What happens when "bigger is better" becomes an ethos for an entire society? From SUVs that will never see a dirt road to McMansions that could fit several families, American culture right now abounds with an excess of, well, excess. The normalization of this can distort priorities, creating a sense that something far larger than what we need is what we want. In arts and culture, the ramifications of this bigger-is-better ideal include the phenomenon of movies begetting franchises begetting expanded cinematic universes. But - more relevant to me personally - it also includes the trend towards bloated novels and multi-volume series, and its counterpart, the devaluation of the novella.
Links of the week December 10 2018 (50)
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 December 2018
There are moments when being a lover of literary minimalism can feel like being part of a secret society. A particularly obscure secret society, and one that's closer in tone to a bizarre eating club than, say, a revolutionary faction looking to burn it all down. Nonetheless, the novella (or short novel; I'll be using the two interchangeably) can feel like an overlooked form: concise enough to be an exercise in restraint, and yet too short to be deemed commercially viable.
Like most authors who don't sell a million books a year, I have a day job. I've been a journalist since before personal computers. It's a fun gig that pays the bills but also a challenging one that limits time for making things up. This past summer, my bosses at Blooomberg Businessweek allowed me a six-week sabbatical so I could focus on writing a second novel I owe my friends at Amazon Publishing's Thomas & Mercer imprint.
I loved the break, though maybe not for the reason most people would think.
I approached the sabbatical with equal measures of excitement and apprehension. I was glad to be out of the office, away from the bank of overhead televisions blaring the hourly apocalypse, unchained from the pressures of concocting and delivering stories. At the same time, I wondered whether I'd be disciplined enough to exploit the opportunity to think about fiction only. Would I behave as if this was a vacation? Might I start cracking beers before noon?I set a goal of writing 1,000 words a day. I know authors who write a lot more, but I didn't want to risk discouraging myself by being unrealistic. Hell, it took me almost four years to write my current novel, Bleak Harbor-an eternity to most writers in my genre.
Mystery author Kellye Garrett found out that her publisher, Midnight Ink, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide, would be closing to new author submissions next year on the same day the news was announced publicly in October, when she received an email from the publisher.
Author Mollie Cox Bryan, whose Classic Star Biography mysteries series will debut with The Jean Harlow Bombshell in May 2019, heard the news from her literary agent. This will be her first-and last-novel for Midnight Ink. Like Garrett, she didn't have any inkling that the publisher planned to stop publishing. "I was shocked and saddened by the news for myself, but also for the mystery community," Bryan said.
Earlier this year, the book publishing world was rocked by stories of unethical behavior by literary agents. On the one hand, this news was disheartening to hear. On the other hand, it opened up a candid discussion on social media about how different agents communicate with their clients and approach the submissions process. This led to a bigger discussion about how to distinguish between an agent who is unfit for the job-and an agent who is fit for the job but a mismatch for a particular client, and vice versa.
These stories made me think about writers who are represented by reputable, successful agents but are quietly contemplating change. If you're a writer, how do you know if it's worth the risk of leaving your current agent? Does past representation impede your ability to find a new agent? I asked literary agents John Cusick and Holly Root.
The passage of time is relentless. We all know it. Whether you're having fun or not. Whether the years are filled with sublime happiness or utter sadness, or, like most of us, with a combination of both. It just goes, and sometimes, our dreams go with it. We turn around and 10 or 20 years have whipped by and we are left to wonder what else we could have, should have, done.
As a lifelong reader, I admired writers above all and I'd always wanted to write. But it seemed there was never the time or the space or the confidence, to begin. Plus, I'd been married to a writer, which works for some, but not for me: not enough air and patience for two of us. Then everything changed: divorce, business shuttered, remarriage. Though well past 40, I finally sat down to write nearly every day. At first, it was a kind of journal, but after a year I decided it needed to have form, to tell a story, and I started a novel. I had no idea what a difficult goal I'd set for myself, didn't know enough not to do it. And, so I kept writing until I found the heart of the story that later would become my first novel, Time Is the Longest Distance.
Authors and critics have called for newspapers to increase the space they allow for children's book reviews after only 7% of the titles chosen for newspapers' books of the year round-ups were for kids.
According to data collated from The Bookseller's Books in the Media for reviews published up until 10th December, only 7% of the books of the year were children's titles, a figure that is higher than the weekly average of 3% calculated last year by author SF Said, who runs the #CoverKidsBooks campaign, but does not reflect the fact that children's books account for 25% of the market.
Internationally bestselling Australian author Kate Morton has fended off a lawsuit by her former literary agent, who instead has to pay the writer more than $500,000.
Selwa Anthony sued the author in the New South Wales supreme court, claiming she was entitled to be paid 15% commission on all royalties earned from Morton's first six published books for the life of each work.
Morton's cross-claim arose out of Anthony's conduct in relation to the negotiation of world rights publishing agreements.In a 248-page judgment delivered on Monday, Justice Julie Ward dismissed Anthony's claim and partly upheld the cross-claim, ordering the agent to pay Morton $514,558 plus interest.
Costs will be determined next year.
If a book is good, if it's artful, entertaining, and informative, should it matter who the author is? Once upon a time, many readers would have said no. It was a long-standing protocol of book appreciation to consider things like the gender, sexuality, ethnicity, personal vices, personal virtues (if any), and prior reputation of the author irrelevant to a book's merits. You could disapprove of a writer's politics and prejudices if they showed up in the text; otherwise, they were customarily bracketed off.
