My entire childhood I hoped to write books, and entered the publishing industry after college on the now humorous assumption-humorously wrong, and also humorously correct for reasons I did not then understand-that being an editor would help me realize that dream. I became a full-fledged book editor in 2007, after the assumed unpaid internship and then editorial assistantship. The last twelve years, during which I have had the opportunity to steep myself in the brain-product of many talented writers, have been a period of academic study in the discipline of the novel. I often found it very difficult to write when I was so immersed in other writers' creative worlds-I felt like I wasn't being the best editor I could be, the editor the author deserved, if I was simultaneously engaging in my own creative endeavors.
Links of the week May 13 2019 (20)
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:
13 May 2019
Now, at age 35, I am publishing my debut novel, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna-what I hope is my debut novel, at least, and not my only novel, but as an editor I know not to assume these things. I am not what the literary world considers a spring chicken; it took me a long, long time to find the space within my editorial career to get myself to this point as a writer. I don't regret my foolishness of embarking on an editorial career. It took me much longer to write a publishable book than my younger self would ever have been able to forgive, but the book I did write is much, much better than it would have been if I hadn't had the benefit of my editorial education to apply to its creation
For 20 years BookBrowse'A literary smorgasbord of a site, offering substantial excerpts from bestselling books which you can browse through before purchasing.' www.BookBrowse.com has been providing reading recommendations to book clubs and readers in general through its website and newsletters, so we at BookBrowse know that the perception many have of book clubs - as primarily social groups with minimal serious discussion - isn't accurate, but until recently we didn't have the hard data to prove it.
Last year we set out to look beyond the who, what, and where of book clubs, and to instead explore their group dynamics. For example: What do people want from their groups? What motivates them to join in the first place, and why do they stay? What do they look for in the books they read? In the process, we conducted two surveys of more than 5,000 book club members, plus 500 non-club members, parsing responses to many questions. In February, we published our report, titled "The Inner Lives of Book Clubs"-the results of the first survey to get to the heart of the book club experience.
So, what did we learn? Among much else, we learned that the stereotype of book clubs being primarily social is far from reality:
In May 2018, Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for Flights, a novel that was published in Poland in 2007. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, for which Tokarczuk is a Booker finalist again this year, was translated a bit faster; it only took a decade. One of the biggest stars in translation of this century, Roberto Bolaño, author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives, fared no better. Back in 2003, when New Directions put out his first translated book, By Night in Chile, Bolaño had already passed away; he was a famous writer by then, at least in Spanish.
The process of literary translation takes time, obviously, but there's something else at play when it takes a decade or more for incredibly renowned authors to reach our shores. This is part of a much larger problem, frequently referred to as the "3 percent problem" by publishers of translation (like myself), which should be troublesome to anyone who believes the world is better off when cultures are in conversation with one another.
I can say definitively now that I faltered in pursuit of my New Year's resolution. My self-improvement project for the year was to read a fresh poem every morning, before glimpsing the accumulation of unresponded email and lifting the lid off Twitter. My purpose, when I explained it to my wife and kids a few hours before midnight, was to ritualistically remind myself of emotions other than those triggered by the front page.
What I didn't say is that I was also positioning myself like a senior citizen hunched over the crossword. I was warding off the possibility of mental deterioration.
I have a fear stoked by a doomsaying prophecy about the future of reading: A century ago or so, poetry was a fixture of everyday life, enjoyed by everyday people. Then it slowly lost its audience. It turned out that the poem required sharper focus than a television audience could sustain and more patience than modernity would permit. This decline, according to some publishers and bookstore owners, is a harbinger. As the age of zombie swiping runs its course, the novel will follow the fate of verse. It will become a niche passion, enjoyed by a shrinking caste of connoisseurs trained to slow their minds and absorb long, twisting chunks of narrative.
There are as many different author photos as there are authors (naturally), but if you look at a lot of them, as I do in my line of work, you begin to notice some trends. Some are good. Some are perplexing. Some are straightforward, while others are more mysterious. Here, I attempt to create a taxonomy of some of the most common versions.
