We should begin by saying that, on a fundamental level, we understand why Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ chose the "Books Are Essential" tagline as a rallying cry. Like every industry during this pandemic, publishing is in a dangerous state of flux, and it needs to find new ways to move product even when supply lines are stressed and it's not safe for people to be in bookstores or go to live publishing events. But this uncertain moment is why it's all the more crucial for the publishing industry to be precise with its language, and it's why we think the tagline has missed the mark.
Links of the week April 20 2020 (17)
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:
27 April 2020
Right now, the term essential is used to describe workers who perform labor that provides our society with fundamental services to survive. It refers to health-care workers, grocery store employees, trash collectors, and others who do jobs that keep us safe, clean, and alive. Crucially, essential is a term applied to people - it is an acknowledgment that workers are what stitch our communities and what's left of our economy together.
One thing the pandemic has done is to make everybody more aware of "supply chains": the path by which a thing gets made and delivered to its ultimate user. Many of us heard many times that a ventilator is constructed of 150 parts that come from all over the world, hinting at the massive logistical challenges of ramping up supply. And we've learned about how hard it is to get the toilet paper or the milk intended for offices and institutions packaged and delivered to stores for consumers instead. Supply chains were not talked about much, but they're important in ways that lots of people are suddenly becoming aware of.
I doubt it was called a supply chain for books when my father started working on it in the late 1940s, but he recognized early that managing inventory title-by-title was both the achilles heel and the biggest opportunity in the trade book publishing business. Each book was not as complicated as a ventilator, but publishers did dozens or hundreds, and now thousands, of different books a year. Unlike most businesses, book publishers created unique products over and over again. Particularly in the days before computers, managing all this detail was a major logistical challenge.
Given all the disruptions to the global economy caused by the new coronavirus, unit sales of print books held up relatively well in the first quarter of 2020, said Kristen McLean, executive director, business development for NPD Books, in a webinar held last week. And though the unprecedented economic plunge makes it difficult to gauge how much of a drag Covid-19 will have on book sales in the long run, publishing has weathered previous turbulent times fairly well. During the Great Recession and its aftermath, McLean noted, unit sales fell meaningfully in only one year-2009, when unemployment was peaking-and units rose from 760 million in 2007 to 807 million in 2012. She added that the gains included the addition of e-books, and that between 2013 and 2019, unit sales generally remained flat.
While demand for books has historically been steady, McLean said, buying patterns have changed as a result of the pandemic. Between March 1 and April 4, demand spiked in such categories as outdoor skills (with print units up 74% over last year); medical history, including books on the 1918 flu pandemic (up 71%); games and activities (up 42%); and literary fiction (up 10%).
More than 300 South African authors and academics have appealed to government to allow the delivery of all books during Level 4 of the national lockdown.
From May 1st, only the selling of educational books will be permitted as part of the next stage of lockdown.
In an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa, Nobel prizewinner JM Coetzee and some of SA%u2019s most prominent authors including Zakes Mda and Mandla Langa praised government for its "sober, compassionate, and science-based leadership" during the crisis. But they warned that South Africa could lose its book industry if it was not allowed to trade.
This will be a strange way to begin a guide to blogging, but I want to save you time, trouble, and heartache.
The average author does not benefit much from blogging.
Yet blogging continues to interest authors, and be discussed, as a way to market and promote. Why? Because blogging does work, if certain conditions are met. The problem is that few authors meet those conditions. This post will delve into what it means to blog successfully and in a meaningful way for an author's long-term platform and book marketing efforts.
What it takes to become an effective blogger If you approach blogging as something "lesser than" your book writing or published writing, you're more likely to fail at it. While blogging can be less formal, less researched, and more geared for online skim-reading or social sharing, to do it well requires the same kind of practice and skill as crafting a novel. You get better at it the more you do it, but I see many authors give up before they've put in enough hours to understand the medium.
My first novel bombed spectacularly. This was about 20 years ago. Everything went wrong. First my editor quit after which my publishing house kinda-sorta forgot I existed. Orphaned was the word they used. Since nobody gave a damn, I at least got to choose my own book cover.
