The secret to selling a book is understanding its readers and how to deliver on their expectations. Though knowledge of readers is most often discussed in relation to nonfiction work, it also affects writers of literary fiction, even if they say they write for no one but themselves: in those cases, the artist becomes a readership of one, with expectations and aspirations for the art they produce. How the story is told, how challenging it will be, and what traditions it will draw upon-all these imply a particular readership who will evaluate the work accordingly.
Links of the week October 28 2019 (44)
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:
4 November 2019
So if you're an author, your voice, approach, and attitude toward the writing are hard to separate from your expectations of the reader and the reader's expectations of you or the text. It's problematic if your idea of the reader changes as you write or changes once you decide to pitch and market the work - especially if it changes because you hope for a larger readership.
As a child, I cavorted in Oxford colleges, rode atop armoured bears and swanned off to Svalbard to witness the majesty of the northern lights - all while remaining within the walls of an Edwardian terrace in Cardiff.
No, I wasn't a fantasist. Or, at least, the fantasy wasn't mine alone. The escapades were thanks to my compulsive reading of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. The first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy was published in 1995, when I was four, so it was a few years after it came out that I fell for Pullman's writing. But when I finally did ... boy, did I fall hard. I zoned out of sleepovers with friends, family dinners, and - on one occasion - my brother's wedding as I joined Pullman's heroine, Lyra, on thrilling Arctic voyages and skirmishes in parallel universes.
So what's behind our heightened connection with children's books? The journalist Lucy Mangan offers some clues in her memoir of childhood reading, Bookworm. She suggests that children's tendency towards re-reading is not only healthy but necessary, given the wealth of new information books convey. "You are learning about people, about relationships, about the variety of responses available to them [the characters] and in many more situations and circumstances ... than one single real life permits," she writes. "Each book is a world entire."
Book publishing has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, and authors of all stripes have new opportunities to manage. Whether you are a long-time author with published work and contracts, or you are a self-published or "hybrid" author with some titles self-published and some licensed to publisher-partners, you need to do some serious thinking and track all of those licenses. This is truly a life-long journey for all writers and their heirs. The earlier you start comprehensively tracking this information, the better.
Let me sketch the big picture, which has two foundation blocks: copyright and the internet. First, copyright in most cases is the life of the author plus 70 years. This is your property - only you have the right to exploit it. The second, the internet, has many distinct but interrelated consequences, and involves two key elements for authors: digital versions of your work and 24/7/365 marketing worldwide.
Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, which recently won the Booker Prize, is out now from Grove Atlantic. We asked her about writers' block, her favorite books, and more.
How do you tackle writers block? I don't believe in writer's block. If there's a problem with getting words on the page, it needs to be investigated. I think that the act of naming it as this thing called "writer's block" actually exacerbates the problem and makes the writer feel powerless and the issue insurmountable. What's really going on? Lack of confidence? (Most likely). Lack of skills and understanding of the importance of structure when it comes to writing a novel or of form when it comes to poetry? Lack of informed constructive feedback? Lack of commitment or patience? Does the writer read books in their chosen genre, which is creative writing 101? And so on.
A few years ago, a writer named Ashima Saigal from Grand Rapids, Michigan, witnessed an incident on a bus in which a group of black kids were mistreated by the police. She was disturbed, and soon after, she wrote about it. Later, reading over what she'd written, she realized the story wasn't working. She'd tried to write from one of the kid's perspectives, but Saigal, who is Indian-American, wasn't sure that she had the skill or knowledge to write from the point of view of a black child. She decided to sign up for an online creative writing course called "Writing the Other."
While imagining the lives of people who are different from you is virtually a prerequisite of most successful fiction writing, the consequences of doing it poorly have grown more serious since the pre-Twitter, pre-woke '90s, as the conversation about who gets to tell whose stories has moved from the fringes of publishing into the mainstream. J.K. Rowling, Lionel Shriver, and Kathryn Stockett have all caught heat for botching the job. In the young-adult fiction world, a number of books have been pulled in advance of their releases for clichéd and problematic portrayals of minorities. The conversation is often depicted in the media as a binary: On one side are those who argue that only writers from marginalized backgrounds should tell stories about people who share their cultural histories - a course correction for an industry that is overwhelmingly white - while on the other are those who say this wish amounts to censorship.
The co-founder of whitefox contributes to our Q&A series
What are the most interesting things you're seeing at the moment in the industry?
What interests me most is that I think the different eco-systems within publishing are settling down somewhat. So traditional legacy publishers seem less concerned about disintermediation from writers and agents. And indie writers and brands who want creative and scheduling control are happy and confident to go DIY and take their own content to market. And these things can co-exist quite happily without anyone thinking either side is eating their lunch.
In 1882, linguists were electrified by the publication of a lost language-one supposedly spoken by the extinct Taensa people of Louisiana-because it bore hardly any relation to the languages of other Native American peoples of that region. The Taensa grammar was so unusual they were convinced it could teach them something momentous either about the region's history, or the way that languages evolve, or both.
