One of the things I was taught as an elementary school student in Illinois was that America differed from Europe in that it was founded as, and has remained, a classless society. These days, if politicians such as Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders bring up the disparities among the classes in America, they are accused by their political opponents of conjuring up class consciousness in order to foment class warfare. Unfortunately, of course, Obama and Sanders are right, and my schoolteachers were wrong. And while class disparity manifests in all sectors of society, for those who seek careers in literature, class differences have a huge impact on who gets hired and who gets published. This, in turn has a real effect on the portrayal of class in literature, and in media depictions of the writer's life.
Links of the week February 15 2016 (07)
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:
22 February 2016
One of the most compelling arguments for literary diversity has to do with the people who are following behind. If a little Mexican-American girl grows up with dreams of being a poet, what happens when she looks at the prize winners each year and doesn't see anyone who looks like her? Can a young African-American man aspire to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist if he doesn't know that there is someone like him out there? I would argue the same thing happens for working-class kids, especially those in families more concerned with putting food on the table than getting to the symphony, families who see the arts as the sole pursuit of the rich (as my own working-class immigrant father did).
Many academic journals are extremely expensive. Want to read just one article? That could cost you around $30. The best way to access academic papers is through universities or libraries. But those institutions can pay millions of dollars a year to subscribe to a comprehensive collection.
Alexandra Elbakyan has had enough.
Elbakyan is a Russia-based neuroscientist turned academic Robin Hood. In 2011 she founded the website Sci-Hub, which has grown to host some 47 million academic papers - Elbakyan claims this is nearly all the paywalled scientific knowledge that exists in the world. These papers are free for anyone to view and download. For students and researchers around the globe who can't afford academic journals, Elbakyan is a hero. For academic publishers that have historically been shielded from competition, she's a villain. Either way, what she's doing is most definitely illegal.
When my children were small, we spent many happy hours in our local library in Cowley, Oxford. As soon as we crossed the threshold, they scrambled out of the pushchair, kicked off their wellies and dived into the picture book boxes.
Those cosy days of rain trickling down the windowpanes, coats drying on the radiator and tiny hands resting gently on my knee were both precious and illuminating. At the time, I thought I was just keeping them busy, but now I look back on it, it was more than that. By taking them to the library I had unwittingly enrolled in a masterclass in children's literature.
Through Dogger, Hughes pulled off something miraculous. The illustrations are a joy; full of life and pathos. But, for me, her words are the true wonder. She skillfully captures the essence of what it is to be a child; the wild rushes of love, the vulnerability and the healing power of kindness. Here was a book for children, addressing their hopes and fears with simple truths. Small children make no distinction between the small stuff and big stuff: it is ALL big stuff. Dogger is true drama.
Seeing the concentrated expressions on my children's faces as I read it out loud, their own special toys held tightly in their arms, I had something of an epiphany. I wanted to be able to perform this sort of magic; to write stories that would speak directly to a child's heart.
The recent decline in ebook sales has led many pundits to pronounce that the digital revolution is over. Admittedly, this is indeed the end, but merely the end of the beginning of how ebooks will affect publishing. We are now in the next wave of publishing's digital transformation-one that is based on the use of data that is collected digitally and allows us to develop unique insights into audiences.
This is the fifth post in my exploration of data-smart publishing, and it explores whether gender and other demographic factors actually affect reading.
When it came to participating in the trials, far more women signed up than men. This is not a surprise: women account for more book purchases and books read than men do. In general, we recorded 20/80 male/female splits across test groups, though some books were noticeably more likely to be picked by men than others (up to five times more likely, in fact).
What was more interesting to us, though, was whether the sub-group of men that read a book had the same completion rate as women. If a man decides to read a book, is he less likely or more likely than a woman to finish it? In other words, is the completion rate of a book at all gender-specific?
I know, I know. This is a column about cutting-edge electronics. So, apologies to gadget-heads as I take a brief sojourn into the land of self-publishing, which has become a lot more high-tech than a lot of people realize.
A few years ago I wrote a book. A novel. "Knife Music." Contrary to what you might think based on my day job, it's not a cyber-thriller, though it is a mystery/thriller with a medical/legal slant.
I could have tried to go for a small publisher, but I was told mine was "a bigger book" with more commercial aspirations and prestigious small publishers were interested in more literary tomes. I also learned that many small publishers were being wiped out by the "self-publishing revolution," a movement that's not so unlike the "citizen journalism" or bloggers' revolt of recent years that's had a major impact on mainstream media, including this publication. The basic premise is anyone can become a small publisher. You call the shots. You retain the rights to your book. And you take home a bigger royalty than you'd normally get from a traditional publisher--if you sell any books.