I'd sold that novel for three grand in an age when young writers were scoring obscene windfalls. Even my own publishing house had just allegedly paid a high six-figure deal to this other first-time author named Manil Suri. Our novels were coming out at the same time, and you can probably guess which novel our publishing house tirelessly promoted and which novel they couldn't have picked out of a police line-up. I kept throwing darts at Manil Suri until the reviews for my novel started coming in. And, boy, there were lots of them, a shit ton, like 40 straight good-to-glowing ones I incessantly reread and could quote at length. I thought I was a made man, but, no, the reviews didn't matter much because bookstores hadn't ordered my hardback-they'd all ordered Manil Suri's instead.
Nicola Upson is the critically acclaimed author of the Josephine Tey historical crime fiction series - praised as ‘historical crime fiction at its very best' (Sunday Times). Since the publication of her debut in 2008, Nicola has gone on to release eight more novels to widespread acclaim. With such a consistently successful track record of writing novels, we caught up with Nicola to find out how to get started on a new project...
Make friends with your work
Ideas for a book or a short story come when you least expect them, and you never know what will spark your imagination - a lonely house or a snatch of overheard conversation, something you're troubled or fascinated by, a quirk of history that not many people know about. When that moment arrives, there's nothing more exciting and it's tempting to jump straight in - but not every idea is rich enough to sustain a multi-layered plot and a memorable cast of characters, so choose wisely. You'll be living with this idea for a long time, so it needs to be a friend you can go to no matter what mood you're in, something you'll be as committed to at the end as at the beginning.
A J Waines, Fiona Veitch Smith and Holly Watt will feature in this year's National Crime Reading Month, which is now online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Co-ordinated by the Crime Writer's Association (CWA) and Crime Reader's Association (CRA), the annual festival promotes authors at live events across the UK.
Chair of the CWA Linda Stratmann said"We've - quite literally - created crime writers in residence by asking authors to post films from their homes while in lockdown. It's a kind of criminally-good through the keyhole! "Readers love the personal insights from meeting authors in person, and most crime authors love to connect to their readers. With all the major crime writing festivals, as well as author events in libraries and bookshops, cancelled for spring and summer, we felt it was important to step in and offer a digital alternative."
On what would have been the late Discworld creator's 72nd birthday, Terry Pratchett's production company Narrativia has announced a new development deal to create "truly authentic ... prestige adaptations that remain absolutely faithful to [his] original, unique genius".
The deal will see Motive Pictures and Endeavor Content team up with Narrativia, which Pratchett launched in 2012, to make several series adaptations of the late author's fantasy novels. There are currently no details of which books the partnership will tackle, though many of Pratchett's books have been adapted before: Sky has dramatised Hogfather, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal; Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters have been turned into animations, and Good Omens, starring David Tennant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale, was recently aired on Amazon Prime and the BBC, to positive reviews.
The Rose of Sebastopol was born out of my life-long obsession with Florence Nightingale. As a child, I was hooked by the images in my Ladybird book about her, and then by the biography by Cecil Woodham-Smith, which to me read like a fairytale. Nightingale's girlhood of frustration and thwarted ambition led to international fame; 30 years of intellectual starvation was a prelude to 50 years' hard labour, during which she established nursing and midwifery as professions, and helped reform military medicine.
Why not, I thought, revisit the ending of my book? Not to change it, but to add a further chapter. 2020, the bicentenary of Nightingale's birth, seemed like the perfect opportunity - I had no idea last summer how terribly poignant a return to Florence Nightingale would be. So my inspirational editor, Juliet Ewers, helped me plan a reissue. All I needed to do was to write the chapter.
I was excited by the prospect of returning to a period, landscape, and characters I loved. But as I began to write I realised that I'd set myself quite a challenge. Fifteen years of life and four more novels had gone by since I wrote that book - I was a different woman and a different writer. And the world had changed - Putin had invaded the Crimea, we'd fought fresh wars, become embroiled in the moral and political struggle that was Brexit, seen the rise of the #MeToo movement.
‘Rights departments of publishing houses invariably seem to be the poor relation of the sales team,' says Richard Charkin. Think of the coronavirus pandemic as a prompt to have another look at that.
It's a truth almost universally acknowledged that the net profit of a general book publisher is invariably smaller or equal to the net rights income received.
At times like this, when so many physical bookstores around the world are closed, when so many publishers' and wholesalers' warehouses are working reduced shifts or none, when the profit from selling printed books has diminished to zero or-like the West Texas Intermediate oil price moves dramatically into negative territory-the income from rights to intellectual property seems even more important.
