The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. opened its doors for live, in-person events for the first time since 2019 this week, starting with an opening press conference, which featured fair director Juergen Boos, chairwoman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association Karin Schmidt-Friderichs, German journalist Muthu Sanyal, and Russian author Dimitry Glukhovsky. It was stated several times that while the fair was back to business, not everything was back to normal.
Links of the week October 18 2021 (42)
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:
18 October 2021
"The publishing industry has gone through one of the biggest stress tests...but one thing was missing, meeting in person," said Schmidt-Fridericks, who commented on how the public turned to reading as a form of recreation during the pandemic. "Social distancing did not mean a distance from the book....books provide answers to urgent questions. Books allow us to leave reality for a moment. They provide hope and courage," she said, adding "The last year has opened our eyes, and posed the question: 'Are we willing to change our way of life?' From diversity to climate change to public discourse. Books help us look at these issues."
The post-pandemic recovery is pushing China's tech-savvy population - 885 million digital consumers - even further online, not only for shopping, but also for entertainment, reading and learning, according to a New Media for Publishing research report. The report comes from Phoenix Publishing and Media Inc, one of the largest publishing groups in China, and NewRank.cn, a Shanghai-based company specialising in monitoring new media data.
Six major social video sharing platforms drove 90% of online book sales transactions in China in 2021, the report finds. One popular platform, WeChat, has seen book sales grow by 800% in six years. These book sales opportunities have been driven through the 1,800 accounts created by 583 Chinese publishers.
From online to social commerce Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and other short video platforms are growing into the most important social commerce platforms, bypassing traditional physical retail stores as well as established e-commerce platforms. The Chinese digital first national policy, the rapid growth of social media platforms, and tech-savvy consumers are three key factors contributing to this shift.
Though the pandemic caused financial hardship for many independent bookstores, particularly those in cities and states that forced retailers to close their doors for months, it has also paved the way for a mini-boom of bookstore openings. "I've gotten a lot of, ‘Why would you open during a pandemic? That's brave,' " said Kari Ferguson, who opened an online children's bookstore, Oh Hello Again, in June 2020, followed by a general bookstore of the same name in the Capitol Hill section of Seattle in December. "But really, the pandemic allowed me to open a physical location, because rent prices dropped on retail spaces due to store closings. The community has been so supportive. I think people are enthralled with the novelty of a business opening rather than shutting down during Covid." Ferguson said her previous experience opening and running a children's bookstore in Vancouver, Wash., has enabled her to keep costs down.
As interest in opening new bookstores continues, so too does interest in transforming long-established ones like Denver's Tattered Cover (see "Tattered Cover Broadens Its Reach," p. 6). Stores that had curtailed expansion plans as a result of last year's lockdowns have begun to scout new locations.
That's the case for 38-year-old Shakespeare & Co., which has two outlets in New York City and one in Philadelphia. "We are now cautiously looking at new store sites in the Northeast, if the rent is right," said CEO Dane Neller. "But our main focus is on our existing stores."
Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that Facebook will be a "metaverse company" in five years. What does that mean for kids?
After decades of unfulfilled promises, VR may finally be on the precipice of "going mainstream."
Nearly $3 billion of virtual reality headsets were reportedly sold during COVID-19 lockdowns. Facebook put its Oculus Quest 2 on the market in October 2020 for $299, the same price as an Xbox Series S. Preorders for the Quest 2 were five times higher than the Quest 1 in 2019, and they sold out at most large retailers before Christmas.
Estimates swing wildly, with reports of anywhere from 26 million to 171 million VR users worldwide today. Even at the low end, it's obvious why, in June, Facebook Reality Labs announced that it had started testing ads in a multiplayer VR game.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview a month later that he was surprised by how consumers were using VR: to socialize. He'd planned on Quest 2 "mostly being used for games," he said, and had thought that "a lot of these social interactions ... wouldn't come until later." He continued, "There are even experiences that I really hadn't thought about," boxing, or dancing, for instance, "just hanging out socially."
