More than 250 authors, editors, agents, professors and others in the American literary community signed an open letter this week opposing any publisher that signs book deals with President Donald Trump or members of his administration.
Links of the week January 18 2021 (03)
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:
18 January 2021
"We all love book publishing, but we have to be honest - our country is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals," the letter read. "We affirm that participation in the administration of Donald Trump must be considered a uniquely mitigating criterion for publishing houses when considering book deals.
Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that's set to change.
This is the news that Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who indulged Trump's conspiracy theories about the election being ‘stolen', has had his book deal with Simon & Schuster terminated. It might not be a book-burning per se, but it's certainly the 21st-century, polite-society equivalent of it.
Simon & Schuster said it decided to pull Hawley's forthcoming book, titled The Tyranny of Big Tech, in response to the ‘disturbing, deadly insurrection' at the Capitol on Wednesday, and what it sees as Hawley's role in this ‘dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom'.
Hawley was among a group of Republicans who opposed the certification of Joe Biden's victory, under the guise of airing the ‘concerns' of citizens about voter fraud. He was also seen raising a fist to the protesters earlier in the day, but condemned the violence soon after it occurred.
From Michael Hansen's perspective, the textbook industry is having a Spotify moment.
The chief executive of Cengage, a leading publisher, brought up the music streaming service on an investor call last month, in reference to a question about the future of physical textbooks.
Hansen knows just how disruptive streaming was to the music industry: He once worked for one of the biggest companies in the business, Bertelsmann. Spotify and other streaming services became popular once consumers realized they were getting a good value for their money, Hansen said. Boston-based Cengage now has its own digital subscription service, but for textbooks; subscriber numbers were up 19 percent, year-over-year, in the most recent quarter.
Textbook publishers had been trying to shift from paper to digital for years. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many reluctant educators and students the nudge they needed to make the leap to online course materials. In Cengage%u2019s case, digital sales now represent 68 percent of total revenue, up from 58 percent three years ago. About half of its sales are to college students, and digital represents 82 percent of the higher-ed revenue now for Cengage. Get Business Headlines in your inboxThe Globe's latest business headlines delivered every morning, Monday through Friday. Enter Email %u201CWhat we have preached for many years, hopefully, is finally coming into the spotlight,%u201D Hansen said in an interview. %u201CWe can use this very unfortunate pandemic to create real impetus for positive change . . . to propel the educational system into the 21st century.%u201D
Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist, is heading a major project to republish books by black British writers that generally disappeared without trace before they could receive the recognition they deserved.
The author of Girl, Woman, Other has curated "Black Britain, Writing Back", a series that launches in February, with six initial titles ranging from literary thrillers to historical fiction. Evaristo said she is seeking "to correct historic bias in British publishing and bring a wealth of lost writing back into circulation".
She told the Observer that a change in climate has brought "more of an appetite" for what black British writers have to say, with greater interest in black British history than ever before. "There is more awareness that there are stories out there from all kinds of communities that are definitely worth engaging with. I wanted to bring back into the light and into circulation books that I think are really important, powerful books. One of the things we've had against us as black British writers is that people haven't been that interested in our stories."
Eight of Barbara Taylor Bradford's novels are to be made into TV dramas after the author secured a major deal with independent film company The Forge.
The deal was brokered by Bradford's media agent, Luke Speed, on behalf of Jonathan Lloyd of the Curtis Brown Group Represents screenwriters and specialises in film and TV. Commission : 15-20%. Website includes submission guidelines. Also represents directors, designers and actors. Founded 1914
The Forge has acquired all eight books in The Emma Harte Saga, including A Woman of Substance, Hold the Dream, To Be the Best, Emma's Secret, Unexpected Blessings, Just Rewards, Breaking the Rules, and Taylor Bradford's latest novel, A Man of Honour. The new novel is the prequel to A Woman of Substance, and Taylor Bradford's long-term publisher HarperCollins will release it this November.
Since 1998, Taylor Bradford has sold 2.06 million books for £11m, with her bestseller 2004's Emma's Secret, on 171,560 copies sold in paperback, through Nielsen BookScan TCM. Commenting on the first novel in the series, the author said: "A Woman of Substance is about a servant girl who through talent, true grit, hard graft, ambition, and drive becomes a huge success as a tycoon. She founds a great family dynasty and an enormous business empire that encircles the world. The novels cover over 100 years, from 1904 to 2009. It is a sweeping epic saga which tells the life stories of Emma Harte plus three generations of Hartes who follow in her footsteps: her granddaughters, great granddaughters, and nieces as well as her male progeny including her sons, grandsons and nephews. There is every human emotion in all of my books and many strong plot lines, which are ideal for television drama."
While I was planning my current novel and annotating that plan, I asked myself a series of questions in the annotations. I know I'm not the only one to make notes on a draft in the form of questions, but until recently I wasn't aware that I was creating problems for myself by not categorizing the questions.
