Two days after Joseph Andras's De Nos Frères Blessés (which had not been on the shortlist of four) was astonishingly announced as the winner of the Goncourt first novel prize, French literati were stunned again this week when Andras turned it down because his "conception of literature is incompatible with the idea of a competition". So the 2016 prize rejection season has at last begun: the following guide may be helpful to other potential refusers who need to know the options available.
Links of the week May 16 2016 (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:
23 May 2016
How to turn down a prestigious literary prize – a winner’s guide to etiquette | Books | The Guardian
Refusing competition
A stance Andras shares with John le Carré, who asked (unsuccessfully) to be removed from the 2011 Man Booker international prize shortlist because "I do not compete for literary prizes". A variant is exiting a specific competition made messy by mud-slinging, as with Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the 2009 Oxford poetry professorship race after personal smears, Vintil Horia's refusal of the 1960 main Goncourt prize (he had been accused of past membership of Romania's far-right Iron Guard), and last year's hoo-ha at the Hugo awards for SF and fantasy, when two novel prize nominees pulled out.
The occupational hazard of being an editor includes rarely having a moment of respite, and if you're Vice President and Editorial Director Rebecca Saletan of Riverhead Books, reprieve comes brief and breathless between early morning interviews, houseguests, Sunday email correspondence, after-hour author meetings, and Friday night industry events. Her work stretches far beyond the nine to five workday. Does Saletan sleep? I doubt it. But at least her authors can rest knowing she's devoted to them and to raising the bar in publishing.
We are hearing voices we haven't heard before. When I'm reading submissions, I'm not generally getting as excited about manuscripts and proposals that tell me what I already know as I am about stuff that pushes the envelope for me personally. I tend to get excited about writing that takes me into worlds that aren't as familiar.
Don't underestimate the commitment it will take to realize your story and write a book. Boil your project down to its core components to see your project through to the end .
Everyone who wants to should be encouraged to write a book, but you should also be aware of what's ahead. At the highest level, there are some essential components you will need to get your project started and see it through to the end. A book that flounders will likely find its author lacking in one or more of these crucial areas.
A catapult
Any book that you finish is a grand personal achievement in itself, but if your goal is publication, the next thing you need to do is get it out the door. A book languishing on your night table will be of use to no one except you. You need a catapult of some sort to fling it off your desk and into the wider world where it can be seen and read independent of you. This catapult, also known as a publisher, can be of the traditional type or it can now be you. Self-publishing is an increasingly viable path, and there are many ways of achieving success as a DIY author. No matter what path you chose, you have to embrace it to get to the final finish line.
I miss the internet. I know that, technically, the internet still exists. It's the Facebook-, Twitter-filtered series of algorithms designed to put cat videos, think pieces, and advertisements in front of you. But I get nostalgic for the days before money invaded the internet - the early 2000s, in particular, when I created the literary blog and webzine Bookslut.com.
When you're just an enthusiast, you can write about anything you want. You can publish long interviews with writers that only 20 people have ever heard of, knowing full well that maybe two dozen people will read all the way to the end. You can write serious, long reviews of books from small presses and faraway countries. Your only restriction is the limit of your curiosity.
Canongate is to publish a "magical" children's series by Scarlett Thomas, author of the adult novel The End of Mr Y (Canongate).
Francis Bickmore, Canongate publishing director, acquired world rights to three books in The Worldquake Sequence from David Miller at Rogers Coleridge and White.
Dragon's Green, the first in the series, aimed primarily at 9-12 year-olds, will be published in April 2017. It follows Effie, a pupil at the Tusitala School for the Gifted, Troubled and Strange. When Effie's grandfather becomes ill, she discovers she is set to inherit the family library. Which would be fine if the books were regular books . . . But before she knows it, the library opens up a world of puzzles, spells and curses and Effie's life is at risk from dark forces, intent on using the books and the power they contain.
Bickmore said: "Dragon's Green is a flat-out amazement, a fully-formed fantasy world, uncannily like our own but one in which books transport us literally to other dimensions and children must learn to harness the ancient lore of magic for themselves. With relatable characters, big ideas, and killer plotlines, Scarlett has really got her groove on in these books. Fans of Ursula Le Guin, TH White, Diana Wynne Jones and Philip Pullman, prepare to fall under Scarlett Thomas's spell."
