One of the world's biggest international literary events, the London book fair, has been cancelled over coronavirus fears, amid growing anger that the delay in calling it off was putting people's health at risk and an unfair financial strain on publishers.
Links of the week February 24 2020 (09)
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:
2 March 2020
Organiser Reed Exhibitions announced on Wednesday that the escalation of the illness meant the fair, scheduled to run from 10 to 12 March, would be called off. Around 25,000 publishers, authors and agents from around the world had been due to attend the event, where deals for the hottest new books are struck.
But the event was already set to be a ghost town when it opened its doors, after publishers and rights agencies began withdrawing en masse over the last week. Some of the world's biggest, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Hachette had already pulled out, as had Amazon and a host of literary agencies including Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing.
I strongly advocate all authors start and maintain a website as part of their long-term marketing efforts and ongoing platform development. But it's an intimidating project because so few authors have been in a position to create, manage, or oversee websites. Where do you even begin?
With this guide, I hope to answer all the most frequently asked questions and make the process a manageable one.
Buy your own domain
The domain is the URL where your site lives, and it should be based on the name you publish under, not your book title. Your author name is your brand that will span decades and every single book you publish. If you can't get yourname.com, then try for yournameauthor.com, yournamebooks.com, or yournamewriter.com. If that fails, consider something other than .com (like .net or .me).
There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space - and these things cost money
Let's start with me: I'm not sure how or if I'd still be a writer without the help of other people's money. I have zero undergrad debt. Of my three years of grad school, two of them were funded through a teaching fellowship; my parents helped pay for the first. The last two years my stipend barely covered the childcare I needed to travel uptown three days a week to teach and go to class and my husband's job is what kept us afloat.
Once, before a debut novelist panel geared specifically to aspiring writers, one of the novelists with whom I was set to speak mentioned to me that they'd hired a private publicist to promote their book. They told me it cost nearly their whole advance but was worth it, they said, because this private publicist got them on a widely watched talkshow. During this panel, this writer mentioned to the crowd at one point that they "wrote and taught exclusively", and I kept my eyes on my hands folded in my lap. I knew this writer did much of the same teaching I did, gig work, often for between $1,500-$3,000 for a six to eight-week course; nowhere near enough to sustain one's self in New York. I knew their whole advance was gone, and that, if the publicist did pay off, it would be months before they might accrue returns.
Editing is energizing, where you take your solid creation and nudge it into brilliance. It's taking a pile of words and shaping it into something that resembles the story you envisioned. Sometimes, a book looks mighty ugly in its early draft form, but even rough, flawed words are so much better than a blank page. You've already conquered the blank page. No problem, right? Now it's time to push up your sleeves again. Here are four exercises to help you notably improve your story.
We all want to be active players in our own life, right? Not someone pushed around by everything that happens to us. Characters are the same way. Reading a day-by-day accounting of someone is not as thrilling as reading a day-by-day, turn-by-turn, twist-by-twist story of a character taking charge of whatever situation they are in for better or worse, for guts and glory.
Do things happen to your character, or are they an active player in the story? A powerful protagonist should not only react to different circumstances. They need to make choices on their own. They need to have agency. They need to be an active player in their own story.
As a reader of thrillers and mysteries for close to my whole life, I've always been drawn to the flawed protagonist, the vulnerable hero, the amateur with a hill to climb. I do occasionally crack a book in which a mythic hero-Jack Reacher, say, or Miss Marple-saves the day by virtue of being stronger or smarter or purer than their adversaries, but I'll usually wander back into fictional realms where ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary situations.
And these days some of these ordinary heroes are grappling with more than just a murderer in their midst. There has been an explosion of recent books in the mystery and thriller genre in which the protagonist is dealing with psychological disorders. Along with the melancholic and alcoholic detectives that have become the norm, we've seen agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical depression, and bipolar disorder creep into the narratives.
Writing in the Observer in 1980, Martin Amis took to task a young New York-based writer, Jacob Epstein, for plagiarising him. In Wild Oats, Epstein had taken not just plot structures or character ideas from Amis's debut, The Rachel Papers, but had duplicated whole sentences. "The boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague," Amis wrote - but Epstein had "decisively breached" that "hazy" line. Rather magnanimously, Amis went on to praise Epstein as a writer of talent; he simply believed that the similarities ought to be made public.
That boundary remains hazy. Among the 13 novels longlisted for this year's International Booker prize, announced last week, is Red Dog by Willem Anker, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel W Heyns. It tells the story of Coenraad de Buys, a seven-foot agent of war who lived and died in the violent, fractured Cape Colony. When I reviewed the novel, unfavourably, in the Times Literary Supplement, my objections lay not just in what I found to be a derivative, repetitious and at times deeply unpleasant book, but in a few sections that bore a striking resemblance to those in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which raised - as I wrote then - "some discussion about the nature and justification of plagiarism".
As we celebrate World Book Day in the UK, our country's strong connection with children's books is clear to see. It is a reminder of how fortunate we are to have a strong children's book publishing industry, evident as schoolchildren mark World Book Day by dressing up as their favourite characters from Harry Potter to Paddington Bear. British children's authors have inspired young readers at home and abroad, creating life-long fans of literature.
While a cause for celebration, World Book Day should also be a time to reflect on the urgent need to end illiteracy around the globe. There are over 700 million people in the world who are still unable to read and write, including 115 million young people. At Room to Read, we believe World Change Starts with Educated Children.
By educating children, we can empower communities to overcome their challenges, from poverty to climate change. We need children to fulfil their potential to create a safer and more prosperous world.
That is why we must redouble our efforts to end the damaging impacts of illiteracy. To achieve this, we need to think about deep and meaningful change, with a focus on publishing children's books.
Our world, more than at any time in history, is all about stories. Snapchat feeds capture your entire day, Instagram users meticulously curate their pages and stories, and detailed Twitter threads recount what happened on the morning commute. We are storytellers, narrators, transmitters of tales - occasionally those of others but mostly our own. We've been assured we all have a story and what we need is the courage and space to tell it. But these days it's not enough just to have an experience, or even just to share it. People feel compelled to claim stories, to plant a flag and proclaim: "This is mine." Instinctively, some people privilege their own experience over any other; that their story is always the "authentic" one.
When that story is rooted in trauma, a whole host of ethical implications suddenly come into play. How do we tell the story of such experiences? Why should we? To what extent does it desensitise the audience to future stories? And perhaps the most pertinent question, at least in this Era of Authenticity, is: who gets to tell it?
24 February 2020
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.
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.