The Authors Guild, along with five other writers' groups and the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking the government to block Penguin Random House's pending acquisition of Simon & Schuster. In asking for the DoJ to step in, the organizations framed the proposed acquisition as part of the ongoing consolidation within the entire publishing industry-including in the bookselling field, which is now dominated by Amazon-that the letter writers say has gone too far.
Links of the week January 25 2021 (04)
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:
1 February 2021
"The time has also come to recognize that simply blocking takeovers is no longer sufficient," the letter states. "The Department of Justice must begin today to proactively restructure the entire U.S market for books in ways that also deal with the danger posed by Amazon."
As part of its reasoning to acquire S&S, PRH has said it needs to create a company that can work with Amazon on a more level playing field. The letter writers say that, while they agree that Amazon's monopoly power "poses a variety of threats to authors, publishers, independent booksellers, and readers, and American democracy itself," the organizations "absolutely disagree" that the answer is to let PRH buy S&S.
The US's prestigious Poetry magazine has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition dedicated to incarcerated poets, telling critics that "it is not our role to further judge or punish [people] as a result of their criminal convictions".
The magazine, which has been running since 1912 and is published by the Poetry Foundation, has just released its new issue focusing on work by "currently and formerly incarcerated people", their families and prison workers. It includes a poem by Kirk Nesset, a former professor of English literature who was released from prison last year after serving time for possessing, receiving and distributing child sexual abuse images in 2014. The investigation found Nesset in possession of more than half a million images and films of child sexual abuse.
In announcing another round of record financial results, Amazon said that founder and CEO Jeff Bezos will turn over his CEO duties to Andy Jassy, currently head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), sometime in this year's third quarter. Bezos will become executive chairman of Amazon.
With fourth quarter sales jumping 44%, sales for the full year at Amazon rose 38% over 2019, to $386.1 billion. Net income increased 84%, to $21.3 billion. In a statement, Bezos said that Amazon has become the company it is because of innovation. "When you look at our financial results, what you're actually seeing are the long-term cumulative results of invention," he said. "Right now, I see Amazon at its most inventive ever, making it an optimal time for this transition."
Jeff Bezos has been stirring things up in the book business ever since he launched Amazon.com 14 years ago, and this past year has been no exception. During the year, Amazon acquired Audible and AbeBooks, expanded BookSurge, saw sales of the Kindle (and Kindle titles) soar and managed to keep book sales growing at double-digit rates. In a marketplace undergoing tremendous transformation, Amazon is a leader in nearly every aspect. For being the driving force behind one of the industry's most dynamic, if sometimes controversial, companies, Bezos is PW's 2008 Person of the Year.
Pushing into new areas is a core mission for Amazon. "We view ourselves as explorers," Bezos says in an interview at Amazon's Seattle headquarters. "It's much more interesting looking at unexplored terrain" and, because of the Internet, "there is boundless unexplored terrain." Bezos's vision that people would be willing to buy books online prompted him to start Amazon and reflects his philosophy of taking a long-term view in all business matters. That strategy has sometimes drawn criticism from Wall Street, but, Bezos says, to succeed in new businesses you have to be willing to experiment and to accept possible failure.
Barriers to Entry
In 1995, the Village Voice published a two-part feature by journalist James Ledbetter titled "The Unbearable Whiteness of Publishing" that examined racial disparity in the American book and magazine publishing industries. The second part of the feature, which focused on book publishing, saw a readership boost online in 2020, after the Voice updated its digital archive. Twenty-five years later, the piece was still timely.
Over the past quarter-century, book publishing has made some strides in diversifying its workforce and the authors it publishes, thanks in part to the efforts of many recently founded advocacy groups and movements, including We Need Diverse Books, People of Color in Publishing, and the #OwnVoices movement. But while the book business's stance on, and dialogue surrounding, race has improved, there is still work to be done-including much that was laid out in Ledbetter's piece.
The parallels between publishing in 1995 and publishing today are astounding, unsurprising, and disheartening. In fact, the main threads of Ledbetter's story could very well have been plucked from any recent discussion surrounding publishing's lack of racial and ethnic diversity today. As a children's book editor who has discussed these issues with my own circle of friends and colleagues, I wanted to revisit this piece, illustrating what has changed and what hasn't.
