As the last decade concluded, book publishers breathed a sigh of relief. The 2010s were characterized by a series of Amazon-related shock waves-the growing power of the retail behemoth, the rise of e-books, a related Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit, and the decimation of bookstores both large and small. But publishers had survived. Once viewed as competitors to physical books, e-books and audiobooks were now considered just two formats among many. Indie bookstores saw a dramatic rebirth during the decade's final years, while Barnes & Noble appeared to be in the early stages of a resurgence.
Links of the week January 13 2020 (03)
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:
20 January 2020
Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell's Amazon-published books won't be found in most bookstores - they are being blacklisted by many booksellers, in protest of the company's market dominance and rapacious business practices. The books are, however, available on Amazon, which is integrating every stage of the publishing process: It is acquiring and publishing books, then marketing and selling them to customers. It is creating a marketplace that omits publishers altogether.
If you grew up on Terry McMillan's books, you know that she's the doyenne of a particular type of black women's lit. It hinges on sisterhood and love but doesn't shy away from confronting how hard it can be to find happiness.
Black Gen Xers immersed in McMillan's worlds as they came of age know, so well, the soapy middle-class fantasies she created, and though her characters are representative of a narrow slice of the black middle class, they appeal across racial and gender lines, and have done so for decades. This may be why her audience spans not just her boomer contemporaries but their children and in some cases grandchildren.
McMillan personifies the idea encapsulated in the title of her new book. On the phone from her home in California, she is funny and charming. She's also wise enough to know that though she knows a lot, she can't afford to stop learning. Maybe this is due, in some small part, to her beginnings as an author. After initially struggling to find an audience, she became a household name. That feat is thanks largely to her fourth novel, 1992's Waiting to Exhale. The book spent months on bestseller lists, and, according to McMillan's agent, Molly Friedrich at the Friedrich Agency, her books have sold, in total, roughly 15 million copies worldwide.
Last week, the author John Boyne pointed out what he saw as a troubling trend in publishing. "I can't help but feel that by constantly using the same three words, & then inserting a noun, publishers and writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration," he wrote on Twitter.
The tweet was accompanied by a picture of seven books: The Mistress of Auschwitz, The Brothers of Auschwitz, The Child of Auschwitz, The Sisters of Auschwitz, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Saboteur of Auschwitz.
The most notable response came from the Auschwitz Memorial's Twitter account: "We understand those concerns, and we already addressed inaccuracies in some books published. However, [John Boyne's book] The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust".
They linked to an article on an educational site, run by the Holocaust Survivors' Friendship Association, which criticised Boyne's story of the friendship between a Jewish child and the son of a Nazi officer, as historically inaccurate.
I love romance. I loved it long before I ever fell in love, and romance narratives served as a kind of template for my own early love-affairs. I filled out diaries with imagined meet-cutes between my crushes and me, assigning them lines I had read some other, more sophisticated love interest say. All romance narratives are, on some level, a story about two people coming to a profound understanding of each other over time, and as an adolescent who wanted desperately to be seen, there was nothing more delicious to me.
There was also very little else for me when I was a kid. Most of the media I consumed as a teenage girl ended with a kiss (straight-people kisses only, except for Olivia Wilde on The OC and also Olivia Wilde on House; thank you for your service, Olivia Wilde). There was a sense that life ended with that kiss, that it was also a death. You could fall in love, get married, and have a kid, and after that there weren't any more stories about you worth telling, at least on TV or in books. Romance novels in particular usually ended there, with the kiss or the wedding or the baby, and the other kinds of stories I could find were mostly about men.
There is so much more ghostwriting being done since I began writing V.C. Andrews over 32 years ago. Recently PW reviewed The Silhouette Girl, and the review ended with "Andrews fans should be satisfied." What greater compliment could a ghostwriter receive? He or she is keeping the style, treatment, characters, and plot concepts authentic enough for the fan base to support the title.
But what is ghostwriting? What is required? When my agent, Anita Diamant, who represented Andrews, proposed I try to keep the books alive, I studied every published Andrews novel to capture her essence, syntax, vocabulary, and unique approach to character. I picked up on how she used dialogue, setting, and surprise.
When I first began the assignment, I was writing far more graphic novels under my own name, the highlight being The Devil%u2019s Advocate, which became a major motion picture. At one point, I actually wrote on two different computers to embed the differences in writing for Andrews and my other writing work and in a sense became multipersonality.
Yesterday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced yet another all-male slate for the Best Director category of the Oscars-and provoked yet another round of outrage that America's culture industry is incapable of recognizing the achievements of women. But there is, in fact, a major creative industry in which women are routinely awarded the top honors. It's called publishing.
The dominance of women in the book trade is most apparent in fiction. In New York magazine, Hillary Kelly argued recently that female novelists replaced white male authors in the 2010s, observing, "Over the past ten years, it was women who were celebrated for experimenting, women whose work redefined genres." This phenomenon extends beyond, or below, the elite ranks as well. Flip through a publisher's catalog or walk through the new-releases section of a bookstore: You'll notice novel after novel written by women, with the men sneaking in like time travelers from the more masculine 20th century. I published a (not-celebrated) novel last year and never had the experience-so common in the sciences, in government, in Hollywood-of being the only woman on a panel. In fact, I participated in two or three in which the men took on the role of token and were expected to speak for a whole gender's point of view.
It wasn't always thus-obviously. Not long ago, it seemed the most famous up-and-coming novelists were all men named Jonathan (Franzen, Safran Foer, Lethem). And fiction, let alone book writing generally, is hardly an all-girls club; the most promising novelist in America is probably a man named Ben (Lerner). This feminizing trend, moreover, would have to continue for roughly 2,000 years to balance out the canon.
We hunger for happiness in queer stories. Many critically acclaimed novels about LGBTQ life have explored and challenged homophobia: James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming-Pool Library are all classics, with more recent examples including 2019's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. There are moments of joy in all of these books, but undeniably queerness is paired with homophobia. Now, though, a new spate of science-fiction and fantasy novels are quietly and gracefully opting instead to imagine worlds where homophobia does not exist.
Fantasy's default mode still tends to be a faux-medieval past matched with archaic sexual and social codes, while sci-fi authors often imagine brave new worlds where a man will happily have sex with an alien, but not another man. However, many writers are solving one of the largest blocks for queer romance by simply doing away with homophobia in their fictional universes. In 2019 alone, we had Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower, with a trans protagonist whose trans-ness is interrogated as important but not other; Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, starring the best cast of lesbians the world has ever seen; Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, which makes space in its epic sci-fi plot for a romance between two women; and Jennifer Giesbrecht's The Monster of Elendhaven, in which the central gay couple break every norm - except their universe's rules on sexuality, because there aren't any.
In more than 40 years as a journalist, I've interviewed some terrifying people. Manuel Contreras, Chile's chief of secret police, who ordered the torture and murder of tens of thousands of people. Roberto d'Aubuisson, head of El Salvador's right-wing death squads. I've sat face-to-face with rapists, dirty cops, Ku Klux Klansmen, neo-Nazis-and yet only one person I've written about has truly haunted me.
When I met Judi Singer in 1981, she was a 32-year-old, stay-at-home mother of three in kitten heels and former chapter president of the national Jewish women's fundraising group, Hadassah. I was 23, and a novice reporter covering criminal courts for the San Jose Mercury. Judi's husband, Robert Singer, was a franchise restaurant owner standing trial for the contract murder of Judi's ex-husband. The victim had been gunned down at his doorstep by a stranger. Judi was not facing charges in the crime.
13 January 2020
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.
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.