Working as a literary agent means being privy to a full canon's worth of submitted novels that the world will never see. Naturally, a good many of these pitches will always be chasing the news. Writers want their stories to seem timely, so if there's a debate happening in real-world headlines that somehow mirrors the conflict in their book, I'll hear about it in the query letter. In past years we now retrospectively call "normal," these tie-ins were scarce or partial, with the political parallels presented merely as subtext or metaphor; maybe the government in the otherwise fully fictional story looks a little like our real one, or the plot's inciting tragedy feels reminiscent of some recent national trauma.
Links of the week March 26 2018 (13)
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:
2 April 2018
Of course, 2017 was not a normal year. In the months that followed November 8th, 2016, a strange thing happened to a huge swath of the thousands of novel pitches I received: their imaginative scope narrowed, the subtext became text, and the stories started tying far more literally to the news cycle where they used to rely on implication. Put another way, an overwhelming number of aspiring novelists started writing about Trump.
Amazon has a Donald Trump problem. For days now, the president has been tweeting about the online retail giant, accusing it of ripping off the U.S. Postal Service, shortchanging state and local governments on taxes, and using these unfair advantages to put countless retailers out of business. "Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon," he tweeted on Monday. "THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country...not a level playing field!"
Under a competent autocrat, Amazon might be in trouble because their business model is so dependent on government. Amazon obtained its market share through a simple pricing advantage: It never charged sales tax on online purchases, for close to two decades. As long as it didn't have a physical headquarters or warehouse in a given state, it could enjoy a significant price advantage over brick-and-mortar stores. It earned its market share on the backs of tax avoidance.
I spent much of this winter living on an abandoned island in the Hebrides, writing my second book. For six weeks, it was just me and my dog in a cabin without electricity, internet or central heating. I had a suspicion that the solitude might be good for my writing (it was), but that wasn't the main reason I was there. In fact, I was there for the same reason as I was writing in the first place, and because of the same motivation that has compelled me for as long as I can remember.
I now recognise that this sensation was what I was seeking when I started writing as a child. Aged 12, I began my first book. It was about 100,000 words, and is the same book that I rewrote on that Scottish Island. I never tried to get it published. I sat on it for a bit, thought about where the characters in it had come from, and then wrote a prequel (which became The Wolf).
Being unable to leave home and seek out physically otherworldly experiences, I explored them on the page instead. My unfortunate characters were wrung in the most testing ways I could envisage, suffering so that I didn't have to, in the vain hope of gaining insight of some kind.
Speaking to booksellers and publishers at Bologna's new bookstore conference, IPA president Michiel Kolman said reading is crucial, as are new digital storytelling tools.
"By the time these young adults were born, the Internet had been fully commercialized for about five years. Amazon was already the largest site for online shopping, rapidly pushing brick-and-mortar stores out of business. As preschoolers, they saw Google introduce its Gmail and Maps services, making it the most widely used search engine on the web. Facebook opened itself up to users beyond the university campus, and before this generation even entered secondary education, smartphones had become ubiquitous."
Jay Bernard has won the Ted Hughes award for new poetry with the performance Surge: Side A, a multimedia sequence which explores the 1981 New Cross fire.
The £5,000 prize is given to the poet "who has made the most exciting contribution to poetry", putting published collections alongside live performance, installations and radio pieces.
Bernard, who uses the pronoun "they", examined a tragedy which came to be a defining moment in black British history after 13 young people died at a birthday party in south London.
According to one of the judges, Sally Beamish, what most impressed the panel about Bernard's performance was "the honesty, the vulnerability and the fact it was so intensely personal".
"What Jay has done is to relate the story of the New Cross fire from their own perspective," Beamish said. "In an amazing way, they've made a parallel between that struggle for validation in the black British community and their own redefining of their gender through surgery. It made it a very intimate experience, very personal and very brave."
A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven't written a single line of fiction.
For a few years now, I've been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work - the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers' roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.
26 March 2018
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.
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.