Have you ever been lied to, deceived, or ripped off? Of course, you have! Unfortunately, we've all fallen prey to a lie at some point in our lives. We're even lied to in literature, and when that happens, we call it an unreliable narrator.
An unreliable narrator is a point of view character who you can't trust for one reason or another. We'll get into those reasons further down. And, while it's never good to lie in your real life, there are plenty of reasons to employ an unreliable narrator in your writing life.
We'll talk about those reasons and much more, but first, let's answer one crucial question.
Have you ever been lied to, deceived, or ripped off? Of course, you have! Unfortunately, we've all fallen prey to a lie at some point in our lives. We're even lied to in literature, and when that happens, we call it an unreliable narrator.
An unreliable narrator is a point of view character who you can't trust for one reason or another. We'll get into those reasons further down. And, while it's never good to lie in your real life, there are plenty of reasons to employ an unreliable narrator in your writing life.
We'll talk about those reasons and much more, but first, let's answer one crucial question.
Towards the end of 2020, a year spent supine on my sofa consuming endless internet like a force-fed goose, I managed to finish a beautifully written debut novel: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, which comes out next month. And yet despite the entrancing descriptions, I could barely turn two pages before my hand moved reflexively toward the cracked screen of my phone. Each time I returned to the novel I felt ashamed, and the shame only grew as I realised that, somehow, though the story was set in the present, and involved an often long-distance romance between two young people with phones, it contained not one single reference to what by then I considered a hallmark of present-day humanity: mindless scrolling through social media.
There was something sepia-toned about the book thanks to this absence, recalling love stories from previous eras even as it spoke powerfully to more urgent contemporary issues. Azumah Nelson's narrator mentions phones in the context of calls and private text messages, but the characters are never sullied by association with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Was this because they were too sensible, ethical or self-assured to use such things, or is the omnipresence of these platforms now so implicit, in literature as in life, that they hardly seemed worth mentioning?
Write what you know. Stay in your lane. Find your niche.
On the one hand, everyone tells you to think bigger, but then they also seem to be saying the opposite: think smaller.
The advice to write for a niche makes sense. It's much easier to market books when they address discrete audiences or solve specific problems. When you can clearly describe the value you provide, whether as an author or in your career, people will know how to refer you to others.
But this advice is tough to hear and act on. For me, the word niche summons an image of a small nook in a wall that might hold a single vase. It is, by definition, restrictive and confining. No one wants to crawl into a tiny box and commit to spending their career there. (That sounds boring!) You have grander ambitions for your book.
At its heart, "finding your niche" is about positioning yourself and your book in the eyes of others. You do need to differentiate your book from the thousands of others on your topic. If you're building a career around your book, be able to explain your specific take on the subject. If you're building a broader author career, over time you will differentiate yourself as well.
Christopher Little, who as a struggling literary agent took a chance on a scrappy submission about tween-age wizards - even though he once disdained children's fiction as a money-loser - and built it into the most successful literary empire in history on the strength of its lead character, Harry Potter, died on Jan. 7 at his home in London. He was 79.
J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, was an unpublished, unemployed single mother in Edinburgh in 1995 when she sent Mr. Little the first three chapters of her first book after finding his name in a directory of literary agents. Knowing nothing about the business, she picked him because his name made him sound like a character from a children's book.
Mr. Little submitted the manuscript for "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" to 12 publishers. He received 12 rejections in response, before selling it for £2,500, or about $3,400 (the equivalent of about $5,800 today). It was a meager amount, but his genius was in the details: He sold only the rights to publish it in Britain and the Commonwealth, and he asked for high royalties.
Janie Brown has put into book form 30 years of experience of caring for cancer sufferers and their loved ones
"You have cancer" are three words heard by 1,000 families every day in the UK. For most people, a cancer diagnosis lands as suddenly as a tree falling on a windy night in the forest, out of the blue, with little if any warning. The news of cancer fells a person and like the tree, the diagnosis takes many others down with it. Cancer happens to one person's body and affects every aspect of that person's life. Cancer also happens to partners, spouses, loved ones and friends whose lives are similarly changed forever. Many people are cured from cancer, and those who are not seek the courage to face the ends of their lives, with the support and wisdom of their community.
