Once upon a time, in the smoky, violent neverland of crime fiction, there were seductive creatures we called femmes fatales, hard women who lured sad men to their doom. Now there are girls. It started, of course, with Gillian Flynn, whose 2012 suburban thriller, Gone Girl, told a cruel tale of marriage and murder and sold a zillion copies.
Links of the week June 13 2016 (24)
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:
20 June 2016
For those of us who choose to entertain ourselves, from time to time, with made-up stories of murder, mayhem, and deceit, this is actually a welcome development, because the men with guns don't do their job nearly as well as they used to. They're old, they're getting tired of walking through those doors, and the heroes they used to threaten - lone-wolf private eyes like Chandler's Philip Marlowe - have practically disappeared from the genre. Like the cowboy, the private eye once embodied male fantasies of rugged individualism. As individualism itself became a less sustainable concept, the popular imagination began to relocate its mythic figures to places farther and farther away from the real-world settings of the old West and the modern city (to, say, the Marvel universe).
This time, it's 10 Steps to getting a literary agent, though I have to warn you, the most important steps are the novel-writing ones.
1. Finish the book
You will annoy everybody you query if your novel isn't finished. You want to be in the position where you can press "send" as soon as an agent requests the full. If a waitress in a restaurant reads you the specials and you ordered one, then she returned to your table to tell you it would be four weeks, how would you feel? Quite annoyed. I had full requests within hours of emailing. Be prepared!
What if every book was worth reading? Not just the books with silver medallions on their covers, but every hardcover featured at Barnes & Noble, every paperback foisted upon you by a friend or a relative or even a stranger-what if they were all pretty good? That's the sense one gets from Book Marks, a new "Rotten Tomatoes for Books" launched Tuesday by the literary culture site Lit Hub. Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, which determines if a review is "fresh" (red tomato) or "rotten" (splattered green tomato) and assigns a percentage score, Lit Hub uses an A-F grading system. But none of the books are remotely in danger of flunking.
Why are book reviews so damn nice? Many argue that America has few professional critics left, which means that most of the criticism is being done by freelancers who lack institutional protection and therefore are disincentivized from making sharp critiques. Freelancers are more likely to be drawn to books that they like because, unlike a professional reviewer, they have no obligation to review a hot new novel. They may also want to publish books themselves, so they're loath to piss off potential publishers. Furthermore, the literary community itself - if such a thing exists - is miniscule. Reviewers may have met the author they're reviewing, either in person or online. (For instance, in full disclosure, I am friendly with Diamond and at least half of Lit Hub's staffers and regular contributors. So if I'm being too nice, blame that familiarity.) Also, reviewers are often authors themselves, and would hope to be treated kindly when the tables are turned.
Since March, we've heard about a forthcoming publishing venture from James Patterson, the best-selling novelist of the age. "To date," writes the New York Times, "[Patterson] has published 156 books that have sold more than 325 million copies worldwide." Or, rather, he relies on a stable of more than twenty co-authors to churn out his novels in what appears to be a tightly orchestrated Fordist scheme. BookShots, his new imprint with Hachette, will accelerate this output by producing short, plot-heavy, "cinematic" novellas. No fewer than twenty-three of these "shots" will be sprayed on readers throughout the remainder of 2016. And the spraying began last Monday.
From the vantage of readers and writers, BookShots reveals the novel's (and broader publishing's) anxiety about both time and other media. Patterson's insistence is that we no longer read because we don't have enough time. (Another motto of the imprint: "Fast reads for fast times.") To this end, Patterson disparages literary work that takes time to develop characters (as if all novels can be categorized by degree of character development). "We have this convention of the novel that you have to know everything about the frigging characters," Patterson told the New Yorker. "Like: What? You know, a lot of people don't know their spouses that well."
It was a fairly modest undertaking at first," Don DeLillo told the Guardian live event, explaining how his 827-page novel came to be. "It was a novella - I assumed perhaps 50, 60 pages ... I had an idea based on a newspaper headline that I saw when I realised it was 3 October 1991, the 40th anniversary of this famous game." Visiting a local library to check the microfilm archive, he found that the front page of the New York Times was split perfectly in two, one half reporting the Giants' win and the other the Soviet Union's explosion of its first nuclear bomb. "So there it was, and once I saw it there was no escape."
Immediately after the remarkable 60-page prologue, DeLillo leaps 41 years into the future to an abandoned airfield in the desert. Here his central character, Nick Shay, is watching an old flame, the visionary artist Klara Sax, being interviewed for French television. When the interviewer warns that she might sound stupid because of her poor English, Sax responds ironically: "But I must be smart, funny, profound and charming." I had this - and DeLillo's notorious dislike of dissecting his work in public - in mind ahead of the author's public discussion with Professor John Mullan. The novel that followed is one of enormous scope, a mosaic of American life pulsating with insight and ambition. Despite its epic size, every sentence is a pleasure. DeLillo paints a fevered picture of the country, weaving the experiences of roughly 100 characters between events such as the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis. His unmistakable dialogue lends characters a heightened ability to interpret and relay aspects of the world around them.