The ebook market in India is at the cusp of a major revolution. By 2030, India will be amongst the youngest nations in the world, with nearly 140 million people in the college-going age group, as per a report by E&Y. India has become the second biggest smartphone market in terms of active unique smartphone users, crossing 220 million and surpassing the US market, according to a report by Counterpoint Research. Going by global analytics, these numbers will lead to interesting synergies for ebook publishers in India.
Road Ahead With ebooks pegged at less than 10 percent of publishers' topline in India, the projection that bets on ebooks reaching a 25-percent market share sounds a little too optimistic. However, rapid development in the area of education infrastructure in India is likely to fuel growth in academic ebooks. This, coupled with the smartphone revolution and some devices likely to be available at less than 11 USD - a key driver for fiction and regional language ebooks - does make this figure achievable. It might not be an exaggeration to say that these trends are likely to usher in a new era in ebook publishing in India.
Warsan Shire has seen her name recognition spike rapidly since Beyoncé incorporated her poetry in the HBO-released visual album Lemonade, and her book sales are following suit.
The Somali-British poet's 2011 chapbook, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, sold 78 print copies the week before Lemonade dropped; it sold 764 the week after, and has sold 13,685 to date, according to Nielsen BookScan.
The chapbook, published by London-based nonprofit Flipped Eye Publishing, has seen an overall increase of sales ranging between 700 and 800%, according to the publisher's senior editor and manager Nii A. Parkes. As of May 13, it was the #1 Amazon bestseller in the European poetry category and #6 bestseller in poetry overall. Amazon briefly listed the title as sold out during the week of May 2.
When the credits roll on Beyoncé's new visual album, "Lemonade," which had its premiere on Saturday on HBO, one of the first names to flash on screen doesn't belong to a director, producer or songwriter. It belongs to a poet: Warsan Shire, a rising 27-year-old writer who was born in Kenya to Somali parents and raised in London.
Ms. Shire's verse forms the backbone of Beyoncé's album and its exploration of family, infidelity and the black female body.
"The editing process was amazing and, at times, infuriating," Mr. Sam-La Rose said. Ms. Shire would hand in a manuscript, and by the time Mr. Sam-La Rose could finish his notes, she would turn in another batch of poems for review.
In elite London poetry circles, the initial reception was underwhelming, Mr. Parkes said. But online, readers were enthralled. They pulled out lines and posted them on their own blogs. One of her most-quoted prose poems is "Difficult Names": "Give your daughters difficult names. Give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. My name makes you want to tell me the truth. My name doesn't allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right."
16 May 2016
Bestselling writer and illustrator Susan Branch tested the self-publishing waters three years ago, when she published the first volume of her autobiography, A Fine Romance (2013) by working with Vineyard Stories, a local hybrid press near her home on Martha's Vineyard. Emboldened by the experience and wanting more control of the publishing process, she decided to go it alone and launched Spring Street Publishing the following year. Since then she's reissued a 10th anniversary of her lifestyle book Autumn (2014) and a second autobiography, The Fairy Tale Girl (2015). And published the third and final volume of the trilogy about her life, Martha's Vineyard, Isle of Dreams, earlier this month.
So far Branch, who began her career by publishing a series lifestyle books -- each installment lettered and painted by hand -- with Little, Brown, has no regrets about switching to self-publishing. Nor has she had difficulty reaching her audience without the backing of a large press. "Word-of-mouth is the secret," Branch said. She acknowledged that Little, Brown gave her a platform for many years. But it's really "the Girlfriends" - her readers - who have served as her ambassadors, she says. Roughly 350,000 to 500,000 Girlfriends read her blog and 53,000 subscribe to her quarterly newsletter.
Publishers are never short of problems. But perhaps the biggest problem is one we rarely talk about, partly because it's a hidden problem, partly because grappling with it presents a fundamental challenge to the business model we all rely on.
