Will Self is the author of 10 novels, five collections of short stories and several works of nonfiction, including The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Dorian and Walking to Hollywood. Phone is the final instalment of the trilogy that began with Umbrella and Shark and is out now in paperback (Viking, £8.99).
Links of the week March 12 2018 (11)
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:
19 March 2018
I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that's already happened. I've been publishing since 1990, so I've seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It's impossible to think of a novel that's been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.
Authors have hit back at writer Will Self's assertion that the novel is "doomed to become a marginal cultural form".
Self's interview in the Guardian, published on Saturday (17th March), featured insights into his thoughts on the Iraq war, e-readers, the future of fiction and female writers.
The headline of the interview with journalist Alex Clark, ‘The novel is doomed', attracted much debate on social media with writers such as Colin Barrett, Roxane Gay and Joanne Harris disagreeing with Self.
Self's comments drew some criticism on Twitter from the literary community. Irish writer Barrett, currently based in the US, tweeted: "As a writer, I'd be embarrassed to ever say there's been no good contemporary writing/no good books in X number of years etc, because more than anything it just reveals the poverty of your own appetite for engagement."
Gay, a writer and commentator also based in America, said: "White men love to declare an end to things when they no longer succeed in that arena. The novel is fine."
The Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry asked: "Also: who cares if the novel is doomed, anyway? Storytelling is as old as time and the novel is revising for its GSCEs."
In 2012, the New York Times Review of Books published reviews of 405 books-and 316 were written by men.
Similarly distressing, Publisher's Weekly found that 82% of employees in editorial departments of major publishers were white. Not surprisingly, writers who identify as anything other than a white man have been clamoring for change for a long time.
Over the last decade, however, something interesting has happened. A much more diverse cast of authors has emerged into our cultural spotlight
Has traditional publishing changed? A little bit. There have been steps in the right direction, but we can't put all the progress down to major publishers having a change of heart regarding diversity.
The bigger forces at play are the rise of small presses and self-publishing.
Of the three authors listed above, all three started out as self-published authors. Traditional publishers wouldn't give them a shot, but when they self-published to much fanfare, publishers were chomping at the bit to get ahold of their book rights. Why didn't this happen sooner?
Last week, Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine was longlisted for the Women's prize for fiction. The debut author, who has gone from writing competition to publishing bidding war to the Costa first novel prize, joins Joanna Cannon, with her second novel Three Things About Elsie. What's more surprising than two relative newcomers sitting alongside heavyweights including Arundhati Roy and Nicola Barker is that these novels are decidedly upbeat accounts of the kindness of strangers.
But up lit isn't simply a means of sugar-coating the world. Rachel Joyce, author of international bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, stresses the importance of light and shade. "It's about facing devastation, cruelty, hardship and loneliness and then saying: ‘But there is still this.' Kindness isn't just giving somebody something when you have everything. Kindness is having nothing and then holding out your hand."
Nothing beats the feeling of typing The End following the last scene of your manuscript. You've spent weeks to months to years laboring over sentence construction, timeline details, and character development, among many other things. Now is the time to celebrate.
Because soon, it will be time to edit.
If you're groaning, stop it. This is where you take your masterpiece and smooth the rough edges. Not all artists have this luxury. We writers get as many passes as it takes to get it right. There is a myriad of posts and checklists on how to best attack the editing process. I like to start with three easy (though not necessarily quick) edits that give me a sense of immediate progress. Following these suggestions will result in tighter prose and eliminate several "flag" words that could make an editor or agent pass on your project.
New report exposes decline in diversity in romance writing, as editor resigns after telling author they avoid putting non-white characters on covers ‘because we like the book to sell'.
Readers, writers and editors of romance books are grappling with the genre's record on diversity, after a week where a report found that books by authors of colour were on the decline, an imprint specialising in diverse romances closed, and another publisher was forced to apologise for telling a writer they avoided putting people of colour on book covers because they didn't sell.