Against the advice of my agent, I began perusing the big self-publishing companies' Web sites and evaluating what they had to offer. Then I started poking around blogs and message boards to get customer testimonials. What I found was a veritable minefield with roads that forked in every direction and very few clear answers.
Digital effects on book publishing are as close as your nearest device housing an ebook file. Less familiar to many in the field, however, is another area of digital shift: rights transactions. After all, our trade fairs are famous for that personal interaction, the face-to-face rights-hall visit. We asked Erin L. Cox to look at the platforming of the rights sector. And we invite industry members working in the rights arena to let us know how they see this change playing out: what is the impact of these new modes of commerce: on opportunity, tempo, international reach? What becomes of the professional relationships so long central to the rights arena?-Porter Anderson
Prior to the digital revolution, the sale of rights was predominantly done in several scenarios: Through meetings at book fairs; In pre-existing relationships with international publishers, film companies, audio publishers, co-agents who managed a partner-agent or publisher's list; and Scouts who reported back to their respective clients on books that were being talked about in the industry. As technology has advanced in both telecommunications (read: Skype) and digital publishing, so have the methods for discovering and selling rights - along with the ability for everyone from agents to authors to connect with publishers around the world, to develop those relationships, and to license more rights than ever before.
The Costa Book of the Year judges, in awarding the prize to Frances Hardinge for her children's novel THE LIE TREE, made a case that I have been slow to recognise: that prize committees and other literary arbiters should not make distinctions between genre and literary titles.
Perhaps there is a case, for the sake of neatness, in restricting the Man Booker to adult novels. Only two children's authors have won the Costa - previously Whitbread - Book of the Year since the current format was introduced in 1984. But would Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass or Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree not have been worthy Booker winners?
15 February 2016
In the first post in this series, I introduced the notion of the "Internet of Bookish Things" to describe how ebooks were now nodes on the Internet that could record how books are being read. And in last week's post, "Reading Fast and Slow - Observing Book Readers in Their Natural Habitat," I began exploring what we can learn about readers using this new "superpower." Today we will continue this exploration by looking at how the attention of readers decays while progressing through a book.
When we first observed this phenomenon, we thought it might be a result of publishers and Jellybooks providing the ebooks for free. But then we saw numerous examples of books with completion rates of 70, 80, 90 percent and more. Surveying readers confirmed that people gave up because they genuinely did not like the book. They either didn't like the writing, couldn't identify with the main character or simply "weren't that into the book." Many a reader also stated, "I will stick it out for 50-100 pages for any book I try, but after that I move on if I don't like the book".
This year marks the diamond anniversary of Avon Books' operation in the market. For 44 of its 75 years, it has been come-hithering Valentine's Day enthusiasts with tales of romance.
Avon Romance Useful submission guidelines for romance writers on the publisher's corporate site. www.HarperCollins.com
In terms of the United States market, the Romance Writers of America - (RWA) Romance Industry Statistics page cites the romance-book business as a whole reporting a total annual sales value in 2013 of $1.08 billion. That number comes from BookStats, and it's important to remember that we don't have adequate sales figures on ebooks from most of the major online realtors, most significantly Amazon. Particularly because romance tends to be the most popular genre for self-publishing writers - and because self-publishers work primarily in digital formats it's impossible to get a good count of how many titles actually are on the market, nor how much revenue the entire category generates.
This handsome arthropod is the image used in Digital Book World Conference materials for "Data Guy," the person behind AuthorEarnings.com
The person who calls him- or herself Data Guy-and who is sporting an embroidered image of a spider these days-is surely Arachnida ambitia, an specialist in avid calculation.
In what promises to be one of the more unusual moments at FW's Digital Book World conference, March 7 to 9 in New York, this mystery analyst will present a keynote oration with easily one of the longest titles of the conference: Outside the Data Box: Taking a Fresh Look at ebook Sales, the Indie-publishing Market, and a Fast-changing Publishing Business.
In the new February Author Earnings report, released Monday (February 8), things continue to look rosy for self-publishing authors and dire for the trade. But there are also announcements of changes in the approach - not entirely clear changes, mind you but in some ways promising. We'll look at a bit of that later in this article. To grasp the industry-political context here, we must remember that many who are skeptical of the efficacy of the Author Earnings effort point to the fact that it is an agenda-driven exercise.
