With some 687 million books sold in the U.S. in 2017, book-selling has been on the rise since taking a dive following the 2008 recession. Still, there's the odd politician, religious group, or police institution eager to advance an agenda by labeling a particular book persona non grata - or, since it's a book, "liber non grata."
Links of the week January 14 2019 (03)
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:
21 January 2019
When state or civil authorities blacklist books, the act is correctly labeled censorship. But what is the word when parent corporations act out political or ideological dissatisfaction by ordering their subsidiaries to snuff out information in the form of books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, movies? There isn't a word or phrase that fully captures this form of censorship, at least not a negative phrase.
When author and self-publishing entrepreneur Michael Anderle was a teenager, he submitted a short story to his high school's literary journal. It wasn't well-received. "Rather crushed, I pulled the submission and hid it in my books, never to try again," he says.
It was quite a few years before Anderle again took a stab at writing fiction. "When I turned 47, I decided to see what it took to release a fiction book as a bucket list item," he says. The result of that effort was the self-published novel Death Becomes Her (2015), book one in the Kurtherian Gambit series. Anderle hit the ground running: he followed his debut with five sequels within the span of 90 days.
A passion for politics, particularly among teenagers and young millennials, is fuelling a dramatic growth in the popularity of poetry, with sales of poetry books hitting an all-time high in 2018.
Record £12m sales last year were driven by younger readers, with experts saying hunger for nuance amid conflict and disaster were fuelling the boom
Statistics from UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan show that sales grew by just over 12% last year, for the second year in a row. In total, 1.3m volumes of poetry were sold in 2018, adding up to £12.3m in sales, a rise of £1.3m on 2017. Two-thirds of buyers were younger than 34 and 41% were aged 13 to 22, with teenage girls and young women identified as the biggest consumers last year.
After a tiny increase in 2017, figures show their ranks swelled by 15 stores last year in the face of ‘an increasingly challenging landscape'
The litany of bookshops that have disappeared from the UK's high streets over the last two decades is long and sobering: chains such as Ottakars, Books etc, Dillons and Borders, and more than 1,000 independents. But over the past two years, indies have been quietly flourishing, with official figures from the Booksellers Association revealing a growth in numbers for the second year in a row.
Bestselling urban fantasy novelist Sherrilyn Kenyon has filed a lawsuit against her husband that accuses him of poisoning her for financial gain, as well as attempting to destroy her career and reputation, in what she described as a "Shakespearean plot against her".
Kenyon, author of the chart-topping Dark-Hunter series, is suing Lawrence R Kenyon II, as well as two individuals employed by the Kenyons, for up to $20m (£15.5m).
The suit, filed in Williamson County in Tennessee, accuses Kenyon II, together with one of the two assistants, of "assault by poisoning", as well as "intentional interference with business relationships [and] prospective contractual relations" and invasion of privacy. Kenyon also accuses both of the assistants of helping her husband to embarrass her in front of fans and isolating her from her friends and employees.
In the most explosive of the allegations, Kenyon says that she suffered from symptoms including tachycardia, severe body tremors, hair loss, memory loss, crumbling teeth, "excruciating" stomach cramps and severe anaemia, which she claims were caused "by the toxins she'd been unknowingly ingesting in her tainted food and drink". The complaint states that Kenyon II and one of the accused assistants "would force her to eat and become enraged any time she failed to consume".
Why produce a daily podcast? If your subject matter is the news, it's the only time frame that can keep up with the snowball-rolling-down-Mt.-Everest pace of what's going on. If your subject matter is poetry, the point is to slow everything down and keep slowing everything down.
That's the goal of The Slowdown, from U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, the Poetry Foundation, and American Public Media. For five minutes every weekday, Smith introduces a new poem, explains why she selected that poem, and reads it. That's the whole podcast. It's a REAL THING. You can actually subscribe to a show that gives you permission to listen to a poem for five minutes read by the woman who was nominated twice to spread poetry all over the country. This is a literary once-a-day multivitamin to keep your body going a little bit longer.
