Overall visitor numbers were up at the 2019 Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., where rights trade was brisk and events addressed timely topics including Brexit, feminism, racism, and climate crisis.
Links of the week October 14 2019 (42)
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:
21 October 2019
Big Weekend Crowds Boost Attendance Figures If you thought the the 2019 Frankfurter Buchmesse seemed more crowded than last year, it wasn't your imagination. Security personnel imposed periodic crowd hold-backs on escalators and at major doorways and thoroughfares for safety and the numbers now prove why: Messe Frankfurt was packed.
Frankfurter Buchmesse reported that on the trade visitor days - Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, October 16, 17, and 18 - attendance was up 1.8 percent, even though the number of exhibitors actually declined a bit - from 7,503 exhibitors from 109 countries in 2018 to 7,450 exhibitors from 104 countries this year.
Writing well is hard. All writers know this. So why don't we talk about it more? But we do, I hear you groan. All writers do is complain. Well, true. But it's also true that most of that complaining comes after said writer has achieved some modicum of success. The back pages of the Best American Short Stories anthologies, for example, are replete with different versions of one tale told over and over: facing constant rejection, a writer wrestles with the prospect of giving up, then a phone call comes at the last minute, telling her that everything she's ever dreamed of is suddenly about to take place.
When the prospect of failure lies just over the horizon, we don't like talking about our unfinished drafts, rejected submissions, or impossible-to-fix manuscripts quite as much. The well intentioned rejections from literary magazines and the "no" emails from agents-sure, they make great dinner party fodder after pub day, but not when we're still waiting for somebody, anybody, to recognize our hard work. Even in this, the era of "fail fast and fail often," for many writers, to admit to not having gotten there yet feels like acknowledging the very real possibility that we might not ever get there at all.
A mini-scandal lit up Twitter last month when the Cut featured a tell-all essay by 27-year-old writer Natalie Beach. In the piece, Beach exposes her seven-year relationship with her friend Caroline Calloway, who scored an agent and a reputed $375,000 book deal for her memoir. Beach, who ghostwrote the book, says her former bestie bought Instagram followers after being told by literary professionals that "no one would buy a memoir from a girl with no claim to fame and no fan base."
Platform has always been key when putting together a nonfiction book proposal. But back in the not-so-very-distant past - a mere dozen years ago! - publishers were throwing six figures and two-book deals at anyone who had a half-decent story and a clip in the local newspaper. These days, a huge following on social media, particularly Instagram, is a must for a book deal.
The moment agents or editors hear an author has a small following or no following, it's over. Yes, there are exceptions. Still, worthy authors are overlooked every day - in favor of a young woman with a photo of macarons that went viral? Now her friend the ghostwriter has CAA shopping rights to her story? Which era is crazier?
You don't expect an author with more than 100 million copies of her books sold into 36 languages and 120 countries to tell you that she's out on a limb.
But Patricia Cornwell tells Publishing Perspectives in an interview from London that one of "the challenges I did not anticipate" in writing her new novel Quantum (October 1) was a lack of the structure that has effectively served her through at least 29 New York Times bestsellers, starting in 1990 with Postmortem.
With her long-running main character, the medical forensic examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta, "I've had an in-built formula called a procedural," Cornwell says. "And in the course of that, you might get a huge dose" of storytelling energy "from a forensic fire investigation.
"But I don't have a procedure for this. This is going to have to segue more into the world of spying and dealing with the enemy that can harm you remotely, someone you can't seen, not the guy crawling through your window."
The book follows the dormouse from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as he finds himself in an enchanted New York City and becomes friends with a hard-working bodega cat, a lizard, a rat, an opera singing frog, and a troupe of tap-dancing cockroaches. Together, they fight to save the city from a gang of weasels in porkpie hats who want to stop time. I also wrote songs for the audiobook, which were scored by Em Goldman.
Writing the book had broken me open, filling me with a giddy joy. I dreamed about underground libraries, and the flower district, and cats talking to queens in Chelsea. I wandered around the Lower East Side singing songs about how beautiful New York City was; as soon as I finished Bernard, I started writing a novel about a frog who played the harmonica and his cousin who studied at the Sorbonne. And while I felt a happier writing these books, while I loved getting lost in their worlds, none of this was a departure for me. On the contrary, the happiness I felt was one of returning.
Deborah Levy's The Man Who Saw Everything is out now from Bloomsbury, so we asked her a few questions about the writer's craft, beloved books, and advice.
Who do you most wish would read your book?
I don't think I could write a book with this question in my mind. Reason is, I would be slyly trying to slip things in that I imagine might please my heroine and punish a bully. That would really be an impossible way to write, don't you think? Mind you, I would have loved Lee Miller and Leonora Carrington to have read my books.
Actually, my fantasy is that we are all three of us just lazing around, lying on the floor, reading, drawing, writing. Lee would be taking photographs. There would be a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge. Perhaps Anais Nin would turn up for a glass and relay her latest sexual adventures. After a while, she too would laze around and write up her journals. I like this atmosphere, but it's not the same as writing books-which requires solitude and stamina and more solitude.
