The Magicians Trilogy author Lev Grossman in his 2011 Time article summarized the mentality surrounding fanfiction in mainstream culture as "what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker." Now don't get Grossman wrong-he is pro-fanfiction, but he also acknowledges that to outsiders, it's an odd world of what some might call extremists. Despite being considered a niche subculture, fanfiction has been steadily growing in popularity, particularly over the last three years. - See more at: http://www.publishingtrends.com/2014/11/fanfiction-fandoms-primer-histor...
Links of the week November 10 2014 (46)
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:
17 November 2014
Fans get to actively participate in the fanfiction world through comments and reviews. The communities are an exchange of ideas, often viewed by both budding and established authors alike as a viable and free forum for feedback on work or as a comfortable place to exercise their writing chops. Most fanfiction websites give readers the option of favoriting a chapter, story, or author. Aside from the occasional flame (a bad review), the community is largely helpful and encouraging. Reviewers can give guesses and hopes for the plot as the serialized chapters are posted, which might possibly help a writer tweak their timeline to better cater to the public's interest.
The success of EL James and her Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy did much to overturn the stereotype of a self-published author. Now academic research further challenges the image of eccentric hobbyists scribbling away in their sheds by revealing that it is middle-aged and well-educated women who dominate the growing e-publishing market.
Alison Baverstock, an associate professor in publishing at Kingston University, Surrey, said her research showed a clear gender split, with 65% of self-publishers being women and 35% men. Nearly two-thirds of all self-publishers are aged 41 to 60, with a further 27% aged over 61. Half are in full-time employment, 32% have a degree and 44% a higher degree.
Presenting her work to the Westminster Media Forum on the prospects for books, publishing and libraries , Baverstock said there were popular subjects that traditional publishers had ignored, including"respectable soft porn" and "gentle memoirs of everyday disasters, such as losing a child". Most publishers, she said, were being outpaced by a heady mix of democratisation and digital distribution, because they came from a "very limited gene pool" all agree on what they like "they know each other, and are not necessarily in touch with popular taste. Self-publishing is going on in schools, across institutions, spreading knowledge [of how to publish]."
Yet another article in a national newspaper suggests self-publishing offers an easy route to success. Not so, argues Liz Thomson.
An article across two half-pages of yesterday's Observer claimed that ,when it comes to self-publishing, "women lead the pack". The piece - topped off by large photos of Lisa Genova, Barbara Freethy and the inevitable E L James - was written by Maggie Jones, occasioned by last week's Westminster Media Forum on the prospects for books, publishing and libraries, and it quoted research by Alison Baverstock, associate professor of publishing at Kingston University.
To get back to the Observer report: Baverstock alleges that "traditional publishers" have for too long ignored "respectable soft porn" and "gentle memoirs of everyday disasters, such as losing a child" - a highly debatable claim. However, she then goes on to make some rather valid points: that editors come from a "very limited gene pool - all agree on what they like - they know each other, and are not necessarily in touch with popular taste". If we're talking, as Baverstock undoubtedly is, of mainstream London publishing, that "gene pool" indeed remains, even today, overwhelmingly white, often public school and Oxbridge-educated and mostly metropolitan. But it's not so much that they "agree on what they like" - rather that they behave like sheep, terrified of missing out on the next big thing.
Should young-adult, science fiction, and fantasy novels be considered works of literature? Is The Hunger Games a work of art? Does anyone care? Over the last couple of years, a handful of authors have pitched their tents in the no man's land between "genre fiction" and "pure literature." But the more intense the genre wars become, the more difficult it is to understand what it's all about. Is it a question of what we should read? Is it a critical discussion about what counts as "literary quality" writing? Or is it a war of words over which books should be published?
Enter New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose recent piece, "A Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate," clarifies the stakes of the discussion while offering a broader historical perspective. Rothman's essay is easy to paraphrase: what we now consider to be the "literary novel" was itself once a genre. Specifically, modernist novelists like Virginia Woolf looked with disdain and frustration on the social novels of the 19th century (Dickens) and the newborn mass culture of the early 20th century. So they went in another direction entirely, producing "spiritual" works whose "aura" still hangs over the 21st-century ideal of literary culture. The problem, though, is that we no longer have a mass culture. So literary culture, Rothman says, is left in a state of confusion.
The trade has reacted with relief to news that Hachette Book Group (HBG) in the US and Amazon have reached a new multi-year agreement.
The agreement, announced yesterday (Thursday 13th November) in a joint statement by the two companies, will give HBG responsibility for setting consumer prices for its e-books but provide the publisher with "specific financial incentives" to keep that price low.
The news has been welcomed by authors and their representatives, although with some caution.
The two companies made their disagreement public in May, when HBG accused Amazon of delaying deliveries of its books on purpose. Since then, thousands of HBG titles have been subject to delayed shipping and readers have been unable to pre-order books. HBG accused Amazon of seeking profit and bigger market share, while Amazon said its aim was to provide customers with e-books at lower prices. Authors were pulled into the six-month long dispute, with prominent writers including James Patterson, John Green and Gladwell condemning Amazon. Preston set up Authors United to petition Amazon to end the dispute, while Amazon set up its own campaign, titled Readers United. A number of prominent indie authors, including Hugh Howey and Barry Eisler, also stepped up to support Amazon, with their own public-facing campaign.
