Over the past two weeks, people around the globe have gathered in protest against the terrible deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. In the UK, within just a few days, it was revealed that the case of Belly Mujinga, who died of coronavirus after being spat at in Victoria station, had been closed while the government's report on race and Covid-19 showed that, as suspected, black people are disproportionately dying from the virus.
Links of the week June 1 2020 (23)
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:
8 June 2020
Amid all the fury, corporations have been quick to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, and publishers have been among them. As readers around the world have flocked to buy more anti-racist books by black authors, each day editors, agents and authors have taken to social media to call for more action. Mainstream publishers have made donations to Black Lives Matter causes, while the #InclusiveIndies fundraiser has raised more than £150,000. Over the weekend, authors also shared how much they were paid to write their books via the hashtag #publishingpaidme, which, among other things, exposed racial disparities in the advances paid by the big publishers. Agents and editors have been more vocal in asking black authors to submit their work in the future.
AdvertisementBut if we are going to inspect the industry's support of Black Lives Matter, we must honestly assess its existing support for black voices. Year in, year out, the numbers have shown all the ways publishing has failed to reflect society.
Books have, for so many of us, been a lifeline. The clichés and platitudes about them being a portal to other worlds, that books can change and save lives, that they help connect us to something bigger than ourselves, are all true. I know that from my own experience and because in moments like the one we are in now, where thousands of protestors have taken to the streets in response to the continued police violence against black people, thousands more people are online sharing resources to help people understand the importance of this movement and how we got here. They are sharing books.
Books afford us the opportunity to read about our past and present while engaging with ideas that will help us to imagine our future. We are reminded that it is our duty to create a new antiracist paradigm. And while we're thankful for the existence of these books, the path that many of them took to get here reflects the very racist structure that these books are meant to challenge. It is not only that the world of books is as white as every other major institution in America; it is that it makes nonwhite writers perform their deservingness in a way that is discouraging at best and prohibitive at worst.
Writers including Malorie Blackman and Nikesh Shukla have urged writers of colour not to give up and that their stories matter, as the #PublishingPaidMe hashtag took off over the weekend to illustrate the disparity between the advances paid by publishers to non-Black authors versus Black authors.
Made all the more stark as some white authors revealed their latest advances for multiple hundreds of thousands, Blackman urged "people of colour" not to let the disclosures put them off a career as a writer or illustrator: "A plea to POC embarking on a writing career," she said, "PLEASE don't let #PublishingPaidMe put you off being an author and/or illustrator if that's the career you're currently pursuing. Your voice, your work, your stories matter. The situation will improve. It has to."
A little over half a century ago, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr and the protests that rose in its wake, Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s then editor-in-chief, Chandler B. Grannis, felt compelled to speak up. "Modern Americans like to think of their society as one marked by scientific achievement and the advance of humanistic culture," he wrote, "but once again we have seen this pretension brutally shattered. Once again the American heritage of violence-perpetuated by nostalgic tradition, racial fear, a confusing war, misapplied nationalism, and television programming-has struck down one of our noblest and most needed citizens."
The editorial might as well have been written yesterday. Today, decades after the victories of the civil rights movement, America is still plagued by so many of the same horrors that convulsed the country through the 1960s-racism, economic inequality, police brutality.
Across the country, people have gathered together over the past week to demonstrate their anger and grief in the wake of the killing of yet another unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of the police. They do so under the auspices of the First Amendment.
An open letter to the Poetry Foundation from a group of its fellows and programmatic partners and signed by more than 1,800 individuals issued in response to the organization's June 3 statement on the killing of George Floyd and other current events calls for significant change at the organization.
Specifically, the letter demands the immediate resignation of both Poetry Foundation president Henry Bienen and board of trustees chair Willard Bunn III. (This has now happened.)
The Society of AuthorsThe British authors’ organization, with a membership of over 7,000 writers. Membership is open to those who have had a book published, or who have an offer to publish (without subsidy by the author). Offers individual specialist advice and a range of publications to its members. Has also campaigned successfully on behalf of authors in general for improved terms and established a minimum terms agreement with many publishers. Recently campaigned to get the Public Lending Right fund increased from £5 million to £7 million for the year 2002/2003. Regularly uses input from members to produce comparative surveys of publishers’ royalty payment systems. http://www.societyofauthors.org/' second real-time survey confirms extent of impact of COVID-19 on authors' income and wellbeing as implications for daily life and publishing industry continue to emerge.
We have released the results of our second Authors in the Health Crisis survey assessing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on authors' livelihoods.
Lost income 57% of respondents reported that their incomes had declined since the outbreak of COVID-19, up over a third from 41%. Only 23% said that the impact of Coronavirus on their earnings remained to be seen, down from 32% a month earlier.
