I've been both a children's book editor and author for roughly a decade. This means that I'm sometimes trying to defend an author's behavior to my publishing friends, or trying to explain an editor's moves to my writer friends. Often, authors and their editors operate as a team, but sometimes it feels like we're playing on opposite sides, and I think that happens when one side doesn't really understand the other's perspective.
Links of the week July 30 2018 (31)
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:
6 August 2018
To try to bridge that gap, I asked a number of authors, "What do you wish your editors knew?" And I asked a number of editors, "What do you wish your authors knew?" And, of course, I thought long and hard about my own answers to both of those questions.
The responses that I got showed an extraordinary amount of respect and collaboration between authors and editors. They showed commonalities between the two groups that one doesn't always expect of the other-for example, everyone is truly and personally devastated when the published book underperforms, and everyone wants positive reinforcement.
What we value most in a blog is passion, extensive knowledge of all aspects of self-publishing, consistency, and clean, clear, entertaining prose. All of these blogs meet those standards, and they can have a huge, positive impact on your self-publishing success if you let them.
All blogs are not created equal -- especially when it comes to those about self-publishing. Many are written by authors who are primarily interested in selling their books, others by "experts" who want to sell their services, and then there are those that are so chock full of entertaining stories and down-to-earth, practical advice that you can't afford to miss them, even if they also might happen to suggest you purchase their books or services.
Some time ago, I found myself in need of a vacation read. I am a book critic, so this was an easily solved problem: I perused the enormous pile of books on my desk that had been sent to me by publishers, found a galley that didn't look too dark or esoteric, and set out for the beach with it. Bookburners, it was called.
Many pages later, I put down the book in a state of profound confusion. I wasn't confused by the plot, which was deeply readable: It was the story of a black ops team working on behalf of the Vatican to exorcise demons from books, and it followed the team all over the world as they traveled to one beautiful city after another to kick demon butt.
Nor was I confused by the writing, which was zippy and fun, if oddly variable from chapter to chapter.
But I couldn't make heads or tails of the structure.
The children's book publishing world has been roiling for the past week over the disclosure that Danielle Smith, the principal of Lupine Grove Creative, an agency specializing in children's and YA authors, acted more like a literary grifter than a literary agent. Since Smith emailed a letter to her clients on July 24, confessing that recently she had "not handled a situation as well as I should have" and thus was dissolving the agency effective immediately, 19 former clients have reached out to PW, sharing tales of a pattern of malfeasance that has shaken their confidence and adversely affected their careers.
More than 60 writers whom Smith has represented at some point between 2013 and 2018 have joined a private Facebook group, where they are sharing information and commiserating with one another. While there is much speculation as to why Smith treated her clients the way she did, and the extent of the deceptions, nobody really has any answers-including Kendrick, who worked remotely from San Francisco. Kendrick says she was taken completely by surprise by Smith's letter and has spent her time since "finding a new home for my clients." She added, "As far as my working relationship with Danielle goes, it was professional and helpful, and she was always responsive to me and my clients, so this was just a shock all around."
People are always saying, "I have an idea for a story." But if a story starts in an idea it might as well give up and be a novel. I think ransacking your mind for story ideas builds up an immunity to the mysterious form itself. At some point you have to bow to the story's elusiveness and refusal of paraphrase, that is, of expression as an idea. As Lucia Berlin said, "Thank God I don't write with my brain."
In my own love of stories and long struggle with them, I've always had very short ones in the drawer that seemed to me an escape from what I was "really" doing. They weren't fragments, because they had endings, but they had ended after letting go of the full story and going somewhere else. A few got into my collections. But lately I've realized that the impatience in these stories is their reason for being. It is an impatience with depth, with supplying corroborative details, and thus, with reason. In a poem, reason can and often must be cast off.
Authors' organisations have revealed an "ever-increasing" demand on financial hardship grants, with new applications to the Royal Literary Fund Old-established British organisation which is using substantial new funds from writers' estates for excellent new scheme offering grants to published writers, who act as 'fellows' helping to improve students' writing in higher education institutions. The fellows each have a page and contact details on the website. www.rlf.org.uk
The RLF is a 238-year-old benevolent fund which helps writers in financial difficulty. New applications from writers applying for the first time increased from 23 in 2013 to 34 last year, chief executive Eileen Gunn told The Bookseller, while many others reapply each year. Altogether the RLF helped support 200 writers last year including those who have suffered debilitating illnesses, accidents and housing problems.
