In an open letter this month addressed to members of the Authors Guild, the organization's vice president, the American author Richard Russo, has warned that tech companies' operations in the content space may increasingly threaten writers' livelihoods and recognition.
Links of the week August 13 2018 (33)
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:
20 August 2018
"Traditional publishers may have underpaid us," Russo writes, "but at least to them we were poets and painters and songwriters, terms that implied both respect and ownership of what we made, at least until we've sold it to them.
"The tech ethos is different. To them, we're often seen as mere hirelings. And since those who hire us are in the business of business, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to pay us as little as they can get away with and to make certain we understand that we're mere workers, not partners in the enterprise."
A great book cover, a marketing plan, and a cool author website are all important, but if an author hasn't spent the time and money for a solid editing job, it's all just wasted effort.
The reading public has no time for badly edited, error-ridden books.
That's true in the traditional publishing world, of course-but it's even more relevant for indie authors. Sloppy work tars everyone.
Every time a badly edited book is published, it chips away at the reputation of the self-published writers who aren't producing rubbish," says Gary Smailes, cofounder of BubbleCow, a U.K.-based company that provides editing and proofreading services to indie authors around the world. "But readers are more forgiving of self-published writers if they appear to have taken a real effort."
Indeed, a book with no errors is a rare thing. Mistakes frequently even make their way into the thoroughly vetted books that come out of big, traditional publishing houses, where professional editors and proofreaders rake manuscripts with the finest of fine-tooth combs. And that's despite the fact that most manuscripts go through an intensive editing process before they're even accepted by a literary agent and shopped around.
This year's International Book Fair is to feature a new, dedicated children's publishing strand, to help cater to a "booming" market for kids' books in China.
According to the Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association (LIMA), China is now the fifth-largest licensed market in the world-and it is still growing rapidly, particularly for children's content. Publishers have said that the relaxing of China's one-child policy, coupled with the cultural emphasis on reading and education, gives the market sizeable potential for growth. "We can never underestimate the sheer size of the Chinese population as well as their enthusiasm for children's education", says Paula Ziedna, foreign-language operations director at Usborne. "Chinese publishers' buying power has grown significantly in recent years, together with their appetite for [a broader] variety of titles. China is one of the rare markets where there is no limit as to the topics that can sell, as the market is so large."
When it comes to determining what the best service for print on demand books is, there's no easy answer. It depends on a number of factors, including: the type of book you're printing, your budget, your plans for online distribution, whether you want to distribute to brick-and-mortar bookstores, and the quality of the printers.
To ensure we got the real indie author experience, we printed a copy of Not the Faintest Trace - a novel by Reedsy author Wendy M. Wilson, formatted through the Reedsy Book Editor, and designed by Patrick Knowles - from the four print-on-demand companies. We then had each copy delivered to Reedsy HQ so that we could review the quality, look, and feel of each proof.
‘When you've been used to spending most of your time switching between one digital activity and another in a matter of seconds,' says San Diego researcher Jean M. Twenge, long-form immersive reading is a tall order.
It's perfectly understandable that one of the least popular comments researchers can make around book publishers these days is that young people are reading less. Nevertheless, when the point is put forward with the weight of scientific studies behind it, it's hard to deny that the trend is deeply underway - toward short-form bursts of reading and writing on one social medium or another, and away from the long-form immersive-reading experience of a book.
Today would have been the 98th birthday of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, who (by no small coincidence) also happened to know a thing or two about writing. Like many American children, I grew up on Bradbury-"The Veldt" remains my favorite of his stories-but as I became a writer myself I began to cherish not just the great author's work, but his attitude towards it. Bradbury loved writing. He took intense pleasure in it, and it shows on every page. This is, of course, not possible for everyone, but still, I find it to be a lovely antidote to all the hand-wringing and hair-tearing and sit-at-the-typwriter-and-bleeding contemporary writers seem to do (or claim to do, online or otherwise) these days.
Quantity creates quality:
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week-it doesn't matter what the quality is to start, but at least you're practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can't be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that's just wonderful.
English author Angela Carter, known for her dark feminist stories, always told people that she wrote her first novel when she was only six years old. Bill and Tom Go to Pussy Market was "full of social realism: cats going about their daily business." As a child, her favorite cat was named Charlie (a naughty kitty who liked to use her mother's shoes as a litter box). She adopted a white cat with "lavender ears" and "bracken-colored eyes" with her first husband, Paul Carter. After winning the Somerset Maugham Award in 1969 for her novel Several Perceptions, Carter used the proceeds to travel to Japan following her estrangement from Paul.
If anyone deserves the title of cat enthusiast, it's Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer author once wrote: "When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction." And, goodness, did Twain love cats - over thirty of them. Always the gifted raconteur, Twain's autobiography is a must-read for fans of the cranky cat collector, who at one time put an ad out in all the newspapers when his beloved black kitty Bambino went missing. Lines of fans with random cats showed up at the Twain household just to get a peek at the famous writer.
13 August 2018
My first published book, May Day, was released in March 2006. In the intervening twelve years, I've released ten more books in that series, watched glowing reviews come in, made an average of $6,000 a year off them (less than minimum wage), and grumbled to myself that if I had only self-pubbed the series, I'd be rolling in the hay by now.
Fast forward to June 2018.
