The Booker opened up to the world - and to some, the publishing world looked a little narrower. With American authors eligible for the first time, the resulting lineup is unsurprisingly Anglo-American in flavour - chair of judges AC Grayling said publishers had been concentrating on pushing their US authors - but also overwhelmingly white and male. No African or Indian authors, and only one British woman. Globalisation often tends towards a monoculture, and the other much-debated rule change, whereby past success increases the number of books a publisher may submit, can only push the prize towards the establishment. The small-press surprises and unknown debutantes that have been a fixture of recent years are notably absent - though notable too is the prize's first crowd-funded long-listee, eco-activist Paul Kingsnorth's Old English tale of resistance to the Norman invasion.
Links of the week July 21 2014 (30)
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:
28 July 2014
At the start of the year, everyone was convinced Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch would win; things turned out to be not so predictable. Her absence may be the only big surprise in a solid lineup, but there are rich rewards to be found.
A new report claims that self-published authors have surged to 31% of ebook sales on Amazon.com, and are now earning more ebook royalties than writers published by the "Big five" traditional publishers. Despite research published earlier this month finding professional UK authors' incomes plunging below minimum standards, self-publishing champion Hugh Howey says the new results, in his third Author Earnings report, prove DIY authors are "here to stay".
While it should be a jolt to see that indies are earning nearly 40% of the ebook dollars going to authors," the report concluded, "we are starting to take this reality for granted. That's real progress. As it has proven to be in other fields of entertainment, the indie movement in literature is not a blip and not a gold rush. It appears to be here to stay."
In the Opinion Pages of the New York Times on July 20, 2014, seven poets were asked to respond to the question, "Does poetry matter?"
Perhaps no other art form is asked to defend its value, impact, relevance, and existence as often as poetry. Through the centuries poets have explained how poetry connects us to ourselves. With a mastery of language and its possibilities, poets elevate the material of everyday communication to art that requires reflection and contemplation, and ultimately elucidates our location in the world.
At the Academy of American PoetsThe website of the wonderful Academy, which was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Any poet or poetry lover would find it worth a visit. it's clear to us that while this may elude some, we're actually having a poetry boom. Not only is poetry alive in the U.S., many millions of people are reading and sharing poems online. Poetry may be the art most suited for mobile technology. And, hundreds of thousands of people are attending and participating in poetry readings, workshops, conferences, slams, and festivals each year. We have rounded up some quantitative examples to demonstrate how poetry matters in the U.S.:
Whether poetry is useless or dead is a question that arrives as regularly as cicadas. Newsweek proclaimed verse a corpse it in 2003; in 2013, The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri called again for a coffin and a shovel. Still, every spring, ivory towers open their gates and a few thousand new Masters of Poetry stroll out. According to Poets & Writers, there are 204 MFA programs and 21 Creative Writing PhD programs, each graduating a new crop of poets each year. When you add on the countless numbers who write poetry outside of academia, it seems pretty clear that poets aren't unicorns-rather, as in sci fi alien invasion movies, they are already among us: what's interesting is that poetry's popularity is so often called into question.
Thanks to the ease of sharing poems through email and social media, it's possible that poetry's audience might be greater now than ever. According to The Academy of American PoetsA poetry book club founded in 1934 to support American poets and foster an appreciation of poetry. www.poets.org/ director Jen Benka, the Academy's Poem-a-Day has over 300,000 readers, so large an audience that the Hearst Corporation recently partnered with the Academy to include the poems in their online and print newspapers and magazines. Benka points out, "The general perception of people who read poetry is not fully accurate. We know there is also a dedicated readership - people who love poetry who are not poets themselves who are completely dedicated to the art form and take it as seriously as poets do."
Imagine a place where you can browse through thousands of books, and buy any of them for £1 each; and drink tea and eat cake at the same time.
No, not the internet and your desk, but an actual bricks and mortar (well, steel and breeze block) bookshop just south of Bristol called Bookbarn International. Billing itself as 'England's Largest Used Book Warehouse', it is indeed a veritable house of wares: with shelves and shelves of second-hand books as far as the eye can see. On the day I visited, the shop was busy with flesh-and-blood customers scanning the shelves and eagerly filling pull-along baskets with bargains.
I hadn't come to buy books (although, reader, I did) but to catch up with Bookbarn's William Pryor. We first met at the House of Commons in June, when ALCS and Bookbarn International launched the Book Author Resale Right - a pilot programme which will compensate authors when "used" copies of their books are sold by Bookbarn International. Authors have never before benefited from the sale of second-hand books in the UK, despite the increasing prominence of the second-hand book market. Through the pilot scheme, which begins this month, Bookbarn International will file a sales report to ALCS each quarter, and then through ALCS, pay royalties of 3% of net receipts to authors on the sales of books that - as Pryor puts it - "have some value. Many of our books sell for 1p, so clearly we're not going to pay out 3% of that."
