Popular histories present the Boston Tea Party as a rebellion against taxes. Yet what the colonists objected to more than anything was the idea of an all-powerful corporate middleman regulating commerce. They viewed the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor as a victory for liberty and a blow against the British East India Company's trade monopoly.
Links of the week August 24 2020 (35)
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 August 2020
As a result, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and other platforms were free to develop business models that treated every seller and buyer - every citizen - differently. These corporations exploited this license to the fullest, and have used their power to reorganize entire realms of human activity. Amazon, Google, and Facebook match individuals to specific shoes and clothes, specific restaurants and hotels, specific movies and music, specific jobs and schools, specific drugs and hospitals, specific sexual partners, and even specific books, articles, speakers, and sources of news.
These companies are the most powerful middlemen in history. Each guards the gate to innumerable sources of essential information, services, and products. Yet thus far no governmental entity in the United States has signaled any intention of limiting the license these corporations enjoy to serve only the customers they choose to, at whatever price they decide.
When U.K. bookseller James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes & Noble a year ago, after a sale that landed it in private hands, he faced the formidable challenge of rescuing the chain from troubles largely of its own making, in the shadow of Amazon's prowess in the segment.
At the time of the sale, annual revenue at Barnes & Noble hadn't grown for seven years, declining, in fact, by some $700 million since 2015. As Amazon powered on as a top bookseller, Barnes & Noble cycled through a series of CEOs and strategies.
The temporary closure of nonessential businesses during the pandemic has panicked many a retailer, but Daunt's team has seized it as an opportunity to overhaul stores. He describes a process of tearing up the old playbook, from how books are categorized to where and how shelves are placed. Years of siloed book-buying and corporate-level planning meant some that should have been shelved together were scattered in various sections, making for an awkward flow - manga stuck behind history, for example. Above all, Daunt wants to create spaces where people can linger and discover, maybe for hours.
As the weather turns and the days shorten, as trees bend low with fruit and blackberries darken the hedges, bookshops are bracing for a bumper crop of their own. September and October are always rich, but this year is exceptional: nearly 600 books will reportedly be published in the UK on 3 September alone.
About 55% of these books are academic and professional, and will not enter a bookshop at all. But 20% more trade books will be published than on the same date last year - a rise replicated on nearly every weekend of the autumn, while Super Thursday the following month is predicted to see a 50% increase.
Partly this is because of lockdown, when most publishers moved spring books into the autumn lists or next year. But it is also because, in direct defiance of gloomy predictions about the death of the book, numbers have been rising by 5% every year of the last decade, not counting the explosion in self-published works. Sales have kept pace: last year was the strongest in the history of publishing. And 2020, against all odds, seems already to have beaten it - sales of hardbacks are, so far, 23% greater than last year's. The sense of relief is palpable.
If it hadn't been for the pandemic and the near impossibility of visiting Vivian Stephens in person, I'm not sure I would have been so attuned to her voice. It is gay and mellifluous; she always sounded delighted to hear from me, a reaction most reporters are not accustomed to. But there was something else: she answers questions about herself not in sentences or paragraphs but in pages, and sometimes even chapters, as if she's been keeping the whole story of her life in her head, just waiting for someone to ask about it.
That voice matches an official photograph from her earlier days, when she was a star editor of romance novels at Dell, then a division of Doubleday, in New York. She was uncontestably beautiful, with a broad, toothy smile and a sly intelligence behind her eyes, a spray of freckles over her cheeks, and an Afro that, befitting the publishing world, was neither too corporately short nor too aggressively political. She is propped up on one elbow and leaning in toward the camera. She looks game for anything.
Romance writing has always been easy to laugh at, at least for the uninformed. You might imagine that these stories mostly involve a castle on the Scottish Highlands, inhabited by a restless warrior wearing nothing under his kilt. Or maybe you picture the broad and bare-chested phenom Fabio, taking time out from piloting his Viking ship on the high seas to attend to a buxom and bound captive down below.
But if this is your vision of the romance-writing world, you might have missed its evolution into a billion-dollar-a-year business. In 2016 romance made up 23 percent of the overall U.S. fiction market, and the net worth of some of its writers exceeds that of John Grisham (see Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel). According to Christine Larson, a romance expert and journalism professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, 45 percent of the romance writers she surveyed made enough to support themselves without a day job-"that is shocking for any group of writers," she said-and thanks mainly to their embrace of digital publishing, 17 percent make more than $100,000 a year. Not Mark Zuckerberg money, but far more than the $45,000 median income of American working women.