I got my rights back to the first ten books in that series. I hired a cover designer, bought book layout software and the computer I'd need to run it, and took a quick and dirty dip in the marketing pool. It's too soon for me to provide sweeping data on what works best, but one thing I know for sure: successfully publishing a book is a hundred times harder than I'd imagined (apologies to my original publisher for my negative thoughts). Read on for the lessons I've learned. Use it as a checklist for your repackaging your own backlist, a behind-the-curtain peek at the life of a hybrid writer, or a cautionary tale.
Authors have been called elitist by book pirates, after they successfully campaigned to shut down a website that offered free PDFs of thousands of in-copyright books.
OceanofPDF was closed last week after publishers including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins issued hundreds of takedown notices, with several high-profile authors including Philip Pullman and Malorie Blackman raising the issue online. Featuring free downloads of thousands of books, OceanofPDF had stated on its site that it sought to make information "free and accessible to everyone around the globe", and that it wanted to make books available to people in "many developing countries where... they are literally out of reach to many people.
JK Rowling notoriously received numerous rejections before meeting her literary agent, and later, publisher. Having stacked up at least 60 rejections in my writing career, I know exactly how that feels.
And while being a novelist recently came out on top in a survey as one of the most desirable jobs to have, it is definitely not for the faint hearted.
I now have an agent and an award, but it wasn't always that way.
As a writer, the first step to securing a publishing deal is to acquire an agent, a middle-man, basically your number one fan who will shout about how good you are to publishers and hopefully persuade them to read your carefully-crafted novel.
They are the gatekeepers to the publishing industry. Digital publishers, however, are changing the game because they talk directly to authors. This doesn't mean that manuscripts are of a lesser quality.
It just means there are new ways of doing things.
An Authors Guild statement frames a week that includes both Simon & Schuster's release of a controversial Trump tell-all and a coordinated exercise of resistance in the news media to Donald Trump's attacks.
In a gesture of solidarity, the Authors Guild has issued an essay condemning Donald Trump's assaults on the news media. The organization is endorsing a Senate resolution condemning the president's characterization of the news media as "the enemy of the people" and "fake news."
‘The share of income from rights has steadily increased from 72 percent in 2013 to 80 percent in 2016,' says the UK's Publishers Association, in a report released this summer.
In the five-year analysis, it's striking just how robust an increase the UK has been seeing in rights trading. From 2013 to 2017, the Yearbook's reports show an increase of 90 percent in the total gross income from rights and coeditions of the 35 respondents to the association's survey.
A young generation of artists is winning prizes, acclaim, and legions of readers while exploring identity in new ways.
Skim the table of contents of the major literary journals, including white-shoe poetry enterprises like Poetry magazine, and even general-interest weeklies with vast reach such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Scan the recipients of the prestigious and sometimes lucrative fellowships, awards, and lectureships granted annually to the most promising young poets in the country. They are immigrants and refugees from China, El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, Vietnam. They are black men and an Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as well as straight and choose their personal pronouns with care. The face of poetry in the United States looks very different today than it did even a decade ago, and far more like the demographics of Millennial America. If anything, the current crop of emerging poets anticipates the face of young America 30 years from now.
V S Naipaul, who has died aged 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author's personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist. The writer, who won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and the Nobel prize for literature 30 years later, has delighted and beguiled readers with works such as The Mystic Masseur (1957), A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979). Drawing on his own life of deracination - a man of Indian family born in Trinidad who studied at Oxford and worked for the BBC before starting to write fiction - Naipaul made picaresque novels that glint with precisely cut sentences and are shaped into a thrillingly original architecture. His formal invention earned him a place as one of the very greatest writers of the past century. He was in the vanguard of a generation of Commonwealth writers who utterly reshaped the meaning of "English literature".
Nevertheless, Naipaul's particular point of view on the travails of colonialism and post-colonialism - both in his novels and in travel books such as Among the Believers (1981) - earned him severe criticism. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said found his picture of Islam unforgivably ignorant and cliched, and accused him of absorbing and repeating pernicious and misleading colonialist mythologies. As a man, Naipaul's sheer naked honesty about his own unpleasant, sometimes violent behaviour was bracing, and threatened at times to overwhelm his purely literary reputation.
Elizabeth Hardwick, who was born 102 years ago last month, was one of the foremost essayists and literary critics of her era, as well as an extremely accomplished novelist and short story writer in her own right. An intellectual powerhouse often credited with expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her incisive, witty, freewheeling style of writing, Hardwick was fiercely invested in the literary landscape of the time (perhaps most infamously demonstrated by her 1959 Harper's essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing"-a scathing take-down of the way books were being reviewed in American periodicals). She produced at least one bonafide masterpiece of fiction in her semi-autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979), and was the co-founder of The New York Review of Books, for which she wrote for over forty years.
On the novels of Edith Wharton: %u201CThere is a tradesman%u2019s shrewdness in Edith Wharton%u2019s work. She knows how to order the stock and dispose the goods in the window. She was a popular author, or, to be more just, her books were popular, not always the same thing. (Even in her day there were writers, many of them women susceptible to sentiment, who trafficked in novels in the present-day manner%u2014more soy beans on the commodities market.) Edith Wharton is free of lush sentiments and moralizing tears. In The House of Mirth, her triumph, she is not always clear what the moral might be and thereby created a stunning tragedy in which the best and the richest society of New York revealed an inner coarseness that might remind one of pimps cruising in their Cadillacs.