No effort at putting Fitzgerald's novel on screen has ever been entirely successful, certainly not in terms of fidelity to his vision. The medium of film has a major obstacle to overcome if it is to provide a faithful rendering of a first-person novel, such as the The Great Gatsby: in general, film cameras show everything in the third person, not from the vantage point of a particular character but from a stance separated from any consciousness. If our reading experience of a first-person novel is substantially conditioned by the particular perspective of the character telling the story-when is it not?-then recreating that reading experience through the third person of film is impossible.
Links of the week January 8 2018 (02)
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:
15 January 2018
What I'm getting at with all this detail is that there's a basic difference between fiction grounded in the interiority of characters, on the one hand, and film and TV, on the other. Novels do interiority and the drama of the mind infinitely better than TV and film do.
The imminent death of the novel has been announced every year for as long as I can remember. (This doesn't mean that the novel won't die; it means that successive soothsayers haven't been very good at soothsaying.) In 2009, the American novelist Philip Roth predicted that within twenty-five years the readership of novels would amount to a cult. "I think people will always be reading them," he said in an interview, "but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."
Sue Grafton made her wishes clear: Her best-selling mystery series would die when she did. No other writers were to continue the alphabetical saga of detective Kinsey Millhone, who entered the world in 1982's "A is for Alibi" and carried on through 2017's "Y is for Yesterday."
"As far as we in the family are concerned," Grafton's daughter Jamie Clark said, after her mother's death on Dec. 28, "the alphabet now ends at Y."
But not all adventures die with their authors. Sometimes their estates assign a writer to perpetuate the franchise - for better or worse.
For the man anointed with keeping Robert B. Parker's most beloved character alive and quipping, it's not a job, but a sacred trust.
Parker wrote nearly 70 novels, 40 of them about Spenser, the literary, wisecracking Boston private eye. He was writing yet another in January 2010 when his wife, Joan, found him dead at his desk, felled, at 77, by a heart attack.
"When my father died, there were a couple of unfinished manuscripts and we didn't know what to do," his son David told The Post. "The publisher suggested we find people to complete them, and it morphed into working with Ace Atkins, who's essentially a Robert B. Parker scholar."
Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the debut collection by a poet who is the first literate person in his family, hailed as ‘the definitive arrival of a significant voice'
After becoming the first literate person in his family and a prize-winning poet festooned with awards, Ocean Vuong has now won perhaps his most prestigious accolade yet for his debut collection: the TS Eliot prize.
Before announcing Vuong as the winner at a ceremony at the Wallace Collection in London on Monday evening, chair of judges Bill Herbert called Night Sky With Exit Wounds "a compellingly assured debut, the definitive arrival of a significant voice".
"There is an incredible power in the story of this collection," said Herbert. "There is a mystery at the heart of the book about generational karma, this migrant figure coming to terms with his relationship with his past, his relationship with his father and his relationship with his sexuality. All of that is borne out in some quite extraordinary imagery. The view of the world from this book is quite stunning."
What is the biggest threat to reading in today's culture? Price-cutting Amazon, or ghost-written celebrities? Library closures, or dwindling literacy?
None of these, according to literary super-agent Jonny Geller. The answer is Netflix.
"It's addictive," he says, "and it's good." People are now as likely to gobble up box sets as thrillers. And so authors (like me) and agents (like him) must adapt to survive. He, at least, seems to be doing that rather successfully.
Selling, he says, is a matter of planting ideas in an editor's mind, so they think that they have done that work themselves, that the clever strap-line on a book's cover is their idea, not his. But does a writer need to have that strap-line in mind before they start writing? (I ask, because I never do this). It depends, he says, thinking of some of his illustrious clients. William Boyd knows exactly what he's doing before he starts writing. Howard Jacobson has a basic idea, but never plans ahead (like me). John Le Carre has a long thinking time, and then quite a quick writing time. "To sell a book, you do need to know what it's about, and to be able to put that into ten words or so."
Not long after "Fire and Fury" reached the bestseller list, WikiLeaks tweeted what appeared to be a full-text copy of Michael Wolff's explosive book about a tumultuous Trump White House.
The hardcover book that costs $18 on Amazon was suddenly free for anyone via WikiLeaks's Twitter page. The tweet, which includes a link to a PDF file saved on Google Drive, raised questions about possible copyright infringement - and whether those who click on the link and download the free file could face legal troubles.
"If I upload an unauthorized copy of a book on my website and I share that link to everyone, that's clearly direct copyright infringement," Shyam Balganesh, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who specializes in copyright and intellectual-property laws, told The Washington Post. "On the other hand, if someone else uploads some infringing content and I just share its location, i.e., the link via a tweet, then it is unlikely to be direct infringement."
Marketing is critically important to a book's success, yet time spent on marketing means less time for writing. Here, I share 10 set-and-forget tips to put an e-book's most important marketing on autopilot. These tricks work 24 hours a day to make an author's books more discoverable to readers.
Editing Turbocharges Word of Mouth
Good books aren't good enough anymore. An author only gets one chance to wow a new reader with a five-star reading experience. It's the five-star read that leads to the ultimate form of autopilot marketing: reader word-of-mouth. To maximize reader satisfaction, hire a professional editor, preferably one with experience editing other books that became bestsellers in the same genre or category. There are multiple types of editing: developmental editing, copy editing, and proofing. Each is critically important, and none can be skipped. Developmental editing is the most expensive but will have the biggest impact on reader satisfaction.
