A few weeks ago I wrote the first draft of Book 12 very quickly - 80,000 words in one month. This meant it came straight from the heart and I was able to write it with a clear view of the characters and plot, without long breaks from the project meaning continuity became hard work. There are casualties from speed-writing in this way - I've just completed the first read-through and had to spend a lot of time developing the minor characters, for example. But however long it takes you to get the initial version down, there is always more work to be done
Links of the week September 24 2018 (39)
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:
1 October 2018
When I first started out writing I didn't really understand what a rewrite was all about. I just thought it was for refining the words - felt I'd worked hard on my first draft and that was enough; all that remained was to check it flowed pleasantly. And to be totally honest I think part of it was laziness. It can be gruelling writing a novel - certainly when you are just starting out and aren't used to the process - and the thought that I needed to look at the whole manuscript once more felt overwhelming.
This is probably why it took me several unpublished manuscripts to bag an agent! And to appreciate that the rewrite was a valuable opportunity to look at the project with fresh eyes - from a distance, at a less involved level, to really make sure that each component of the story (plotting, characterisation etc) was doing its job properly. And to not be scared of deconstructing the story. You have to be brave to make your novel the very best it can be.
Orwell advised cutting as many words as possible, Woolf found energy in verbs, and Baldwin aimed for ‘a sentence as clean as a bone'. What can we learn from celebrated authors about the art of writing well?
Every writer, of school age and older, is in the sentences game. The sentence is our writing commons, the shared ground where all writers walk. A poet writes in sentences, and so does the unsung author who came up with "Items trapped in doors cause delays". The sentence is the Ur-unit, the core material, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right. For James Baldwin, the only goal was "to write a sentence as clean as a bone".
What can celebrated writers teach the rest of us about the art of writing a great sentence? A common piece of writing advice is to make your sentences plain, unadorned and invisible. George Orwell gave this piece of advice its epigram: "Good prose is like a windowpane." A reader should notice the words no more than someone looking through glass notices the glass.
In November, Weather Woman by Cai Emmons will release from Red Hen Press. To spread the word this summer, Cai drove "the Weather Woman van" to independent bookstores in the Western United States, distributing advance reader copies and chatting with booksellers. She's also speaking at a variety of venues across the country (see the full list).
Given the unusual nature of her pre-publication marketing, I asked her why she's pursued this strategy and what the payoff has been thus far.
Cai Emmons: I felt that my first two novels could have had a wider readership, so when I received a contract for my third book from Red Hen Press, I decided to educate myself about book promotion as thoroughly as I could. Red Hen was emphatic that I needed to take responsibility in getting my book out there, something Harcourt and HarperCollins had not said to me so directly. As I went about educating myself, a remark of yours made a deep impression on me: You said that it made no sense for a writer to force herself to do things she hated to do or was bad at, but that she should do the things she liked and was good at. That comment prompted me to evaluate my strengths. I'm pretty good at talking to people one-on-one. And I love booksellers.
Independent booksellers often talk about their tight bonds with their local communities, and, increasingly, one of the many ways in which they are engaging with those communities is by stocking self-published titles by local writers. For years, the libertarian and frequently contrarian nature of independent authors was at odds with the requirements of bricks-and-mortar indies; self-published authors were empowered by the emergence of online retailers that produced, published, and sold their works, and they didn't consider how those books would be sold in physical stores. But the relationship between indie authors and indie bookstores has evolved, and numerous booksellers are willing to stock self-published titles-albeit within certain limitations. PW surveyed the members of BXsellers, our Facebook group for booksellers, to find out what criteria they apply to handling self-published work.
Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, co-owner of Greenlight Bookstore, which has two locations in Brooklyn, said she limits the selection of self-published books each store carries to authors who live nearby. "We do have certain requirements - the book must have the name on the spine, for example - and we have a six-month consignment policy, but we consider it a community service," she wrote. "And some do end up taking off!"
