The global bookselling industry has been experiencing many trials and tribulations over the last decade. Indigo books in Canada has been losing 20 million each quarter for the last year, Borders Books in the US went bankrupt and everyone else is feeling the pinch of Amazon. Are eBooks destroying our bookselling culture?
Links of the week August 25 2014 (35)
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:
1 September 2014
eBooks have their downsides, aside from disrupting the traditional bookselling industry. A recent study had 28 copies of the same book distributed half in paperback format and the other half on the Amazon Kindle. Anne Mangen of Norway's Stavanger University, a lead researcher on the study said "The Kindle readers performed significantly worse on the plot reconstruction measure." The readers struggled to make sense of the key 14 plot aspects. The researchers suggest that "the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does".
Children's laureate Malorie Blackman has vowed that "hell will freeze over before I let racists and haters silence me" after facing an outpouring of racist abuse following her call for more diversity in children's books.
The attacks began after the award-winning author spoke to Sky News about diversity in children's literature, saying that although "you want to escape into fiction ... and read about other people, other cultures, other lives, other planets", there is "a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading".
Support for Blackman, the UK's first black children's laureate, was immediate from both her fellow writers and from her readers. Carnegie medal winner Patrick Ness tweeted: "I adore @malorieblackman. I think she's a brilliant Laureate. I'm seething. Why have we agreed we're OK with this? I'm bloody well not." The novelist Matt Haig announced he was "disgusted that the wonderful @malorieblackman, one of the great forces for good, has had to come off Twitter because of racist abuse". Chocolat author Joanne Harris told Blackman: "Don't read below the idiot-line. You are loved and appreciated here ", and Horrid Henry author Francesca Simon added: "I'm proud to be a children's writer with the marvellous @malorieblackman representing us."
As the battle lines harden in the Amazon dispute, Ian Grant argues that no one is in the wrong - that both sides are, in fact, right.
Established authors in the United States and the UK write to Amazon, complaining about Amazon's commercial practices in a dispute with Hachette. Authors in Germany write in similar terms about Amazon's negotiation with Bonniers. In the other direction, an open letter from a number of American authors urges support for Amazon. In France, the same row transmutes into a law protecting independent booksellers. It's all about patronage.
Both sides are right
The two positions that understand the matter best are that of Michael Pietsch, CEO of Hachette, when he says that "This dispute started because Amazon is seeking a lot more profit and even more market share, at the expense of authors, bricks and mortar bookstores, and ourselves", and Sue-Ellen Welfonder, who wrote, in defence of Amazon, "In traditional publishing, a few will always thrive, but a large number of writers, those on the dread midlist, have to learn how to paddle hard to stay afloat. Indie publishing (and Amazon) offers new writers never-before opportunities and gives midlisters a wonderful chance to re-invent themselves, making it possible to have the kind of control and power over our work that was unthinkable just a short while ago." They are both right, but Pietsch should not expect anything else when dealing with a retailer, any retailer. Welfonder clearly understands the market and works hard to make herself heard.
Emily Dickinson said, over a century ago, that "There is no frigate like a book to take us Lands away," and it's true. When we pick up a book, turn on the TV, or watch a movie, we are carried away down the currents of story into a world of imagination. And when we land, once more, on a shore that is both new and familiar, something strange happens. Stepping onto the shore, we're changed. We don't retrace the footsteps of the author or character we've followed here. No, instead we walk a mile in their shoes.
Researchers in psychology and neuroscience, child development and biology are finally starting to gain quantifiable scientific evidence of what writers and readers have always known - that stories have a unique ability to change a person' point of view. Scholars are discovering evidence that stories shape culture and that much of what we belief about life comes, not from fact, but from fiction; that our ideas of class, marriage, and even gender are relatively new, and that many ideologies which held sway for centuries were revised within the eighteenth century and re-drafted in the pages of the early Novel.
25 August 2014
No one really writes for television anymore, argues media analyst, Kate Bulkley
If you are still attending dinner parties and telling your fellow guests that you're a "TV writer", it might be worth reconsidering your job description.
Not only has the viewing, production and distribution of television been going through dramatic change since the start of the millennium, the effect on writers and their words has also been considerable.
