Whether you're an emerging author or one that is well-established, it can be challenging to figure out what belongs on your website's homepage and what to say about yourself on the front door to your online presence.
Links of the week October 2 2017 (40)
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:
9 October 2017
Knowing how to craft your homepage starts with knowledge of two things:
• clarity about your readership or audience-or who you're addressing
• a focused and clear message you want to get across to that audiencIf you don't know your readership that well or your message is fuzzy, that will likely be reflected on your homepage. Since visitors to your site may not linger for more than 7 seconds at your site, it's important to focus on what visitors should remember about you (or your work) after they leave. This requires careful consideration of your homepage copy and accompanying visuals; together, they should convey the most important aspects of your work (or your "brand", if you want to think of it that way-but you don't have to).
This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review ran a front-page article titled "In the Mood for Love." It was a round-up of romance novels publishing this autumn, written by Robert Gottlieb. Gottlieb is best known as an editor, having led at Simon & Schuster, Knopf, and the New Yorker, and worked with authors including Michael Crichton and Toni Morrison.
Gottlieb claims that in the hundreds of romance novels due to be published over the next few months, there are only two categories: Regency, and "contemporary-young-woman-finding-her-way stories." Anyone who bothers to take one look at a romance department in a bookstore would see this is not the case; there are westerns, paranormal, LGBTQ, military, Amish, erotica, romantic suspense - the list goes on.
In a year dominated by divisive, nationalist politics, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the 2017 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. by emphasizing the importance of books and culture. Speaking at the fair's opening ceremony, the two leaders spoke of forging a new Europe that is united-not divided-by culture and mulitlingualism.
The fair offered the two leaders a chance to stand together and outline their vision for a stronger, united Europe bound together by culture in the wake of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of nationalist movements throughout Europe, including in France, and Germany-where the far right wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party finished third in recent elections, and will have seats in the new government.
"Without culture," Macron said, "there is no Europe."
There's a photograph on the jacket of Ocean Vuong's debut poetry collection of a small boy sitting on a wooden bench. Encircled by the arms of two women in summery cottons, he gazes steadily at the camera.
The elegance is deceptive: it was taken when the family were living in poverty in a refugee camp in the Philippines, en route for the US, after being expelled from Vietnam. Vuong, the only child in the three-generation exodus, was two years old. A fellow refugee was bartering photographs for food. "That picture cost my family three tins of rice, according to my mother," he says. "Each of us gave up our ration just to be seen."
His debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, is the work of a man with history on his back, even if he has had to imagine some of it into being again. He brings a mythmaker's insistence on being seen and heard to subjects ranging from the death of Telemachus's father, from Homeric myth, to the fall of Saigon and common-or-garden masturbation. Already festooned with awards when it arrived in the UK, the book went on to gobble up the Forward prize for best first collection.
Forget page-turners and celebrity memoirs, Brits have rekindled their love of verse.
More than a million poetry books were sold in the last year, the highest number on record, as the popularity of social media sensations such as Rupi Kaur continues to reinvigorate the art form. Sales are up 13%, to £10.5m, according to figures from Nielsen Book Research.
Kaur, whose latest book hit shelves this week, is at the heart of the boom. Her debut anthology, Milk and Honey, broke all records when it was released in 2016, and this year it has sold more copies than the rest of the top 10 poets combined. Kaur is even outselling heavyweight fiction writers such as Ian McEwan and Anne Tyler.
When it came to writing poetry, she looked at ways to form simple, easy-to-understand verses, often so short you can read them in one breath. She's known for tackling hard subjects such as alcoholism head-on, but a lot of her work deals with love and relationships.
"I don't want someone to read my poetry and think: what does that mean? So every time I'm writing, I'm thinking: OK, what word can I take out? How do I make this more direct? What's too technical?"
Kazuo Ishiguro's literary agency has revealed the "calls have been coming in thick and fast" following the author's Nobel Prize win, with more than 20 renewal deals flooding in and new deals in countries where the author has never previously been published.
The British writer, published by Faber in the UK, won the £832,000 prize for an outstanding contribution in literature on Thursday (5th October) which led to "mass euphoria" in the Rogers, Coleridge and White office in London.
Ishiguro's agent and RCW m.d. Peter Straus said there had been multiple renewal deals (following the lapse of the original contracts) and deals in new territories including Armenia and what is believed to be the first deal administered by the agency has ever administered for Mongolian rights. Straus told The Bookseller: "He was very well published everywhere already [in more than 50 countries] before the Nobel but of course there is a lot of great activity surrounding this announcement."
