Most readers will have to wait until September to find out what happens in Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, but the Booker judges have deemed The Testaments worthy of a place on the 2019 longlist for the £50,000 literary prize.
Links of the week July 15 2019 (29)
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:
22 July 2019
On a longlist packed with big names - but notable for its exclusion of well-received novels by authors including Ian McEwan, Mark Haddon and Ali Smith - Rushdie is one of several British novelists nominated. Alongside him are Jeanette Winterson for Frankissstein, her reinterpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; John Lanchester for his dystopia The Wall; Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, a verse novel about the lives of black women; Max Porter's Lanny, the story of a missing boy in a commuter town; and Deborah Levy's The Man Who Saw Everything, which will be published next month and slips between time zones in what judges called "a playful and complex structure".
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
The plot: Under lock and key until publication day on 10 September, The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid's Tale and follows the lives of three women in Gilead.
What we said: Nothing yet! But it is set to be one of the biggest books of the year.
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (Jonathan Cape)
The plot: Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor who self-describes as a "hybrid", meets Victor Stein, a celebrated professor who sees transhuman possibilities in Ry's body."You aligned your physical reality with your mental impression of yourself," he tells Ry. "Wouldn't it be a good thing if we could all do that?"
What we said: "Frankissstein is a fragmented, at times dazzlingly intelligent meditation on the responsibilities of creation, the possibilities of artificial intelligence and the implications of both transsexuality and transhumanism." Read the full review.
When Lynne Truss wrote, in her best-selling 2003 grammar screed Eats, Shoots & Leaves, of "a world of plummeting punctuation standards," she was (perhaps unwittingly) joining an ancient tradition. How long, exactly, have shortsighted curmudgeons been bemoaning the poor grammar of the generations that follow theirs? According to Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style, the answer is, like, forever: "Some of the clay tablets deciphered from ancient Sumerian include complaints about the deteriorating writing skills of the young."
The notion of being taught language has always been oxymoronic because language is in a constant state of flux, a restless, malleable, impatient entity that, like the idea of now, can never be fixed in place. Take, for instance, the journey of the semicolon as chronicled in the delightful, enlightening new book by Cecelia Watson, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark. The twisty history of the hybrid divider perfectly embodies the transience of language, the ways it can be shaped by cultural shifts that have nothing to do with correctness or clarity. Invented by the Italian humanist and font pioneer Aldus Manutius in the late-15th century, the semicolon was originally "meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon" (hence its design).
For many indie authors, book marketing has become synonymous with social media activity. The effectiveness of marketing a book depends on likes, comments, retweets, and pins-all methods of interacting with content in the online social world.
Although video has exploded as a favorite form for sharing across social networks, a lot of the content that lies behind the links we see on social outlets is still text-based articles from blogs. This is especially true of authoritative information used for problem solving.
Content isn't created in a vacuum-there has to be a need for it to exist. Why else write it?
The best way I've found to create content that people will really want to share is by thinking from the perspective of the person searching for help. What are an author's target readers actually looking for?For writers who know their subject matter deeply, this might involve demonstrating expertise in a way that helps others solve problems. Writers who are newcomers to a field could share what they learn for the benefit of those who will follow in their footsteps. Other writers provide news or entertainment.
By the end of the 1950s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Age of classic British mystery fiction was completely done. The breezy puzzles of Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, and Ngaio Marsh had been overtaken by hardboiled detectives, psychological thrillers, mean streets, twisted characters, and plots that examined the underbelly of human behavior.
Ah, but then there was Patricia Moyes. I'm exceedingly fond of dark and twisty, but sometimes you just want to sit back with a book that's engaging, ingeniously plotted, and populated by memorable characters. In nineteen novels from 1959 to 1993, Moyes gave you exactly that.
Books are generally presented as the work of one person, but almost 60 others worked on mine. But will readers care enough to read about them?
We writers lead a necessarily solitary life - at least, that's what we like to think. Though the act of writing can involve lots of lonesome glaring at an open Word document (with occasional breaks for coffee and Countdown), the process of turning deathless prose into an actual book involves a lot more people than the name on the cover suggests.
This is why my publisher Trapeze, an imprint of the Hachette company Orion, is starting to put full, movie-style credits at the back of their books. They asked me if I was amenable to this for my forthcoming novel Things Can Only Get Better, after trialling it in Candice Carty-Williams's hugely successful Queenie. Of course I said yes - not only because I think it's a brilliant idea but also because whenever I write my acknowledgments, I always fear I've missed somebody out. Looking at the two pages of names at the back of Queenie, I realised that I had previously left out lots of people.
In the delightful Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, Cecelia Watson, a historian and philosopher of science, takes readers through a lively and varied "biography" of the semicolon. She covers the punctuation mark's history (which began in 1494 Venice, in a travel narrative about scaling Mount Etna) and changing grammatical function, from creating rhythm to separating two independent clauses, along with the love/hate relationship writers have long had with it. Watson shares some lesser-known facts about the punctuation mark.
My husband and I fell in love, in part, over discussions of the semicolon, a woman told me last year. I'm afraid of it, students tell me every year. Love, fear, or outright hate - the semicolon can elicit them all. People have always had strong feelings about the semicolon, and its history testifies to its ability to touch hearts - or nerves. Here are a few things about its past that you might not know.
Book designer and author Joel Friedlander takes a look at pitfalls self-publishers face when doing their own book formatting, and explains how to avoid these mistakes in the first place.
With more and more authors taking the production of their books into their own hands, more and more of those books look... strange. That's not a good thing for either authors or their readers.
Book design used to be a pretty arcane branch of graphic design, pursued by a handful of practitioners, many of whom were employed by typesetters and publishing houses. Like many other specialties, only the insiders knew or cared about the intricacies of long-form typography and all the small nuances that go into creating beautiful books.
Along with editors, these professionals made sure that the books they produced conformed to long-established publishing industry standards. That's important when you're sending your book to store or chain buyers, to media bookers, to reviewers, or to anyone who is used to looking at traditionally published books as part of her job.
So, it really behooves authors who decide to become DIY publishers to educate themselves as to how books are supposed to look, how they are constructed, and what book professionals expect to see. As my father used to say, it doesn't cost any more to print a book that's properly designed and laid out than it does to print one that's a typographic train wreck, so why not do it right the first time?
15 July 2019
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.
"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.