Last weekend I spent a lot of time around aspiring authors. On Friday, I ran a 'trade secrets' workshop for writers at Chipping Norton Literary Festival. The day after I headed to Leicester University to deliver a plenary talk to the audience at the sixth national Self-Publishing Conference. And my overwhelming impression - both within the official sessions and while chatting at lunches and coffee breaks - was an uplifting sense of energy, optimism and experimentation.
Links of the week April 23 2018 (17)
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:
30 April 2018
Yes, there's more noise out there than ever. Yes, publishers are inundated with submissions, and the Amazon marketplace seems to become more opaque and complex by the day. Yes, review space in the mainstream press is being squeezed yet again, social media can be a scary sandpit, and frenzied discounting makes it seriously hard to turn a buck.
But amongst the writers I met there was also a real sense of opportunity. In a, ahem, troubled world, telling your unique truth feels more important than ever, and there's a tangible public hunger for diverse stories that have historically slipped through publishing's cracks. Our early 'web 2.0' utopianism may have faded, but innovation fresh routes to market continue to open up for entrepreneurial storytellers unafraid to seek them out.
My first book was published when I was 34. I was at that time a copywriter, earning a living by removing errant apostrophes from clothing catalogues, and drafting news reports for legal journals. Before then, I had been a civil servant (a job to which I was ill-suited in every respect), a minimum-wage shop worker, a nanny, an office temp and a legal administrator. Often I am asked what possessed me to join the civil service straight after graduation, and the frank answer is that I had supported myself financially since I was 18, and needed to earn a living: writing, my long-held ambition, would have to wait.
When it became intolerable to me that I was not doing the one thing I had ever felt would give my life purpose, I applied for an MA and then a PhD in creative writing (funded by a tax rebate and a scholarship respectively). I began a novel, and abandoned it, and wrote a series of earnest and trite short stories; I took up the novel again, and wrote a thesis on the gothic, and all the while carried out my full-time work as a secretary to a committee of barristers.
Sales of Children's books in the UK fell short in 2017, but we can point to at least one distinct reason for that decline: 2016 saw Harry Potter & the Cursed Child earn £16m through BookScan from 1.5m copies. In the end, sales last year were down only £90,000 and 1.1m units, with growth for both established and emerging authors helping to close the gap. This follows consistent years of growth since 2013, culminating in 2016 as the highest-earning year for children's books since BookScan began. Which makes 2017 the second-highest year, and I think we can all agree that these records make for a good time to be in the business of children's books.
Now that the market decline stat is out of the way, onto the positives: internationally, six of the countries covered by BookScan grew their children's sales in 2017, with only the UK, Spain and South Africa showing falls. Among the top 10 global bestselling titles (across editions and translations), five were children's or crossover books: Bad Dad by David Walliams, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli, The Getaway by Jeff Kinney, The World's Worst Children 2 by David Walliams, and Guinness World Records 2018. If we look at total author sales, the leading name in six countries was a children's author - Geronimo Stilton in Italy and Spain, Andy Griffiths in Australia, David Walliams in Ireland and New Zealand, and Julia Donaldson in the UK - and in the remaining three, a children's author was second.
"If you build it, they will come" is the biggest crock of sh*t ever foisted. The second biggest is my own mental script: "If I write it, The New York Times bestseller list will come."
*EHNT* Wrong answer.
How do I know? Because if that mess was true, my first title, Dead Inside, would have been topping that list.
Seriously. It ticks all the boxes:
- It's a near statistical impossibility for a self-published book to get picked up by a New York publisher. Dead Inside was originally self-pubbed. It's now with a New York publisher.
- An unknown writer snagging a blurb from a famous author is a utopian dream. Mega-bestseller Ellen Hopkins blurbed my book when it was a Word document. Kirkus ReviewsThis offers more than 400 pre-publication reviews of books published in America in 24 print issues a year. It also has an archive of more than 300,000 reviews dating back to 1933 - the most extensive single-source reviews database anywhere. A subscription costs $37.50 a month. www.kirkusreviews.com, the grand dame of book review bodies, is notoriously crabby. Kirkus gave Dead Inside a killer review.
