Even by the standards of the ailing book publishing industry, the past year has been a bad one for Barnes & Noble. After the company spun off its profitable college textbook division, its stock plunged nearly 40 percent. Its long-term debt tripled, to $192 million, and its cash reserves dwindled. Leonard Riggio, who turned the company into a behemoth, has announced he will step down this summer after more than 40 years as chairman. At the rate it's going, Barnes & Noble won't be known as a bookseller at all-either because most of its floor space will be given over to games and gadgets, or, more ominously, because it won't even exist.
Links of the week June 20 2016 (25)
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:
27 June 2016
In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits. Literary writers without proven sales records will have difficulty getting published, as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some will probably never be published at all. And rigorous nonfiction books, which often require extensive research and travel, will have a tough time finding a publisher with the capital to fund such efforts.
Here she is, Jessie Burton, at the door of what she describes as her "burrow" in Forest Hill, south-east London. First glimpse of her flat: colourful, perky, tidy. "Come in," she says. She shows me what she calls her "she shed" - a literary wendy house at the end of the garden - built on the proceeds of her first novel The Miniaturist and in which she has finished her second, The Muse, which is out this week. Jessie matches these upbeat surroundings. Dark, vivid and forthcoming, she wears a skirt that is just asking to be twirled and has a musical, ever-so-slightly panicky laugh. She looks Spanish but is not - she grew up in Wimbledon. If you did not know otherwise (as I already do), you would say this was someone who would never let anything get out of hand. But life has a way of testing even the most flourishing individuals and, in Jessie's case, the challenge came wrapped up in success.
Today, Jessie seems steady, sunny and clear-minded. But she fears a return to the "depleted, gloomy place" of last year. She hopes she has learned that, "success is a mirage and you have to do a lot of analysis to understand it is impossible to embody it". She has realised, "The horrible thing is that it is only when you get financial security that you understand what is important in life - that's the moral lesson." What is most important to her is "the facility to write". And success has made her "more grateful for friends and family, if that doesn't sound too mawkish".
If you're looking for representation, or smarting from yet another rejection letter, please don't switch off. I've had some major disappointments since my first rejection letter in January 2013, but somehow I just kept writing.
I've kept most of my rejections in a folder called Novel. (It should really be called Novels, since I've written three of the things.) There have been highs - being shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize in 2014, for example, when writers and publishing bods including organiser Joe Melia said some lovely things about my work. (I tucked these away for dark days.) And there have been lows. At one point, five agents were reading a full manuscript, but all of them turned me down.
When I look back though, the extreme lows, the moments that hit me hardest were the turning points - not that I knew that then. My ego was battered purple, and just a tiny frazzle of hope remained - but I kept going and at the moment, I am so thankful that I did.
Here are my six wobbly steps to getting representation (I fell over several times):
Towards the end of the noughties, Colm Tóibín bounced into the office of a London publisher clutching a fat Australian novel and insisting that he had to bring it to the UK. His enthusiasm for what he would later acclaim as a book "of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don DeLillo's Underworld" caused some surprise at Atlantic Books, which was among the 80-odd publishers that had already rejected Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap.
So what is an imprint, and why are there suddenly so many more of them? The simple answer is that they are subdivisions of bigger publishers. Sometimes, they come about through takeovers and sometimes they are startups. Andrew Franklin, whose Profile Books recently took over Tuskar Rock, points out that imprints have no legal status, "if Tuskar Rock had libelled someone with I Love Dick, it's Profile that would be sued. On the other hand, they break up monolithic companies and give space to individual editors."
Although Carole Nelson Douglas has traditionally published more than 60 novels, she wanted more control over her books and decided to go indie. And while she did find the transition challenging - and encountered a "status downgrade" in some of her writers groups -- Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ gave her latest, Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit, a positive review.
"Figure out why you're writing. It's usually because you didn't like something in the books you otherwise love, or felt a certain aspect was missing. Bestselling example: Twilight into Fifty Shades of Gray. Figure out who your audience is, who you're writing for, what genre you're writing in, and what the books in that genre look like. Recognize that indie publishing is a lifetime learning experience. Yes, some authors broke out big and fast a few years ago, and those gold rush days are over, but audience-expanding strategies are still out there. Look for role models online. Authors love to tell "how I did it."
It went in, I think twelve editions. And I sent it-I don't know if I sent it, or if it was sent-to a man, a black man in prison. And he wrote a letter and asked for two more copies of the book. He said, "I have one copy, which I want to hold against my heart. But I need another copy to throw up against the wall. And I need another copy after that to give to a friend."
All those emotions were in that book. The horrible stuff that happened, the lynchings, I mean all of it-and the letters people wrote. Anyway, I don't need to tell you all of the details, but I did want to suggest to you that part of the business of editing is telling people to shut up.
So the president came down once and said he knew about this book I had published. And he said, "I would like for you to stay as an editor at Random House, but I want you to talk to Knopf. Because they could publish you, and you could stay in this company." Random House owns Knopf. So I only had to go talk to the editor in chief of Knopf to see if he was willing to edit me - they'd keep me as an editor at Random, but would the other part of the company be willing? They didn't just tell people what to do. So I went to talk to him, and he said, "I don't want to be your boss. But I very much want to be your editor."
What is it like to be emerging writer in an age of a thousand cuts? Being an unknown writer is a slog and a labour of love at the best of times but this year, when grants to individual writers are being cut by 70%, the decision to devote yourself to writing a book is both intrepid and wildly optimistic.
While no one was taking the microphone and screaming out "what a time to be alive!" - the mood on opening night of the Emerging writers' festival in Melbourne last week was upbeat.
Sam Cooney, publisher of the Melbourne-based literary journal The Lifted Brow, has watched with a keen eye how things have changed for young Australian writers.
"When you are emerging even small things can make a difference to a practice, a craft and a career," he says. "There's been less and less institutional support for young writers from publishers. Not that long ago a writer would be identified by a publishing house or editor at an event or a reading."
A relationship between the writer and the publisher would then unfold. The publisher would work with the writers for many years, producing three, maybe four books before the writer really hit his or her stride - and made some money or started winning awards.
20 June 2016
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.
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.