When public discourse denigrates expertise, when politicians and Twitter trolls alike have learned to dismiss every criticism or uncomfortable truth as "fake" and media outlets compete for clickbait headlines, it's not surprising to find a corresponding hunger for a deeper, more thoughtful form of engagement with ideas and for that - thankfully - there's still no better medium than a book.
Links of the week November 5 2018 (45)
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:
12 November 2018
Personal stories have tended to dominate popular nonfiction in recent years; in 2014, 2016 and 2017, three out of the four shortlisted titles for the Costa Biography prize each year were memoirs that explored wider cultural themes rather than traditional biographies. The unstoppable rise of the TED talk culture has also had a double-edged impact on nonfiction writing; on the plus side, it has helped to feed an appetite among a young, educated demographic for enthusiastic, well-qualified experts sharing cross-disciplinary ideas in easily digestible and accessible chunks.
Want to succeed in the self-publishing world? Here are some important tips from Bookworks to help you make the most of your book.
It's a jungle out there. Anybody who has ever self-published, or even thought about it, knows this. Sure, the opportunities for self-publishing success seem almost limitless these days, but why is it that some self-published authors have sold millions of books while others spend thousands of dollars and only manage to sell 122 copies-mostly to friends, acquaintances, and their mom?
For now, what is a self-respecting, ambitious self-publisher to do? It all comes down to this: take charge. Whether you're working with a subsidy publisher like CreateSpace, Book Baby, or Lulu, or you are taking the do-it-yourself route, it is essential that you oversee every aspect of the process. First, you have to make sure your book is the very best it can be. Second, you have to become smart, savvy, patient, and persistent in the marketing department
American comic book writer, editor, publisher and former President of Marvel Comics Stan Lee died Monday at the age of 95.
Lee gave us over six decades of work like The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man - superheroes we could identify with, characters that allowed us to suspend our disbelief because they reacted to bizarre situations like you or I might.
In a 1998 interview, Lee told me, "Before Marvel started, any superhero might be walking down the street and see a 12-foot-tall monster coming toward him with purple skin and eight arms breathing fire, and the character would have said something like, 'Oh! There's a monster from another world; I better catch him before he destroys the city.' Now, if one of our Marvel characters saw the same monster, I'd like to think Spider-Man would say, 'Who's the nut in the Halloween get-up? I wonder what he's advertising?' "
Born Stanley Lieber in New York City in 1922, he took the pseudonym Stan Lee to save his real name for more literary pursuits. But those pursuits never came. Instead, Lee devoted more than six decades to the comics industry, co-creating Spider-Man, Black Panther, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Iron Man and Daredevil. In 1970, he successfully challenged the restrictive Comics Code Authority with a story about drug abuse in Spider-Man.
Over the past quarter century, Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas and phrases that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Purple Cow to Tribes.
In an exclusive video keynote created specially for this year's FutureBook Live conference on 30th November, Seth will explain how the ideas from his brand new book, This Is Marketing, can help reinvigorate the future of the book trade.
Book sales are up, and they're up because a few people are buying more books, not because a lot of people are buying some books. And that is a symptom of an industry in dramatic decline. These are really good people who make a product they can be proud of. They keep their promises, they don't cheat, they don't steal, and they're not always chasing the next stupid bright light. All of those things are great. But I've been watching for thirty years and they keep shooting themselves in the foot, over and over again. And they're not going to get too many more chances to be able to do this, because as soon as Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster or whoever goes from making a little bit every day to losing a little bit every day, they're just going to fire everybody. The backlist keeps it moving, but the backlist is threatened because, as we've seen with Spotify hurting the backlist for music, once you've got access to the six paragraphs you need from that book, you don't have to buy the book again.
It would be easy to frame the history of Irish book publishing as a simple tale of David against Goliath, the plucky Irish upstart against the ‘overmighty neighbour'. Yet, as Tony Farmar shows in his new book on the subject, the actual story is far more complex.
In the rollercoaster boom and bust of publishing, in Ireland and elsewhere, most publishers survived for only a few years. The introduction of fixed book prices in the 1890s created a more stable environment, allowing publishers to dictate to booksellers the price at which their publications were to be sold. This was known as the Net Book Agreement, and it lasted in Britain and Ireland for nearly a century.
