'The Children Act' novelist and screenwriter reflects on what he's learned about endings and studio execs' suggestions: "They were all formed out of a pattern, as if they'd all taken Screenwriting 101 years ago."
Links of the week September 10 2018 (37)
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:
17 September 2018
After penning 14 novels and winning the Man Booker Prize, Ian McEwan seemingly doesn't have much left to prove. Still, the author says, "I don't think I've ever worked harder in my life" than in 2018. This year, three film and television adaptations of McEwan's books - two of which he wrote the screenplays for - are rolling out while just last week, McEwan finished another novel. "So yes, it's been quite an interesting year," he says.
Social media is one of the best ways to connect with readers, build a large, engaged audience - and promote your books. Whether you're an author working on your own social media, or a publisher developing a social media presence for one of your authors, it pays to think strategically about what you want to achieve.
However, this is still surprisingly rare. Book-based social media is still incredibly prone to last-minute-ism, 'throw stuff out and see what sticks', and 'same old same old' copycat churn. So make sure you think through these eight elements when putting together a social media strategy, if you really want to see results.
Never underestimate the power of one determined person. What Carole Cadwalladr has done to Facebook and big data, and Edward Snowden has done to the state security complex, the young Kazakhstani scientist Alexandra Elbakyan has done to the multibillion-dollar industry that traps knowledge behind paywalls. Sci-Hub, her pirate web scraper service, has done more than any government to tackle one of the biggest rip-offs of the modern era: the capture of publicly funded research that should belong to us all. Everyone should be free to learn; knowledge should be disseminated as widely as possible. No one would publicly disagree with these sentiments. Yet governments and universities have allowed the big academic publishers to deny these rights. Academic publishing might sound like an obscure and fusty affair, but it uses one of the most ruthless and profitable business models of any industry.
The model was pioneered by the notorious conman Robert Maxwell. He realised that, because scientists need to be informed about all significant developments in their field, every journal that publishes academic papers can establish a monopoly and charge outrageous fees for the transmission of knowledge. He called his discovery "a perpetual financing machine". He also realised that he could capture other people's labour and resources for nothing. Governments funded the research published by his company, Pergamon, while scientists wrote the articles, reviewed them and edited the journalsfor free. His business model relied on the enclosure of common and public resources. Or, to use the technical term, daylight robbery.
French booksellers have called on literary judges to "defend books and not those who threaten them", after one of France's most prestigious prizes selected a self-published novel available only via Amazon.
Among the 17 titles in contention for this year's Prix Renaudot is Marco Koskas' Bande de Français, which was self-published on Amazon's CreateSpace platform. According to the Syndicat de la librairie française, which represents French booksellers, the jury have put them in an impossible position.
The French-Israeli author, who has published more than a dozen books via more traditional routes, told the Guardian he was forced into put out an edition of Bande de Français himself after no French publisher picked it up.
"As I didn't want to bow down to this decision," Koskas said, "in the end I decided to self-publish. Otherwise I might have gone into some sort of literary hiding."
The novel is only available for sale through the internet giant, so according to the Syndicat, it is "technically and commercially almost impossible" for bookshops to put it on their shelves.
There was widespread reaction when the Philosopher's Stone in the title of the first Harry Potter book became the Sorcerer's Stone after its US publisher, Scholastic, decided that children might confuse wizards for Plato.
But hordes of books have had their titles changed in America. Disproportionately, they are mysteries. Twenty-five Agatha Christie titles have been "localised" but unfortunately, their new names do not add to their allure. Instead, they merely baffle Brits who, when buying Murder in Three Acts or Poirot Loses a Client on vacation, discover they are Three Act Tragedy or Dumb Witness in disguise.
Naturally, book titles change from country to country. Altering the first Potter adventure to Harry Potter a l'Ecole des Sorciers in French is far less baffling than what was done to its American counterpart. Some localisation is to be expected: if you're translating the text, why not change the title to match? But, with the UK and US sharing a language, why change titles?
Knowing which type of printing service to use depends on authors' publishing needs - and before any decision is made, it's important to have a clear understanding of the two types of printing.
While the vast majority of indie authors turn to print-on-demand services when it's time to take their book public - and for good reason - there are certain cases in which offset printing is the way to go.
POD was developed more than 15 years ago to help publishers manage the economics of deep backlists; in other words, as a way to keep older titles in print without being forced to print and store piles of physical books, says Kelly Gallagher, VP of content acquisition at Ingram Content Group.
Today, and for a similar reason, self-published writers use print-on-demand as a flexible distribution strategy that allows them to make their work available in markets around the world - without making a significant upfront investment or dealing with the logistics of shipping, distribution, and storage.
Every agent is different, and every agency has slightly different guidelines, but here are a few tips I would suggest bearing in mind when submitting. Agents receive a number of novels and non-fiction proposals every day, making it so important to do everything you can to ensure yours stands out from the rest... good luck!
Always include a blurb in the body of the email - much in the same way an agent's job is to catch the attention of an editor and get them excited about a project, a writer needs to hook an agent. One way of ensuring your book/proposal ends up on the top of their reading pile is by including an enticing blurb that piques their curiosity without giving too much away.
When Penguin and Random House announced in the fall of 2012 that they intended to merge, Hurricane Sandy was barreling toward New York City, America's publishing capital. It was an instant metaphor for headline writers: "As Sandy Loomed, the Publishing Industry Panicked." People inside both companies worried about their jobs; people outside the companies worried about the market power of a new conglomerate comprised of the country's two largest trade publishers. Agents and authors, meanwhile, worried that the consolidation would further drive down advances.
This has been the story of Penguin Random House these past five years. Privately owned, the company has moved deliberately, while publicly traded competitors like HarperCollins (which is owned by News Corp) and Simon & Schuster (CBS) have had to fend off pressures from shareholders. It has not used its gargantuan size - it controls more than half of the traditional literary marketplace according to many estimates - to take back territory from Amazon. Instead, it has focused on building equity and ensuring that it publishes the next generation of bestsellers. In so doing, Penguin Random House has built what may be the perfect corporate publishing house. There's just one problem: Thanks to Amazon, the age of the imperious corporate publishing house is coming to an end.
10 September 2018
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.
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