Google almost any celebrated short story writer - George Saunders, Kelly Link, Alice Munro, Isak Dinesen, Joy Williams - and you're likely to see the same two words over and over again: "writer's writer." Lest you be tempted to exalt that phrase's use, consider Cynthia Ozick's description: "Every writer understands exactly what that fearful possessive hints at: a modicum of professional admiration accompanied - or subverted - by dim public recognition and even dimmer sales."
Links of the week June 6 2016 (23)
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:
13 June 2016
As a short story writer, I lived in denial for years. I pretended that the editors were all wrong when they said that short story collections don't sell, that the Goodreads comments were sullen outliers. After all, most of my friends loved short stories! Never mind that most of my friends were writers, and when I told non-writer friends that my book was a short story collection they were congratulatory but fervent in their expressed hopes that I would someday, finally, write a novel. I did, one sad afternoon, suck it up and start asking people - non-writers - whether they read or enjoyed short stories, and after that proved too dispiriting I took to the internet and read lots of reviews and comments and criticisms and understood, finally: It's all true.
AuthorEarnings, a company that uses data services "to call for change within the publishing community for better pay and fairer terms in all contracts," has issued a May report that it calls "the definitive million-title study of US author earnings." Among the report's findings is data on the infamous "dark pool" of books that "appear on no category best-seller lists at all."
So how much are authors being paid for books sold on Amazon? The numbers are either dismal or inspiring depending (of course) on your point of view. To begin with, around 9,900 writers are earning $10,000 or more from Amazon, which, as AuthorEarnings points out, is "a nontrivial supplementary income." But it's important to remember that this number includes authors making more than $10,000. It's also important to point out that independent authors generally outperform those published by the Big 5 publishers, especially if you consider authors published in more recent years. This pattern would seem to confirm our earlier report that says Big Publishing's market share is in decline.
A writer scored a significant victory over publishers this week, when comic book giants Marvel and DC - who had tried to block Graham Jules from using "superhero" in the title of his self-help manual Business Zero to Superhero - backed down after more than two years, just before a hearing in London. Their double shame (first coming across as bullies, then failing) raises the question: how well do publishers fare when they sue or are sued - are they legal superheroes or zeroes?
Howard Hughes v McGraw-Hill (1972) McGraw-Hill believed they'd pulled off a coup by acquiring the "autobiography" of reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, based on interviews with Clifford Irving. But Hughes angrily telephoned reporters and sued the publisher, saying he'd had no dealings with Irving, who was swiftly exposed as a hoaxer. (McGraw-Hill cheques totalling $650,000 had gone to an "HR Hughes" who turned out to be Helga Hughes, an alias used by Irving's wife.) Publisher loss
But this season, there is a chill in the literary atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, given that the publishing industry continues to face tough times and, for its practitioners and impresarios alike, an uncertain future, it all starts with money. For years now, a row has rumbled on about the fees paid to authors at literary festivals or, more precisely, the lack of them. And it came to a head in January, when Philip Pullman resigned as patron of the 20-year-old Oxford literary festival, deciding that the position put him in clear conflict with his other role as president of the Society of Authors - the organisation committed to defending writers' increasingly precarious ability to make a living from their work.
Pullman's standpoint was unequivocal: "A festival pays the people who supply the marquees, it pays the printers who print the brochure, it pays the rent for the lecture halls and other places, it pays the people who run the administration and the publicity, it pays for the electricity it uses, it pays for the drinks and dinners it lays on: why is it that the authors, the very people at the centre of the whole thing, the only reason customers come along and buy their tickets in the first place, are the only ones who are expected to work for nothing?"
Since e-books became a crucial source of revenue for publishers six years ago, the royalty rate on the format has been an ongoing bone of contention between authors (and their agents) and publishers. While authors and agents have stood firm on their position that the standard rate of 25% (which refers to the percentage of net sales authors receive on e-books sold) must change, publishers haven't budged. must change, publishers haven't budged. Could a flat royalty system, in which one rate is used across formats, be a solution? Though some industry members believe a single rate could simplify a complicated royalty structure, agents said the move wouldn't address the real problem: authors being shortchanged on the profits from their e-books.
Agents, for their part, seemed suspicious of the notion. "When I'm looking for better royalties out there, it often has do with e[-books]," said Jennifer Weltz, of the Jean V. Naggar Agency. "That"s where the issue is." Adding that she doesn't feel a flat royalty rate would ultimately work to get authors a better payout, Weltz said she would like to see escalators more regularly built into the e-book royalty rate and has already had success achieving this in the international market. When asked what he thought of the idea of a flat royalty rate across formats, Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group, was more blunt. I'm always open to hearing about things that are beneficial to our authors... I just don't generally hear those things from publishers."
Children who grow up with a large number of books in the house earn more money later in life, according to a new study published in the Economic Journal.
Economists from the University of Padua in Italy studied 6,000 men born in nine European countries in the mid-20th century, categorising them depending on whether they had fewer than 10 books at home, a shelf of books, a bookcase with up to 100 books, two bookcases, or more than two.
One day two years ago Rachel Ann Nunes, who writes Mormon fiction and romance novels, received an email from a reader asking a strange question: Had she collaborated with someone named Sam Taylor Mullens? Nunes had never heard the name before. But the reader went on to say she had noticed similarities between one of Nunes's novels, A Bid for Love, and another self-published book by Mullens. When the reader confronted Mullens about the parallels, she was told the two authors were simply collaborators. If that was a lie, the reader said-and it was-then Nunes may have been the unwitting victim of plagiarism.
With that single exchange, Nunes found herself part of a trend affecting many professional authors in the age of self-publishing. An anonymous stranger seemed to have stolen her book, changed it superficially, and passed it off as her own work. First published in 1998, A Bid for Love did well enough to spawn two sequels before it eventually went out-of-print. Mullens' book, titled The Auction Deal, looked like the same story with much of the same language. In Chapter 2, Nunes writes, "The dark brown curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for twenty-eight of Cassi's twenty-nine years." Compare that to Chapter 2 of Mullen's book, which begins, "Dark brunette curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for the thirty-one years of my life."
Imagine breaking your back writing your memoir with the dream of getting it published. Then your book agent receives 50 rejections from hot shot editors that give you amazing excuses why they have to pass on publishing the book. The next move is to self-publish. You do, and your dream of publishing your book becomes a reality when you use the Amazon owned company Createspace. Now, you wait for book sales and online reviews to appear from the huge base of followers you have built from your many years as an anti-drug war activist. But despite this no reviews are appearing. You look into the reason why and find out that Amazon is blocking your online reviews because of an ongoing war waged by Amazon against companies that offer fake reviews for cash. You realize that you are being SABOTAGED by your own publisher!
This is what has happened to me when I published my new memoir This Side of Freedom: Life After Clemency. And I was not alone, the same thing has happened to many other indie authors that use Amazon as a source to publish and sell their books. Just look at "Amazon's's Review Policy is Creepy and Bad for Authors" by Kiona Smith-Strickland.