Writing is in danger of becoming an elitist profession, with many authors being subsidised by their partners or a second job in order to stay afloat, according to new statistics.
Links of the week April 29 2019 (18)
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:
6 May 2019
The full findings from the annual Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society report into author earnings paint a more nuanced picture than the headline results from last summer, which revealed that median earnings for professional writers had fallen to less than £10,500 a year. While the average professional writer earns £10,000 a year, the mean earnings for a writer's household were more than £81,000 a year, and median household earnings were at £50,000 per annum. "Most writers supplement their income from other sources, such as a second job or household earnings contributed by a partner", according to the report, which analysed answers from more than 5,500 professional writers.
The rush to release a print version of the Mueller report is the latest example of a desperate industry increasingly addicted to quick takes for fast profit.
It took less than a week for publishers to get the redacted version of the "Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election"-more commonly known as "the Mueller report"-into old-fashioned, analog, hold-in-you-hand book form. Scribner, working with The Washington Post, won the race to be the first on physical shelves; their version, fleshed out with an introduction and commentary from Post journalists Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotsky, is already in bookstores across the country.
Initially, book publishers, like the rest of the media, were slow to take Trump seriously. Given the typically long lead times for writing and publishing books-several months, if not years-many assumed that he would be yesterday's news by the time their biographies and exposés were released. In 2016, David Cay Johnston's The Making of Donald Trump-published by Melville House after the big houses shrugged it off-and the Post's Trump Revealed (published by Scribner) were bestsellers, but sales of both paled in comparison to books that approached Trump's support more tangentially. J. D. Vance's enormously flawed Hillbilly Elegy was the year's breakout hit, thanks in large part to being embraced by the establishment class as an explainer for Trump's diehard base.
Jennifer Asbenson developed survival skills early on in her life. She says that growing up in rural Southern California, her family had no water or electricity. "We lived on a lonesome mountain away from civilization." She describes living with a mother who was "physically and emotionally abusive," adding, "I was ashamed and embarrassed about that." As a result of her circumstances, she relied on her imagination for sustenance and escape: "Rain became ‘shower time.' Storytelling replaced TV. Daydreaming often shielded me from reality."
Asbenson didn't know then that her practiced self-reliance and resilience would end up saving her life.
Years after the experience, still navigating her trauma, Asbenson decided to tell her story in writing, finding solace in the protective space of her furnished split-level tree house in her backyard. For years, Asbenson had thought about writing a book, though she imagined that she would need a ghostwriter. But the desire to recount her experiences intensified: "I realized if I did not trust myself enough to write it, it would never be written."
I've always been interested in family stories, my father's in particular. He grew up in a Cypriot village at a time of political unrest, during the island's struggle for independence. His education was cut short because his father couldn't afford the bus fare to school. In the 1960s he moved to England with ten pounds in his pocket and spent his first night in a telephone box. His was a rags-to-comfortable-life story that inspired the writing of my first novel.
He said the book was a safe place to express emotions he would never talk about openly, that it got his brain going and helped him forget everyday problems. "It's good to remember your heyday," he said, "even the bad memories. To think, I lived through that and survived." Just as I had hoped, the book made him feel good about himself. His response was the green light for what would come next.
Do disturbing novels reflect an extreme reality or are they just titillation? Hanya Yanagihara, Leïla Slimani and others on why they set out to shock us
Bret Easton Ellis received 13 death threats before American Psycho was even published. He had to sign a declaration saying he had read them all. That way, if somebody did murder him, his parents couldn't sue the publisher. This was in 1991. "I would not have the impulse to write that book again," Ellis says now, during a visit to the Guardian. "It came from that time and place ... And does anyone remember that there was no one there for me at all? I had to pretty much go through a trial by fire on my own."
You can't tell everything about a person by looking at their social media feeds, but trust me: It is meaningful, or at least somewhat meaningful, that George R.R. Martin hasn't made a single mention of HBO's Game of Thrones on his Twitter or blog since the April 14 premiere of the show's final season. No chef's-kiss congratulations to the cast, no hashtagged episodic livetweeting, no nerdy defenses of "The Long Night"'s brightness settings - just some announcements of his speaking engagements, some #tbt photos, and some Perd Hapley-ish commentary on the NFL Draft. ("Neither the Giants nor the Jets have a second round pick today").
You might expect an eccentric, gnomish fantasy writer like Martin to have highly specific feelings about everything - nerds of all stripes will recognize something of themselves in his general demeanor and affectations - but his barely concealed bitterness parallels with the increased fun made at his expense as his literary output has long laid fallow, while the show has continued to win acclaim and audiences.
