Filmmakers love to use novels as source material for films, and writers love to have their work adapted for the big screen. Why not? For filmmakers, literary adaptations come with a built-in fan base, along with (usually) a well-crafted story populated by ready-made, compelling characters. For writers, film adaptations come with money, prestige, and-hopefully-with more attention for the book, which often translates into more copies sold.
Links of the week February 19 2018 (08)
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 February 2018
But sometimes Hollywood can be more trouble than it's worth. Just ask these twenty authors, who all hated the film adaptations of their literary works - for reasons ranging from the understandable to the, well, let's say enigmatic. I mean, artists, am I right?
A simple, easily searchable website is one of the most potent tools in the indie author's marketing arsenal.
There's no need to ask, ‘Do I need an author website?' The answer is a resounding ‘yes.' A simple, easily searchable website is one of the most potent tools in an indie author's marketing arsenal.
Whether an author goes it alone or hires a web designer, the essential site features remain the same. Authors need to make sure readers can visit an easy to find, easy to read, informative website. After all, every visit is a potential book sale. Here's a checklist of things you should include on your author website.
Long before the rise of "autofiction", and the contemporary wave of authors drawing from their own lives for their novels - Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner and others - many writers in the first half of the 20th century were experimenting with the limits of autobiography. Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Wyndham Lewis, Gertrude Stein, HG Wells, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf: all wrote memoirs as inventive, in different ways, as their novels (which were often themselves very autobiographical). And that list is only the tip of the iceberg.
The novelist%u2019s memoir is a fascinating subgenre, if a slippery one when it comes to the truth. Writing autobiography, like all self-portraiture, is an art, even if it can be very lifelike. Novelists, whose daily craft involves making things up, know this all too well. So many different elements pull against the memoirist%u2019s obligation to veracity %u2013 not least privacy, style, and the vagaries of memory %u2013 that some fiction is inevitably woven in. As the biographer Leon Edel writes, a biography (and the same is true of autobiography) %u201Ccannot imitate life %u2026 it rearranges its material; it tells a flowing continuous story %u2013 something our lives never were%u201D.
After 17 drafts over two weeks, Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art" was completed on November 4, 1975. The poem began as notes, and evolved into a villanelle. She changed the title. She deleted words. She reached for possible rhymes. Brett Candlish Millier says the "effect of reading all these drafts together one often feels in reading the raw material of her poems and then the poems themselves: the tremendous selectivity of her method and her gift for forcing richness from minimal words." Revision is art.
Denise Levertov said it was dangerous to revise a poem unless "you are hot in it." Some poets suffer through revision. Other poets find life in revision. All poets do it. Here are 15 poets on the worthy work of revision.
"I revise incessantly. Usually when I'm starting to work on a poem, I don't read it aloud-not until it gets to a certain point. You can lull yourself with your own voice; but I hear it in my head." - Rita Dove
"The energy of revision is the energy of creation and change, which is also the energy of destruction." - Maggie Anderson
"I revise constantly. I used to revise whole poems; now I revise as I go along, from line to line. Sometimes I erase so much I tear a hole in the paper." - Charles Wright
In 2013, when Keira Drake sat down to write her debut young-adult fantasy novel, The Continent, she wanted to write about privilege, about the way that those who have it can so easily turn a blind eye to the suffering of those who don't. Her imagination had been sparked by an NPR report about bombings in Iraq; it brought her to tears, and when she switched off the radio, she began thinking about what might happen if someone like her - someone white, sheltered, and privileged - suddenly found herself in the middle of a war between two violent societies in a foreign land. Drake set her fantasy in a place called the Continent, a brutal realm where privileged tourists, safe in their heli-planes, gaze down with detached curiosity at the native people slaughtering each other below. After a heli-plane crashes, Drake's narrator is saved by one of the natives from an attempted rape at the hands of an enemy tribe, and she, in turn, saves his people from ruin.
It wasn't until five months later that a legion of less enchanted readers took to Twitter to offer a differing perspective. Justina Ireland, an African-American author of young-adult fiction, tweeted out a point-by-point summary of her read in which she called the book a "racist garbage fire." Ireland eventually deleted the thread after receiving a barrage of death threats, rape threats, withering reviews of her own books, and an anonymous email to her editor calling her a bully and urging him to drop her. And so it was that Drake, like her protagonist, suddenly found herself at the center of a feud between two warring factions.
Lionel Shriver, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, has warned that "politically correct censorship" risks turning the world of fiction into a "timid, homogeneous, and dreary" place, and called on her fellow novelists to take a stand against it.
