First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
Links of the week February 17 2020 (08)
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:
24 February 2020
I think that everyone can write a book. ... I think almost everyone can, and I think that if they do, the writing of that book will change their lives. This is really wonderful and really exciting because if you learn to have a certain kind of mental and emotional discipline-and I think that the mind and the emotions together is the definition of the soul-you become a more soulful person, if you concentrate and try to write that story from the beginning to the end. I'm not trying to say that it's going to get published, or trying to say anything special about it. I am saying that it's a moment of great self-revelation.
I received an offer of representation for my young adult novel. When I notified the other agents who had the full manuscript that I was withdrawing from consideration, I got an additional five offers! What would you advise I ask of the offering agents in this situation?
Sincerely,
Full Dance Card
Dear Happy Dancer,
Well, first of all, if I am one of the offering agents, I advise you to pick me. I am delightful.
But really, thank you so much for this question, because this happens more often than most authors realize. When multiple agents make an offer on the same manuscript, there are indeed several questions you should ask the offering parties, and yourself, in order to determine which one might be your best match.
I should note for others here that these questions should also be considered even if only one agent is offering. After all, an offer isn't an obligation - it's an invitation, right? So invite them into a conversation!
Publishers often keep extremely tight-lipped about just how much cash they've parted with when paying authors their advances. Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books, for instance, merely said they'd signed a ‘seven figure' book deal with Cassandra Clare in 2017 for her new adult series The Sword Catcher, publishing next year. From there we can extrapolate that she's scooped up at least a million pounds.
Massive as that sum already is, here are ten book deals which dwarf that. I've ranked the ten biggest payouts I could find, in descending order, and found only one author of colour who succeeded in meeting the parameters of receiving an advance of $7 million (the lowest figure in the top ten) or more. My main source was this article from the Guardian, as well as an appendix in Nathan Joyce's recently published compendium of Michelle Obama facts.
Updating: With the 30,000-attendee Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. postponed in virus-struck Italy, the international book business debates how to proceed, though London Book Fair commits to going ahead.
A representative reaction quote comes from Kate Wilson, managing director of the much-awarded Nosy Crow children's book publisher, who says, ""So much of our business comes from Bologna and Frankfurt, and our schedules are shaped around the dates of the fairs. But the vast bulk of our appointments at the book fairs are with people we already deal with, and we expect that we will be able to keep in touch with them through calls and emails and through switching the dates of trips we've already got planned to key territories.
"We expect that we'll be sending a lot of material digitally over the next few weeks, rather than holding material back to reveal at the book fair itself."
Sally Rooney doesn't come across as someone who spends a lot of time on Snapchat. There is no scene in her 2018 novel Normal People where her protagonists Marianne and Connell bond over the camera filter that turns your face into a dog. The characters in her debut, Conversations With Friends (2017), mostly communicate by text. Nevertheless, the label "Salinger for the Snapchat generation" - apparently dreamed up by an editor at Faber - surfaces in every article about the Irish author. Including this one.
Normal People has been greeted by readers, critics and booksellers alike as one of those novels that captures something ineffable about its age. The forthcoming BBC adaptation stretches its 266 pages to a decadent 12 episodes, a pages-to-minutes ratio that recalls the famous 1981 version of Brideshead Revisited, which spent as much time on the apparently incidental scenes in Evelyn Waugh's novel (the whisky and water business on the ocean liner, for example) as it did on the central plot. Normal People is also a novel of tiny details and the beats of pleasure that come from noticing them: "Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything."
To us, and many of you, reading fiction is like breathing - something we would struggle to live without. But why is it that novels are so vital to women today? Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter Helen Taylor explores this in her new book Why Women Read Fiction. We're lucky enough to have a fascinating piece from Helen on her findings, plus a chance to win one of five signed copies of her brilliant new book - read on!
Ian McEwan once said, "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead." A few years ago I began to explore why that is, and the more I researched, the more startling were my findings. Here are a few statistics. Women account for roughly two-thirds of fiction sales in the UK (higher if you include the US and Canada). For all categories, apart from fantasy, science fiction and horror, women purchasers outnumber men. We buy three quarters of general and erotic fiction, but roughly nine out of ten romance, saga, and Mills and Boon novels.
Clive Cussler, the bestselling American author of adventure novels including Sahara and maritime thrillers starring his hero Dirk Pitt, has died aged 88.
The author and co-author of more than 80 books, Cussler sold more than 100m books around the world and was published in more than 40 languages. He made the New York Times bestseller list 17 times in a row. His fortune was estimated to be $120m (£92.8m).