I'm Jo Simmonds, I'm the editor of The Fiction Pool, an online journal which features short stories, flash fiction and occasionally poetry. I'm a published flash and short story writer but I also dabble in poetry and script writing.
Why did you start your publication?
I started The Fiction Pool because I was aware of a gap in the ‘market' - a website which was smartly presented with photographs alongside bold, gritty and visceral writing from new and established writers from diverse backgrounds. I also wanted to be a female editor in charge of evening up the gender of the writers featured. I wanted to open the gate a bit wider for disabled and LGBTQ writers like myself and look for some BAME writers who may be struggling to get noticed.
The happiness of the writers definitely scores extremely highly - it feels very rewarding that I have given someone a happy day - it makes me feel proud and empowered. Also the immediacy of the publish button and knowing people can access the site from any device wherever they are is hugely gratifying.
It's often lamented that the art of deferred gratification has vanished from our instantly downloadable culture, but the increasing popularity of serialised novels suggests this may not be the whole story.
This won't come as news to anyone who spent the autumn of 2014 gripped by the unfolding drama of the Serial podcast, which took the No 1 spot on iTunes before it was even released, and 18 months later had racked up 80m downloads. Though non-fiction, Serial was cited as a gamechanger for the way we consume stories. But, as many pointed out, it was merely changing the game to a model that dominated publishing for the second half of the 19th century - and built the careers of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins and many others.
Serialisation - which took off in earnest with the publication of Dickens' The Pickwick Papers in 1836 - allowed reading to become a communal and more easily accessible experience. Those who could not afford the publication, or couldn't read for themselves, joined reading clubs and informal gatherings where the latest instalment was read aloud every week. It was only as book production became cheaper and literacy more widespread that the serial novel began to lose out to completed books, making reading a more interior and self-contained pursuit.
12 March 2018
In 2017, almost 50% more short story collections were sold than in the previous year. It was the best year for short stories since 2010. Booksellers are reporting a surge in popularity for the form, commentators note publishers are buying more collections and issuing them with greater care and enthusiasm; in December the newcomer Kristen Roupenian cut five- and seven-figure deals in the UK and US after her New Yorker story "Cat Person" went viral
Plodding through these random explosions of joy, the short story continues to exist with or without the glare of widespread attention. Each year, good collections are published; some are noticed, some are not. Most don't sell many copies (a debut collection from one of the major publishing houses might have a print run of 3,000, with little expectation of a reprint). When a collection is fortunate enough to be reviewed, it will very often be a discussion not just about the book but also the form generally.
The standard how-to-find-an-agent advice goes something like this: search databases and websites and the acknowledgments pages of the books you love for the names and contact info of agents who might have an affinity for your style; write a svelte and compelling query letter that captures the essence of your book and the meat of your bio in under 500 words; include said query in the body of an email; attach the first 50 pages of your manuscript; and wait, sometimes for months, for your dream agent to request the entire book or send you on your way.
I met my agent as a student in NYU's M.F.A. program, at an agent/writer meet-and-greet. I had three meetings, including one with Claudia Ballard, from William Morris Endeavor. We talked less about my unfinished novel than we did about the books we both loved. A few days later, I sent Claudia some stories; she asked for my novel. I sent her an essay; she asked for my novel. I sent her 100 pages of my novel, attached to an email that, in place of a query letter, included a list of disclaimers; miraculously, she asked for a meeting.
Author platforms: we're still talking about them because they're such a crucial part of introducing new books and new authors to a wider readership. And, for indie authors, having a robust author platform can mean the difference between giving up your day job or staying put for a while.
Unfortunately, many authors seem to think that their author platform is located somewhere on social media sites, although those certainly play a part. But savvy authors realize that having direct access to their readers - and a larger universe of people interested in the types of things they write about - is the most valuable asset of all for anyone hoping to write and publish books for a living. The way you get that direct access is by appearing in people's email in-boxes. Still not convinced? Here are seven reasons why authors should build email lists.
