June 2015 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'When John Spurling won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction recently with The Ten Thousand Things it was much more than a good win against a formidable shortlist, which included Martin Amis, Helen Dunmore, Adam Foulds and Kamila Shamsie. The subject was obscure perhaps to a western audience, the story of Wang Meng, one of his era's great masters of painting and the novel was Spurling's fourth, although it had taken him 15 years to write...'
• The brilliant British author Jim Crace has just won the International 2015 IMPAC Dublin Award, which at €100,000 is the world's largest literary prize for a single work published in English. His 2013 novel Harvest, published by Picador, won out of a shortlist of ten novels. But is he retiring from writing?
• 'Mike Shatzkin's long piece on his blog gives an update on why the publishing business as we have known it is not going away anytime soon. Shatzkin is one of the most respected but also down-to-earth commentators on the publishing world...' Our News Review gives a summary of his blog.
• 'It's been a pretty good surprise for the book trade that in two weeks' time (perfect timing for summer reading) E L James will publish a new book featuring the same characters as Fifty Shades of Grey. This time the story is told from Christian Grey's point of view and the book is simply called ‘Grey'...' Another big bestseller for E L James.
• 'This was a week packed with news, much of it from Book Expo, so this is just a short summary...' News Review ranges across BookExpo - Richard Charkin saying that power was shifting to authors - to Google's latest action and how authors' groups are offering support to their members.
• Independent London publishing house Atlantic has recently had a new managing director, Will Atkinson. He put forward the company's publishing philosophy very clearly in an article for Bookbrunch, which sadly is behind their paywall. It is possible however to quote what he says in his article, ‘Publishing culture and commerce'.
• Good news on children's books - 'Recent figures from Nielsen BookscanUK bibliographic organisation, describing itself as 'the definitive retail monitoring service for books', which shows UK bestseller lists on its website. http://www.nielsenbookscan.co.uk/ show that children's print books are doing well in eleven out of the twelve countries the research tracks, the exception being India. That means there's a real boom going on in children's books, heartening news for children's writers...' This week's News Review is entitled Children's print book sales booming.

Comment

• 'Becoming a writer is like changing your gender. When I was young, my identity was as a Paki, a mixed-race mongrel boy from nowhere. The idea of having another identity as a writer seemed like a splendid solution to that. My place in the world was different. It created a future for me...' Hanif Kureishi in The Times magazine.
• 'Amazon has done one good thing, which is to make books available to everyone. But they've done it at terrible cost to authors by selling books so cheaply. It gives the impression that books don't cost very much to create...' Our Comment this week is from Philip Pulman, author of His Dark Materials and The Ruby in the Smoke.
• 'I think most women are amateur psychiatrists. We're brought up to be like that. We think much more about the whys than most men do: ‘Why has someone done that?' And that is an advantage in writing crime novels.' Our Comment is from Minette Walters, author of The Cellar, in the Guardian.
• ‘In talking to other writers and getting a bit older and realising how it works, (I discovered) that the gestation period for a new book is very tender - it's like a new shoot, you can't expose it to the light too quickly or it might wither. You'll lose the impetus, you'll lose the belief in it.' Laura Barnett, whose just-published three-pronged first novel, The Versions of Us, has sold in 18 countries, in the Bookseller.
• 'At some point, I will get down to actually writing. I don't believe in waiting for inspiration to strike. I'm sure inspiration does arrive at some point, but I would never embarrass it by noticing its arrival or departure...' Anne Enright, author of The Green Road, in the Sunday Times magazine
• 'What I love about fantasy is that it is all about the world, and that world can be showcased in so many different ways, be it film, games, books or artwork. That's part of the reason fans feel so passionately about fantasy. There are already 35 fan fictions about the Summoner trilogy on Wattpad, for example.' Taran Mathan, author of just-published Summoner, Book One: The Novice, which has already attracted more than six million reads on Wattpad, in the Bookseller
• ‘Yet a writer's life is not limited to the dramatic moment of first exposure or the excitement that greets the new work of the well-established. In particular, as suggested by the phrase "the difficult second novel", things can get tough after first publication. If your first book has gone like the clappers, you'll probably be feeling pressure, both self-generated and from expectant publishers...' Alex Clark provides this week's Comment on "The difficult second novel".

Quote

'Life being so short and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.' John Ruskin