- It was singled out for recognition by the big, taste-making library publications: Junior Library Guild, School Library Journal and Children's Book Council, among others. Big media has been all up in its grill.
- The cover reveal was on Bustle. It was covered in VICE. I appeared on CBS's The Doctors.
Print books are dead! EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. are dead! People don't read any more! Over the last few years in publishing and bookselling we've been assaulted by a rollcall of apparent certainties. As a creative industry wrought with hand-wringing good intentions we've suffered the harsh slap of reality with the growing pains of corporatisation, globalisation and the acceleration of technological change.
However, it might not be obvious, but the number of people reading, and the number of places and formats they can express their passion for ideas, entertainment and information, continues to increase, and it's our job to find these readers, listen to them, engage and deliver.
One of the more hideous things you have to do when you have a book coming out is suck up to other authors in the hope they'll give you a blurb for your jacket. Everybody in this process hates it: the people doing the asking, the people being asked, the third-party friends leaned on to lean on their own contacts. And yet, in the absence of any better ideas, the quote economy chugs on.
At the other end of the spectrum is the novelist Rose Tremain, who said in the Times last week: "I hardly finish any books. Our so-called literary world is now choked with the mediocre and the banal, piles of which arrive through my letter box, soliciting endorsements, every week." One feels her pain: no one wants big slabs of text dropping uninvited on the doormat. On the other hand, cheer up, Rose - maybe one day these dreadful people will go away, and then you'll have problems indeed.
We often can't help judging a book by its cover - but author Jojo Moyes says cliched cover designs are stopping potential readers from picking up books they might like.
Books, on the whole, are designed so readers think they know what they're getting before they even read a word - especially when it comes to those by, or aimed at, women.
But Jojo Moyes, whose most famous novel Me Before You was a huge success, doesn't want her books, or any books by female writers, to be judged in such a superficial way. "So many women who write about quite difficult issues are lumped under the 'chick lit' umbrella," she tells the BBC. "It's so reductive and disappointing - it puts off readers who might otherwise enjoy them." The 48-year-old says she has been "lucky to get a wider audience" but wishes books were presented in a different way, avoiding that age-old cliche about book covers and judging.
You walk into the bookstore. You sit in your folding chair, or on the floor, with your paper cup of wine. The poet approaches the microphone, affably introduces himself, and maybe cracks a joke. He shuffles his papers, launches into his first verse - and all of a sudden, his voice changes completely! Natural conversational rhythms are replaced by a slow, lilting delivery, like a very boring ocean. Long pauses-so long-hang in the air. Try and get comfortable. There's no helping it. You're in for a night of Poet Voice.
For the study, the researchers chose 100 different poets - half born before 1960, and half born after - aiming for "a variety of aesthetic educational backgrounds, as well as some ethnic, racial, class, and sexual diversity," as they write. They found audio and video clips of these poets reading their own poems by scouring websites like PennSound and Poets.org. Then they took the first 60 seconds of these recordings, first chopping off any introductory chit-chat, as most poets use their "normal" voices for that.
23 April 2018
The thing I love about book fairs is that I am obliged to talk about my books and authors for a week to everyone I see, all the time. I may lose my voice and at points my ability to construct a sentence, but the reason I still find this job fascinating after so many years is that there are always new books and new stories about books, and there's the possibility of a new favourite book just around the corner.
I love publishing because it doesn't play to formulae, and something always happens that no-one could predict. It keeps us all on our toes. I can't think of a time when there haven't been challenges in publishing or when the industry hasn't adapted to meet them, but at this moment my particular worry is that the market is being led by the success of a smaller number of titles, and that we are looking at a polarised publishing climate that makes risk-taking more difficult than it should be, particularly for literary fiction. There is a feeling of feast or famine, both on submission and publication, but is this a problem?
The theme of the day seemed to be ‘publishers can and must do more with digital' - whether through integrating it deeper into their business or simply realising that is where their audiences are spending most of their time. Competitor number one isn't another book, it's every other way a potential reader might pass their time. Increasingly that means crushing candy, swiping endlessly through Instagram or ending up in a YouTube black hole of videos. How does one compete in a world of constant distraction?
