First up, I should confess that I have absolutely no credentials for writing this post. I am - as yet - unpublished, so could be categorised as ‘an aspiring writer'. However, I am an avid reader and since joining twitter and the @CBBookGroup, I have studied the emerging careers of over twenty debut authors, observing and participating in book launches, reviews and blog tours. This experience, combined with my general tendency to make sweeping judgements about the world, has led me to conclude that there are three rules to ensure a successful writing career:
Links of the week October 26 2015 (44)
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:
2 November 2015
Rule number one: write like an angel
I thought I knew this. I'd read Stephen King's 20 rules for becoming a frighteningly good writer, where he says there are four categories of writers: bad, competent, good and great. Now, obviously we all want to be ‘great', but what does that actually mean? I've always read a lot - a combination of the classics and whatever caught my eye in the train station - but thanks to twitter and @CBBookClub, this year I've read mostly debuts and/or the books that the industry, bloggers and writers rave about. And in case you don't know this already, I have to tell you that the bar on what counts as ‘great' right now is VERY high. Frighteningly high, as in how-can-I-ever-compete-with-that-high. Basically, there's no point in sending your classic ‘fish and chips' MS to an agent who is fine dining on the very latest novels.
" Under the theme "Face out: Strategies That Work and Why", she will comment as one of the most widely recognised trailblazers in the English-language industry.
She was the first female worldwide c.e.o. of a major publishing force, HarperCollins, from 1997 to 2008, but Friedman says she carefully deferred in the UK to Victoria Barnsley. "I wanted her to be the c.e.o. of the Commonwealth, as we say," she recalls, "so I haven't really done much speaking in London."
Deep into a career that started in 1968 and spans what were arguably publishing's most tumultuous decades, Friedman has a lot to say. After all, she is building what may become her most lasting legacy: a digitally eternal backlist for a worldwide readership. Her Open Road Integrated Media is best understood as a verb-a convincing demonstration of how to open a road; how to clear new digital territory for publishing into the future.
My great friends, during those years, really thought that if anyone could pull this off, it would be me. Which was flattering. But nobody really knew if it was possible. I always believed I could send a cheque to a widow who hadn't seen a penny in 20 years. That was my goal. With investors, maybe I shouldn't say this, but while my goal was to make a company successful, my real goal was to bring books back to life, books I felt the next generation should be reading.
With a 50-50 split with authors and more than $20m in investment funding, Friedman and her team are, as Steven Bertoni wrote for Forbes, "finding new readers (and new revenue) for old books". Friedman, however, is also thinking of publishing commentator Mike Shatzkin's piece; she describes him writing: "Open Road discovered backlist and now so has everybody else." And with the major publishers still so focused on frontlist, there is little to suggest they will mount a credible retort to Open Road on the basis of backlist - but they might hang on to what they have."
John Bond reports on a new generation of writers for whom self-publishing is a matter of choice.
You would had to have been on a long vacation from planet publishing not to be aware of the high-profile success stories in indie publishing from the last few years. Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, Amanda Hocking - no matter which routes to market they have ended up taking, these are the often-quoted big beasts, the patron saints of DIY. But you can perhaps be forgiven for never having heard of Dan Gennoe. Gennoe has been a London-based freelance writer and journalist for 16 years, and recently self-published his first novel All Neon Like Love under his own Joe Bones imprint.
"I put so much of myself into the book, I wanted to be able to be just as involved in the publishing of it," says Dan. He took a hands-on approach to many of the specialist roles usually dependent on in-house publishing expertise - typesetting, pricing and metadata - and saw that process as valuable learning. At the same time, he prioritised finding the right people, at the right cost, for the things he couldn't do himself. He made his e and p publication as professional as possible - the best copy-editor, proofreader, cover designer and PR. Crucially, he wanted to ensure someone was looking out for the book throughout its life. For Dan, "publication was the beginning, not the end".
It's fall, the time of year when literary journals open their doors for new submissions. Around the country, writers are polishing poems, short stories, and essays in hopes of getting published in those small-but-competitive journals devoted to good writing. Though I've published short stories in the past, I'm not submitting any this year, and if things continue the way they have been, I may stop writing them altogether. The reason, in a nutshell, is reading fees-also called submission or service fees-which many literary journals now charge writers who want to be considered for publication. Writers pay a fee that usually ranges from $2 to $5-but sometimes goes as high as $25-and in return, the journal will either (most likely) reject or accept their submission and publish it. Even in the lucky case that a piece is published, most journals don't pay writers for their work, making it a net loss either way.
