We put a tremendous amount of stock in endings. The concluding paragraph or a novel, or the final novel in a sequence of a dozen books, can secure an experience in our minds, or taint the hundreds or thousands of pages that came before. The logic is perverse: the longer the series-the more words preceding the last one-the more weight we give to that wrap-up. When Robert Jordan passed just prior to the completion of his then 11-book saga The Wheel of Time, the discussion was overwhelmingly about what would happen next: who would end his story, and how? Terry Brooks is nearing the chronological conclusion of his decades-long Shannara series, a last volume that will have to support the 30 or so that preceded it.
Links of the week November 19 2018 (47)
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:
26 November 2018
Out this week is Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones, the first of two volumes in George R. R. Martin's faux-history of the dragonlords of House Targaryen, ancestors to its last survivor, young Queen Daenerys. It begins with Aegon the Conqueror and the forging of the Iron Throne, and carries through subsequent generations, and the family's battles to keep it. It's backstory that's only been glimpsed before, and some of the most intriguing Westeros has to offer, set in the days when dragons ruled the skies.
This year, for the first time, the National Book Foundation awarded a National Book Award for Translated Literature. As was no doubt their intention, the prominence of the award served not only as a way to celebrate great translated literature (and translators) but also as a little push to the book lovers of America to keep reading it and thinking about it-and for some, to stop and reflect on translation as a literary form. After all, there are few literary feats more magical-and more mysterious to those of us unfamiliar with the language of the source text.
Translation is a curious craft. You must capture the voice of an author writing in one language and bear it into another, yet leave faint trace that the transfer ever took place. (The translator extraordinaire Charlotte Mandell calls this transformation "Something Else but Still the Same.") Though spared the anguish of writer's block, the translator nonetheless has to confront the white page and fill it. The fear: being so immersed in the source text, adhering so closely to the source language, that the resulting prose is affected and awkward-or worse, unreadable. Yet immersion is inevitable. In fact, it's required.
Authors with strong brands enjoy numerous marketing advantages over those whose brands are weaker. For example, authors with strong brands are more likely to earn coveted book reviews and retailer merchandising. The results of such wins then feed into a self-reinforcing cycle that generates more readership, greater visibility, and more sales.
Authors with strong brands can also command higher prices for their books. In fact, the prices authors select for their books convey a promise about their brands.
Smart brand building is how unknown authors become known authors. Here are seven tips to help authors cultivate stronger brands:
Authors with strong brands enjoy numerous marketing advantages over those whose brands are weaker. For example, authors with strong brands are more likely to earn coveted book reviews and retailer merchandising. The results of such wins then feed into a self-reinforcing cycle that generates more readership, greater visibility, and more sales. Authors with strong brands can also command higher prices for their books. In fact, the prices authors select for their books convey a promise about their brands. Smart brand building is how unknown authors become known authors. Here are seven tips to help authors cultivate stronger brands:
When Danielle Steel was a budding 19-year-old writer, she bought a secondhand German typewriter for 20 dollars. Steel recently completed her 174th book on that same machine. "I think I'm onto a good thing," Steel told Refinery29 from her home in San Francisco.
This is a very significant understatement. Steel is the bestselling author alive. Her career reads like that once 19-year-old's fever dream of a writer's life: Her novels are a constant fixture on the New York Times Bestseller List, and have sold a combined 800 million copies. All of her books are still in print. Lukewarm critical reviews have never, and will never, affect her fans' devotion. She writes so prolifically that she can barely remember the plot of Beauchamp Hall, released November 20.
How does an author turn a viral article into a published book? In the case of writer Gemma Hartley, whose September 2017 Harper's Bazaar article on emotional labor, "Women Aren't Nags-We're Just Fed Up," went viral on publication, it helped that she was prepared. "This was one of the few cases throughout my freelance career when I thought, I could write a whole book on this," she said.
Since there were several months between filing her article and its publication, she had time to mull over the topic. When the article exploded online, with over half a million social media shares, she was contacted by literary agents. By that point, Hartley says, she already had a "rough outline" in mind for the book, which felt like "a natural, if surreal, next step." Her expanded exploration of the topic, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward, was published by HarperOne on November 13.
Hartley had six months to complete her manuscript; her proposal included an overview and extended table of contents when the book was sold. She credits her work as a prolific freelance writer, usually writing more than a thousand words a day, to her ability to do justice to her subject as she went from personal essay to a more research-based approach. "Without that work ethic already going strong, I would have crashed and burned in a hurry."
Margaret Atwood is writing a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, set 15 years after Offred's ambiguous final scene in the acclaimed 1985-published novel.
