For almost two years after my first book was published, I did not write a single new thing-not an essay, a story, a chapter, an ode, an elegy, nor even a monostich.
Links of the week September 23 2019 (39)
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:
30 September 2019
In the past, writing had felt like pushing over the first domino at the beginning of a long intricate row - one word would tip forward, knocking another word down, and so on to the next; the words forming sentences all falling into place, and then I would resurface hours later with multiple first drafts of poems or an essay written.
Now that momentum was gone. I'd type one or two words and stop and stare at the letters. Then I'd space my cursor backwards, deleting to start again, only to hit another wall. The open document on my computer felt like a white room I was locked inside - no matter how hard I pounded at the walls or how loudly I screamed, I was trapped.
I love a great crime thriller, especially one that's raw and visceral and frightening. Over the years, I've read or watched hundreds of them, and while most have long since faded from memory, there are a few that linger in the dark corners of my mind, stories with images so haunting that they still make me shudder - stories like Thomas Harriss's The Silence of the Lambs, James Patterson's Kiss the Girls, and the movie Seven.
But what's the difference between an unforgettable crime thriller and the sort of thriller that retreats into the remote fissures of your brain, never to be pondered again? What are the key ingredients that make some thrillers impossible to forget?
"So, how did you two meet?"
It's a common question that my then-boyfriend and I were often asked on a big backpacking trip we took in 2008. We were travelling around the world for an entire year on redundancy - one last self-indulgent hurrah before Settling Down, and every time Mark blushed and I told the story, at the end people would say, "Wow!" That it sounded like a book, or a film, or something. That it was a cool story.
With so many people we met saying it sounded like a novel, I got the idea to start writing one. We had a lot of downtime on this trip after all, and my background is magazine journalism. So in Bangkok I bought a teeny tiny laptop and started scribbling away.
Me in the third person
It was strange to write about myself in the third person - but I felt more comfortable leaping out of myself and writing about someone else. So the nervous girl on the train became Maya; Mark became James (but still Train Man), and although much of our lives were similar to the characters that were evolving on the Word document, in their fictionalised form Maya and James could become bigger and cooler versions of us; I could exaggerate their stories - and feel less self-conscious.
They can be identified by their independent-bookstore tote bags, their "Book Lover" mugs, or-most reliably-by the bound, printed stacks of paper they flip through on their lap. They are, for lack of a more specific term, readers.
Joining their tribe seems simple enough: Get a book, read it, and voilà! You're a reader-no tote bag necessary. But behind that simple process is a question of motivation-of why some people grow up to derive great pleasure from reading, while others don't. That why is consequential-leisure reading has been linked to a range of good academic and professional outcomes-as well as difficult to fully explain. But a chief factor seems to be the household one is born into, and the culture of reading that parents create within it.
The size of the American reading public varies depending on one's definition of reading. In 2017, about 53 percent of American adults (roughly 125 million people) read at least one book not for school or for work in the previous 12 months, according to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Five years earlier, the NEA ran a more detailed survey, and found that 23 percent of American adults were "light" readers (finishing one to five titles per year), 10 percent were "moderate" (six to 11 titles), 13 percent were "frequent" (12 to 49 titles), and a dedicated 5 percent were "avid" (50 books and up).
For decades, Mighty Girls have devoured the works of Judy Blume, from Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret to Forever... to Just As Long As We're Together. Her characters are compelling to readers because they face real issues - issues like puberty, struggles with friends, sexuality, divorce, and bullying. There's even a book, Everything I Needed To Know About Being A Girl I Learned from Judy Blume, which features a collection of essays by twenty-four notable women authors about the impact Judy Blume's novels have had on their lives and writing.
But what many Mighty Girl readers may not know is that the very topics that made Blume's work speak so powerfully to them also made them the subject of frequent challenges and bans. Blume has the dubious distinction of being one of the most banned writers in America. In fact, challenges and bans to her books still happen frequently; as a result, in some towns, it is actually harder for kids to get access to her books now than when they were written.
Publishing is the business of creating books and selling them to readers. And yet, for some reason we aren't supposed to talk about the latter. Most literary writers consider book sales a half-crass / half-mythological subject that is taboo to discuss.