Short story anthologies are enjoying a boom in sales, rising by almost 50% in value, to reach their highest level in seven years.
Trade figures have suggested much of the genre's popularity could be down to blockbusters such as Tom Hanks' debut collection, Uncommon Type: Some Stories (William Heinemann), while others have credited writers such as Eley Williams and "Cat Person" author Kristen Roupenian as bringing the form into a "new light".
Natalia de la Ossa, the retail manager of the London Review Bookshop, said the store had sold more short story collections this year. "This is definitely something we have noticed," she said. "We certainly feel that there has been a recent flurry of short story collections by great writers. In December we sold around 40% more short fiction anthologies than we did in 2016."
Di Speirs, editor of books at BBC Radio and Music Production, who has judged the BBC National Short Story Award [NSSA] since its inception in 2005, said she has seen more short story collections being published, "and published well, with verve and passion, and even review coverage. Publishers seem keen to discover a greater diversity of voices and talent, and are often not insisting on a novel in a deal too."
You know the feeling: you're staring at the black computer screen, blinking occasionally-staring and blinking, staring and blinking, until the cursor starts to blink back and you have to go to bed for a while. Maybe you're staring and blinking at an actual, physical blank page, in which case you should definitely go to bed for a while if it starts to blink back. Yes, it's the dreaded, insidious, much-mythologized affliction known as writer's block.
Everyone, it seems, has an opinion on writer's block-how to fight it, how to submit to it, how to think about it, how to ignore it. While some writers resort to writing about not writing, and others give up altogether until the muse returns, many-more than I was expecting, at least-don't believe in writer's block at all. To get a wide sense of the range of opinions, I scanned assorted interviews and essays from a variety of writers. Below, you'll find a totally non-comprehensive but still fascinating run-down, which should be very useful in what I can only imagine is your own current state of writer's block-fueled procrastination.
Just under half of children and young people aged 8-18 enjoy reading or creating poetry, although that figure rises to 55.7% of those who receive free school meals, according to a survey from National Literacy TrustUK-based organisation which has campaigned since 1993 to improve literacy standards across all age groups. Excellent research information and details of the many initiatives the charity is currently involved in. www.literacytrust.org.uk. It also has a useful page of news stories on UK literacy, which links to newsletter http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/TheLibrary.aspx to mark National Poetry Day.
For the report, entitled "A thing that made me happy: Children, young people and poetry in 2018", researchers Christina Clark and Fay Lant surveyed 2,978 8-18 year-olds from 27 schools between May and july this year.
Just under half (46.1%) of those surveyed said they engaged with poetry in their free time. A quarter said they consumed it by reading, listening or watching poetry performances and 10.4% said they wrote or performed it themselves. Another 10.3% said they do both.
Children on free school meals were, however, more likely to spend their free time on poetry, as 55.7% of that demographic consumed or wrote poetry compared to 43% of those who don't receive free school meals. More pupils on free school meals said they like poetry because it is a playful form of writing (62.5%), whilst only 56.7% of pupils who don't get free school meals agreed.
Lang Leav first shared her poems on Tumblr in 2012 before self-publishing her debut, Love & Misadventure, the following year. Within months, she joined Writers House and landed a publishing contract with Andrews McMeel. Today, with nearly 2 million followers across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the poet/novelist has sold over a million copies of her books, including the latest, Sea of Strangers.
When Love & Misadventure first came out I was next to Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Frost, and now it's almost like a whole category with the new YA. I always felt there was something there [and] always loved poetry. It's the most beautiful form of language and it was sad to me that it was dying. I felt if only I could make it relatable to people so it wasn't too esoteric. I think there is absolutely a place for esoteric poetry, and I love esoteric poetry, but the type I write can be a stepping stone to people getting engaged with the category, and I think that sales have improved for poetry on the whole because of this modern genre.
