In the battle for people's attention, Nick Wells writes, we must be where our readers want to be.
Links of the week October 30 2017 (44)
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:
6 November 2017
The day starts with its usual cascade of free offers. I'm on my way to work, my phone pings in a variety of delightful-to-irritating siren calls. I spin through Facebook, Twitter, Google-plus, WeChat, distracted from a long-form newspiece on the New York Times app. Email notifications begin to shake at my mobile: Groupon, Amazon, HMV, Techcrunch, Runner's World, Musicnotes, YouTube, YoSushi! I'm listening to a stream of nostalgic music, suitable for blocking out the sounds of travel all around me, looking forward, tonight, to the release of the new Star Trek Discovery on Netflix, to fill the gap left by The Handmaid's Tale and The Man from the High Castle series. I've just checked my podcast app and downloaded a couple of episodes of an American SF channel for late-night listening as I potter around, before forcing myself to bed.
Free, it's all free. At least it feels like it.
In 2010, I was three years into writing my linked story collection when I took my first trip to Vermont to attend a writers' conference. My workshop was a group of seven that included our instructor, Ellen Lesser. With a couch and cushioned chairs set in an oval everyone talked around me and about my story. I remained "in the box" (that is, not allowed to speak) during my classmates' deliberations and discussions. My only additions were steady nods or pursed lips. Once I was allowed to speak, I thanked them, but bemoaned the fact that this particular piece in my collection was taking a long time. Ellen crossed her legs and met my eyes. She tucked a salt and pepper lock behind her ear and said in a kind and confident tone, "You're acting as if writing should be an efficient process, Jennifer. It's not."
Six years later, I returned from yet another conference where I workshopped another story in this same collection. The instructor in this case, Tayari Jones, recognized the character, having seen a previous iteration of a story a few years earlier. Like Ellen, she gave me the tough love stare and asked, "What's taking so long?" I had no answer.
I recently attended a literary festival, where I met a successful food author whose career had included regular appearances on popular radio shows and television networks across the U.S. Her most recent book, however, failed to get that same level of exposure, so after a falling-out with her publisher, she chose to self-publish her latest as an e-book.
The results were disappointing, she complained. There were no reviews or spots on Good Morning America. No one, it seemed, was even aware that her new book existed. "I put it out there and nothing happened," she said. "I'm a writer, not a marketer. It's not my job to do that work."
She also chose not to hire a publicist. Without one, I wondered, who but she would promote her book?
Her frustration was one that I continue to hear from authors, both commercially and self-published. In a crowded marketplace-according to Bowker, more than 300,000 books were traditionally published in 2016 - the prospect of one's book attracting critical attention can seem dauntingly slim if not downright impossible. As a small press author, I knew this intimately. Neither my publisher nor I had the resources to invest in a professionally run marketing or publicity campaign for The Hunger Saint, released earlier this year. Still, I published the book hoping it would be read.
This reality puts particular pressure on authors. In addition to conceiving a book and meeting a publisher's editorial demands, an author must often request blurbs and solicit reviews while functioning as a social media strategist and events coordinator. Without the backing of a large press, it's difficult to have one's book stocked in bookstores, let alone to be supported on a book tour. So it's not hard to empathize with the food writer's bewilderment.
My family has just moved house, and unpacking the endless boxes of books has reminded me of the sheer amount of fantasy we have. Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar trilogy. Trilogy after trilogy by Robin Hobb. Piles and piles of Steven Erikson. Joe Abercrombie. It's everywhere, there aren't enough shelves for it. We're drowning in triple-deckers.
I was mildly comforted, then, by a new graduate study of film and book trilogies: three-volume novels, it turns out, get better (at least in terms of reviews), while film trilogies get worse (ditto). Perhaps that's why our house isn't slowly collapsing under the weight of DVDs.
The study's author, statistics graduate student Kaylin Walker, took a range of book and film trilogies, and analysed their reviews on Goodreads and IMDb. "Movie trilogies get worse, losing favour with each film, while book trilogies secure higher ratings for book two and maintain them for book three," she writes.
Walker speculates as to why this might be: "It could be that book content is better. Authors have the opportunity to lay out the full arc from the start, resulting in a more cohesive story, while movie trilogies are often constructed quickly following box-office success, resulting in third-act disasters like The Matrix Revolutions or slapdash profit grabs such as Legally Blondes."
Most writers these days are advised to keep their day jobs.