The novelist talks to Jasmin Kirkbride about returning to poety after being "diverted" to fiction
Louis de Bernières' house is exactly as you imagine a writer's house ought to be. Cozy yet somewhat labyrinthine, half-open doors giving hints at rooms packed with curiosities beyond: a half-built guitar on a long dining table, the flick of a cat's tail around a doorframe, stacks of musical instruments and books. One would expect the man who lives in this house to write love poetry, and de Bernières' latest collection, Of Love and Desire, doesn't disappoint.
First love: poetry
De Bernières has made his career in novels, notably Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the more recent The Dust That Falls From Dreams (2015). In recent years, however, he has begun to publish poetry, which he has been writing since he was very young. The latest collection includes poems from his 20s right up to the present day, the earliest one being "On Giving a Silver Heart to a Cruel Lady".
His love for poetry stems from childhood. "My father has always written poetry. My mother's pet name for him was "poet" [he pronounces the nickname "pote"] and he occasionally read these out to us, so we had a poet in the family already. And I had a teacher at my second school who used to make us learn a poem every week. They were all from the Dragon Book of Verse. A lot of them were very ti-tum-ti-tum, and quite a few of them were heroic, like how Horatio kept the bridge. I think it gave me a window onto poetry and an eternal love for it. "Poetry was what I was writing first, and when I was young, I thought I was going to be a poet, rather than anything else. When I first started getting going as a writer, I sent a collection of poetry to an agent and she said, 'I don't do poetry, I don't get it, I don't like it, there's no money in it, send me prose!', and I sort of got diverted to being a novelist.
If you know the Greek island of Paros in the Cyclades, you'll be familiar with Parikia's Panagia Ekatontapyliani, or "Church of 100 Doors." Said to date back to the 4th Century AD, it's a stately, elegiac Byzantine landmark in the Aegean. It does not, in fact, have a hundred doors, and no sure explanation for that abiding moniker, either.
When you look at the evolving industry of publishing today, it can seem to have parallel characteristics: the books business is a kind of temple based on our regard for literature. It has an honored past; some obscure traditions; and-on the face of it-at least a hundred ways in, entry points of debate and discussion, presumed thresholds to potentially lucrative business everywhere you look.
One of the many areas in which author-service offerings have arisen in recent years is the paid book review. That sub-sector of the author-services world gives us an interesting picture of the dynamics that can come into play as free enterprise and writers' needs converge. Some author-service offerings are offshoots or trial balloons sent flying by major corporate interests. Others are grassroots efforts. In your childhood you might recall your father converting the back porch into a "beauty parlor" or a travel agency for your mother to operate. Today, one or both spouses may just as likely announce an intention to assist authors in their bid for publishing success. Haircuts may be had in both instances.
"Over 2 million book proposals are submitted to literary agents in the US every year - and 96% of those are rejected," Vincent explains. "That's almost 2 million people in the US alone who are seeking a publisher for their book, every year. We realised we could use our pre-orders metrics to match our authors with publishers based on their interests. So, rather than being painfully rejected dozens of times, we can flip that equation and bring our authors dozens of interested publishers."
Biggest challenges? "Solving the chicken-and-egg dilemma," Vincent admits. "As a platform, we need readers to attract authors, and authors to attract readers. We also need authors to attract publishers, and publishers to attract authors. Building a three-sided marketplace is a seriously big challenge - we're fortunate to have well-connected advisors and to be in a position where we add value to each user segment. Our readers enjoy exclusive pre-order rewards, authors benefit from the widest range of publishing choices, and publishers benefit from making more profitable acquisitions. It's a win-win-win model, but insanely difficult to execute."
The internet and e-books were meant to signal the death of the physical book. That didn't happen. The plight of authors is another matter. As they face a perfect storm of relentless commercial pressures and repeated attacks by the federal government, the outlook for authors and their readers, and for Australia's literary culture, has never been bleaker.
Recent surveys in Britain, the United States and Australia have revealed a serious slump in the income that authors receive from their writing. In Australia, authors have seen their average income from writing decrease from about $22,000 in the early 2000s to less than $13,000 in 2015. For many authors, that means they can no longer earn a livelihood from their work. It's particularly worrying for young writers, who may abandon their craft altogether. And that's bad news for readers, who could miss out on the work of our future Tim Wintons and Richard Flanagans.