The proportion of respondents unable to mitigate their financial losses following the outbreak increased from 57% to 62%, reflecting growing unease, with only 15% of respondents reporting that they expect their incomes to remain stable or increase following the public health crisis, down from 18%.
Writing about the people you are closest to can be one of the most rewarding experiences a writer can have-but also the scariest. This is a big topic, so I will cover it in two parts. First: what to put on the page. And second: how to deal with your subjects' reactions to what you write about them.
Lets start, as some of my favorite memoirs do, with a cliffhanger. Here is what you should not do: When your publisher gives you a January 1 deadline for submitting the final manuscript, you should not print out a copy for each of your family member-characters and send those copies all at the same time, which guarantees you will receive their responses right before Christmas.
Neil Gaiman has dug out a story he first wrote on a scrap of paper more than a decade ago and turned it into a new book for "anyone of any age who likes pirates, cooking, swashbuckling and/or doughnuts".
The American Gods and Good Omens author's rhyming Pirate Stew, out in October, will be illustrated by the former UK children's laureate Chris Riddell. Gaiman has previously collaborated with Riddell on titles including The Graveyard Book, Coraline and Fortunately, the Milk, with characters from the latter set to appear in the forthcoming book.
I pronounced rather grandly recently that smaller publishers are the delicatessens of the publishing world. We don't publish that much but when we do, it stays with the reader and lingers on the taste buds of the creative mind that bit longer.
Corporate publishing has a different economic imperative, and I understand that - it is a different business model, they have to satisfy the demands of shareholders. They are the supermarkets of the publishing world and have the heft to stack them high and sell them cheaper.
Of course, there are exceptions and they do publish some fantastic authors and books but within literary fiction it is the smaller presses that appear to be doing most of the heavy lifting and finding and developing new voices and writers.
Book lovers' passion for words on the printed page has inspired them to donate millions of dollars to help keep their favorite independent shops afloat and workers paid during coronavirus-prompted closures and restrictions.
In San Francisco, supporters of City LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/ Bookstore, home of the beat poets, donated more than $493,000 to a GoFundMe campaign to help the store stay afloat while it was closed.
"After eight weeks of mandatory sheltering-in-place, our booksellers are now allowed back in the store, and boy does it feel amazing to finally be able to get back to work!!" a post on City Lights' web page said. The renowned destination bookstore reopened May 20.
The coronavirus pandemic has seen a "huge swing" towards print on demand (p.o.d.), Ingram's senior vice-president David Taylor has said. He also warned that physical booksellers could have difficulty clawing back trade from online retailers after lockdown.
Taylor said some publishers had even used p.o.d. as a backup for frontlist titles during the crisis. He suggested the technique could help make the supply chain less fragile in the future. Taylor said: "Publishers are putting titles into print on demand who previously may have been reluctant to do so. Fulfilling a virtual inventory and manufacturing it is a less fragile supply chain than printing a book cheaply and shifting it round the world and putting it in a warehouse."
While none of the major New York City publishers who took part in PW's survey about their efforts to return employees to their Manhattan headquarters had fixed plans, no companies said they expected to begin bringing staff back in a meaningful way before Sept. 1. For the most part, they see the week of Labor Day as a target, but acknowledged that date may not be realistic. Several said they see a limited reopening coming after Labor Day (which is September 7 this year).
PW sent a brief questionnaire to all of the Big Five trade houses plus Abrams, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media, Kensington, Norton, Scholastic, and Workman. While all said there are too many uncertainties about the future course of the virus to make final plans, there was consensus around some issues. There was widespread agreement that the top consideration before publishers will fully reopen will be the condition of New York City's mass transit and how comfortable workers will be using subways, buses, and trains. Several publishers said they plan to stagger work hours, something that has been recommended by New York City officials to ease overcrowding during usual rush hours.
1 June 2020
Never mind newly minted corona lockdown stories, authors are frantically rewriting existing projects to reflect a world turned upside down by the pandemic - or shelving them indefinitely
Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, has been having a busy lockdown. Signed up to write a political thriller called The House, he and his co-author Imogen Robertson have been rapidly rejigging their novel to reflect a post-Covid world.
Their near-future setting now includes a national inquiry "about what's going on in the background", where characters - if they meet socially - "choose not to drink out of glasses and they wipe the bottle before they drink", and undergo temperature checks when entering public buildings, "which everyone is used to by then", says Watson, who is finding life away from politics as a newly minted thriller author "a relief".
My parents-good Protestants that they are-often ask me, "Why horror? Why can't you write nice things?" To which I generally reply, "Have you read the newspaper lately?"
Because there is nothing in the world of fiction that compares to the daily atrocities humanity inflicts upon itself, or to the seemingly chaotic and certainly uncaring universe that wields an ugly axe of natural disaster, disease and death. Want a truly frightening read? Try Modern Times: History from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson, a galling account of our modern world that will leave you yearning for the comforts of Stephen King.