8 January 2018
Welcome to my annual publishing predictions post where I prognosticate about the future and share my views on the state of the indie nation.
Each year around this time I polish off my imaginary crystal ball and ask it what the heck is going to happen next.
My crystal ball was a bit surly this year. The first thing it told me was, "you don't want to know." Less than helpful.
The second thing it told me was, "Re-reread your 2017 predictions. 2018 is going to play out as a continuation of last year."
That's a little more helpful. Most of my predictions for 2017 were pretty close.
10 years ago, publishers controlled your fate. They decided which writers became published authors, and they rejected most who came knocking, pleading and begging at their door.
Publishers were the gatekeepers to the printing press, retail distribution and readers.
Now, thanks to the tools of indie authorship, you've wrestled your fate away from publishers. You decide how and when you publish your book. You can reach readers without a publisher.
Over the past year, Helen Gordon and I have been putting together Being a Writer, a collection of musings, tips and essays from some of our favourite authors about the business of writing, ranging from the time of Samuel Johnson and Grub Street, to the age of Silicon Roundabout and Lorrie Moore.
Researching the book, it quickly became obvious that there isn't a correct way to set about writing creatively, which is a liberating thought. For every novelist who needs to isolate themselves in a quiet office (Jonathan Franzen), there's another who works best at the local coffee shop (Rivka Galchen) or who struggles to snatch an hour between chores and children (a young Alice Munro).
Hilary Mantel - a little arrogance can be a great help
"The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence - arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you."
The publishing industry hasn't produced a must-read adult book in several years, but that drought came to an end in the first week of January with Henry Holt's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff. The title was originally set to publish January 9, but Holt's rollout plans were overwhelmed by fast-moving events that began January 3 with the publication of highlights from the embargoed book by the Guardian. The story included a description of an incident in which former Trump strategist Steve Bannon referred to a meeting during the 2016 campaign between Donald Trump Jr. and a group of Russians as "unpatriotic" and "treasonous."
In its response to Trump's action, the Authors Guild cited the president's well-documented practice of suing, or threatening to sue, writers of articles and books critical of him. "It is one thing for a private citizen to use libel laws to quash speech. It is unheard of for a sitting president to do so," the Guild said in a statement. Guild president James Gleick further observed: "This isn't a country where we quash books that the leader finds unpleasant. That's what tyrants do, not American presidents."
As a management consultant, I talk about money all day. Since it's my client's money-not my own-these conversations are more transactional than emotional; they're not personal, it's business. When I talk about my own money (particularly my book money), however, it's entirely different. Offering even cursory details has the air of confession; I feel exposed, vulnerable and can barely choke out words. I'd rather describe my darkest, dirtiest sexual fantasies than tell you how much I've earned writing novels. But this essay is about my corporate career, which means it's mostly about money; to tell it right I have to come clean.
For many authors, art comes from chaos. For me, it's the opposite. In fact, having steady, stable employment is what affords me the freedom to write fiction. When I was a kid, my family struggled financially; by my senior year in high school, we'd moved 17 times. So I understood very early that the way I eventually earned money would have to be separate from my writing life; to my mind, a corporate job not only offered financial security, it also ensured that I'd never be forced to write solely as a means to pay rent. As a result, I've been able to pursue two distinct, unrelated careers over the past few decades: becoming a solid corporate citizen during business hours, while earning an MFA and publishing four novels in the shadows.
New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof was one of the first to start blogging for one of the most well-known media companies in the world. Yet on December 8th, he declared his blog was being shut down, writing, "we've decided that the world has moved on from blogs-so this is the last post here."
The death knell of blogs might seem surprising to anyone who was around during their heyday. Back in 2008, Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell wrote in Public Choice, "Blogs appear to be a staple of political commentary, legal analysis, celebrity gossip, and high school angst." A Mother Jones writer who "flat out declared, ‘I hate blogs'...also admitted, ‘I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy.'"
Today, writers lament the irrelevance of blogs not just because there's too many of them; but because not enough people are engaging with even the more popular ones. Blogs are still important to those invested in their specific subjects, but not to a more general audience, who are more likely to turn to Twitter or Facebook for a quick news fix or take on current events.
Explains author Gina Bianchini as she advises not starting a blog, "2017 is a very different world than 2007. Today is noisier and people's attention spans shorter than any other time in history...and things are only getting worse. Facebook counts a ‘view' as 1.7 seconds and we have 84,600 of those in a day. Your new blog isn't equipped to compete in this new attention-deficit-disorder Thunderdome."
Things we need:
1. Money
Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I've returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary magazines' funding practices, especially in light of renewed interest in eliminating the government allocations for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (whose FY2018 allocations are still under congressional consideration).
Each time I revisit this tweet, I imagine being in the conference room for this theoretical planning meeting in Iowa, and I think of the similar scarcity-driven discussions I've participated in both as poet and editor, largely-in either role-as unpaid labor.
If the submission-fee model means only poets with a couple hundred (or thousand) discretionary dollars in their bank accounts can afford to publish their books, should presses and journals stop charging them? First, we must consider the degree to which-or whether-our presses and journals can operate without them. The data confirm the wide-ranging degree presses depend on fees to function: while book sales (good news!) still yielded the greatest funding share for surveyed presses, submission fees still comprised a sizable, integral portion-which means we need to consider what might replace them if we ban them as a practice.