For a while we were told that books were going to be a thing of the past. A new century had dawned, our lives were being digitised and surely there was no longer any reason to lug the pressed pulp of dead trees around. And yet, over the past decade, it seems clear that the death of the book has been greatly exaggerated. As we move into the 2020s there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the resurgence of the book - while also acknowledging that other avenues for storytelling are opening not only in the marketplace but in readers' minds. The fact that we spend more and more time online may mean that we are increasingly distracted from reading... but it can also mean that readers have more avenues to find the stories they want and need.
Links of the week December 2 2019 (49)
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:
9 December 2019
And readers are finding new ways into text. No one can have missed the dramatic rise in the sales of audiobooks. Audible, the audiobook retailer and publisher, saw its revenue in the UK rise by 38 per cent in 2018: the year before, the company posted a 47 per cent sales increase. Research suggests that, in the UK, audiobook sales will overtake sales of ebooks in 2020. Listening to a book can be a fascinating complementary experience even if it was one you loved reading.
Suppose you've been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They've uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.
This method is quite common in science fiction. It's not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn't have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn't about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums.
My grandmother read one novel in her life. She told me that fact on more than one occasion and I rather suspect that she enjoyed shocking me with it. Imagine: one single book in 88 years! The much-honored volume was Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, consumed in the wake of Richard Chamberlain doing his conflicted-man-of-the-cloth bit in the 1980s mini-series.
Dorothy enjoyed it, she said it was a good book, but didn't feel any inclination to try another one. Her tone of voice dictated the matter closed-and none of us ever dared mention having glimpsed that copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover behind the jam jars in her pantry. When pushed, Dorothy would quote her own grandmother, who was seemingly regularly given to pronouncing that, "People who read books have dirty houses."
In my early childhood memories, Mum is at an old click-clack typewriter, there's a smell of Tippex and cigarettes, and there are notebooks all over the floor. She would spend the next 30 years periodically polishing-up a single manuscript, cosseting it, refining, updating. As far as I'm aware, she had just one brief flurry of submitting it to publishers, got as far as an acquisition meeting, chalked up a near-miss, and then it became just a private project. She never stopped writing, but now it was a quiet, solitary pleasure.
Fern Michaels is women's fiction royalty and a publishing legend. The author of the wildly popular Sisterhood series, Michaels has written more than 150 books, more than half of which have been New York Times and USA Today bestsellers. She has 75 million books in print, and her work has been translated into 20 languages.
Above all, Sisterhood books are about inspiring, powerful female characters. These qualities stem from Michaels herself, who took control of her life to become the successful writer she is today. "Back when I first started to write," she says, "I was a wife and a mother of five kids, with no time to do anything for myself. When my youngest went off to kindergarten, I was literally lost. Suddenly I had time to read, and boy did I read!"
Michaels spent a lot of time at the library and recalls reading three pages of a book and immediately figuring out the entire plot. "I told myself I could have written it better," she says. In the end, that's just what she did. While her first novels weren't published, she kept at it. "My mantra was: if you persevere you will prevail," she says. And in 1995, she joined the Kensington roster with Dear Emily, beginning the long and fruitful relationship that, a few years later, would lead to the Sisterhood.
When our writing resists us - when it refuses to do as we hope - we often respond with ever more force, pushing it to bend to our will. We ask a friend to tell us which "darlings" to murder. We go through with a red pencil, slashing words.
But what if we looked at our early drafts differently? What if, instead of seeing them as adversaries to be wrestled into submission, or even as inchoate versions of our to-be-realized visions, we learned to read them as a kind of roadmap, reflective of the unspoken needs and confusions of our writing selves? What if the moments of resistance we encounter in our drafts-and in our drafting process-were trailheads, capable of leading us deeper into the work?
In the creative writing community, there's lots of talk about writing that outsmarts the writer, about not trying to fully understand our own work. I appreciate mysticism as much as the next person (or more), but I don't think our writing's "intelligence"-its expression of meanings, impulses, and desires outside our control-is especially mystical. Like other areas of life we don't fully control (i.e., all of it), the writing we produce can become a key to deeper self-knowledge, if only we learn to step back and read it that way. And, rather than persist with "solutions" that paper over or dismiss the quirks and deviations we experience as "problems," we might instead embrace these moments of insubordination, approaching them as pathways to fuller expression of our visions and ourselves.
The business school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
has not perhaps inspired many poets. But when Mary Jean Chan describes her journey to becoming one of the world's most promising and admired young writers, she names her decision to leave the business school as a pivotal moment.
"It was desperation really," she says. "I was in a very bad place bordering on depression. My parents saw that and knew something had to change."
Talking to 29-year-old Chan a decade later, in her adopted home city of London, it's hard to believe she enrolled in the first place. Sensitive and thoughtful, she seems the antithesis of a hardbitten banker or financier. "I always knew I didn't have a talent for numbers. Maths was my worst subject. My parents were taken aback [by her decision to leave]. My teachers wanted to talk about it."
Written over several years, the poems in Flèche allow these fluctuating tensions to play out, without any need for resolution. When I mention how accessible and clear her writing is, Chan suggests it reflects the insecurity of the non-native English speaker. "The first goal of learning a language is being able to convey yourself in ways that others can understand. The last thing I want is to befuddle people, in a way. Not because I don't believe in intellectual befuddlement, but because I don't want you to think my English isn't good enough. I want you to hear me."
As children, our minds are filled with magic. With all of the information we absorb at a young age, there is no wonder that being a children's author can be very rewarding. Speaking of rewards, a children's author can start off small but eventually make a serious living! Adults that once read their favorite children's book to sleep will eventually read it to their child.
This makes children authors' works last forever to be discovered over and over again! Thus, long-lasting stories that children will ask their parents to read forever have made these 10 individuals the richest children's authors of all time!
A net worth of over $100 million will definitely land you on this list of the richest children's authors of all time. That is why Jeff Kinney is next up! This amazing cartoonist has written the ever so hilarious Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. This series features 13 extremely versatile and funny tales of a kid going through obstacles in life. As a cartoonist, he also features great illustrations in his books that engage children first, encouraging them to read within. With a new book added into the series just last month, there is no question that Jeff will be making some substantial income from these publications.