Men are giving up on reading books because they prefer to watch the big screen version instead, a study commissioned by the Reading Agency has revealed. Researchers found that being too busy, not enjoying reading and preferring to spend their spare time on the internet means men read fewer books, read more slowly and are less likely to finish them than women.
Links of the week April 14 2014 (16)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
21 April 2014
Nearly three quarters of the men surveyed said they would opt for the film or television adaptation of a book, whereas the same percentage of women were as likely to go for the book itself. It also emerged that women are more likely to have bought or borrowed a book this year, with more visiting bookshops, libraries, supermarket book aisles and online retailers than men.
At the Observer, Tom Lamont (a writer and commissioning editor for the Observer) and Robert Muchamore (author of the best-selling Cherub series of books, and of Henderson's Boys) sat down to discuss a very important topic: Should celebrities stop writing children's books?
"A celebrity - Kylie, Sting - announces his or her intention to write for children, and I instinctively feel for the career-pledged writers who have been huffing away with their thesaurus and watercolour brushes for years. Beneath them, the hopefuls with worthwhile manuscripts hustle for interest...And, uh, oh, here's another celebrity, lolloping into the game. They've noodled out an idea on a Groucho Club napkin. Their agent has swiveled at the bar to arrange a six-figure deal. The published result, you can bet, will absorb more than its share of publicity budgets, review space, shelf space.
'How many words are there in Goodnight Moon? A hundred? It's seen as easy work, a short cut to reputation-padding bibliography. And this is offensive (isn't it?) to the children's authors who devote themselves to writing for developing minds; who agonize; who know that, actually, those 100 words of Goodnight Moon are just perfect.'
If there was one dominant theme coming of out the London Book Fair last week it was of an industry taking a pause, drawing in a big deep breath and working out what comes next. At Digital Minds, the author Nick Harkaway said that publishers liked to reach a plateau and then wait for the next innovation to run them down. In my Leader column for The Bookseller last week, I took issue with this. Just because the activity isn't visible, and the answers are not forthcoming, does not mean that publishing isn't thinking about it.
There isn't a conversation I have with anyone in publishing these days that isn't prefaced by a worried shrug, or a slightly nervous glance over the shoulder. Publishing is in confident mood right now, but that confidence is based on some brittle assumptions: that digital continues to not disrupt, and that physical book retail does not close down. Take either of those two pillars away, and all this talk of an orderly transition to digital, will vanish as quickly as a drunken tweet.
The panel had the mouthful-of-a-title: "Eating the Cake, Too: The New Breed of 'Hybrid' Authors Have the Best of Both Worlds." Speaking with Diego Marano, U.K. manager of Kobo Writing Life, Howey began by noting that he should not be held up as an example of your average self-published author. As someone who has become a major bestseller--making money from self-publishing and, now, through deals with traditional houses--Howey admitted that he is, by all standards, an outlier in the self-publishing landscape. Nonetheless, he believes in the power of self-publishing as a way for writers to connect with readers, become part of a community and, finally, hone their craft.
So how does an author looking for an audience, giving away his content, make money? Howey believes the key is in backlist. He said he felt that, no matter how an author is published, the key for them is to keep writing. And, the advantage to being an unknown, he feels, is that it gives you time to write. "Use your anonymity wisely," he advised. "And hope it's your 10th book that takes off, so you have a backlist."
Books, always, seem to defy expectations. Some are hyped to high heaven and never meet expectations; others surprise. Take the case of Herman Koch's The Dinner. The Dutch novel, a huge success in Europe, has found itself in the top ten on The New York Times Book Review's bestseller list for three weeks running.
Like the Times‘s own reviewer, Claire Messud, I had my doubts that the book would resonate with American readers. The novel, in short, covers a multi-course dinner at which a pair of brothers and their spouses meet to circuitously discuss a crime committed by their sons. One brother is a politician; the other - Paul Lohman, the narrator - is a former high school teacher retired for medical reasons. The crime is not as central to the plot as it might be in a crime novel or thriller, but does provide a crux which enables Koch to explore issues of European economic, political and social pretense. It struck me as a distinctly European - and Dutch - novel.
Are there books that are indeed too culturally specific to sell well across borders? I suspect there are. But the publishing industry is so finely tuned these days that virtually any book with potential to sell will get a good look; those that don't are the ones that will remain locked within their own borders. And that makes perfect sense.
14 April 2014
Archipelago Books is a small, independent, Brooklyn-based press founded a decade ago with one mission and one mission only: to publish works exclusively in English translation. For the latter six of its ten years, Archipelago has resided in the Old American Can Factory, a red brick, labyrinthine complex built at the end of the 1800s along the Gowanus Canal, in an area once known as South Brooklyn. Renovated a little less than ten years ago, it now houses art studios, film companies, performance spaces, and a few other bright spots in the American literary landscape: Akashic Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, and the journal One Story.