Tristan Kendrick, the agency's foreign rights agent, said: "Since the win, we've had renewal offers in more than 20 territories from all over the world. We expect them all to be concluded by the end of Frankfurt, we are trying to move as quickly as we can. Some deals may have closed by the end of this phone call." He revealed that "calls are coming thick and fast" for the author with some territories publishing his whole backlist. "I'd say the majority of the ongoing renewal deals are for whatever backlist is still available. As much of Ish's backlist is still in print in many territories it is maybe a case of filling gaps," he said.
African literature is the object of immense international interest across both academic and popular registers. Far from the field's earlier, post-colonial association with marginality, a handful of star "Afropolitan" names are at the forefront of global trade publishing.
Books like Chimamanda Adichie's "Americanah" and "Half of a Yellow Sun", Teju Cole's "Open City", Taiye Selasi's "Ghana Must Go" and Yaa Gyasi's "Homegoing" have confounded neat divisions between Western and African literary traditions. The Cameroonian novelist Imbolo Mbue captured a million-dollar contract for her first book, "Behold the Dreamers". That's even before it joined the Oprah's Book Club pantheon this year.
In 2001, when Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider nailed his first mission in Stormbreaker, young readers took an immediate liking to this intrepid, high-tech gadget-wielding, teenage spy. And they clearly wanted to see more of him. Horowitz penned eight subsequent Alex Rider adventures in quick succession before announcing-unequivocally-that 2011's Scorpia Rising would be his last Alex Rider novel. But Alex's many fans-the series has sold 19 million copies worldwide-were pleased to learn that Horowitz had a change of heart. In keeping with its title, he decided to revisit Alex Rider in Never Say Die, which Philomel will publish next week with an announced first printing of 200,000 copies. After revealing his new book's cover this past spring, PW called on Horowitz to ask about Alex's return appearance.
I always missed Alex. He'd been a huge part of my life for 15 years, and he'd also made my name! It's true that I focused on writing adult novels for a while, but every time I gave a talk, there would be kids in the audience asking about Alex. Then my publishers asked me to look at some short stories I'd written, some about Alex, with the idea of publishing them in a collection. I read them. I rewrote them. Then I added some new stories to them. Suddenly, I realized how much I had missed Alex, and knew I had to bring him back.
2 October 2017
My second novel, Shining Sea, came out in paperback last month. In the year between its hardcover and paperback releases, I did the required work of promoting the novel, wrote a number of short and long-form nonfiction articles and op-eds, and began researching and making notes for a new novel.
I also read like a coyote loose among sheep. I devoured recent releases, explored and fell in love with a whole new genre, graphic novels-after cramming into a taxi with a group of riotous graphic novelists at the Miami Book Fair, and consumed huge chunks out of my to-be-read pile. I re-read every book I own by Willa Cather, which is pretty much every book by Willa Cather. Because I was traveling to Uganda, I consumed any work of fiction or creative nonfiction related to Uganda that I could get my hands on. I strolled into bookstores and strode back out with books recommended by a bookseller.
The irony of not being able to do the pastime I love, not even wanting to do it, because of the work I love, when they are so closely related, isn't lost on me. I do listen to people talk about books that are new and sound interesting and feel a twinge of yearning. But I'm not a critic and don't need to read any book at any given time. I keep a list of all those want-to-read books for when I'm ready to investigate them. It's a price, but not an enormous one to pay for the privilege of being a novelist.
With NaNoWriMo around the corner, many authors are gearing up to weave worlds, characters, and stories into novels with their words. But... how many words does a novel make? And when it comes to creating art, just how important is it to stick to the rules - such as standard word counts?
Well, if your goal is to publish and sell your novel, those rules are pretty darn important. As with many publishing standards, word count guidelines exist for a number of reasons - including marketing and sales - but also to help create stories that are free from plot or pacing issues that can exhaust readers. You wouldn't be reading this article right now if a quick scroll down showed an apparent 10,000 words, would you?
Covers sell books. But in the case of Hillary Clinton's memoir What Happened, you can't help thinking that the book's sales in the UK are despite the jacket treatment, not because of it. Whereas the US jacket oozes the gravitas you expect from the woman who stood up to Donald Trump, the UK jacket has all the power of a shrugged "meh".
One jacket designer, Stuart Bache, says the gulf between British and US design has narrowed in recent years, especially in literary fiction. Traditionally, US design tended towards literal interpretation, driven, Bache believes, by the complexity of the US market: the image that motivates readers in southern California to pick up a copy of a book is likely to be different to what appeals to readers in South Carolina. As a result, US jackets have tended to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that does not make for good design.
