In an effort to gather as much information as possible about how much authors earned in 2017, the Authors Guild conducted its largest income survey ever last summer, reaching beyond the guild's own members to include 14 other writing and publishing organizations. In all, the survey drew 5,067 responses from authors published by traditional publishers and from hybrid and self-published authors as well.
Links of the week January 21 2019 (04)
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:
28 January 2019
The findings of the new survey are in line with previous studies: income for authors continued to decline. The new study found that the median income received by published American authors for all writing-related activity in 2017 was $6,080, down from $10,500 in the guild's 2009 survey. The survey also found that, specifically for book-related income, the median income for published authors declined 21% in 2017 to $3,100 from $3,900 in 2013, and it was down just over 50% from 2009's median book earnings of $6,250.
Previous Man Booker prize winners are among those keenly awaiting the announcement of the new sponsor of the prestigious literary award, after the prize's sponsor of almost two decades, Man Group, became the latest in a wave of companies pulling out of backing book prizes.
The hedge fund, which has sponsored the £50,000 literary award since 2002, announced on Sunday that it would end its association with the prize after 2019, which cost them £1.6m a year. On Sunday, the Booker Prize Foundation said that its trustees are already in discussions with a new sponsor "and are confident that new funding will be in place for 2020".
"There is an emotional dependence on it, in a way that doesn't attach to any other of the British prizes, as splendid as they are. Not having it there would be a little bit like navigating without a North Pole for fiction," he said.
"The Booker prize certainly makes a difference to one's life. Peter Carey said it was like being run over by a bus - but it's a bus many of us would put our hands out to be run over by ... It is the lodestar of the literary year and if it vanished it would be a big adjustment. It looks as though they'll get sponsorship but it would be an interesting climatic change over the book industry if they don't."
While it is not the only financial corporation to take on a literary prize - investment management firms Baillie Gifford and Rathbones currently sponsor the Samuel Johnson and Folio prizes respectively - some have speculated that Man Group pulled out due to criticism of their role as a financial institution, as well as their influence on the prize. In July, author Sebastian Faulks branded Man Group "the enemy", saying: "Man Group are not the sort of people who should be sponsoring literary prizes. They're the kind of people literary prizes ought to be criticising."
Neil Gaiman on His New Storytelling MasterClass, Good Omens, and the Upside of Twitter | Vanity Fair
Most Internet-savvy folks are already aware of MasterClass, an online-seminar platform that allows mere mortals to learn from people at the very top of their fields. Chef Thomas Keller may teach you how to make a sauce; Werner Herzog may teach you the ins and outs of camera lenses. But as the company has grown, one name has cropped up again and again as the person would-be writers most wanted to learn from: Neil Gaiman.
The multiple award-winning author burst on the scene three decades ago, when his genre-defying Sandman took the comic-book world by storm. Gaiman has been defying descriptions ever since, conquering not only comics but short fiction, long fiction, children's books, radio, film, and TV. Even those unfamiliar with his written works will know the films and TV shows based on his wildly popular stories, including Stardust, Coraline, and American Gods. Now, Gaiman has finally partnered with MasterClass for his first-ever online class, and gave Vanity Fair an exclusive sneak peek at what's to come.
Wattpad, the Toronto-based online reading and writing community that says it has received 565 million story uploads since its launch, is starting its own publishing division, Wattpad Books. Ashleigh Gardner, deputy general manager of Wattpad Studios and Publishing, will head the new unit and Deanna McFadden, publishing director for Wattpad Studios, will manage the book unit's operations.
Wattpad Books will launch this fall with six young adult titles. According to the company, the six stories on the initial list collectively accumulated more than 100 million reading minutes from the general public in 2018. Gardner told PW that Wattpad decided to aim its first list at the YA market because, while it has a diverse audience, the vast majority fall in the Millennial and Gen Z categories. She added the future lists will expand to include "various demographics within our network."
Lauren Child thinks children's book publishing still gets a bad deal. It's one of the reasons the best-selling author-illustrator and current Children's Laureate - her tenure ends this year - is so happy to be a judge for this year Oscar's Book Prize. "There's still a lot of snootiness about children's books. Just look at the teeny-weeny percentage that get reviewed compared to adults. It's as if there's a kind of hierarchy."
Child is best known for her books featuring Clarice Bean, Charlie and Lola (who became a TV series), Ruby Redfort and Hubert Horatio, which together have sold more than five million copies worldwide. In the two decades since we first met quirky, snub-nosed Clarice Bean and her chaotic, trendy family, her legions of original fans have become adults.
"The most touching experience in my whole career is talking to grown-ups who tell me what the book meant to them when they were growing up," says Child, 53. "It's why I'm so passionate about the idea that children's book writing and illustrating should get more recognition, and why prizes like Oscar's Book Prize are so important, because there is so little coverage. We know that a child's life can be changed by what they read, so why don't we spend more time thinking about what that material is?"
The 31-year-old south Londoner began writing at school, printing out poems, stapling them together, and charging classmates £2 for a copy.
More than a decade later, Jay, who self-describes as non-binary, has won the 2018 Ted Hughes Award for Surge: Side A, an exploration of the New Cross Fire in 1981 - which killed 13 young black people in south-east London.
Jay's poetry is personal and explores identity, politics, and what it means to be young and black in Britain.
Unlike Ashanti, Andrew McMillan, 30, grew up in a house where books of contemporary poetry were on his family's bookshelves. But the 30-year-old from South Yorkshire agrees that attitudes towards poetry have changed.
Andrew's debut collection, Physical, was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award.
The award-winning poet and senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University says that, although more young people are buying poetry books, the industry isn't lucrative, as many poets still need part time jobs to fund their passion - unless they are already "independently wealthy".
Perhaps because of this, he believes poetry will always be niche, but that social media has made poets and poetry more accessible.
Adam Croft could be the most successful author you might not have heard of. Aged just 31, he's already sold over a million copies of his crime novels and topped the bestseller charts all over the world, at some points even outselling JK Rowling.
And the reason he is underneath the radar? It's because rather than having his books printed by a traditional publisher, Adam sells his books via the internet via his own website and Amazon, so readers download them to read on computers, e-readers and mobile phones.
It meant that at one point, he was earning an incredible £2,000 a day in royalties from his books, making him one of the world's most successful independently published authors.
Adam's is an inspiring story for anyone who wants to be a writer but fears that the world of traditional publishing isn't for them.
Without an advance or the support of a publisher's art, publicity, and marketing departments, securing funding to publish and publicize a book can be an uphill battle. Because of this, many enterprising indie authors have turned to crowdfunding platforms -- which pair artists and projects with donors -- to support their publishing efforts. Crowdfunding can be a fun and creative way to raise money to support a new book.
There are book-specific crowdfunding sites well worth checking out such as Pubslush, which calls itself a "global book club with a cause" and Authr.com. Though these have a smaller audience, the advantage is that funders are specifically looking to support publishing projects. The two largest and most popular sites, however, are the more established Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
21 January 2019
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."
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