I published my first novel in October 2008. At the time I was on the dole, trying and failing to get various jobs. I had spent three years studying for a PhD in American literature that was nowhere near being finished. I owed money to my parents and to my landlord. My book had earned me precisely €4,000 - this was the advance paid by my Irish publisher.
Links of the week April 26 2021 (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:
3 May 2021
A month after the book was published in Ireland, my agent sold the reprint rights in a two-book deal to a UK publisher for more money than I had ever made in my life. (Given that I had never earned more that €16,000 a year, this should not be taken for a particularly startling metric.) Then she sold the film rights. Then she sold foreign rights, to Spain, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Brazil.
The success of Bad Day in Blackrock allowed me to become that superficially glamorous thing, a full-time professional writer. I moved into an apartment in the centre of Dublin with bookshelves lining the hallway. The apartment overlooked the courtyard of a busy hotel, which meant that every morning at 6am, I was awoken by the sound of glass bottles crashing into the recycling bin directly below my window.
When The Tipping Point was published in 2000, it marked a sea change in the world of books. Selling over a million copies, Malcolm Gladwell's "biography of an idea" convinced publishers that, told well, readers could and would read serious books about economics and social change and history and science and business. A new genre of silo-busting, multi-disciplinary non-fiction was born. And even though it drew largely from academic research, it wasn't stodgy, it was fun. And its central thesis - "there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible" was broad enough to talk about over a beer. Suddenly books about ideas were cool.
That central idea wasn't original; ideas of critical mass in physics and the threshold theory of disease had been around for decades. But applying the concept to pop culture - kids' TV, shoes and drugs - sucked in new readers eager to understand how trends took off. Gladwell's central metaphor of epidemics, while painful reading in our current circumstances, was distant and abstract enough not to discomfort; instead, he made the possibility of ideas or products becoming ‘viral' positively aspirational!
James Ellroy doesn't do technology, so the crime fiction writer and self-described "demon dog of American literature" is on the phone-a landline-from his apartment in downtown Denver. "I've never used a computer for anything," he says. "I don't have a cell phone. I don't know how to text message. I write my books by hand, and I write historical novels, and it all works."
It's worked for 40 years. In June, Knopf will release Widespread Panic, the latest in the 73-year-old author's more-than-20-book oeuvre. That includes the L.A. Quartet, which spans 1946 to 1958 in Los Angeles and incorporates two of Ellroy's most famous novels, The Black Dahlia-his breakout book in 1987-and L.A. Confidential; the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, which starts with American Tabloid and covers the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.; and the Second L.A. Quartet, set during World War II, beginning with 2014's Perfidia. According to Knopf, his books have sold a combined 2.5 million copies.
From writing in her lunch break at Hampstead Waterstones, to securing an international publishing deal, Lorraine Brown was finally able to see her debut novel on the shelves when lockdown eased.
She wrote Uncoupling while working as a secretary at Devonshire House School, but didn't get the chance to see it in bookshops when it was published in February.
"I felt quite flat afterwards," she said. "Until last week when I finally went to Waterstones Piccadilly and saw my book next to authors like Maggie O'Farrell and (Douglas Stuart's) Shuggie Bain. That was the moment I felt, 'I've done it'. It was the closest I've ever come to a Booker prize winner!"
As his debut children's picturebook launches, author Ian Brown on getting published, 30 years writing and producing for TV - and what it's like working with a tortoise
You wait decades to land a book publishing deal - and then four come along at once. Yes, I know. But I can crow a bit. Can't I? It's taken what feels like for ever to secure a deal, and now publication day for the paperback of the first Albert the Tortoise picturebook is here.
Vaccinations may be increasing at a rapid rate, and many business are reopening to close to pre-pandemic hours, but publishers and booksellers are not in a hurry to resume in-person author tours this spring or summer. Most publishers contacted by PW said they are deferring making any concrete plans about tours until authors feel comfortable going back on the road and booksellers and librarians feel comfortable hosting in-store events. For the moment, publishers and booksellers are willing to stick with virtual talks and readings, though a growing number acknowledged that online events are becoming a bit stale.
The pandemic itself remains a wild card for publishers and booksellers, since spikes in infection rates have upset numerous plans for bringing back live events, and publishers are reluctant to develop extensive tours only to dash them because of some new surge. "Obviously we remain hopeful about an eventual return to in-person events," said Jim Plank, publicist for Haymarket Books. "But lots of people, especially those in positions of power, have spent the last 13 months being repeatedly and disastrously wrong about when and how reopening on a large scale can be done safely."
Crying "Censorship!" has become the right's favorite book marketing technique.
Roger Kimball, president of Encounter Books, is the latest publisher to hawk his wares this way in the Wall Street Journal. Last week, on the op-ed page, Kimball complained that Amazon had stopped selling "When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment," by social conservative Ryan T. Anderson. Kimball called the move "a deliberate act of censorship" - presumably to placate critics who call the book transphobic. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Consider that your local indie bookstore contains titles that have been carefully curated according to how much physical space is available, which books the managers consider worthy and what they anticipate customers will want to buy.
