Andy Mulligan is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. He reflects on the differences and similarities between the crafts.
Writing is a sit-down-and-start kind of job, and see where it goes. The more I plan, the more useless the plan becomes.
Links of the week October 5 2015 (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:
12 October 2015
I was walking in the Highlands last month, and had the same experience: no amount of staring at the map prepares me for missing or finding the right footpath, and whilst getting lost on a mountain can be very dangerous and foolish - getting lost in a story or a play is very exciting. I find characters do what they want to do, whether I'm writing script or prose - and the closest equivalent is the memory of play, as a child.
Most children, I hope, have the experience of total immersion in a game - when the dolls come to life? I don't think it's mystical, I think it's very natural: we project ideas onto our action figures, and the action figures enact and demand more ideas. Soon the thing ignites, and the dolls seem to do and say things you didn't anticipate: that, for me, is writing.
For decades, the gatekeepers to reach large audiences of book consumers have been retailers, publishers, libraries and national media outlets. These organizations hold the keys to reaching millions of readers. But access to their audiences is limited unless one purchases paid advertising, hires a publicity firm or undertakes an expensive, time-consuming tour of the country. For the most part, authors who want to reach the masses have been at the mercy of these options. Until now.
As these authors built huge audiences over time, they made it much easier to sell thousands of their books. But more importantly, they began to attract attention from other entities seeking access to their audience. That interest has created exciting new revenue opportunities for the authors through paid advertising, joint partnerships, corporate spokesperson roles, etc
In an ironic reversal of roles, authors who had to pay companies for advertising now charge companies to advertise products to their audience. The authors listed above routinely receive thousands of dollars for individual ad space. This growing trend represents one of the most exciting times in literary history to be an author.
Old fashioned publishing skills are still "as relevant and vital as ever" in the children's market, even though children are increasingly discovering books through digital and new media brands, Egmont UK's m.d. Cally Poplak (pictured) has told The Bookseller Children's Conference.
Poplak said Egmont's strategy was driven by "what children love to read and what their parents are prepared to buy".
Research done by the publisher with Nielsen has also found that parents "really value reading". "They see it as something genuinely special and a truly desirable alternative to screen time," she said. However, Poplak added that parents are less focused on the literary canon and more on whatever gets their children reading. Following its research, Egmont also found that of the 14m adults who buy children's books or magazines, 50% said other media and brands encouraged their children to read.
Whatever the old adage might warn, there is a bit of merit to judging a book by its cover - if only in one respect. Consider the blurb, one of the most pervasive, longest-running - and, at times, controversial - tools in the publishing industry.
For such a curious word, the term "blurb" has amassed a number of meanings in the decades since it worked its way into our vocabulary, but lately it has referred to just one thing: a bylined endorsement from a fellow writer - or celebrity - that sings the praises of a book's author right on the cover of their book.
The life of a blurb excerpted from a critic - a book review, say, from NPR - is a fairly simple one. A recognized critical institution writes a positive review; that review comes to the attention of a book's publisher, who then puts a positive quote somewhere on the book. But well before the book's been seen by critics, well before it hits store shelves, its manuscript is passed around for praise from a writer's peers. "When we start thinking about a publicity plan, you talk about what's going to be important. And so one of the first things to come up is: 'Are we gonna go after blurbs?' " says Kimberly Burns, a co-founder of Broadside, a literary publicity firm.
"Editor" has probably been the most common job title in publishing, but we're increasingly an endangered species. Publishers are eliminating editors in favor of project managers, content coordinators, digital gurus, etc. - and, of course, an army of freelancers.
This is a profound mistake, one that could lead to the end of publishing as we currently understand it - although, ironically, it would hardly mean the end of the editor.
