Recent weeks have seen a flurry of conversation about factchecking in the publishing industry. Two high-profile authors have had their work's accuracy questioned by their sources, leading to something of a reckoning in the book world. Many people are asking how these inaccuracies could have happened, but those familiar with the publishing process say they aren't surprised.
Links of the week May 14 2018 (20)
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:
21 May 2018
These controversies have raised concerns about the accuracy and standards of published books. Similar concerns were circulated earlier this year when Michael Wolff released his book about Donald Trump's White House, Fire and Fury. But what anyone who has never published a book might not realize is that the bar for factchecking books during the editing process is low, if it even exists at all. Not only that, it's common for publishers to never have a conversation with authors about the issue of factchecking and to assume that getting it right is entirely on the author.
Dear Editor:
How do I write a query letter to an agent? -Sally A.
You need to do three things: (1) Determine which agents are right for your book. Check the acknowledgements page in similar titles. Those are likely the agents for you. (2) Do your homework. Tell the agent why she's right for your book. (3) Write an intelligent, clear letter describing how your book differs from others in its field, who the readership is, and why it will sell well.
Ebook sales are dying. 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 insanely popular.
If the short definition of cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas to be true, ebooks are about as dissonant as digital content gets.
Yet ebooks may also represent a chapter in the still-being-written story of how keeping track of what's happening with content hasn't always kept pace with the technology that's transformed it.
Let's start with the bad news. Two new sets of numbers covering 2017 show ebook sales are on the decline, both in terms of unit and dollar sales. The first, released in April by market research firm NPD's PubTrack Digital, saw the unit sales of ebooks fall 10 percent in 2017 compared to 2016. In absolute numbers, that meant the roughly 450 publishers represented saw ebook sales drop from 180 million units to 162 million over a year's time. The second, just released by the American Association of Publishers, reported a decline in overall revenue for ebooks, a year-to-year decrease of 4.7 percent in 2017. AAP tracks sales data from more than 1,200 publishers.
Philip Roth, the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in 20th-century literature, died on Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.
In the course of a very long career, Mr. Roth took on many guises - mainly versions of himself - in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man. He was a champion of Eastern European novelists like Ivan Klima and Bruno Schulz, and also a passionate student of American history and the American vernacular. And more than just about any other writer of his time, he was tireless in his exploration of male sexuality.
The e-book landscape is shifting and authors who stay current will find rich opportunities.
It has never been easier to publish your own e-book. The wealth of tools, platforms, and services available to self-publishers continues to grow and be refined for an ever-broader reach and greater efficiency. But with so many good options, it is also more important than ever for authors to choose carefully how best to position themselves for the greatest chance of engaging the largest possible audience.
The first major choice a self-published author makes is which major retailers (Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes & Noble Nook Press, Kobo, Apple iBookstore) and distributors (Smashwords, BookBaby, Blurb) to use to publish his or her e-book. These services are for the most part nonexclusive, so an author holds on to her rights and can use any or all of them simultaneously%u2014making revisions, price changes, or removing the work altogether, whenever she chooses. This makes it desirable for an author to distribute across as many platforms as possible, typically publishing with Amazon and then using Smashwords or BookBaby to distribute to all other major retailers.
I'm sometimes asked whether, now that I've written several books, the process has gotten easier, but the truth is this: what you learn from writing a book is how to write that book. I wouldn't have it any other way. The pleasure, for me at least, is figuring it out as you go. But I do have a few bits of advice.
1. Write what you want to write. Sometimes, especially when we are starting out, we look around at what other people have written, and we think we see The Kinds of Things People Are Supposed To Write. Guard against this. If you aren't interested in writing a coming of age story, then don't write one. If you don't feel drawn by the idea of an intersection of disparate people that will leave all parties changed, don't write that. A story in epistolary form - don't do it if it doesn't feel necessary. Trust yourself.
Amazon has been fighting fake reviews since at least 2012. They have deleted scads of reviews, banned paid reviews, filed suit against several batches of fake review perpetrators, and even forbidden authors from having any type of relationship with reviewers.
And it's still not enough. Fake reviews are still being posted, mostly due to an underlying problem.
Amazon has an automation problem. This company uses bots to run almost every aspect of the Kindle Store from detecting fake reviews to checking the formatting in ebooks and finding fraud in Kindle Unlimited, but the bots don't work very well. This leads to situations where innocent authors are punished because Amazon's bots think the authors are scamming Kindle Unlimited while the actual scammers continue to operate at a massive scale.
14 May 2018
Whether you're an author, publisher or book discovery startup, a mailing list might well be the most valuable asset in your toolbox. A bold statement, no doubt, but one which is rooted in digital reality. As acclaimed blogger Jeff Goins puts it: "At 4.9 billion email accounts worldwide, email outnumbers all the users on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and every other social media channel - combined. That makes it the world's largest social network."
Unlike a newsfeed, your mailing list belongs to you, and you alone. It future-proofs your content from the vagaries of social media. Your newsletter projects your voice, directly and intimately. It is exclusive. But building a critical mass of loyal subscribers - rich in both quantity and quality - demands certain prerequisites.
