Next week Amazon celebrates its 20th anniversary with a bunch of Black Friday-like sales. Remember how innovative and exciting Amazon was going to be, and the announcements that founder Jeff Bezos loved books and wanted to invigorate literary culture? Let's walk down memory lane briefly and think of a few reasons we wish Amazon an unhappy birthday.
Links of the week July 13 2015 (29)
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:
20 July 2015
3. Destroying the profession of author Amazon and the rise of e-books and the other digital shifts have not just damaged bookstores, the people who used to work there, and publishing folk as well. It's undercut the advances authors use to buy time to write something - slicing it by as much as half. Around the time of Amazon's war with the publisher Hachette, a number of authors became vocal. One of them was Janet Fitch, author of "Paint it Black," who prefaced an open letter to Bezos this way: As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled. What will be lost when working writers no longer can support themselves pursuing their ideas, their art? What will be lost to this country, if these most talented can no longer make a living? I am making this an open letter, because I believe we are at a crossroads, and decisions are being made now which will affect our country permanently.
The release of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman provides another moment to reflect on the developing e-book market and how it mixes with the print sector. Released globally in print and e-book format, and at various retail prices, there are three competing editions in the marketplace (hardback, e-book and audio): which will prevail?
A second interview, this time with Amanda Ridout chief executive of Head of Zeus, helps indicate why. HoZ is well-known for its prodigious digital output (it has 1,300 e-books available after just three years of publishing) and a mantra of e first and last.
Yet unlike Canelo it is also developing a print business: significantly print sales made up 60% of its 2014 turnover. As Ridout said: “How we think about what we publish, is that ‘e’ and ‘p’ are intrinsically linked . . . ‘E’ is where you can recruit readers quickly and it provides a way to reach readers wherever they are. But you need print to attract authors and frankly since we know print is not going away, there is a business to be made [from it].”
"If a work is to be PoD/ultra short-run and/or ebook only, and the author is being paid only a minimal, or no, advance, in my view the comparison is not only with how those terms compare with a traditional contract, but also how they compare with the fact that an author can self-publish in such forms, at almost zero cost, perfectly well. And the self-publishing author retains all rights and 100% of any income, and can cease self-publishing almost instantly should a better offer, such as a fat advance from an established publishing house, come along.
"If a work is to be PoD/ultra short-run and/or ebook only, and the author is being paid only a minimal, or no, advance, in my view the comparison is not only with how those terms compare with a traditional contract, but also how they compare with the fact that an author can self-publish in such forms, at almost zero cost, perfectly well. And the self-publishing author retains all rights and 100% of any income, and can cease self-publishing almost instantly should a better offer, such as a fat advance from an established publishing house, come along.
Like the great magazines of yesteryear, Boing Boing lets really smart people tell us about the things they find interesting. When Boing Boing went from 'zine to blog, it was able to amass a huge audience with anything-but-mainstream material, as did many other sites that aggressively stuck to their own voices and their own interests in the early golden age of online writing.
That was the appeal of the Web to me from the start-that what seemed too niche for the "mainstream" could flourish because you had a mechanism (search, links) for reaching all the oddballs on your frequency. To paraphrase (and reverse) William Gibson, your readers are already here, they're just evenly distributed. The Web brings your true fans together. I call it gerrynerdering.
Except something's changed. Whether you blame Facebook, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, or "algorithms," the new media landscape has grown a big fat mainstream of its own. Not at one particular site, but in the sense of a particular mechanic of creative expression: tailored for clicks, pasteurized, grabby. The long tail of odd and authentic content is bigger than ever, but if you find your content the way most people do, through the algorithmically warped suggestions in your social media feeds, the stuff you stumble onto feels less like writing and more like wordage, a sort of tips-and-tragedies lorem ipsum. What happened? And what does this mean for writers who want to reach an appreciative audience without putting their ideas through a wood-chipper? I'm an editor and author marketing consultant, so this shift is of profound importance to me: boring writing sucks even more for those of us who have to work closely with it.
In the UK a new digital publisher called Canelo releases its first titles this week and will discover over coming months whether its bold, innovative approach will work. It is operating in a different way to most publishers in that it is not paying advances, but offering its authors much higher royalties, starting at 50% and going up to 60%. It is also signing titles on short, five-year licenses, giving authors the option to take titles elsewhere if they wish, and is rediscovering old authors and backlist titles, presenting them afresh to a new audience.
