British publishing houses broke all previous revenue records in 2017 to see their collective sales rise 5% to £5.7bn, driven by a growth in export sales which now account for 60% of publishers' revenues. However, while most areas of business performed robustly, domestic sales of textbooks to schools took a 12% hit, revealing that savage public sector cuts are starting to bite in the education. Sales of children's books also slid by 3%, while domestic sales of consumer e-books plunged by 9%.
Links of the week July 9 2018 (28)
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 July 2018
David Shelley, c.e.o. of Hachette UK, said: "The story of 2017 in consumer publishing is one of a sector showing remarkable resilience - material increases in sales for both fiction and non-fiction, and a buoyant underlying market for children's books...All told, given a challenging high street environment for book retailers in the UK and increasing competition for people's time and attention, the 2017 numbers speak to the creativity and innovation of the UK trade publishing industry and show it to be in excellent health, with an increasing international focus."
Reading ebooks and print are on the decline and everyone involved in retail and the publishing industry are trying to figure out why. Are people simply not reading for pleasure anymore and consuming original Netflix content or listening to Spotify? What we do know is that between 2003 and 2016, the amount of time that the average American devoted to reading for personal interest on a daily basis dropped from 0.36 hours to 0.29 hours.
Here are some heart wrenching statistics. 33% of high school graduates never read another book the rest of their lives and 42% of college grads never read another book after college. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years and 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
Biography combines history, psychology, and gossip, and there will always be a market for its insights into the Life (how careers crest or crater) and the Times (the context of each life) of a stranger.
Students of US politics, for example, hunger for a fifth volume of two-time Pulitzer-winning author Robert A. Caro's biography of thirty-sixth president Lyndon B. Johnson. Aside from the jaw-dropping details about Johnson's personal habits (issuing orders to subordinates while he defecated) and political achievements (the Great Society), there is Caro's larger theme. In his words, "I always wanted to use the life of a man to examine political power, because democracy shapes our lives."
Caro may dominate the biography world today, but five volumes, totalling many thousands of pages, about Johnson with publication spread over nearly three decades?
In twenty-five years, how many readers will want a heavyweight linear narrative about a Dead White Male? How many publishers will support such a marathon?
Whether you've been blogging for a while, began this year or are setting up your blog for a New Year launch, I know what you want. You want to create the best blogging year possible. You want to attract lots of visitors, gain tons of subscribers and even make some money on your services and products, which could include a book you blogged. How can you do that?
Let me tell you...
I've heard the reasons why most people don't manifest their dreams or achieve their goals. Maybe you've said something similar: You don't have the money. You don't have the time. Your significant other (or your mother or siblings or friends) won't approve. You don't think you're good enough, smart enough, expert enough, old enough, or young enough. You have too many responsibilities.
The loving and attentive reader of children's books knows that the best of them are not one-dimensional oversimplifications of life but stories that tackle with elegant simplicity such complexities as uncertainty, loneliness, loss, and the cycle of life. And anyone who sits with this awareness for a moment becomes suddenly skeptical of the very notion of a "children's" book.
Maurice Sendak certainly knew that when he scoffed in his final interview: "I don't write for children. I write - and somebody says, ‘That's for children!'" Seven decades earlier, J.R.R. Tolkien had articulated the same sentiment, with more politeness and academic rigor, in his terrific essay on why there is no such thing as writing "for children." But one of the finest, most charming and most convincing renunciations of the myths about writing for children comes from E.B. White, nearly two decades after he sneezed Charlotte's Web.
When the interviewer asks whether there is "any shifting of gears" in writing children's books, as opposed to the grownup nonfiction for which he is best known, White responds with the rare combination of conviction and nuance:
Anybody who shifts gears when he writes for children is likely to wind up stripping his gears. But I don't want to evade your question. There is a difference between writing for children and for adults. I am lucky, though, as I seldom seem to have my audience in mind when I am at work. It is as though they didn't exist.
Last year, some of the best-selling books in the world were poetry books, created by Instagram Poets like Rupi Kaur, Atticus, Nayyirah Waheed, and Nikita Gill. These poets, whose work appears in visual form all over social media and garners hundreds of thousands of followers, often found success in choosing to self-publish poetry. This way, they controlled the look and feel of the finished product, and they were able to get their book into the hands of their followers faster than with traditional publishing.
