IN 1995, I WENT to work as a writer and editor for Book World, the then-standalone book-review section of The Washington Post. I left a decade later, two years before Amazon released the Kindle ebook reader. By then, mainstream news outlets like the Post were on the ropes, battered by what sociologist John B. Thompson, in Book Wars, calls "the digital revolution" and its erosion of print subscriptions and advertising revenue. The idea that a serious newspaper had to have a separate book-review section seems quaint now. Aside from The New York Times Book Review, most of Book World's competitors have faded into legend, like the elves departing from Middle-earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Their age has ended, though the age of the book has not.
Links of the week September 6 2021 (36)
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:
6 September 2021
Nobody arrives better equipped than Thompson to map how the publishing ecosystem has persisted and morphed in the digital environment. An emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge and emeritus fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, Thompson conducts his latest field survey of publishing through a rigorous combination of data analysis and in-depth interviews. Book Wars comes stuffed with graphs and tables as well as detailed anecdotes. The data component can get wearisome for a reader not hip-deep in the business, but it's invaluable to have such thorough documentation of the digital publishing multiverse.
Books are not big macs or baked beans - every new book is a unique educational tool and potentially life-changing. But each title also represents an array of commercial risks, and a huge investment of expertise and labour from writers, agents and publishing teams. That's why a post-Brexit shift towards "international exhaustion", in which copyright rules are weakened, would fatally undermine an exceptional system that plays a vital role in life the global book trade.
Like many agents, I represent a whole range of writers, from veteran top ten bestsellers to debut authors and those finishing that "difficult second novel". What they have in common is immense hard work and no easy route to a sustained writing career - some holding down more than one job to make a living before their breakthrough.
"Don't give up the day job," agents advise when signing new writers - with acclaimed authors like Monique Roffey, Bernardine Evaristo and Val McDermid writing multiple books before major turning points in their careers. As a poet, I've experienced the long and twisty road to publication too and know how crucial the UK's intellectual property system is to the health of the industry and the wellbeing of writers.
The hoopla around the release of Sally Rooney's new novel on Tuesday - with bookshops opening early, and queues of shoppers eager to lay their hands on Beautiful World, Where Are You - has contributed to the image of a publishing industry in rude health. Last year had the highest sales in eight years. Yet authors, bricks-and-mortar bookshops and publishers alike fear that the industry faces a powerful new threat, if cheap editions legitimately produced for an overseas market are allowed to be sold in the UK. Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernardine Evaristo and others have warned that the effect on writers would be devastating.
EU regulations meant that UK producers could prevent the importation of such books into Britain; in the wake of Brexit, the government is considering reversing this.
What was it like seeing book sales explode during the coronavirus pandemic? Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster's president and CEO, couldn't help quoting Charles Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
"A lot of people had extra time at home and they turned to books," Karp said. Virtual sales and appearances, meanwhile, "made it easier to reach readers directly."
Still, it's been a rocky 18 months for U.S. publishers, whose jobs are defined by predictability: They work on monthslong publishing schedules, orchestrate book tours and promotional plans and calibrate printings based on expectations.
As COVID-19 swept across the world last year, they had to throw many of those plans out the window - canceling tours, delaying books and having their media rollouts drowned out by breaking news. Nevertheless, fueled by online sales and the demand of the quarantined and bored, total unit sales for print books in the generally flat industry rose 8% between 2019 and 2020, according to NPD BookScan.
This fall promises something almost as valuable as a boom year: a return to some semblance of normal.
In a follow to Monday's (August 30) update on the United States' market, NPD BookScan's research team has released a genre-specific look at the thriller and suspense category, finding that US sales have dropped six percent in the last year.
Thrillers and suspense are probably most popular in the United Kingdom's market, where they reign at the top of the list, much as romance seems to do in the American market. But the category is a major one in the States, making its apparent trend toward a softening interesting.
"Part of the declining growth in thrillers seems to be because of changes in consumer tastes," McLean says-which could indeed be predictive of more weakening in the category.
