Are we at the beginnings of a backlash against big tech? Last week the New Yorker published a disruption takedown from Jill Lepore in which she castigated the tech community for its "reckless and ruthless" philosophy of disruption. Over the weekend the Observer criticised tech companies for sometimes thinking "they are above good rules". A few weeks ago the New Statesman ran a series of articles puncturing the Silicon Valley dream, and warning about the "political and social damage that may be done by the future land-grab being pursued by the big internet companies".
Links of the week June 23 2014 (26)
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:
30 June 2014
In her summing up of the Apple collusion trial Judge Denise Cote evoked the two wrongs rule: "Another company's alleged violation of antitrust laws is not an excuse for engaging in your own violations of law. Nor is suspicion that that may be occurring a defense to the claims litigated at this trial," she said. But as a profile of Cote published in Vanity Fair earlier this year noted: "Nothing the publishers did - delaying the release of e-books, complaining to Amazon, upping their wholesale prices to the company, or, in the case of one house, Hachette, actually going to the Justice Department to gripe - seemed to work."
Literary agent Juliet Mushens began her publishing career at HarperCollins after reading history at Cambridge. She now works for The AgencyFounded in 1995 they represent screenwriters, directors, playwrights, composers, and children's authors & illustrators. Also film and TV rights in novels and non-fiction. Adult novels represented only for existing clients. Also handle dramatic rights for a number of authors, working in association with the literary agencies Rogers, Coleridge & White, Luigi Bonomi Associates, Faith Evans, Gregory & Company, David Grossman, A.M.Heath, Lutyens & Rubinstein, and Lavinia Trevor. Group. Here, she shares her 10 tips for breaking into the publishing industry.
1. Read widely The job is about finding and championing new writers, so it's important to see what else is in the market, what's working and what's not working, and to develop and hone your taste. I meet a lot of people who say they want to be agents, but only read the classics. I think the best agents are widely read and aware of up and coming writers as well as established talents.
2. Work hard Agenting is a job where you get out as much as you put in. When I was interning (which led to my first job) and assisting (which led to my promotion) I worked all hours and put as much effort into menial tasks as more glamorous ones. I have the same ethos now I'm an agent.
Chris HolifieldManaging director of WritersServices; spent working life in publishing,employed by everything from global corporations to start-ups; track record includes: editorial director of Sphere Books, publishing director of The Bodley Head, publishing director for start-up of upmarket book club, The Softback Preview, editorial director of Britain’s biggest book club group, BCA, and, most recently, deputy MD and publisher of Cassell & Co. She is also currently the Director of the Poetry Book Society; During all of this time aware of problems faced by writers, as publishing changed from idiosyncratic cottage industry, 'occupation for gentlemen', into corporate business of today. Writers encountered increasing difficulty in getting books edited or published. Authors create the books which are the raw material for the whole business. She believes it is time to bring them back to centre stage. describes the work of the Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk, set up to get the best new poetry to a wider readership.
Founded by TS Eliot and a group of friends in 1953, at the suggestion of the poet Stephen Spender, the Poetry Book SocietySpecialist book club founded by T S Eliot in 1953, which aims to offer the best new poetry published in the UK and Ireland. Members buy at 25% discount. The PBS has a handsome new website at www.poetrybooks.co.uk (PBS) had as its mission "to propagate the art of poetry". Eliot was supported by the recently established Arts Council, which instigated the setting up of the new poetry organisation early in the new Queen's reign and soon after the Festival of Britain. Eliot, a publisher as well as a great poet, teamed up with other luminaries such as "the Gaffer", Basil Blackwell, founder of the bookshop chain, to set up an organisation with the entirely practical aim of getting poetry to a bigger audience of readers. For more than 61 years the PBS, operating as a small charity, has been doing just that, evolving into an upmarket and highly regarded club, which has at its heart the aim of connecting great poets with great readers. The Poet Selectors choose the best new books of the quarter to go in the Bulletin with their reviews, which are complemented by the poets' own comments on what they have written. The Choice book is sent to all full members, and there are four Recommendations, a Special Commendation, a Recommended Translation and a Pamphlet Choice, as well as short reviews of a number of other new books.
23 June 2014
Tim Parks, whose novel Europa was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, said the traditional long works would have to be broken down into bitesize chunks to allow for competing demands on the modern reader's attention. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Parks, 59, said that "the seductions of email and messaging and Skype and news websites constantly updating on the very instrument you use" meant "every moment of serious reading has to be fought for".
As a result, he said, novels would have to adapt to "the state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction - for immersing oneself in it and then coming back to it over what could be weeks, or months, each time picking up the threads of the story or stories, the patterning of internal reference, the positioning of the work within the context of other novels."
Not all authors, however, are so pessimistic. Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, told The Independent: "There are always a few people who are going to want to read a serious literary novel. If there is demand for it, it will survive. What will change is the nature of publishing. That goes through periods of change and convulsions."