Women are used to living off scraps that fall from the table. Whether we're being patronised by politicians touting for our votes, or being told by advertisers we're "worth" a £3 bottle of shampoo, we have learned to take any crumb of grudging appreciation. And we even have a day each year - 8 March, International Women's Day - to feel special.
In this context, the decision by bookseller Waterstones to banish the boys and give over the entire front page of its website to "celebrate" women's writing on International Women's Day seems par for the course. But while it may be good PR, it isn't enough in a market that would collapse without women, whether readers, writers or publishers.
A 2014 analysis of 40,000 of its members by book review website Goodreads revealed that though we tend to stick to our own gender when reading - 90% of men's most-read books of the year were by male writers, with a similar figure for women - what we hold in highest regard are books by women. On average, both genders rated books by women at 4 out of 5 stars, with the efforts of men marked lower.
When a writer is born into a family, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz said, that family is finished. Yes, but when a writer dies that family's troubles have only just begun. Wills may be contradictory and instructions to literary executors confused. Works left behind on computers or in desk drawers may be of uncertain status: were they intended for publication or not? And if the writer is famous enough, there'll be biographers to deal with: can they be trusted to paint a kindly portrait? In their lifetime, authors have a measure of control. Once they're gone, it's left to others to guard their reputations.
Literary management is back in the news because the will left by Harper Lee has been made public. It was signed only eight days before her death in 2016 and, while naming as heirs her niece and three nephews, appointed the lawyer Tonja Carter as her literary executor. Lee's sister, Alice, used to perform that role, but after Alice's death in 2014 at the age of 103, Carter assumed control. It was she who discovered the "lost" manuscript of Go Set a Watchman in a safe deposit box and, two months after Alice's death, arranged for it to come out, despite Lee having maintained for 55 years that To Kill a Mockingbird was the only novel she would ever publish.
A Manchester-based author whose debut novel was initially rejected by British publishers has won one of the world's richest literary prizes.
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - who's from Uganda and moved to the UK 17 years ago - has won one of the Windham Campbell Prizes from Yale University in the US.
She will receive $165,000 (£119,000). "I haven't been earning for a long, long time," she says.
"I really put everything into writing. So for this to happen is unbelievable."
The prize money is more than double the amount that the Booker Prize winner gets, and organisers say it's the richest award dedicated to literature after the Nobel Prize. Makumbi is one of eight writers to receive Windham Campbell Prizes this year spanning fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry - and is the only winner to have published just one full-length work.
Last week the internet all but imploded with the news that Reese Witherspoon, queen of the book-to-screen adaptation, will be giving another tome the Big Little Lies treatment. The star announced the news about Little Fires Everywhere by posting a photo of herself alongside fellow actress and producer Kerry Washington - both clutching copies of the Celeste Ng-penned hardcover, of course - and caused a firestorm to the tune of almost a quarter of a million likes and countless news stories.
These clubs exist entirely online and almost entirely on Instagram - Belletrist has 160,000 followers and Reese's Book Club has 390,000. Each month the actresses select a title for their fans to check out and offer their own opinions, discussion topics, and exclusive interviews with the authors - in addition to the chance for readers at home to feel like they're following the novels alongside their celebrity idols. And for the chosen authors, the benefits are practically endless.
Romance writing has done the impossible. Hard to say how this even happened, but... it's gotten whiter.
This is from the second of two annual studies done by the Ripped Bodice, our fair nation's only all-romance specialty bookstore. As we wrote back in October, only 7.8 romance books out of 100 published in 2016 were written by women of color.
Another statistic makes that one look even worse: there were 5.5 percent more romance books published in 2017 then in 2016. And, as Lenker writes this month in Entertainment Weekly, reporting on the Ripped Bodice's newest study, -half of the publishers surveyed showed no improvement or had decreased the number of books written by authors of color - since last year. (Linker's piece is great, and features some helpful infographics.)