Anyone who follows publishing knows that it loves to celebrate a disruptor. Disruptor is a label thrown at anything new, and publishing is unusually easy to disrupt because it is particularly slow to change.
Back when I started She Writes Press in 2012, I was called a disruptor. I confess, I liked it. But it wasn't exactly accurate, and whenever I spoke at conferences about what we were doing-which was growing a reputable hybrid model based on the systems of traditional publishing-I let audiences know that legacy publishers had been cutting hybrid deals for years, which was an open secret. If I was doing anything disruptive, it was encouraging the authors we published to be proud of publishing nontraditionally. As I mentioned, it doesn't take much to be considered a disruptor in this space.
Now, nearly a decade into running She Writes Press and with more than 20 years of publishing experience under my belt, every time I see a new business model or idea being touted as the next big thing, all I can see is the giant boulder of resistance to change that defines this industry. Yes, new business models and profit-sharing and the democratization of publishing are all important, but we mostly face roadblocks to doing anything meaningfully disruptive because the major players are disincentivized to effect true change.
Does it sound grand to say I have always written? It took me thirty years to get published, but now the second in the series of Albert the tortoise picture books is launching.
One of my earliest memories is winning a prize for writing - and drawing. I was about 5 years old. It was a story about how milk became chocolate for a competition run by Cadbury's. The prize was chocolates and a certificate. My drawing was not that good. Fortunately, I've teamed with illustrator Eoin Clarke for Albert Upside Down and now Albert and the Wind. His pictures are definitely superior.
My approach to the books is the same as for newspapers and TV: once I have enough ideas, I write the story. For newspapers or TV, I would be making a story from gathered information. For the books, it's collected ideas.
A novelist friend told me that social media is pretty much mandatory these days, otherwise I could expect to remain plankton in a sea of fish all swimming toward the same accolades. As a poet, I'm already used to being a small fry, yet as I move into writing journalism and creative nonfiction, I've wondered whether I should log back on.
I quit Facebook in 2014 after a manic episode that reared its Medusa-like head online. My wall was a mess of incoherent thoughts, followed by all the email rejections I'd ever received, copied and pasted from my inbox. For the grand finale, I wrote that I would stage a hunger strike to protest the government's lackluster care for those living with mental illness. Soon after my last post-but not before I typed out the addresses, emails, and phone numbers of my closest friends (should the news media want to reach out to them for comment)-I was hospitalized and newly diagnosed with bipolar I.
As it turns out, extreme social embarrassment is an excellent way to curb a Facebook addiction. A true introvert and a perpetual validation seeker, I knew my pictures were never cute enough, my posts never witty enough, and I spent hours looking at the profiles of women that guys had dumped me for. "She rides an old-school motorcycle," I'd think. "Makes sense."
I still remember a one-star review my first novel got on Goodreads. It simply said, "The problem with this book is that it's bad."
At least I think that's what it said. I haven't looked at it since I saw it, slammed my laptop shut, and yelped out a laugh. I mean, it was objectively funny - a staccato declaration that couldn't help but incite admiration even though the person on the other end of the keyboard did not like my work.
But finding that comment was also the moment that made me decide it was time to stop reading online reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon, where anyone with internet access can leave critiques and numerical ratings of books. Social media would be harder to avoid, of course, but maybe I'd try to stop reading reviews on those platforms, too. It was a good idea. Fruitless, but good. Because authors now exist in a world where book coverage has shriveled at almost every major news outlet, professional reviews are few and far between, and in-person events rarely if ever take place these days thanks to the pandemic. As a result, most of the feedback we get these days comes from open-access online platforms where armchair critics abound. This ecosystem has caused so many authors to ask themselves the question: Should I read all my reviews?
The first time I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I failed. The story idea I'd come up with on October 31 ran out of steam after about 20,000 words and so did I. So I came back the next year ready to learn from my mistakes and get that coveted first NaNoWriMo "win." Here's what I did.