Bhaskar said that they have been "grilled" by London's agents and added:"In terms of paying agents, they will, we presume, have a cut of the royalties. So when we and the authors earn, agents earn - and because the royalties are much higher, agents are taking a cut of a bigger royalty. So both authors and agents should have a good deal. They don't have money up front, but they have their authors published to a very high standard with a good chance of big cheques coming back. We'll be doing everything to ensure that is the case."
There's Granta's list of the Most Promising Authors Under 40. There's The Guardian's 20 Writers Under 40 to Watch. There's The New Yorker's 20 Under 40. And I'm sure there are others. Lots and lots of others.
When did forty become the cut-off age for discussing "promising" debut authors?
Forty-eight year old British novelist Claire Fuller, whose debut novel Our Endless Numbered Days, won the Desmond Elliot Award this year, says "yes." And in The Guardian, she wrote about a new writers group: the Prime Writers: - a group of about 50 authors who were over 40 when their debut novel was published. The group spans many genres, publishers and locations; some of us have agents, others don't; what links us is that many journalists, event organizers and book prize administrators think we're getting on a bit."
George RR Martin has urged "every true fan" of science fiction and fantasy to vote for this year's Hugo Awards to "help protect the integrity of the rocket".
The 2015 Hugo Awards, honouring the best science fiction and fantasy works and achievements of the previous year across a number of categories, including books, television, film, and fanworks, have been beset by controversy this year.
A number of the nominees for this year's awards were on lists recommended by two groups calling themselves Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, and by fantasy author Vox Day, all of whom are allegedly right-leaning.
Martin said in his blog: "Who are all these new Supporting Members? Are they trufans rallying to the defense of one of our field's oldest and most cherished institutions? Are they Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, Happy Kittens, Gamergaters?... Are these the Neo-Nazis and right-wing reactionaries we have been warned of? The truth is...no one knows. We may get a clue when the ballots are opened and counted, but even then, the numbers may well just say, - Answer cloudy, ask again."
13 July 2015
After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from the traditional industry. But in our rush to admire, there's a risk we overlook the wider cultural significance of what is going on. As publishers from all over the world prepare for next week's London book fair, here are 10 changes that they ignore at their peril.
1. There is now a wider understanding of what publishing is - and that it is more difficult than it looks. The industry has long suffered the irony that effective publishing is most evident when invisible; it is only when standards are less than felicitous that we realise how well what we read is managed most of the time. Now that school cookbooks, or fundraising brochures for sports teams, can be effectively self-published, people are learning the process and what is involved. In the past, the industry has tended to recruit heavily from those in the know (the offspring of former publishers and authors being particularly well-represented); wider awareness of publishing is now promoting wider diversity.
When the strait-laced romantic novel Arrows From The Dark by Sophie Cole appeared on Edwardian bookshelves in 1909, neither Gerald Rusgrove Mills nor his publishing partner Charles Boon guessed it would be the beginning of a never-ending love story.
More than a century on, the company they founded, Mills & Boon, sells 5.5 million books a year - that's one every four seconds.
They are printed in 26 languages across 109 countries with 150 new titles added monthly.
Almost all Mills & Boon authors are women, but one in ten readers is male. "It's not so surprising," says Kate. "Men read Mills & Boon the same way they watch romcoms - a lot of entertainment has romance at its heart and a feel-good factor."
Most writers use a pseudonym, a Mills & Boon convention. It lets them write other genres and ensures that teachers and nurses, for whom writing is not a full-time career, retain their professional privacy. "As our books are quite sexy, you can imagine why teachers wouldn't want their students reading or passing around copies," points out Mills & Boon senior editor Joanne Grant.
This Friday, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic - the Wall Street Journal in the US and the Guardian in the UK - will publish the first chapter of the much-awaited Harper Lee novel, "Go Set A Watchman". The licensors who authorized these excerpts are HarperCollins in the US (and they are, of course, News Corp cousins of WSJ) and Heinemann, a division of PRH, in the UK.
I have not seen any reports detailing whether any money changed hands for the rights to publish these excerpts. But, unless it was a lot of money - an amount worth reporting - doing first serial this way of such a newsworthy and anticipated book seems like an anachronism, a mistake.
Just think about what the publishers are giving up by doing these deals. All that traffic and a slew of Google-juicing inbound links could have been coming to their site. Competitors to the Guardian and WSJ, who will probably be reluctant to drive up traffic at a rival, might not link to it, but almost certainly would have if the excerpt were on a book publisher's or author's site. The publishers have given up the potential to get email names - perhaps hundreds of thousands of them or more - in exchange for the privilege of reading a bit beyond the first chapter or some other perk. The publisher hosting the content could aggressively upsell the book or ebook, and be driving traffic to their retailer partners, which gets them both goodwill and affiliate revenue. (How far would that affiliate revenue go toward covering any licensing fee they collected?)