Every reader will have his or her own sense of how reading conditions have changed, but here is my own experience. Arriving in the small village of Quinzano, just outside Verona, Italy, thirty-three years ago, aged twenty-six, leaving friends and family behind in the UK, unpublished and unemployed, always anxious to know how the next London publisher would respond to the work I was writing, I was constantly eager for news of one kind or another. International phone-calls were prohibitively expensive. There was no fax, only snail mail, as we called it then. Each morning the postino would, or might, drop something into the mailbox at the end of the garden. I listened for the sound of his scooter coming up the hairpins from the village. Sometimes when the box was empty I would hope I'd heard wrong, and that it hadn't been the postino's scooter, and go out and check again an hour later, just in case. And then again. For an hour or so I would find it hard to concentrate or work well. You are obsessed, I would tell myself, heading off to check the empty mailbox for a fourth time.
Of course long books are still being written. No end of them. We have Knausgaard after all. People still sit on the subway with the interminable Lord of the Rings and all the fantasy box sets that now fill our adolescent children's bookshelves. Certainly 50 Shades of Grey and its variously-hued sequels were far longer than they needed to be. Likewise Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Never has the reader been more willing than today to commit to an alternative world over a long period of time. But with no disrespect to Knausgaard, the texture of these books seems radically different from the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. There is a battering ram quality to the contemporary novel, an insistence and repetition that perhaps permits the reader to hang in despite the frequent interruptions to which most ordinary readers leave themselves open.
In our disrupted lives writers have both freedom and responsibility - and to achieve success they must exercise both, argues Molly Flatt as she reports on this year's conference on Writing in the Digital Age. If there was one statement that summarised last weekend's Writing In the Digital Age conference, the annual event produced at Farringdon's Free Word Centre by the Literary Consultancy, it was that voiced by Orna Ross, founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, during a self-publishing panel called "The Writer In the Machine".
"Nowadays, every writer should be an indie, whether they are traditionally published or self-published," Ross declared. "They have to take control of their writing careers."
And writers can no longer abdicate responsibility for their rights. In his opening keynote, the journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow delivered a brilliant polemic about the evils of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and the companies that promote it, declaring that he would rather give up his right to tell stories than publish using a system that threatens freedom of speech. Later, Ross sounded a warning note about unscrupulous agent-assisted self-publishing services, and when Polly Courtney talked about her defection from HarperCollins for insisting on branding her novels as chick-lit, the point was reiterated: whether operating in print or digital, trade or indie, authors need to educate themselves about the credentials of their collaborators and develop their own ethical codes. In the words of Granta's Senior Editor, Max Porter: "Read the way you want to read, write the way you want to write, and weatherproof your value system."
Anyone who has followed the coverage of the ongoing Amazon-Hachette dispute knows that some of the most impassioned voices on the pro-Amazon side of the argument come from self-published writers. It's easy to understand their impulse to defend Amazon's e-book publishing programs, given that many had tried in vain to publish their books with traditional houses before opting for, say, Kindle Direct Publishing.
However, the dispute with Hachette has nothing to do with Amazon's publishing programs and everything to do with the way traditionally published books are retailed, a distinction that self-published authors ignore at their peril. This is one quarrel where the self-published authors would be smarter to side with Hachette and the other "Big Five" houses.
One reason for the crossed wires here is that most self-published authors really, really, really hate traditional publishing, which has either rejected them or (in the case of authors who use Amazon to make their out-of-print titles available once more), let them down. The intense rage such experiences instill can lead to strange glitches in logic, such as the charge that it is publishers who have engaged in "monopolistic" practices because not everyone who wants to publish with a traditional house has succeeded in winning a contract.
Wattpad has always resonated with an international audience. Since our earliest days countries like Vietnam and The Philippines have been active members of the community - reading, writing and sharing stories in their own languages.
We see millions of users from these two countries every month with an ever-increasing number coming via mobile devices. In fact, Wattpad is currently the number one mobile app and the number one mobile website in The Philippines. Non-English speaking, South East Asian countries aren't usually high on the radar of the traditional big publishers, but as a global platform what we're seeing is a huge pent up desire for people to simply participate.
A quick anecdote of the power of this model: Lilian Carmine who speaks Portuguese, writes in English, lives in Brazil was recently signed by a UK publisher after her story racked up more than 20,000,000 reads on Wattpad. Her London-based publisher was surprised to learn when they asked if Lilian could come by to meet them that she lived in Brazil. On Wattpad there are no borders; no gatekeepers. The power lies in the hands of the global community. These millions of people contributed to Lilly's unique path to success and should be proud for discovering this rising talent.
BERLIN: It might not be a surprise that Germany is one of the most influential countries when it comes to publishing: it has, of course, produced Gutenberg, inventor of the first printing press, authors - Goethe, Schiller and Günter Grass to name only a few; and is home to the most influential book fairs in the world. Well, ok, so far...that's old news.
But why should publishers, writers and others pay attention to Germany today? Here are six reasons why I think it's time to pay closer attention to Germany now.
1. Germans do read in English Here comes the real news: Germany is one of the most important markets for books in English. More than 40 million people living in Germany are fluent English-speakers. They do not only adore UK and US television series like Downton Abbey and Mad Men and devour the latest news about Kate Middleton, Ryan Gosling, Lady Gaga and the Obamas, they also love books by British and American writers - in both original and translated versions! One recent example: Both English and German language editions of Dan Brown's Inferno hit the German bestseller lists - the German edition reached #1 and the English edition reached #9.