First, redefine winning
I don't really like the term "win" when it comes to NaNoWriMo because anything writers do to cultivate a regular creativity practice is a win, even if they don't write 50,000 words in a single month. And I've heard many in the writing community admit that setting such a lofty goal actually creates feelings of failure in an already fraught industry.
So redefine what it means to win NaNoWriMo right now. Do you want to write every day in November? Do you want to write 25,000 words? Do you want to sketch out the bare bones of your new story? Whatever your goal, make it something that you can reasonably achieve given the demands on your time.
I spent many hours as a child, sitting with my grandmother on her couch, watching black-and-white films from the days of classic Hollywood. Her favorites were mysteries, and if there happened to be a ghost or some paranormal element to it, so much the better. It was inevitable that when I started reading that I would gravitate towards mysteries and paranormal stories-with a particular love for ghost stories. I loved the Hardy Boys and the other series for kids; and I still love watching films from classic Hollywood. I eventually outgrew the Scholastic Book Club and the kids' mystery series (I read almost all of them), and happily spent hours examining the paperback racks at the Zayre's Department Store in our Chicago suburb, trying to decide which book to take home with my meager allowance.
I was always drawn to the books that had spooky-looking covers-the ones that now have countless websites, Pinterest boards, and blogs devoted to them, usually titled some variation of "Young Women With Long Hair Running Away from Spooky Houses in Nightgowns." I love these sites and being reminded of books and authors I used to enjoy, like Daoma Winston and Virginia Coffman and Susan Howatch, among others. But my favorite authors from that period - Barbara Michaels, Victoria Holt, Phyllis A. Whitney, and Daphne du Maurier-are favorites of mine to this day, and I love revisiting their work when I have the time. These women also had an enormous influence on my work.
Good children's literature is a serious business. Not serious as in boring or "improving", but serious in attention and ambition, serious about beauty and wonder, about engaging the brain but also the heart, about sadness and difficulty, but also about silliness and joy. Above all, it is serious about the legitimacy of a child's world - which is a world away from being child-ish.
Good children's books, from picture books to 500-page novels, can be seriously hard to write. Mark Haddon published 17 books before The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. His wise and beautiful The Sea of Tranquility took two years and 50 drafts, 50,000 words becoming 500. "Which seems," he has written, "like a fair trade. If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed."
What do we talk about when we talk about science fiction? Is it our hope for the future, or our fear of creating the very thing that will destroy us? If the most influential sci-fi books of all time are any indication, the answer is both.
The most influential sci-fi books of all time have shaped not just science fiction and its myriad sub-genres, but horror, fantasy, and manga, as well. Filmmakers have drawn inspiration for the stories between their covers, and real-world STEM developments have been made in their names. Without these books, for better or worse, our world would not be what it is today.
What book trends and what will be the "big book" of the fair are key questions that one always asks at the beginning of any Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two.. On October 11 and 12, the Frankfurt Book Fair launched its virtual conference program, dubbed the Frankfurt Conference, which sought to give a preview of the hottest topics for discussion.
The general topic of discussion was industry trends and, in particular, best practices for selling a variety of translation around the world. "In general the market for translated fiction is buoyant," Francois von Hurter, co-founder of Bitter Lemon Press, a U.K. publishing house focused on translated crime novels, said. "The old saw about only 3% of the books in the U.K. and U.S. are from translation is no longer accurate and that changed in the last few years, influenced, obviously, by sales of people like Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård."
Hurter added that the market seems to be more open and more receptive than in the past and that publishers should feel confident offering rights to titles for translation. "Sure, there's still a bit of a bias if people saying if it's a translation, it's a bit esoteric or elitist - and we have to overcome that. But in general, I think we're well on our way."
He cited continued interest, especially in the U.K., for translated crime fiction, and in particular, books in series. He added that when it comes to successful series, readers don't remember the name of an author, but rather, the name of hero or protagonist. "The silly example are the James Bond books," he said, citing the example of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander or Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano as two other examples. "It's the character's name that you want to build up as the brand, not the author