A simple Twitter post helped debut author B.B. Alston land a three-book deal and a film option at Universal Pictures for his middle grade fantasy series. Last fall, the aspiring author had been living in South Carolina and working on the manuscript for Amari and the Night Brothers before heading into a biomedical science program in preparation for medical school.
Links of the week August 26 2019 (35)
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:
2 September 2019
"I'd been writing as a hobby for most of my life," Alston told PW. "I can remember as far back as middle school when I would write horror stories featuring all my classmates. They'd all gather around the computer to see who made it to the end." In October 2018, Alston had been looking for seasonal work at a nearby Amazon warehouse. On a whim, he decided to pitch his work-in-progress to literary agents through #DVPit, a Twitter hashtag created by agent Beth Phelan to amplify "marginalized voices that have been historically underrepresented in publishing."
Alston described his middle grade fantasy project with a few hundred characters on Twitter: "When an inner-city kid gets nominated by her long missing brother to try out for the Bureau for Supernatural Affairs, it's her chance to learn what happened to him. But it'll mean competing against the nation's wealthiest kids."
A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster.
But it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn't perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. This is in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin with. Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers' agitation-not unlike the way a person's browsing history might reveal a single day's struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.
In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life. Its narrative occupies a mere eight sentences. Among many other things, it is a rebuke to the consistent downgrading of the "domestic" in literature, so frequently ascribed to female writers, because it insists that our consciousness does not exist in neat compartments marked personal, social, familial, political. Our heads, instead, are a riot.
Which of these six will triumph on 14 October? (And will the ceremony have to compete with a general election?) Given the thematic unity of this year's prize - from long to shortlist, there has been an emphasis on experimentation and engagement with the present day. It's not immediately obvious where divergence of opinions will begin; as ever, it's a pin in a donkey's tail. Perhaps out of sheer fun, my money's on those Ducks.
To know me, you wouldn't guess I'm carrying on a secret life. I go to my desk early and stay late, making about as little noise as a human can make while earning a living. I'm a novelist by trade, and in recent years also a screenwriter, adapting my work to film or television. I enjoy this new business that marries my brain with those of others who are skilled in different arts, in service of beautiful, accessible creations. Screenwriting is like and unlike writing novels: Compelling plot and characters are equally crucial to page and screen. Tension and economy are appreciated by readers, demanded by viewers.
I'm writing poetry. I hadn't realized how badly I've missed language, the weight of words, their rhythms and tastes on the tongue. Oh, I love telling a story: beginning, middle, end. But there's delight in telling a moment: the world turned over by a sudden encounter of unacquainted thoughts. When a poet tells me that hope has feathers, or that life is a loaded gun propped in the corner, or that time holds me green and dying though I sing in my chains like the sea, my pulse races. Get me up there on that tightrope where I can write my own sun barefooting cartwheels over the grass. Words are heady beings when they dance.
Oh, the heyday of publishing - big desks, lots of cash, martini-soused three-hour lunches, trying to appease your government. That was the world in which TS Eliot, then a director of Faber and FaberClick for Faber and Faber Publishers References listing, was living in 1944, when he rejected George Orwell's Animal Farm for its criticism of Stalin, who was then Britain's wartime ally. "We have no conviction," Eliot wrote to Orwell, "that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time." He did, however, say he was "very sorry" to pass on it, as it would likely mean Orwell wouldn't send them his next book - which would end up being a little novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His decision has haunted the publisher ever since. Toby Faber, the former managing director and the grandson of the publisher's founder, is now urging Faber to rectify Eliot's bad call by printing its own edition of the book when it comes out of copyright in 2020, alongside Eliot's rejection.
Hanging Eliot out to dry seems a little harsh, though - he is far from the first editor to miss out on a future bestseller. At least his letter didn't describe Animal Farm as "a stupid and pointless fable in which animals take over a farm and run it", as a very sniffy editor did at the US publisher Knopf. Knopf also passed on The Diary of Anne Frank ("a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions") and Jack Kerouac's On The Road ("I don't dig this one at all").