SAN FRANCISCO - A worldwide strike by antiquarian booksellers against an Amazon subsidiary proved successful after two days, with the retailer apologizing and saying it would cancel the actions that prompted the protest.
It was a rare concerted uprising against any part of Amazon by any of its millions of suppliers, leading to an even rarer capitulation. Even the book dealers said they were surprised at the sudden reversal by AbeBooks, the company's secondhand and rare bookselling network.
The uprising, which involved nearly 600 booksellers in 27 countries removing about four million books, was set off by the retailer%u2019s decision to cut off stores in five countries: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, South Korea and Russia. AbeBooks never explained its actions beyond saying it was related to payment processing.
Contemplating comments on his last monthly column, publisher Richard Charkin takes up the question of author pay: ‘Publishers aren't the greedy sharks they're sometimes portrayed to be.'
I was struck by a comment on my last column about measuring commercial success in publishing. It came from Ryan Jones who is, I imagine, an author. He wrote: "Publishers pull in billions of dollars yearly and yet few writers can even make a living. What's wrong with that picture?"
Kazuo Ishiguro, the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, transports us to a realm where public history and private memory create both harmony and dissonance. In his novels, public and private realms intermingle - and in their intricate intermingling, and delicate tension, lies Ishiguro's enduring appeal. He is a writer of unfettered imagination and undeterred ambition. A realist and an absurdist at heart, Ishiguro (62), in his career spanning three-and-a-half decade, has broken new grounds with seven novels and a collection of interlinked stories.
Like the artist of one of his novels, Ishiguro is the writer of a floating world, a world where everything is in a state of perpetual flux, a world in the throes of uncertainties - of memories, space and time. In novel after ingenious novel employing unreliable first-person narrators, Ishiguro, in pared-down prose, explores the various ways memory shapes identities. If memory fades or gets suppressed or distorted, it has its pitfalls: it can suppress and distort personal histories, memories of people, their recollections of who or how or what they were once. Ishiguro shows us how we - as individuals, societies and nations - suffer with the inherent inability to face the past and how we reconcile with that "foreign country", each of us in our own way. In his novels, we discover how individuals - and societies - remember and forget.
5 November 2018
Written into our culture is the idea of the writer as adventurer, or the writer as rake. It isn't enough that a person should strive to write interesting things. They ought also, we feel, to have an interesting life: to flash and yearn and travel intemperately, to artfully unspool (but how, I wonder, do they ever get anything done?).
I am-insofar as I am anything at all-a writer of fiction: a maker-up of things, someone who repurposes, taking elements of reality and twisting them out of shape. I also have two small children. A garden. I do a lot of washing, and go to bed at half past nine. Where creative transports ought to go, there are only 500 solid words on the page each morning and the nursery run. I am ashamed.
Of course, if we expect our writers of fiction to be as interesting as their work, and if we suspect, somewhere deep down, that people with ordinary lives will only ever be ordinary writers, then we will be given what we deserve: books by a small minority, mostly male, mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly without families, who can afford to spend their lives doing nothing else. The rest of us-the majority who have to fit writing around whatever it is that lets us eat, or for whom writing is a route to eating and must therefore be done regardless of the presence of that dilettante, desire-will only ever, perhaps, be second rate.
Whether you are an indie author struggling to get discovered, a well-known traditionally published writer, or somewhere in between, writer's block may sneak up on you once in a while-maybe even more than once in a while.
But what is writer's block, anyway? Edmund Bergler, a well-known disciple of Sigmund Freud, first coined the term in New York City in 1947. He believed that writer's block was one of the many manifestations of "psychic masochism," which is "the unconscious wish to defeat one's conscious aims, and to enjoy that self-constructed defeat."
Why would a writer (or anyone else for that matter) want to do that? Because, according to Bergler's theory, the person's subconscious is furious about having been denied enough milk and nurturing by his or her pre-Oedipal mother, so he or she, subconsciously, wants to recreate that starved feeling-by becoming blocked.
My fourth-grade fantasy was to have five older brothers and one twin brother; in reality, I had two little sisters. Sometimes in public I would slur my sister Debbie's name so it sounded like "Danny." Boys got to have more adventures and therefore more fun; pretending to have a brother was the closest I could get to both.
