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:
Rachel Hecht Children's Scouting
As we get on the road to Bologna, I think the power of the tie-in continues to have a significant impact internationally: books that have been picked up by Netflix in particular, or optioned in major studio or streaming deals, are generating immediate and big foreign interest-as are novelizations of popular TV series or video games that provide an additional point of entry for readers and fans.
Addison Duffy
Agent United Talent Agency
Across all platforms, buyers are looking for fresh new voices and stories. Studios and especially streaming platforms are hungry for family, young adult, middle grade, and children's content across animation and live action. With the addition of the Disney and Apple streaming platforms, there is a sizeable shift in the appetite for kids' programming.
Brexit has loomed large over the last three London Book FairsInternational Book Fair Information, the focus of numerous panels and programs. But during the 2019 event, the issue came to a stunning crescendo, with three consecutive votes in the U.K. Parliament over the course of the fair's three days leaving the U.K.'s divorce from Europe in a state of chaos.
In his opening keynote at Quantum, the fair's preconference, Faber & Faber CEO Stephen Page celebrated the extended period of stability publishers are currently enjoying. And, citing the "chaos of Brexit" and "Citing prejudice around the world," Page urged publishers to pay attention not only to their individual bottom lines but also to the vital role that publishers collectively play in the cultural ecosystem.
E-books may be the future of publishing, but print editions continue to make up a large portion of book sales, and, for many indie authors, printing remains a crucial aspect of the self-publishing process.
One of the most popular ways indie authors print physical books is through POD-or print-on-demand-services. The clearest benefit of using a POD service is that authors don't have to spend money printing large quantities of physical books that customers may or may not end up buying; with POD, authors only have to print as many books as they sell.
Most services also ship to customers directly, which cuts down on delivery time and allows authors to attend to the many other tasks and responsibilities that come with self-publishing. And, because books are always ready to be printed (assuming the contract with the service remains active), titles are never out of stock. Finally, many POD providers offer ancillary services, such as cover design and copy editing, which can be of tremendous help to indie authors who lack the contacts or expertise to manage these aspects of the process on their own.
Beyond these features, which are common to most services, POD providers vary widely in the benefits they provide, the business models they follow, and the fees they charge. Here's a breakdown of some of the major POD players and the attributes that make each service unique.
AA Dhand sits at a table in the balcony cafe at Bradford's magnificent old Wool Exchange and points to the spot where his latest victim was found.
She was hanged in a particularly grisly fashion from a ledge below the hammer-beam roof, suspended between two grand granite pillars.
Her name was Usma and she met her tragic fate at the start of City of Sinners, the Bradford crime author's latest novel.
The reputation may not be helped by crime thrillers that paint a picture of its mean streets. But Dhand says his books, which tackle racial and religious tensions, child grooming and terrorism, can't try to please anyone but his readers.
"My job as a crime writer is to thrill and entertain and to keep you turning the page," he responds. "It's not to try and make the city read a certain way."
In 2013, at an age past which most people live, W.S. Merwin published three books. One of them was a 1,500-page Collected Poems with Library of America, which even as it landed was out of date. A new volume was already scheduled for 2015. Others would follow. Just last month yet another book of prose arrived, full of Merwin's account of meeting Pound, tales of translation woe, tiny shards of memory from travels long ago. This constant production, which in a writer like Updike could feel like mania, in Merwin felt proof that the meaning of living was to search, and the search could not end until he did.
Just after World War II, a young Princeton student journeyed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, to visit Ezra Pound. The great poet had been tried for treason for broadcasts he made in Italy for the fascist government and, pleading insanity, wound up serving a dozen years in the psychiatric institution. To the astonishment of his young visitor that day in 1946, Pound greeted him as if he were a serious poet. Like an elder, he also offered advice. "You don't really have anything to write about at the age of eighteen," Pound warned. "The way to do it is to learn a language and translate. That way you can practice, and you can find out what you can do with language, with your language."
While times have been upbeat in the book world, with almost universal good results for publishers, the same cannot be said of news media, and in particular digital news media. Whereas a few years ago startup news companies, backed by aggressive venture capital and touting technologically turbo-charged journalism, were riding high, now they are in full-on crisis mode. Large-scale layoffs have occurred at former darlings of the internet economy including the HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Vice and the Pool. For those working in the field, the news has been grim; prospects are shrinking; jobs are going; budgets are being slashed; the promised future is not coming to pass.
Ultimately this is all about the currency that powers the media environment and that, in the digital age, has become the most prized asset of all: attention. Getting, keeping and, crucially, monetising attention are harder than all of these companies had bargained for. Nonetheless, there is a huge lesson and positive message here for publishers
Toby Faber on the pleasures and surprises of writing the history of the firm founded by his grandfather
In January 2017, I succumbed to a long-standing temptation and decided to pitch a history of Faber & Faber.
There was a clear arc to the story: the early struggle and the arguments with shareholders that accompanied the foundation of the firm, the luck and insight that led Geoffrey Faber to recruit TS Eliot as an editor, the need to adapt to the post-war world, the almost-bankruptcy in 1970, the turnaround fuelled by money from Cats in the 1980s, and then, finally, the restructuring in 1990 that reinforced the firm's independence when all its competitors were being swallowed into conglomerates. I knew many of the individual stories that I wanted to tell, too: the elaborate jokes the directors played on each other in the 1930s, Lord of the Flies being rescued from the slush pile, the rejection of Animal Farm, and Eliot's handwritten note on a memo about Ted Hughes: "I think we ought to take this man now. Let's discuss him."
Three authors of middle grade and young adult titles transformed a panel discussion into a master class on how reality finds its way into fiction, during a wide-ranging conversation hosted by Children's Books Boston on March 12 at Simmons University. Led by Horn Book executive editor Elissa Gershowitz, authors Liza Ketchum, Malinda Lo, and Tara Sullivan shared the extent to which they combine meticulous historical research, careful editing, and personal acumen to create realistic fiction storylines for young readers.
For all three authors, however, the need to establish a firm factual foundation for their work is done in the service of creating compelling fiction. The daughter of a historian, Ketchum said her work is, in part, informed by the fact that her father's books were, "All about white guys." Fiction, she said, creates the opportunity to enrich the stories of people who are not seen in those histories.