24 September 2018
A publishing success story that continues to receive mainstream (and industry) media attention is that of Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey. One wonders how many more profiles can be written of Kaur, though the story offers multiple angles: her work was first self-published, for example, and it's a collection of poetry. Who reads and buys poetry anymore? Young people who use Instagram, it turns out.
Many writers meet disappointment when they're only one or two books into a career and find themselves constantly giving their work away because no readership has been developed yet and there is no demand for the work. At such a time, it can feel natural for them to blame readers and believe that their work isn't valued. The truth most likely is that the work doesn't yet hold any market value, or that the author hasn't found the package or context that would offer value worth paying for.
The rise of audiobooks, a small but rapidly growing piece of book publishing, is by now well documented, but rarely is it framed as a tech story. It's maybe a little counterintuitive to think of what we once called Books on Tape (so cumbersome they had to be abridged to remain affordable) as a format on the disruptive cutting edge. But this decade's double-digit annual growth - with total sales doubling to $2.5 billon over the past five years - has a clear analog in the e-book boom that preceded it, and the same company has driven it: Audible.com owner Amazon.
The audio companies have driven not only innovation but also spending, bidding aggressively on unsold rights (i.e., those not retained by print publishers). One big agent says Audible paid twice as much for one of his client's audio rights as a print publisher paid for the rest. "The Big Five will not relinquish the audio rights," the agent says, "so the only way Audible is going to get their hands on brand-name authors is to throw down an eyebrow-raising amount of money, in hopes that the agent will be willing to sell it to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or Norton," two larger independent publishers without their own audio divisions.
Besides being a social burden I'm finding it to be a problem in my reading and writing. Facts/lines of poems/details of plot smear in my head, and often I find myself left with impressions of texts that are far too vague for me to build opinion around. Reading non-fiction or heavily referential fiction feels near pointless as things go in one ear and out the other. Marginalia helps, but I get most of my books from the public library and I don't wanna be a defacer.
The answer is yes, there is training. There is training for almost everything! I think we often assume that other people's learned skills must be innate talents. I know a lot about perfume and a fair amount about wine, so people are always saying to me, Your sense of smell/taste must be really good. And they are, kind of, but I wasn't born with some kind of sensory superpower; I was interested in smells and tastes, so I started paying attention, then looked for corroboration of what I noticed. By smelling a lot, and reading about smells, you can learn to have a good nose, and I think you can learn to have a better memory.
It took a less than an hour in 2013 for Anna Todd to change her life. The Army wife and part-time babysitter had spent a lot of time reading fan fiction, stories by amateur writers about existing fictional universes and real-life celebrities. So her erotic tale about Tessa and Hardin-a wholesome college freshman and a tattooed bad boy who is a thinly veiled stand-in for singer Harry Styles-came together quickly when she sat down to type the first chapter of After on her phone. Todd posted it to Wattpad, one of the world's largest destinations for online reading and writing.
After has since been read more than 1.5 billion times on Wattpad. It's now a bestselling book series, with 11 million copies sold after Wattpad brokered a mid-six-figure deal for Todd with Simon & Schuster. She fully credits Wattpad with getting her in the door. "If I had sent After to any publisher, there's no way they would have even read it," says Todd, 29. Wattpad got paid for its work, taking an estimated 15% of Todd's book earnings-about what a typical literary agent would charge-and it's also a co-producer of the After movie that began production in June. The lucrative evolution from Wattpad post to mainstream book to Hollywood movie is precisely what Wattpad wants to see more of.