10 November 2014
Twenty-three client authors of the The Andrew Lownie Literary Agency Full-length MSS. Biography, history, reference, current affairs, and packaging journalists and celebrities for the book market (worldwide 15%). Submission Guidelines: No reading fee; will suggest a revision. Authors include Juliet Barker, the Joyce Cary Estate, Tom Devine, Duncan Falconer, Jonathan Fryer, Laurence Gardner, Cathy Glass, Timothy Good, David Hasselhoff, Lawrence James, Damien Lewis, Julian Maclaren-Ross Estate, Norma Major, Nick Pope, Martin Pugh, Desmond Seward, David Stafford, Daniel Tammet; The Oxford Classical Dictionary , The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English . Founded 1988. Association of Authors' Agents
Nicholas Best:
I live in a Cambridge village and work in a 17th century barn across the drive from the house. There's a 400-year-old skeleton under the floorboards, a cat buried in a corner to ward off evil spirits. It doesn't work for the Inland Revenue.I start writing after breakfast and continue until lunchtime. If I'm lucky, I'll have written 400 words by then, although I do occasionally stretch to a thousand. If I'm unlucky, I'll have clocked up minus 200 or so after deciding that whatever I wrote yesterday was rubbish. Apart from the odd Spitfire overhead in summer, there's no noise to disturb me. I write the first draft with pen and paper, then produce a second draft on computer. I write the third draft with pen and paper again and so on for anything up to five or six drafts
Cathy Glass:
I rely on a writing routine; it's the catalyst that triggers my writing, like the dinner bell rung for Pavlov's dogs it sets my creative juices flowing. I've had the same writing routine for the last fifteen years: I rise early (approximately the same time every morning), put on my joggers and a comfortable top and creep downstairs so that I don't disturb my family. I make a large mug of coffee and go through to the front room where I collect my paper, pen, and the printed text I've written the day before. I go into the living room and quietly close the door. I need absolute quiet for writing and I need to be alone. I sit in the same chair each morning and with my coffee within reach I begin by reading what I've written the day before, editing with a pen as necessary. By the time I come to the end of the previous day's work, my new words are ready to flow...
One day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com's South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant's sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. "There were, like, four people there," Chance recalls. "It was bizarre."
The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going-one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company's fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance's latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy.
It is not exactly the model to which Amazon once aspired, which is why the rap on the company's imprints in New York is that they are, as author and Amazon critic Douglas Preston has heard it, "a dismal failure". The company has signed few big names, produced little that critics have felt compelled to review, and rarely propelled its titles onto The New York Times best-seller lists. Yet the model has proved surprisingly profitable for a certain kind of midlist author left behind by big publishing houses. For instance, Los Angeles suspense writer Deborah Reed has sold more than 100,000 copies of her Amazon titles. "It's crazy," she muses, "because it seems like nobody has ever heard of me." Sales figures like these can look attractive even to better-known writers. Robert Dugoni, a New York Times best-selling author of legal mysteries, came out with his latest book, My Sister's Grave, this month. The publisher: Amazon's Thomas & Mercer imprint. I'm a working guy" is how Dugoni explains his choice of publisher and the economics behind it. "I have two kids who go to private school, who hopefully someday will go to college."
The music, film and TV industries have all undergone radical transformations over the last fifteen years. In contrast, the publishing industry is only now feeling the full force of technological change.
EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. and ereaders are changing consumers' reading habits and throwing up serious questions about how the industry can go forward on a sustainable footing. Major players in the music industry eventually solved their own sustainability issues by embracing change and incorporating subscription-based services in their business models. However, ebooks pose different problems. Subscription services alone particularly in emerging markets where content piracy is rife, do not seem viable. The magic bullet could be 'social'.
But why are social features so appealing to ebook consumers? By integrating a user's social network accounts, their reading is shared through several different and complimentary networks. This leads to exponential growth, as a book is shared, commented upon and recommended across several networks all at once. Research by Shoutly, a monetization platform for the social web, revealed that a friend's recommendation on social media is the most influential factor when buying software or ebooks, much more influential than an advert on TV or in online search results. Over 90 percent of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product if it had been recommended to them by someone on social media. Add to this the fact that consuming media has become a much more social activity and it makes perfect sense to integrate social media and chat functionality on ebook platforms.
The changing nature of the book industry in Europe as it redefines itself in the online era; the reduction of stores and shelf space both in Europe and in India; and-inevitably-the Amazon-Hachette dispute are among concerns exercising English-language publishers' minds as the end of 2014 draws near.
Faber's International and Digital Sales Director Miles Poynton is surprised - and concerned - that the German market has contracted for the first time in ten years, and wonders whether the growth in tablets, with their other attractions, isn't to blame. "Its odd because [Germany] has always been quite resilient, and there is a degree of protection. Europe as a whole hasn't been consistent - it has been rather flat. Spain and Greece are both difficult because of economic instability.
Fifteen years ago when I started working in publishing for Walker Books in London, the publishing world was primarily focused on the UK and the US picture book markets. Whilst it is still largely the case today, the industry is slowly changing and accepting more non-English publishers who promote their local authors and illustrators and sell rights successfully.
Being born and raised in France, I have followed closely the rise of French children's books internationally with artists such as Hervé Tullet at the forefront. I only have one word-Chapeau! We also saw recently the success of Mapy by Aleksandra and Daniel Mizielińscy from Poland and other high-quality picture books are emerging from all parts of the world.
With the expansion and globalization of selling rights, a growing demand for foreign rights expertise is starting to surface and, as a result, a new breed of foreign rights professionals is emerging. These foreign rights professionals have, for the most part, worked for publishing houses for many years and have gathered a deep and well-rounded understanding of international markets and sales. At some point in their career, they decided to become independent and specialize more in their field. They are looking to represent publishers from growing markets that want to sell rights and are eager to expand.