Archipelago's office is an open room with a large white support column in its very center. A window takes up the rear wall, while the other three support a complex of shelving practically overflowing with the press's latest titles. The floor is stacked with cardboard boxes full of books fresh from the printer. Near the front door, five people, at three desks, tap away at computers. It looks, sounds, smells, and feels much like the way one might imagine a busy press should. But in this case, looks are deceiving. Those people tip-tapping away, they aren't employees; they're a micro-press startup that subleases the space from Archipelago. And that column in the center of the room, it obscures a desk near the back at which one, maybe two, people could fit comfortably. Turns out, Archipelago Books, a press that has, in a very short time, managed to acquire, translate, design, publish, and market 100 titles from over 35 different countries originally written in 26 different languages, runs primarily on the fuel of one person. And that person's name is Jill Schoolman.
First, a translator is selected. Schoolman wants to ensure that the book is in the best, most capable hands. Once that's been taken care of, the translation process begins. What for many might be considered a long and arduous undertaking, at Archipelago, translation is greeted as part of the fun. Schoolman uses, as often as she can, translators she has already worked with in the past. Translators are so well-respected at Archipelago that, as has been the case with Bill Johnston, Schoolman will sometimes go in search of a book specifically for a translator. Whereas it's common for one translator to translate a specific author's works for a certain publisher, one finds in Archipelago's catalogue certain translators working on a variety of authors. Johnston, for instance, has translated eight works by four different authors; Peter Wortsman has translated five works by as many authors; and Richard Seiburth has translated four works by as many. Schoolman understands translation is not a simple series of flipping sentences as if on the other side of the Dutch coin one might find English. She knows it takes focus and passion and understanding. But she also seems to know that above all else it takes a deep love of language.
In all of the recent debate surrounding traditional publishing versus self-publishing, both models appear to be emerging as valid options for books. But while the Big Five aren't closing up shop entirely any time soon-despite recent mergers and rumors of future mergers-and self-published authors continue to earn accolades and income, one entity in the publishing industry has been largely overlooked: literary agents.
Agents, once considered the first-round gate keepers to getting your book published, have had to look for new ways to continue their relevance in a rapidly changing book market. Some agents, such as Deidre Knight of The Knight Agency and Scott Waxman of Waxman literary, were the first to embrace digital publishing as a viable option for their clients, citing the desire to get a client's book "out there," regardless of the interest from publishers. Ebook-only or digital-first became an opportunity to not cast aside a quality book that just hadn't found its place in the market.
In the traditional industry, the first step was always a hardcover edition to build an audience, then follow up with the lesser expensive paperback. But in a time when ebooks are selling in record numbers, it makes sense to begin with an edition that reaches almost as many readers as print without the prohibitive investment in printing. Powered by Vook's award-winning ebook construction tools, The Studio will release the digital edition ahead of any plans for print.
The Digital Minds conference in London took a philosophical bent, questioning is this "golden age for publishing or the end of the book?"
Copernicus, Ptolemy, Einstein, Wittgenstein and Willard Quine (don't worry...he was a US philosopher and logician) were all name-checked in a presentation at yesterday's Digital Minds that was as abstract as the speaker's hair. Bill Thompson from the BBC Archives gave a philosophical masterclass on what we mean when we refer to a book and how the print and digital versions are very different animals, one passive, the other active.
Earlier, in the keynote address by bestselling author Anthony Horowitz, the merits of e and p were also raised. Though he admits to using a Kindle when he travels, he said that he loves the physicality of printed books. "On a Kindle you have no sense of the journey between page one and page 100. With a printed book, each turn of the page is an unveiling. Also, physical books remain at home with as your friends. I still have my signed Ian Fleming and the original Sherlock Holmes collection my father gave me when I was 17."
Then he became philosophic too. He talked about the book as "false friend, as in Atonement, and the ideas Nabokov played with in Pale Fire. In fact, I've always wanted to write a book in which the physical book plays a part too, where the reader has to solve a mystery by tearing something to reveal something hidden in the cover.
After the excesses of the early years, did we all wake up in 2013 with a digital hangover? It can sometimes feel like it. Coming off the back of three years of treble-digit e-book growth, last year's growth rate, of around 20%, was a detoxifier. In truth though, this party has barely even begun. As Amara's Law argues, we tend to overestimate the impact of digital changes in the short term, but underestimate them in the long run. My hunch is that we are now at the fulcrum of this passage, with too much debate about whether we are at a plateau or a cliff, and not enough focus on what comes next.
However, I don't think the overarching message would change. The champagne days of treble-digit digital growth for all are clearly behind us. What we perceived as an explosion of e-reading was actually a market shift: for some sections of the reading community the e-book represented something new and convenient, and they flocked to it in their droves, downloading more than they'd ever had access to before, at low prices, and reading, I suspect, only a proportion of it. That - along with Fifty Shades of Grey and The Hunger Games - served to inflate the e-book space at a time when the print market was heading in the opposite direction. It also overemphasised the slowdown.