Some people (sadly including many senior managers) think that editors just fiddle with the commas and run a spell-check. And, let's face it, those tasks are pretty routine these days. After all, Microsoft Word has spell-check and even grammar covered. The role of the editor is actually to find and improve books, ready for publication. "Finding" can mean anything from literally stumbling across a manuscript to months of work researching a market, selecting and briefing an author, and generally shaping a book to hit a particular niche. (Lisa Edwards wrote a great article about this recently). A skilled editor will turn a mediocre book into a good one, and a good book into a great one. Most authors value their editors highly as a result, because we make them look better.
This morning, The Bookseller reported that Waterstones was taking Kindle devices off most of its shelves due to "pitiful" sales.
No great surprise here: the chain's managing director James Daunt said after Christmas 2014 that device sales, once strong, had tapered off, a reflection of a digital market that has moved beyond its adoption-period.
Daunt has never made any secret that under him Waterstones' job was to deliver what its customers want: at the time of the Kindle deal in 2012 Daunt said that a number were choosing to read digitally, and Waterstones needed to be in that game.
However, there seems little doubt that the dedicated e-reader market is a tough one both for developers and retailers. It is incredibly hard to improve on the original design, and unlike some tech these pieces of plastic (as Daunt used to refer to them) do not break easily. If adoption slows, then replacement will not pick up the slack. As Douglas McCabe, analyst for Enders, said: "The e-reader may turn out to be one of the shortest-lived consumer technology categories." David Prescott, c.e.o. of Blackwell's, said that he was seeing replacement sales [of Nook devices], but not new people buying an e-reader for the first time.
In 2012, before the success of Inside Amy Schumer and Trainwreck, Amy Schumer sold an essay collection to HarperCollins for $1 million. Over the next year or so, Schumer turned in a few essays, but the project ultimately didn't go far. The material was raw, so in 2013, New Yorker writer Patricia Marx was brought in for rewrites. Still, there wasn't much progress, and the following year, Schumer canceled the contract altogether, claiming she was "too busy." She almost certainly was: in 2014, Schumer's star was rapidly ascending-Inside Amy Schumer had become a huge hit with viewers and critics, and she was hard at work on Trainwreck, her first feature film. This summer, Trainwreck grossed over $100 million. And then, last week, Schumer got a new book deal, also for an essay collection, but this time, the publisher was Simon & Schuster, and the deal was worth between $8 and $10 million.
All of this appeared in a report by Alexandra Alter in last Thursday's New York Times. On one level, all of this makes complete sense. A book from Amy Schumer was probably worth around $1 million in 2012. Three years later - following the massive success of her movie and TV show - she commanded a much, much higher figure. Who wouldn't cancel a $1 million contract if you knew you could make much, much more? (Schumer's advance has the distinction of being the highest ever to a pop culture figure.) And yet, on another level, everything about this story is insane. As Emily Gould tweeted last week, the Schumer saga represents "how nonsensical the publishing industry can be." Alter's piece is a fine tale of two book deals, yet it leaves some of the biggest questions about celebrity book deals unanswered. Is Amy Schumer's essay collection actually worth $8-10 million? Will it make Simon & Schuster any money? Massive book deals have been a fact of life for major publishers since the early 1980s, but they're still not particularly well understood outside of the publishing industry - in many cases, they aren't particularly well understood inside it either.
5 October 2015
What do Hard Times, Middlemarch, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and many more of the greatest novels ever published have in common?
When they were first published, they were not published as books. They were published serially.
People unfamiliar with the history of something tend to assume that what they've always known is the way things have always been. That's why most people think the 20th-century model of publishing, which favoured the publication of novels in book rather than serial format (I call it the "Doorstopper Model"), is a "traditional" form of publishing. It's not. It's also why we've more or less abandoned the basic ontological distinction between the novel and the book. They are not the same thing. The Brothers Karamazov (also published serially) is a novel; like all novels, it's a book only in a secondary sense, if and when it happens to be produced that way.
Children's books are boosting the global publishing industry. Here's what you need to know to capitalize on this opportunity.