The World Wide Web is a different world. Large online book retailers are essentially search engines. They populate their sites by automatically sucking up inventory data from vast wholesalers, such as Ingram, so that they can, in effect, offer every book that exists. In the 1990s, that was part of Amazon's great innovation, which allowed it to be the World's Largest Bookstore, despite the fact that it began in Bezos's garage.
Amazon continued to cash in on our new shop-work-relax-from-home habits in the first three months of this year, reporting a huge rise in sales and a tripling of profits.
Almost every aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic has served to boost the tech giant's revenues, from video streaming to grocery delivery.
It said it expects the boom to continue over the next few months.
The pandemic could herald "a golden age" for Amazon, one analyst said.
Amazon's are the latest blow-out results from Big Tech this week. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google's parent firm Alphabet have all reported big sales increases a year after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Amazon group has continued to spread its reach into automated grocery stores, online healthcare services, even experimenting with a bricks-and-mortar hair and beauty salon in London.
But its core offerings: online shopping with home delivery, media streaming and cloud-based web-services all flourished during a year of upheaval for other businesses.
Half a dozen professional writers' organizations have joined with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in forming a joint task to press the Walt Disney Company to ensure it pays all royalties owed to authors. The task force, #DisneyMust Pay, contends that Disney is putting the onus on authors to prove they are owed money, rather than working with authors and author groups to proactively pay authors royalties that are due.
In addition to the SFWA, other organizations that are part of the task force are: the Authors Guild; Horror Writers Association; National Writers Union; Novelists, Inc.; Romance Writers of America; and Sisters In Crime. Four authors have also signed on: Neil Gaiman, Tess Gerritsen, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Chuck Wendig.
Last week news broke that Blake Bailey, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, had been accused of sexual crimes and that his publisher, W. W. Norton, would halt promotion of the book. I had just reviewed it. Bailey's transmogrification didn't change my basic opinion of his work-not because it's that good, but because it's that bad. However, the scandal did help explain the nature of its badness.
The questions raised by the Bailey affair are timely and timeless. Obviously, if he raped women and groomed students for sex, as he is alleged to have done, he deserves no sympathy. But if an artist is a bad person, should that change the way audiences interact with his art? In this particular case, if the author is a rapist, should that change the way we read Philip Roth: The Biography? Arguably, no. A book has an existence apart from its author, a truism that is extra true in the case of biography. When the biographer turns out to be a contemptible human being, his subject comes under suspicion too: What drew the biographer to this guy and not someone else? We owe it to this guy to be fair-minded.
We like to pretend that art is art. That an author writes what they are inspired to write, with no concern but the voice of the muse. This is a useful fiction. It is good for writers to focus on the art when writing and worry about the business side later. But it is a fiction. Writers are aware of market demands, what kinds of novels get buzz, and what subjects award judges gravitate towards. Even writers with high artistic aspirations are-consciously or unconsciously-warped by these pressures. Especially those of us hoping to make a living on our writing.
In my recent post on the literary fiction and SFF short story markets, I mentioned how the short story was the economically dominant length of fiction in the first half of the 20th century. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald bemoaned the fact they had to write short stories to subsidize their novel writing. In 2021 - and really the last 50 years or more - the dynamic has been the opposite. Today, short story writers frequently (if mostly privately) grumble about how they have to write novels if they want any chance at earning money or even just getting an agent.
Children read longer books of greater difficulty during lockdown periods last year, and reported that reading made them feel better while isolated from the wider world, according to new research.
The annual What Kids Are Reading report from Renaissance Learning, which studies the reading habits of more than one million pupils in the UK and Ireland, found that while the number of books read overall dropped 17% in the year to July 2020, compared with the previous year, children read more during lockdowns and school closures. The data showed that the books read during lockdowns were more challenging, with primary school children and those in year seven reading more demanding texts in particular.
After a very, very long year, the Edgar Awards are once again upon us. 2021 marks the 75th year that Mystery Writers of America will celebrate the best crime and mystery writing, and while 2020 was an abysmal year by any other metric, it was a stellar year for great new books. In what's become a tradition here at CrimeReads, our editors partnered with MWA to organize a giant roundtable discussion between the Edgar nominees, and we received responses from over 30 authors, each with their own fascinating take on our beloved genre.
Nev March (nominated for Best First Novel 2013 Murder in Old Bombay): Crime writers are an odd sort of moralist, I think, who rail at the way things are by making it all intensely personal. Crime stories show loopholes in the law, in statute of limitations and other crevices where evil hides.
We hear about tragedies and crime every day, but only when people feel injustice can we change minds. We're confounded by individuals who defy the law. I think some part of us wonders, could they really get away with it? Sadly, in real life they sometimes do, for decades. Crime fiction allows us to speed up the process of seeing justice served.