"Sorry - no self-published books accepted." How many authors have been confronted with those words? I certainly have. It's a prime example of what has been dubbed the self-publishing stigma. But as the sector grows, shrugging aside suspicion and hostility, will this negative image fall away? Has it already begun to do so?
Links of the week May 11 2015 (20)
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:
18 May 2015
The brutal truth is that when you can publish anything, people will do exactly that. The market was flooded with indie literature and, sadly, a large percentage of it was substandard. Bad editing, awful covers, and mediocre content were rife. Advice was scarce, the methods many and varied. It was an exciting time, but a muddled one. Just as self-publishing was trying to shrug off the mantle of vanity publishing, it earned itself a new reputation for low quality. Lo and behold, the self-publishing stigma was born.
From cultivating spices in India and talking to owls in South Africa to finding ‘fun in hell' in Hungary and writing Dadaist fairy tales in Argentina, the 10 contenders tell us about the diverse lives and ambitions which have brought them to global attention
Is it the duty of the novelist to engage with the political issues of the day? No on both counts: "political" and "issues of the day". Writers should engage with matters of significance, and these are often not issues of the day - climate change is a good example. Nor can climate change be defined as narrowly "political"; like literature it is about much more than that. (Amitav Gosh)
Publishing digitally first can help authors to learn about the publishing process, make writers more critical of their own work and help reinvent an author. However, the author Stark Holborn warned that the format should only be used in the right context as there is "a difficulty in marketing something that has no physical presence".
Braml's editor at Transworld, Harriet Bourton, said the publisher's aim %u201Cwas to find a way of introducing digital-heavy readers to new authors and building a relationship with them from there, with a digital serialisation acting as a literary equivalent to a television series. "A four-part serial seemed the right balance to me and Cathy, and by releasing in digital format first we had total freedom. There was no dependency on a retailer to stock it in order for readers to discover it," Bourton said. "We are still releasing the serials as complete paperbacks, so we have two chances to grow a fanbase for Cathy: via the digital route and the traditional one. Cathy and I have always been very mindful that the serialisation wasn't just a gimmick. We really wanted the reader to enjoy the experience of reading a story in instalments, and so the structure of the individual parts and the novel as a whole has always been forefront in our minds."
Publishers should start to spread money from the sale of e-books fairly between themselves and authors, and not make assumptions when they start to experiment with new channels that "an author is going to be thrilled with it", Association of Authors' AgentsThe association of UK agents. Their website (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.html) gives a Directory of Members and a code of practice, but no information about the agencies other than their names. The association refers visitors to the UK agent listings from The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook on the WritersServices site. president Sam Edenborough has warned.
Edenborough said authors were keen on innovation, but wanted to be consulted by their publishers first on new things"The other thing is don't make assumptions when you start to experiment with new channels that an author is going to be thrilled with it," Edenborough said. "It's a really good idea to ask first then do it later, rather than just assuming you probably have those rights and it would be alright probably to bung the book into a subscription service or into a library." "We're really keen to innovate, authors really want to work with publishers to experiment and get the best out of the market, but we won't do that happily if we're not asked nicely."
On 14 May, 1953, Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood had its first staged reading at the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center in New York. From now on, the event will be commemorated with Dylan Day, an international celebration of the life and work of the Welsh poet.
Thomas is a great writer because he wrote with accuracy and truth about being human. His language is inventive, yet stolen and re-made from every word he read, every phrase he heard. His poetry, including Under Milk Wood, which I'd call a radio poem, leaves echoes in the mind as music does, as all true poetry should. His prose shows a hawk's eye and ear for detail; fierce, but shaped by tenderness, fearless honesty and humour. The whole man, body and mind, and the whole life are in the words. We see ourselves on the page, feel the arrow in the heart. He gave not a toss for any critical reader but himself. Music and truth, the qualities of all great writers, are what convinces us to read him, to believe him. James Joyce, one of his inspirations, is a prime example. There is no contrivance, no self-consciously "good English" in such writing.
But what does he mean to me? To Wales? I was a teenager when Under Milk Wood was first broadcast. My father, a BBC sound engineer, a Welsh speaker from Carmarthenshire, met Dylan at the BBC, and spoke about the "difficult young genius". He turned on the radio and made me sit down and listen. What I heard changed my life. It was the real thing - alive, lyrical, funny, sad, familiar, tender, and spoken in the phrasing and accent of south-west Wales. It was a revelation.
A recent headline which caught my eye, but certainly didn't surprise me, was one which valued global STM publishing at $35 billion annually. Breaking this down a little, research from International STM and Outsell valued the STM publishing market at approximately $25 billion, plus $10 billion in additional journal revenues.
There has been particular growth in the scholarly market, the report notes, in East Asia and China. China, the report states, is "now the second largest producer of research articles in the world (and has overtaken the U.S. in some subject disciplines)." Additionally, growth has been notable in India and Brazil.
11 May 2015
Ruth Rendell, who has died at the age of 85, spoke to Nicholas Clee for newbooks magazine in 2008...
There is both unconventionality and orderliness in her life and career. In much of her writing, Rendell has pushed against the rules of the mystery genre in which she works; but she has also written 21 detective novels, for the most part in the classic tradition, starring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. Starting with her debut From Doon with Death (1964) and continuing with Not in the Flesh, the Wexfords present crime as a mystery to be solved in the final chapters. She characterises Not in the Flesh as a "typical" Wexford: "It has a puzzle and a solution, and the solution more or less brings order out of chaos - which doesn't apply of course in my other books."