If this seems like a reasonable practice, it's worth noting that this model is nonexistent in the rest of publishing, where it's always been free for writers to send their work to editors. In fact, literary agents who charge reading fees are usually considered shady, and writers are warned to stay away. But over the last few years, more and more literary journals have started charging fees, including well-known publications such as Ploughshares, New England Review, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and The Iowa Review. While most journals are still free, every few months, a new journal seems to announce that it's going to start charging writers to submit their work - a trend that's slowly threatening the inclusivity of literature when it comes to new, diverse voices. A $3 fee might not sound like much, but the average short story might receive around 20 rejections before it's published, meaning writers can be us much as $60 in the hole per story. Ideally, a writer is producing more than one story a year. If you're trying to build a career - and yes, that's still possible - you're investing a lot just to get started, with no expectation of financial return.
Africa is on the path to digitisation. According to Internet World Stats, about 300 million Africans are connected to the internet, with smartphones emerging as a preferred device to get online. It is expected that mobile growth over the next five years will increase 20-fold (twice the global rate). This access to communications technology, and education and information, is leading to the rapid development of digital education programmes.
One country with clear digital opportunities is South Africa, where public and private sector investment has led to a range of opportunities for publishers. The government is currently rolling out a National Infrastructure Development Plan, which aims to provide broadband coverage across the country from big municipalities to rural areas by 2020.
Linked to this increase in infrastructure, e-textbooks are fast becoming a reality in schools and universities across large parts of the country. In the Gauteng province, which includes the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, a "Paperless Classrooms" pilot started this year, making use of tablets and interactive whiteboards as teaching and learning tools. The five-year programme had first been tested in seven classrooms, before being expanded to 375 schools in the province recently.
As Alison Flood reported in The Guardian as the project got under way, it's been almost 200 years since Charles Dickens took Britain by storm with the serialization of his first major novel, The Pickwick Papers. And now, "American novelist Joshua Cohen is setting himself a larger target - of the internet at large - as he embarks on an a mission to reinterpret Dickens' debut live online."
That's right. He wrote it live. Online.
"There's no chance it's a good novel," Cohen said. "There's no chance it's a bad novel. It's not a novel. It's what happens when you take a culture worker who is under time constraints trying to present himself as a symbol of a culture worker under time constraints. Working for newspapers, which I used to do-what I saw when the '90s turned into the 2000s was you'd have to write more pieces, more quickly, for less money. So the idea is a commentary on that. The huge volume of communications we have to deal with constantly, and how they're destructive and overwhelming and impossible to deal with."
On October 26, the Women's Media Group gathered for their monthly luncheon, this time at the Upper Story restaurant inside the storied D&D Building (which features floor after floor of home interior design showrooms). WMG, founded in 1973, is comprised of women across different fields of media, from television to film to magazines to digital media to newspapers. Their aim is to be a supportive network for women in the industry. There were a lot of agents in the room, as the theme was "Panel with YA Superstars."
But the new trend is a style of books that Julie Strauss-Gabel is championing now, and always has been, is contemporary realistic fiction. "There are also a lot of readers interested in a new genre that could be called 'heightened contemporary,' she said. Call edgy, call it weird, or call it culled from the adult horror market, these titles are somewhat grotesque in nature. Maybe they're true stories with a twist, for example, of a girl receiving a new face from a plastic surgery treatment that is still cutting edge." "Also, sci-fi is gaining ground again."
26 October 2015
For publishers, sending authors on tour is expensive-they have to cover transport, meals, and nice hotels. And perhaps more importantly, touring doesn't necessarily translate into better book sales. It's hard to tell, in fact, what effect they have at all, as sales records don't show what prompted someone to buy the book, only where the book was purchased. With the publication of my two books, most recently The Art of Forgery in June, I've found myself part of a lucky group that still gets to partake in this somewhat fading institution. I've witnessed firsthand how publishers have adapted to a changing industry-by becoming more selective about which authors to send on tour, which promotional appearances to secure, and how to make the dollars stretch.
The editors and publicists I spoke to for this article explained that, back in the day, publishers would send authors out on tour fairly regularly - the more events and cities covered, the better. But in this new, more austere era, publishers only regularly pay to send authors who are compelling public speakers, authors with large established audiences who are guaranteed to sell well and therefore cover expenses (the James Pattersons, Gary Shteyngarts, J.K. Rowlings, and so on), or authors with a high profile that extends beyond books (such as actors, athletes, comedians). Publishers might send the odd debut writer, in hopes of more media coverage, but it's no longer a given.
The number of Americans who claim to have read a book in the previous year declined slightly, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. However, in a somewhat surprising twist, the survey also showed that young adults 18-29 were more likely to have a read a book over the past year than their older counterparts.
According to the survey, which was launched in 2011 and has been conducted annually since, over the past year 72% of American adults read a book, either in whole or in part, compared to 80% of young adults.