LES EYZIES-DE-TAYAC, France - In college in the 1990s, I happened upon a Brazilian writer so sensational that I was sure she must be a household name. And she was - in Curitiba or Maranhão. Outside Brazil, it seemed, nobody knew of Clarice Lispector.
My freshman year, I'd abandoned studying Chinese when our professor said it'd be 10 years before we'd be able to decipher a newspaper. I switched to Portuguese, despite zero knowledge of the language or culture.
Eventually we started reading short Brazilian works. One of these, a 1977 novella by Lispector called "The Hour of the Star," changed my life. Though its nuances were lost on me, I sensed the strange beauty in the story of a poor girl in Rio de Janeiro. The author was the book's most forceful presence, and I wanted to learn everything about her. Who was the woman who peered from the back cover like an exiled empress?
The past decade has given me time to reflect on the main cause of Lispector's obscurity: the increasing global dominance of English. An international tongue may help tourists, but it is turning literature into a one-way street. Not only does this make life harder for contemporary writers, the situation is even worse for those, like Lispector, who can no longer speak for themselves.
Writers who work in English can't be faulted for profiting from a situation that has developed over centuries. But since we do profit from it, it's partly up to us to try to remedy it.
Zambia's Namwali Serpell has won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa's leading literary award, for her short story entitled "The Sack" from Africa39 (Bloomsbury, London, 2014).
The Chair of Judges, Zoë Wicomb, announced Namwali Serpell as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 6 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
The Sack explores a world where dreams and reality are both claustrophobic and dark. The relationship between two men and an absent woman are explored though troubled interactions and power relationships which jar with the views held by the characters.
Why on Earth would you start a literary magazine? You won't get rich, or even very famous. You'll have to keep your day job, unless you're a student or so rich you don't need a day job. You and your lucky friends and the people you hire-if you can afford to pay them-will use their time and energy on page layouts, bookkeeping, distribution, Web site coding and digital upkeep, and public readings and parties and Kickstarters and ways to wheedle big donors or grant applications so that you can put out issue two, and then three. You'll lose time you could devote to your own essays or fiction or poems. Once your journal exists, it will wing its way into a world already full of journals, like a paper airplane into a recycling bin, or onto a Web already crowded with literary sites. Why would you do such a thing?
If you do have defined goals or a clear aesthetic, then you've got a reason to attract writers and readers and donors who aren't your friends - though they're less likely to turn you down if they know you personally, at least a little. Keith Gessen says that n 1 started because "we were in New York, where things can take on a momentum of their own," but he doesn't address the source of that momentum; the least convincing of all the propositions in this volume is the idea that, thanks to the Web, it no longer matters where you live. The advantage of life in a cultural center has not vanished, though it has diminished. You can start a Web journal, publish your friends, and ask better-known writers for contributions, but it helps if you've met them; and, if you want to meet them, it helps if you live, or used to live, in Toronto or San Francisco or New York.
Every one of us is the unreliable narrator of our own life. The bucket and spade summers may not have been entirely sunny, the ice-cream not quite so delicious. But Shirley Hughes's books, with their deftly sketched figures and everyday adventures, uphold a greater, altogether more magical truth about the sequestered world of childhood. Scraped knees and escaped piglets, digging for worms and teatime jellies (shaped like proper jellies) - it's all in there.
With pen and paint, Hughes unsentimentally summons the puppy fat of babyhood and the awkward stringiness of adolescent girls. Her life-drawn images are as vivid and timeless as childhood itself; the rounded cheek, the wayward hair, the shyness and boldness, the delicious terror and laugh-aloud joy of being young.
Generations of children adore her books, which are kept up to date with the lightest of touches; admittedly nobody is hauled off by a Tiger Mother to practice the viola, but the milk floats have gone, parents wear jeans and, in the latest hardback, Alfie Outdoors, a 21st-century father is seen holding a mobile.
"Bloody phones!" cries Hughes, who was awarded an OBE in 1999 for services to Children's Literature. "They are such a terrible distraction; children love them and I understand why because they are instant and whizzy. Books, on the other hand, need - deserve - space and time." "If parents want their children to care about books they should take them away on a reading retreat every so often; a remote Scottish cottage without television or internet."