Philip Pullman waited 17 years before allowing readers back into the world of Lyra Belacqua, Joseph Heller took 33 to return to Catch-22, and George RR Martin is still keeping fans hanging for his version of the final struggle for the Iron Throne. The eight years readers have been waiting since the second volume of Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy may not seem much in comparison. But for Mantel, they have been the most demanding years of her career.
Links of the week May 27 2019 (22)
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:
3 June 2019
Anne Rice is another author who understands the strain of reader expectation. After publishing a series of novels set in the world of Interview With the Vampire between 1976 and 2003, it was 11 years before she returned with the novel Prince Lestat. Rice admits that she had been under great pressure from fans to write about the character again - but she couldn't do it until his story came alive.
Nearly three times as many Americans read a book of history in 2017 as watched the first episode of the final season of "Game of Thrones." The share of young adults who read poetry in that year more than doubled from five years earlier. A typical rage tweet by President Trump, misspelled and grammatically sad, may get him 100,000 "likes." Compare that with the 28 million Americans who read a book of verse in the first year of Trump's presidency, the highest share of the population in 15 years.
So, even with a president who is ahistoric, borderline literate and would fail a sixth-grade reading comprehension test, something wonderful and unexpected is happening in the language arts. When the dominant culture goes low, the saviors of our senses go high. Which brings us to Michelle Obama. You can make a case that we owe a big part of the renaissance of the written word in recent months to her memoir, Becoming. In the first 15 days after publication last year, it sold enough copies to become the best-selling book in the United States for all of 2018. By the end of March of this year, it had sold 10 million copies and was on pace to become the best-selling memoir ever written in this country.
I was late to her book, having my doubts about platitudinous, focus-group-neutered memoirs by political personalities. As it turned out, she's a luminous, observant, self-aware writer, even if she had some help from a team of ghostwriters.
When you're nervous about reading in public, you tend to picture the audience as the enemy, distant and judgmental, just waiting for you to mess up. If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize that it's an illusion born of fear. In fact, your audience wants to love you and your work. Some of these people probably already do.
The audience is on your side. They love writing just as you do; that's why they're there. These wonderful people have taken time out of their lives, probably traveled some distance and spent some money, just to hear you read. They've come to witness your imagination at work. They've come to be moved, entertained, motivated, validated, informed, provoked, stimulated and inspired. In short, they're receptive.
They are your allies.
The strongest impact you can make when reading aloud is emotional, not intellectual. For that reason, you will do best if you choose content you have a strong emotional connection with: passages that make you laugh or cry%u2014if you let yourself.
Lee Child has had the kind of success most authors can only fantasise about. He's written 23 thrillers featuring American hero Jack Reacher - with total sales of at least 100 million copies worldwide. He's just been named author of the year at the British Book Awards. And if he hadn't lost his job in TV none of it would have happened.
Lee Child - born Jim Grant in Coventry in 1954 - says he grew up reading exactly what an average British boy would read in the 1960s. "I'm not one of these guys who claim they read Dostoevsky when they were seven. I started with Enid Blyton and then the Biggles books by Captain W.E. Johns and later it was Ian Fleming. Alistair MacLean probably made the biggest impression on me with stories like Where Eagles Dare. All very normal stuff for a kid of my generation.
"Back then everything was so unstructured compared to the modern world of online book groups and suggestions for further reading. I sort of miss the chaotic days of random discovery."
Last spring, I was flown to Seoul to launch the Korean edition of my debut novel, Dark Chapter. My publisher Hangilsa Press had astutely monitored the growing public response to #MeToo in Korea and had decided to not only bring forward my novel's publication date, but also set up a full promotional "tour" for me with multiple TV interviews, public talks, and a press conference. In some ways, it was every debut author's dream: a round-trip flight halfway across the world, five nights in a luxury hotel, guest of honor treatment throughout. It was also completely exhausting, requiring nonstop eloquence and enthusiasm about a difficult topic (my own rape)-and all this while jet-lagged, surrounded by translators. (I am Taiwanese American, not Korean American, and I don't speak any Asian language fluently, but my Korean publisher, media, and audiences were unfazed by the language gap.)