Penguin is launching a new series of succinct collectible guides of contemporary poetry called Penguin Modern Poets.
The series is a revival of the 1960s series that ran to 27 titles under the same name until the mid 1970s in a bid to usher in "a new golden age".
The mission statement of the original guides, assembling groups of writers including the Mersey poets, was to introduce contemporary poetry to the "general reader" by selecting the work of three poets that would best "illustrate the poets' characteristics in style and form".
By the end of the original series, it had conducted a survey of 81 poets, spanning the anti-modernist movement poetry of Kingsley Amis to British Poetry Revival member Tom Raworth who aimed to counter modernism's "pernicious influence". Every volume in the new series promises again to bring together "the most exciting voices of our moment". The series is aimed at both "seasoned poetry fans" and "curious readers" alike
I belong to a wide range of Facebook groups and follow a lot of media news, and few things are more frustrating than people who celebrate the apparent "resurgence" of print and the comeback of independent bookstores as some kind of "win" over ebooks and digital media. Most of it is wishful thinking rather than an understanding of what's actually happening out there. With my colleague Porter Anderson, I try to offer perspective on current developments and put all the stats into their proper context.
As you can tell from Nielsen's graph above (which tracks sales of titles with ISBNs), the flattening of ebook sales started happening back in 2013. Some of the ebook decline we''re seeing may be attributable to higher ebook prices from traditional publishers, as well as rapidly falling Nook sales. Adult ebook sales have been relatively stable; the big decline is in children's/YA ebook sales due to the lack of a big franchise hit in 2015. (I hope it gives you pause to learn that the absence of a Harry Potter book or a new YA series can directly affect how well the industry does in a given year.)
International publishing this season lies downwind of hot blasts of political potentials that many feel could be damaging to various countries' books industries and their readerships. Welcome to a Summer of Insecurity.
Last night at 22:34 UTC, we entered summer in the Northern hemisphere. It's a hot one, and in some unprecedented ways.
Initially, almost any heat wave now ahead of us might have been answered with John McEnroe's famous line on the tennis courts of his youth, "You cannot be serious."
Could the UK leave the EU? Could Donald Trump seize the US Republican nomination for the presidency? Could Beijing imprison booksellers? Could Australia challenge copyright protection and fair use?
These once were when-hell-freezes-over bellylaughs for some. Now, it's looking pretty icy downstairs. While good literature never stands far from politics of one kind or another, the pressure points of the season are arriving in ways that are no joke. And the industry, along with the wider societies it serves, is understandably on edge.
13 June 2016
Google almost any celebrated short story writer - George Saunders, Kelly Link, Alice Munro, Isak Dinesen, Joy Williams - and you're likely to see the same two words over and over again: "writer's writer." Lest you be tempted to exalt that phrase's use, consider Cynthia Ozick's description: "Every writer understands exactly what that fearful possessive hints at: a modicum of professional admiration accompanied - or subverted - by dim public recognition and even dimmer sales."
As a short story writer, I lived in denial for years. I pretended that the editors were all wrong when they said that short story collections don't sell, that the Goodreads comments were sullen outliers. After all, most of my friends loved short stories! Never mind that most of my friends were writers, and when I told non-writer friends that my book was a short story collection they were congratulatory but fervent in their expressed hopes that I would someday, finally, write a novel. I did, one sad afternoon, suck it up and start asking people - non-writers - whether they read or enjoyed short stories, and after that proved too dispiriting I took to the internet and read lots of reviews and comments and criticisms and understood, finally: It's all true.
AuthorEarnings, a company that uses data services "to call for change within the publishing community for better pay and fairer terms in all contracts," has issued a May report that it calls "the definitive million-title study of US author earnings." Among the report's findings is data on the infamous "dark pool" of books that "appear on no category best-seller lists at all."
So how much are authors being paid for books sold on Amazon? The numbers are either dismal or inspiring depending (of course) on your point of view. To begin with, around 9,900 writers are earning $10,000 or more from Amazon, which, as AuthorEarnings points out, is "a nontrivial supplementary income." But it's important to remember that this number includes authors making more than $10,000. It's also important to point out that independent authors generally outperform those published by the Big 5 publishers, especially if you consider authors published in more recent years. This pattern would seem to confirm our earlier report that says Big Publishing's market share is in decline.
A writer scored a significant victory over publishers this week, when comic book giants Marvel and DC - who had tried to block Graham Jules from using "superhero" in the title of his self-help manual Business Zero to Superhero - backed down after more than two years, just before a hearing in London. Their double shame (first coming across as bullies, then failing) raises the question: how well do publishers fare when they sue or are sued - are they legal superheroes or zeroes?
