February 2017 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• The successful growth of new British publisher Head of Zeus shows how an international approach to publishing can put a business in a strong position through challenging the traditional approach to publishing markets...' But it's through selling ebooks internationally that the firm is coming up with a new publishing model. News Review
• Coming from the tech arena is a fairly hostile view of traditional publishing, which assumes that it is dead and will shortly be totally replaced by indie publishing. But is this really what is happening at present? It doesn't seem so clear-cut. News Review on the debate about 'The black hole of modern publishing practices'.
• In a very visible case, highly successful Australian author Kate Morton has accused the agent who kick-started her career of favouring her own interests. Morton is seeking a refund of up to $2.8 million paid to her agent in commission. Her well-respected agent Selwa Anthony is suing her former client for breach of contract relating to books on which she says she was entitled to receive her 15% commission. News Revie
• It's been a lively week on the children's publishing and reading front, with an attack on the "joyless education" which is putting children off reading, an intervention from the Children's Laureate demonstrating that drawing and illustrating help children's literacy and authors complaining about celebrity signings for children's books. The week's News Review, is Should celebrities be signed up for children's books?
• Nielsen has just reported that ebook sales in the US declined a rather surprising 15% in 2016, as compared with 2015. There seem to have been two reasons for this... Most amazingly, hardback sales have overtaken ebook sales for the first time since 2012. If you look back to the early days of ebooks, this is a long way from the commonly-asserted prediction that ebooks would totally replace print books within five years! News Review reports on this and some good news from children's publishing.
• Some nervousness has been expressed by authors and staff in the last few days about the impending purchase by Bertelsmann of part of the Pearson share of Penguin Random House, but is there really much reason to feel anxious about this?
• The first major publishing news of the New Year has been the announcement that Pearson, having declared a profit warning because of change and volatility in the educational market and declining sales in higher education, is intending to offload its 47% stake in Penguin Random House - and its partner Bertelsmann is keen to acquire it.
• Amongst the predictions springing up as we move into the new year, a hard figure is the most astonishing. The slowing-down of ebook sales is well-documented but it is quite startling that the first figure of 2017 is that the UK print market sold 195 million books in 2016, an increase of almost 7% on 2015, and volume increased by 4.5%. News Review on The publishing world as 2016 turns into 2017.

Comment

• ‘I realize how decadent writing a novel is. You really own this world, you can do whatever you want to it. You can go inside people's minds. Gone Girl has a lot of internal monologues, so it was a big struggle to figure out how to have them show you who they were instead of like, "Here's about me." Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places in the Hollywood Reporter gives us this week's Comment.
• Our Comment is from Mark Dawson, author of 24 books, including The Cleaner, his latest John Milton title, and the Isabella Rose series: ‘You have to be the writer and get the words down, then you've got to know to take off your writer's hat and put on your business hat. And this is why self-publishing is not for everybody... If you sign up to my mailing list, you get the first two books in the Milton series free - you need to shoot them a pill to get them to sign up... You want to take someone from being a customer to being a reader, then a fan and in the end you consider them friends...'
• 'If I've written the screenplay, I get a lot of say, or I make myself an executive producer and at least pitch in with it. I always think of the novel as a visual form. I think of people as visual creatures. It's our strongest sense. The key to an important scene is to get the visual details correct... There comes a moment when you just have to back off. Once it goes into pre-production, all the big decisions are made and you really don't want to be lurking around saying ‘it's not like this in my novel! Our Comment is from Ian McEwan, author of The Children Act and sixteen other novels and books of stories in Concrete Online.
• ‘Wonderfully, out of that private box of miracles that is a writer's life, I just wrote that sentence [that now opens the book]: "The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake." The whole damn book was just lying in behind that sentence.' There followed ‘four or five joyous months where, for once in a decade, you are going down to your work room like a 22-year-old instead of a 61-year-old, and being very surprised...' Our Comment is from Sebastian Barry, author of Days without End, which recently won the Costa Award and which paints a fascinating picture of a slice of American history.
• "I've never had writer's block yet, which I attribute, not just to luck, but also to my technique. I would advise anyone looking to ward-off writer's block to start writing something else, a completely different project. I'm always working on about six different projects at various stages of development, so if I don't feel like working on one I just turn to another. Basically, monogamy is hard, in writing as in life!" Our Comment is from Emma Donoghue, author of Room, and of the screenplay for the film, which has just been released.
• ‘She probably went too far in putting out a fake autobiography. Which is like an invitation: expose me.' (referring to Frantumaglia, which is about to be published in English - not an autobiography as such, but a collection of letters, essays, interviews and the like.) "But she's not committed a crime. Nor do I feel that she was a bad person to write under a pseudonym..' Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and Maddaddam on Elena Ferrante in the Guardian provides this week's Comment.

Quote

'It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.'

William Faulkner