Slated for publication in September 2019, The Testaments promises to be a "global publishing event" as it continues Atwood's story 15 years on from the moment Offred steps into the Eyes' car "into the darkness, within; or else the light". According to Atwood, it was inspired both by fans' questions about Gilead and "the world we've been living in".
The news follows a marked rise in popularity of the book following Donald Trump's 2016 election as well as on the heels of the Emmy Award-winning TV series, starring Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes, that aired in the UK on Channel 4, pushing sales up a whopping 670% year-on-year. Through Nielsen BookScan, it has now sold 886,019 copies across all editions (including academic editions) while the 2017 TV tie-in has sold 188,804. Meanwhile, according to Vintage, eight million copies have been sold globally in the English language.
The United Kingdom may be teetering on the Brexit abyss but you, Diagram Prize voters, have plumped for European unity in the only referendum that really matters.
I am delighted to announce that, for the first time in the 40-year life of the world's most prestigious literary gong, a foreign-language tome, Joy of Waterboiling, has won the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. A point of order to forestall any rants from foaming-at-the-mouth Brexiteers about bloody foreigners, coming over here, stealing our book prizes (or perhaps from Mark "Make America Go Home Again" Richards at John Murray, a renowned objector to certain awards criteria): though JOW is a German-language text, it is eligible for Diagram consideration as only a book's title need be in English.
19 November 2018
The other day at lunch, my friend - a writer and former journalist - raised a palm toward me to stop my monologue and said: "I don't get it! Why would anyone self-publish a book?"
I had just described the number of people I had attracted to seminars on self-publishing this year in the Midwest. Unlike my students, my friend expects to publish a book with a traditional publisher and snag a full-page review in the New York Times Book Review. To her, self-publishing is an admission of defeat, or at least an admission that your book isn't good enough to attract a "real" publisher.
The belief that all self-published books are poorly written, unedited and poorly designed is pervasive. And, yes, many of them are. Way too many. But some self-published books are great - as fine as those distributed by the big traditional New York publishers and better than some. One of the main reasons that authors self-publish good books is that they have too few years left in life or too little patience to go traditional. Most publishers will acquire only those books brought to them by agents, and finding an agent can take an author two years - or forever. Typically, agents will pick up two or three new authors out of every 2,000 manuscripts submitted to them. (It helps if the author is related to someone in the publishing industry or got an MFA from Iowa or Stanford.)
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
In America and Britain, fiction is said to be in decline. PW recently called attention to the 16% (or $830 million) decline in the sales of adult fiction reported by the 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 during the 2013-2017 period. In Britain, the Publishers Association reports a slightly larger drop over a similar period. These are figures you'd associate with a product in long-term decline: landlines in a mobile age, horses in the age of Ford.
Of course, there's a problem with the data here: Where are the self-publishers? Where are Amazon's own imprints? But more broadly, and speaking as a novelist, I can't help feeling that these AAP numbers simply don't reflect what's happening with readers. (And, as an author with extensive experience with both self-publishing and traditional publishing, I'm able to speak from both sides of the curtain.)
The fact is that nothing at all in my interactions with readers makes me feel like I'm selling horses to car owners. Indeed, if my email inbox is anything to go by, I'm selling horses to people who really, really like horses. The appetite for good, absorbing, well-written fiction feels to me as intense now as it ever did.
This week, I'm a guest on the Marginally podcast, which is about writing (or the creative life) when you also hold a day job. I immensely enjoyed the conversation with Olivia and Meghan, not least because it was free of the usual nuts-and-bolts of how to get published. Instead, we discussed the vexed issue of writing and money.
In every podcast conversation or interview, there is at least one question where I wish I''d offered a better, more considered answer. This one was no different and it was related directly to the premise of the podcast: How do you navigate the writing life when you have an intense day job? Does such a thing as balance exist?
Few things are more personal than making time or finding balance. Today, my idea of balance is keeping email off my phone and only working about four hours on the weekends. Ten years ago, while I held a corporate job, my idea of balance was not looking at email after 10 p.m. daily. Each of us must deal with shifting personal circumstances (e.g., our family needs us, we need a day job for health care) and psychological demons (e.g., that awful teacher who told us we'd never make it as a writer).
A much-loved Québécois literary prize has been suspended after the five finalists for this year's award publicly protested at its sponsorship by Amazon.