And yet, rights departments of publishing houses invariably seem to be the poor relation of the sales team except at Frankfurt and similar trade shows.
Pilgrimages to the houses of late artists and writers are often destined to disappoint. Many of us go with grand hopes of finding something revelatory-we're not sure what-that will make us feel closer to the person, perhaps lead us to discover something hidden about their work. Lives of Houses, out from Princeton University Press, is a collection of essays largely centered on such pilgrimages and what we unexpectedly find.
Perhaps we all ought to begin there - in the poems, artworks, and books themselves - even if the houses themselves are still standing. Because in trying to learn what home might've meant to the writers in this book, we sense that they lived primarily within the space of their words rather than between walls.
20 April 2020
Do you think you remember a movie in which a knight gallops toward a castle just as its drawbridge is going up, and his white horse jumps the moat in one glorious airborne leap? I could picture it too, but when I went looking for this image on the Internet, all I could find was a couple of cars sailing over rivers via lift bridges and the Pink Panther detective flailing around in the murky water, having missed.
Nonetheless, we're that rider. Chasing us is the dreaded coronavirus. We're in midair, hoping we make it to the other side, where life will have returned to what we think of as normal. So what should we do while we're up there, between now and then?
Think of all the things you hope will still be there in that castle of the future when we get across. Then do what you can, now, to ensure the future existence of those things.
Health care workers go without saying: everyone should be supporting them, because let's assume we all want a health care system in that Castle Future. But what made your life worth living when you were healthy, apart from friends and family? We each have our own lists. Here are some of mine.
People in the UK are turning to books to help them through lockdown, according to a new survey by The Reading Agency.
The figures, released on Thursday to mark World Book Night, suggest 31% of people are reading more since lockdown restrictions were imposed in the UK.
Most are reading fiction, with classics and crime novels proving popular.
Almost half (45%) of the young people - aged 18-24 - asked said they were reading more than they had been before.
And many of the 2,103 people surveyed cited reading as a form of release, escapism or distraction during these troubled times, and that having more time was the key to reading more.
With Axel Scheffler's illustrations and Hugh Bonneville's narration, Nosy Crow's ‘Coronavirus: A Book for Children' has been downloaded more than 700,000 times.
Since it was posted to Nosy Crow's site on April 6, the free 15-page PDF Coronavirus: A Book for Children has been downloaded more than 713,000 times, according to the London-based children's publisher.
Nosy Crow's co-founding managing director Kate Wilson has written the book with Elizabeth Jenner, a children's book author and Nosy Crow nonfiction editor, and Nia Roberts, who is the publisher's head of design. Its illustrations are by Axel Scheffler (Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, and The Whale and the Snail with author Julia Donaldson).
An audio version has been read by actor Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey, Notting Hill, Paddington, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), and is available at the App Store's CloudAloud streaming app for children's literacy.
Winning authors explain how the award changed their lives and share their favourite books by women
Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire, 2018
When news of the shortlist came I was driving along an American highway. My phone was on the dashboard giving me directions and I saw a call come in from my editor. I had to keep driving for another 15 minutes before there was somewhere to pull over. I've been shortlisted twice before - I know that's the point when you really should just enjoy it, because winning a prize is always a far more unlikely than likely event. Still, I won't pretend the winning didn't feel really wonderful.
It still feels profoundly moving. But these days I'm in the early stages of writing the next novel, and when you're at your desk, it really doesn't matter what happened with the last book. You are, as always, that writer looking at the blank page, wondering how to fill it.
A survey by the Authors Guild of its members earlier this month found a majority of authors had already lost significant income due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The Guild received 940 responses to its survey and asked if income from any source declined in recent weeks due to the crisis, 54% responded "yes," compared to 45% who responded "no."
Among responses, the most common loss of income resulted from "speaking/performance engagements cancelled," which was identified by 232 authors; this was followed by "journalism" (93 authors), "non-writing related work - furloughed or laid off" (87), "partner's loss of income" (75), "book contracts cancelled or payments delayed" (52), and "loss of book sales or revenue through self-publishing" (45).
A survey conducted by the Society of Authors has found writers are unlikely to be covered by the government's coronavirus financial support schemes, and are being particularly badly hit by the cancellation of events.