NB: I did my best to use only actual author photos (i.e. used on their books or in other official capacities) and not just photos of authors (i.e. taken by journalists or their moms), but I may have been tricked here and there. Sometimes moms are really great photographers.
NB II: Trends in author photos change year by year, and the same author may participate in many author photo trends over the course of their career. So none of the photos here should be considered as definitive photos of any particular author.
NB III: I did not include a category for what I like to call %u201Cnormal%u201D author photos, which are just pictures of the authors. You know what those look like, and they are fine, but not very interesting.
Poet Simon Armitage, whose "witty and profound" work spans sharp observations about modern life and classical myths, is to be the UK's next Poet Laureate.
The West Yorkshire writer will hold the historic post for the next decade, taking over from Dame Carol Ann Duffy.
Over recent decades, the role has moved away from mainly chronicling royal occasions to promoting poetry and capturing a wider view of British life.
Armitage has published 28 collections and is on the national curriculum. His 2017 book The Unaccompanied was described by The Guardian as a document of "a world in social and economic meltdown". It opens with a poem about climate change called The Last Snowman, and includes another titled Poundland, about "the Disney design calendar and diary set, three cans of Vimto/cornucopia of potato-based snacks and balm for a sweet tooth". Image copyright Getty Images
Describes itself as 'the world's leading provider of images, film and digital services'. Material available includes the Hulton Archive.
Image caption Carol Ann Duffy began her 10-year stint in 2009 The announcement comes five months after Armitage, from Marsden, won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2018, arguably the most prestigious accolade in poetry behind the laureateship.
A total of 94% of authors in the U.K. are white, with 2% Asian, 2% mixed race, and 1% black. (4% identify as "other.") The most recent census, in 2011, put the white population of the U.K. at 86%.
The findings come from the report on authors' earnings-commissioned by ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) and written by researchers from the U.K. Copyright and Creative Economy Centre at the University of Glasgow-which was initially published in headline form last summer. The full report, which is based on responses from 2,696 ALCS members, has now been released.
The ALCS believes that the low rate of diversity is a by-product of the low author earnings exposed by the survey. As reported last June, the median earnings for "primary occupation authors" (i.e., writers who spend more than half their working time writing) are £10,497 a year. Accounting for inflation, this represents a 42% drop since 2006, when ALCS carried out its first survey of author incomes.
"There is considerable inequality of earning power among authors, with the highest-earning 10% of writers taking home about 70% of total earnings in the profession," the study found. "Meanwhile, most writers need a second job to survive, with just 28% of respondents making a living from writing alone without a second job, down from 40% in 2006."
There's a sign in Danielle Steel's office that reads, "There are no miracles. There is only discipline." It's a dutiful message, and yet the sheer amount that Steel has accomplished in her five-decade career does seem like the stuff of dreams.
Let's look at the numbers, shall we? The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year-her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week-and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author-381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A few times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)
Netflix, Spotify, iPads, YouTube and Instagram are just a few things that didn't exist when the Children's Laureate was set up 20 years ago.
In 1999, the main obstacle in getting children interested in reading was their own attention spans.
The printed page may now have far more competition than it used to, but author Michael Morpurgo, who set up the Children's Laureate, says technology has in some ways been "enormously beneficial".
"Children are now using the written word a great deal, they are emailing and they are texting," he tells BBC News. "And so the written word is more familiar to them to express themselves.
"Each of the Children's Laureates, in his or her own way, has raised the level of interest in and enthusiasm for children's books," Morpurgo says.
His initial reason for setting it up was to try to ensure writing for children got the attention and credit it deserved.
"I was aware that, by and large, the world out there wasn't that interested in writing for children or in books for children," he explains.
"You must remember, this was pre-Harry Potter, and pre-Philip Pullman and many of our great authors of today.
"Serious literature had to be for people who were called adults, and then there were these books called children's books, which were at the back of a bookshop, and belittled to some extent."