"But it's also true that books that have traditional elements of thriller and suspense books are now being categorized in in other hot areas of the fiction market," she says, "like women's contemporary fiction, general fiction, and young adult fiction, where they're driving growth." That trend of thriller and suspense content going into other traditional categorizations might be what's behind the downward pressure on the category.
"Platform Nine and Three-Quarters (Platform 9 ¾) is a platform at King's Cross Station in London. Magically concealed behind the barrier between Muggle Platforms Nine and Ten, this Platform is where Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry students board the Hogwarts Express on 1 September, in order to attend school. In order for someone to get onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, they must walk directly at the apparently solid metal ticket box dividing Platforms Nine and Ten. There is a guard stationed just outside the entrance, in order to regulate entries and exits from the platform."
Indeed all children's worlds are an inextricable mixture of fantasy and reality. We all have our own personal memories of our childhood-not to mention stories about the imagined worlds of other childhoods. One child I know of (not mine) when, about two-and-a-half, disappeared under the table at a motorway café and reappeared to announce that he and his imaginary friend Dees (making his first appearance on this occasion) had been parking their yaks. During the ensuing year it turned out that Dees had relatives with further yaks, so that whenever he did not want to do something (such as going to the dentist) he would explain that he had 93 yaks to park before he could enter. This, naturally, might take some time . . . Another child-a girl confined to her bed for two years from the age of 12 and told by her doctors that she might never walk normally again-composed dramatic short stories, plays and even operas (an art-form which she had never encountered).
Thirty years ago, Helen Mirren stepped into the role of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, and an icon was born. In the series Prime Suspect (which ran from 1991-2006), Mirren's Tennison created an indelible archetype of the female investigator: a take-no-crap leader battling the overtly misogynist and often corrupt institution that she nevertheless believed in very deeply.
In less talented hands, Tennison could have been a superficial and unconvincing character. With her booze and her chain smoking, her dysfunctional personal relationships and her obsession with her work, she could have been little more than a simple gender-reversal: your typical grizzled male detective slipped into silk blouses and sensible heels. But the magic of Prime Suspect lies in the alchemy between the character, conceived by series creator and writer Lynda LaPlante, and Mirren's own charisma, which gives Tennison verve and nuance. Tennison's tough-minded doggedness and Mirren's sexy irreverence and subtle fragilities remake the kind of role normally played by a man. They make a dynamic and unforgettable character that allows the show to explore and challenge the gendered norms of the police procedural. Over seven series (of two episodes each), Prime Suspect draws a gripping and thoughtful portrait of Tennison-how her toughness and softness, her skill and her compulsions, are all shaped by her place as a woman in a man's game.
Every so often I set out to read as many books as I can by a single writer as I can in a single year. It's the best way I know to do a deep dive into a major writer's work, and to try to understand them in the context of their own career: I inevitably come to see what a writer excelled at from the start, what they had to learn as they went, and what they never got quite right; I become familiar with the ideas and topics and tropes they returned to most often, learning how their ideas and aesthetics changed over time. It's a rewarding and engaging way to read, and every writer I've read this way has become a lifelong favorite, including Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Anne Carson, Toni Morrison, and, most recently, Ursula K. Le Guin.
In early 2018, I read Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time, on a whim. I'd owned the book for years: why hadn't I ever read it? I don't really have an answer. I do know that up to that point I'd read about Le Guin more than I'd read her fiction: I'd enjoyed "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" and a few other stories, a handful of essays and interviews, her acceptance speech from when she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. I'd heard about Gethen and Anarres and Urras, a little, and Earthsea, a little more, but I hadn't been to those places yet-they were like countries on another continent that I knew my friends had visited but I couldn't quite picture.
The first time I considered the relationship between fiction and research was during a writing workshop-my first-while I watched the professor eviscerate some poor kid's story about World War II. And yeah, the story was bad. I remember the protagonist being told to "take cover" and then performing several combat rolls to do so.
"You're college students," the professor said. "Write about college students."