The odds of earning a full-time living from writing alone are just too great to risk going without, and no one wants to worry about how they're going to pay their bills while they're trying to put together their next novel.
But staying employed while trying to manage a writing career is a challenge, to say the least. I've been hearing more and more from Writing and Wellness readers that "the job" is one of the biggest roadblocks when it comes to finding more time to write.
So what can we do to create a better balance in our lives between the work we have to do to keep a roof over our heads and the creative work that calls to our hearts?
It's no surprise that writers are feeling the squeeze. In today's technologically connected world, people in a number of countries, including America, are struggling to maintain some sense of work-life balance, say nothing of finding a way to fit in something more, like writing or another creative endeavor. According to a 2015 report, one in three employees said maintaining a healthy work-life balance had become more difficult over the past five years. Cell phones, emails, and video conferencing makes it much too easy to work after hours, to the point that there doesn't seem to be any real "quitting time" anymore.
Jeff Kinney is the author and illustrator of the beloved and bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, which is now celebrating 10 years in print. The series, which focuses on the hijinks of middle-schooler Greg Heffley and his friends, got its start on Kinney's educational gaming website, FunBrain, and has since spawned 11 sequels, four movie adaptations, and a musical. Book 12, which hit shelves today, finds the Heffley clan on a holiday vacation that is more stressful than relaxing. Kinney, having recently returned from an international tour, is currently embarking on a series of school visits across the U.S., bringing books to underserved communities. We spoke with Kinney about the global success of the series, the appeal of visual storytelling, and finding new aspects of childhood to explore.
It actually gets more and more challenging as I go along! I'm always trying to explore something I haven't explored yet. On the one hand, it's more challenging because you run out of areas to explore. On the other hand, childhood is such a big universe with an almost unlimited amount of topics to cover. I used to draw on my memories. Most of the incidents in the books happened to me in real life, but were put into the fiction blender. Now I have to generate the ideas. One technique I use is called systematic inventive thinking, to help me generate new jokes.
Since my book The Joy Plan came out a few months ago, people have been asking me a lot of questions. And surprisingly, one of the questions I'm asked most often has nothing to do with the content of the book. "How did you do you it?" people want to know, referring to everything from the actual banging out of 80,000 words to getting an agent, publisher, distribution in every Barnes & Noble in the US, making of an audiobook, and worldwide publication in Spanish.
Perhaps you have this same question. Do you dream of writing a book or have an idea so hot it's ready to burn itself through your fingertips? I feel you. I always wanted to write books. In fact, I started churning out stories (and recording my own audiobooks) when I was only five years old. But I didn't have a clue about publishing, and although writing remained a big part of my life and career, I let my dream of writing books stay asleep.
Until I had a story so compelling that I literally couldn't stop my hands from writing it, and the rest is history. I still didn't know much about becoming a published author, and because the industry is always changing, I'm sure I'll always have a lot to learn. But there are a few things I wish I would have known a long time ago. So if you're thinking about writing a book and don't know how to go about it, this is for you.
Telling is a quick, efficient way to relate lots of information to a reader in a short amount of time. It works for writing transitions or other places where you need to move the timeline ahead, or where showing mundane details would bore readers. Despite its usefulness, "show don't tell" is probably the most commonly given advice in writing. So why is it so hated?
Telling stops your story cold. Every sentence spent telling your readers about something is time not spent moving the plot along. Imagine meeting someone for the first time over coffee and the entire conversation is her talking about people you have never met and her deepest darkest life experiences? You'd probably think she needs some serious counseling, but so many of the manuscripts I see begin this way.
30 October 2017
Stop us if you've experienced this before: the clock strikes 8pm and you realize that you really need to pick up your drycleaning. But you're right in the middle of your book! Well, you'll put the book down when you get to the end of this chapter, you reason.
30 minutes afterward, you can't resist taking a quick peek to see where you are in the chapter. That's when you discover: you're only a quarter of the way through.
If you've ever felt this sinking feeling before, you've already got a sense of why chapter word count should be so darn important to writers. Lengthy chapters can make readers want to give up on reading a story.
Chapter breaks aren't blocks of space that the writer just arbitrarily decided to insert. Instead, they: help keep your readers in the story; help reset the story so that there's no information overload. (Imagine watching all of The Lord of the Rings at once!); help you adjust the pacing of the story and create suspense.
With some 60 million monthly users-90% of whom are Millennials and Gen Z-spending more than 15 billion minutes per month reading content on Wattpad, the Canadian-based storytelling platform is a goldmine of information about what's most popular with young readers around the world.