The popularity of Nordic noir may seem to be fading after its heyday of the early-2010s but Norway's biggest-selling author would beg to differ. Public tax information revealed that Jo Nesbø's two companies took in more than NOK 58 million ($6.5 million) in 2019, of which NOK 45.5 million ($5.1 million) was classed as book royalties.
Most critics link the development of modern Scandinavian crime fiction to the Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who together wrote ten novels about the police investigator Martin Beck in the 1960s and 1970s. They introduced a strong sense of place and thick layer of social criticism into the story, characteristics that have gone on to define the genre.
Nesbø's work been praised for expanding the crime genre with psychological insight and a globalized outlook. While critics point to his alcoholic, anti-hero police investigator as a tired trope, Nesbø was one of the writers responsible for popularizing the trope in the first place.
Of all of the forms of fiction, "flash fiction," which is typically defined as being a story less than 1,000 words, is the only one described with a metaphor. As James Thomas, the editor of several seminal anthologies of flash fiction, tells the story, he was talking with his wife about what to call these short stories of under 1,000 words. He'd been calling them "blasters," but that moniker didn't ring with any poetic allure. Right at that moment, a bolt of lightning struck, and the dark night lit up with a flash. "Call them flash," his wife said. And the name of a genre was born.
The irony is that flash, despite being the smallest of fictional forms, breeds sub-genres and an ever-flowing list of new names. Flash stories are often called miniatures, short shorts, or postcard stories. There is the drabble (stories that are exactly 100 words), micro-fiction (stories under 400 words), and hint fiction (stories under 25 words).
My dog has a carbon footprint. She loves food for one thing, especially meat, and sometimes I keep the heat turned up a few degrees for her when I leave the house. In a strictly economic sense, her productivity (the ratio between output and input volume) is zero. She has no measureable output-she doesn't work, which is ironic because she's classified as a "working dog," bred to herd cattle. She is not a service animal, insofar as she doesn't wear a vest and no one has ever filed any paperwork, but she does have a job, and that job is complex and important, and therefore worthy of consideration.
Dogs cannot be characterized by dialogue or thoughts (anthropomorphized interiority, maybe), so why is literature so obsessed with them? Dogs change humans. Dogs reveal human wants and vulnerability. Dogs, ultimately, make humans more human. So, if my dog%u2019s primary job is to make me more human, then she is productive, very productive, even measurably productive in an economic sense.
The 1970s detective would not be an American pacifist ready to burn his draft card down on Main Street, nor would he be a Lieutenant Calley, murdering civilians and singing his own battle hymn. Detectives of this era attempted at once to recreate and to atone for a manliness of the past in order to situate themselves in the strange new present. [Robert B.] Parker's introduction of Spenser became the main event in 1970s hard-boiled literature.
Spenser has a sardonic nostalgia, but rather than being a self-aggrandizing or bitter has-been, he thrives in the cultural weeds of the early 1970s. He is kind to others, ready to protect the weak, and is indestructible. Spenser is also clever and poetic, fond of quoting Wallace Stevens. He is even a gourmet cook, though he notes that if he were a woman, no one would call him a gourmet; they would just call him a housewife. One critic remarked that Parker had essentially created a hard-boiled superhero, noting Spenser's bulletproof build and moral toughness. But despite some improbably impressive fighting skills, he also deals with the human concerns of how to be a responsible individual, a male adult, and an instrument of justice in a time of widespread disillusion.
I didn't have a very clear idea of what I wanted to do as a young person at all. I knew I needed a job, and I wanted to do something that didn't bum me out.
I was the first person of color to be the director of the National Book Foundation. It's been an extraordinary experience, and I hope it remains so until the bitter end when I leave in December. Publishing and books can feel exclusive. It can be a really difficult community to be a part of. People are really proud of what it means to make a book and to live in the world of books. It's a relationship business. I wanted it to feel like a party for everyone. I didn't want people to feel they weren't the right color or age for the party, or that they didn't live in the right place to be invited. I wanted to make this be something that all people can enjoy.
Publishing is going through a reckoning right now. Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ does a report on demographics, and it's very, very clear that you don't have a lot of people of color sitting at the table. One of the big conversations our industry is having is: What do you do with data that tells us we're not diverse enough for the year 2020? We make the culture - we make books. If we are serving a whole country, then we need people within our publishing houses who reflect what our country looks like.