Howard Hughes v McGraw-Hill (1972) McGraw-Hill believed they'd pulled off a coup by acquiring the "autobiography" of reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, based on interviews with Clifford Irving. But Hughes angrily telephoned reporters and sued the publisher, saying he'd had no dealings with Irving, who was swiftly exposed as a hoaxer. (McGraw-Hill cheques totalling $650,000 had gone to an "HR Hughes" who turned out to be Helga Hughes, an alias used by Irving's wife.) Publisher loss
But this season, there is a chill in the literary atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, given that the publishing industry continues to face tough times and, for its practitioners and impresarios alike, an uncertain future, it all starts with money. For years now, a row has rumbled on about the fees paid to authors at literary festivals or, more precisely, the lack of them. And it came to a head in January, when Philip Pullman resigned as patron of the 20-year-old Oxford literary festival, deciding that the position put him in clear conflict with his other role as president of the Society of Authors - the organisation committed to defending writers' increasingly precarious ability to make a living from their work.
Pullman's standpoint was unequivocal: "A festival pays the people who supply the marquees, it pays the printers who print the brochure, it pays the rent for the lecture halls and other places, it pays the people who run the administration and the publicity, it pays for the electricity it uses, it pays for the drinks and dinners it lays on: why is it that the authors, the very people at the centre of the whole thing, the only reason customers come along and buy their tickets in the first place, are the only ones who are expected to work for nothing?"
Since e-books became a crucial source of revenue for publishers six years ago, the royalty rate on the format has been an ongoing bone of contention between authors (and their agents) and publishers. While authors and agents have stood firm on their position that the standard rate of 25% (which refers to the percentage of net sales authors receive on e-books sold) must change, publishers haven't budged. must change, publishers haven't budged. Could a flat royalty system, in which one rate is used across formats, be a solution? Though some industry members believe a single rate could simplify a complicated royalty structure, agents said the move wouldn't address the real problem: authors being shortchanged on the profits from their e-books.
Agents, for their part, seemed suspicious of the notion. "When I'm looking for better royalties out there, it often has do with e[-books]," said Jennifer Weltz, of the Jean V. Naggar Agency. "That"s where the issue is." Adding that she doesn't feel a flat royalty rate would ultimately work to get authors a better payout, Weltz said she would like to see escalators more regularly built into the e-book royalty rate and has already had success achieving this in the international market. When asked what he thought of the idea of a flat royalty rate across formats, Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group, was more blunt. I'm always open to hearing about things that are beneficial to our authors... I just don't generally hear those things from publishers."
Children who grow up with a large number of books in the house earn more money later in life, according to a new study published in the Economic Journal.
Economists from the University of Padua in Italy studied 6,000 men born in nine European countries in the mid-20th century, categorising them depending on whether they had fewer than 10 books at home, a shelf of books, a bookcase with up to 100 books, two bookcases, or more than two.
One day two years ago Rachel Ann Nunes, who writes Mormon fiction and romance novels, received an email from a reader asking a strange question: Had she collaborated with someone named Sam Taylor Mullens? Nunes had never heard the name before. But the reader went on to say she had noticed similarities between one of Nunes's novels, A Bid for Love, and another self-published book by Mullens. When the reader confronted Mullens about the parallels, she was told the two authors were simply collaborators. If that was a lie, the reader said-and it was-then Nunes may have been the unwitting victim of plagiarism.
With that single exchange, Nunes found herself part of a trend affecting many professional authors in the age of self-publishing. An anonymous stranger seemed to have stolen her book, changed it superficially, and passed it off as her own work. First published in 1998, A Bid for Love did well enough to spawn two sequels before it eventually went out-of-print. Mullens' book, titled The Auction Deal, looked like the same story with much of the same language. In Chapter 2, Nunes writes, "The dark brown curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for twenty-eight of Cassi's twenty-nine years." Compare that to Chapter 2 of Mullen's book, which begins, "Dark brunette curls were everywhere. They were a curse, and had been for the thirty-one years of my life."
Imagine breaking your back writing your memoir with the dream of getting it published. Then your book agent receives 50 rejections from hot shot editors that give you amazing excuses why they have to pass on publishing the book. The next move is to self-publish. You do, and your dream of publishing your book becomes a reality when you use the Amazon owned company Createspace. Now, you wait for book sales and online reviews to appear from the huge base of followers you have built from your many years as an anti-drug war activist. But despite this no reviews are appearing. You look into the reason why and find out that Amazon is blocking your online reviews because of an ongoing war waged by Amazon against companies that offer fake reviews for cash. You realize that you are being SABOTAGED by your own publisher!
This is what has happened to me when I published my new memoir This Side of Freedom: Life After Clemency. And I was not alone, the same thing has happened to many other indie authors that use Amazon as a source to publish and sell their books. Just look at "Amazon's's Review Policy is Creepy and Bad for Authors" by Kiona Smith-Strickland.