Fanfic is still going strong on Wattpad with more than 4.4 million English-language "fics" posted to Wattpad this year. What changes so quickly is what those fanfics are about. Wattpadders react to real-world events and changes in pop culture as soon they happen. As soon as there's a new Taylor Swift single, a popular show like Riverdale releases its season finale, or even news events like the US election or natural disasters, our readers are inspired to write about the things that are important in their lives.
If you're an indie author, a moment of truth occurs when the proof of your first book arrives in the mail. Until then you've been dealing with word processing files, PDFs, and on-screen displays of layout and typography. Now you finally get to hold a physical copy of your book.
There's no denying that this is an exciting and moving experience. You're on the edge of publication: you're both excited and a little frightened. But wait-don't rush to approve that proof just yet!
Putting a book together is a complicated process that's executed by a team of people over a significant period of time. The point of the proof is to prove that everything - editing, copyediting, layout, design - has been done correctly. Errors invisible on-screen or in printouts (misalignments, wrong fonts, weird spacing, and typographical errors) will suddenly leap off the page. What's the difference between the way a self-published author deals with book proofs and the way a professional handles proofs? Nothing. As an indie author, you should check proofs like your job depends on it. Books last a very long time, and so do the errors that sneak into them.
In a New York apartment offering spectacular views of Central Park, Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, stares out at a brick wall.
The positioning of his writing room is a typically disciplined move from the Birmingham-raised author, who in the 1990s faced up to redundancy from Granada TV by writing a novel.
Twenty-three years on from Killing Floor - the first Jack Reacher story - his thrillers are a publishing phenomenon, dominating the fiction charts, sparking film adaptations starring Tom Cruise, and enthralling millions of fans.
"A novel has a huge number of competitors now - the internet, video games, streaming movies.
"I'm trying to visualise a 25-year-old person somewhere in the world.
"They have a lot of choices and the book has to earn its place. You've got to suck them into that story."
What a difference a decade or so makes. Not so long ago-2004, to be exact-journalist and author David Marr wrote that his main impression of judging that year's Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, was "how very little good writing there is." He noted that Australia's already-small market for literary fiction was shrinking and that Australian outposts of multinational publishers were cutting back on fiction and ignoring unsolicited submissions.
No longer. Over the past couple of years, Australia has hatched a raft of authors whose work is selling around the globe. Hannah Kent, Liane Moriarty, Graeme Simsion, and, most recently, Jane Harper are now global exports. Harper's debut, The Dry (Flatiron), which arrived in U.S. bookstores in January with a Reese Witherspoon movie option and glowing praise attached, has sold in 29 territories and has worldwide sales of more than 420,000 copies. (Sales in the U.S. are more than 26,000 copies to date, according to NPD BookScan.) Moriarty, of course, hit the bestseller lists in the U.S. with Big Little Lies, which has sold more than 565,000 copies in trade paperback since it was released two years ago and more than 260,000 copies this year, helped by the HBO miniseries adaptation.
Someone should write a book about the economics of bookselling. Nothing about Britain's 900 independent bookshops adds up.
I visited half-a-dozen on a book tour last week. Books have never been more beautiful and small shops never more creative in selling these lovely objects. Many indies have sofas or cafes. They all convene book groups (seven a week in the case of Simply Books in Bramhall, Cheshire). They work with schools, open late, host author talks and devote hours to free advice for the nation's army of aspiring poets, publishers and playwrights.
When I last toured indie bookshops two years ago, there was ebullience at the peaking of Kindle sales and popular revulsion at Amazon's tax arrangements. But no conventional economist could grasp how 900 indies are still in business. They are, because so much bookselling is done out of love. That's wonderful, but the rest of us - and publishers producing special editions - must love them back.
Michael Bhaskar warns that the strong performance of the book market over the past few years should not disguise the challenges ahead.
Publishers like nothing more than to complain. Times are always tough and never seem to get better. But, whisper it, that hasn't been true over the past few years. Sure, making money from selling words is never simple, but there has been a remarkable recent run for the traditional trade publishing industry. What happened? What went so right, from an industry on the rocks just five years ago to the flourishing and confident one today? And does that create its own new dynamic - and its own new risk?
Principally this is a story built, as most commercial success stories are, on a recovery in sales. From 2014 onwards, the huge trough that built up in the years after the crash, which saw real term falls in sales across the UK, US and many other territories, started to reverse. If anything was going to deliver a surge in confidence, this was it.