In a lawsuit filed September 14, a former Swarthmore College baseball player named Charles Green accused Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding, of stealing significant plot points from Green's unpublished autobiographical novel, Bucky's 9th. "The two baseball novels bear a substantial similarity that could occur only as a result of Harbach's access to a version (or versions) of Bucky's and his large-scale misappropriation of Green's creative efforts," the suit claims. Among the "uncanny" parallels cited: Both are baseball stories. Both concern, specifically, the baseball teams of Division III liberal arts colleges. Both involve a baseball prodigy coming of age, and incorporate a "Recruiter-Mentor Plot" and an "Illicit-Romance Plot." Both feature an estrangement between a father and his adult child. Also, both have a "climactic beaning scene."
Links of the week September 18 2017 (38)
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:
25 September 2017
J.K. Rowling has been accused of idea theft, and vice versa, so many times that there's a whole Wikipedia page for "legal disputes over the Harry Potter series." The earliest was American writer Nancy Kathleen Stouffer, who sued Rowling for infringement in 1999, when only three of the books had been published (although it was already clear that the series was turning a handsome profit). Stouffer claimed that she'd invented the word "muggle" in her vanity-press book The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, and that another of her works featured a character named Larry Potter.
In early June, 1944, tens of thousands of American troops prepared to storm the beaches of Normandy, France. As they lined up to board the invasion barges, each was issued something less practical than a weapon, but equally precious: a slim, postcard-sized, softcover book.
These were Armed Services Editions, or ASEs-paperbacks specifically designed to fit in a soldier's pockets and travel with them wherever they went. Between 1943 and 1947, the United States military sent 123 million copies of over 1,000 titles to troops serving overseas. These books improved soldiers' lives, offering them entertainment and comfort during long deployments. By the time the war ended, they'd also transformed the publishing industry, turning the cheap, lowly paperback into an all-American symbol of democracy and practicality.
As the bookseller Michael Hackenberg writes in an essay for the Library of Congress
The national library of the United States, which offers a massive amount of information easily available, including details about copyright registration. http://lcweb.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html
, small books and paperbacks have arisen many times over the course of publishing history, usually in response to some particular need. In 1501, Venice's Aldine Press began printing octavo-sized editions of Latin and Greek classics for aspiring scholars on the go. (The books were designed to be "held in the hand and learned by heart - by everyone," their publisher, Aldus Manutius, later wrote.)
Inkitt, which bills itself as "the world's first reader-powered book publisher," has raised $3.9 million in pre-series A funding, in a round led by Redalpine, with Frontline Ventures, Speedinvest and a number of private investors also participating. The Berlin-based startup is part writing and reading community, and part publishing house, with one aspect feeding the other.
The Inkitt online community consists of a forum to post writing work in-progress and get feedback, and to solicit support for things like editing and plot development. However, a major focus - and key to the startup's unique publishing model - is the beta readers section. Here Inkitt members are encouraged to post full manuscripts to be read by the app's over a million readers. This is a way to get reader reviews and further feedback, but can also lead to a publishing deal with Inkitt itself if the reader engagement data the company collects points to a potential best-seller.
One cold March, just a few years ago, I rented a flawlessly clean silver car and drove up to Maine from my home in Brooklyn. I'd made it just north of Boston when the trees started to press in close, and as the network of pavement thinned down to I-95, I began hours of sitting in the dark, following that one road ever north. I held my left hand steady on the wheel at six o'clock, sifted through pop songs and ad spots with my right. I missed my early twenties, when I still had my own car and still smoked, moodily exhaling into the night on my semiannual trips up and down the East Coast, from college to home and back again.
The fear waits for me still, always worse when it is dark or cold. But it's the half hour of transition from day to night that's hardest, watching the light seep from the landscape, taking with it its illusion of safety. On the rare days when I'm here in winter, when dusk starts sliding over this valley at four o'clock or even earlier, I have to fight against panic. I turn away from the windows, stir my aunt's soup, sit with my silent uncle watching race cars hypnotically circle an endless oval track. Once it is truly dark out, I feel a bit better: there may be hours of nervousness to get through, but now I'm in them. I've been here before, and no matter how bad things get, some part of me always remembers that I'll come out the other side.
Hachette Children's Group's c.e.o Hilary Murray Hill has called on publishers to "act as agents of social change more than ever before".
As part of her keynote speech for The Bookseller Children's Conference at London's Milton Court on Tuesday (26th September), Murray Hill shared concerns over "overuse of social media and time online" and how the current generation of young children is "absolutely beset by anxiety".
In her speech titled ‘Wider than vision: how should we think about the readers of tomorrow?' Murray Hill outlined potential issues arising from "early sexualisation" of young people. She also said publishers had to be aware that attitudes towards gender identification among children was "changing at an exponential rate".
