An interesting piece on The Bookseller today about literary fiction. The worry from some agents and publishers is that unique and daring voices are going to fall silent because of the changes in the publishing industry (fewer bookstores, lower advances, less risk-taking). The idea seems to be that without the funds to support these writers, the works will never materialize, and literature will suffer a great loss.
Links of the week May 19 2014 (21)
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:
26 May 2014
I think the opposite is going to happen. The future of literary fiction will be owned and operated by digital natives - writers who grow up posting on blogs, debating on forums, posting on Facebook and Twitter, and all the myriad forms of self-publishing that we don't seem to label "self-publishing". Learning how to turn a manuscript into both a physical book and an e-book at almost no expense to the author takes a weekend of fiddling around. And that's from someone who learned to type on a typewriter. Digital natives are going to be both literary and technologically savvy. It won't be long (it's probably already happening) before the next great voice is putting her work out there . . . simply because she can.
Writing for The New Yorker, Adrienne Raphel looks back at the glory days of Harlequin Romances, noting that, "Harlequin Books Limited - now Harlequin Enterprises, was founded in 1949 in Canada as a small printer, packager, and distributor of books. In the 1950s, Harlequin started reprinting titles from Mills & Boon, a British publisher of popular romance novels. In 1972, Harlequin acquired Mills & Boon, and soon was synonymous with the romance novel. By 2012, romance novels were a 1.5-billion-dollar-a-year business that made up nearly seventeen percent of fiction sales. But, for the past several years, Harlequin's sales have declined as people have started getting their romance from erotic - and often self-published - ebooks instead of grocery-store paperbacks. Earlier this month, News Corporation announced it would acquire Harlequin from its parent company Torstar Corporation for about one hundred and fifteen million dollars - not much more than Harlequin's revenue last year. Harlequin will become a division of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers.
Amazon released its first Kindle in 2007. Three years later, Raphel writes, romance novels were the fastest-growing part of the ebook market, in no small part because, as Julie Bosman wrote in the Times, readers could trade "the racy covers of romance novels for the discretion of digital books." But while the Kindle and other e-readers added a new level of popularity to Harlequin Romances, it also made it easier for writers to self-publish their novels, and for smaller romance publishers to get their titles noticed. And, as Raphel notes, some of those titles were racier than traditional Harlequin offerings.
The first-ever uPublishU Author Hub has its ribbon-cutting at 10 a.m. on Thursday May 29 at BookExpo America (BEABookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States). You're most welcome to join us if you're there with a BEA badge.
Author C.J. Lyons, as mistress of the ribbons (I just made that up) will hand off to her fellow "Indie Bestseller," the author Hugh Howey. And Howey will lead the first programmed session in the Hub, discussing findings and interpretations of his brand-new May 2014 Report from AuthorSolutiions.com
One thing that has slowed down many who might have liked to consider self-publishing is the quandary of how to get their books into libraries.
Make of it what you will, but it's a plain fact of publishing life that more people will read the latest Star Wars franchise novel than all the books shortlisted for last year's Booker prize put together. The world is a noisy place, made all the more so by the democratising influence of the internet, where it sometimes seems that all seven billion members of the global village have self-published their own book. Confronted with this tumult of competing egos, you can hardly blame the average punter for sticking with entertainment brands scorched into their psyche by the lightsabers of multibillion-dollar marketing budgets.
The kingdom of the franchise novel extends far beyond spin-offs from cinema and TV. You can keep your Lord of the Rings and even your Game of Thrones. If I could take only one fantasy novel with me to read in the dungeons of Mordor it would be Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil - better known to most readers as the redoubtable Kim Newman. In the early years of Games Workshop the creators of the Warhammer franchise it published a short run of novels that added some depth of charcater to the two-dimensional world of tabletop gaming. Drachenfels was by far the best, a little known gem of fantasy fiction still unrivalled in its canon.
A former journalist with the East Kilbride News has signed a dream contract with publishing giants HarperVoyager.
