When the disruption hit the publishing industry ten years ago, I watched with a wary eye. After I finished The Freelancer's Survival Guide in the summer of 2010, I repurposed this weekly blog to help me understand the changes the publishing industry was undergoing. It seemed, in those heady days, that everything changed daily. And there was a large contingent of brand-new writers who knew so much better than the rest of us how revolutionary this indie publishing thing would be.
Links of the week July 1 2019 (27)
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:
1 July 2019
We've been conditioned by our upbringing in the business culture of the previous century to think of the published book as the be-all-and-end-all of everything we did. Which is why it made my brain hurt, back in the 1990s, when writers would sell their manuscript to the movies first. What was the point of that? I wondered. (Besides money.) Because I always saw it through the narrow prism of a published book. What if the movie didn't get made? That would hurt the published book (and often did).
Because we-none of us-had the right attitude about what we did.
We are not in the publishing industry. We are in the entertainment industry.
For underneath the froth, these were books written by women who not only understood the ways in which women's lives were changing but who were eager to capture those changes on the page. Women such as Rona Jaffe, celebrated for her classic "girls in the city" novel The Best of Everything (1958), who would go on to write 1979's Class Reunion, which followed four women from their time at Radcliffe College through bad marriages and by-and-large better careers to their college reunion 20 years later. And Lisa Alther, whose Kinflicks, published in 1976, told the riotous coming-of-age of Ginny Babcock, teen renegade turned sorority sister, lesbian, suburban mother and more.
But behind all the Ritz and romance - Krantz's heroines in particular were fond of a good wedding or three - something more interesting was going on. Critics often sneer at these books as vacuous and stuffed full of "trivial" concerns such as clothes, shoes and makeup (the wonderfully acerbic Angela Carter memorably described reading Krantz as like "being sealed inside a luxury shopping mall whilst being softly pelted with scented sex technique manuals"), yet they are also part of a rich tradition of novels which place women's interior lives and, most importantly, their sexual desires centre-stage, and, crucially, they are usually, although not always, at their heart about female friendship.
Why are strong, attention-getting titles so important for indie authors? Because there's a lot of competition out there-and next to an arresting, professional-looking cover design, it's the title of your book that's most likely to grab a reader's attention and convince her pick it up and buy it.
The questions become: what is a "good" title, and how do you come up with one? Author Walker Percy once said, "A good title should be like a good metaphor; it should intrigue without being too obvious." True to his conviction, some of his best known titles are The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, The Second Coming, and Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Intriguing but not too obvious, are they not?
Perhaps you've had a title for your book in mind right from the start, but if you haven't you might want to consider these six tried-and-true tips for creating successful book titles.
One of Neil Gaiman's best known and most influential works, The Sandman, is in development by Warner Bros. Television for Netflix for a live-action series of at least 10 episodes, according to today's (July 1) announcement from the streamer.
Allan Heinberg (Wonder Woman, Sex and the City) is show runner with David Goyer (The Dark Knight, Foundation) and Gaiman, all three of them to co-write the initial episode and all three of them executive producing.
The Sandman, which focuses on Morpheus or Dream, originally was published by DC Comics from 1989 to 1996, and had 75 issues. From the 47th issue, it was released under the Vertigo imprint.
Many early reports of the deal are citing unnamed sources who say it's "the most expensive series that DC Entertainment has ever done" (Lesley Goldberg, Hollywood Reporter). No one in the news media seems to have the actual figures, but the rumors of big bucks have led AV Club to headline Sam Barsanti's write "Netflix Is Throwing a Ton of Money at a Sandman Adaptation" and Gizmodo to headline Charles Pullman Moore's write-up "Neil Gaiman's Sandman Is Becoming an expensive Netflix Series."
As the Caine Prize contenders visit the UK in advance of the announcement of the winner next week, chair of the judges Dr Peter Kimani discusses what the prize has meant to African writing
What have been your observations of the quality of work shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing?
The five stories on the shortlist are outstanding and any of them is a deserving winner. That four of the five writers are women adds another dimension about the place of women writing on the continent. Quite honestly, this wasn't obvious during the judging process. Not that it matters, but women writers outshone the menfolk in the contest.
The judging panel works with the submitted works. But I believe the Caine Trust engages in outreaches to mobilise writers to participate. Neither did we engage in regional balancing in our judging; we just picked the best writing. That said, we received over 130 submissions from 21 African countries. That's a substantial sample of the continent's writing. However, since the Caine Prize is offered to best fiction in English, or is available in English translation, this linguistic categorisation obviously locks out Arabic, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. Moreover, some 2,000 indigenous languages are in active use in Africa, so the Caine Prize can only accommodate a slice of African writers of English expression.