Some of the most famous poetry books of all time were originally self-published and self-marketed, like Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. There's a long tradition of success with self-published poets, and this new generation is finding an audience dedicated to buying print. Success as a poet doesn't depend on traditional publishing - now, less than ever. Have your own collection of poems? Here's how to put your work in print, so it's ready for the delight of your friends, fans, and followers:
Twenty-eight million American adults read poetry this year - the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years, according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau.
"We've never seen an increase in poetry reading. If anything there had been a decline - a pretty sharp decline - since about 2002 at least," said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis.
Young adults and certain racial ethnic groups account for a large portion of the increase. U.S. poetry readers aged 18 to 24 more than doubled, jumping from 8 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2017. Among people of color, African Americans and Asian Americans are reading poetry at the highest rates - which more than doubled in the last five years - up 15 and 12 percent, respectively. Other notable increased readership groups include women, rural Americans and those with only some college education.
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple's treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25% of the global corpus of research knowledge is open access, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market floatation due to a lack of interest. This announcement came just days after Couperin, a French consortium, cancelled its subscriptions to Springer Nature journals, after Swedish and German universities cancelled their Elsevier subscriptions to no ill effect, besides replenished library budgets. At the same time, Elsevier has sued Sci-Hub, a website that provides free, easy access to 67 million research articles. All evidence of a broken system.
A record-breaking year for publishers has been greeted with renewed demands for authors to receive a bigger slice of income and investment, as sales of books passed the £5.7bn mark in 2017.
Book sales income was up 5% on the previous year, according to annual figures released by the Publishers Association. In sharp contrast, a recent survey of authors' earnings revealed a 42% drop over the last decade, with the median annual income now below £10,500.
However, authors contrasted the figures with a long-term decline in pay and investment in writers, particularly those yet to have a breakout bestseller. The author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier, said: "Authors have seen their earnings chipped away at while publishers thrive.
"Most writers cobble together a living from several sources: teaching, journalism, and odd jobs. Writing is just one shrinking source of income. Shrink it enough and people will stop writing altogether. It literally won't be worth it."
9 July 2018
Reliably, every year or so, you'll see headlines about new research that claims author incomes are on the decline. The most recent is from the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), a British nonprofit run by writers for writers. (Download the report here).
Before I continue with this epic-length post, here's the short version: I don't trust these surveys' results and I question their usefulness in improving the fortunes of writers. Too often it feels like promotion of a self-interested narrative from writers' organizations, with the outcome boring and predictable: There is media coverage that claims writers' incomes are plummeting, a few big-name authors come out and try to shame publishers or even society for not valuing writers properly, debate ensues, then everyone gets back to work-until a new study emerges.
This latest gnashing of teeth has motivated me to finally write a comprehensive post about why these reports are so frustrating, in the hopes more people will ask critical questions and notice their flaws. In the long run, I hope organizations will either reassess how these studies get done, or focus on more useful support of professional authors. However, a brief side note for industry insiders: For the purposes of this article, I'm setting aside the fact this research may be done mainly to support arguments and legislation for strengthening and protecting of authors' copyright and thus (presumably) their earnings potential. Frankly, I don't think weak copyright law is the problem, and I believe such efforts have little effect on the average author.
Films based on books take 44% more at the box office in the UK and 53% more worldwide than original screenplays, research from the Publishers Association (PA) has shown.
The trade body's landmark report titled ‘Publishing's contribution to the wider creative industries' has shown that films based on literary sources "tend to have substantially higher grosses" than those based on original scripts.
The research found that films based on books took 44% more box office revenue in the UK (£5.4m) and 53% more globally ($91m or £68m) than those based on original scripts.
Meanwhile, 43% of the top 20 box office-grossing films in the UK between 2007 and 2016 were based on books, with a further 9% based on comic books.The report reads: "In short, published material is the basis of 52% of top UK films in the last 10 years, and accounts for an even higher share of revenue from these leading performers, at 61% of UK box office gross and 65% of worldwide gross.
Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn explains why she wants to see "every kind of woman" represented as the TV version of her novel Sharp Objects reaches the screen.
When Gone Girl became a best-seller, some people were taken aback by its protagonist Amy, played by Rosamund Pike in the film.
The problem was, she just wasn't... nice.
And that's exactly the way Gillian Flynn, who wrote the book on which the 2014 film was based, wanted it.
It wasn't the author's first rodeo either, having set out her stall creating dark, complex female lead characters with her 2006 debut Sharp Objects.
That novel has now also been adapted the screen. It stars Amy Adams as Camille, a journalist with a troubled past who is sent to her hometown to report on a young girl's murder.
