It's a cheerful orange giant stuffed with fan fiction and smileys which can garner a billion reads for an erotic One Direction story - scoring 25-year-old Texan Anna Todd a six-figure publishing deal in the process. But Wattpad also has a serious side as a thriving culture of original writing, with a small but steady flow of authors finding mainstream success with Big Six publishers such as Random House and Harper Collins. Half a dozen of these authors are getting together in the real world mid-December, at Wattpad's first UK convention. The site has attracted more than 40 million users around the globe. No surprise, then, that Amazon has decided it wants a piece of the action.
Links of the week December 8 2014 (50)
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:
15 December 2014
The internet shopping site has just launched its own social reading and writing platform, Kindle WriteOn, a move characterised by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian as "trying to eat [Wattpad's] lunch". WriteOn is currently in invite-only beta mode, but all you need for access is the online equivalent of a Masonic handshake - a code passed to you from someone on the inside. On first impressions, it looks remarkably like Wattpad, just less orange. But WriteOn is making a clear play for writers of original fiction with publishing ambitions. It bills itself as "a story lab" where "you can get support and provide feedback at every stage of the creative process. And while Wattpad's reader comments tend to be short and sweet, WriteOn is designed for in-depth critique. Feedback submissions have a whopping 10,000-character limit. Imagine how many :D and <3 you can get for that.
As a book publicist, my job is sometimes as much about educating authors about publishing and bookselling as it is about getting media attention for their book. Long ago, before the internet became the dominate avenue for promotion and communication, there were certain tried-and-true paths to book publicity that every publicist traveled. Newspaper book sections, NPR, and publications devoted to book coverage were the most significant media for books, and so these outlets were what most publicists pursued.
Nowadays everything hasn't just changed, it continues to evolve constantly. New social media platforms develop, blogs appear and disappear, and established media sources update and transform according to audience feedback. Although there are fewer newspapers and even fewer book sections, there are many, many more reviewers and media outlets that cover books. The routes to effective book promotion have expanded exponentially, so much so that it can be challenging for writers and publicists alike to determine the best path for their books.
Not content with running his six eponymous bookshops in London's smartest neighbourhoods, James Daunt has now turned around the nation's biggest bricks and mortar bookseller, Waterstones. Hermione Eyre meets him to talk vlogger power, Kindle culture and how to save our bookshops in the online age.
Following his heart at the age of 26, he took a loan from the now-defunct Business Expansion Scheme to buy, for £240,000, arguably the most beautiful bookshop in London: the Edwardian former antiquarian booksellers at 83 Marylebone High Street. As he and his wife Katy brought up two daughters, Molly and Eliza, in Hampstead, Daunt Books grew, slowly, into six artfully curated bookshops in the capital's loveliest enclaves (Marylebone, Holland Park, Hampstead, Chelsea, Belsize Park and Cheapside) - very different to the 300 Waterstones up and down the country. Daunt's taste isn't particularly populist - during our interview he has a crack at Fifty Shades of Grey (‘sometimes, for reasons no one can ever understand, a book sells in bucketloads...') and he prefers authors getting up and talking - ‘or reciting poetry to 30 people' - to big celebrity signings. He admits to being dazzled by Hillary Clinton. ‘There was a buzz. Even the 200th person whose book she signed came away delighted.'
YouTube sensation Zoella (Zoe Sugg) is not a national treasure in the UK yet, but the controversy over her novel Girl Online, and the questions it raises about authenticity, have a faint echo in the latest book from someone who is definitely a UK national treasure, the TV presenter and media star of the 2012 Olympics, Clare Balding.
Trouble is, just as one feels a certain indignation building up "this is Clare Balding, a national treasure, how can she do this?" Her editor Joel Rickett at Viking clarifies things: "It's from a real photo shoot! I was there - we shot it in the Hampshire Downs on 13 January. The photographer Charlotte Murphy did a fab job. Definitely no studio, no painting, no stock images. All we've done is add a very slight Instagram-style filter to enhance some of the colours- that said, it was a glorious blue morning and the sky was actually that blue. Archie (the dog) kept misbehaving but did strike that great pose at just the right moment."
8 December 2014
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Keen, journalist, polemicist and self-styled Antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen's new book, The Internet is Not the Answer, is being published by Atlantic in 2015, a historical reflection on the World Wide Web 25 years after its creation.
Keen observers will feel on familiar ground. In his previous two published books Keen has identified and reflected on the dark-underbelly of first Web 2.0 (The Cult of the Amateur), and Web 3.0 (Digital Vertigo). In both books Keen explores the destructive, destabilising impact of social media, rather than the positive benefits of sharing sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In Digital Vertigo, for example, he wrote how our constant interaction with social media means we are "simultaneously detached from the world and yet jarringly ubiquitous".
The Internet is Not the Answer takes a broader view, detailing how first the internet and then the web were conceived and then founded, and how this current incarnation has failed to live up to the ambitions of the creators. "The Internet, we've been promised by its many supporters, is the answer. It democratises the good and disrupts the bad, they say, thereby creating a more open and egalitarian world. . . They thus present the Internet as a magically virtuous circle, an infinitely positive loop, an economic and cultural win-win for its billions of users." The truth is far from this, writes Keen, instead we have "digital robber barons", billionaires hanging out at exclusive clubs such as The Battery in San Francisco, and gigantic centralising corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Uber that thrive in this new economy because their first-mover advantage has allowed them to occupy monopolistic positions.
Articles from 49 subscription journals on nature.com - including from Nature, the world's most cited scientific publication - can now be shared freely between subscribers and non-subscribers around the world.