The Pew Research Study indicates that the reading habits of Americans, balanced between print, e-books and audiobooks, have remained fairly stable since the first report in 2011. This year's survey shows that 27% of Americans read an e-book over the past year, up from 17% in 2011, and about 12% of Americans listened to an audiobook. According to Pew the figures, which cover the period 2011-2014, are "statistically similar based on the size of the e-book reader population.
As Amazon invests $10 million its translation project, Susan Bernofsky ask if Amazon is turning translation into a "glorified form of self-publishing."
AmazonCrossing, Amazon Publishing's five year old literary translation imprint, has announced a $10 million commitment over the next five years to increase both the number and diversity of its books in translation.
With 77 titles from 15 countries and 12 languages being published in the U.S. in 2015, AmazonCrossing has become one of the largest publishers of translated literature in the States. The announced investment will go towards fees paid to translators over the next five years, as well as to increasing the countries and languages represented on the AmazonCrossing list, which, since 2010, has included more than 200 titles by authors from 29 countries writing in 19 languages.
And at Translationista, writer and translator Susan Bernofsky wrote this about the new submission process and its impact on translators:
“… Several years ago, Amazon set up a portal that allowed translators to bid on translation projects to be published by AmazonCrossing, and while my contacts at Amazon assure me that these gigs do not automatically go to the lowest bidder (there’s someone checking credentials and weighing skill against cost), I don’t know what other purpose a bidding website can have other than to drive prices down, obviously at the translators’ expense. Drive them down to how low? It’s impossible to say, since last I heard Amazon was still requiring the translators who accepted contracts to work for it to sign a non-disclosure agreement. (If they’ve since dropped that requirement, I’d love to hear about it and will publish a statement to that effect right here.)
Last week, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., the largest and oldest in the world (it dates back to the fifteenth century), AmazonCrossing, Amazon Publishing's translation imprint, announced it would be committing $10 million over the next five years to publishing more works in translation. "We launched AmazonCrossing five years ago to introduce readers to voices of the world through English-language translations of foreign-language books," AmazonCrossing's publisher Sarah Jane Gunter said in a statement. "While we are now one of the largest publishers of translated literature in the United States, translated fiction is still a tiny fraction of new publications."
Over the past five years, only Dalkey Archive, the uber-literary small press that has published books by authors like Carlos Fuentes, Viktor Shklovsky, and Danilo Ki%u0161, has published more works in translation than AmazonCrossing. This year, AmazonCrossing plans to publish "77 titles from 15 countries and 12 languages" in the United States, which will almost certainly dwarf the output of Dalkey and its ilk. And, with this new $10 million commitment, the number of works in translation published by AmazonCrossing should continue to soar. Which means that AmazonCrossing will almost certainly be the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States for at least the next five years. Of course, $10 million over five years for works in translation is not a world-shaking announcement - after all, Simon & Schuster just gave comedian Amy Schumer close to that amount for just one book. And, while AmazonCrossing did announce a few interesting tweaks to its operations (more on those in a moment), it is mostly committing to continuing to do what works, just on a slightly grander scale. Still, though $10 million over five years will not turn AmazonCrossing into a publishing powerhouse, it still has important implications for translators and for readers.
When it comes to reading books, the kids are all right. But the rest of us have some work to do.
A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that the percentage of Americans who read books has dropped in the past year, but millennials definitely aren't the ones to blame. The study found that overall, 72% of American adults have read a book in the past year, while the percentage for millennials, ages 18 to 29, was higher: 80%.
Education proved to be the best predictor of whether a person is a book reader. Ninety percent of college graduates reported having read a book, compared with 34% of those who didn't graduate from high school.
The India Book Market Report released by Nielsen at Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. last week values the print book market in India, including book imports, at $3.9 billion. This positions India among the largest English-language book markets in the world. The compound annual growth rate of the market is 20.4% between 2011-12 and 2014-15, according to the report.
A growing literacy rate, estimated to reach 90% in 2020, government spends on education, digital initiatives, and outsourcing of publishing services to India, are all identified as the strengths of the Indian publishing industry. While the market is highly fragmented, it is also experiencing consolidation, in part as a result of the involvement of foreign multinationals.
Jo Henry reports on some of the findings of the Nielsen India Book Market Report 2015, launched last week at the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two..
As an attractive market for publishers, China has been getting many of the headlines in recent years. New research from Nielsen Book, however, shows that India is another huge market that has not yet reached its full potential for the book industry. The numbers are mind-boggling. Currently the world's second-most populous country with more than 1.28 billion people, India is forecast to surpass China by the end of 2030, with a population of some 1.53 billion.
The unique features of India's demographics in terms of a growing population, especially of young people who are literate and educated, present tremendous opportunities for the growth and expansion of the publishing industry in all sectors - but these huge opportunities do not come without challenges. For example, India has 22 official languages, and with regional languages and dialects from all states the figure is more than 1,600.