It was simultaneously exhilarating and lonely, yet also the kind of publicity platform any ambitious novelist would love to have. But throughout most of this, a question popped up, the inverse of a more familiar one: Would my Korean publishers have done this if I were white?
Indie authors all agree: hiring an editor to work on your manuscript is one of the best and most necessary investments an author can make. Editing takes both time and money and can encompass anything from a substantiative (i.e. structural or content) edit-where the editor makes suggestions on character and plot development, chapter organization, and big-picture issues-to copyediting and proofreading. We talked to eight successful indie authors who shared their editing experiences and offered some tips and advice as well.
Hugh Howey Hugh Howey is one of self-publishing%u2019s biggest success stories%u2014and one of its greatest champions. The author of the bestselling Wool series is a Kindle Top 100 author and a #1 bestseller in Amazon%u2019s science fiction category. His series was also optioned by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian for a feature film. Howey hires an editor, David Gatewood, for all of his books, and sees the process as one that benefits not just his own writing but the creative industry as a whole.
The creator of the classic children's books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat, Judith Kerr, who has died aged 95, was unusual in being equally successful as a writer and an illustrator. She always claimed that she was "a very slow" illustrator and that her work was "more rubbing out than drawing", but in a career that ran from 1968 to this year she created more than 30 books, mostly about Mog, all of which have remained in print and which sell worldwide.
The bestselling The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968) was her first book. Characterised by its bold, naive-style illustrations and gentle anarchy, it tells the playful and imaginative story of how the everyday routine of a mother and her young daughter, Sophie, is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of a handsome stripy tiger. There is no panic; the tiger settles down to drink all the water and eat all the food, to Sophie's delight rather than terror, before exiting politely. When father comes home he cheers mother and daughter up by taking them out to dinner.
Described as "a dazzling first book", which would make children "scream with delicious pleasure at the dangerous naughtiness of the notion" by Antonia Fraser, one of the earliest reviewers, it was initially received as exactly what it was: a simple picture book that generated delight for children. Later, it was subjected to much analysis, with many assuming that the tiger stood for the Gestapo, who had so vividly interrupted Judith's own childhood. It was a view she dismissed flatly; when chairing her at events across the country I frequently heard her say, in the nicest way possible, "It's just the story of a tiger who came to tea. I made it up to amuse my children because we were bored and because their father was away filming for very long days at a time."
Before a bookstore event in Chicago in November to celebrate the launch of Shell Game, the 19th V.I. Warshawski book, Sara Paretsky sat down to talk about her writing career, her inspirations and false starts, the beginnings of Sisters in Crime, pioneer journals, and much more. Only a few days later, before this conversation could be transcribed and published, Paretsky's beloved husband, Courtenay Wright, died. At the time of this conversation, Wright had just turned 95, Shell Game had just been released, and the interviewer, Lori Rader-Day, had just become the national vice president/president-elect of Sisters in Crime, the organization Paretsky established in 1987.
I write what's on my mind. There's a wonderful Chicago writer, Carol Anshaw, whose books are very under-recognized, but she took up painting in middle age and she calls herself an autodidact, which always sounds to me like an extinct bird. But I am an autodidact as a writer. I sometimes think I would be a better writer if I actually had some training, more discipline, more focus. But I write what's on my mind. And maybe it keeps the series fresh.
For Allen Lau, it turns out that sometimes the biggest decision in a business can be to stick to your original idea and build on it.
That's his story, anyway. It's the story of Wattpad Corp., a Canadian company that started in 2006 as an online reading room and now attracts 70 million users a month to its site and app in more than 50 languages.
"People share their stories, from science fiction to romance to everything in between. Every day we see about half a billion uploads of content," says Mr. Lau, Wattpad's co-founder and CEO.
Not all successful tech companies stick to their guns for as long as Wattpad has. Netflix, for example, used to deliver DVDs by mail; Amazon sold books and has pivoted to, well, everything. But while Wattpad's products and services are expanding, they're still based on its first premise, that people want to read and write.