There's nothing like writing and publishing a book to bring out the dormant diva who lives inside every aspiring author. Even the most unassuming authors have moments when indulging the fantasy of übersuccess sends them into an uncharacteristic fanning of tail feathers as they imagine what might be possible. And, of course, there are authors with far less reserve, who can be blatant in their own self-regard. I say more power to them. Publishing a book is a big deal, and it doesn't hurt to dream. What does hurt, however, is allowing that dream to cloud reality.
Links of the week September 3 2018 (36)
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:
10 September 2018
In the nearly two decades I've been working with authors, I've heard 10,000 copies as a sales goal over and over again. I would love to better understand the psychology of 10,000 copies and why writers have glommed onto that number. My guess is that it stems, at least in part, from the fact that authors and publishers at writing conferences often include discounted or free e-books in sales numbers. I also imagine that 10,000 sounds like a smaller number than it actually is. Whatever the reason, it's an unrealistic benchmark for 95% of authors, and it's especially unrealistic for debut authors.
Full disclosure: I like Waterstones a lot. When I was first published, it was Waterstones booksellers that pushed my book. I remember going to Waterstones Deansgate, right after my novel The Testimony was published, and meeting the wonderful booksellers there. I didn't really know howbookshops worked, and I had vague recollections of the pre-James-Daunt days of Waterstones, where the tables were the same in every branch. But the power and goodwill of those booksellers overwhelmed me. How they had whole tables of books that they cared about, the way that they spoke about the books they loved, the little stand they had for my little book, with the shelf-talker card underneath (Do you know what those cards mean to a writer? I take photos every time.)
So while Waterstones is a massive company, it still feels personal. The booksellers are proud to be booksellers; the staff are proud of who they work for. In that way, they don't feel so different to many of the independent bookshops I have loved; populated with staff who just want to get the world reading.
Blink and you'd have missed it. On Friday it was announced that Waterstone's have bought Foyles. Ten years ago this would have been a major news story, and featured in the first few pages of The Times. Today it didn't feature at all in the main newspaper and only managed a few columns on page 7 of the Business section. It shows how little the media cares about the books sector nowadays. The reason? Probably because most journalists haven't been in a bookshop for years and fulfill all their bookbuying needs from Amazon.
In 2018, Ottakers are gone. Swallowed up by Waterstone's. Same with Dillons. Books etc went bankrupt. As did Borders. Blackwells have retrenched from 70 shops to 45, including the closure of their famous Charing Cross Road shop in London. Meanwhile they also took over Heffers, Hatchard's, Hodges & Figgis and James Thin.
Writing a novel requires the creation of a living, breathing, fully populated world. Deities can pull off a trick like that in six days, but how long should it take to write a book?
William Faulkner wrote Light in August in seven months, a slog compared to As I Lay Dying, which he wrote in less than six weeks while working the night shift at a power plant. Jack Kerouac spent seven years on the road, but the actual writing of that iconic book took less than a month, typed on a single, taped-together roll of paper. Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange for money and churned it out in three weeks. John Boyne gave voice to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in a breathless two and a half days.
When I started Refuge, my latest novel, I was determined to shorten my writing time. Three years, I told myself sternly. Four, max. And I met that deadline. Exactly four years later, I submitted the manuscript to my agent, who sent it to my editors at McClelland & Stewart and W.W. Norton. I scheduled some minor surgery, imagining myself recovering on my couch, eating bonbons and contemplating the six-figure offers.
In July 2008, science fiction publisher Tor launched a new website called Tor.com to promote its upcoming releases. But the site was designed to go beyond Tor's books. It was meant to provide coverage for books from other publishers as well as original fiction chosen by Tor editors.
Since its founding, Tor.com has gone from a simple website to a full-fledged publishing operation. In addition to publishing shorter works of fiction, it also publishes a range of novelettes, novellas, and even some short novels, with books like Nnedi Okorafor's Binti and Martha Wells' All Systems Red earning considerable acclaim from the science fiction community. This week, the site published the anthology Worlds Seen in Passing: 10 Years of Tor.com Short Fiction, which celebrates the best of the site's fiction in the decade that it's been in operation.
These days I feel that finding time to write is more like purse-snatching than any other activity: I grab what I can get and run away with it. Often I do so furtively, hoping that no one trips me, grabs my ankle and hauls me in to visit the authorities.
That's how it can be, sometimes, when you have a day job and a couple of kids to take care of as well as a fine tome to write. What follows are some habits that help me cope, and which I hope might help others in a similar position - i.e., not having infinite minutes or monies at their command. These tips are aimed at bucking the limits imposed by time as well as mental space.
"I don't know!" David Fickling laughs when asked why so many brilliant children's authors have wanted to work with him over the course of his career. The founder of David Fickling Books can count discovering Philip Pullman and partnering Jacqueline Wilson with Nick Sharratt among his professional achievements, but says he is not a calculated editor and has only recently learnt how to describe what he looks for in a manuscript.
"I'm always looking for the essence of the story: the voice, the feel, how good the prose is," he says. "If I read something and really love it, then I know it is right and that means I must do something about it."
Now, of course, Fickling runs his own business. He says one of the advantages of being a small outfit is that its authors feel like they are "inside" the company. "People in large corporations have no control over contracts and if a book isn't successful, they are moved around willy-nilly. We like to give the author some continuity."
Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell on why we need libraries – an essay in pictures | Books | The Guardian
Two great champions of reading for pleasure return to remind us that it really is an important thing to do - and that libraries create literate citizens
Words by Neil Gaiman and illustrations by Chris Riddell
3 September 2018
In the publishing industry, adult non-fiction revenues are soaring above fiction revenues and have been widening the gap for the past five years. Adult non-fiction revenue totalled $6.18 billion across the publishing industry in 2017, while adult fiction revenues reached $4.3 billion, according to Penguin Random House, using data from 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 (AAP), the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and Bookscan.
One caveat should accompany these numbers before we start reporting the death of adult fiction, however: The numbers only account for traditionally published books, and any fiction or non-fiction from the not-insignificant indie self-publishing community is not included. As publishing expert Jane Friedman noted in a Twitter comment about the findings, "The market for fiction may not be shrinking overall, but it may be shrinking for traditional publishers if indie authors' cheaper titles look more attractive to avid fiction readers."
Book relaunches can take a variety of forms. If done right, they enhance your overall brand, as well as your book sales. Their first and foremost benefit is the new publication date. Having a new book opens up access to bloggers and media who might not have been available to you with an older book. Unless you've already been getting some interest in the book, books six months or older are harder to work with. You need to have a new book, or newer book, to capture more blogger and media attention.
Last year I met an author at a writers' conference who published a science fiction book about five years ago. The book was long, 400 pages, and he said nothing really happened with it. He told me, "If I had known then what I know now, my book could have done so much better." And I said, "Why not re-release it?"If your book needs another round of edits, your reviewers will likely tell you if it does! Editing may also involve adding content, changing some of the content to suit industry changes, or even updating pop culture references.
Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, these books can give you the equipment, the insights, and the courage you need to make your book the best it can be.
When it comes to writing well some things never change-at least not all that much. Take the revised edition of The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White for example. In 1918, Strunk, a Cornell University English Professor, wrote a 43-page style guide and called it The Elements of Style. He published it himself, for use in his classroom. His main point, "Make every word tell," or as he put it in his 13th elementary principle of composition-"Omit needless words." Fast forward to 1957, when one of his students, White, decided to do an article on Strunk and his passion for lucid prose in The New Yorker. White called Strunk's little book "a 43 page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English."
Audible UK grew its revenue by 45% last year to over £97m and posted its first operating profit to date of almost £2m. Meanwhile, market analyst Enders has predicted that "the market will continue its period of strong growth", with sale comfortably above £100m already, though it warned that there were "early signs of over-hype".
The growth of the audio market, which now represents 5% of the total trade market for books in the UK according to Nielsen, is "in no small part thanks to Audible", Enders' analysis said, because the company has opened up the market to people who don't usually buy books, such as young men.
However, it also dubbed Audible a "frenemy" for simultaneously "breathing new life" into the market and "putting publishers under pressure". It described its approach to bidding for audio rights and its investment in high-end productions as "aggressive", making it a player "more directly threatening to publishers in audio than Amazon publishing is in written books".
Plagiarism is always aspirational. In a wish to have someone else take their place, or supply their words, plagiarists generally steal something better than they might write themselves. In this way, though it may seem an anxiety about status or a nervousness about originality, plagiarism paradoxically displays privilege-the belief that I could've thought of it if I'd had enough time or desire.
Why, when they steal, do plagiarists take from popular material? Why not stick to the obscure? Or is it that we only catch those plagiarists who become popular themselves? Most plagiarism cases, as with other hoaxes, include what amount to clues planted almost expressly to be found.
After a "frantic" few days at the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) last week, UK publishers have reported a successful fair with their Chinese counterparts hungry for content, but also increasingly on the lookout for audio and film and TV rights.
The 25th edition of the BIBF (22nd to 26th August) was a record year with organisers saying the event had around 300,000 visitors-150,000 of those were publishing professionals, an increase of 30% on 2017.
Caroline Clarke, senior rights executive at Canongate, praised the "busy" nature of the fair and said there was a great deal of interest in titles from UK publishers.
Clarke said: "I had many requests for books which were inspiring and empowering, both in terms of non-fiction and fiction, as well as award-winning literary writers. There was also a big demand for audio rights as well as TV and film rights specifically for a Chinese adaptation."
Veteran literary agent Michael Sissons was born to make paint. The Hull-based family firm Sissons Brothers & Co had been doing just that since the 18th century, at one point making "Hall's Distemper" once regarded as the best paint in the British Empire. The Second World War ended all that. His father, grandfather and cousin were killed in the conflict and the paint factory was destroyed during the blitz of Hull.
Instead of paint, Sissons fell "by accident" into ink in 1959 under the wing of the then formidable literary agent Augustus Dudley Peters, whose own son was killed in the last week of the war. In 1973 Sissons inherited the agency A D Peters & Co from its founder. "I knew from day one that it suited me down to the ground," he says. "I have never looked at the notion of another job since that day. I have never wished to do anything else, and I can still scarcely believe my luck."
It is scarcely possible now to imagine the world Sissons entered 50 years earlier. "Publishing regarded itself as an occupation for gentlemen," usually of the titled variety, whereas agents were "universally regarded by publishers as very bad news," he says. Sissons helped set up the Association of Authors' AgentsThe association of UK agents. Their website (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.html) gives a Directory of Members and a code of practice, but no information about the agencies other than their names. The association refers visitors to the UK agent listings from The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook on the WritersServices site. in the 1970s, partly to help define what agents should be and how they should be regarded within the business. In contrast to publishers, he says: "I don't think we had a very clear view of what we were. We were definitely on the periphery of publishing activity and that irked me very much."