Mills & Boon (M&B) has revealed a "huge" relaunch lined up for January, the first facelift for the brand in a decade. The rebrand features a sleeker logo and revamped covers, refreshed point-of-sale material, a beefed-up book club and the brand's first engagement with the blogging community. There will also be a raft of commercial partnerships and retail promotions for the romance imprint which will go live on 1st January.
HC "tested the elasticity" of these readers and whether they would stay with M&B through various changes, and judged that the group "is so loyal that these readers will". Rose said: "One of the researchers went into a shop and said, ‘No one's buying Mills & Boon'. And the manager said, ‘You're here on the wrong day. Everyone comes on the day they come out, they come in knowing what they want.' It's like magazine publishing in a way: the titles are on the shelves for a month and then they're off. So the researcher went back the following Thursday and said, ‘I was nearly knocked down by all these people'."
In bestselling author Harlan Coben's latest novel, Don't Let Go, New Jersey cop Nap Dumas is shocked to learn that fingerprints at the scene of a crime-the shooting death of a fellow cop and high school classmate during a traffic stop-belong to Maura Wells, Nap's high school sweetheart, who disappeared 15 years earlier. Coben, author of dozens of novels, shares his five writing tips.
1. You can always fix bad pages. You can't fix no pages. So write. Just write. Try to turn off that voice of doom that paralyzes you.
I first came across Philip Larkin's poems as a schoolboy in the late nineteen-sixties, when I began taking English "A" level and my teacher Peter Way asked our class to talk about Larkin's poems "Wires" and "At Grass." At the time, I had no great interest in poems, but I was interested in these two partly because (as a country boy) I thought that they both had a mistake in them. "Wires" says that the electric current running through cattle-fencing has a "muscle-shredding violence" (if this were true, the countryside would be strewn with the bodies of incapacitated cows and farmworkers); and in the evening of "At Grass" a "groom's boy" comes to collect a horse from a field, carrying "bridles" rather than a much more probable halter.
As soon as I arrived in Hull, my new colleagues in the English department told me that I should now consider myself one of the more deceived. Larkin really was a hermit. He disliked virtually everyone who worked for the university, and especially those in my department, because he thought we talked nonsense about poetry (by nonsense, he meant structuralism). And they weren't exaggerating. For the first few months of my first term, despite a certain amount of time spent lingering in his library, or dillydallying along the "Great White Way," which ran outside his office windows, he remained as elusive as the yeti.
Led by David Almond and Anthony McGowan, writers have spoken out against stress on famous names in works chosen for 2018 event
Top children's authors including David Almond and Anthony McGowan have criticised a celebrity-heavy lineup of titles for next year's World Book Day, describing the choice of books by famous names including Julian Clary and Clare Balding as patronising and demeaning.
Almond, who wrote the novel Island for this year's event, took to Facebook this weekend to ask "how it is that books by a clutch of celebrities could possibly be better than those by some of the wonderful children's authors at work today? ... I guess some folk might say I'm just being elitist or something if I start going on about the choices for next year, if I allow myself to think that the nation's children are being short-changed by this and that the nation's authors and illustrators are being scorned, if I wonder whether the choices show a lack of true seriousness and a narrow understanding of the importance of children's literary culture ... But what the hell. That's what I wonder, that's what I think."
Romance is a part of life, and so it should also play some part in our novels-if we intend for our characters to mirror real life. Even if you don't write in the romance genre, don't be too quick to dismiss adding the element of romance to your story.
However, just slapping a few romantic moments into a scene or developing a romantic interest to add flavor may not help your story. In fact, it could even sabotage it.
Depending on your genre and plot, your story structure is going to vary. As will the role romance plays in your novel. And this is important to understand.
Most novels have one engine that drives the story. There is one primary focus or plot the protagonist is involved with. The hero is chasing a visible goal, which is reached or not at the climax of the book. That main goal is not centered on a romantic relationship developing.
Romance, then, is a component of such a story. If you are writing in any genre other than romance, it's important to understand the purpose romance can serve in a story.
The English author Kazuo Ishiguro has been named winner of the 2017 Nobel prize in literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for his "novels of great emotional force", which it said had "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
With names including Margaret Atwood, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and Haruki Murakami leading the odds at the bookmakers, Ishiguro was a surprise choice. But his blue-chip literary credentials return the award to more familiar territory after last year's controversial selection of the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. The author of novels including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro's writing, said the Academy, is "marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place".