Some questions have to be answered before I can make any progress with a draft. But others are simply the result of indecision; I could simply make up my mind and move on, knowing I can always change my mind later. Now I am convinced that two things can hold me back (for years on some projects) and they are: not knowing the answers to crucial questions, and not knowing which questions were which in the first place.
Women ‘are routinely overlooked for awards,' says Melinda Gates as her Pivotal Ventures company backs the forthcoming Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction may not be a literary or publishing award you know, and that's because it has yet to be awarded. Today (January 15), however, the program has announced a donation from Melinda Gates' Pivotal Ventures investment and incubation firm, a handsome US$250,000, which is sure to help make this specialized awards program make a viable start on its mission to recognize the work of women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the United States.
There are a ton of book-to-movie adaptations coming our way this year, even exceeding this list. Those that do not have set dates yet we've omitted, such as YA sequels To All The Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean, After We Fell and crime action flick Tom Clancy's Without Remorse starring Michael B. Jordan. Here's just about every major movie you might want to crack open a book for in 2021
There are a ton of book-to-movie adaptations coming our way this year, even exceeding this list. Those that do not have set dates yet we've omitted, such as YA sequels To All The Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean, After We Fell and crime action flick Tom Clancy's Without Remorse starring Michael B. Jordan. Here's just about every major movie you might want to crack open a book for in 2021.
When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the press coverage was overwhelming. The trusted book publishing media, including Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Lunch, The Bookseller in the U.K. and Quill & Quire in Canada, each did a fine job of monitoring developments within publishing and bookselling.
Then, early in the pandemic, Amazon prioritized what it deemed to be essential items and let book order fulfillment lag. This caught my attention: here was an impact that was not occasioned by anything that publishers were doing wrong, but was strictly an external force that (in the short term) had a major negative impact on publishing sales. But then it emerged that some booksellers were able to take advantage of the disruption, and with innovations like curbside pick-up, gain some much-needed retail sales.
Meanwhile the pandemic was wreaking havoc with many traditional retailers. That, in turn, was weakening the retail mall sector, which in turn could have a negative impact on chain bookstore sales. The crisis in Washington was blocking aid to the states, which in turn threatened public library budgets. But the disruption in colleges and university face-to-face instruction proved to be a boon to digital sales for McGraw Hill, Pearson and Cengage.
The move to Zoom has, overnight, made many people comfortable with organizing and participating in online events, which has created an opportunity for authors to promote their books in new ways.
Over the weekend fanfiction website Archive of our Own went down, to the dismay of fanfic readers everywhere. While it's not the result of any one fic, despite what some fans thought, it's a reflection of how much the pandemic has changed our fanfiction reading habits.
Archive of our Own is a website to archive transformative works, also known as fanfiction. Fanfiction uses the fictional boundaries of someone else's fiction in order to tell new stories with those characters and in those universes. While fanfiction is mostly associated with lovesick, teenage Twilight fans who insert themselves into their favorite novels, fanfiction and the associated cultural force of fandom has become the default view of what it means to be a fan. For some fans, especially in particularly online fandoms, reading fanfiction and reacting to it is a huge part of how they express their fandom. Over time, Archive of Our Own has been recognized as both a very popular website and a culturally important one, eventually winning a Hugo Award for best related work.
Naver, Korea's leading internet platform, is acquiring Wattpad for more than $600 million in cash and stock.
Naver is the leading search engine and digital tools and services provider, a platform akin to Google, in Korea. Naver is also home to the online comics platform Webtoon, which has 72 million monthly users and has produced such popular series as Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, and worked with numerous notable corporations including the Jim Henson Company, Crunchyroll, and Vertigo.
Wattpad, the online social writing and reading platform based in Toronto, has more than five million writers contributing to the site, and reached some 90 million people in 2020. In all, users spent 23 billion minutes a month on the site, which is best known for genre works written by and aimed at young adult audiences. In recent years, Wattpad has inked numerous production deals with Hollywood studios and launched its own young adult publishing imprint, which has released 21 titles to date. The company has a significant international presence, and says that some 1,500 works from the site have been produced as books, films, or television series around the world.
Organizers of the United Kingdom's TS Eliot Prize had planned to hold its shortlisted poets' readings at London's Royal Festival Hall on January 10 and an awards ceremony on the 11th.
Under the circumstances of coronavirus COVID-19 spread mitigation orders, an adjusted plan was made for a limited-audience reading and announcement of a winner for Sunday (January 24) at Queen Elizabeth Hall4, but that event will now is set for a digital rendition at 1900 GMT.
In case you're not familiar with this one, the T S Eliot Prize is the best-paying award in British poetry. The winning poet receives a purse of £25,000 (US$34,111) and each shortlisted poet receives £1,500 (US$2,046).
Its organizers emphasize that it's "the only major poetry prize which is judged purely by established poets" and the program awards collections written in English and, in this case, published in 2020.
The program's shortlist was drawn from a total 153 poetry collections submitted by British and Irish publishers. There are five women and five men in the group, and the list of 10 includes two writers who are Americans, as well as poets whose backgrounds range from Chinese, Indonesian, and Native American ancestry to British and Indian roots.
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