Genre fiction - namely, horror and noir fiction - embrace the dark side of life through fantasy and a grim, fatalistic pessimism. Horror fiction tends to veil true horror in a guise of metaphor. As cartoonish as they can be, zombies, vampires or supernatural monsters bent on inflicting death and chaos are merely masks over the true horrors of life. Noir fiction plots its way through corruption, politics and murder. Sometimes it's just fun, a way of stripping power from death, but, when done well, both have a unique way of imposing judgement against the world as it is.
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy in her care. The girl, local to this island, knew the boy's parents would not take her with them. She was hiding out of equal parts jealousy and spite. Only when the noise outside died down would she and the child emerge to find the streets abandoned, spectral plumes of smoke rising in the distance, and the little boy's parents gone. Only then would the girl realize what she had done.
A different writer might make it up, but I needed to base my fictional evacuation on real unrest. I'd have to visit the islands in person to decide if there was any actual "there" there for me. When I finally made that trip, late in 2010, what I found catapulted my own momentum forward even as it propelled my fiction half a century backward.
Once, a bush pilot who moonlighted as a leg-breaker for a minor crime lord offered my father a handful of cash to help collect a debt. The scene between this guy and Dad didn't go down like it would've in one of my stories. We'll circle back to that.
Pulp literature loves its heroes and villains. Loves ‘em larger and bolder than life and painted in broad strokes. Generic lit goes for poetic naturalism; Daddy hated me and Mommy loved me too much and it's oh so complicated because who's to say what is good or evil? Postmodern and brutalist types avow that the stars are to blame for our flaws. Neither heroes nor villains exist; there's merely action and reaction. We're all crushed under the heel of the military industrial juggernaut and it's dog eat dog, man. Dog. Eat. Dog. Of these, the naturalists and brutalists come nearest to the real affect. Yet, by necessity even these modes fall back upon style and stylization in the end.
Nobody called it that at the time, but the first realistic English novel was a genuine "beach read." Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," published in 1719, is a tale of exotic adventure literally set on a beach. Three hundred years later, a lot has changed, but we still crave stories with waves crashing on the shore.
My first "beach read" was a shameful, illicit affair. A middle school classmate with a wild older brother had gotten a hold of a copy of "Jaws." In my lily-white innocence, the naked swimmer on the cover of Peter Benchley's thriller was just as terrifying as the shark soaring up to eat her. Sitting cross-legged in my friend's attic, I tore through those pages, ricocheting between Thanatos and Eros.
I didn't know it then, but "Jaws" spent almost a year on the bestseller list and sold millions of copies. A sexy man vs. monster melodrama set on Long Island, the novel is in many ways the greatest beach read ever - so good, so bad.
Books scheduled for release this spring and summer are now on track for fall, when authors will be fighting for attention in the midst of a presidential election and an ongoing crisis.
In March, when parts of the United States began shutting down because of the coronavirus, the best-selling children's book author Jeff Kinney faced a dilemma.
"Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure," part of his popular Wimpy Kid series, was due out in April with a first printing of three million copies. His publisher had lined up a 10-city tour.
In a matter of days, those plans crumbled. "The book was about to land in stores that were closed to customers at the height of a pandemic," Mr. Kinney said.
He and his publisher decided to postpone the release until August, in hopes that by then, his tour could be resurrected. Millions of copies are now sitting in warehouses. "It wasn't an easy decision," he said. "We knew lots of kids would enjoy the book while in lockdown."
Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton has said the beginnining of the pandemic had a severely negative impact on Bloomsbury's sales, but that overall the company had "transformed surprisingly well".
Speaking to former Rowman & Littlefield International c.e.o Oliver Gadsby at the virtual IPG spring conference today (2nd June), Newton said the company had lost "100% of [its] retail customers, practically overnight". Newton said: "We basically had no customers over night, but the channels that are open have over-performed, Tesco has sold a lot of books because supermarkets are not only open, they are having the time of their lives, but they only sell a certain type of book."
But confirming what other big publishers have noted, Newton said it sales had recovered after initially being down by two-thirds. "Our sales are not anything like as far down as we originally imagined," he said, but declined to give specific numbers. He added that "the overall message is that total sales are not as completely awful as we thought, but we arrive at that position from many things being completely wiped out, and other things being way up."
Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charging the Internet Archive with copyright infringement. The suit asks the court to issue preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the IA's scanning, public display, and distribution of literary works, which it makes available to the public through such businesses as its Open Library and National Emergency Library.
In its suit, the publishers make clear it is not suing the IA over "the occasional transmission of a title under appropriately limited circumstances, nor about anything permissioned or in the public domain," but rather over the IA's "purposeful collection of truckloads of in-copyright books to scan, reproduce, and then distribute digital bootleg versions online."