21 July 2014
Chief executive of 9,000-member UK group argues that while 'authors' earnings are going down generally, those of publishers are increasing'
'Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing' ... Society of Authors chief executive Nicola Solomon
"Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing and producing quality work," she said. "Publisher profits are holding up and, broadly, so are total book sales if you include ebooks but authors are receiving less per book and less overall due mainly to the fact that they are only paid a small percentage of publishers' net receipts on ebooks and because large advances have gone except for a handful of celebrity authors."
Crime fiction might be dominated by violence against women - but there's more to it than titillation
Is crime fiction getting more violent? Yes, I think so, but then I might have said the same thing 70 years ago. One person who did was George Orwell, who wrote in 1944 that "the crime story, at any rate on its higher levels, has greatly increased in bloodthirstiness during the past 20 years - and the most disgusting details of dismemberment and exhumation are commonly exploited". In a wonderful moment of unintentional comedy, he goes on: "Some of the Peter Wimsey stories, for instance, display an extremely morbid interest in corpses." It is hard to imagine even the most delicate reader today finding much to upset them in Dorothy L Sayers' Wimsey novels.
What does it mean to cry over a book? It's a question that has been in the foreground lately, thanks to "The Great Y.A. Debate of 2014"-the conversation, sparked by Ruth Graham last month in Slate, about the merits of John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" and other young-adult fiction. The debate has been about a lot of things, including the tension between high and popular art, the role of criticism, and the fate of maturity as a cultural value. But it has also been-peculiarly-about the value and meaning of tears. "I'm a reader who did not weep," Graham wrote, defiantly. "Does this make me heartless? Or does it make me a grown-up?"
Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was still a new form, crying was a sign of readerly virtue. "Sentimental" novels, brimming with tender and pathetic scenes, gave readers an occasion to exercise their "finer feelings." Your tears proved your susceptibility to the suffering of others.
Novelist David Mitchell is to tell a 6,000-word story on Twitter, beginning today (14th July).
The author of novels including Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (both Sceptre), whose latest book The Bone Clocks is published (also by Sceptre) in September, will relate short story "The Right Sort" in 300 tweets from account @david_mitchell.
Mitchell told The Bookseller that the Twitter story was his own idea, after having been first persuaded to open a Twitter account by his publisher. "I'm going to do events in theatre-sized venues for The Bone Clocks and to tell people about them, I was persuaded it is useful to link up with people," he said. "I'm not a natural social media person - I want to protect my privacy and not tell people 'I am having jam on toast this morning.' I'm not a natural epigram-hatcher like Stephen Fry. So here I am basically using my Twitter account as a noticeboard - and that seemed like selling social media short. I thought, 'How can I use it and still feel I retain some integrity?'"
In recent months, America's publishing giants have been up in arms about the predatory practices of Amazon.com. Their outrage would be less hypocritical if they weren't guilty of conduct that's just as bad.
I'm an author. One of my books (Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times) was on the New York Times best seller list. Another (Missing) served as the basis for an Academy-Award-winning film. I've learned over the years that big-name writers might be treated fairly by the media conglomerates that dominate publishing today. But the average author isn't.
Publishing is a business. It's about squeezing every last dollar out of every available source, and the most vulnerable source is the author. No clearer proof of that exists than the "standard" book contract. Many clauses that are imposed on authors throughout the industry today bear no relationship to any economic reality other than the best interests of the publisher. Yet these clauses flourish because virtually every major publisher insists on them and the average author has no recourse.
Kenya's Okwiri Oduor won the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing, often described as Africa's leading literary award, for her short story "My Father's Head" from Feast, Famine and Potluck (Short Story Day Africa), South Africa, 2013).
The Chair of Judges, Jackie May MBE, announced Okwiri Oduor as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held Monday night at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
"My Father's Head" explores the narrator's difficulty in dealing with the loss of her father and examines the themes of memory, loss and loneliness. The narrator works in an old people's home and comes into contact with a priest, giving her the courage to recall her buried memories of her father.
The winner of the Caine Prize has the opportunity to take up a month's residence at Georgetown University as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and will be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September 2014, The Storymoja Hay Festival in Nairobi, and the Ake Festival in Nigeria. And, to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Prize, each shortlisted author will also receive £500.