Publishing reporters doing wrap up stories occasionally call me for impressions. From those conversations I have gleaned that the prevailing impression of where the book business is now is of "stability". The consensus about adult trade is that ebook sales have stalled or perhaps even receded, that print is strong, and that the big publishers have beaten back the threat of disruption from indies that a few short years ago seemed like a massive threat.
Links of the week December 11 2017 (50)
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:
18 December 2017
But while that picture has accurate aspects, it is really incomplete. The world of commercial publishing - even factoring in the growth in juvie books and audio - is shrinking more slowly than it was a few years ago, but it is still shrinking. One "tell" is that Amazon doesn't believe ebook sales are reducing, they see them growing. Part of that is that Kindle is taking market share from all the other ebook platforms (except possibly Apple iBooks, at the moment). Part of that is that Kindle has titles nobody else has, as some self-publishing entities just use the dominant platform and skip the rest. Part of that is that Kindle doesn't just sell ebooks; it provides subscription access through Kindle Unlimited that in the aggregate logs a lot of eyeball hours. And almost no big publisher commercial content is included in Kindle Unlimited.
Finally it's official: literary fiction is in crisis, and writers across the land are burning the midnight oil in their garrets, teaching or slogging away in unrelated jobs to keep the fire ablaze in the grate. This Dickensian picture was revealed by Arts Council England today in a report that suggests it may have to shift its funding priorities in order to save a population whose economic and cultural solvency has been chipped away over the years.
So why has it come to this, and how much does it really matter? The first thing to be clear about is that people are not necessarily reading less - print sales of books across fiction, nonfiction and children's titles rose almost 9% in the UK last year, while on Tuesday market analysts Nielsen BookScan will reveal that sales over the all-important Christmas period have risen 20% since
But it's undoubtedly true that in the age of the smartphone and streaming services, books face unprecedented competition for our attention; and that when we do choose a book over a film or social media feed, we are choosing less adventurously. Last year's chart-topper was JK Rowling's (and Jack Thorne's) play script for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Rowling also appeared in 12th, 28th , 64th and 95th place, the latter as her alter ego, crime writer Robert Galbraith - a success due to the combination of branding and familiarity that can keep a bandwagon rolling for years if not decades. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials follow-up, La Belle Sauvage, has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies since October.
Arts Council England has pledged to engage with more bookshops, fund more writers and lobby the government to provide tax relief to independent publishers following a report finding that "the general trend for literary fiction is a negative one".
The work undertaken by digital publisher Canelo over the course of 2016-17, found that sales, prices and advances for literary fiction are all down and the ability of authors to make a living through their writing has been "substantially eroded".
Sarah Crown, director of literature of Arts Council England, told The Bookseller she believes literary fiction is "something that we need to defend".
"Research shows that reading literary fiction has neurological benefits, it transports you across the world and promotes your ability to empathise," she said. "Also considering our place on the international stage, it is so important. We are seen across the world as the home of great literature."
The solution does not just lie with one element of the industry but was a "collective responsibility", Crown said.
International rights sales are one of the loftiest holy grails of self-publishing today. As any seasoned indie author will tell you, you can make your book available in myriad markets through Amazon or Kobo. But selling translation rights is not as easy. Without a local publisher to handle translation, production, distribution, and marketing in a foreign market, it can be extremely hard to generate sales in offshore markets.
How many copies does she need to see an indie author move to reasonably present the content to a foreign publisher? Viotti says she and her team look for sales in the 80,000-to-100,000 range. Essentially, the presence of a trade author's publisher in the home market as proof-of-performance is simply missing in a deal made on an indie title. So the sales numbers have to make up for the seal of approval of another house.
Don't let the wine-soaked book launches, literary awards and glitzy literature festivals fool you. While Indian literary fiction continues to throw up some interesting writers and books, the backbone of the publishing industry in India very much remains non-fiction and commercial fiction. Selling in the tens of thousands (and for big names, lakhs), commercial fiction writers bring in the kind of money that successful literary novelists can only dream of. Mythological stories (Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik) and romance (Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta, and Preeti Shenoy, among others) still rule the roost. For publishing houses, holding on to these bestselling authors is key for their financial health. And for publishers that manage to convince authors to switch over to them, it's a cause for celebration.
What themes are popular? Is there a new emerging trend or are romance and mythology still the clear leaders?