The CA$5,000 (£3,000) Prix littéraire des collégiens, running since 2003, is intended to promote Québécois literature and is decided by a jury of hundreds of students who select their winner from a selection of five works of fiction written in French by Canadian authors. But after this year's finalists, the writers Lula Carballo, Dominique Fortier, Karoline Georges, Kevin Lambert and Jean-Christophe Réhel, discovered that Amazon Canada would be the prize's new principal sponsor, they wrote to Le Devoir urging organisers to reconsider.
"Our great unease comes from the dangerous competition this giant has with Quebec bookstores. Need we remind you of the precariousness of the book trade and literary publishing? Need we mention the inhumane methods of this online giant, which constitute a danger for small traders and culture at large?" they wrote.
Would JK Rowling please leave Harry Potter in peace? Back in 2010 was a good time to move on. Harry Potter's last adventures had hit the bookstores in 2007, and three years later the Warner Bros adaptations had just about run their course in cinemas too. For many millennials, the young wizard had worked his magic through most of their childhood.
But it's 2018 now, and a new Harry Potter extended universe film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, is out this week. The Harry Potter series, it would seem, truly "opened at the close". By Dumbledore, I wish it hadn't.
I love Harry Potter and I always will. It's all there in my Pensieve: the first delight at reading "Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much"; the wizarding treasure hunt thrown by my parents for my ninth birthday, with my dad dressed as Hagrid in the garden shed; the Beauxbatons parchment letter, written in green ink, sent by my older cousin during my 11th summer; deciphering my copy of Deathly Hallows, the first book I read in English, and having to check the French for "wand"; the 2001 trip to the cinema to see Philosopher's Stone, and all the ones that followed.
But, in 2010, just as I caught up with Harry's age of 17, I thought it was finally over.
Edgar-winner James Lee Burke is the bestselling author of more than 30 books, most recently House of the Rising Sun. Burke shares his writing tips.
Robert Frost once said a poet must be committed to a lover's quarrel with the world. He had it right. If a person writes for money or success, he will probably have neither. If he writes for the love of his art and the world and humanity, money and success will find him down the line. In the meantime he must work everyday at his craft, either at his desk or in his mind and sometimes in his sleep. It's a lonely pursuit, one without shortcuts.
I published my first short story when I was nineteen. I wrote on my own for two years and met many dead ends and received many rejection slips, then I enrolled in a fiction writing class with William Hamlin and a poetry class with John Neihardt at the University of Missouri. I learned in weeks what I could not have learned in years through trial and error. For that reason, I recommend that a beginning writer find a group, either at a community college or university or city library or church, it doesn't matter, so he can share his work with others.
Broadhursts of Southport's part-time staff member Joanne Ball announced on Twitter that she had just sold a book in stock since May 1991. "We always knew its day would come," she wrote of the Pitkin children's biography of William the Conqueror - unaware that her announcement would be retweeted almost 150,000 times as book-lovers worldwide rejoiced in the book finally finding a home.
Broadhursts of Southport's part-time staff member Joanne Ball announced on Twitter that she had just sold a book in stock since May 1991. "We always knew its day would come," she wrote of the Pitkin children's biography of William the Conqueror - unaware that her announcement would be retweeted almost 150,000 times as book-lovers worldwide rejoiced in the book finally finding a home.
The Society of AuthorsThe British authors’ organization, with a membership of over 7,000 writers. Membership is open to those who have had a book published, or who have an offer to publish (without subsidy by the author). Offers individual specialist advice and a range of publications to its members. Has also campaigned successfully on behalf of authors in general for improved terms and established a minimum terms agreement with many publishers. Recently campaigned to get the Public Lending Right fund increased from £5 million to £7 million for the year 2002/2003. Regularly uses input from members to produce comparative surveys of publishers’ royalty payment systems. http://www.societyofauthors.org/ (SoA) and a number of writers have criticised YouTube for emailing its users saying Article 13, part of the EU's proposed copyright directive, would prevent them from uploading videos onto online platforms.
In September the European Parliament voted in favour of the copyright directive, which was put together to modernise copyright for the digital age. Article 13 of that directive would make any websites that host large amounts of user-generated content (like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) responsible for taking down that content if it infringes on copyright.
YouTube yesterday (21st November) emailed a letter to its users encouraging them to protest against Article 13, saying: "Imagine an internet where your videos can no longer be seen. Imagine an internet without your favourite creators. Imagine an internet where new artists are never discovered. It could happen in Europe.
To be clear, we support the goals of Article 13. However, the current European Parliament proposal of Article 13 will have serious unintended consequences. It threatens to deprive millions of people in Europe of their ability to upload content to platforms like YouTube. European viewers would lose access to billions of videos from all over the world."