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:
Confusing Memoir with Autobiography
Writing a memoir is not the same as writing an autobiography. In an autobiography, you typically start at the beginning of your life and record all the details you can remember, chronologically. In a memoir, you take a slice from your life-a particular theme or lesson or flavor of experience-and write about that, pretty much ignoring the rest.
Telling a Story Already Told
That brings us to the second mistake people make when attempting to write and market their personal story: often they don%u2019t realize that their story has been told before, by other people who have experienced the same thing. Growing up with an alcoholic mother or father or going through a divorce, for example, are stories which countless other books have already explored.
If you want people to read your memoir, it must be unique enough to stand out amidst the sea of other memoirs. Not only that - it also must sound unique in your marketing materials (including your query letter to agents). Agents don't want to represent a book they think is a rehashing of books already written, because they know they can't find a publisher for that. Publishers are interested in buying unique memoirs only, because that is what the public wants to buy.
How did a one-woman show at Edinburgh become a worldwide hit? As a book of the series is published, performers and writers ask her about inspiration, sex and guinea pigs
Jess Phillips, politician
Did you know Fleabag was as good as it was before it aired, or were you anxious about anyone seeing it?
I was hugely anxious before it came out. I didn't know if people would like it. I had to remind myself that my job is to move people, not impress them. I don't think I'll ever feel the pressure as keenly as I did the first time. It was a huge opportunity that had the potential to change my life - and it did! I was also aware that the play had done well and I didn't want to fail it with a crap TV adaptation. I shudder remembering the sleepless nights!
Amazon Crossing, Amazon's publishing imprint focused on literary translation, was first announced in May 2010 and published its first book, The King of Kahel by Guinean author Tierno Monenembo, that November. Since the release of that first title, the imprint has published more than 400 books, from 42 countries and in 26 languages, and become the most prolific publisher of translated literature in the U.S.
Crossing has also produced some of the bestselling titles to emerge from Amazon's publishing platform, including The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch, which has reached more than 800,000 readers according to the company, and Petra Durst-Benning's The Glassblower, which has reached 329,000 readers-both translated from German. (Amazon opts to quantify the success of its books in terms of "reaching readers," which encompasses sales for the book across print, digital, and audio, and downloads from Kindle Unlimited.) Among the imprint's other popular fiction writers is Marc Levy, whose P.S. from Paris reached 95,000 readers; Levy, arguably the bestselling author in France today, has published four books with Crossing, with the fifth being A Woman Like Her, in May 2020.
There's an intriguing contradiction at the heart of Nicholas Meyer's best work, a sort of chiaroscuro where the novelist, screenwriter and film director addresses dark topics in a disarmingly light manner. Even when he has addressed addiction (The Seven Percent Solution), climate change (Star Trek IV) or nuclear holocaust (The Day After), you never forget you're in the presence of a great entertainer who delights in the stories he tells and the histories he unearths.
Meyer's new novel, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols (Minotaur) his first in 26 years, finds the author in characteristically ebullient form as he sets Sherlock Holmes on the trail of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the origins of modern anti-Semitism. Writing during the Trump era in which purportedly outdated prejudices have once again risen to the fore, Meyer, 73, seems to feel a greater sense of moral responsibility than has been evident in his previous Holmes pastiches. And yet, there is an inescapable joy to the writing - jokey asides; clever footnotes; a scene which pays homage to the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes. His purpose may be grave, yet he seems to be having a great time pursuing it.
In The Child That Books Built, the writer Francis Spufford, rather controversially, described fiction as "a mood altering drug".
This is ironic, given that parents spend half their lives terrified that their children will become addicted to drugs - and the other half worrying that they are not reading enough. Yet anyone who has ever fallen in love with a particular novel recognises what Spufford describes. You start reading, and you are never quite the same person again.
Many years ago, in 1996, I picked up just such a novel in a bookshop. It was, of course, Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/, the first part of His Dark Materials. It went on to win the Carnegie Prize - but at that time, its author was a well-kept secret.
Why had I not heard of Philip Pullman? One answer was that 1996 was at the dawn of what I have called the Third Golden Age of children's literature. Adults thought they could leave behind novels for children, as if these were childish and irrelevant to literary excellence. A certain Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had also just been published; something that was to make its author one of the most commercially successful in the history of publishing. I found JK Rowling's world delightful, but Pullman's was in an altogether different category. It was as if Milton and Blake had rewritten the Narnia books. I knew it would change the imagination of generations.
The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won't be the same as someone else's, and they may not fit your life or practice, but maybe you'll pick up something useful.
Take notes regularly.
This will sharpen both your powers of observation and your expressive ability. A productive feedback loop is established: Through the habit of taking notes, you will inevitably come to observe more; observing more, you will have more to note down. Here are some examples from my own notebooks and also from the Austrian fiction writer Peter Handke's notebook selection entitled The Weight of the World. Other notebooks that might serve as useful models are Kafka's and the painter Delacroix's.
The artist Jim Kay, whose latest book is "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," surrounds himself with nature when he draws unnatural creatures like dragons, goblins and trolls.
Jim Kay's favorite part of drawing is right before he makes a mark.
"The best moment is a blank sheet of paper," he said. "Every line is a slight degradation of that ideal."
Kay, the artist behind the illustrated editions of the Harry Potter series, works long days and often into the night in a free-standing studio in the garden of his home in Sussex, England.His cluttered work space contains virtually every artist's tool imaginable, and some unlikely props: metal scrapers from a dentist's office, which he uses to add details to clay models; insect specimens; a model skeleton; and leaves, branches, seeds and feathers that he collects. He uses those motley materials to build three-dimensional models of winged dragons, elves, goblins and trolls, which he then sketches.
"The problem with fantasy books is these things don't normally exist, so you have to create them to give them a sense of reality," Kay said.
What if you love to write, you want to be a writer, but you don't feel that something sufficiently monumental has happened to you? That is, sufficiently monumental about which it is worthwhile to write? Vonnegut has some things to say about that.
"Patience"
Vonnegut opines about the generations:
What is it the slightly older people want from the slightly younger people? They want credit for having survived so long, and often imaginatively, under difficult conditions. Slightly younger people are intolerably stingy about giving them credit for that.
What is it the slightly younger people want from the slightly older people? More than anything, I think, they want acknowledgement and without further ado that they are without question women and men now. Slightly older people are intolerably stingy about making any such acknowledgement.
Turkish police have rearrested the journalist and novelist Ahmet Altan, just a week after his release from prison over alleged links to the failed 2016 coup.
Karin Karlekar, PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ America's director of Free Expression at Risk Programs, described Altan's re-arrest as "a disgrace and a horror" and called for his immediate release.
"Ahmet should never have been imprisoned to begin with; he has committed no crime. His release last week after more than three years in detention was a cause for hopeful celebration, but today we are faced again with the cruelty of a justice system that no longer upholds the rule of law," she said.