While romance and mythology dominate the market, we now receive more manuscripts that involve plots that readers can relate to, those that reflect the current climate - political thrillers, gruesome crime, nuanced relationship novels, stories around social media.
Although you might expect to see "short story" in a sentence topped and tailed with "is the" and "dead?", in the past few days a New Yorker short story written by the previously unknown Kristen Roupenian has gone viral.
The story of Margot and Robert, who meet at the independent cinema where Margot worked and gradually build a connection, has resonated with many readers - most of them women - to the point that it is now being held up as the perfect example of the reality of 21st century dating. Margot and Robert's bond is constructed primarily over text messages, in which they share jokes and emojis and an imaginary correspondence on behalf of their cats, but it becomes clear both are talking to a version of the other that doesn't really exist.
Despite the criticism, why is Cat Person so popular? It's nothing to do with the experience it reflects, but the skill in the writing. Vanity Fair journalist Nancy Jo Sales tweeted: "Basically anyone who's ever used a dating app could write Cat Person, just maybe not as well." And she's right; the fact that Roupenian is able to make it feel so personal, so immediate, so like a true experience, speaks to her consummate skill, not some channelling of the collective subconscious.
The Man Booker winner, the diary of a junior doctor and the secret lives of cows ... Which books made their publishers proud - and which ones made them envious?
Thomas Penn
Editorial director, Penguin
The book that made my year: It feels strange to talk about John Berger in the past tense. His writing gets to the heart of the human condition, and Confabulations, his last work, is a characteristic bear hug of a book: warm, vital, conspiratorial and full of hope. The cosmologist Max Tegmark is an astonishing thinker. In the face of vast leaps in the development of artificial intelligence, his Life 3.0 is a call for people and governments alike to think hard about what kind of future we want to create.
Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall
Familiar Stranger by Stuart HallOur book that deserved to do better: Familiar Stranger, the acclaimed memoir by the pioneering, hugely influential cultural theorist Stuart Hall, is a powerful depiction of the end of empire and of the entanglements of race and class. Hopefully, paperback publication next year will see it find the wider readership it deserves.
I wish I'd published: Miranda Kaufmann's preconception-confounding Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld). Deeply researched, vividly told, it places people of African origin at the heart of a pre-colonial, pre-imperial, pre-modern England. Their presence, says Kaufmann, "was common knowledge at the time, and it needs to become common knowledge again".
11 December 2017
We're an odd lot, novelists. Obsessive. Why else does someone launch a project that consumes so much time and holds out such a wavering promise of reward? I wrote my first three novels in deep night-the only time I had-and I used to put things away (in a dish bucket, set against the kitchen wall) in a tired heave of sadness, as if I might never pick them up again, as if my fledgling world might never be real. And of course it never was, because that's a large part of the siren call of the novel: Come hither and create your own world. Put what you know and believe and want into story. Defy the randomness of real life; make meaning. This is a long-haul project and it is so much a part of who you are, you can't imagine not doing it, not even if it takes years.
My advice is short and simple.
You should feel driven by a story you want to tell, even if you don't know every nuance of it.
You must be able to live with the ambiguity of the enterprise.
You must have a commitment to a schedule of writing.
A writer who waits for the ideal conditions under which to write will die without putting a word on paper," E.B. White said in a Paris Review interview. He chose to write in his living room, surrounded by "noise and fuss," adding: "In consequence, the members of my family never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go."
Ernest Hemingway famously wrote standing up at his desk. In an interview with George Plimpton for the Paris Review, he said he started "every morning as soon after first light as possible," when "there is no one to disturb you." He added, "You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next, and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.... It's the wait until the next day that's hard to get through."
William H. Gass, author of Omensetter's Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and Middle C, died on Wednesday at the age of 93 at his home in St. Louis. Gass was a boundary-breaking experimental writer (please read In the Heart of the Heart of the Country) as well as a critic, essayist and philosophy professor. Most importantly, Gass was a reigning master of the art of the sentence, and every one he wrote, he wrote with singular purpose. "If I am anything as a writer, that is what I am: a stylist," he told The Paris Review. "I am not a writer of short stories or novels or essays or whatever. I am a writer, in general. I am interested in how one writes anything."
Be stubborn, even in the face of rejection:
I was turned down for ten years. I couldn't get a thing in print. My writing went nowhere. I guess you have to be persistent. Talent is just one element of the writing business. You also have to have a stubborn nature. That's rarer even than the talent, I think. You have to be grimly determined. I certainly was disappointed; I got upset. But you have to go back to the desk again, to the mailbox once more, and await your next refusal.
