From a father's wartime trauma to Italian frescoes to strange family pets – the six novelists explain what inspired them
Links of the week October 6 2014 (41)
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:
13 October 2014
Publishers have expressed outrage that their titles were included in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited subscription service against their wishes when it launched in the UK last week.
Several publishers told The Bookseller that they declined to be a part of the e-book and audiobook promotion, and were shocked to find their requests ignored when Kindle Unlimited launched last Wednesday (24th September).
Others have said they were not consulted regarding their titles being used, and were only told of the development a few hours before Kindle Unlimited went live.
While no publishers wished to be quoted for fear of reprisals from the internet giant, many spoke privately of their anger at Amazon's conduct and said they have engaged lawyers to look over the legality of the situation. One said: "We made it very clear that we had no interest in putting our titles into this service, despite [Amazon's] persistence, so it was quite a surprise to find our titles there." Another said: "We have looked at our contract and tried to ascertain if it is legal to be used as part of another service but it seems as long as they are paying us as if it was a sale then they are not." Another admitted: "It is not something we are in a position to fight. We feel powerless. The concern is if these are just the first round of titles, they will add more later - perhaps from larger publishers."
Often, in relationships, there comes a time when partners go their separate ways. It's not always a lack of love that kills the relationship, but sometimes it's a focus on one's own interests and, more often, there is also a lack of respect for the other's position. Unfortunately, all too often these days, publishing is starting to look like a bad relationship.
Is it readers, those who will be given a choice between millions of low-cost titles feeding the popular culture on one end, and a thinning list of pricey, professionally vetted titles - ones that ideally, are intended to advance the literary culture - on the other? Or is it the writers or publishers or booksellers themselves, the ones who crave stability and reliability in order to get their day-to-day jobs done? Maybe in some cases going separate ways would be better. Maybe it would allow each to grow in their own way, to experiment, to take the time to look inside themselves, meet new people - be they writers or readers - and find out what they really want.
As noted in yesterday's editorial, recent publishing history seems to have been rife with conflict, much of it fomented by digitization: Amazon vs. everyone, print vs. digital, traditional vs. self-publishing, books vs. all other media.
Maybe it was our digital immaturity that led us to see everything as a win/lose, zero-sum game? That led us to believe creative content was like natural selection, the stronger inevitably eliminating the weaker. It was, some of us told ourselves, a revolution.
Maybe now, after years of our "digital revolution" we've finally gotten a little, well, perspective and matured enough to see it as evolution. And to evolve, you need to innovate.
6 October 2014
Last spring, when Amazon began discouraging customers from buying books published by Hachette, the writers grumbled that they were pawns in the retailer's contract negotiations over e-book prices. During the summer, they banded together and publicly protested Amazon's actions.
Now, hundreds of other writers, including some of the world's most distinguished, are joining the coalition. Few if any are published by Hachette. And they have goals far broader than freeing up the Hachette titles. They want the Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.
They also want to highlight the issue being debated endlessly and furiously on writers' blogs: What are the rights and responsibilities of a company that sells half the books in America and controls the dominant e-book platform?
Amazon declined to comment for this article. But in an interview in July, Russ Grandinetti, the company's vice president for Kindle, said: "Books are really home for us. That's where we started. We care deeply about them. Helping books and authors succeed in a crowded world of digital media is very important to us." Even Amazon's detractors readily admit that it is one of the most powerful tools for selling books since the Gutenberg press. But how that power is used is increasingly being questioned in a way it was not during the company's rise.
Publishing is not for the faint-hearted. Sometimes I wonder why I decided to go into publishing, using my own money when it's a business that is fraught with so many hundreds of possible places where you can go wrong. There's always a new possible error, mistake, blunder, oops, disaster. Some cost money, some cost face. It's a business that keeps you humble and on your toes. A lovely bookseller told me that she worked in publishing only briefly, she found it way too stressful. I smiled happily.
Oh and by the way number 23 refers especially to paying poets, in their own books, not as bad as it sounds for the writer, in fact quite good. Say the print run is 400 - you deduct 50 copies for marketing, freebies and prizes. So you give the poet 35 books (10% of print run) plus their 6 free ones. The problematic thing for the publisher is that poets are a good point of sale for their own books. So by paying them in books you effectively wipe out a big chunk of your potential sales. So much better to pay writers a cash royalty, (just don't lose the cash sales receipt book).
Self-publishing - or independent publishing, or author publishing, call it what you will - is a partnership, says Orna Ross, Founder and Director of the Alliance of Independent Authors. "No writer is an island," she told delegates at the London Book Fair's latest Tech Tuesday session on ‘the rise and rise of self-publishing,' chaired by LBF Director Jacks Thomas and held in fashionable Hoxton in east London. "We can't do it by ourselves. Writers need support - editorial, production, promotion, design...Very few people can do all those things themselves. Writers need to take advice and need to invest, especially in editorial, typically £3,000 to £5,000."
Floating somewhere between both was ghostwriter Andrew Crofts who has written for publishers large and very small. He took things right back to basics with a neat summary of the whole history of storytelling and the book industry. "We went from storytelling around the fire where the audience were the most important people, to a situation where storytellers forgot about audiences, forgot about readers and began to concentrate on pleasing publishers..."
This is where the rot set in, he believes (although he was overstating it, one feels, giving "good panel," as it were), and eventually created the conditions for self-publishing to emerge, once the tools were there.
What self-publishing has done is to relight the campfire. The glow of the tablet, mobile or laptop screen may have replaced the flames, but the direct engagement with the reader that the storyteller had in the cave has come back in ways that no one would have imagined, thanks to social media. The warmth of these digital flames can now be felt around the world - we're all in the cave again, only now it's both enormous and intimate.
Book publishers continue to struggle with taking their business model online, but is the answer to crowdfund authors' book ideas? Online publisher Unbound thinks so, successfully using the crowd to fund more than £1m worth of book projects.
Projects offer readers different levels at which they can invest in the project. Tied to these levels are different perks, such as a lunch with the author or an invitation to the book launch, for example. It can take time for an author to develop his or her fan base, but once it has been built, it is an easy market to tap into, says Kieran. And the readers have a hunger to take part. "Our users love to be involved in the process and have critical taste. They are not passive consumers - they're micro patrons," he explains.