Seven years ago, when Amazon was in the midst of a contentious pricing battle with one of the country's largest publishers, a group of famous authors banded together to make the case that publishing was a crucial industry for the nation's cultural and intellectual life.
Links of the week May 10 2021 (19)
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:
17 May 2021
"Publishers provide venture capital for ideas," the authors wrote. "They advance money to authors, giving them the time and freedom to write their books.... Thousands of times every year, publishers take a chance on unknown authors and advance them money solely on the basis of an idea. By assuming the risk, publishers expect-and receive-a financial return." The letter was signed by a who's who of American writers: Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Donna Tartt, Lee Child, Ron Chernow, Ann Patchett, and Robert Caro, among many others.
This is more or less the story that publishers have told about themselves for decades. Publishers take chances, they nurture talent, they're constantly on the hunt not just for marketable books, but for ideas. The industry is, by extension, one of the most important protectors of speech in the country. It doesn't matter what the idea is or who it comes from, as long as it's bold and original.
Book publishing is having an existential crisis. The industry is finding itself saddled with deals by polarizing political figures, and no idea how to handle them. Which, in turn, gives rise to some fundamental questions about the purpose of publishing.
Is the industry's purpose to make the widest array of viewpoints available to the largest audience possible? Is it to curate only the most truthful, accurate, and high-quality books to the public? Or is it to sell as many books as possible, and to try to stay out of the spotlight while doing so? Should a publisher ever care about any part of an author's life besides their ability to write a book?
These questions are becoming more and more urgent within the private realms of publishing, amid debates over which authors deserve the enormous platform and resources that publishers can offer - and when it's acceptable for publishers to decide to take those resources away.
Who knew that publishing could be so thrilling? Writing is a solitary activity-a lot of sitting around and typing quietly. Editing isn't the stuff of great drama, either. But the business of books has increasingly become a hothouse, generating controversies, Twitter feuds and scrambles to save face as existing power structures are challenged.
Three new novels navigate the thorny interior of the industry. Two are driven more by plot than interrogating real-world problems, yet all are concerned with the motivations of the people behind the stories we read. In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, a teacher steals the idea for a book from his dead MFA student. Alexandra Andrews' Who Is Maud Dixon? follows a protagonist, the assistant of a famous novelist, who will do just about anything to get ahead. And in Zakiya Dalila Harris' The Other Black Girl, the sole Black employee at a publishing house finds herself unexpectedly isolated after the hiring of a new Black editorial assistant.
Naver, Korea's leading internet platform, has completed its acquisition of Wattpad for more than $600 million in cash and stock. Wattpad will remain headquartered in Toronto under the leadership of founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen. Lau will serve as CEO, reporting to Jun Koo Kim, CEO of Webtoon, Naver's online comics platform. Over the next year, Naver plans to hire an additional 100 staffers to work at Wattpad in engineering, marketing, content, and in other roles, according to a press release.
Wattpad attracts some 90 million monthly users, including five million writers who have contributed stories to the platform. Naver's Webtoon brings in 76 million monthly users.
The 35-year-old Beijing Book Fair, responding to public health constraints, will have international participants engaging digitally and in-country publishers offered a physical fair.
The next jolt on the still-quaking landscape of world publishing's trade shows arrives this morning (May 17) from China where the Beijing International Book Fair is announcing that its 2021 edition will be hybrid and limited to physical attendance by Chinese and China-based publishers, in response to public health limitations.
What organizers are describing as "a large physical in-person fair" will offer stands that can be manned by Chinese assistants, and a service called Smart!Assistant (the exclamation point is theirs, not ours), as well as collective stands. These assistants, the fair's messaging says, will be able to "present international publishers titles to interested Chinese publishers and forward their contacts after the fair."
In the last month, there have been a few informative articles discussing how much authors earn:
The One Where Writing Books Is Not Really a Good Idea by Elle Griffin (Substack)
How Much Do Authors Make Per Book? by Sarah Nicolas (BookRiot)
How Much Do Authors Actually Earn? by Lincoln Michel (Substack)
All of these are excellent pieces, written and reported by people bringing transparency to the money side of the writing life. If you go and read them, you'll have a meaningful education in what to expect as a writer if you're just starting out. This is a subject near and dear to my heart and why I wrote The Business of Being a Writer. I'd heard too often-usually from speakers at AWP-that they wish someone had told them, before they went into six-figure debt for their MFA, that writing doesn't pay that well. Not even a minimum wage.
So I'm always happy to see the veil lifted. We need more discussion of what writers earn, with specific authors talking about their advances, royalties, sales, expenses, connections that led to earnings and profitable gigs-all of it. In an industry where talking about the money is often taboo or even shameful (few want to admit how little or how much they earn), the more we all open up, then the more we can normalize the practice of talking about art and commerce, and the more people can make the best decisions for their careers. And I'll disclose my own book earnings by the end of this post.
From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify?
Over the past five years, the Observer's annual debut novelist feature has showcased 44 writers, 33 of whom were female. You will find similar ratios on prize shortlists. Men were missing among the recent names of nominees for the Costa first novel award. Here, too, the shortlisted authors over the past five years have been 75% female. This year's Rathbones prize featured only one man on a shortlist of eight. The Dylan Thomas prize shortlist found room for one man (as well as a non-binary author), and so too did the Author's Club best first novel award, which prompted the chair of judges, Lucy Popescu, to remark: "It's lovely to see women dominating the shortlist."
But not everyone in publishing sees it in such benign terms. "Why is that ‘lovely to see'?" a male publisher emailed me shortly after the list was announced. "Can you imagine the opposite, a shortlist of five men and one woman, about which the chair says, ‘It's lovely to see men dominating the shortlist'?"