-from a 1995 interview with BOMB
Suresh Ariaratnam, literary agent
I set up as an agent in 2007 and about a quarter of my clients are people of colour. Representing them draws on my experiences of growing up as a second-generation immigrant and wanting to ensure that our culture today reflects all of us. In comparison to five years ago, there is greater receptivity, which is a positive, but more can and needs to be done.
Sarah Shaffi, BAME in Publishing co-founder
It would always be nice for change to happen faster. It would be good to have scope for fast-track management programmes for all under-represented groups, and to accelerate this process. We don't want to be waiting 20 years to take a slow, meandering path to the top tier. The problem at the moment is the whole pipeline. People of colour don't see themselves in books and in publishing houses. Publishers say they don't get the stuff coming through from agents, agents say there are few submissions from writers of colour, people of colour don't see people like themselves published - and so the cycle never breaks. We have to be proactive until the gateways are opened up.
To me, the keystone of the phrase "the great American novel" is not the word American but the word great.
Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, "a great American" means a great American man, "a great writer" means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun ("a great American woman," "a great woman writer"). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as "great Americans/writers, both men and women . . ." Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.
The writer who sets out to write the great American novel must see himself as a free citizen of that province, competing on equal ground with other writers, living and dead, for a glittering prize, a unique honor. His career is a contest, a battle, with victory over other men as its goal. (He is unlikely to think much about women as competitors.) Only in this view of the writer as a fully privileged male, a warrior, literature as a tournament, greatness as the defeat of others, can the idea of "the" great American novel exist.
The narrative that important, authoritative female novelists ultimately owe their brilliance to men refuses to die as we close out 2017-and it's ensnared one of our newest literary stars. The plagiarism allegations against The Girls author Emma Cline, leveled by her ex-boyfriend, have set off a bruising legal battle and exposed Cline's personal life. But more than just sordid, they're a public attempt to silence a young and intriguing literary voice.
The assertion that Cline, however subtly, owes her brilliance and accolades to a male hand is recurring in literary circles whenever a woman pens powerfully-like when some critics thought Elena Ferrante was a pen name for a man, even though the Italian novelist's Neapolitan works told a story that felt so subjective, so deeply and unquestionably female. These novels, too, were a portrait of a lifelong female friendship (or frenemy-ship), set against the backdrop of a community that experienced poverty and domestic and mob violence. In Lila and Elena's desires for escape, fury at the world and obsession with each other, many of us who succumbed to Ferrante Fever saw an exhaustive exploration of a female psyche-not necessarily ours, but someone's. That felt new and thrilling.
If you cannot see the Ojibwe in Louise Erdrich, perhaps that's because two centuries of popular culture have depicted this nation's first people as cartoons. You can hear Erdrich's paternity in her Teutonic surname; her mother is half-French and half-Ojibwe, a group known also as Chippewa, who are among the many indigenous people on this continent collectively called Anishinaabe.
In the novel The Antelope Wife, Erdrich writes, "You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you're creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself." I met Erdrich this October in Minneapolis, at a restaurant next door to the small independent bookstore she owns, Birchbark Books. I read the quote from The Antelope Wife back to her and she laughed. "Absolutely," she said. "I was thinking of myself."
"Endless" is an apt word. Erdrich's 16 novels are the heart of an astonishing achievement, one of the most impressive bodies of work by any American writer alive. Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both. It's further confounding when so serious an artist also manages to be entertaining - and Erdrich never fails to offer the reader that particular pleasure.
JK Rowling must be thanking Dumbledore that she has her Cormoran Strike series to fall back on, after a predictive keyboard wrote a new Harry Potter story using her books and it became the funniest thing on the internet.
After the team at Botnik fed the seven Harry Potter novels through their predictive text keyboard, it came up with a chapter from a new Harry Potter story: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. It is worth reading.
"He saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family. Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.
‘If you two can't clump happily, I'm going to get aggressive,' confessed the reasonable Hermione."
It continues in this vein: almost making sense, but mostly just gloriously bonkers, like: "To Harry, Ron was a loud, slow, and soft bird. Harry did not like to think about birds." And my favourite: "They looked at the door, screaming about how closed it was and asking it to be replaced with a small orb. The password was ‘BEEF WOMEN,' Hermione cried."