Andy Livingstone is one of a handful of authors worldwide to be successful after the fantasy and science fiction arm of "big five" publisher HarperCollins opened their doors for two weeks to allow aspiring writers to submit full-length novels directly to them.
And not only has HarperVoyager agreed a contract with him for his novel, Hero Born, but also for the two further books in the trilogy.
The response to Harper Voyager's invitation for "new authors with fresh voices, strong storytelling abilities, original ideas and compelling story-lines" attracted more than 4500 novels, more than double the amount they would normally be sent in a year.
In a letter sent by the AAR to Amazon, which PW has obtained, the organization says it "deplores any attempt by any party that would seek to injure and punish innocent authors--and their innocent readers--in order to pursue its position in a business dispute."
AAR president Gail Hochman, who signed the letter (posted in full, below), said she had no further comment on the situation. At press time, Amazon had not responded to a request for comment about the letter.
Dear Amazon Team, I am writing as the President of the AAR, the Association of Authors Representatives, the largest organization of literary and dramatic agents in North America. The AAR has more than 400 member agents, who in turn represent tens of thousands of authors, dramatists, and other rights owners.
19 May 2014
Do I need an agent?
The longstanding advice to new writers was that if they had any hope of a successful career in publishing they absolutely needed an agent. Myriad books and blogs have been devoted to the topics of how to pitch agents and how to find the right agent. Unfortunately for most authors, winning an agent is easier said than done, and rejection is the rule rather than the exception. With the growth of indie publishing and presses that will consider unagented work, entrepreneurial authors are starting to ask how relevant agents are in today's publishing world.
The results indicate that the greatest advantage from having an agent may accrue to authors when they traditionally publish. Authors who only traditionally published and hybrid authors both saw substantially higher median advances and total earnings on their most recent traditionally published books when they had agent representation. As I reported in Part I of this series on agents, the authors we surveyed were unsure whether agents were helpful to authors self-publishing their work. In contrast to the results for traditionally published books, there was no advantage for authors who were only indie-published from having an agent, while hybrid authors saw higher median earnings on their most recent self-published books but not by the same margin. In terms of annual writing income, agented authors reported higher annual writing income, only if their publishing history included traditionally published works, either alone or in concert with self-published ones.
If you happen to be a writer, one of the great benisons of having children is that your personal culture-mine is equipped with its own canaries. As you tunnel on relentlessly into the future, these little harbingers either choke on the noxious gases released by the extraction of decadence, or they thrive in the clean air of what we might call progress. A few months ago, one of my canaries, who's in his mid-teens and harbours a laudable ambition to be the world's greatest ever rock musician, was messing about on his electric guitar. Breaking off from a particularly jagged and angry riff, he launched into an equally jagged diatribe, the gist of which was already familiar to me: everything in popular music had been done before, and usually those who'd done it first had done it best. Besides, the instant availability of almost everything that had ever been done stifled his creativity, and made him feel it was all hopeless.
There is now an almost ceaseless murmuring about the future of narrative prose. Most of it is at once Panglossian and melioristic: yes, experts assert, there's no disputing the impact of digitised text on the whole culture of the codex; fewer paper books are being sold, newspapers fold, bookshops continue to close, libraries as well. But - but, well, there's still no substitute for the experience of close reading as we've come to understand and appreciate it - the capacity to imagine entire worlds from parsing a few lines of text; the ability to achieve deep and meditative levels of absorption in others' psyches. This circling of the wagons comes with a number of public-spirited campaigns: children are given free books; book bags are distributed with slogans on them urging readers to put books in them; books are hymned for their physical attributes - their heft, their appearance, their smell - as if they were the bodily correlates of all those Gutenberg minds, which, of course, they are.
I'm tired of reading about the death of the book. It's not true, in the first place, and in the second, it's a lazy signifier, a way of addressing cultural import (or risk) that's not really justified.