Writing in March's issue of Prospect magazine, Shriver said that authors in today's "call out" culture are "contend[ing] with a torrent of dos and don'ts that bind our imaginations and make the process of writing and publishing fearful". She provoked outrage in 2016 when she said in a keynote speech at the Brisbane writers festival that she hoped "the concept of ‘cultural appropriation' is a passing fad". Almost two years later, she has now written that "preventing writers from conjuring lives different from their own would spell the end of fiction", because "if we have the right to draw on only our own experience, all that's left is memoir".
The recent interview that Hachette CEO Arnaud Nourry gave to Indian news site Scroll.in has been a sort of nine-day wonder of the ebook world lately. In this interview, Nourry called the ebook a "stupid product" because it's "exactly the same as print, except it's electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience."
He added that publishers have tried enhanced or enriched ebooks time and time again, and they simply haven't worked. As a result, he came to the conclusion that publishers simply don't have the necessary skill set to enhance ebooks because they're too stuck on the printed page and don't know where to go from there.
There's so much to address in this, though to some extent I already did when I addressed Random House CEO Markus Dohle's similar opinions a few months ago. Reading over this particular article actually reminds me a lot of an anecdote from the late Douglas Adams's best-known work, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I was a relatively late convert to the e-reader, getting my Kindle five years ago when it became clear that reading 600-pages of A Suitable Boy while breastfeeding wasn't going to work. After a frenzied few months of almost exclusive e-reading, I returned largely to the traditional printed book for a number of reasons: screen fatigue, a tendency to scrawl in margins, because I want my kids to see me reading, and because I'm a passionate supporter of bookshops and booksellers. Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry recently called ebooks "stupid" - but last summer, they changed my life.
Given that backlist especially is free money for the publisher, I'm bewildered by Nourry's dismissal of the ebook. Of course there are caveats; Amazon's near-monopoly of the market is worrying, and we have already reached the tipping point where competitive pricing has become a race to the bottom in which profit margins are negligible. But a stupid format? Clever books such as Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy are not dumbed down in digital. Lyra's Oxford is just as enchanting in e-ink as when bound and typeset in carbon black.
19 February 2018
New Delhi: In 18 short years, David Shelley has gone from being an editorial assistant and then publishing director at independent publisher Allison and Busby, to becoming chief executive of Hachette UK last month-a career that's nothing short of phenomenal. Along the way, the Oxford graduate in English literature has also been the CEO of Little, Brown and Orion.
Shelley is seen as one of the hottest young talents in global publishing and has worked with authors such as J.K. Rowling and Mitch Albom. A passionate advocate for publishers adapting to the digital environment, Shelley also oversees Hatchette UK's inclusion initiative, Changing the Story. In the country for Hachette India's 10th anniversary celebrations, the 41-year-old Shelley spoke about his career, publishing in the digital world, audiobooks, the company's diversity initiatives and plans for India.
I started in a small company called Allison and Busby. Due to a series of events I was running it when I was 23! There were five of us, and we had an office in Brixton in south London, which is not an area where publishers tend to have offices. But it was close to my house so I thought it was a good idea. Working for a small independent publisher with five people, looking back on it, it was the best thing that I possibly could have done. You learn absolutely everything. You know about sales, you know about distribution, you know about editorial, you know about art. I had to make sure that we had enough money in the bank to pay everyone. That really focuses your mind on what you publish and how you publish it.
Learning the art of book marketing is a pursuit which can often feel like an unending demand on your limited resources. But it's a craft we must improve over time, as well as keep up-to-date with using newest book tactics. Our book marketing landscape changes, and so we must too.
Keeping up with the latest book marketing trends and learning new tactics can be expensive. Couple this with the growing cost of self-publishing, and it's important that we be economically shrewd in our endeavors.
Courses are a wonderful way to effectively and efficiently learn how to market our books, but it seems like the price of a course increases every year. Plus, new tactics also pop up, requiring another course to take, like Facebook messenger bots or Amazon ads. So, how are cash-strapped but talented authors supposed to rise above? Luckily, there are some effective ways, platforms, and methods for the cost conscientious and time-starved authors out there. Since you''re here reading one of my personal favorite book marketing blogs, we won%u2019t discuss top writer websites, but we will instead focus on some other methods to help you learn, grow, and improve your book marketing skills, without breaking the bank.
They don't make literary feuds the way they used to. Maybe authors are kinder than they used to be-or maybe they just have Twitter. Either way, I love to hear about author feuds of yore, and so I've collected (and ranked) twenty-five of the best below.