Being a teenager isn't easy. That's been the case for generations, but it's arguably truer than ever in a world growing increasingly complicated. What's also true is that publishers of YA fiction are striving to amplify a variety of teen experiences and engage and entertain a large, diverse readership. We spoke with editors about three areas of expansion.
The YA fantasy genre continues to expand at a steady clip, allowing characters who may have previously been relegated to sidekick status, or not represented at all, to move into the spotlight. "It's so exciting to see underrepresented characters take center stage in worlds that we haven't already explored thousands of times in YA," says Sarah Shumway, executive editor at Bloomsbury.
Joyce Carol Oates brings me joy.
I first met the author at a book signing. We had traded tweets about our pets beforehand, and she'd given me a story for my Anthony-finalist anthology Protectors 2: Heroes. But when she saw me, she leaned over to her friend the artist and author Jonathan Santlofer and exclaimed, "have you met Thomas? He's a lovely kitty man."
I am a large and hirsute man, a "temperate yeti," in the parlance of a witty friend, and the "kitty man" nickname brought a few laughs. I have since embraced it; as a big goon with a nose smashed flat from fight training, it's been a good icebreaker at readings.
As one of the most daring writers working (in my opinion), she began writing regularly when she was fourteen, and was gifted a manual typewriter; she won a Scholastic award in her teens, the National Book Award for her novel them at age 32, and was given the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010. With her husband Ray Smith, she published The Ontario Review literary journal until his death in 2008. She writes in many genres including Gothic and crime; if any would doubt she is a crime writer at heart, one of her formative literary moments was after reading the horse-whipping scene in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which defined her duty as a writer: "Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere..."
BEST-SELLING author Martina Cole has just ordered me to strip. "Get it off, get it off now!" she commands, her rasping voice loaded with authority.
BEST-SELLING author Martina Cole has just ordered me to strip. "Get it off, get it off now!" she commands, her rasping voice loaded with authority.
For a moment I'm terrified. When the "Queen of Crime", who counts London gangsters such as Krays' rival Eddie Richardson as friends, gives you an order it would be foolish not to listen. But thankfully she was only telling me to take off my soaked jacket after I was caught in a downpour heading to meet her and she was worried I'd get pneumonia. That exchange sums Cole up. She's intense and fierce when she wants to be, but caring and kind as well.
14 October 2019
Julia Wisdom, publisher at HarperFiction, has bought UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to Girl A and The Conspiracies in a six-figure deal with debut author Abigail Dean. Juliet Mushens negotiated the deal at a nine-way auction after turning down two "significant" six-figure pre-empts within 48 hours of submission. US rights went to Laura Tisdel at Viking in a seven-figure deal at auction by Jenny Bent on behalf of Mushens, while the novel was pre-empted in France, the Netherlands, Italy and Sweden, and sold at auction in Spain and Lithuania. TV/film rights are in negotiation via Sally Willcox at Paradigm.
Dean said: "HarperFiction's pitch was incredible: smart, creative and full of passion for the novel and its characters. I'm so excited to be working with Julia, Laura and their fantastic teams to introduce Girl A and the Gracie family to readers across the world. The last few weeks have been dreamlike, and I'm in awe of my agent, Juliet, who has worked tirelessly to make all of this happen."
The number of books self-published in the U.S. saw more rapid growth in 2018, jumping 40% over 2017, according to Bowker's annual survey of the self-publishing market. In its report, "Self-Publishing in the United States, 2013-2018: Print and E-books," the total number of print and e-books that were self-published in 2018 was 1.68 million, up from 1.19 million in 2017.
Amazon is considered to be largest publisher of self-published e-books, even if no number is available. Amazon's CreateSpace division dominates the print self-publishing market, with 1.4 million self-published print titles last year, up from 929.290 in 2017. Lulu published the second most print self-published titles last year, with its output rising to 37,456 titles, from 36,651 in 2017, according to Bowker. Author Solutions, through its many different imprints, released 16,019 print self-published print books last year and 10,585 e-books, with both figures slightly higher in 2018 over 2017.
Is Netflix a friend or foe to the book business? That question was addressed by the Global 50 CEO Talk 2019, which featured a conversation with Kelly Luegenbiehl, VP International Originals of Netflix, hosted by publishing consultant Ruediger Wischenbart and with the editors of global trade journals.
Netflix, Wischenbart pointed out, spent in excess of $10 billion on content development every year - the global revenue of Penguin Random House is about $3.5bn. Luegenbiehl said: "We look at the publishers and editors as partners, that is the best word. For us, the more collaboration the better. Our goal is to bring books to life on the screen in a way it has not been done before."
In the Golden Age of British detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, four women were universally considered the four Queens-Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers (don't forget the middle initial, please, she was most adamant about that). She earned that title largely on the strength of eleven extraordinary novels published between 1923 and 1937, featuring the iconic character of Lord Peter Wimsey and, in four of them, the inestimable Harriet Vane, as well as dozens of short stories and one stand-alone novel. Her influence on detective fiction went far wider than that, however.