In London, Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed this week is reporting that in 2018, it transported more than 1.28 million books to libraries, schools, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps in 25 countries.
The charity's operations last year represented an expansion, according to the staff, to embrace more displaced people and more war-impacted destinations than in the past.
As examples, the nonprofit cites:
- 7,000 books sent to Mosul where to help rebuild a destroyed library
2,591 books sent to Syrian refugees in Jordan- 18,684 books sent to South Sudan, where the UN Commission on Human Rights reports it's investigating what appears to be systematic sexual violence amid the country's civil war
- 5,000 books sent to support children in Cameroon, where the Voice of America's Moki Edwin Kindzeka on January 3 reported that English-language areas are being deserted as battles continue between military forces and separatists
- 25,045 books to schools in Syria for children struggling to learn amid the hostilities
14 January 2019
In one of those quirky coincidences of news coverage, a familiar number has arisen in the top-line reporting from the United States' Authors Guild about author incomes.
Since 2009, their newly released report says, median incomes for authors from writing have fallen by 42 percent.
And when the United Kingdom's counterpart survey results were announced in June of last year, the Society of Authors reported that the Authors Licensing and Collecting Society had found that median incomes for professional writers since 2005 had dropped the same amount: 42 percent.
Nothing can be made of a "42 percent" coincidence, of course, beyond an understanding that for all the intricate variables and uncertainties in surveys of this kind, the overall international community of writers on whom publishing depends is repeatedly telling the industry that it sees its revenues declining.
First, let's go over high-level points of the new Authors Guild survey to get a sense for the positioning that the US market's oldest and largest (some 10,000 members) advocacy organization for writers is providing. And then, we'll look at the developing discussion around the news.
Amazon has called the conclusions of a recent report into US author earnings flawed, after the Authors Guild suggested that the retail giant's dominance could be partly responsible for the "a crisis of epic proportions" affecting writers in the US.
The report from the writers' body, published last week, highlighted the statistic that median income from writing-related work fell to $6,080 (£4,730) in 2017, down 42% from 2009, with literary authors particularly affected. Raising "serious concerns about the future of American literature", the writers' body singled out the growing dominance of Amazon for particular blame. "Amazon (which now controls 72% of the online book market in the US) puts pressure on [publishers] to keep costs down and takes a large percentage, plus marketing fees, forcing publishers to pass on their losses to authors," said the report.
But on Wednesday, Amazon took issue with the report's conclusions. "The Authors Guild has acknowledged that there are significant differences between the data it compared in its recent survey and years prior, noting that ‘the data does not line up'," said an Amazon statement. "As a result, many of the survey's conclusions are flawed or contradictory. For instance, the survey also shows that earnings increased almost 17% for traditionally published authors and 89% for independent [self-published] authors, and that full-time authors saw their median income rise 13% since 2013."
As publishers in many parts of the world look for avenues in which their content can find more digital life-and profit-the international video streaming platforms clearly are gaining rapidly in importance.
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Penguin Random House/Anchor), of course, is a good example of the book-to-platform pathway, having been developed by Bruce Miller with Atwood into a 33-episode, three-season series that put a 1985 novel on the 21st-century map-with entirely new content developed in the latter part of the series to keep the cinematic edition going.
Much more recently, as Publishing Perspectives has reported, Josh Malerman's 2014 book Bird Box, in its screen adaptation directed by Susanne Bier for Netflix and Universal Pictures, has become the streaming network's biggest Netflix film release in terms of initial viewership. Nielsen counted 26 million viewers in the film's first week in its coverage area, and Netflix reported an overall 45 million accounts watching it in the same week, worldwide, setting a record for the network.
When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you're likely to think that they're on the same side - the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.
In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don't like scandals that might threaten their bottom line - or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?
Agents hate morality clauses because terms like "public condemnation" are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You'd be surprised at how many don't read the small print.
Poet Hannah Sullivan has won the prestigious and lucrative TS Eliot prize for her first collection Three Poems - just the third debut to land the award in its 25-year history, and a sign that the poetry world is hunting for a new generation of voices.