Having read many books for kids over the years with my now-teenaged daughter and son, I see that a similar belief about the relative potential for girls and boys to have adventures still holds true in children's literature, regardless of strides made in the nonfictional world. While awareness of gender gaps is nothing new, I want to talk specifically about an issue in children's chapter books I'll call "the golden gender ratio." Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, the golden ratio is a mathematical relation deemed pleasing in art, architecture, and design. When a line is divided into two parts in the proportions of this ratio, the length of the longer segment divided by the length of the shorter segment is equal to the length of the whole line divided by the length of the longer segment, a ratio of approximately 1.618:1. Classic examples can be found in the layout of the Parthenon and Da Vinci's The Last Supper.
HarperCollins will publish a debut novel, A Woman of War by midwife Mandy Robotham, along with three other titles, following its first open submissions scheme which opened in February.
Along with Robotham's "heartbreaking and uplifting" tale, the Avon editorial team also snapped up The Widow Next Door, by Pennsylvania-based high school teacher and writer L A Detweiler, along with self-published author Jane Gilley's The Woman Who Kept Everything and The Man I Fell In Love With by Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA)-winner Kate Field.
The HarperCollins imprint, which publishes commercial fiction across digital and paperback format, reached out to aspiring writers in February, asking them to email novels directly to its editing team. The open submissions window remains open with no current plans to close it, an Avon spokesperson said.
There is something exciting, but also terrifying, about creating a new series character - especially as I have been writing about my first detective, DCI Tom Douglas, for so many years.
Tom grew up in Manchester, as I did, and I can picture the road he lived on as a child, the places he visits, the scenes of the crimes he investigates. I know what he looks like, what he drinks and that he likes to cook. He feels like one of the family now, and I understand his moods, his passions and his fears.
It is so easy to write about him - I know how he will react to every situation. So why a new character?
Language is our greatest invention. As a device for understanding ourselves and the world, nothing else comes close. Poetry is language at its keenest, and the poetry of these islands is our greatest achievement.
Accordingly, the laureateship should be the highest office in poetry and the laureate should be the guardian of those ideals. It should be awarded to a poet of true recognition, a poet admired by both their fellow poets and by the public, a poet who is both expert and enthusiast, and a poet who is an accomplished practitioner of the art as well as its champion and ambassador. No one else will do.
It should be a poet who listens more than they talk, who reads more than they write, who thinks more of other poets' work than they do of their own, and who knows and cares deeply about the poets of the past, because there are more of them than us and they are better. If you put the laurel crown on your head and you haven't read the whole of Beowulf or the Iliad, or don't know who wrote Lycidas, or can't recite a poem by Sappho or Emily Dickinson, or can't name a poem by Derek Walcott, then you are not worthy of the role. Prepare to be embarrassed at your first interview. The great majority of the best poetry ever written is freely available so not to have to read it - even just to disagree with it - is inexcusable.
Signing with a publishing house is undoubtedly a very exciting experience, but it can also come with a side of confusion, especially for debut authors. It can be hard to let your work go, because you've worked on it so hard and up until now, you've been in control (perhaps with your agent too). I wanted to explain some of the decisions publishers might make for your book, and why.
1. Changing your book title
I work for a very commercial publishing house, so we do this quite a lot for our authors, and the title of my own book was altered by the publisher too. Sometimes, authors might wonder why this is being done - maybe you love your title as it is, or don't like the new one. There are a few reasons why a publisher might give you a shiny new title, though, and all of them have the same aim which is to ensure your book sells as many copies as possible and performs brilliantly both for you and for the publishing house. So, we might change a title because the current one is too long - when designing book jackets, we have to think about the lettering and how it will appear on a cover. If the title is very long, there won't be enough space for the letters to ‘breathe' and it will become tricky for the imagery to work in conjunction with the title - remember the author name and probably a strapline also need to fit on! So sometimes, we will find a shorter, snappier title which will look better in a design.
As the new Staunch prize sets out to reward thrillers that shun brutality against women, the Ghost Wall author explains how she writes about violence.
The Staunch prize, for a thriller - in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered - is about to announce its first shortlist. The new prize has attracted the anger invariably raised by public mention of violence against women. Writers object to the implication that someone is telling us what to write about; some men object to the implication that violence against men is less problematic. We all know that abused female bodies sell books.