Meanwhile the Society of Authors (SoA) has revealed an "ever-increasing number of applications" to its contingency funds "from authors who are struggling to make a living", its chairman Nicola Solomon [pictured] told The Bookseller. The society has also called on the government to take action in its newly published evidence into a parliamentary inquiry into authors' earnings.
Solomon agrees that diminished advances have had an effect as well as large discounts on books. She told The Bookseller: "Deep discounting, diminishing advances and low royalty rates all have an impact on authors' incomes. We want to work with publishers to improve financial transparency and find ways to ensure that authors who produce quality work can make a sustainable living, and will no longer have to resort to crowdfunding healthcare because the state and industry have left creators out in the cold."
Experienced authors tend to chastise vanity press victims for not doing sufficient research, but the murky web of vanity partnerships - and the uncritical coverage which invariably accompanies same - makes it difficult for newer writers to chart a safe path.
Some vanity presses are very good at crafting a veneer of legitimacy, one which can be very convincing to those starting out. Infamous vanity press conglomerate Author Solutions figured this out very early on, creating partnerships with Penguin, Harlequin, Writer's Digest, Random House, HarperCollins/Thomas Nelson, Hay House, Reader's Digest, Lulu, and Barnes & Noble.
Of course, the greatest trick that Author Solutions ever pulled was getting itself purchased by Penguin in 2012 - a move which gave it instant credibility, but also generated a huge outcry among writers, particularly after a couple of class actions revealed the grim nature of its business practices in forensic detail.
However, Penguin Random House now seems to have quietly severed all links with Author Solutions.
30 July 2018
Has anyone ever said you should write a book? Maybe extraordinary things have happened to you, and they say you should write a memoir. Or you have an extremely vivid imagination, and they say you should write a novel. Maybe your kids are endlessly entertained at bedtime, and they say you should write a children's book. Perhaps you just know how everything should be and imagine your essay collection will set the world straight.
Everyone has a book in them, right?
I hate to break it to you but everyone does not, in fact, have a book in them.
I am a literary agent. It is my full-time job to find new books and help them get published. When people talk about "having a book in them," or when people tell others they should write a book (which is basically my nightmare), what they really mean is I bet someone, but probably not me because I already heard it, would pay money to hear this story. When people say "you should write a book," they aren't thinking of a physical thing, with a cover, that a human person edited, copyedited, designed, marketed, sold, shipped, and stocked on a shelf. Those well-meaning and supportive people rarely know how a story becomes printed words on a page. Here's what they don't know, and what most beginner writers might not realize, either.
Before trying to answer this very important question, it is useful to ask yourself another one: "Why should I get my book published?" What do you hope to achieve by releasing your work into the world, and what would success look like to you? Because knowing what you want from being published will help you find the best way to achieve it.
There are about 184,000 books published every year in the UK, which most people in the industry would agree is too many. Even so, you should see some of the proposals that don't make it. As a former newspaper literary editor, a freelance book editor and a commissioning editor at a book publisher, I can tell you that there's a lot of rubbish out there. The positive news is that good authors can easily stand out.
George R.R. Martin is best known for his fantasy magnum opus, the A Song of Ice and Fire series, but his work has influenced all corners of the genre fiction world, from science fiction to mysteries and thrillers. PW spoke with Martin, who gave the keynote address and was honored as the International Thriller Writers' ThrillerMaster at the organization's 13th ThrillerFest, held in Manhattan from July 10-14, about his new book and more.
I was using the term "fake history" for a number of years, and some of my readers actually took umbrage at that. They didn't like the term-they felt that it was demeaning, and that I was demeaning my own work. As much as I might steal from real history, file off the serial numbers, do my own version of it, and draw inspiration from it, it's not meant to take its place, or suggest that there's any level of reality to it. So I thought imaginary history was a good way to describe it.
Everyone thinks they have a book in them. Eighty-one percent of Americans think so, at least according to one estimate. Since that drive to write a book is so common, scams are constantly springing up in the book publishing industry, all aimed at fleecing optimistic and naive author wannabes. However, the most popular publishing scam of the 1990s by far, reading fees, has today receded into the background, even as the total amount of industry scams has grown. To explain why, we need to examine the rapid evolution of the publishing industry itself.