This year, the Mellon Foundation provided $2.2 million in funding to the Academy of American PoetsThe website of the wonderful Academy, which was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Any poet or poetry lover would find it worth a visit., which is using the money to further the work of the Poetry Coalition and to grant fellowships to poets laureate across the U.S. The funding, the Academy said, was the largest sum of its kind provided to poets in the U.S. at any one time by a charitable organization. (The largest single donation ever made to an institution dedicated to poetry, Ruth Lilly's $100 million bequest to Poetry magazine in 2002, remains the largest provided in the service of poetry, but did not directly impact poets on an individual basis.) PW spoke with poet Elizabeth Alexander, the former chair of the African-American studies department at Yale University who has served as president of the Mellon Foundation since last July, about the Foundation's decision to fund poets, how the money is being spent, and more.
When good poetry is created, then it needs to also find a paper place to live. I think that the powerful thing that this grant does is it helps occasion the creation of poetry, the distribution of poetry, in a way that then also calls up the ongoing need for books. Poetry will never exist without books. And a lot of the different kinds of events that the poets laureate have planned that will be funded by these grants, these will be events where books are sold, books are distributed. The people who come to these events of various kinds will either be previous readers or hopefully will more deeply become readers. This work that the poets laureate will be doing is also about rewarding and enhancing and giving food to vast communities of readers.
The new publisher Boldwood Books in London has placed a robust rights strategy at the heart of its business model. The house is seeking world English language rights for commercial fiction in print, ebook, and audio formats. Chief executive Amanda Ridout argues that conditions have never been better for a start-up publisher to exploit rights globally.
"You can literally reach the world in all formats from a basement in Fulham, London SW6," Ridout says. "You can buy world English language rights and actively market the ebook, the audiobook, and the print book, certainly through print-on-demand as a starting point, very effectively.
"It's a reality," she says, "as opposed to just demanding a land grab of rights and not being able to exploit them properly. There is a good opportunity to start a company that can do that well."
29 April 2019
In a ringing endorsement, the United States' leading author-advocacy trade organization, the Authors Guild, today (April 29) has issued a statement in support of author Nora Roberts' lawsuit against an alleged Brazilian plagiarist.
The organization has used the court action instigated by Roberts to highlight its own effort, writing, "The Authors Guild has convened a group of author organizations to delve into the problem and is in discussions with Amazon to address ways to curtail the plagiarism and scams."
As reported by the Associated Press' Hillel Italie earlier this month, Roberts-one of the biggest names in American trade fiction-is suing the Brazilian writer Cristiane Serruya for what Roberts alleges is "multi-plagiarism" on a "rare and scandalous" level.
Papers reportedly were filed on April 24 in Rio de Janeiro, charging that Serruya creates books that are "a literary patchwork" of stolen phrases. According to Italie's report, Roberts is seeking damages in accordance with Brazilian law that come to "3,000 times the value of the highest sale for any Serruya work mentioned in the lawsuit."
"Mistakes are reminders that books are made by humans and not gods," a publisher once told me when I was a relatively new editor, bemoaning a typo that had managed to slip through. Those words brought me some comfort at the time. And now, all these years later, in my role as publisher of two imprints, those words come to mind often-because where there are books, there are errors.
Newly published authors' reactions to typos and other errors range from resignation to distress. Some authors put the blame on their editors and publishers; others blame themselves. Understandably, frustration with errors in finished copies will increase with the quantity of said errors.
First, be discerning about the actual level of editing required for any given book. Over the years I've helped a number of authors self-publish and found too many of them willing to send their manuscripts straight to a proofreader when, in fact, the book needed a developmental edit and it most certainly needed a copyedit. In some cases, I tried to persuade authors to get a heavier level of edit, only to be met with refusals and excuses. Any author who opts out of necessary editing will likely get feedback from future readers that the book could have been better.
I recommend that authors get all three levels of editing: developmental, copyediting, and proofreading. Editorial is not the place to skimp, and the consequence of doing so is potentially disastrous.
Part of the perennial fascination of the publishing business, for any book lover, is the ringside seat it provides at the creative process. How and why was that book written? What made it such a success/failure? What was its reception? Did reviews make a difference? Following the money: how did it sell? What did it earn? Dip into a publisher's letters and memos and you get a backstage pass to the sometimes mysterious process that creates literature. Thus the appeal of the Faber correspondence.
In the last century, before the internet and the mobile telephone, such circumstantial traffic was perhaps more comprehensive than ever before. Almost no nuance of the book business went unscrutinised, with documents for every transaction. Faber & Faber, taking its contribution to literature rather more seriously than some, made a particular practice of archiving the paper trail left by every book published under its imprint, first from its offices in Russell Square, London, and then, after the 1960s, at Queen Square on the edge of Bloomsbury.
