If you want to purchase a copy of The Institute, Stephen King's latest novel about supernatural kids, you could find it at your local bookstore or order it on Amazon. You could also head to your local library, where the world's books are available for the low, low price of free. And if you want to download an e-copy of King's book without paying for it, there's also SlideShare, a hosting service owned by LinkedIn that has become home to a vast warehouse of illegally pirated books.
Links of the week January 6 2020 (02)
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:
13 January 2020
Now 14 years old, SlideShare serves as a repository for professional slide-decks, infographics, and other kinds of visual presentations. If you've sat through a corporate meeting or a webinar over the past decade, chances are good that the person hosting your meeting relied on it. At first glance, it's not a natural channel for content piracy; few people would probably want to read a book broken out, sentence by sentence, across hundreds of slides.
We're closing the doors on 2019 and with that, I've finally finished up this essay, which I've been working on for over a year and which keeps having to be updated as new scuffles arose. I have many thoughts on the modern publishing scene, many of them related to class/race/gender/disability issues, but I will focus on a particular question because right now we're seeing a lot of this getting enacted yet again, this time in the form of the Romance Writers Association debacle, where author Courtney Milan was officially censured, suspended from membership for a year, and banned for life from RWA leadership after two other members complained that she had repeatedly/intentionally engaged in conduct injurious to the RWA through comments on social media.
In this decade, writers have found themselves at an unsettling and unpredictable moment in publishing as well as history, one that marks major changes in the ways humans consume words. New forces have entered the scene. Among them are the rise of indie publishing, the ability of binge readers to download an entire series to their e-reader in an instant, the accessibility of free media through sites like Project Gutenberg
Contains thousands of classic texts, available for download. The site, which looks a bit dull, is backed by university departments and other institutions all over the world and gives links to sites which will help you download a Project Gutenberg text to an e-book.. http://www.gutenberg.org
, unforeseen copyright battles involving new technology and business models, and social media with its global reach, to mention only a few.
The Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, 59, has sold more than 33m books worldwide and won a host of prizes, including the prestigious Glass Key for best Nordic crime novel. Nesbø took a circuitous route to becoming a bestselling author, playing football for Norway's premier league team Molde before torn knee ligaments ended his career. He went on to form the band Di Derre, who topped the charts in Norway, and worked as a financial analyst before his first novel, The Bat, was published in 1997. Nesbø's latest Harry Hole book, Knife, opens with Harry waking from a hangover covered in blood...
Harry Hole travels an extremely dark path in Knife... Was this always the plan?
It's been on the cards for many years, actually. When I wrote my third novel [in the series], that was when I planned what was ahead for Harry. It's all part of his life story, which belongs not only to the genre of crime fiction but also of classic tragedy. So it was bound to happen.
It is the nature of progress that what is now cutting-edge will, with the passing of time, become traditional. And it is the nature of human beings to remake and refine what has worked in the past, and call it new.
And so the term "traditional mystery" is from the outset somewhat difficult to define absolutely. It has an almost organic structure, with successive authors and generations adding their own extensions and renovations to the house built by the likes of Poe, Christie, James, Sayers and Conan Doyle.
The protagonist of a traditional novel no longer needs to have the savant abilities of Holmes or Poirot. Indeed, modern audiences have become skeptical of cases made on a finely balanced tower of minute observation and inference. Today%u2019s reader has too sophisticated an idea of legal burdens of proof to be satisfied with an arrest predicated on opportunity established by inventive conjecture. Protagonists have become less to-be-admired for their infallibility, than relatable for the opposite.
"Since I was 19 I've been living in England and thinking I'd go home, but there was a point, around six years go, when I realised I'm here now: I'm black British." So says Roger Robinson, who this week won the TS Eliot prize for A Portable Paradise, a poetry collection born of this realisation.
Furious laments for the victims of Grenfell Tower are followed by a crisp snapshot of idealistic young Jamaicans disembarking from the Empire Windrush in 1948, and a didactic sequence about the legacy of slavery today. A moody evocation of riot brewing on the south London streets sits alongside a love song to the National Health Service, which saved the life of his own prematurely born son.
Beneath the idea of paradise lies the concept of prayer, whether this involves the refusal of an Afghan immigrant to accept the substitute of therapy - "If it is Allah's will, who is he to unload his burden on someone else?"- or Robinson's own fervent prayers for his newborn son to be spared. The collection's two dominant impulses, observation and entreaty, come together in fortuitous ways, and never more so than in the name of the nurse who cradled his son in neonatal intensive care, which becomes the title of the most overtly moving poem, "Grace". Was she really called that? Yes, yes, he insists. He occasionally spots her driving around, though he has heard she has recently retired.