The problem is this: there are far, far too many books. The market for books is chronically saturated, yet we must all go on regardless, writing, publishing, selling, stocking, distributing and marketing more, more and more books year in, year out. At some level most of us recognise this, but rarely do we dwell on the business, let alone the cultural, implications.
Why does it matter? Because it changes the value equation. This is something I have been thinking about in connection with my forthcoming book, Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess (Piatkus, 2 June). Essentially in such saturated environments, I believe value shifts to secondary selection from primary production. This is difficult for publishers inasmuch as they are producers of books, but good if we see publishers as arbiters and selectors. The truth is they are always both, but thinking in terms of an overloaded market - a market where the marginal value of adding another book is decidedly limited - lets publishers, and all in the book world, have a clear sense of where their value lies. Curation may be the buzzword we love to hate, dismissed as faddish and ridiculous, but underneath that it's a more interesting and powerful idea than we give it credit for.
In the shrewdly competitive world of publishing and publicity, the story behind a novel is often as important as the story between its covers. Like superheroes, modern writers stalk through the media trailing their origin myths behind them: think of JK Rowling scribbling away in an Edinburgh café at the Harry Potter books, or EL James bashing out the Twilight fan fictions that became 50 Shades of Grey. We love these it-could-be-you stories; publishers know this and strategise accordingly. As in so many other areas, it's human interest that sinks the hook.
The latest of these stories belongs to Andrew Michael Hurley, whose novel The Loney has a strong claim to being the greatest British publishing success of the past few years. In January, The Loney - a spooky tale of extreme Catholicism and pagan practices, set near Morecambe Bay in the Seventies - won the Costa prize for the year's best first novel. On Monday this week, it scooped not only the award for best debut novel but also the overall prize, Book of the Year, at the British Book Industry Awards.
The Caine Prize for African Writing is a registered charity whose aim is to bring African writing to a wider audience using our annual literary award. In addition to administering the Prize, we work to connect readers with African writers through a series of public events, as well as helping emerging writers in Africa to enter the world of mainstream publishing through the annual Caine Prize writers' workshop which takes place in a different African country each year.
Our link is to the shortlist, which has just been announced, and you can read the stories written by the shortlisted writers.
On Monday evening, the inaugural winners of the new Man Booker International prize will be named, rewarding the best translated novel of the year, a high-profile acclamation with a generous prize pot split evenly between translator and original author. And as part of this welcome focus, the MBIP has commissioned research from Nielsen into how the increasing number of works of translated literature actually sell. The headline data is still only partial, but promising: in the past 15 years, while the overall fiction market has stagnated, translated fiction sales have apparently increased by 96%. And today’s translations actually sell on average better than non-translations. But should we really be surprised?
All too often we translators discuss "translated fiction" as though it appeals only to a discerning but limited readership. A niche interest. Yet what we're really talking about is every book from all of continental Europe and Latin America, from much of Africa and most of Asia. That's quite some niche.
In early 2011, the American group Vida published the first iteration of its now-annual Vida Count, finding a striking gender imbalance in literary press coverage. Far more books reviewed in the previous year were by men than women; most of the reviewers were men.
Vida focused, understandably, on the best known general literary journals. As the editor of a magazine devoted to science fiction and fantasy - genres that tend to be covered only infrequently by, say, the LRB, but which have their own active critical culture - I wanted to know what the situation looked like in my corner of the literary world. The result was the Strange Horizons SF Count, now in its sixth year.
Jo Henry reports on how 'older female millennials' are driving the boom areas in publishing
From YA to grip lit These are the young women who grew up with Harry Potter: they would have been aged between 6 and 15 when the first novel in JK Rowling's series came out. They were also instrumental in the extraordinary growth in sales of YA titles such as The Fault in Our Stars and the Hunger Games and Divergent series. Since 2011, YA has been a key publishing genre, with purchasing fuelled not just by the teenagers at whom the books are targeted, but by consumers aged 18-plus buying for themselves. This generation of women has become an important one for the book industry, seemingly making or breaking genres with their patronage - and in 2015, they found "grip lit" a suitable replacement for the YA books they had been devouring a few years before.