So why did Flynn decide to write such disturbed, and at times disturbing, characters? Well, you can blame so-called "chick lit".
Kurt Vonnegut's caution against the use of semicolons is one of the most famous and canonical pieces of writing advice, an admonition that has become, so to speak, one of The Rules. More on these rules later, but first the infamous quote in question: "Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
To begin with the lowest-hanging fruit here-fruit that is actually scattered rotting on the ground-the "transvestite hermaphrodite" bit has not aged well. The quote also, it seems, may have been taken out of context, as it is followed by several more sentences of puzzlingly offensive facetiousness, discussed here.
But however serious Vonnegut was being, the idea that semicolons should be avoided has been fully absorbed into popular writing culture. It is an idea pervasive enough that I have had students in my writing classes ask about it: How do I feel about semicolons? They'd heard somewhere (as an aside, the paradoxical mark of any maxim's influence and reach is anonymity, the loss of the original source) that they shouldn't use them. To paraphrase Edwin Starr, semicolons - and rules about semicolons - what are they good for?
With unit sales of print books rising 4% in the adult nonfiction segment-the industry's largest major category-total unit sales for the first half of 2018 increased 2% over the comparable period in 2017 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The gain follows a 3% increase in six-month unit sales in the first half of 2017 over 2016. The strength in adult nonfiction offset a 4% decline in sales in the adult fiction segment. Overall, total units in the first half of 2018 were 316.8 million, up from 310.7 million in the first half of 2017.
Adult fiction sales suffered from yet another period where no new novel broke out in print. (Though several did sell briskly in e-book). The top-selling new novel in the first half of 2018 was The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, which sold nearly 384,000 copies in the first six months of 2018. Stephen King''s The Outsider was the second-most popular new adult fiction title in the first six months of the year, selling over 275,000 copies. In the first six months of 2017, two backlist novels led the adult fiction chart - A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman sold 451,000 copies, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale sold 325,000 copies.
Growing up in Minnesota, Helen Hoang suffered from crippling social anxiety and struggled to make friends. She found refuge in romance novels, frothy stories that allowed her to experience intense feelings that were clearly spelled out on the page, always with the promise of a happy ending. "It was like I found a pure, undiluted drug," she said.
Many years later, as a mother of two in her 30s, Ms. Hoang began researching autism and realized that she's on the spectrum, a condition that makes it difficult for her to hold casual conversations, read emotional cues, have an office job and meet new people. She once again turned to romance. But this time, she wrote the story herself.
So far, romance fans have swooned over Ms. Hoang's debut novel, "The Kiss Quotient," a multicultural love story centered on an autistic woman who has trouble navigating the nuances of dating and courtship. Readers have flooded the website Goodreads with more than 7,000 positive ratings, and the book, which was published in June, is already in its fourth printing.
Have you ever considered changing genre? I hadn't before last year when the decision was taken out of my hands. My debut women's fiction novel, Forgive Me Not, is out two weeks today. It's my tenth book. The other nine are romcoms, the latest being One Summer in Rome, all of them published under the wonderful HarperCollins umbrella. I now have a new publisher, the amazing Canelo - so also a new editor. After all most five years of being a published author this is quite a change.
But the story wasn't funny. The main thrust of it wasn't romantic. I wasn't sure how my writing style would fit this new genre. I wasn't sure if I was up to writing in a new way with no one-liners, nor a humorous tone. I didn't know if my readers would follow me along my new path.
But I had to do it. So with the guidance of my incredible agent I started. And it was tough. The first draft virtually needed to be scratched and I almost gave up. But a writer's heart is a powerful tool. It kept nudging me and eventually I began again with renewed passion.
Step into any bookshop today and you'll find too many compendiums of feminist heroines designed for both children and adults. The books might be recently published, but the formula is well-established: colourful illustrations opposite short descriptions of the lives and works of pioneering women such as Jane Austen, Frida Kahlo and Hillary Clinton. This publishing avalanche owes its existence to a single commercial success: 2017's Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.
Italians Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, who are romantic partners as well as co-founders of their own company based in California, longed to correct the gender imbalance they saw in the world of children's media. In 2016, the idea of a children's book with the word "rebel" in its title came to them. As Favilli explained to the Bookseller magazine, "Rebel is usually considered a negative word... especially when it's associated with women." Within months of starting a crowd-funding campaign for the project on Kickstarter, they had raised $1m. Rebel Girls became the most funded original book in the history of crowd-funding.