Bookshops are experiencing an "extraordinary" boom in New Zealand as Kiwis commit to buying local to resuscitate the economy following seven weeks of lockdown.
Booksellers around the country say they're experiencing "Christmas" levels of demand post-lockdown, as many readers have sworn off shopping offshore following the Covid-19 crisis, which claimed 21 lives in New Zealand.
"People are really thinking about where they want to spend their money and the businesses they love. They got a taste of what it was like if you weren't there," says Jenna Todd of Time Out book store in Mt Eden, Auckland.
"We're in this space where people are wanting to spend money and support local. A lot of people haven't spent money in a long time. Some people have more money than they usually would from not commuting or going out to dinner."
Head of Zeus is launching Aries, a new action and adventure imprint, in August with books from Brad Taylor, Ethan Cross and Matthew Harffy.
The imprint will be overseen by Aria editorial director Hannah Smith and editor Holly Domney who has just joined from Canongate where she looked after authors such as Simon Brett, Caro Ramsay and David Hewson. Both report into publishing director Laura Palmer.
Publishing in e-book, audiobook and print, the imprint will release 30 titles in 2020, and double this to 60 in 2021. "Whether Dark-Age historical epic or near-future techno thriller, Aries will bring together a community of authors with readers who are looking for their next adventure read," Head of Zeus said.
The estate of Watership Down author Richard Adams has won back all of the rights to the late author's classic novel about anthropomorphised rabbits, in a high court ruling against the director of the famed animated adaptation.
The high court in London ruled on 27 May that Martin Rosen, the US director of the 1978 adaptation of Adams's novel, had wrongly claimed that he owned all rights to the book, in which a group of rabbits fight to survive the destruction of their warren.
The court heard that Rosen, who owned the motion picture rights to Watership Down under his original 1976 contract, had entered into contracts worth more than $500,000 (£400,975) while claiming that he held all rights to the novel. Rosen also made $85,000 from an unauthorised licence for an audiobook adaptation, and also failed to pay the estate fees and merchandising royalties from the 2018 BBC/Netflix television adaptation, on which he served as an executive producer.
By the time I finished my editorial work on this year's edition of The Best American Travel Writing-about five weeks into my state's mandatory stay-at-home order-I'd had plenty of time to think about the future of the form. During the first few weeks of lockdown, I was invited on to a podcast with several other travel writers to discuss "Coronavirus and Predictions on the Future of Travel Writing."
With gloom and doom, I speculated about magazines suspending publication, compared this to how travel had "irrevocably" changed after 9/11, and declared that this was "the extinction event" for a certain type of travel publishing. To be honest, I had no more idea of what might happen than anyone else, and I still don't. But I held forth anyway, and I am aware that whatever I write now, in the spring of 2020, may seem naïve, hysterical, or wildly inaccurate by the fall, when the anthology is published, never mind a year or five from now.
Roughly 100,000 Americans have died from what President Trump has disparagingly called "the Chinese Virus," as reported by a media he labels "fake news." Trump has accused China of deliberately obfuscating facts, possibly including the origin of the virus. Xenophobic fear-mongering aside, he might have found an unwitting ally in Fang Fang, a 65-year-old Chinese novelist who lives in the city of Wuhan.
Fang's "Wuhan Diary," which began as a series of blog posts, was published in English earlier this month in a translation by UCLA professor Michael Berry. Covering two months of lockdown, Fang reports details of privation and overcrowded hospitals that are embarrassing to the government, and she grows critical of its response, displaying a level of overt frustration not routinely expressed in China. The diaries, posted online each night, were read by tens of millions, making her a celebrity.
Shoppers will be cautious about returning to the high street but Waterstones will emerge from the coronavirus crisis and eventually have a wider range of shops, the firm's c.e.o. James Daunt has said.
Speaking to Boldwood Books founder Amanda Ridout in an interview for the IPG Virtual Spring Conference, recorded ahead of the UK government's confirmation that shops can reopen from 15th June, Daunt said his stores would reopen once necessary safety measures were in place.
The firm's branches will have clear social distancing markings and signs inside and out, sneeze guards, and gloves and masks, and will use contactless payment whenever possible, he said. He also confirmed plans to quarantine books taken off the shelves by customers for up to 72 hours.
Daunt said Waterstones online sales had "exploded" during the lockdown, but consumers were buying a different kind of book to the ones habitually sold at physical stores. He said: "In particular there is a segment of books which are not performing as well online. Particularly the new, the undiscovered, the slightly more esoteric doesn't, at least for us, perform online as well as it did in the shops and that clearly is associated with bookseller recommendation, the physical presentation of books in front of customers and the fact that as you browse you buy the book that you hadn't thought of you didn't know about. That's evidently much more difficult online."