An avid car collector and scuba diver, Cussler continued to write until his death. In a 2015 interview with Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, he laughed at suggestions he would retire from either. "Hell, no. I'm not quitting," he said, joking that "they may find me behind the computer, just bones and cobwebs."
The art world has the National Gallery; drama has the National Theatre. Now poet laureate Simon Armitage is putting plans in motion for a National Poetry Centre "headquarters" in Leeds.
The National Poetry Centre is intended to be a public space with an extensive poetry collection, several rehearsal and performances spaces, and a cafe, where literary events can be held, writers can exchange ideas, and visiting authors can stay. It is backed by Leeds city council, the University of Leeds and Leeds 2023 - a year-long celebration of arts and culture in the city.
Armitage, who began his 10-year stint as poet laureate in 2019 and is also the professor of poetry at the University of Leeds, said that it was his "very ambitious" goal to "bring poetry into line with other national art forms during his tenure and that he hoped the new institution would "develop an international reputation in accordance with the status UK poetry holds abroad".
Once upon a time, writing and sharing fan fiction on the internet carried a distinct stigma. Extending other people's universes or characters was widely seen as an outlet for the uncreative, the unsocial, and the sexually frustrated.
Those days are coming to an end.
Last year, the fan-created and curated website Archive of Our Own celebrated 10 years of collecting and organizing more than 5 million stories and other works of art in every conceivable fandom. In November, AO3 - as the site is known - earned a Hugo Award for its contributions to science fiction and fantasy. A number of recent academic books have made strong cases for fan fiction's ability to teach writing through online communities built on the shared love of a particular work. Well-known authors such as Meg Cabot and Naomi Novik now proudly admit to getting their starts in the field.
17 February 2020
A few months ago, I had the chance to speak to a group of MFA students about my second novel, Last Seen Leaving. One of them said, "I know that so far you've written literary thrillers, but I see that your new book is a fantasy novel. What did you find to be the biggest difference between writing crime and writing fantasy?"
This question, I'm embarrassed to say, had never occurred to me. "One has magic and the other has cell phones," I said, joking, and quickly moved on to the next subject. Afterward, the question nagged at me, in the way the best questions do. Worldbuilding, after all, is a concept we mostly associate with fantasy and science fiction; google it, and you'll find endless How-to guides, lists of tips, even entire seminars devoted to it. There's even a subreddit, r/worldbuilding, which is ten years old, and has more than 475,000 members.
Worldbuilding is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Taken on the grandest scale, it can include world maps, languages, even entire religious systems. On the page, it's details. The room the character sleeps in, what they see out the window when they wake up, what they put on before leaving; what they eat, what they wish they were eating, what they do for fun. It's all the little things that may not directly affect the plot, but add richness and color nonetheless. Honestly, I don't consciously think too much about worldbuilding when I am actively engaged in writing, just like I don't consciously think too much about character development: the words go on the page, and then I add or pare away or change those words until the story on the page comes as close as possible to matching the one in my head. But the more that I think about it, the more certain I am that worldbuilding works just as hard in crime writing and noir as it does in fantasy and science fiction.
Throwing your new manuscript into the query trenches can be an exhilarating but nerve-crushing experience. I use a systematic and business-like approach to help take the sting out of rejections and keep me focused on moving forward with querying.
Before querying, I ensure my manuscript has been through multiple revisions, critique partners, beta readers and edits to give it its best shot. I also have a polished and professionally critiqued query letter
Helpful Hint: Properly screening the right agents takes an extraordinary amount of time! Start collating your list of agents during your breaks while you are finishing off the last of your revisions or edits on your manuscript, or else this task will seem monumental if you leave it to the last minute.
You wrote a novel so that people would believe that you knew your own mind.
No one believes you when you say you don't want to write a novel. They always think you're lying about it in order to conceal your insecurity, your fear, your trepidation. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a writer in want of an agent, of a publishing contract, of acceptance for their love of writing shall be in want of a novel. You laugh at this. You call it a cliché. You shrug. You say Some really great story collections out this year. You retweet short stories online. Your palms sweat in your pockets. You feel a beat of panic. You fear that it is true. You ask yourself if you are a writer if there is no novel to prove that you are what you say you are.
You comfort yourself with writing groups. You laugh. You feel better. You drink the warm seltzer and eat the stale pretzels. You talk about plot. You talk about scale. You talk about lines of tension. You fret over sentences. You add em dashes. You subtract em dashes. You build. You worry. You feel a bolt of terror, blue-white like lightning, when your friends say they are working on a novel, a quiet little thing on a disk somewhere, slowly accumulating pages, turning into something dense, something heavy. You feel relief when they say they've put it aside. You hate yourself for feeling relief. You worry.