But first, some rules. In order to qualify as a literary feud, both parties must be literary authors in their own right (no editor-author squabbles), and the argument must be two-sided-that is, there should be at least one exchange, two shots fired. No simple unremarked-upon bad review or unacknowledged shit-talking will suffice. For instance, Bret Easton Ellis's bizarrely vicious attacks on David Foster Wallace in the years after his death don't rate, because Ellis is just trolling. As far as I can tell, Mark Twain simply bullied Bret Harte, who kept his mouth shut about the whole thing. The Rick Moody/Dale Peck incident-already toeing the line as Peck, while a novelist, is arguably better known as a critic-devolved into a publicity stunt. I wouldn't count Hans Christian Andersen overstaying his welcome at Charles Dickens's house a feud, no matter how bad his manners. Same goes for Rimbaud and Verlaine's gun-toting lovers' quarrel...
At the last FutureBook conference I was asked to participate on a panel that asked how more authors can be helped to reach more readers in a distracted world. FutureBook is a day when a lot of hard science and serious data gets cited and chewed over. I'm an agent, and I represent authors. Without authors, we have no books - and by consequnce, I argued to those in the room, no future. So as my contribution I undertook a scientific and serious survey, putting to authors the very question of the panel debate.
Well, I say "scientific". I admit, I spoke to six authors - hardly a YouGov poll's worth. But they ranged from a writer whose first book was published less than 12 months before, to one who has been in print for 40 years. They spanned fiction and non-fiction. And they had 60 published works between them. I gave them a deadline of a week to respond. Most came back overnight. This is a question no-one had ever thought of asking them before. And they were keen to be heard. The four themes were consistent. Many points were startlingly blunt. And what I quote here comes pretty much verbatim.
The CEO of Penguin Random House on trends in publishing
Markus Dohle is the global Chief Executive Officer of Penguin Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher. Additionally, he is Chairman of 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 and serves on the PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. Excerpts from an email interview:
The playwright David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction". What is your sense of the future of literary fiction? People are reading more than ever, but is there still a place for longer, textured novels?
I believe in the future of literary fiction. I think fiction is more important than ever in today's world because it helps people escape from the never-ending news cycle by immersing themselves in great stories and complex characters. Additionally, the repeating nature of fiction makes it the most sustaining and viable category in publishing.
Romance is a genre about women, by women and pored over by women - 84 percent of readers are female, according to Romance Writers of America.
It's a $1 billion industry, and 35 percent of romance book buyers have been reading them for 20 years or more, according to RWA.
So after a year when persisting and resisting were the norm - what does this world of fiction look like? Have romance novels evolved given the current social/political climate? The answer to that is yes, but not in a "big boom" kind of way, said Joanne Grant, editorial director of the Harlequin Series.
"I think this is something that will continue to shape romance over time, but I also feel strongly that this is a conversation we've been having over the course of years," she said. "It's not a new thing for us to pause and look at our male/female dynamics: how we portray sex, consent, how do we keep the fantasy alive while making sure that the heroine is relatable in the 21st century?"
I first realized that literary genres existed-that certain books were, by dint of their cover designs and physical dimensions, suspect-in fifth grade. My friend Adam and I had just been to see The Client, and Adam's father, from the front seat of his minivan, described the John Grisham novel on which the movie had been based as "junk." He said this in the same tone in which he might have described a stop sign as red.
I had, until that moment, been absurdly proud of having read The Client. For weeks I'd been leaving the cinderblock-sized hardcover all over the house, as conspicuously preoccupied by its convolutions as a good-hearted Southern lawyer menaced by the mob. Now I was stricken.
Is it junk?, I asked my dad as soon as I got home.
Well, he said. Sometimes you feel like a cheeseburger; sometimes you feel like a steak.
All of which would have been fine-there's room in life for both cheeseburgers and steaks, after all-except that I had decided, at some point, that I was going to write books myself. And, like every writer who has not yet tried to write a book, I was unreasonably ambitious. I was determined to give readers the spacious, delighted, heart-tenderized feeling that Alice Munro gave me-and to harpoon them sweatily to their seats like Ken Follett. I wanted to make filet mignon cheeseburgers.
But writing a book-let alone writing a book that satisfied my every readerly craving-turned out to be hard. Excruciatingly, crushingly, pace-around-the-apartment-with-tears-in-my-eyes hard. Creating credible characters, and moving them through a world whose weather and lighting and set decoration I alone was responsible for, left me panting. So, without ever articulating to myself that this is what I was doing, I set my genre ambitions to one side. Maybe someday I'd scratch my genre itch by writing a series of detective novels with plots like Rube Goldberg machines. Until then I'd be over here trying to figure out how best to describe the smell of imminent snow.