She said: "Early sexualisation is already creating attitudes towards long-term commitments and relationships which may mean a more fractured society and home life for children of the future. Attitudes towards gender identification are also changing at an exponential rate - and we are only just starting to see the reality of this playing out. And how much will we be driven by boys being boys and girls being girls? It's a big focus for us right now."
In 2016, an old scam began circulating on Facebook about a man who needed to collect money to rescue his cousin, a Nigerian astronaut, from space. One Dr. Bakare Tunde explained that he needed to raise $3 million to save the astronaut from a secret Soviet-era space station where he was trapped. The email seemed preposterous-the astronaut would have been stuck on the space station for some 25 years-but the subject of the scam wasn't entirely far fetched. Nigeria does operate a space program that is managed by the National Space Research and Development Agency, which the scammer accurately described. And in 2016 Nigeria announced it really would be sending a manned mission to the moon.
I enjoy a swiftly paced adventure story which draws my eyes along the page, even if I know that in the frenetic pacing something is being lost-believable characters usually, or plot holes that are glossed over with a colossal explosion. And as a Nigerian-American, I've longed to write an adventure story set in West Africa. But we've come a long way since the days of Allan Quartermain slashing through jungles wearing a pith helmet, and it's been nearly 40 years since the release of Michael Crichton's novel Congo. In setting out to write a novel, my challenge was to craft an adventure story that embraced Africa in its 21st-century complexity, instead of its fabled exoticism.
The Hobbit, that retelling by Mr JRR Tolkien of the adventures of Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End, is celebrating its 80th birthday, albeit with no party of special magnificence nor, perhaps, much talk and excitement in Hobbiton or beyond.
But while the the book is not as venerable as its hero - Bilbo died aged 131, we are told in Lord of the Rings; hobbits live, on average, to the age of 96.8 years according to the wonderful number-crunching site lotrproject.com - it is still an anniversary worth noting.
While we can point to other authors who played a part in creating the genre of heroic fantasy - from the epics such as Homer's Odyssey and the Scandinavian myths, through to Lewis Carroll and Lord Dunsany, to Conan creator Robert E Howard and Fritz Leiber, whose fantasy duo Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser debuted in 1939, two years after The Hobbit - the themes and tropes laid down by Tolkien continue to shape fantasy to this day. A quest. An artefact of power. An unlikely or unwilling hero. Fantastical races of elves and dwarves, orcs and goblins. Dragons. Monstrous spiders. The shadow of profound evil falling across a pastoral, peaceful, medieval world. Fantasy may have evolved a lot since Tolkien's day, but these building blocks can still be seen in most contemporary novels in the genre.
Dear Editor:
What should I do when I disagree with my editor? It seems to be happening more and more.
-Adam
The primary job of an editor is to bring out the best in the manuscript she is working on: to make it read like the best of your work, not hers. If you feel that your editor is not respecting your voice, doesn't really understand your subject matter, or is just plain wrong, then tell her.
18 September 2017
Whenever I am speaking at a public event or on the radio, one of the questions I inevitably get is: "What will be the next big discovery?" My answer is always the same: "If I knew, I would be doing it."
What I didn't expect was the internet. Of all the technological developments that have changed the way modern society functions, perhaps none has presented such a disruptive challenge to society. It has changed everything about how we communicate with one another, shop, get entertainment, and receive our news - and of course the way science is carried out, to name just a few examples. Yet nowhere in mainstream science fiction was the internet imagined.
An English teacher once asked me, "Are you a writer or an editor?" This isn't an unusual question, it seems: plenty of writers (and readers) have come up against it, even if it all just boils down to how many hours they have in the day. But some magical people, of course, manage to do it all: write incredible books and also edit them. The premier example of this is of course Toni Morrison, whose impressive list would be much more discussed if she wasn't also one of the most important novelists of the century in her own right. But still: an editor's influence can be major, and they are not always well-appreciated for it.
Who says you can't be an acclaimed novelist and a beloved editor at the same time? According to Max Porter, who joined Granta & Portobello Books in 2012, and whose wonderful novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers was published in 2015, that's not even all: the editor's role, he says, is to be "part proofreader, part therapist, part in-house champion and, increasingly, there to put a marketisation on the written word."
Multi-million-pound selling writer Milly Johnson has hit out after finding fraudulent books that she did not write being sold on Amazon under her name.
Commercial women's fiction writer Johnson, published by Simon & Schuster, said she felt "defiled" upon discovering the six titles on Amazon listed under her name while she was checking her rankings on the e-commerce site.
The titles, which have a similar style of book jacket to Johnson's work and feature some of the same character names, are YA short stories and are "dire, unedited, ungrammatical tripe" according to Johnson.
"I noticed a title that was not mine but had my name on it called Resisting Him," Johnson said. "I found six e-book titles on Amazon - three of which looked stupidly similar to mine. I was so shocked."