But first the novels! Entertaining, erudite, lucid, filled with ingenious puzzles and even more ingenious solutions, written with grace, elegance, flair, wit, and an acute attention to character and psychological development, these novels combined the best qualities of the detective story with a novelist's attention to the mores and manners of the day.
Seamus Heaney was real. Were he a fictional character, however, we likely would call him unrealistic, his life story and his career too good to be true. Like Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, but perhaps with fewer missteps and regrets, Heaney became the sort of modern poet whose best-known phrases circulate without attribution.
And then - his children grown or in their teens, his job and his reputation secure - Heaney decided to write about happiness. 'Walk on air against your better judgment,' one of the poems from The Spirit Level (2014) suggests. The poet had already moved from earth and water to fire and heat, and then over water again, across the Atlantic. Now he became a poet of air: one who wanted to share with his readers not so much extravagance as confidence, lightness, the ability to stay pleased.
Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, months after this riven old island voted to leave the European Union, and days after an ex-reality TV host became the leader of the free world, a writer happened to win an award. In her speech she thanks this country which has been her home for half her life. She thanks it for valuing her book, for valuing her at this historic moment in time. And she means it. This validation means the world to her. It comes from a country, Scotland, that is not exactly hers but in which she has settled. In which she has produced a mixed-race baby and become a writer.
Afterwards she is whisked away for photos, handshakes, congratulations, the heady stuff of success. Only the following day does she discover what else happened that night. Following her speech, the head of the organisation returned to the stage and made an off-the-cuff comment about this award really ticking "all the boxes". It was nothing really, just a lighthearted joke, more at the expense of funders and their infuriating rules than the writer who happens to be Indian, English, bisexual, a woman, the daughter of first-generation immigrants.
Twenty years before Peter Handke would become a Nobel laureate, he won another title. In 1999, Salman Rushdie named him the runner-up for "International moron of the year" in the Guardian, for his "series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević". (The winner was actor Charlton Heston, for being a gun lobbyist.)
The Austrian playwright, whose Slovenian heritage had inspired in him a fervent nationalism during the Balkans war, had publicly suggested that Sarajevo's Muslims had massacred themselves and blamed the Serbs, and denied the Srebrenica genocide. Seven years after Rushdie's scorching condemnation, in 2006, he would also attend war criminal Milošević's funeral.
First, the Swedish Academy's apparent commitment to be less "male-oriented" and "Eurocentric" just days before had been quickly proven false, with two European winners and only the 15th female laureate in 120 years. Secondly, having declared that the prize would take a fallow year to reassess its direction after a now infamous sexual harassment scandal, the academy had left observers hopeful that the Nobel would stop eliding controversy with intellectual rigour, and choose authors that could be praised for both their work and their politics.
"Handke is a troubling choice for a Nobel committee that is trying to put the prize on track after recent scandals," said author Hari Kunzru, who has taught the laureate's work to his students. "He is a fine writer, who combines great insight with shocking ethical blindness."
In a shock move, last night Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo were announced as the joint winners of the Booker Prize 2019 at a ceremony at Guildhall in London. The pair will share the £50,000 prize money after the judges 'broke the rules' to award the prize to both authors.
The Booker has been awarded to two authors twice before, in 1974 and 1992, but in 1993 the rules were amended to allow only one winner. Literary director Gaby Wood said that the decision was 'definitively against the rules' but that the panel had chosen to 'flout them'. Peter Florence, chair of the judges, said they were 'Two novels we cannot compromise on', and added that, 'They are both phenomenal books that will delight readers and will resonate for ages to come.' Wood added that the judges left the judging room 'happy and proud'.
When announcing the winner, Florence said that there camea time in the Booker process when you were 'reducing the books that you celebrate, and not only do I want all the shortlist to win the prize, but I want the longlist back as well. And I would like to pay tribute to that longlist." He went on to pay tribute also to the editors, agents, writers, booksellers, librarians and journalists involved in the prize, along with the Booker trustees, his fellow judges, and Gaby Wood. He said: "We love this shortlist... Today, we tried voting. We found that there were two novels - not that we couldn't let go of, but that we desperately wanted to win this year's prize. So we're awarding the prize jointly to both of them. There are two winners of this year's Booker Prize who will share this honour and this money."
With the hindsight of history, the Booker misses plenty of tricks. In 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the most vital and prescient works of modern fiction, was pipped to the prize by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. With Margaret Atwood now elevated to the status of a contemporary prophet, 2019 may have seemed like an opportunity to redress that mistake. Published with all the fanfare of a new Harry Potter and accounting for 86% of shortlist sales, her sequel has dominated this year’s award, sprinkling some much-needed publishing glitz.
Two extraordinary books, then: but it has to be said that this feels like a fudge, weighing a huge event novel against a more obscure choice and trying to have it both ways. The danger is that the Booker effect that propelled last year's "difficult" winner, the brilliant Milkman, to a wider readership will be dissipated. Perhaps it's best understood as a reminder of how impossible it is, in the end, for the subjective process of weighing one novel against another to come to an objective conclusion.