Take Will Self's essay this past weekend in the Guardian. Titled "The Novel Is Dead (This Time It's for Real)," it uses a conversation the author had recently with his teenage son as a starting point for a meditation on the futility of long-form fiction in a world of tweets and bytes.
As it happens, I'm sympathetic to Self's method - my book "The Lost Art of Reading" is built around a similar device. But I also think his argument is shopworn: secondhand and not particularly apropos.
If serious novels will neither cease to be written nor read, then it's tough to say that the literary novel is dying - any more now than it has ever been. I agree with Self that there was a time when such books had a currency they don't have currently; he says the 1980s, but I'd suggest it was well before. By the 1980s, chain bookstores and corporate publishing were ascendant; we had MTV and personal computers, those emblems of a shift in cultural access, cultural style.
How can we accept the decline of newspapers and magazines, and the quality journalism therein, or accept the exploitation of writers? How can we retain valuable reporting, which requires payment?
One of the limitations of my talk was that it focused primarily on the history of book authorship and creative writing, more so than the fortunes of newspaper and magazine publishing or freelance journalists. I consider writing for hire (freelancing and journalism) quite different than creative writing (novels, memoir, etc), because the former necessarily has to pay attention to marketplace concerns, and if not, be gifted into existence or sustainability by patrons, grants, fellowships, and so on.
The challenge, of course, is that we know how to monetize a print newspaper or magazine - and it's easier to charge for their perceived value. We're still figuring out how to monetize digital forms. But amidst this challenge, I'd argue we're not seeing less quality journalism today, we're seeing more, because we have no distribution barriers and low start-up costs in digital publishing. I'd also ask if we really think the system pre-Internet was producing quality journalism, or if we merely prefer the devil we know. In the mid-20th century, media began to be operated by handful of conglomerates with significant control over the mass mediums of radio, TV, newspapers and magazines, a system that was hard for outside voices to access. To be sure, these major media conglomerates are being disrupted by another set of powerhouses (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook), but the latter provide us possibilities that didn't exist before: the ability to directly reach a specific, targeted readership and gather a community, which can lead to monetization by individuals and businesses alike.
Mills & Boon is claiming to be turning "traditional storytelling ... on its head" with the launch of an online story world which stitches together more than 800 pieces of digital content in multiple formats in what it says is a global first.
The romance publisher - whose parent Harlequin has just been acquired by News Corp - has created a fictional online hotel, The Chatsfield, as the jumping off point for a host of different storylines. There's Jessie, the executive assistant who has bet her best friend that she won't date anyone for three months, who stumbles across a mysterious bar manager with a secret to hide. There's a chambermaid with a sideline as an escort, and, in true Mills & Boon style, a playboy media mogul. The stories will be played out through Facebook, YouTube, blogs, short stories and Twitter, with characters reacting to readers' interactions, and the publisher planning to develop the characters that users interact with most.
Mills & Boon hopes the project will be a new evolution for the series romance novels for which it is best known. "Welcome to a world of style, spectacle and scandal," says the Chatsfield website, which went live this week. "The Chatsfield has welcomed, captivated and entertained the fabulously rich and famous for almost a century." Readers can follow the characters' real-time Twitter and Facebook account, watch their video blogs, and even check characters' emails.
"A digital story isn't just an ebook or an ebook with hyperlinks or video added," says the publisher. "Harlequin has taken traditional storytelling and turned it on its head, to get the attention of their audience in the digital spaces where they are already hanging out and being entertained." "Obviously Mills & Boon is really popular. It's a powerful part of our brand, and customers get really addicted to the series," said Jo Kite, Mills & Boon's marketing manager. "But we wanted to take it further, and develop it - make it something like popular series at the moment such as Mad Men or Modern Family. We wanted to engage our audience, and create something more contemporary."
Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury UK, offered the keynote speech at this year's Klopotek Publisher's Forum conference in Berlin taking place this week, where he ended dramatically with a list of "Don'ts for Publishers" - a riff on Bloomsbury's two million-copy bestselling revivals from 1913, Don'ts for Husbands and Don'ts for Wives.