The reconstruction of the Taensa grammar was the painstaking work of a French teenager named Jean Parisot. He claimed to have stumbled upon a manuscript in his grandfather's library in the Vosges region of France, and to have realized that it was notes made by unknown explorers who had passed through Taensa territory while the now-extinct people inhabited it.
Parisot's glory was short-lived. The linguists soon became suspicious about his Taensa grammar: The verbs seemed too regular, the relative clause structure too European. And there were anachronisms in the stories and songs he claimed to have transcribed from the manuscript: They contained references to sugar cane, for example, which had only been introduced to Louisiana, by Jesuits, around the time the Taensa disappeared.
The jailed Turkish author Ahmet Altan, whose detention was condemned by 38 Nobel laureates, has been released from prison after more than three years behind bars.
The 69-year-old was arrested in 2016 with his brother, the economist and journalist Mehmet Altan, on allegations of spreading "subliminal messages announcing a military coup" on television. Alongside journalist Nazlı Ilıcak, the Altan brothers were charged with attempting to overthrow constitutional order, interfering with the work of the national assembly and the government.
"A moment of freedom for Ahmet Altan, who gets to see the world again," wrote Sands, referencing the title of Altan's prison memoir, I Will Never See the World Again, which was longlisted for the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize in September. Assembled from notes given to his lawyers, Altan writes in the book of how "never again would I be able to kiss the woman I love, embrace my kids, meet with my friends, walk the streets ... I would not be able to watch the sunrise."
28 October 2019
This year marks the 50th Anniversary of Bouchercon, North America's premiere mystery convention, an event that brings together authors, publishers, and readers alike to celebrate the wide world of crime literature. Bouchercon is much more than a convention with a funny name (in case you were wondering, the "Boucher" part is for legendary mystery critic, editor, and writer, Anthony Boucher)-it's a prime opportunity for fans to gather together and celebrate the wide world of crime and mystery.
Alex Segura (nominated for Best Novel-Blackout): I'm not interested in crime novels that don't grapple with the world as it is today. The best crime novels, for my money, also serve as cutting social commentary-they put a mirror up to our world, and show us how we live and are, warts and all. I don't think crime novels should-or can, really-come up with solutions to all of society's ills, but they should damn well try to show us a world that is like our own, so readers can at least take their vitamins with their dessert.
Asked to explain "Why the novel matters", my first question is: "Well, does it?" As soon as I typed that sentence, I then thought that the second logical question would probably have to be "Has it?" But, after typing that, I opened my browser and went to look at the news because I was a little concerned that tanks might be rolling down the Mall in order to disperse pro-democracy protesters. After all, it was 10 September and the night before Boris Johnson had prorogued parliament - illegally as it later turned out - so I, along with plenty of others, was feeling rather like the chair had just been kicked out from under the feet of this country's democracy. I feared, because this had been allowed to happen, we were on the way to a future in which anything might become possible.
In my moment of media-mediated and media-medicated fright, it didn't occur to me to reach for my copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or The Handmaid's Tale or Doctor Faustus rather than the flashing screen and the - necessarily somewhat undigested - prose produced by journalists in the rolling 24-hour news cycle. Without the distraction of the news feeds, I fear my brain will fill up with imagery that frightens me and leaves no space for the words and stories I have spent my life surrounded by.
Les Cowan, author of the David Hidalgo crime thriller series, considers the importance of setting
Are you a country girl or a city boy? Would a week in Las Vegas be a dream or a nightmare? What about a holiday in the Highlands? Is the city exciting and full of possibilities or a world of dangers just waiting to pounce? As in life, so in art - place is important.
Character and plot are often seen as the two sides of the fiction coin. Both are vital, but proportions vary depending on author, genre and style. We may learn little about the protagonists of crime novels beyond the characteristics required by the plot.
But what about sense of place? I would suggest it's also vital, and maybe much overlooked.
First, place is key to authenticity. As readers, we are primarily looking for emotional engagement with a good work of fiction. We want to feel involved and have our imaginations lit up. How better to do this than with strong locations? A burning, lifeless desert. The corrupt and decaying underbelly of the city. A windswept promontory looking out to sea. When these are authentically described we can find ourselves almost immediately in the shoes of of the character. We are there - burned by the sun, looking round for signs of danger, gazing across the waves wondering if the little boat will survive.
There was a spat the other week about a children's book, Equal to Everything: Judge Brenda and the Supreme Court, which is about an encounter between a little girl called Ama and the nation's pin-up, Brenda Hale. The book's author is the Guardian columnist Afua Hirsch. It's written in vague rhyming couplets with the worst illustrations I've ever seen in a book for children.
In a newspaper report about the book, Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, was quoted saying ‘This looks like deliberate propaganda to bend the minds of children', while MP Andrew Rosindell said that ‘she is being painted into some kind of hero in this book aimed at children'.