Complaining about the Man Booker Prize is an important British tradition. Since its inception-as simply the Booker Prize, in 1969-it has been criticized for its imperialist overtones, its unwillingness to take risks, and, above all, its corrupt insularity. Though any writer from the Commonwealth was eligible, the winner was determined by a small and incestuous circle of London elites. In 2001, the comic novelist A.L. Kennedy described the Booker as being decided by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is."
With two debut novelists on the short list, the Booker is clinging to its reputation for breaking out authors and for rewarding the not-yet-famous. But only barely. Four years after first announcing the decision to open the prize to Americans, the Booker is virtually indistinguishable from its competitors. It is exactly what many feared it would become: corporate and daft.
March, 2015. I am sitting in the National Library of Ireland, scrolling through microform of an 1820s County Kerry newspaper. My eyes ache-this is the fourth day I have spent in front of the reader. As I wind through the pages of miniscule print, zooming in on articles and reading them only to discover their irrelevance, I feel familiar threads of anxiety knot in the depths of my stomach.
Next to me, carefully pasted in the front of my notebook, is an article reported from the 1826 Tralee assizes by the Morning Post. It describes the trial of "Ann Roche, an old woman of very advanced age" indicted for a serious crime "committed under the delusion of the grossest superstition." The woman claimed she had been trying to "put the fairy out" of a child she described as "fairy struck."
I found this article in 2011, and have spent the last four years plagued by questions of who Ann Roche was and whether she believed her own defense. Did she truly accept the existence (and malice) of the fairies? What had she done and why? I have told my publishers I am writing a novel about her. I have committed myself to her story, and am writing under deadline.
How do poets make money? The answer, a lot of the time, is: not through poetry. When I first attempted to live full-time from my words, I expected to make money in one of three ways: poetry on the page (through pamphlets and collections), poetry for the people (through commissions), and poetry in person (via poetry readings and spoken word gigs). Three years into my freelance career, my perception of how to make money as a poet has changed somewhat. These days, I understand that while I tend to call myself a poet first and foremost, of all the work I do to make a living, I probably spend the least amount of time actually sitting down to write poems. I'm a poet who doesn't write a lot of poetry, a writer who doesn't spend most of her time writing.
As a rule, most poets deemed ‘spoken word artists' tend to self-publish...
Of the many jobs I do, the one thing they all have in common is that they are about my writing more than they are about me. I'm lucky enough to be doing well enough from my writing to stay on this path. Making a living from poetry has never been easy, or simple. But the fact that so many poets are managing to survive from their words shows that today, it's perhaps more possible to do so than it has ever been.
A few years ago I wrote an article for the Guardian on ageism in the literary world, about the predilection of publications like Granta, the New Yorker and Buzzfeed for authors under the age of 40. The problem hasn't gone away and on Tuesday I wrote an open letter to the Royal Society of LiteratureThis British site may seem rather formal (stated aim ‘to sustain and encourage all that is perceived as best whether traditional or experimental in English letters, and to strive for a Catholic appreciation of literature’), but has a lively series of lectures and discussions involving distinguished authors. Also administers literary prizes. http://www.rslit.org/index1.html, after it called for nominations for 40 new fellows under 40.
Encouraging young writers is laudable. After all, it's increasingly difficult to get started. Publishers' advances are low and getting lower; arts degrees are more expensive than Stem subjects; social security is fiercely tested. Which must mean that those most able to pay for a writing course, or those most able to take time off work to write while still young, are those most likely to have money, security, contacts, confidence. There's a correlation between setting an age bar and encouraging the already privileged.
All writers were young once, and many start writing young, but not all begin their careers as published authors at that point. Leaving aside the fact that some only decide to start writing later in life, many factors affect one's ability to commit to writing seriously. Besides income issues, age bars can lead an organisation into worrying territory. Authors from outside the perceived cultural mainstream who do not already see their voices represented - LGBTQ writers, writers of colour - are sometimes slow to recognise the contribution they can make, or to feel like their voices will be valued.
In 2013, I observed a conversation on Twitter where a publisher said they didn't believe in author websites "for a lot of authors"-that social was a better place for authors to spend time from a marketing perspective.
It bothered me, and I ended up writing a blog post about it, exploring why a publisher might think this-rightly or wrongly.
Since then, I've taught countless conference sessions and webinars about author platform development, content strategy, marketing and promotion, and long-term best business practices. Hands down, the No. 1 thing I'm questioned about is social media-by the unpublished writers, advanced writers, and well-established career authors. I don't mind fielding such questions, but I find social media the most difficult topic to teach effectively, and I'll have a separate post about that tomorrow.
On the flip side, I rarely field questions about author websites, aside from technical ones about what service to use or other fiddly details related to domains, hosting, and WordPress sites. I believe this happens for a few reasons: Website design and development is a more technical area, plus few authors actively engage on their site with readers. It can be something of a "set it and forget it" thing. Who's really looking at an author website that much anyway, especially one without a blog or active updates?