For years, crime fiction titles have topped the bestseller lists and library lending tables. That sales of the genre have now overtaken general fiction, as revealed at the London Book Fair last week, comes as no surprise to its readers, practitioners, critics and industry professionals.
Links of the week April 9 2018 (15)
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:
16 April 2018
We've always recognised its reach, dynamism, integrity and, increasingly, diversity. Yet its rise, and indeed acceptance, is still a mystery to some, with any number of narratives seeking to understand the phenomenon. This is about as helpful as trying to define exactly what makes a bestseller a bestseller, and, perhaps more important, how to spot the next big thing. At best it's a lucky amalgamation; so many factors come into play. Being in the right place at the right time, with the right idea, and talent, might be one answer. But how the hell do you come up with the right idea?
It has happened at last! Finally, the literary world is a meritocracy! Crime fiction - which I first became aware of as the Best Genre Ever when I read my first Enid Blyton mystery at six years old - is now officially the UK's bestselling genre. Nielsen BookscanUK bibliographic organisation, describing itself as 'the definitive retail monitoring service for books', which shows UK bestseller lists on its website. http://www.nielsenbookscan.co.uk/ data at the London book fair has revealed that crime novels in 2017, for the first time since Nielsen's records began, sold more than the category rather vaguely labelled "general and literary fiction". Crime sales of have increased by 19% since 2015 to 18.7m, compared to the 18.1m fiction books sold in 2017.
So why is crime fiction suddenly the most popular genre of fiction in the UK? I think readers have a sense that this is a genre that will: a) prioritise their pleasure and entertainment over anything the writer might want to get out of the experience; and b) offer a guaranteed a gripping plot. Yes, many literary novels have fantastic plots, and some crime novels are as dull as a puddle in a potholed pavement - nevertheless, as a genre, crime always promises suspense and action in a way that general and literary fiction does not.
A new collection of short stories featuring works from 18 well-known authors is bypassing print and going straight to audiobook. Could this be a sign of things to come?
Last week, figures from Nielsen BookscanUK bibliographic organisation, describing itself as 'the definitive retail monitoring service for books', which shows UK bestseller lists on its website. http://www.nielsenbookscan.co.uk/ showed audiobook sales have doubled in the last five years, rising by 12% in 2017 alone.
Harris points out: "You don't have to have 42 CDs to listen to somebody reading a book anymore. You don't have to physically have that amount of space. And people have busy lives, they like to listen to audiobooks in the car, on the commute, when they're running."
In a tightening market for fiction and especially for debut authors looking for that big break, editors can be choosier - and many are more dependent than ever on literary agents to find their next debuts.
"But sometimes the agent will have it go to auction. I've pre-empted two books this year," Chandler said, "and it usually involves reading the book overnight. It's very dramatic and exciting and involves sleepless nights."
Chandler said that like most editors, she finds authors through literary agents who filter submissions. "It's quite an old fashioned process," she said, "but in reality, I'm just one woman and I can only read so much." Not surprisingly, she said that good relationships with agents become important if an editor is to find the best material.
In the winter of 1983 I finished my first book. I wrote it in longhand on yellow legal pads and after putting down the last word I scrawled "The End" with a flourish, something that's impossible to do on a keyboard. Then I went out for a solitary, celebratory beer.
Creators of manuscripts, the large armies of writers denied authorship (larger in the days before self-publishing), are incapable of forgetting the work they've brought into an unsuspecting world. The thought of it sitting unread dampens their happiest moments and turns their worst days even darker. Their lives will not be complete until their manuscript goes through editing (cosmetic surgery) and production (chrysalis) and emerges triumphantly as a book. And because of this, they never lose track of it-where it's been, where it is now-and they never stop searching for places to send it. They are constantly on the lookout for new agents, small publishers-someone, anyone, who might find them gifted and worthy of championing. In bookstores they scan the spines of same-genre books and note the names
LONDON - At the opening of the London Book Fair on Tuesday, a mobile massage company set up a row of stools for anyone in need of a shoulder and neck rub. It's been a feature of the fair for years, but the service has never seemed more timely.
The Olympia exhibition center in West Kensington teemed with British publishers and editors, a cohort badly in need of stress relief these days. Britain's looming departure from the European Union has set many people here on edge.