In the heyday of this correspondence, there's no mistaking its priceless significance. For better or worse, next to the ancient universities, the BBC, Fleet Street and the metropolitan clubs, Faber was a foundation stone in the edifice that housed a literary tradition. In postwar Britain, it was an influential part of the culture. After the 1970s, everything was about to change. Now that world has almost disappeared.
Once again, the Edgar Awards are upon us-that august night of crime and mystery when honors are bestowed, traditions celebrated, and champions of the genre feted. This Thursday, authors, editors, and crime and mystery professionals will gather in the banquet hall of the New York City Grand Hyatt Hotel to hear the winners announced, and to toast those who have dedicated their lives to crime and mystery, just as the Mystery Writers of America have done for decades.
Ahead of the ceremony, we caught up with 20 Edgar nominees, including the nominees for this year's inaugural Sue Grafton Award. We've organized their responses into a roundtable discussion on the state of mystery and crime fiction. Because there were an enormous number of highly entertaining and thoughtful responses from the authors, we split the discussion into two parts (You can read Part 2 here).
In Part I of the roundtable, writers and editors discuss what exactly is a crime novel, the most pressing issues in the genre today, how to build a career as a crime writer, and the best gateway drugs for mystery.
When I met author Colson Whitehead at a 2011 event, I was starstruck. Meeting incredibly talented writers does that to me, because they represent what I want to be when I grow up. Since I'm 50-something, most would assume I've missed out on that, but most also don't know how many decades I've invested in my dream-or how much of that time I've spent coming to terms with cultural appropriation in fiction, a topic Whitehead recently addressed as keynote speaker at the 2019 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.
So should authors write only about people whom they resemble? I doubted that back then, and I'm glad I didn't let this question stop me from writing my first novel. Now, though, with the issue of cultural appropriation in fiction a hot topic, I fear that some writers might let the negative pushback that they may experience if they write outside their lives stop them from writing. Instead, I hope that they read the many articles now available on the topic and apply the lessons they learn to their writing.
Will Self has declared literature to be "morphing into a giant quilting exercise", suggesting that no current creative writing graduates will make a living from literary fiction.
The author criticised courses during an interview with Radio 4's "Today" programme on Thursday (2nd May), in a show recorded at the University of East Anglia, almost 50 years since its prestigious Creative Writing MA launched.
Self said: "If you want to do it and you're not too concerned about making a living in the future then it's probably a good idea. The paradox is, in the modern university, everyone is encouraged to tailor their courses towards employability but it's certainly not clear what the pathway is into literary fiction - possibly into genre fiction, or possibly people can use the writing courses just to develop themselves as writers to write video games or something else, that's a possibility."
The show's host John Humphrys asked if the course was a professionalisation of writing but without the real life experience.
Self replied: "It's a deprofessionalisation, that's the problem. The people coming out of these courses are never going to make a living as novelists, certainly not in literary fiction though that's a somewhat suspect term. Basically writers are chasing too few readers at the moment. I think literature is morphing into something else, it's morphing into a conservatoire form, into a more privileged form in many ways, morphing into a giant quilting exercise where people read and comment on each other's writing.... This is predicated on the digital and making things, in a lot of ways, more mutual."
What is it about the Tudors that attracts us so? Is it the pomp and excess of the Tudor monarchs? The bigger-than-life personalities? The passion and the danger? The reversals of fortune that could end in a violent and public death? The reasons are as numerous as the number of readers drawn to this era in British history.
The Tudor Dynasty lasted a little over 100 years, from 1485-1603, but their rule was one of the most dramatic and unforgettable in European history. The period sat on the cusp of modern society - influenced by the European Renaissance, yet haunted by superstitions from the medieval past. Plenty of authors use the Tudors as a springboard for their stories, and I'm one of them. Rather than focus on the politics and imbroglios associated with nobility, my Bianca Goddard Mysteries tell the stories of commoners - people with no political clout, but who must navigate their king's peevish policies.
For many authors, live readings and events are the best part about writing books. It's a chance to celebrate the completion of a years-long effort, to interact with enthusiastic fans, or to introduce an audience to one's writing. But, though they can be fun, author events require plenty of work not only to draw a crowd, but to ensure that they provide long-term value.
Any author would be delighted to show up at a bookstore to find a room packed with eager audience members who heard about the event and rushed over to attend. But the reality is that indie authors who hope to fill a room are going to have to do most of the filling themselves.