While authors avoid the topic, every now and then the media brings up book sales - normally to either proclaim, yet again, the death of the novel, or to make sweeping generalizations about the attention spans of different generations. But even then, the data we are given is almost completely useless for anyone interested in fiction and literature. Earlier this year, there was a round of excited editorials about how print is back, baby after industry reports showed print sales increasing for the second consecutive year. However, the growth was driven almost entirely by non-fiction sales... more specifically adult coloring books and YouTube celebrity memoirs. As great as adult coloring books may be, their sales figures tell us nothing about the sales of, say, literary fiction.
This summer, author Megan Miranda won the publishing lottery.
Miranda, who writes thrillers and young-adult novels, is the kind of author that publishers usually call midlist. She's well established, and one of her books has even been a New York Times bestseller, yet outside of her genre, she's not exceptionally famous.
But in June, Miranda published her 10th novel, The Last House Guest, about a murder in an exclusive Maine vacation town. In August, Reese Witherspoon selected it for her book club. "My editor called me up," Miranda said by phone a week after the pick was announced, sounding still slightly dazed. "I had just gotten back from my first leg of the book tour when I found out, and I was so ecstatic."
23 September 2019
In a video that began making the rounds last month, Meg Stalter describes herself as a writer in New York City ("can you get any more cliché than that, no you can't" she said), and gives some writerly advice.
"Write every day, every second of the day. When you wake up, you should be looking, ‘Where's my writing stuff that I use to write?'" Ms. Stalter is a comedian, and her video has gone a little viral. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda now follows her on Twitter.
Her impersonation of a writer giving advice to aspiring writers is funny because it's true. Thanks to tweets, comment threads, Instagram captions, Facebook confessionals, newsletters, self-publishing and the internet's insatiable thirst for first-person essays, everyone is now a writer (or a "content creator"). With an oversupply of words and increasingly distracted demand, making money in a side hustle or day job is harder than ever.
Arundhati Roy, JM Coetzee and Sally Rooney are among more than 250 writers who have defended Kamila Shamsie after a German literary prize withdrew an award over her support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
In an open letter published today in the London Review of Books, the writers, who also include Noam Chomsky, Amit Chaudhuri, William Dalrymple, Yann Martel, Jeanette Winterson and Ben Okri, say that the Nelly Sachs prize has chosen to "punish an author for her human rights advocacy". Michael Ondaatje, a former winner of the award, is one of the signatories to the letter.
If the fortunes of Barnes & Noble are going to be turned around-and new CEO James Daunt is confident they will be-the improvement will be led by the company's booksellers. In an interview at B&N's flagship bookstore in New York City, Daunt repeatedly stressed that the makeover of the company will be done by empowering store managers and other booksellers to create stores that meet the needs of their local communities. "The bookseller in North Dakota knows what the customer wants better than someone in New York," Daunt said, adding that managers won't be held hostage by planograms from New York when determining how a store should be stocked.
While all buying will still be done from New York (publishers will not need to have reps call on individual stores, as some had thought), managers will be free to display books where they want, order them in the quantities they need, and merchandise them appropriately. Under the new operating philosophy, store managers will be given more responsibility for the performance of their stores. "They won't be able to say the store isn't doing well because the people in New York don't know what they are doing," Daunt said.
In an era plagued by deep fakes and online disinformation campaigns, we still tend to trust what we read in books. But should we?
In the past year alone, errors in books by several high-profile authors - including Naomi Wolf, the former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, the historian Jared Diamond, the behavioral scientist and "happiness expert" Paul Dolan and the journalist Michael Wolff - have ignited a debate over whether publishers should take more responsibility for the accuracy of their books.
Some authors are hiring independent fact checkers to review their books. A few nonfiction editors at major publishing companies have started including rigorous professional fact-checking in their suite of editorial services.
While in the fallout of each accuracy scandal everyone asks where the fact checkers are, there isn't broad agreement on who should be paying for what is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process in the low-margin publishing industry.
Everyone wants to write a book, or to say they have written a book. Publishing a book is still an honor, a point of pride-but like pretty much everything else, it's also dependent upon a capitalist business model. And the financial side of publishing can be opaque, unfair, and downright contradictory. Combined with the distinctly American habit of not wanting to sully talk of artistry with talk of money, this means that many people who want to make writing their full-time career have no idea how the money part of writing actually works. In this TED talk I will answer some of the most common questions I get as a literary agent about the money side of things. I will try not to make it too depressing.