If you want to browse a horror section of a physical bookstore, you're almost certainly going to have to Half-Price Books to find one. Barnes and Noble has long-since sent theirs to pasture. Anything even vaguely science fiction or fantasy goes there, serial killers and torture live in mystery, and everything else fits into fiction. That latter is where Joe Hill dwells, who I would argue is the only new horror star marketed AS a horror star that has come on the scene in the last two decades. He's certainly the only one I can think of who is getting books and television adaptations made, even as his dad (Stephen King) enjoys a nostalgia renaissance.
It's nearly Halloween, so I'm always on the lookout for horror. I mean, I am the rest of the months, too, but this time of year it seems the search should be easier. And yet, it's not. Most of the time I find myself actually inside my local B&N using their app to browse the horror tag then asking clerks where I might find individual books since they don't have a section. Thank Stoker for the general fiction anthology section, where you can usually find the latest collections of spooky tales in Haunted Nights, co-edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, and/or the output from Blumhouse. That's how I found John Langan's story "Alone in the Dark," which is for my money the scariest thing on the written page I have ever read period.
Revenues from US publishers have increased 6.9% to nearly $6 billion for the first six months of 2019, with growth in all categories apart from e-books, according to the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies (AAP).
E-book revenues were at $493 million, a decline of 3.8% as compared to the same period in 2018.
In trade publishing, net revenue for paper formats, including hardback, paperback, mass market, and board books grew 2.5% as compared to the first six months of last year, reaching $2.5 billion. Paper formats accounted for 72.1% of all reported sales during the first six months of 2019. Elsewhere, downloaded audio continued to see the highest growth and was up 33.8%, reaching $279 million while physical audio declined by 18.0%, coming in at $17 million. Downloaded audio accounted for 8.1% of all trade sales during the first six months of 2019.
In a stipulation filed in federal court on August 28, Audible has agreed to exclude works from a group of major publishers from its Captions program until copyright and licensing issues raised in a recent lawsuit are resolved.
"Audible will not enable its ‘Captions' feature for all audiobooks for which Publishers own, or are the exclusive licensee of, the text or audiobook rights (including without limitation Publishers' Works as defined in Paragraph 36 of the Complaint filed in this litigation) until the Court rules on Publishers' Motion for a Preliminary Injunction," the filing states, "or the motion is otherwise disposed of."
The Stipulation terms represent a minor victory for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies and a group of plaintiff publishers (Chronicle Books, Hachette; HarperCollins; Macmillan; Penguin Random House; Scholastic, and Simon & Schuster) who had filed suit on August 23 in the Southern District of New York to stop Audible from including their works in the program's upcoming launch without permission.
26 August 2019
When I read this week that Olivia Laing would be sharing her James Tait Black prize winnings with her fellow shortlisted novelists, I was less surprised than some. Not because I know Laing (I don't), but because her decision made sense.
In 2017, I donated half my winnings for the International Dublin Literary award to establish a new prize for debut translators, the TA First Translation prize. The previous week, Jessica Cohen won the Man Booker International prize and announced that half of her £25,000 would be going to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights NGO. What we spend money on - especially in a business where there isn't enough to go around - is a statement of what we value.
A prize's function can be activist, explicitly or not. A prize rewards a winner particularly, but also affirms that this is a category of thing in which excellence matters and should be recognised - endorsed by passion but also shored up by rigorous critical conversations.
The Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies today (August 23) has asked the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to enjoin Audible from providing to its audiobook consumers the machine-generated text of literary works "without any authorization from, compensation to, or quality control by the copyright owners."
"On most days, publishers are in the business of investing in authors, inspiring readers, and disseminating knowledge to the public. Today we find ourselves in court because it is, at times, essential to stand against deliberate acts of disregard and self-interest, particularly when they threaten the long-term viability of the publishing industry and the laws that are its foundation."
I moved to Nashville, Tenn., in the summer of 1999 to go to college, in the height of the file-sharing "crisis." I put the word "crisis" in quotes because while the music industry was quick to judge on what was, and was not, ethical consumption of music, we learned a few things from the episode:
With that sequence in mind, we now look at what's happening in book publishing. Audible rankled book publishers by introducing, albeit in beta, a new feature called "Audible Captions," which allows users of audiobooks to read along with transcribed text, a few sentences at a time. Publishers argue Audible doesn't have the rights to do that. That's an argument straight out of 1999. Did tech companies like Napster have the right to give music away to downloaders? Of course not. But did music publishers devastate their own revenue for years to come by not forging a path to partnership? Sure did.