I imagine writing a crime novel is close to the middle of human experiences ranked by difficulty. It isn't brain surgery, but neither is it a walk in the park (although, conceivably, you could write a novel while doing either of those things, and I'm sure plenty have). I was fortunate to come from a family that loved books, and lucky to go to good schools, where books were bountiful. I was less lucky in that, when I started writing, I didn't have much in the way of sympatico teachers, mentors, friends or even, really, acquaintances who knew anything about writing books, finishing them, and publishing them. Which is to say, I learned how to write from reading. One of the joys of my adult professional life is the opportunity to be a friendly and encouraging (if busy, occasionally cranky, sometimes unpleasant, not-so-rarely angry-well, no one's perfect here) older friend to younger writers when they need one. But as writers, our best friends aren't people; they're books. If we got along with people so well, we'd be out there among them, instead of home alone, writing. Here's some of my best friends, and the crime writing lessons I learned from them; I hope these introductions will make new friendships, and I hope these friendships will serve you as well as they've served me.
Structure Is Everything
James Sallis, The Lew Griffin Series
Structure is a part of style, a part of story, and even a part of character. In addition to remarkable characters and killer prose, this series jumps around in time, revealing evocative moments and meaningful clues in emotional order, rather than chronological. The books aren't organized around their mysteries; they're organized around the detective and his inner life. This unusual structure allows for a deeper look at the titular character, detective and writer and teacher Lew Griffin. It also allows for strange doors to open in the heart and mind of the reader, by connecting things we might not have connected otherwise.
It's a common question in our constantly evolving digital world: are publishers adapting quickly enough? Yet through a decade of rapid technological change, a global recession, and ever-shifting consumer expectations, the global book business has shown its resilience. And one needs look no further than the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. for an example of the industry's strength.
Book publishing is, of course, a mature business in some parts of the world, including Europe and the U.S. But globally, Boos points out, there is strong growth in a number of emerging markets-particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. And that growth is fueling an era of international expansion for the Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two..
"At Frankfurt, over the past 10 years, we went from 60% German exhibitors, 40% international to the other way around," Boos says. "We now have more international exhibitors than we do German-language exhibitors-it's like 65% to 35%." And along with that international business comes an equally important opportunity: to showcase more talent, stories, and cultures from around the world-something fair organizers are always working to encourage. "It is very important to listen to other voices," Boos adds, "and I think we must invest as an industry to make these voices accessible."
One day last week, after I spent the best part of an hour opening two days' worth of post at my office - I work as literary editor of the Spectator - I posted a peevish tweet: "Can we all stop publishing, for good and all, nonfiction books about the future, books about how to change your life, books about what it means to be/how we came to be human, and books about fucking Nazis? For a start."
This was bad manners, for which I apologise. But it's a semi-public expression of the sort of momentary eye-roll that's the occupational hazard of my work.
Publishing micro-genres have always been with us. Remember, in the wake of Longitude, that late-1990s run of biographies of inanimate objects? Or the still barely abated torrent of abuse memoirs that followed A Child Called It? More recently the success of Robert Macfarlane has produced a flowering of "new nature writing"; the prominence of H Is for Hawk spawned a nature-writing/mental-health hybrid; wild swimming books went, briefly, wild; and the efforts of Henry Marsh, Adam Kay and Paul Kalanithi mean that everyone who has ever donned surgical scrubs now seems to be writing a book about it.
The number of adults in the US reading novels and short stories has hit a new low, with the decline of almost 8% in the last five years seen mainly among women, African Americans and younger adults, according to a major new survey.
While not going into detail on reading, the new report does provide some breakdown on who is reading what. In what is likely the biggest surprise among its findings, the percentage of adults reading poetry rose between 2012 and 2017, marking the first time poetry reading has increased in the history of the NEA's survey of participation in the arts. In 2017, 11.7% of adults said they read some poetry in the prior year, up from 6.7% in 2012. And although the report does not list reasons why interest in poetry rose, it does give some evidence that the boom in interest in Instagram poets such as Rupi Kaur is an important factor in the increase. The report found that between 2012 and 2017, the share of adults ages 18-24 who read poetry more than doubled, placing that age group above all others when it comes to poetry reading rates. The report also found that nonwhite groups, including African-Americans and Asian-Americans, read poetry at the highest rates overall.