How much money am I going to get for my very, very good book
This is the single most common question I get from my clients, and other people when they find out I'm a literary agent, and I respond with a very infuriating "$5,000 to $50,000." Most times, though, I'm right! I have sold books for both more and less than those amounts, and to be fair, there are many genres where I can estimate a much smaller spread. But the total advance depends on so many things, including the quality of the work, the sales potential of the work (not the same thing!), the author's platform and/or previous sales, the zeitgeist, the "market," how many other editors are interested (if any), how similar books have performed for the publisher and/or other publishers, and many, many other things. Because there are so many factors, there's no "average" book advance. $1,000 is rare. $1,000,000 is also rare.
Author Cressida Cowell has argued that the industry will become "dead in the water" without more support for children's reading, as she reiterated her campaign to make school libraries a statutory requirement.
The Waterstones children's laureate told around 300 delegates at the Bookseller Children's Conference at County Hall in London on Monday (23rd September) why children's engagement with books must be encouraged at every opportunity.
In her endnote speech, ‘Reading is Magic and Magic should be for Everyone', the How to Train Your Dragon author said: "If you don't get them reading as children then the industry is dead in the water." Reading is most important for children in how it promotes intelligence, creativity and empathy, describing reading as "creativity in action", while films "tell you how things should look and sound". She spoke of how she is not temped to jump ship for Hollywood: "People say, ‘have you thought of writing for the movies?' As if that a more superior, a more exciting and more modern thing to do.
In her role as children's laureate, Cowell will campaign to ensure that there are libraries in every school in the UK. "I am going to be campaigning about why school libraries should be statutory... because otherwise it will just be a very spotty situation across the country. There are so few libraries left in primary schools in this country. And again, I don't think people realise that. People say 'oh of course, every school has a library.' But that is not the case."
More than 100 pages of court filings precede a hearing expected this week in the US publishers' lawsuit of Amazon's Audible. Publishers allege copyright infringement, the audiobook company asserts fair use.
What's essential to proponents of the publishing community's arguments is the charge that Audible's voice-generated Captions form a rendition of a book that's neither licensed nor paid for by Audible.
By contrast, Audible's over-arching answer is that the Captions are an allowable and useful evocation of a book and that no copyright infringement is involved in their creation.
Joanne Harris has spoken out against an "absurd" focus on debuts in the publishing world.
The Chocolat author urged publishers to support existing writers in their careers rather than pursuing one debut after another, during a Q&A held with The Empowered Author founder Sam Missingham on Monday 23rd September.
Harris said: "I've seen a number of debut authors emerge and get very large initial advances - which is great for a debut author - but it doesn't necessarily mean that the publisher will value that author beyond their debut. We're getting a generation of twenty-somethings being praised and paraded around for their debut because it's a debut and then we just don't hear about them again. Their second novel - which if often a bit of a problematic one to do anyway - may not necessarily do as well, has not necessarily been pushed as much. Their career instead of moving upwards and building on its success ends up kind of dwindling. They get replaced by the next big debut."
She said: "I've had a number of proofs recently that purport to be debuts but they are not debuts. They are an established author writing under a new name in the hope of riding the wave of this love affair with debuts which seems to me both misleading and a bit absurd. Although it's great for us to be seeing debuts supported and praised, it's also important for publishers to continue to sustain and support their existing authors rather than just flitting from one exciting debut to the next and just hoping that people will be able to look after themselves because that doesn't always happen."
Not so long ago, Golden Age detective fiction was hopelessly out of fashion. Yes, Agatha Christie continued to sell, and her books were regularly televised and filmed. But she is a literary phenomenon, an exception who breaks every rule. Fans of the other Crime Queens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham, kept the flame burning, while several good writers came and went who worked essentially in the Golden Age tradition; examples include Patricia Moyes, Dominic Devine, and Sarah Caudwell. But hundreds of writers who made their name in the Golden Age were out of print. And so far as readers and critics were concerned, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
There is, of course, a timelessness about the classic tropes of Golden Age fiction: dying message clues, locked rooms, red herrings, closed circles of suspects, least likely culprits, and all the rest. They cropped up before the Golden Age, and have recurred ever since. But after two decades of immense popularity, the Golden Age style of storytelling fell out of fashion. After the Second World War, new authors emerged and new ways of treating crime in fiction came along.