In early 2018, I was spending a warm West Hollywood Sunday evening on the balcony of a young director of film development, drinking a beer and hoping for an early night[1]. I had planned to sleep on his couch, but when I suggested we turn in, he said, "Nah, just take my bed, I'm probably not sleeping tonight." I asked why not, and he looked momentarily surprised, as though it was strange I wasn't aware of the impending event that had a small but important segment of the film and publishing industries alive with anticipation at the two ends of the great book-to-film pipeline connecting agents, assistants, film execs, and book scouts through endless emails and group chats. "That new David Grann story drops at midnight," he said.
We are now in the mature stage of a book-to-film boom that is quietly transforming how Americans read and tell stories - and not for the better. The power of this force is hard to quantify because intellectual property is now being bought in Hollywood in such unprecedented volume and diversity of source material. Almost all written works that achieve prominence today (and many more that don't) will be optioned, and increasingly it is becoming rare for film and television projects to move forward without intellectual property attached.
Smashwords' Mark Coker is sounding the alarm about indie publishers (those who write and publish their own works-let's get the terminology right-it's INDIE publishers, not the deprecating "self-published") relying too much on Amazon.
I agree with Coker.
Two and half years ago, I started advertising on Amazon's AMS platform. It doubled my sales. But then, everyone else found the platform and the cost of advertising has sky-rocketed. I get it. There's competition, as there should be. But what I don't get is that the platform is confusing, frustrating, and most of all, inconsistent. You may advertise using Keyword A and get fantastic results. If you try to duplicate that with a similar title, say the second in a series, however, you'll probably get zilch. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. There's no consistency. That's a simple example, but the inconsistency extends throughout the platform.
John le Carré has been named the latest recipient of the $100,000 (£76,000) Olof Palme prize, an award given for an "outstanding achievement" in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish prime minister.
"Attracting worldwide attention, he is constantly urging us to discuss the cynical power games of the major powers, the greed of global corporations, the irresponsible play of corrupt politicians with our health and welfare, the growing spread of international crime, the tension in the Middle East and the alarming rise of fascism and xenophobia in Europe and the US," the organisers said, calling his career "an extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice".
Le Carré said he would donate the winnings to the international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières.
An independent bookshop that failed to sell a single book on a rainy day this week has been inundated with customers after publishing pictures of its empty aisles on social media.
The Petersfield Bookshop in Hampshire sent a melancholy tweet revealing that it had not welcomed one paying customer, probably for the first time in its 100-year history.
Within a few hours, the fantasy and science fiction author Neil Gaiman retweeted the post to his millions of followers and, as if by magic, orders came flooding in from across the globe. The unlikely turnaround began when the bookshop - which specialises in antiquarian publications, maps and secondhand books - experienced a particularly miserable Tuesday. Robert Sansom, who has worked at the shop for 13 years, hammered out the gloomy tweet.
6 January 2020
Audiobooks are having a moment. As they soar in popularity, they are becoming increasingly creative - is the book you listen to now an artform in its own right, asks Clare Thorp.
Back in 1878, shortly after he had invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison hit upon an idea. Leaning over his new machine one day he recited the words: "Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow." As he created the first ever audio of the spoken word, Edison dreamed that the technology might one day allow a whole novel to be recorded. Fast forward nearly 150 years, and he'd be pretty impressed to find more than 400,000 audiobooks available to download straight into his pocket.
I've always sort of wondered what I wasn't getting about "Little Women."
I'm pretty sure I read it in school, though I would be hard-pressed to recall a single scene. I know I saw at least part of the 1994 film - the one with Winona Ryder, Claire Danes and Christian Bale - but I remember walking out of the room midway through and never returning, much to my mother's dismay.
Nothing about the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott's perennial best seller particularly stuck with me, and as an adult, annoyance overshadowed apathy as I tried to understand how the literary heroine of so many women I admired - the spunky, independent writer Jo March - would, by the end of the novel, relinquish her art for marriage, and then proclaim that she is the happiest she'd ever been.
What was I missing?
It appears that what I was missing was Greta Gerwig - along with the real-life story of Alcott, on whose life the book was based, with a few major differences.
