LAST March, Amazon quietly changed the way it sells books. An obscure and seemingly harmless modification to its website has opened the door for some third-party sellers to deceive Amazon's customers by selling books as "new" that may not come straight from a publisher or its wholesaler, thus depriving authors of royalties they should have earned from the sale of a new book.
Links of the week October 9 2017 (41)
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:
16 October 2017
So when you, the customer, hit that main buy button, you should always expect to get a brand-new book, right?
Not necessarily.
To explain why, we have to take a journey into the underbelly of the book market. Have you ever asked yourself, when shopping for books on Amazon, how third-party sellers can be offering dozens of "new" books at prices way below even the discounted Amazon price? The reason is that such books could have been bought in bulk by a handful of giant online third-party sellers to be re-sold through Amazon as "new" books, when some are not.
In one of my first meetings with Philip Pullman, he led me to the crenelated tower of Exeter College, in Oxford, and pointed out the room he lived in as a student. More than 50 feet up from the ground was a tiny attic window. To visit friends living in rooms on the adjacent staircase - accessible only at ground level - Pullman, a tall, sturdy man with a head like a boulder, would clamber out his window, shimmy along a gutter and propel himself through a window into a bathroom...
Lyra Silvertongue, Lyra Belacqua, but really just Lyra: one of those characters in literature - Pip, Emma, Lolita - who is on first-name terms with her public. Pullman has written 35 books, mostly for children and young adults, but Lyra stands foremost among his protagonists, a plucky scamp of mysterious origins who lives among Oxford academics and is accompanied through life, like almost everyone in the universe of "His Dark Materials," by her dæmon, a shape-shifting animal self.
Under US copyright law, creators who have signed away their copyrights for the "full duration of copyright" can still get their rights back from publishers under something called the "Termination of Transfer," which is a hellishly complex and technical copyright provision that is almost never used, since it requires that creators wait decades and then successfully navigate all that complexity (even knowing how many years you have to wait is complicated!).
Whatever they choose to do, it is important that creators know this law exists, and that they feel empowered to take advantage of it. Authors Alliance and Creative Commons developed this tool to raise awareness of the law and its importance to creators who want to share their works widely.
It's commonplace for literary journals to interview well-known writers and, at some point, to ask them about their process, what their days look like.
When I was a younger woman, back in the days when I longed to call myself a "writer," but knew that I had not yet established any kind of writerly authority to claim the mantle, I remember reading an interview with Graham Greene. He explained how he was able to write one novel per year: he told his interlocutor that he held himself to a standard of 500 words per day-no more, no less-and that, in the course of a year, that would produce a novel.
If someone were to ask me about my writing process, it would not bear any resemblance to Graham Greene's. I am up most days between 4 and 5 am. I consider those wee hours to be my time for reading the news, surfing the internet, looking for new things to write about. Depending on how much time is already scheduled during my day, I may begin working on my first freelance article by 5 am, with the goal being that I will have the standard 800-1200 words for most internet content written, edited, and emailed to an editor by 9 am.
It's no understatement that digital mediums have taken over every aspect of our lives. We check what our friends are doing on the glowing screens in our hands, read books on dedicated e-readers, and communicate with customers and clients primarily through email. Yet for all the benefits digital mediums have provided us, there has been a growing body of evidence over the past several years that the brain prefers analog mediums.
But it's not just recording our thoughts on an analog medium that appears to be better for us. Absorbing information from analog mediums now appear to be better for memory retention, and thus, productivity. In a study conducted by Anne Mangen, PhD, a professor at the Reading Center at the University of Stavanger, Norway, the researcher gave participants the same 28-page mystery story to read either on an Amazon Kindle or in print format. After the participants read the story, they were asked a number of questions about the text.
For new writers, throwing in a few combat scenes can seem like an easy way to add some excitement to a novel, but the reality is that violence can be incredibly difficult to pull off effectively.
There are many pitfalls writers will fall into when writing about violence-I want to talk about what they are and how you can avoid them. In their places, I've offered up two main alternative methods that I think work for ninety percent of combat scenes.
Violence: The Detailed Method
If you're writing a fight or battle scene in genre fiction, detailed description will be the way to go nine times out of ten. This is because a fight scene of any scale and duration is likely to involve two or more people tied up in an incredibly fast-paced and complex process. Detailed description serves to guide the reader through the confusion and helps your readers suspend their disbelief.
The upstairs room of an indie bookstore. A book launch for a local author. Crisps and wine are being handed out, a buzz is in the air, congratulations are showered upon the young writer. I know - because I worked there at the launch of Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.
When Catton won the 2013 Man Booker prize, people in the bookstore were crying. Looking back on that day, the store's manager said: "I don't watch rugby, but I did think, maybe this is what it's like when we win the World Cup?"
The 2013 Booker put New Zealand literature on the map internationally, but perhaps more importantly, it revitalised its relevance for locals. This is what the Booker can do, used to do, and should still be doing for global English literature.
And it's what this year's shortlist - an even split between US and UK authors - is not doing. This doesn't come as a surprise - it's the inevitable result of the rule change made in 2014, opening up the prize to American authors. There were criticisms at the time that this would "Americanise the prize". Now those fears have been realised. Two of the Americans on this year's list, Paul Auster and George Saunders, are extremely well established. I'm pleased for Emily Fridlund, an American debut novelist, and there are two British writers: the previously shortlisted Ali Smith and another debut author, Fiona Mozley.
Escapism and connection-this is what buyers 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. are betting readers want. Descending on Germany against the backdrop of a tumultuous and disheartening news cycle, the tastemakers in the publishing industry spent big on a handful of women's fiction titles, and a bunch of memoirs. While the novels will offer a classic dose of escapism, the memoirs, some insiders mused, can deliver something readers may crave even more in these divisive times: a sense of connection with other people.
The title that some insiders said spoke most profoundly to what they believe readers want right now, namely stories that inspire hope, was Seager's The Smallest LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/ in the Universe, which Rachel Klayman at Crown bought in a North American rights acquisition. An MIT professor and expert on exoplanets-her work focuses on proving the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy-Seager lost her husband to cancer, suddenly, just before turning 40. Struggling as a widow and newly-minted single mother to two young children, she found salvation in a local widows support group. Mollie Glick at Creative Artists said the book explores the notion that "our understanding of the cosmos and our understanding of love and loss are twin quests."
9 October 2017
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.
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.