Macmillan Science and Education is using technology developed in its Digital Science business to enable the "frictionless" sharing of articles between researchers, in what the publisher describes as "a ground-breaking publishing initiative that will make it easy for readers to share an unprecedented wealth of scientific knowledge instantly with researchers and scientists across the globe".
Macmillan Science and Education c.e.o. Annette Thomas [pictured] commented: "We exist to serve the information needs of researchers, to help them in their work, and ultimately in making discoveries in order to improve the way we all live. We have, over many decades, published a wealth of world-leading scientific knowledge through our family of journals. Today we are able to present a new way to conveniently share and disseminate this knowledge using technology from one of our innovative and disruptive divisions - Digital Science - to provide a real solution to the global problem of how to efficiently and legitimately share scientific research for the benefit of all." She told The Bookseller: "Within the academic space this step is completely unique, because it's combining access to the highest impact scientific content in the world with the first technology that allows frictionless sharing to subscribers and non-subscribers, and also annotation of content. Scientists collaborate more and more, yet there has been no optimal tool to share knowledge "it [the academic space] really hasn't kept up with technology in the consumer space, such as restaurant reviews, or your music library."
Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, the U.S. trade magazine, recently ran an article confirming that the number of seven-figure advances for novels is actually on the rise. It lists several recent acquisitions by big American publishing houses, mostly for debut novels, that involved payouts of more than $1-million. That's right - debut novels.
You might be wondering if you read that right, given what else you have heard recently about the demise of book publishing and the alleged poverty of respected authors. You likely have read that a famous writer was contemplating working in coal mines to make ends meet, and that, in this country at least, several foreign-owned publishing companies have been flailing about in a kind of budgetary panic, having fired, laid off or rearranged senior staff. This after a decade of decline in the book-selling business, with bookstore chains in decline and a near-universal sense that Amazon is the Eye of Sauron. It looks, from the inside, like turmoil.
So what on earth is going on? Are the publishers actually rich?
The publishers admit that they are making less money from their mid-list (the unpromoted space where challenging literary novels tend to find themselves) and from their back-list (the books from previous seasons that are still in print). So, instead of trying to promote those books, they are abandoning them. It%u2019s an all-the-eggs-in-one-basket strategy. They guess at which handful of books are going to be blockbusters and blow their yearly acquisition budgets on a couple of them.
Mentoring for writers is essential as editors, publishers and literary agents become ever busier, authors have told The Bookseller, claiming that everyone in the publishing process benefits from writers having guidance from others in the industry who can act as a sounding board, and champion up-and-coming talent.
Writer Cesca Major, whose début novel will be released next year by Corvus, mentors via the WoMentoring scheme, which was launched earlier this year. The project pairs female authors with women from across the trade, who volunteer their time to offer advice and guidance on the publishing process. "I think there are a lot of writers that have yet to secure an agent, and they are the group that need mentors the most," said Major, who mentors under her writing pseudonym Rosie Blake.
Viskic said: "There has always been a gap between writing and getting published, but the gap is now a chasm. Once upon a time, an editor might choose to guide a promising writer through the labyrinthine publishing process, offering practical and creative advice. Now editors, publishers and literary agents are all so overwhelmed by the amount of unsolicited submissions [that] they receive, they barely have time to send a rejection [letter]. Everyone benefits from writers being mentored - publishing houses, editors, writers - but no one has time."
Currie said: "A mentor can help writers build a network of professional publishing contacts while they gain recognition, as well as working with them to fine-tune a writing project." She said being a mentor had improved her own writing, and given her"a deeper insight" into the publishing process: "It's satisfying."
I often dream I am in a bookstore or in a library. Then I wake up and I am in Queens, the largest of the five boroughs in New York City, the most diverse place imaginable, and where there are currently two Barnes & Noble and one independent book seller and a few places to buy used books. But given the size and density of this borough, this borough truly lacks bookstores.
Queens Library, on the other hand, has 62 branches scattered throughout the borough. Hours, staffing and budgets were severely cut during the Bloomberg administration and then even further by the cost cutting measures put in place by the now on paid leave CEO Thomas Galante. The entire Queens Library is struggling to recover from the alleged misappropriation of funds and mismanagement of the library in this borough during the many decades that Galante was in charge of its finances.
Let me state the obvious when it comes to bookstores, we have too few, the rent is too high and the chances of a bookstore surviving during economic downturns are small. Yet, a library is always there. The buildings are maintained by the city budget (though, there are many problems here as well) and the utilities, security and plumbing are built in. Libraries have comfortable places to sit and read, computer stations and free wifi for the customers. There are programs, from exercising to book clubs to chess teams to quilters, that are ongoing, free and fill the spaces with people from the community and beyond.
Ben Okri has won the 22nd annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, for The Age of Magic (Head of Zeus). The prize was presented by the Reverend Richard Coles, former member of chart-topping band The Communards, presenter of Saturday Live and latterly a Church of England priest who served as the inspiration for TV's Rev. His memoir, Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went from Pop to Pulpit, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in October.
The Age of Magic follows a team of filmmakers shooting a documentary about the idea of Arcadia, who wind up in a hotel by a lake in the shadow of a looming mountain. There, they find themselves troubled by an ominous figure called Malasso.
The judges were swayed by an ecstatic scene involving Lao, the documentary's presenter, and his luminescent girlfriend, Mistletoe:
The Age of Magic prevailed over competition from a very strong shortlist, including the winner of this year's Booker Prize, Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North ('Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world'); Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage ('Shiro's were small, but her nipples were as hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair was as wet as a rain forest. Their breath mingled with his, becoming one, like currents from far away, secretly overlapping at the dark bottom of the sea'); and Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham's The Snow Queen ('He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade. And is finished').