Despite modest growth or even decline in adult book sales in many countries, children's books are selling well around the world. Why is this and what can publishers do to maximize this opportunity? At the second Nielsen Children's Book Summit in New York on Wednesday, these (and many other) questions fueled the day-long discussion.
More literary authors, from David Mitchell to Jennifer Egan, are turning to Twitter to publish fiction, a form that mimics both poetry and serialization.
But can a serious work of fiction emerge from a series of tweets? Professor of Digital Humanities at University College London, Melissa Terras, told The Atlantic that all literary forms come with their own forms of constraint, and "Twitter is simply the latest restriction." "It's the role of literature to play with forms," she said. "In poetry you have very rigid forms, and people have to operate within those constraints." (Think about Shakespeare's sonnets for example.) "With Twitter fiction, people are taking the limitation of 140 characters and doing something creative. It's a slightly different art form and it creates a different experience of fiction."
Lauren Parsons of Legend Press says that when acquiring a debut author for a UK list, one needs to believe the book can compete with the established brands.
The word "debut" can be the ultimate taboo in the UK market. Debuts propose risk, the unknown, and if a reader has never heard of the author before, how on earth are we going to sell them the book? It's probably best to stick to a winning formula. Keep churning out formulaic fiction, a lot of similar looking books and similar, predictable plot lines.
There is, of course, a need to make money, but we shouldn't shy away from a challenge. Major publishers pride themselves on having at least one fiction debut each year and they are proud of it. One. Maybe two. Out of hundreds of titles published that year.
Imagine if the same marketing and publicity budget that was allocated to a bestselling author's fifteenth novel were applied to an unknown name. A nobody with a big talent.
Are people reading the e-books they purchase from companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo? There is growing research data that is supporting the notion that people are not reading the digital titles they buy online and for the most part, they are never even opened.
I am of the belief that people are not buying literary fiction or poetry on their e-reader. Instead, they are buying guilty pleasures such as hardcore erotica and gay fiction because they are too bashful about being seen in public reading the paperback. In other cases people buy e-books similarly in the same type of fashion as people who are in airports who buy a throwaway pulp novel by Tom Clancy or something, fall asleep on the plane and end up throwing it out.
The death of legendary literary agent Carmen Balcells will reverberate for weeks in the lead up to the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two.. Balcells was one of the most powerful and influential figures in Spanish publishing of the last half-century, after setting up her agency in 1956 in Barcelona). represented such literary giants such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Vicente Aleixandre. She was so important to Spanish literary cultural heritage that in 2010, the Spanish Ministry of Culture bought approximately 50 years of her personal archives for three million euros.
"Carmen Balcells was a formidable force of nature bursting always with new projects, jotting down brilliant ideas and thinking always of her authors. Over the last ten years, I had the immense fortune of getting to know her her and enjoying long conversations at her apartment over a great meal every time I would visit Barcelona. Before that, she trusted me to work directly with authors like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Gabriel García Márquez, the highest honor of my life.
"Carmen, single handedly, changed the course of literature in Spanish in the 20th century. Apart from promoting and representing the most amazing group of Latin American writers, the "Boom," she embodied the figure of the Agent in Spanish, changing forever the relationship between authors and publishers."
There's a tendency to think of self-published books as a bit of a joke, and it's true that the poorly thought-out ebook covers unearthed by the Guardian in March this year gave us all a bit of a giggle. As reputations go however, this one is a bit unfair. Although it's true that some authors, left to their own devices, can create rather dodgy designs, the majority of the authors I work with at CompletelyNovel.com take a professional approach to their books that matches high industry standards.
So when we launched a competition to find the "Lord of the Book Covers" from an international pool of self-published authors, the skeptics might have been surprised by the entries we received. When we announced the shortlist last week (see some of these covers below), there was't a misplaced alien or sub-standard concept to be seen. These book covers were no joke. They were actually really good.