Last week, Barack Obama released his annual summer reading list, receiving 250,000 Facebook reactions and 26,000 comments. The ex-president is certainly not the first public personality to tout their literary nous; everyone from Emma Watson to Kim Kardashian West has opened their bookshelves to the world. But how are these celebrity tastemakers transforming what we read, and what does it mean for professional literary criticism?
With secondary motives underlying the stories promoted by these emerging literary intermediaries, what has happened to the art of objective literary critique, which demands "taste, training, sensibility, some knowledge of the past, and a rare feeling for both language and argument"? Is book culture being undermined?
Ironically, while creative nonfiction and memoir writing can be a tool of self-discovery, you must have some distance from the self to write effectively. You must know when you are ready to write about certain subjects and when you are not - when you are still sorting them out for yourself. Perhaps you will be able to write about a small aspect of a large experience, focusing your attention on a particular detail that leads to a larger metaphorical significance.
This is not to say that creative nonfiction or memoir is devoid of emotion; on the contrary, the most powerful nonfiction is propelled by a sense of urgency, the need to speak about events that touch us deeply, both in our personal history and those that occur in the world around us. The key to successfully writing about these events is perspective.
As readers, we rarely want to read an essay that smacks either of the discourse appropriate to the "therapist's couch" or "revenge prose." In both cases, the writer has not yet gained enough perspective for wisdom or literature to emerge from experience. The writer may still be weighed down by confusing emotions, or feelings of self-pity, and want only to share those emotions with the reader. In revenge prose, the writer's intent seems to be to get back at someone else. The offender does not emerge as a fully developed character, but only as a flat, one-dimensional incarnation of awful deeds. In both cases, it is the writer who comes out looking bad.
Every now and then over the last 10-15 years, there has been a little flurry of panic and outrage as another author discovers there are free downloads of their book(s) available somewhere online. Seasoned authors point out that they can send as many take-down notices as they like, the sites will just ignore them and be unprosecutable because they are always under the non-jurisdiction of some bit of the cyberhinterland. Google some of my books and there are TEN THOUSAND links to illegal downloads.
I could spend my whole life sending pointless take-down notices, so I send none. Lots of those sites don't even have any books; they are just harvesting email addresses or depositing the digital equivalent of doggy dung, not in a plastic bag but on the gullible consumer's device. This style of piracy is part of the landscape. Like shops trying to stop shoplifting, it's a fight that will never be won, though we can possibly pick off a few of the more amateur attempts.
But this year has seen something rather different, involving large and generally respectable organisations from public libraries to the BBC.
My daughter, like me, is of mixed heritage. She has wildly curly hair, as have I. When she was born four years ago I was given five copies of the same kids' picture book by well-meaning friends and relatives. It was called Guess How Much I Love You. This book, whose lead characters are rabbits, was a bestseller in the 1990s. Back then it flew off the shelves. What I did not expect when I was pregnant with my daughter was that it would be far easier to find her a rabbit picture book than one featuring a child like her with brown skin and curls.
This week Malorie Blackman, author of Noughts and Crosses, told Channel 4 News that of the many books she read as a child "not one of them featured a black child like me", adding that "it made me feel invisible in the world of literature". And when, in her mid-20s, she noticed in a children's bookshop that little had changed, "that's when I decided that I wanted to write for children ... for the child in me, really, for all the books I wish I could have read as a child".
Blackman's books have now sold over a million copies, but sadly, aside from her groundbreaking novels, little has changed. When the Guardian analysed the top 100 bestselling illustrated children's books published last year, only five were found to have featured a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) character in a central role, with three of those being the same character, the malevolent mixed-race burglar Lanky Len from the What the Ladybird Heard series. Almost 70% of the books with illustrations of minority characters featured them in only non-speaking roles. Not a single author or illustrator on the list was identified as BAME.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Beatrix Potter's first book-and is still her best known. But had the beloved author not had the confidence to publish the book on her own terms, we might not have ever known her name (or Peter Rabbit's) today.
The origin of Peter Rabbit dates back in 1893, when Potter wrote the beginnings of what would become her iconic children's book in a letter she sent to Noel Moore, the ailing five-year-old son of Annie Carter Moore, Potter's friend and former governess. "I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were - Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter," the story began.