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 26 2018 (48)
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.