Ye-es, Mr R. That's the idea. That's what an awful lot of children's literature is about now: generating role models for woke children. For anyone who reviews, publishes, sells, buys or reads children's books, the move to children's lit as consciousness-forming propaganda has been evident in Britain since at least 2017, when Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls took off. This was a collection of inspirational mini biographies with pictures, about Malala, Maya Angelou et al. At the time it struck me as identical to the saint stories I read as a child, modern hagiography, only with Frieda Kahlo and Michelle Obama instead of Joan of Arc and St Agnes. The impulse is precisely the same: forming young minds.
The next Rebel Girls spin-off is immigrant women who changed the world. There now exists an entire family of spin-offs, from Stories for Boys Who Dare to be Different to Kate Pankhurst's Fantastically Great Women. They lifted sales of non-fiction books for children by 30 per cent last year.
The audio technology company Voxnest owns the podcasting platform Spreaker. The Italy-based StreetLib is a digital book distributor. Last week, they teamed up for a symbiotic relationship that will let StreetLib's book publishers create podcasts and Spreaker's podcasters create and distribute digital books or audiobooks.
It's yet another example of the impact ripples left by the sharp rise of digital audio in the publishing industry. Audiobooks and podcasts alike have been booming across the past few years: Audiobook revenues rose 24.5% over the previous year in 2018, hitting $940 million - it's the seventh year in a row of double-digit revenue growth, by the Audio Publishers Association's estimate.
Getting cozier with podcasts is a smart move for publishers. Everyone's smartphones are omnipresent and thanks to a glut of streaming video services and addictive social platforms, everyone's eyes have a lot to take in. By piping books into audience's ears through the medium of audio, publishers can catch readers' attention during moments when they wouldn't have the time to read a physical book or even watch video - like during their commute or their gym break
About 10 years ago, as the anxiety and hype around digital publishing began to build, I had a lot of conversations about the future. Publishers looked up from the constant churn of new books and projects to examine the far horizon. Big, existential questions were raised and, at least in part, addressed.
It didn't feel absurd for publishing to question every aspect of what it did, how and why. It didn't seem strange to reimagine what it could do. Although this phase was often accompanied by bouts of unreasoning excitement and at times hysteria, these were fascinating and important discussions.
What has happened since? The wave came and went; digital found its niche, but print asserted its ongoing value. Publishing rebounded from the financial crash. Book sales started tracking up; profits boomed. And, for the most part, the blue sky conversations stopped.
The most popular books genres in the UK
It turns out we're a nation hooked on crime and thrillers, with over a third of Brits reading these genres regularly. Mystery and drama follow in third and fourth position, with 34.9% and 32.9% of the population selecting these as their favoured genres.
Both autobiographies and biographies also made the top ten, suggesting life stories to be real page turners.
The most popular books genres in the UK
It turns out we're a nation hooked on crime and thrillers, with over a third of Brits reading these genres regularly. Mystery and drama follow in third and fourth position, with 34.9% and 32.9% of the population selecting these as their favoured genres. Both autobiographies and biographies also made the top ten, suggesting life stories to be real page turners.
Go to the Book People's site to see this information presented in an excellent graphic.
If you spend much time on the internet, you may have heard that mystery novelist and former prosecutor Linda Fairstein was officially canceled earlier this year, when Ava DuVernay's miniseries When They See Us exposed her role in the railroading of the Central Park Five. Last November, the crime writing community got a preview of this drama when the Mystery Writers of America honored Fairstein with the prestigious Grand Master Award, only to rescind it a few days later. (I played a small role in this controversy: I wrote an essay on Fairstein and the award for the Los Angeles Times after Attica Locke-who in addition to writing amazing crime novels wrote on When They See Us-took the MWA to task on Twitter.) This incident caused a bit of a reckoning in our corner of the world, showing the fault lines in our community.
When I was a freshman in college, I took a class on American Detective Fiction with Professor Joyce Moser, a just-for-fun class that introduced me to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Walter Mosley, and for better or worse completely reconfigured my life path. Fifteen years later, I still remember a particular lecture on form, in which Professor Moser described crime fiction as a "Cconservative" genre. She didn't mean "conservative" in the political sense of the word - only that mystery novels are structurally conservative, often starting with two or three or several seemingly unrelated plotlines that converge, in the end, toward resolution.
After completing eight books (in a series that was initially supposed to be a trilogy), Eoin Colfer thought he was finished with Artemis Fowl, his devilishly naughty anti-hero, when his last adventure released in 2012. Not quite. Colfer returns to the Fowl universe with a new series featuring Artemis's younger brothers, 11-year-old Myles and Beckett, "the first recorded nonidentical twins to be born conjoined," boys who are as different as night and day...We spoke with Colfer about revisiting his popular characters in The Fowl Twins, out next month from Disney-Hyperion.
When Artemis first came out, the combination of lore and science fiction plus fantasy, I presumed hundreds of people had done that before but I have become known for that and it's a nice place to be, to straddle those worlds. I mean, there are plenty of writers who combine fantasy with something else. Neil Gaiman is already doing that pretty well, and Rick Riordan adds mythology, and J.K. Rowling is doing okay, too.