That 10% fee buys a novelist like me more than the chance of a big book deal - from a hand with the DIY to a shoulder to cry on after yet another knockback
Links of the week June 28 2021 (26)
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:
28 June 2021
A few weeks after the sudden death of my agent, Deborah Rogers, in 2014 the colleague deputed to take me on phoned. "I've found something in Deborah's desk."
"Yes?"
"A letter from you. To you."
"Ah."
"It looks like she'd read it. Remember it?"
Of course I remembered it. Frustrated after months of trying to get a response to a novel, I had written a letter to myself, enclosed a self-addressed envelope, and asked her to tick the appropriate response: "Novel read", "novel needs work", "novel submitted", "novel sold for a: £1,000, b: £10,000, c: £100,000". Petty-minded and, given her support and encouragement over the years, unforgivable. But, being Deborah, she took it well.
In 1938 my father, aged 14, was packed onto a crowded train in his hometown of Vienna and sent to England, without his family, on the Kindertransport. The train travelled through the night, passing through Holland, where kind Dutch women waited on the train platform to give the children cakes and hot drinks, until it eventually arrived in Kent. My father, who spoke no English, was met by one Mr Marx, who spoke a little German, and so began a new life as a refugee.
For so many of the diaspora, the Holocaust was a call to keep their faith close, a light by which to define them, when so much of who they were had been taken away. For my dad, the early trauma had the opposite effect, seeing him drift away from religion altogether. As a young man, he wondered how to uncover life's meaning when there was a god who could sanction such atrocities. But he kept a tight hold on his cultural heritage, a strong seam of which ran through his life. Instead, he discovered a sense of safety and found solace in science: he was a keen astronomer, a militant atheist and rationalist. Some might consider this an interesting counterpoint to a career built entirely around the arts; first briefly as an actor, then later as a film director (he said he was a terrible performer).
Billed as an "epic exploration of who writes about the past", The History Makers was due out this Friday before being serialised on Radio 4 in the UK. But publication has been postponed at the last minute amid bitter rows over race and appropriation.
The Observer reported last month that author Richard Cohen was asked by his US publishers to rewrite part of his 800-page book, which covers 2,500 years, after failing to take into account enough black historians, academics and writers. Cohen added an 18,000-word chapter, plus extra material in existing chapters, to include individuals such as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the sociologist WEB Du Bois and the author Toni Morrison.
To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst's couch is in fact a bed-after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst's bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.
In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier.
"‘Natalia' was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting," I read and continued: "When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch."
VIDEO FROM LIT HUB:
DUOS Clip - Japanese Breakfast & Brandon TaylorThese two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.
Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military - using novels to try to pinpoint the world's next conflicts. Are they on to something?
The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.
The academics weren't AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks.
The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire value chain: touching every step from how authors got money to how readers got books. Significant institutional players were lost in both prior disruptions, and all the ones who remained had to change their models and practices significantly.
The cause of the disruption on both prior occasions and now was the introduction of asymmetric competition. Before 1995, publishing and retailing were the province of entities that did it in a businesslike way, usually for profit but always within an organizational structure dedicated to their publishing or retailing activity.
The book business is in the early stages of its third great disruption in the past quarter century. The first two both changed the shape of the industry and created winners and losers across the entire value chain: touching every step from how authors got money to how readers got books. Significant institutional players were lost in both prior disruptions, and all the ones who remained had to change their models and practices significantly. The cause of the disruption on both prior occasions and now was the introduction of asymmetric competition. Before 1995, publishing and retailing were the province of entities that did it in a businesslike way, usually for profit but always within an organizational structure dedicated to their publishing or retailing activity.
Young TikTok users are sharing their passion for books with millions - bringing titles they love to life online and reshaping the publishing world, all in under a minute
In August 2020, Kate Wilson, a 16-year-old from Shrewsbury, posted on the social media video platform TikTok a series of quotes from books she had read, "that say I love you, without actually saying I love you". Set to a melancholy soundtrack, the short video plays out as Wilson, an A-level student, holds up copies of the books with the quotes superimposed over them. "You have been the last dream of my soul," from A Tale of Two Cities. "Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same," from Wuthering Heights. "Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own," from Jane Eyre. It has been viewed more than 1.2m times.
Giorgia Cerruti reports on how the charity works with a global network of partners to distribute appropriate books to libraries, schools, universities, refugee camps and prisons round the world
My job is, in short, to connect people with books. I work with our network of over 100 NGO and library partners round the world to establish where the books that publishers donate to us here in London could have the greatest impact. It is a brilliant job - and our charity's work is very much needed, because there are still so many people who have only a few books, or no books at all. Our partners cannot afford to buy books, so the books we provide often offer people's only opportunity to read. What we do is much more than sending books - it's about getting the right book to the right community. And for that, you need partnerships.