Victoria Strauss, author and cofounder of the publishing industry watchdog group Writer Beware, spoke with me about how the most common publishing scams have changed over the past few decades.
"A reading fee is a fee charged by a literary agent for reading a submitted manuscript - typically, anywhere from $50 to a few hundred dollars," Strauss explains. "The idea is that the agent is investing valuable time to read the manuscript - which, if they wind up rejecting the manuscript, will be uncompensated. So why shouldn't they request a fee to offset this?" While some agents did indeed only accept and charge for manuscripts that they would genuinely consider, others opened the floodgates, leading on any would-be authors willing to pay up in order to have a manuscript "read."
Last week, the literary lawsuit against Chad Harbach's 2011 bestseller, The Art of Fielding, was dismissed. This week, Charles Green-the author of the unpublished novel Bucky's 9th that Green believes Harbach mined for plot points and other elements-said he is going to appeal. I've followed the case since it cropped up in 2017 because I've been writing a novel about baseball and because (why lie?) I enjoy literary gossip. But also because I've been wondering when someone was going to mention the thing that instantly popped into my mind: The Simpsons did it.
Writing consists of basically two things: idea and execution. You come up with an idea, and you figure out how to execute it in terms of style, setting, and genre. Writers are understandably protective of our ideas, but for better or worse the law only really protects execution. Unless someone is directly stealing your exact words, it is nearly impossible to prove that they took the idea. And it probably wouldn't be a good thing if it did. As I've argued before, the history of literature is the history of remixing existing ideas in new ways. Prevent people from reusing an existing idea, and you end literature.
July 1, 2018, marked the fifth anniversary of the completion of the Penguin Group-Random House merger, a deal that created the world's largest trade publisher, which had $3.4 billion in global sales in 2017. That revenue total was generated by a company that has 275 worldwide imprints, sells some 700 million books per year, and publishes 14,000 new releases annually, all produced by about 10,000 employees. And PRH legacy and current imprints have published more than 60 Nobel laureates.
Though Dohle was confident Penguin and Random House would mesh, he acknowledged that he was "happily surprised how quickly we became one company." He attributed that, in part, to the respect employees from both companies had for publishing the best books possible. And it didn't hurt, Dohle noted, that many people had worked at both companies over the course of their careers. Five years into the merger, about half of the PRH staff were employees who began working at PRH after the merger.
For most of Prime Day, Amazon's annual sales bonanza, an unfamiliar face topped the site's Author Rank page: Mike Omer, a 39-year-old Israeli computer engineer and self-published author whose profile picture is a candid shot of a young, blond man in sunglasses sitting on grass. He was-and at the time of this writing, still is-ranked above J.K. Rowling (No.8), James Patterson (No. 9), and Stephen King (No. 10) in sales of all his books on Amazon.com. His most recent book is ranked tenth on Amazon Charts, which Amazon launched after The New York Times stopped issuing e-book rankings, and which measures sales of individual books on Amazon. (The company does not disclose the metrics behind Author Rank, which is still in beta.)
Omer is one of a growing number of authors who have found self-publishing on Amazon's platform to be very lucrative. While he may not be as familiar a name as the big authors marketed by traditional publishing houses, and may not have as many total book sales, Omer is making an enviable living from his writing. Sales of his first e-book, Spider's Web, and its sequels, allowed him to quit his job and become a full-time author. Now, he makes more money than he did as a computer engineer. "I'm making a really nice salary, even by American standards," he said.
Kingsley Amis is best remembered today as the author of comic novels-perhaps even the pre-eminent writer in that genre during the second half of the 20th century. But you would hardly guess it if you looked just at his output from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. This was Kingsley Amis's midlife crisis, and it showed up in the strangest sort of way.
Other aging males in this situation would solve their midlife crisis by buying a fancy sports car, but Amis didn't know how to drive. So instead he turned to James Bond. Agent 007 was truly the right hero for the right author, a stylish gent who could save the world, meet a deadline, and still not miss cocktail hour. If Bond could defeat SPECTRE and SMERSH, surely he could help a 40-something bloke get back on his feet again?