Much of the worry stems from a looming fight with American publishers over sales in Continental Europe. For decades, the British have had this market to themselves, selling English-language editions of books in France, Italy and every other country in the European Union.
That helped turn Britain into the largest book exporter in the world, with total sales equivalent to $6.8 billion per year, according to the Publishers Association, a British trade group. Just over half of that revenue came from exports, and the biggest export market is Europe.
Sat across hundreds of small tables dotted around more than 2,000 stands, members of the publishing world turned ruthless as they hammered out agreements for territorial and translation rights and negotiated distribution deals for books across TV, film and other formats.
With more than 1,500 exhibiting companies, 120-plus countries represented and 25,000 visitors, it is one of the star events in the sector's calendar.
"Probably six or seven years ago everyone was really sounding the death knell for the printed book and everyone was saying why on earth would you continue to read the print book, everyone's going to read on their Kindles, etc, etc. And if you've seen any research then you'll know that's simply not the case and print is very stable," Thomas says.
Some books make little impression, others earn our respect. And others again make us greedy not just to read but to own them and return to them time and again. Enitharmon's aptly titled The Heart's Granary belongs to this last group. Beautifully produced, and with "poetry and prose from 50 years of Enitharmon Press" bursting the seams of its 380-odd pages, it's an anthology designed not to prove a theory or establish a canon, but to celebrate the work of one of our most remarkable small publishers.
Enitharmon was among the crop of independent poetry publishers that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s. Poetry was then passing through one of its phases of heightened popularity - it was the era of the Liverpool poets, and of 1965's International Poetry Incarnation gala at the Albert Hall - just as trade publishers began to trim their lists. Together with Anvil (also founded in 1968), Carcanet (founded a year later), Peterloo (founded in 1972) and Bloodaxe (founded in 1978), Enitharmon established a new poetry world, in which some of the best writing from home and abroad appeared thanks to the editorial flair of a handful of visionary individuals.
9 April 2018
British readers have become more gripped by crime and thriller novels, with sales up by 19% between 2015 and 2017, new figures suggest.
The rise has been fuelled by the growth of psychological thrillers and the success of big names like Lee Child, James Patterson and Dan Brown.
Last year, 18.7 million crime books were sold - 19% more than in 2015, data company Nielsen BookscanUK bibliographic organisation, describing itself as 'the definitive retail monitoring service for books', which shows UK bestseller lists on its website. http://www.nielsenbookscan.co.uk/ says.
Julia Wisdom, crime and thriller publisher for HarperCollins, said the rise in sales of crime fiction was mostly down to the "phenomenal popularity" of psychological thrillers. "People have got sucked into these stories which are told from the first person, usually, and often with an unreliable narrator. It immerses you straight into someone's psyche rather than seeing them from the outside," she said. "They often don't have very complicated plots but it's all about the build-up of suspense and fear, and you have to be completely immersed in the voice."
When you look around at the most beloved books of the past decade, the books that seem destined to be classics, one thing becomes clear:
Small presses are amazing.
While the burst of small press publications we've seen over the last 10 years or so is undoubtedly a good thing, one thing that often gets overlooked is just how it came to be - and more specifically, how modern self-publishing made it all possible.
To understand all of this, you need to know what makes modern self-publishing different than the self-publishing of 10 years ago.
In his opening keynote at the London Book Fair's pre-conference, Quantum event, Tom Goodwin, head of innovation for Zenith Media, spoke about publishing in what he dubbed "the mid-digital age," the current "interim" period "before things get amazing," when our technology is still too complex-and often disappointing.
"We live in this amazing age where incredible things are possible, but routinely people are quite disappointed," Goodwin said. "It seems that what is possible accelerates very quickly," he explained, "but what people expect from technology accelerates even faster."
"The world at the moment is struggling to adapt to the Internet and what it means," he said, contending that for all the talk of technology today, we don't spend enough time thinking about the impact of technology on society and our lives.
"It always appears that when new technology arrives, we think about how we've done things before and sprinkle a little bit of technology around the edges of what we've done before," he said, rather than engage with how that technology might fundamentally change the way we live.