Of course, Gerwig isn't the first to change the way "Little Women" gets told. People have been adapting, and then critiquing, and then adapting, and then critiquing it for decades - each iteration a kind of Rorschach test for how the world feels about women at the time.
This generation of kids has access to an abundance of digital information and technology from a very young age. And that means that the skill sets of these kids are completely different from those of their parents when they were children. Research by Kids Insights shows how much technology is going to change the future of workforces, with as many as one in four children already having learned to code to some extent. Growing up digital natives, they are acquiring specific skills - often passively while enjoying other entertainments and interests.
As children especially become increasingly involved in social activism, they're also becoming more conscious of their favourite brands' actions - and this is influencing their choices. Global consumers, down to the very youngest, are seeking out companies that care about environmental issues.
"Nobody knows anything ... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."
That's what William Golding said in his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. He was talking about the Hollywood movie industry, but he might just as well have been talking about today's publishing industry.
Justin Ractliffe, the new publishing director at Penguin Random House Australia, quotes Golding in a report he's just made to the industry, based on a study tour to the US. Funded by a Copyright Agency fellowship, he did a lot of researching and interviewing and compared the publishing business to another company producing mass entertainment, Netflix.
You've been there. You're having dinner with friends, talking up a storm. After a laugh or a sigh, the conversation falls to silence. You've exhausted a topic. The silence feels awkward, and no one puts forward a new topic. How do you tolerate that moment of nothing?
The most basic way to imply time passing is to announce the time. Then depict some activities. Then give the time. Boring stuff. Another way is to list the activities, giving lots of details, task after task, and to suddenly arrive at the streetlights blinking on or a chorus of mothers calling their kids to dinner. And these methods are fine, if you want to risk losing your reader's interest. Besides, in Minimalist writing abstract measurements such as two o'clock or midnight are frowned upon for reasons we'll discuss in the section on Establishing Your Authority.
A white romance novelist's ethics complaint against the author Courtney Milan for calling her book a "racist mess" led to the censure of Milan and sparked an uproar across the publishing world. Now the novelist, Kathryn Lynn Davis, says that her original complaint about the professional harm she suffered was not accurate.
In an interview with the Guardian, Davis said she was "encouraged" by the administration of Romance Writers of America (RWA), a trade association for romance writers, to file a formal complaint against Milan, an influential former board member and diversity advocate. She now feels she had been "used" to secure a political outcome that she had never intended.
As a controversy over bias and a lack of transparency at the Romance Writers of America continues to roil the country's foremost writers association for romance writers, the RWA has announced that it will postpone the 2020 RITA Contest until next year. The RITA Award is the U.S.'s top prize for romance fiction.
"Due to recent events in RWA, many in the romance community have lost faith in RWA's ability to administer the 2020 RITA contest fairly, causing numerous judges and entrants to cancel their participation," the RWA said in a release. "The contest will not reflect the breadth and diversity of 2019 romance novels/novellas and thus will not be able to fulfill its purpose of recognizing excellence in the genre. For this reason, the Board has voted to cancel the contest for the current year. The plan is for next year's contest to celebrate 2019 and 2020 romances."
I've always been a slow reader. I've loved books since I was a kid, but I didn't identify as a voracious reader until grad school. My writing professors touted the importance of students reading thousands of books before taking a stab at penning their own. So, in an effort to maintain positive habits after graduation, I decided to track my reading.
I'd jumped on the habit-tracking train before: daily words written, weekly miles run. For a while, I even tracked the minutes I wasted on social media (I don't recommend this-it's too depressing). The outer accountability of habit tracking has helped me form healthier routines and utilize my time more wisely. I set my first annual reading goal at 40 books, finishing the final page of book number 40 before the ball dropped that New Year's Eve.
As the year progressed, I read several books I wasn't wild about. In the past, I've always felt at peace with abandoning a book before finishing it. Why waste time on a book I don't love, trudging through to reach an ending that won't satisfy? But reading a book a week made it harder to justify abandonment. I didn't want to fall behind-like I said, Goodreads will tell you when you do. And the thought of that sent my Type A brain into a tailspin. So I wound up finishing several books I felt lukewarm about from the very first chapters. I bolted through short story anthologies cover to cover, most of which I ordinarily would've thumbed through, reading only the stories with openings that piqued my interest. The pressure to finish books sucked some of the day-to-day joy out of my reading life.