Later, better professors would clarify for me that research, with a touch of imagination, can be a perfectly valid substitute for experience. But that's always where the conversation stopped. If we ever uttered the word "research" in a workshop, we did so in a weaponized way to critique a piece of writing: "This desperately needs more research," we'd all agree, and then nothing more would be said. We'd all just pretend that everyone in the room already knew how to integrate research into fiction and that the failures of the story were merely a lack of effort rather than skill. Secretly, though, I felt lost.
I knew research was important, and I knew how to research. My questions all had to do with craft. How do I incorporate research into fiction? How do I provide authenticity and detail without turning the story into a lecture? How much research is too much? Too little?
Much has been written about the style and mood of William Friedkin's The French Connection (1971). Commentators are fond of identifying influences ranging from Costa-Gavras' Z and the Maysles brothers work, to the more recently noted Kartemquin documentaries of the 1960s. There's been a great deal of talk about long takes, overlapping dialogue and the film's "gritty" verite style generally.
What's so interesting to me, however, is how the elements of cinematography and sound establish the important formal elements of the police procedural in The French Connection. The scenes unfold in a manner so completely artful and seamless that we forget we're watching a Hollywood cop film. Indeed, what's unorthodox (and liberating) about the film is not that it deviates significantly from the procedural formula, but that the elements of formula are artfully hidden in its style.
The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie - but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee.
Several comic book writers and artists have announced lucrative deals to provide exclusive content for the California-based company founded four years ago, in some cases eschewing contracts with Marvel and DC to do so.
Among the comics writers making the move is James Tynion IV, whose star is certainly in the ascendant, and who turned down a three-year contract writing Batman for DC in order to write for Substack. Advertisement Tynion, who was earlier this year named best writer in the comic industry "Oscars" the Eisner awards, has two series in development as TV shows, and scripts The Nice House on the Lake series for 2019s "mature readers" imprint Black Label, as well as penning Batman.
At 30, the Normal People author is already the most talked-about novelist of her generation. As she readies her third novel, she's bracing for more (unwanted) attention
Sally Rooney appears before a stark, white background, stripped of even the most incidental feature. It makes me laugh: in 18 months of Zoom meetings, I've encountered people in their bedrooms and home offices, in front of bookcases and windows - situations that, no matter how bland or contrived, still betray some minor, contextualising detail. The empty staging today is, evidently, something that Rooney, after two hit novels and the rapid onset of an unwelcome fame, clearly wishes might extend further than a video call. Later in our conversation she will tell me celebrity is a condition that, in many cases, "happens without meaningful consent - the famous person never even wanted to become famous". Now, after exchanging greetings, I mention the singularity of the naked white walls and she laughs and says merely, "Yes."
Writing suspense is all about building tension. Writing romance is also all about building tension-just a different kind. These rising tensions can be achieved in all sorts of different ways. Please note: my way may be very different than your way. Take my words as suggestions or thought provokers as you discover what works best for you. And if you write suspense without the romance or vice versa, I hope you'll take away what you find most helpful.
If you're writing a romantic suspense, the task is to build the tension in both the suspense and the romance at the same time. It's like a braided rope. Each strand has strength and purpose, but once they're braided, the finished product has more strength and becomes an entity all its own. If you can rip out either the suspense or the romance and still have a coherent story, the elements aren't sufficiently braided together.
Beloved children's author and illustrator Jill Murphy has died at the age of 72. Murphy was best known for writing children's book series The Worst Witch and The Large Family.
Murphy started writing The Worst Witch while still at school, completing her first manuscript at the age of 18. Her mother once commented that Murphy and her two friends looked like witches in their dark school uniforms, which gave the author the idea for her first book. Murphy initially struggled to publish her first novel, as many publishers at the time worried that children would find the book about witches too frightening. But the tale of clumsy young witch Mildred Hubble and her adventures at Miss Cackle's Academy stole the hearts of generations of children, selling more than 3m copies and becoming one of the most successful Young Puffin titles.