My mom was so proud: I was quoted in The New York Times. The article by David Streitfeld ran under the headline, "In Amazon's Bookstore, No Second Chances for the Third Reich." Streitfeld had noticed my How To Resist Amazon and Why zine and interviewed me for an anti-Amazon perspective. Bonus: he even mentioned the zine in the article.
In the online version of the article you can click on the title of my zine; the link takes you to the zine's Amazon page. I've often spoken about how in-article links enable Amazon's monopoly in online bookselling. [1] Still, just for fun, I clicked on the link to my zine's Amazon page. I always enjoy the irony of seeing it up there. But this time I noticed something different: Amazon had stopped offering the zine for direct sale. Often on Amazon it can be hard to tell whether you're buying from Amazon directly or whether you're buying from a third-party seller. You're know you're buying direct if you see the phrase "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com." That phrase was now erased from my zine's page.
Fanny Blake reports on the crucial contribution of the Quick Reads programme to improving adult literacy
Reading changes lives. It gives renewed confidence, boosts brain power, increases empathy and helps relaxation. In short, reading contributes to individual happiness and to the well-being of our society.
Yet research shows that as many as one in six adults in the UK struggles with reading (OECD, Survey of Adult Skills, 2015) with one in three not regularly reading for pleasure (DCMS, Taking Part Survey: Free Time Activities Focus Report, 2017/18: 2).
These statistics persuaded me to join the Quick Reads team some four years ago. As someone who has taken my ability to read for granted, taking enormous pleasure from it and indeed earning my living through it - first as a publisher, then a journalist and writer - I feel everyone should be given the opportunity to enjoy something with such demonstrable benefits.
For all of the claims that people aren't reading books anymore, political books are selling like Donald Trump merchandise at Mar-a-Lago, dominating nonfiction bestseller lists for the past few years.
Whether they're pro-Trump (see practically every book written by any Fox News personality) or anti-Trump (reporter Michael Wolff sold 4 million copies worldwide of his insider-y reported book, Fire and Fury), Americans seemingly can't get enough details about the man who has dominated the news in all formats for more than four years. And they're rewarding bad-faith publishing efforts as a result.
The book publishing industry has many problems, but the one I find most chilling as a former book editor who now reports in the industry is that people who have vital information about our democracy are rewarded for putting such info in books rather than coming forward.
In the summer of 2000, Alexander Chee, then a burgeoning writer struggling to get his first book published, boarded a train to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. On the ride, he pulled out the manuscript that would eventually become his debut novel, Edinburgh, and decided to make an unflinching assessment.
"I'm just going to read it, and if I really think I should stop trying to find a publisher, I will stop," he says, recalling that day now, 20 years later. Chee, a gay Korean American writer, was being persistently rejected by publishers at a time when the very concept of diverse voices was largely superficial in the industry. "But I was reading it and I was like, I'm my favorite debut author."
It was a moment of hubris that still makes Chee bowl over in laughter, but his conviction was a crucial matter of self-assertion. "I wrote a book I wanted to read," he says. "I wrote a book that I wanted to see in the world." Yet it was a book - a shattering novel about wading through the trauma of sexual abuse - that much of the industry failed to appreciate. "They couldn't figure out if it was an Asian American novel or what they call a gay novel," Chee says. His protagonist was a gay Korean American, but "there wasn't a coming out story, it wasn't about immigrant struggles per se."
Last fall, the Codex Group, a book audience research firm, conducted an online test to gauge how effective different book presentations were at getting consumers to browse books. More than 50 new and upcoming titles were included as part of the test, and nearly 4,000 book buyers took part. Cover presentations designed by Amazon Publishing did by far the best job of luring in prospective buyers. In fact, the company had eight of the top 10 most actively browsed books tested. (As part of the test, each cover has an adjoining "read more" button, with each "read more" click counted as a "browse" for that book.)
For two of the three most-browsed books in the Codex test, participants said that the books' titles, not their graphics, were the strongest factors in prompting them to click the read more buttons. "People who buy and read books are word lovers; nothing intrigues them more than a strong message delivered by uniquely crafted title, subtitle, or even a reading line," Hildick-Smith said.
I‘ve just signed a publishing contract with Ben Fenton, a Fleet Street veteran and director for creative industries at Edelman. His book is on the concept and practicalities of fairness-and that concept's history, science, law, politics, and morality, as well as an explanation of the number 42.
My independent press Mensch Publishing is to release it in March 2021, all going well.
Fenton's topic got me thinking about the idea of fairness in publishing.
It's pretty clear what's unfair. Not paying on time. Breaking the terms of an agreement between publishers, booksellers, authors, agents. But fairness is more difficult to pin down.