It's a journey every publisher is going on, and one that becomes increasingly more difficult as the years go on, especially as younger users spend even less time engaging with one medium as the habit of multi-tasking takes hold.
Since that day last December, we've been on an interesting journey and realisation of our own too. Happily, we've managed to raise an investment round to help to grow the business. But in the process it's made us ask questions about what's valuable about our product. Is it the technology? Is it the user base? Is it the engagement metrics, or is something else? What will get investors to sign a cheque and believe in us?
In reality, it turns out none of these things matter as much as you think they would. The number one question we were asked by investors was: How are you going to create great stories? What's the content model? How do you create stories that people will tell their friends about? Now that you've got a format that works, what do you do with it?
Five years ago, I decided that it was time to write my first book. It was the story of how a single dad of five led his kids, his business and himself from disaster to success. At that time, I hadn't written even a single word on the topic. Writing a book seemed like an overwhelming task and I didn't even know where to begin. What kind of book should it be? A self-help, memoir, parenting, leadership or business book? Should I self-publish or try to get a traditional publisher or was there another option? I researched and found 10 individuals who were either experts, consultants or had published books. I got 20 opinions on what to do.
I have recently completed the long and arduous journey of writing a book. Leader of the Pack, a self-published book memoir, even reached No. 1 in self-help, new releases on Amazon. Now I get to brag about having a bestselling book and share how I made it happen. So, here are some the techniques I learned along the way that you'll need to create your best-selling book:
What makes a writer? How do you become one? When I was younger, even asking those questions seemed to disqualify me: a writer isn't something one becomes, I thought, a writer just is. Despite writing, rewriting and reading all through my 20s, I was no closer to completing, let alone publishing, a novel. I realised I would need help if I was going to succeed, and I applied to several creative writing MAs.
Epstein's "tips" were alarmingly specific. "One must have in mind between 68 and 73% of the ending" before starting a story, he advised, tongue only slightly in cheek. Writing about dreams was discouraged, if not outright banned, as were ellipses, abstract nouns and satire.
When Hanya Yanagihara was 10 years old, her father let her visit a pathologist's lab. He was a doctor and an artist, twin interests his young daughter shared so that when the pathologist opened the cadaver, she whipped out a sketch pad and started to draw. "I was always interested in the disease, not the human," she says of that early fascination with medicine, a forensic interest that foreshadowed the themes of her fiction and, 30 years later, found Yanagihara in an unusual life: writing acclaimed novels at night, with a day job as a senior editor at the New York Times.
She expected A Little Life to sell 5,000 copies and would have been happy with that. Instead, it sold tens of thousands and inspired many rapturous reviews, including one in the New Yorker, which described it as a novel that could "drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life" - although, says Yanagihara, it often surprises people that after its success, she couldn't put her feet up and retire. The money, she says, is not "enough for me to live on, which I think people assume it is". One of the many reasons she returned to the New York Times was for the health insurance.
In a groundbreaking study of more than two million books published in North America between 2002 and 2012, scholars found that books by women authors are priced 45% less than those of their male counterparts. The researchers, sociologist Dana Beth Weinberg and mathematician Adam Kapelner, both from Queens College-CUNY, say there is a lot more to the story than can be gleaned from this price gap alone.
The similar pattern might be attributed to the fact that consumers are conditioned to pay less for books by women or within traditionally female genres. But because indie writers are able to set their own book prices, there was more parity in the price of books. So while indie titles are priced lower - on average - than traditionally published books, there was only a 7% price gap overall, compared to the 45% gap in traditional publishing.
"I see them as kind of a great white shark. You don't really want to mess with them." The words are those of a former manager at Amazon - and she is describing her former employer.
It is an apt analogy. Amazon is huge - worth $740bn (£530bn) at Monday night's share price - but it moves fast and is a lethal predator.
One of the 14 business principles set out by founder Jeff Bezos, who started the company in a Seattle garage in 1994, is "think big". Amazon does exactly that. It operates in nine out of the 10 biggest industrial sectors in the US and its scale and control is such that it has been compared to a private company owning the road network. It has also turned Bezos into the world's richest man, worth $130bn.