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 30 2018 (18)
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.