It was 1.30 in the morning in Melbourne and Adrian McKinty had just got home after dropping off his last Uber customer of the night at the airport. His phone rang. It was Shane Salerno, agent to authors including Don Winslow, and it was a call that would pull McKinty into "some major league craziness", ending in a six-figure English-language book deal and, last week, a seven-figure film deal from Paramount for his forthcoming novel The Chain.
Links of the week July 8 2019 (28)
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:
15 July 2019
"Don told me you've given up writing," said Salerno. McKinty, an award-winning crime novelist, had recently blogged about his decision to quit being an author. Beginning with his debut, Dead I May Well Be, written while he taught high school English in Colorado, and continuing with his award-winning series about Northern Irish detective Sean Duffy, McKinty's books might have won him prizes and great reviews, but they weren't making him any money. The family moved from the US to Australia in 2008 because McKinty's wife, author and academic Leah Garrett, was offered a job there. Now the family had been evicted from the home they'd had lived in for eight years, and he was working as an Uber a cab driver ("the world's worst," he says now) and bartending in an attempt to actually bring in some cash.
We all judge books by their covers. A cover is the most important piece of marketing for any book. Publishers know this, which is why they have entire departments devoted to the design of book covers. Art departments do tons of market research, A/B testing, and usually go through several designs before deciding on a direction for a cover.
However, whenever a cover is revealed that readers don't like, the author bears the brunt of the criticism. Which is frustrating because, usually, they have little to no input on the cover. Most of the time in traditional publishing the author gets an email that says, "Here's your cover! We hope you like it." Sometimes an author will get to give input that may or may not be used in the design. The case is rare where an author has any sort of authoritative control.
It's 10 years since David Nicholls' novel One Day became a publishing phenomenon - a word of mouth sensation that has sold more than five million copies around the world. Five years later came Us and now five years after that he's back with a new novel. But can he repeat the success with Sweet Sorrow - a story of falling in love for the first time?
Nicholls is under no illusion that whatever he does next, a book he wrote a decade ago "will always be the most popular and successful thing" he is known for. One Day was a phenomenon that not only sold five million copies around the world but was also made into a movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. But its story that followed two characters from their graduation to their early 40s by visiting them every St Swithin's Day, cast a long shadow, says the author."The success of One Day made it very hard to write," he tells BBC News.
After Angie Thomas requested that she not be tagged into negative reviews of her books on social media, she has received a torrent of abuse.
History has yet to find the book that is universally adored - or the author who enjoys reading bad reviews. While Angie Thomas has topped the charts and scooped up armloads of awards for her two young adult novels, The Hate U Give and On the Come Up, her recent request that book bloggers stop sending her their negative reviews saw her on the receiving end of a wave of vitriol. Thomas wasn't asking reviewers to stop writing bad reviews. She was just asking that they didn't give her a prod on Twitter or Instagram to tell her about it.
The newly reported annual sales survey from the APA shows audiobooks continuing to be the market lead for growth in formats, with listening in cars on the upswing in 2018.
In its annual audiobook sales survey for 2018 released today (July 16). the US-based Audio Publishers Association has announced that audiobook revenue in 2018 grew by 24.5 percent and totaled US$940 million. These figures represent a 27.3-percent increase in unit sales.
Long cheered by the US publishing industry as the most dependably growing sector of its formats, downloadable audio has-as the APA's leading survey graphic trumpets-produced seven years of double-digit revenue growth.
What's more, if you've been holding out for CDs and cassette tapes, it's time to give up and get onto the grid: 91.4 percent of audiobook revenue in 2018 is reported to be coming from digital usage.
When you read a poem, you might be struck by its form on the page, the page etched with careful words, the words teased into line breaks. But when you hear it? Then you meet the poem in a more intimate space.
For years, audiobooks and poetry readings have used the authority of voice to bring poems to life. But there's another, newer platform I want to talk about: the podcast.
A podcast allows you to do things outside of a poem by making the world of poetry itself more approachable. In most poetry podcasts, there's a discussion about the context of the work and the poet that goes beyond just reading a poem out loud.
We think that poetry is old ... that it's about dead men walking by a pond in the 19th century ... but poetry is more vast than that and podcasts ... allow you to access that vastness through conversation.
"We think that poetry is old ... that it's about dead men walking by a pond in the 19th century," says Ydalmi Noriega, of the Poetry Foundation. "Sure, that's one version of poetry, and perhaps that's what we are presented with in classrooms, but poetry is more vast than that and podcasts ... allow you to access that vastness through conversation."
Sometimes a story demands more than just a plot to move its emotional content forward. When a story becomes very complicated, or a little too crowded with characters, or stretched over a long period of time, you may want to create a context. Context is the descriptive background in a story that sheds light on its meaning. Context is larger than plot; it gives the characters a larger arena in which to hate or love each other, to discover or destroy themselves, to fall under or triumph over adversity.
In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, the plot follows Ethan's doomed affair of the heart with Mattie Silver, the "companion" of Ethan's sickly and querulous wife. It is a dark story told in the context of the cruel New England winter. After a brief prologue, the story opens this way:
The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.