Indie authors all agree: hiring an editor to work on your manuscript is one of the best and most necessary investments an author can make. Editing takes both time and money and can encompass anything from a substantiative (i.e. structural or content) edit-where the editor makes suggestions on character and plot development, chapter organization, and big-picture issues-to copyediting and proofreading. We talked to eight successful indie authors who shared their editing experiences and offered some tips and advice as well.
HUGH HOWEY
Hugh Howey is one of self-publishing's biggest success stories-and one of its greatest champions. The author of the bestselling Wool series is a Kindle Top 100 author and a #1 bestseller in Amazon's science fiction category. His series was also optioned by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian for a feature film. Howey hires an editor, David Gatewood, for all of his books, and sees the process as one that benefits not just his own writing but the creative industry as a whole.
"The most satisfying part of becoming a successful artist has been the chance to support other freelancers," he says. "My editor started out as a beta reader, working with me for free," Howey relates. Howey insisted on paying him for his work and began recommending him to other authors-and Gatewood now works as an editor full-time. "And my former editor at Simon & Schuster is now doing freelance work," he adds.
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart has been translated into over 50 languages, making it the most translated African novel. But almost 60 years after it was first published, there is no authoritative translation into Igbo, Achebe's mother tongue. An equivalent instance would be if Conrad's Heart of Darkness had not been translated into Polish. But even then, the comparison would not work.
"The Makerere writers, like a literary tsunami, came and buried early South African writing underneath a torrent of realist novels written in English."
When I first saw the #MisandryInPublishing hashtag, I assumed it was a joke. How could anyone actually believe that there is a bias against men in an industry that has historically prioritised the work of men, and paid them more for it? How?
I soon realised the hashtag was the work of a male author who was complaining about female agents and writers who had spurned him - myself in particular. Though I had not yet read his book, I had retweeted a meme about male authors being bad at writing female characters, which he didn't like. It was enough to put me in his crosshairs.
Here's the problem: while one man was behind the creation of #MisandryInPublishing, he's not alone in his beliefs that women stand in the way of male authors being published. If the misogynistic vitriol that fills my inbox and my Twitter notifications is any indication, a lot of men feel this way. They believe that feedback is personal, that rejections are gender-biased punishment, and that if it were not for systemic and rampant hatred of men, I would be representing them and selling their book.
The romance genre is a juggernaut that continues unabated.
It's a billion-dollar industry that outperforms all other book genres, and it's remarkably innovative, with a strong tradition of independent and self-publishing.
It's also an industry that's been grappling with a diversity problem. The RITA Award, the top honor for romance writers awarded by the Romance Writers of America, was awarded this week, and the organization acknowledged that in its 36-year history, no black author has ever won the prize. According to the RWA's own research, black authors have written less than half of 1 percent of the total number of books considered as prize finalists.
Getting published was pretty tough. My first book was more sort of on the sexier side, and the heroine was south Asian. ... You sort of fall into an internalized trap, all of my characters [before] were always white, and my heart just wasn't in it. So I felt like, this wasn't a book I hadn't see anywhere, so I want to write it. ... I shopped the book around [with different publishers], and I was told to change the characters' ethnicities. "We can take this if you can edit it." ... It is disheartening to hear, "Well, we can't really connect to her, but we can if you make her white."
Everyone knows that writers mine characters, details, and events from their own lives. After all, how could anyone avoid it? (See also the fact that every AWP, you are sure to spot at least one person wearing some version of this shockingly clever t-shirt.) But sometimes those borrowed details turn out to be rather, shall we say, pointed. Even barbed. (Or just Hemingway swinging a drunken club at whomever was nearby.) Below, a few cases of authors who have drawn very unflattering fictional portraits of real people, including other writers, famous people, and their nearest and dearest (unsurprisingly, these categories often overlap). Maybe we all really should be paying attention to those t-shirts.
Hanif Kureishi's portrayal of his family in The Buddha of Suburbia It isn't only Rushdie who has had family members publicly decry their apparent portrayal in a work of fiction. (In fact this is the most common kind of dissing authors seem to do.) Kureishi has had repeated trouble with his loved ones and their interpretations of the truth and his presentation of it - though of course as an outsider it is nearly impossible to know the truth.