The survey, which polled over 1,000 authors, found 78% of respondents had had events cancelled by organisers since the UK Covid-19 outbreak, and 52% of those would not be compensated by insurance.
Of those whose events-including literary festivals and launches-had been cancelled, 58% were unable to "mitigate the loss" of funds through other earnings.
As a demographic, authors are expected to be among the most vulnerable in the industry due to a reliance on a second source of income, often zero-hour based teaching contracts and commissioned articles, the SoA said.
The organisation confirmed it had heard of requests from publishers to accept late royalty payments, and that as a result authors were experiencing "significant financial losses."
Authors The Bookseller spoke to confirmed they were still waiting to understand the full extent of the pandemic's impact on international sales, and their income.
Twelve years ago, on the eve of the modern-day indie author revolution, few writers aspired to self-publish. Self-publishing was seen as a fool's errand. At the time, many writers embraced the false narrative that only publishers and literary agents possessed the divine wisdom to decide which writers are worthy of publication.
It was a different era back then: e-books accounted for less than 1% of the book market; self-publishing was all about print. Without an agent, it was difficult to get the backing of a publisher, and without a publisher it was nearly impossible to get books into physical bookstores, where most readers discovered and purchased books. So of course early self-published authors failed.
Retail distribution has always been critical to a book's success. The more stores that carry a book, and the more prominent the placement within each store, the greater the sales. Once a print book lost retail distribution, or lost prime shelf space, sales plummeted. Physical shelf space has always been precious to the author and expensive for the retailer. When booksellers moved their stores online and opened e-book stores, it created new opportunities for self-published authors. For the retailer, virtual shelf space is cheap and unlimited.
It's not often that an author finds herself with not one but three books coming out within the space of two weeks, but that's exactly what was about to happen with me. Two of the books are paperback releases of hardbacks published last year, and the third is a special new edition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
What should have been a triple celebration of this momentous occasion in a writing career spanning four decades, however, has turned into something of a nightmare. The coronavirus pandemic has effectively closed all bookshops and massively disrupted distribution, marketing and sales. Up until 10 days ago I had a European and Brazilian tour lined up, a television interview, book launch parties, literary festival appearances, radio slots, public speaking engagements, and a creative writing course to host. Instead, as publishers and publicists, the media and festival organisers have decamped to their homes to juggle schooling with the day-to-day running of the business we all earn our crust from, everything has fallen away. To add insult to injury, Amazon has warned publishers that books may be considered "non-essential" items, and that the "Buy" buttons could disappear from many book listings from 1 May.
As his latest detective thriller #Taken comes out in paperback and e-book, Tony Parsons muses on the appeal of ‘the space between books' and how it has shaped the idea for his first James Bond novel. All he needs now is the tap on the shoulder...
James Bond's dapper creator may have died in 1964, but the James Bond books - the first books to fill my dreams - have never stopped coming. Fleming wrote just 13 007 books in his lifetime but since then numerous writers have had a crack at extending his legacy, including Kingsley Amis, Anthony Horowitz, Jeffery Deaver, Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd: some big names trying to catch that Fleming voice and to capture that 007 essence. My day, I always felt - and still do, between you and me - will come to carry on what my literary hero started back in 1953. And I know exactly what I will do - I will write my James Bond story in the space between books.
Carol Ann Duffy and the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University have brought together poets from around the world to write new poems about the recent days past and the weeks ahead. The poets were invited to write directly about the Coronavirus pandemic or about the personal situation they find themselves in right now.
The poems are presented in date order and each includes a note about where it was written. Submissions are ongoing and we will add to the collection as new work arrives. Readers are welcome and encouraged to share any of the poems using #WWWAN or tagging @McrWritingSchl on social media.
"We need the voice of poetry in times of change and world-grief. A poem only seeks to add to the world and now seems the time to give"
Carol Ann Duffy Creative Director of the Manchester Writing School
I spent a long time thinking about what this blog would be about - most of it thinking about poems of hope and consolation, and some of it thinking about poems about spring, but in the end it turned out that what I was writing about was cats.
I have two cats who are fond of me, but not each other, and both well into middle age. They have been very attentive while I have been at home. The Orange Cat sits by my computer as I work, next to me on the sofa as I read and follows me around in the garden digging up all of the things I have just planted. The Blue Cat - asks for food and sleeps on my bed. We serve our purpose for him.