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 17 2018 (51)
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.