Writing was always my dream job. When I was eight I sent my handwritten book, bound in wool and written in pencil, to Ladybird publishers. Several weeks later I received my first rejection. I tried again when I was 11. Rejected again. The bubble popped. I would never be an author, sitting in my seaside cottage with a dog at my feet, gazing out at the sea while I tapped away at my typewriter.
Links of the week March 19 2018 (12)
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:
26 March 2018
When I was first published I had no idea how the industry worked. I signed my first deal in 2008, and, while there was quite a lot of information on the web about life as an author, there wasn't nearly as much as there is now. Like most newly published authors, I thought that all my dreams had come true. I'd done the hardest bit - I'd got an agent and a two-book deal. I had a career for life.
Elizabeth Rusch's picture book about Mario Molina, the Mexico-born chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work studying the destruction of the Earth's ozone layer, was a decade in the making. It took her nearly 30 drafts to get it right, and she was thrilled when the children's publisher Charlesbridge acquired it in 2013. The book was finally due out next month.
Then, news broke that the book's illustrator, David Diaz, had been accused of sexual harassment. Worried the book would be clouded by the controversy, Charlesbridge decided to postpone publication of "Mario and the Hole in the Sky," pulp the finished copies and hire a new illustrator.
Publishers face complex calculations as they weigh whether or not to cut ties with an author. Canceling a book can lead to lost profits, but publishing and promoting a book by an author accused of misconduct can have other negative ramifications.
An overwhelming majority of authors in the Folio Academy, which includes Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its ranks, have called upon the Man Booker prize to revert to admitting UK, Irish and Commonwealth writers only, over fears of a new American dominance emerging in the prize.
Three years since the Man Booker began allowing any author writing in English and published in the UK to enter, 99% of Folio Academy members who responded to the question have said that the Booker should change its rules again, with most responses citing the new ubiquity of US authors in the prize's longlists.
Author John Banville, who won the Booker in 2005 and originally supported the new rule, revealed he has since changed his mind. %u201CThe prize was unique in its original form, but has lost that uniqueness. It is now just another prize among prizes. I am convinced the administrators should take the bold step of conceding the change was wrong, and revert,%u201D he said.
The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. 2018 has been a broadly positive event, with non-fiction on the rise and the UK market's Middle Grade mania continuing, though Bonnier Publishing's shock decision to shutter its Australian children's division sent ripples of concern through the halls.
Though the news was a dampener for some fairgoers, most were enthusiastic about Bologna 2018. Skylark Literary co-founder Joanna Moult called the fair "buoyant", adding: "Submissions are better this year. The quality of the writing is better than it has been, so we are excited. Publishers are more interested, it seems, and everyone is in the mood to do deals-more so than [they were] in the second half of last year." Moult's fellow Skylark co-founder Amber Caravéo agreed: "We are starting to see more interest in YA. For a while it was all Middle Grade, Middle Grade, Middle Grade. Now people want to find good YA. There has been a sea change."
Here's the truth: I never had a freelancing dream. I was happily and continuously employed for 15 years after college graduation. Yet as I grew in experience and knowledge, I found myself increasingly at odds with the red tape and inevitable office politics that come with even the best of jobs. I started to wonder if I'd do better and be happier on my own.
Your motivations or desires to freelance might be different than mine, but the process of transitioning away from conventional employment will raise similar questions and psychological barriers. While I was positioned to do well given my career history, it was by no means a golden ticket. Someone else with the same set of experiences and connections could find themselves empty-handed and struggling (and in fact I know of some who are). So what laid the groundwork?
We asked Hugo Award-winning authors Neil Gaiman and N.K. Jemisin to sit down and talk about books, writing, comics and whatever else came to mind. What followed was a wide-ranging discussion of cultural representation in comics, rereading your own work (or listening to it, as the case may be with audiobooks), and fighting for accurate television adaptations. The conversation begins with Gaiman's series The Sandman, which was first published by DC Comics in 1989 and ran for 75 issues.
N.K. Jemisin: I have been a giant fan of Sandman. It is the thing that made me like American comics again, because I was a giant manga nerd for years and years. It's one of the things that reminded me that American comic books could be an art form. I had forgotten that.
Each year, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer honors a new writer in the science fiction and fantasy field: an author who has professionally published a short story or novel in the past two years. Last year, Too Like The Lightning author Ada Palmer took home the award.
Last year, author Jake Kerr compiled The Event Horizon 2017 anthology, a massive two-volume, 400,000 word ebook which collected stories from 75 authors. This year's anthology contains 59 stories, and like last year's edition, it's free for the taking in ePub, MOBI, or PDF formats, while you can pick up a print edition for $15 on Amazon. Both editions will only be available through July 15th, 2018.
19 March 2018
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).
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.