Ah, book writing. For most people, it is not a viable (or at least not a reliable) source of income, but for the lucky and/or talented few, it can be pretty lucrative. Extremely lucrative, in some cases! Six-figure book deals used to be the gasp-worthy news in the literary world, but over the years, it's been upped to seven. But who exactly is getting paid?
For the purposes of this list, I'm limiting the field to literary fiction sold over the last ten years-mostly because it's the genre with the fewest, and therefore most notable, big-money deals (other than poetry, I suppose). Yes, the Obamas sold their books for "well into eight figures," but it's hard to compare a deal like that to one for a highbrow novel or a story collection. I'm also limited to information that is publicly available-or at least available on Publishers Marketplace-so I'll make no claims that this is anything close to a complete list. Lots of deals are not reported in the public sphere, and for instance, while I've heard certain rumors, and while I'd wager that Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner and other big-name authors have gotten sizeable advances for recent books, I haven't found any specific intel to that effect, and so I can't swear to it.
The thriving market for ebooks has prompted many authors to turn to Amazon Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) for book distribution. But with great sales opportunities come great pitfalls.
Self-published authors, according to Author Earnings, are verifiably capturing at least 24%-34% of all ebook sales in each of the five English-language markets, including the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When including uncategorized authors, the vast majority of whom are self-published, the true indie share in each market lies somewhere between 30%-40%, the study shows. A later Author Earnings update of these data shows that taken all together, Amazon accounts for more than 80% of English-language ebook purchases. Amazon has one goal when you publish through Kindle Direct. This worldwide monopoly doesn%u2019t want you to go anywhere else for anything else related to publishing (or any other product for that matter), whether it is designing a book cover or interior layout or producing the programming code necessary to have a book published in digital form.
Back in 2011 my co-author Louise Voss and I were at the crest of the first wave of self-publishing that followed the release of the Kindle in the UK. We held the top two positions on the Amazon chart and, after many years of trying to "make it" as an author, I finally had readers and was making some money from my writing.
Louise and I were soon signed by a major trade publisher in a four-book deal, including the two novels we'd already self-published. Unfortunately, that experience was disappointing for everyone, and the books didn't sell as well as we all had hoped. So at the start of 2013 I found myself broke and close to despair, thinking my writing career was already over. In desperate need of cash - and wanting to prove that there were still readers out there who would love my books if they knew about them - I decided to self-publish a solo novel, The Magpies.
Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattan's moneyed status-seekers in works like "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," "The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities," died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.
"As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world," Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. "His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia' 57 times."
William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: "He is probably the most skillful writer in America - I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else."
It has been easy, in the last few years, to reread Tom Wolfe and find him horribly dated. After the announcement of his death on Monday, I went back to my copy of The New Journalism for the first time in a decade and found myself tutting in annoyance, or as Wolfe himself might have put it, going tskkkkuh-fnmmm-ught. All those made-ups words and jaunty phrases; the testosterone; the punctuation. Lord, the punctuation. And then I thought of where I was when I first read Wolfe and felt my heart crater.
Tom Wolfe obituary: a great dandy, in elaborate dress and neon-lit prose
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It's not an interesting story. I was on a bus in 1994. It was the 280 service between Aylesbury and Oxford and it was one of those occasions when the mind-blowing effect of the book you are reading forever cements what you saw when you looked up from the page. Boiling hot day, empty bus, spriggy hedgerows through the window and oh my word - I remember it so vividly - these mad sentences I couldn't believe it was actually legal to write.
Wolfe was different: grander, more outrageous, less inclined to censor himself than the others. He was that strange combination of above-it-all with his white suit and cane, and elbow-deep in the mud and the hustle. I had wondered if the obituaries would be unkind, given the fact that, looked at through the lens of today's sensitivities, much of what he wrote is completely unacceptable. But the tone of the coverage was largely affectionate, as people paid tribute not only to him but to the memory of themselves when they read him.
Author Jojo Moyes has pledged to save Quick Reads from closure by funding the adult literacy programme for the next three years.
The Me Before You (Michael Joseph) author offered to provide the costs of running the scheme after reading about its struggle to secure the £120,000-a-year needed to continue in The Bookseller last month. The money will ensure the campaign will be rescued from closure, and that coordinators The Reading Agency can commission another series of short and accessible titles from famous authors in 2020.
The author revealed she was was "completely dumbfounded" on learning of the scheme's closure and is believed to have donated around £360,000 to help it continue.
"Having written a Quick Reads myself [Paris for One, in 2015] and spoken to readers who had benefited from the scheme, I knew how important it was," she told The Bookseller. "It is relatively low cost and loved by authors, publishers and readers. At a time when libraries are ever more endangered, it seemed a completely regressive move to lose Quick Reads." She added: "I can see how it helps reading because I get so many emails from people who have said they read my Quick Read title [to start with] and have gone on to other things, so I know my book won't be the last thing they have read."