered the defining characteristic of her work. And these days, when social life is more or less a free-for-all, what could be more appealing?

In the 19th century, Charlotte Brontë famously rejected Austen’s work as lacking warmth, enthusiasm or anything heartfelt, sniffing, “She ruffles her reader with nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her.” A modern Austen fan might argue there is enough in the world already to disturb a person, if that’s what she wants.

Austen’s England is the opposite of our messy, confessional culture, where everyone’s lives and loves are posted on Facebook for all to peruse. Her works conjure — rightly or not — some quaint, if unrealistic notion of dignity and restraint. The entire universe of an Austen novel often consists of three or four families in a village, left to sort out their lives between them. There are only so many possible configurations. Emotion figures into it, of course, but it always gives way to rationality, propriety and social norms.

Which isn’t to say the current fascination with all things Austen is not about romance. But it is a functional, grown-up kind of romance. Courtship in Austen’s day had weight and carried real consequences in a way that it doesn’t today. Readers are well aware of Austen’s mistrust (even horror) of unbridled passion. One misstep and a woman winds up destitute and unloved, a social pariah. Today, by comparison, nothing seems to have weight. Dating, co-habitation, marriage — everything’s undoable. It’s a hard-won freedom that does have its downside.

“Being a woman, especially a single woman in the contemporary world can be quite confusing,” says Viera Rigler, author of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict. “There are no rules. Who’s supposed to pay? What do sex and dating and monogamy mean? Looking back and putting our own modern nostalgic construction on Jane Austen’s world, the rules were very clear, and I think people long for that.” It’s that yearning for predictability and a social template that draws fans into Austen’s world — a place where two people plus one interaction equals one set outcome. This is also why, among her true devotees, the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, faithful to text, was so beloved and why the dreamy 2005 version starring Keira Knightly was derisively labelled “Brontëfied.”

Austenmania is likely also another response to the current cultural environment in which femininity and feminism remain at loggerheads. Admirers of Marie Antoinette — a living doll with more exquisite jewels, shoes, and petits fours than any person could reasonably desire — attempted to reclaim coquetry and material binges (raunch culture with money and taste). Through Austen, they express the desire to lose themselves in the cozy confines of 18th-century British propriety, replete with an elaborate set of rules to be corseted by. It is, as author Wendy Shalit called it, the “girls gone mild” phenomenon.

Of course, no woman in her right mind would actually trade 21st-century life for the Regency era, where women of leisure spent their lives promenading round the shrubbery and torturing the pianoforte (although some days, would that be so bad?). Still, there’s an element of this life that speaks to something many people now long for — something slow. “The pace certainly appeals for good reason,” says Devoney Looser, an Austen scholar and professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “There is something that just seems very peaceful and calm about the way that these women of leisure live. Most of us don’t have a governess or a scullery maid.”

Of course, most people back then didn’t have a governess or a scullery maid either. Whether or not we know it, when we fetishize Austen, we’re also fetishizing the freedom to not worry about money matters. In her book Confessions, Rigler’s protagonist, upon finding herself in the boudoir of a Regency-era lady of leisure, muses to herself about the lifestyle: “I can’t begin to count the times I’ve agonized over my chequebook and wished I didn’t have to decide which was more important, paying the electric bill on time or buying groceries, although sometimes I did neither and had my highlights done instead. It’s unlikely that a person with a bedroom like this and a well-stocked jewellery box ever has to prioritize such things.”

Women in our times may be especially susceptible to this kind of wistfulness. Thankfully — praise Mary Wollstonecroft! — women are no longer reliant on fathers or husbands for income. We can buy our own finery. However, a certain regressive discomfort with personal finance is more common among women than most would care to admit. This is the “white knight” fantasy Liz Perle writes about in her book Money: A Memoir, for which she interviewed hundreds of women about their most shameful secret fantasies pertaining to love and cash — the most common being the wish that someone or something will come along and just take care of it. “Insistent feminist that I was (and remain),” she writes, “I still wanted the option of knowing that I, alone, would not have to be the steward of my financial destiny.”

In the end, we reconcile the dilemmas Austen fantasies pose by bastardizing her work a little, cherry-picking from it. We hearken back to a Hollywood-reimagined time that never was and invest her heroines with more self-determinative power than they actually had. “It’s a way-we-never-were sort of fantasy,” says Looser. In a famous 1940 essay on Austen’s work called “Regulated Hatred,” the critic D.W. Harding wrote that it’s these licences that Austen fans are prone to take with her work that she would have loathed the most. He writes: “her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” Today, this translates into a bunch of flighty Lydia Bennets looking to imagine for a few hours that they could be a little more self-possessed, like their big sister Elizabeth.

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