Technology is allowing video content to be viewed on demand and on different devices and this is changing not only how and what people view but when they view it. For example, BBC iPlayer%u2019s %u201Cprime-time%u201D viewing of catch-up TV spikes after traditional prime-time telly viewing, as consumers take their devices to bed with them.
Sure, going on a book tour sounds glamorous. But not if, like many writers, you're paying for it yourself, running the gauntlet of grotty hotel rooms and angry-or even worse-non-existent readers.
We writers love to complain. If we're not complaining about rejections or small advances, we're probably complaining about bad reviews, poor sales, a sloppy editor, a worthless agent, writer's block, impotence, hair loss, hangover, Amazon and/or a partner who has grown tired of our complaining. But few things inspire more howling from writers than that post-publication Bataan death march known as the book tour.
Yet there wasn't a hint of self-pity in any of McNair'ss tales. "Being able to sit on a stage and talk about your book - instead of sitting in an audience listening to somebody else talk about his book 's so profoundly different," he said. "It's exhilarating to have a book out and go places where you can wave it in the air, meet readers and other writers, spread the word. After almost 20 years, it was a thrill to have a book in print. At one reading I looked up and saw 200 people clapping. It's an unbelievable dose of vindication after all those years."
Sandy Hall was nervous. Ms. Hall, a librarian in Morristown, N.J., was preparing one recent night to lead her weekly book club meeting with a group of 14 teenagers. The book being discussed, a young-adult romance titled "A Little Something Different," was her own debut novel.
"I'm still in the ‘I hope they like it' phase," she said an hour before the meeting.
But Ms. Hall, 33, has more cause for confidence than most other first-time authors. Her novel is the first book to be published by Swoon Reads, a new young-adult imprint that lets fans vote on manuscripts to choose which ones are published.
"The fans and the readers are more in touch with what can sell," said Jean Feiwel, senior vice president of the Macmillan Children's Publishing Group and publisher of Swoon Reads, who came up with the concept in 2012. "They're more at the pulse of these things than any of us can be." So far, Ms. Feiwel has acquired six debut novels out of the 237 manuscripts posted on Swoon Reads' website. The novels, which range from contemporary realism to paranormal romance, were chosen based on comments and ratings (from one to five hearts) from the site's 10,000 registered users. Readers also vote on audiobook narrators after listening to digital audio samples, decide which cities the authors visit on their tours and choose the books' covers. Writers published by Swoon Reads receive a $15,000 advance, plus royalties.
Publishing has a secret weapon that most other industries don't: passionate readers who promote books for no reason other than to spread the joy of a good story. These readers also seek out recommendations from others in their book community. Strong communities exist for all types of books and authors and new ones are created constantly. They vary in size, location, and membership but all share the love of reading as their core inspiration.
Community endorsement is often the most important part of book promotion, although it may mean different things to different authors. Aside from the perennial bestsellers like Janet Evanovich and James Patterson, there are not many first-time or non-famous authors on the bestseller list. The ones who do make it usually have a community of peers and devoted readers behind them spreading the word about their book.
The gatekeepers of many prominent communities are booksellers and librarians who play an influential and important role in informing readers about new books and recommending reading through displays, book groups, and social media. If you are looking for the right fit, ask them what communities they belong to and how they get the word out to their customers about books they love. Attending events in person is also a great way to research how book signings and discussions work and what might be a good fit for you when thinking about your own events.
On Saturday I was able to steal away a few hours to see The Hunger Games movie with my wife. Later that night, with our daughter finally asleep, we took a few more hours to watch the DVD of the US remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The opening weekend of The Hunger Games crushed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - coming in at a record $152.5 million vs. $12.7 million. Financially, it was a knockout. But how do the movies stack up as adaptations? This is where the two are closer than one might think.
And that is the main difference between these two adaptations: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo makes what is alluded to explicit, while The Hunger Games takes what's explicit in the books and merely hints at it. The filmed version of The Hunger Games strips away the frippery that consumes so much of Katniss's interior monologue - the clothes and the food in particular. But having read Suzanne Collin's books actually, in this rare case, makes the movie better. You can fill in the extraneous detail, you know more about the character's unsaid motivations, and you can discount the overt flaws. Having read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I for one was simply disappointed with the movie (and I wasn't such a big fan to begin with).