Launching a book is difficult and book launches are getting more difficult.
For as long as I have worked in publishing, I have wondered what makes some books work and others don't. I am sure everyone who works publishing books wonders the same things. When things shift, like they did in 2020, you wonder a little more-what is still true about your incomplete view of how it all works.
Book launches have been hard to do in the last 12 months. As the reality of the coronavirus settled in last March, publishers made decisions to push many releases later into 2020 or fully into 2021. Those pushes made sense to me with many venues either unavailable or overwhelmed for much of last year. Physical bookstores were closed. Media outlets were fully committed to COVID and the US elections. And readers weren't reading as many books. They were searching websites, twitter feeds, and podcasts for reporting on the current events.
That doesn't mean books weren't being purchased. The business category was down 11% for the year, but that still meant that millions of copies were purchased last year. With less launches though that meant that books that were being purchased were already published.
Most of us in the business of writing, publishing, and selling books share a beautiful belief: books are magic. Books have this incredible power to change lives, we know. They offer understanding, compassion, and connection, while at the same time, sweeping us through portals where there are dinosaurs and planets and people both flawed and triumphant.
The act of writing those books is often apportioned its own version of enchantment, too. Credit is given to an unseen force, which causes the characters to act on their own, against the will of the writer, even, or to a muse, that wispy, romantic source of inspiration. But I've found that there's another kind of magical entity at work when I write, something that offers a particular, practical magic.
Most of us in the business of writing, publishing, and selling books share a beautiful belief: books are magic. Books have this incredible power to change lives, we know. They offer understanding, compassion, and connection, while at the same time, sweeping us through portals where there are dinosaurs and planets and people both flawed and triumphant.
The act of writing those books is often apportioned its own version of enchantment, too. Credit is given to an unseen force, which causes the characters to act on their own, against the will of the writer, even, or to a muse, that wispy, romantic source of inspiration. But I've found that there's another kind of magical entity at work when I write, something that offers a particular, practical magic.
When Leigh Bardugo first came face to face with her characters, she wept. In a video that was uploaded everywhere from YouTube to TikTok, the author stepped on to the Budapest set of Netflix's Shadow and Bone and embraced her heroine, Alina - or rather, the actor Jessie Mei Li in costume. "You guys look amazing," Bardugo repeats in the video, between hugs and tears. "You look so incredible. It's actually eerie."
"Adaptation is scary," Bardugo says now. "I don't begrudge any author the right to say that they don't want to do it, because we've all seen it go wrong. It would be heartbreaking to be locked out of the house that you built. But I got lucky, because the people I collaborated with cared deeply - not just about the material, but the people who love it."
To understand how popular Bardugo's books are - more than 3m sold in English, translated into 41 languages, a No1 show on Netflix and countless passionate fans, including one Tiktoker steadily adapting the books into an unofficial musical - is to understand why young adult fiction itself is so significant.
My first crime novel, Seven Miles From Sydney, was published in 1987, when I was 29. I wrote it for the saddest of reasons. My good friend, the Australian screenwriter Miranda Downes, had been murdered two years earlier while jogging on a Queensland beach.
A decade older than me, Mandy was a major influence on my writer's journey when, in my early 20s, I lived in Sydney. I was working shifts in a railway station bookstall, returning on the ferry to bash out a story on my Olympia typewriter in the shade of a jacaranda tree. Mandy read through my drafts, occasionally laughing at bits intended to be poignant - her feedback was anything but tippy-toed. She encouraged me, discussed the pitfalls, agonies and the joys of writing, and sent me back to do redrafts. Hanging out with Mandy in her study, I'd gaze at scene cards lining the walls while she told me the importance of structure and suspense. Through Mandy I learnt how important it is to have a trusted few who believe you can write. She set me on the road.
It has taken nearly a decade to research and write, and runs to more than 750 pages. But The History Makers, described as "an epic exploration of those who write about the past", has itself been rewritten after its author failed to take into account enough black historians, academics and writers.
Richard Cohen was told by his publisher to produce new chapters and expand others after failing to sufficiently acknowledge the roles of black people and African Americans.
"It was to do with the publisher's sensitivities," says Cohen, who previously wrote the highly praised Chasing The Sun and How to Write Like Tolstoy. "I was then asked to write more, and have done about another 18,000 words."
Now, despite the rewrite, publication of the book in the US has been cancelled, according to sources in New York. Cohen%u2019s contract with Random House in America was signed some years ago and was said by sources to be for about $350,000. Yet, after seeking the changes on black history and historians, the publisher dramatically pulled out of the deal last Wednesday. Cohen%u2019s wife, the leading US literary agent Kathy Robbins, is urgently seeking a new publisher in the US.
I can't remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book where my enjoyment wasn't tied to the euphoric sense of achievement I got from finishing it. This is not because I don't love reading, or would rather watch television. No, it's because of a little app on my phone called Goodreads.
Home to about 90 million readers worldwide, Goodreads is a website that lets users track their reading and broadcast their tastes to the world - or, in my case, a few friends and vague acquaintances. At its core, it's a harmless concept: an online community for bookworms, and an opportunity to discover new books your friends have loved.
It's also extremely satisfying. Since joining Goodreads a few years ago, the annual roundup I receive tallying up the books I have finished that year has become the clinching point of my reading experience. I get a buzz from increasing my reading goal every 12 months, and from comparing how many pages I've turned or hours of audiobooks I've listened to with other people's numbers. I feel a sense of accomplishment every time I update my "progress" with a book.