Sullivan, a 39-year-old Londoner who won the £25,000 prize on Monday night, is the third first time poet to take the prize, with all three winning in the last five years: Vietnamese-American Ocean Vuong in 2017 and Chinese-British Sarah Howe in 2015. Before then, the prize had tended to be awarded to more established poets a few collections into their careers, among them Derek Walcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
"A star is born. Where has she come from?" said chair of judges, poet and previous winner Sinéad Morrissey. "I don't know her personally, I hadn't read her in magazines or anywhere else before. She has not come through the usual creative-writing, pamphlet route. She has just arrived, and it is breathtaking. I couldn't be more delighted if I had won it myself."
When the Millions launched in 2003, it was in every way an artifact of its moment: a labor of love with a blogspot.com URL, dedicated to one man's love of literature. By day, C. Max Magee worked in a West Hollywood bookstore; by night (or whenever), he was the sole proprietor of the Internet's newest hub for literary discussion, where year-in-reading lists and enthusiastic reviews ran alongside short, casual posts
Back then, the Millions was just one site among many, at a time when every 20-something with something to say was self-publishing it online. Starting a blog was the last decade's equivalent of launching a podcast, the go-to (generally unpaid) side hustle for young people with a lot of opinions. But over the next ten years, fueled by Magee's relentless enthusiasm and not much else, the Millions grew into a unique and remarkable place. As of last year, the site was revered by almost everyone who cared about books, a coveted outlet for book publicists and marketers and a launching pad for the careers of multiple literary stars. Yet it retained the indie credibility of a passion project run by industry outsiders.
At the 2018 Worldcon, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became the first person to ever win three consecutive Hugo awards for Best Novel. Given that level of success, science fiction editor John Joseph Adams felt she'd be the perfect guest editor for the latest edition of his anthology series The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.
"Given that she's clearly the face of the genre at the moment, I thought it would be wonderful to have her as guest editor," Adams says in Episode 342 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And thankfully she said yes."
Charles Payseur, whose story "Rivers Run Free" leads off the book, agrees that the Yu and Anders' stories will make readers think hard about current political realities. The Yu story, in which humanity declines to aid extraterrestrial refugees, and the Anders story, in which a trans woman's consciousness is forcibly transferred into a male cadaver, both grapple with the issue of morally-compromised bystanders.
Flaubert might have adored or reviled Emma; that question is still up for debate. But it was exactly his ambivalence - and the indeterminacy of her likability - that set the template for potent female characters ever after. Fuck likeable: she was real. Whether readers love or pity her, most of them agree she's one of the most dynamic creations in literature.
More than 150 years after Bovary breathed her last, the market is flush with psychopathic she-beasts and irredeemably miserable vipers. Villainous bitches are popping up everywhere. That shouldn't surprise anyone, given the twisty vine of rage rightfully wrapping itself around American womenfor the last several years (or decades). In fiction, these women follow the Bovary template in at least one respect: The rare angry singleton aside, they are married or recently divorced women, unhappy with the dull rituals of companionship or the woefully inadequate men to whom they've chained themselves. What we've come to call domestic thrillers have become, by and large, stories about psychos in shitty marriages. Unfortunately, many of these psychos are one-dimensional - angry women without a shred of complexity, cardboard storyboards for the inevitable film adaptation.
Daphne du Maurier is one of the most overlooked writers of the twentieth century, says Oxford University's Laura Varnam. As Rebecca celebrates its eightieth anniversary and du Maurier enjoys a critical renaissance, Varnam explores five works that best highlight this novelist's sheer range and brilliance-from biography and fiction to history and horror.
She's one of the most important and most neglected 20th-century writers - hugely popular and bestselling but often underrated. At the moment, she's enjoying a resurgence of interest and starting to be critically recognised for her talent. Apart from several short stories published at the end of the 1920s, du Maurier's writing career really began with her first novel, The Loving Spirit (1931), and she continued writing right up until the publication of her last novel in 1972, Rule Britannia. So her career spans a wide temporal range across the twentieth century.