The question of genre agitates admirers of Rendell's work more than it does her. They believe that she has not won the recognition from the literary establishment that she deserves. She has received many genre awards: several Gold Daggers from the Crime Writers' AssociationA networking society for some 400 British crime writers (widely defined) and links to their sites. Membership for published writers only, but award a Debut Dagger for the best unpublished crime novel. Some articles from their magazine Red Herrings are posted on the site and there are links to many individual crime writers' websites.; several Edgars from the US equivalent, the Mystery Writers of America; and, in 1991, the Cartier Diamond Dagger, for a lifetime's achievement in crime writing. Only once, when King Solomon's Carpet was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, has she come close to winning one of the big literary prizes. However, in 1990 the Sunday Times, a longtime champion of her work, gave her its award for literary excellence. "I never worry about genre," she says. "It's a waste of time. If people want to say I'm a genre writer, that's alright - a lot of people have bought my books for that reason."
True story: In 2007, the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid catapulted into the literary spotlight with his second book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, an examination of the harsh realities of America's fractured post-9/11 relationship with Muslims. The book sold over a million copies worldwide, was turned into a Mira Nair-directed feature film, and was short-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The Guardian called it one of the books that defined the decade.
Mohsin HamidJillian Edelstein
Given that he's one of those rare, respected literary intelligentsia who can actually make a comfortable living from writing novels alone, I was surprised to learn that Hamid has recently started a new chapter: He's now working for the half-century-old creative consultancy Wolff Olins as the company's first chief storytelling officer.
"Stories are fundamental to how we think about the world," Hamid tells me by phone from his home in Lahore, Pakistan, where he lives with his family when he's not traveling between London or the States for work or research (he's working on his next novel now). "Nelson Mandela told a story about what post-apartheid Africa could look like. That story was persuasive enough to promote change, and it became reality. JFK told a story about putting man on the Moon, and it inspired people and came to pass. These types of huge events were built on stories."
The prevailing mythology around tech is that the giant internet companies will dominate globally, just as they do nationally. They are borderless and all powerful. Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users, YouTube 1 billion unique users. So what happened with e-books? Five years ago pundits were talking about how Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo would roll out globally to meet the worldwide demand for e-books: an eco-system built largely in America for a global audience. But something got lost in translation. Like the print-book market, the global e-book market has become complex-pulled in different directions by local nuances.
The Global E-book Report 2015, compiled by Ruediger Wischenbart, shows just how different each market can be and how this should alter how we think about this transformation. While both the US and UK have seen robust e-book growth for a numbers of years, leading to digital as a proportion of overall trade sales at about 30%; in mature book markets in non-English speaking countries the rate of progress has been much slower, and in some cases non-existent. As the report notes, in these non-English speaking countries (including Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden), the market share of e-books within the trade segment of the book market is below 10%, ranging from as little as 1 or 2%, to 4.3% in Germany. More alarmingly, even at such low levels of penetration, the report adds that growth is showing signs of flattening out.
For awhile it probably seemed to some friends and family that Rebecca Faith Heyman had pursued an expensive degree at NYU without any intention of actually using it. She did her undergraduate and graduate degrees there, both in English, and while many of her classmates secured internships at the big publishers and magazines, Heyman spent her summers working service jobs in hotels and restaurants. "When I got out of school I wasn't really sure what to do," she told me recently. "I had started teaching yoga, which is not, as you can imagine, terribly lucrative."
But despite forgoing the traditional publishing route, Heyman had always held an interest in book editing, and what with her advanced degrees in English she thought she could give it a try. So in 2007, right around the time of the Amazon Kindle's debut, she signed up for a couple online freelance marketplaces, the kind where potential clients post jobs on which freelance editors bid. At first, many of the jobs she took on were for simple proofreading, but when she began offering tentative feedback on the editorial structure of a manuscript she was surprised to find a receptive audience.
How big is this growing market? Exact data is hard to come by, but a recent paper published in Learned Publishing found that up to 59 percent of self-published authors have at some point used an editor. "There is evidence to suggest a growing awareness among self-publishing authors that professional editing is an essential component for increasing the chance that their work will sell," the authors wrote.
It's not about legacy: James Patterson has donated $100,000 to Australian and New Zealand book stores.
Dipping into his considerable personal fortune to donate $100,000 to local bookstores, the prospect of an enduring legacy was the last thing on James Patterson's mind.
In his first visit to Australia in 11 years, Patterson announced the donation from which Australian and New Zealand book sellers with dedicated children's sections could apply for cash grants of up to $5000.
The greatest challenge facing society, warned Patterson, was getting bright children to read more broadly and at-risk kids reading competently. One in three Australian high school students could be considered functionally illiterate. Patterson's hope was that Australia might follow Germany's lead and set up a ministerial foundation to support and acknowledge the importance of independent booksellers as missionaries of children's literacy.
Were Amazon to locate its operations in Australia, Patterson predicts half the local bookstores would close.
I love ebooks. Despite their unimaginative page design, monotonous fonts, curious approach to hyphenation, and clunky annotation utilities, they're convenient and easy on my aging eyes. But I wish they didn't come wrapped in legalese.
Whenever I read a book on my iPad, for example, I have tacitly agreed to the 15,000-word statement of terms and conditions for the iTunes store. It's written by lawyers in language so dense and tedious it seems designed not to be read, except by other lawyers, and that's odd, since these Terms of Service agreements (TOS) concern the use of books that are designed to be read. But that's OK, because Apple, the source of iBooks, and Amazon, with its similar Kindle Store, are not really publishers and not really booksellers. They're "content providers" who function as third-party agents. And these agents seem to think that ebooks are not really books: Apple insists on calling them, not iBooks, but "Books Store Products," and Amazon calls them, not Kindle books, but "Kindle Content."