Writers are turning to the spoken word as their preferred medium, encouraged by a boom in audiobook sales that is transforming publishing.
Links of the week June 4 2018 (23)
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:
11 June 2018
This weekend, audio publisher Audible, owned by Amazon, released an audiobook of Andrew MotionEnglish poet, novelist and biographer; Poet Laureate of United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009; during his laureateship founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work reading 30 mostly unpublished poems as part of his memoir Essex Clay, and thriller writer Brian Freeman has given up on print entirely for his 19th novel, out out next year, which will appear only as an audiobook. "We haven't even thought about print," he said. Just 15 years ago, hardly any of his readers chose audio versions of his books. "Now I hear about them all the time. It made sense to do something specifically for the audio market."
When Michael Lewis had an idea for his next book, a contemporary political narrative, he decided he would test it out first as a 10,000-word magazine article, as he often does before committing to a years-long project.
But this time he made a surprising pivot. Instead of publishing the story in Vanity Fair, where he has been a contributing writer for nearly a decade, he sold it to Audible, the audiobook publisher and retailer.
"You're not going to be able to read it, you're only going to be able to listen to it," Lewis said. "I've become Audible's first magazine writer."
Lewis is part of a growing group of A-list authors bypassing print and releasing audiobook originals, hoping to take advantage of the exploding audiobook market. It's the latest sign that audiobooks are no longer an appendage of print, but a creative medium in their own right. But the rise of stand-alone audio has also made some traditional publishers nervous, as Audible strikes deals directly with writers, including best-selling authors like historian Robert Caro and novelist Jeffery Deaver.
My heart is breaking.
Michael Peck sent me a link to an article in The Guardian about Chuck Palahniuk. Palahniuk is one of the clients of Donadio & Olson, the agency that had a bookkeeper embezzle a minimum of $3.4 million from writers over the past seven years. Palahniuk is one of those writers.
I blogged about this agency and the embezzlement in last week's post. Unfortunately, as I have been telling you all for years now, embezzlement and financial negligence is rampant at big name agencies. Almost none have systems set up to prevent it. Of the four agencies I worked with over the decades, two actively embezzled from me. I was anal with the latter two by constantly monitoring money, so I know they didn't embezzle. They didn't have the chance. But the agencies that did are probably still stealing some of my money. Licensed properties (tie-in books) are tougher to get to switch the paperwork/finances switched away from the agent, so those royalties from some of the smaller companies have never shown up.
Someone on Facebook recently posted to ask me about how to restructure an entire book if it needs a bit of an overhaul. This is something I work with authors on at Avon, and it's also something I had to do for my own book, so I do have a few tips on the best way to approach this. Looking at the structure of your finished novel can feel quite overwhelming - especially when you've already written 100,000 words and can't bear the thought of having to move them all around like a nightmarish jigsaw - but it can also be so, so worth it. The structure of your book is so important, because readers are a discerning bunch and a weak ending or confusing middle will not go down particularly well on publication.
Write down a chapter summary for each of your chapters. This is particularly useful if the book contains a lot of characters or multiple plotlines. Just write a sentence or two after each chapter to sum it up, and if you're writing from several points of view, you could colour code each chapter so that at a glance you can see which points of view are getting the most airtime, and work out whether the POVs are equally spaced. When you have these little summaries, it will become a bit clearer as to which chapters could afford to either be cut, or moved to another part of the book (and still ensure the book makes sense!). You could try writing them on little cards or post-it notes too which you can then move around if you're more of a visual person.
In her opening comments at BookExpo‘s first of three collaborative panel presentations with the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, the AAP's chief Maria A. Pallante firmly set copyright debate into its proper arena: "Good copyright policy is good public policy."
"Fundamentally," Pallante said, "Copyright is about balance. To be rational, it should be flexible enough to encourage innovation and new actors, but strong enough to incentivize and protect the works of authorship that are so central to its purpose."
Last month, Lara Prescott was preparing to graduate from her three-year creative writing fellowship at the University of Texas. Two weeks later, she is sitting on book deals worth at least $2m (£1.5m), after publishers on both sides of the Atlantic battled to get their hands on her first novel.
Prescott's We Were Never Here tells the story of how the CIA smuggled copies of Boris Pasternak's classic novel Doctor Zhivago into Russia during the cold war in an attempt to seed unrest. Drawing from the voices of Pasternak's mistress and muse Olga, as well the women of the CIA typing pool involved in the mission, the novel provoked a fierce bidding war when it was submitted by Prescott's agent last month.
In the UK, 12 publishers fought for the novel, with Penguin Random House publisher Selina Walker winning the bid with a "high six-figure" offer. In the US, Knopf is reported to have paid a seven-figure sum, beating 13 other publishers to the debut. According to Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, this was not the highest bid, but Knopf's history as the original publisher of Doctor Zhivago helped clinch the deal.
If you have been following tech news then you've probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms, but it is thrown around a lot by tech companies trying to get in on the hype.
We've even seen a few companies like Binded or LBRY claim to offer services to authors, and a lot of people in publishing saying that blockchain is the greatest thing since sliced bread. So far, none of the new ideas from either the tech companies or publishing pundits are actually useful to authors, but one day that is going to change. With that in mind, I think now is a good time to go over some basic guidelines on how to evaluate new tech and whether we should use a new tool or service based on that tech.
Independent publisher Salt has raised more than £7,500 after appealing to its supporters to purchase "just one book" to help save the struggling business.
Director of the Norfolk-based press, Chris Hamilton-Emery, told The Bookseller that the firm was in a "very precarious position" after total sales plummeted by 41% in the financial year to April 2018.
"We didn't know whether we could survive and I was talking to my colleagues and said, ‘You know, it would all work if people just bought one book from us.' And we mentioned this on Facebook. Within hours it had gone viral and we did over £30,000 of business, rescuing us", said Hamilton-Emery
The publisher decided to renew the call on Tuesday (29th May) after its recent woes and has since received 445 orders raising more than £7,500.