When people had an issue with the author, it was because they felt that he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the "autobiographical pact." This is the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the "I," of the text. The pact obviously governs our expectations about memoirs, but it extends in a more general way to books in which the speaker or the protagonist is presented as a fictionalized version of the author (so-called "autofiction"), and it extends even to straight-up fiction: if the name on the cover seriously misleads us about the identity of the author, we can feel we have been taken in.
10 December 2018
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying. -Anton Chekhov
You might think the agony of what to remove from your work is reserved for nonfiction and memoir writers. True when I do write the occasional nonfiction piece, usually an essay, I agonize if it has anything to do with family. I'm not out to hurt anyone. On a practical level, what do I do?
I change names, genders, ages, locations, and other identifying factors, nothing that's not standard. I have also at times left a sibling out of a scene entirely if I can get away with it, to minimize the bruising, if I think there will be any.
Mostly, I stick with fiction.
And I'm here to tell you it doesn't make the problem disappear.
Amazon's dubious ethical employment standards are nothing new. You know the ecommerce giant is unrivalled when it comes to logistics and infrastructure. And their unscrupulous pricing strategy has long ceased to astonish - retailers simply cannot compete. But as Amazon continues to expand far beyond its current terrifying $1tn etail presence, grabbing an even bigger piece of the bookselling pie, what are the implications for publishers and retailers?
Amazon's latest foray into your territory? Building on the popularity of online book clubs such as Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine and Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf, Amazon has partnered with Buzzfeed to launch the Buzzfeed Book Club. With online ad spend and native content on rocky ground, media outlets are seeking new ways of monetising their audience and diversifying revenue streams. With Buzzfeed Books 1.2 million followers-strong on Facebook, it makes sense to connect with book lovers directly.
Nora K. Jemisin wants to talk about cities.
First, Ferguson, Missouri. As Jemisin, along with the rest of the world, watched a city rise up in rage in response to the injustice of then-officer Darren Wilson's murder of Michael Brown, she slowly began to imagine a new way for the world to end. A society that had endured environmental disaster after disaster for generations in a cycle that was irregular but always inevitable, so much so that people were born into the world believing the Earth hated them. A world where you live one way when the seasons changed as usual, and another when the Earth churned in anger, threatening to kill everyone on it. She called these recurring cycles of disaster the Fifth Season, a name good enough for a title.
Thus begins Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, a three-volume epic that maintains a remarkably sharp focus thanks to building itself around on Essun's revenge, powered by the real-life rage that comes from witnessing a nation's violent history of injustice catch up with it. It's also a cycle of novels that would lead to Jemisin making history, becoming the first black woman to win the Hugo Award for best novel-speculative fiction's highest honor-with The Fifth Season, and then becoming the first writer ever to win that same award three consecutive years in a row with the next two books in her trilogy, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.
The average American reads 12 or 13 books a year, but with over 3 million books in print, the choices they face are staggering.
Despite the introduction of 100,000 new titles each year, only a tiny fraction of these attract a large enough readership to make The New York Times Best Seller list.
Which raises the questions: How does a book become a best-seller, and which types of books are more likely to make the list?
Then we examined the fiction list. Much of the press focuses on literary fiction - books we see debated by critics, lauded as important and culturally relevant, and eventually taught in schools.
But in the past decade, only 800 books categorized as literary fiction made the best-seller list. Most best sellers - 67% of all fiction titles - represent plot-driven genres like mystery or romance or the kind of thrillers that Danielle Steel and Clive Cussler write.
Action sells -- there's no surprise there.
In the mid-1990s, when I was a student of creative writing, there prevailed a quiet but firm admonition to avoid composing political poems. It was too dangerous an undertaking, one likely to result in didacticism and slackened craft. No, in American poetry, politics was the domain of the few and the fearless, poets like Adrienne Rich or Denise Levertov, whose outsize conscience justified such risky behavior. Even so, theirs weren't the voices being discussed in workshops and craft seminars.
Maybe it was our relative political stability that kept Americans from stepping into the fray. Perhaps America's individualism predisposed its poets toward the lyric poem, with its insistence on the primacy of a single speaker whose politics were intimate, internal, invisible. Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, and the war in Iraq, and something shifted in the nation''s psyche.
"Once a day, I cast my eyes heavenward and say, ‘Thank you for Donald Trump,'" Michael Wolff said last spring.
He has good reason to thank the president. Without Trump, Wolff would not have made this year's rankings of the world's highest-paid authors.
The world's 11 highest-paid authors sold 24.5 million print books combined in the U.S. during our scoring period, logging $283 million. The prolific James Patterson takes first place, earning $86 million and selling 4.8 million books in the U.S. alone, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks 85% of the domestic print market.
Female authors have managed to avoid including bad sex scenes in their novels this year - at least according to the Literary Review, which has announced an all-male shortlist for that least-coveted of literary prizes, the Bad sex in fiction award.
Haruki Murakami, often named as a contender for the Nobel prize, makes the cut for passages from his latest novel Killing Commendatore in which impossible amounts of semen are ejaculated by the protagonist. The controversial US novelist James Frey, who was exposed for inventing parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, was selected for a scene in his novel Katerina described by judges as "almost like wish fulfilment".