Within two weeks of publication in March 2020, the UK was locked down by the global pandemic, the bookshops were closed, book and media events were cancelled, and I had to rush back to Canada before the border closed. Regardless of this setback, it appears that one year later, at the brink of the paperback publication, and in another lockdown similar to the first, these 20 teaching stories are landing in the laps of the people who need their reassurance, and that is all that really matters.
25 January 2021
I was reading a great interview on CrimeReads.com the other day-Paraic O'Donnell talking to Lee Child, genius author of the Jack Reacher novels-and they has this wonderful debate about the unreality of fiction. When I say it out loud, it sounds obvious, but it came up twice. And Lee said: ‘The only two real people in the transaction are the author and the reader.'
It's absolutely true. Even if I put the Queen of England in the heart of my action-like in the ‘The Crown' on TV-it isn't actually her. It's a fictional appearance by a ghost of a real person. If I put the 16th century Catherine de' Medici on the page, a woman who history pretty much assures us was an embodiment of some kind of evil-and I do in The City of Tears-it's still just a ghost of her presence.
And yet ...
I'm a writer of historical fiction. I'm a storyteller, but the facts of history are the framework for my novels, the backdrop. When my modern-day heroine Alice finds the cave in my 2005 novel Labyrinth, she's opening a window on a genuine documented past, a place where people lived and loved and fought and died. Where leaders sacrificed themselves for their people. Where leaders sacrificed their people for personal gain. When my new ‘hero' Minou, in The City of Tears, is in Paris or Amsterdam, she is an imaginary witness to real history.
Start in the middle.
Get all the important characters on the page in the first chapter.
Reveal what the protagonist wants.
Reveal the protagonist's vulnerabilities.
Establish what's at stake.
There are a whole lot of books on the craft of fiction out there, and it can feel like every one of them makes the case for one thing your book must do if it is going succeed. And for the most part, their recommendations are good.
But as far as I'm concerned, the novel is novel, in that it's constantly being reinvented, which means precepts like those above can go right out the window if it serves the story.
There's only one thing that any novel must do if it's going to succeed, and that's arouse the reader's curiosity.
According to the emerging body of neuroscience associated with fiction, as soon as a reader's curiosity is aroused, dopamine is released into their bloodstream, signaling that important information is on the way. The reader starts making predictions about what happens next, whether they're aware of it or not, and this in turn keeps them turning the pages to find out.
What's a mystery all about? The ending? Well, of course, you say-the denouement, the unraveling of the clues, the big reveal. If it's too easy to guess the ending before that very moment, or if the ending doesn't seem to mesh with the clues provided by the author you're disappointed with it. It's a lousy mystery, right?
Really? Ever re-read a mystery? Even though you know the solution? (If you're like me, of course, you can re-read it a year later because you've forgotten the solution, but that's another matter.) But what's the pleasure in re-reading if the entire pleasure is in the solution dangled like a carrot before you? Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright, opines that a play which depends on keeping its secrets isn't worth viewing twice-which he found out the hard way. Which brings us to the mystery of Sherlock Holmes. If you've read a Holmes story, chances are you've read another, and if you've read two, you've probably read them all and re-read them all, and chances are you've picked every bone of that corpus clean, with a great deal of relish. Why on earth would you do that? Where's the mystery in that?
Nosy Crow is this morning 'delighted to announce a call for picture book submissions from writers of colour', with a view to increasing the diversity of its picture book list. The scheme is also open to writer-illustrators, who can submit illustrations along with their picture book stories.
According to Nosy Crow: 'For a period of four weeks starting today, 21 January, writers and writer-illustrators are encouraged to submit their stories, which will be reviewed by editors and designers on the Nosy Crow picture book team. Texts should be suitable for children aged around 3-5 and can be in rhyme or prose. They can feature human characters, animal (or fantasy!) characters, or a mixture - and they can be about anything you can imagine!
'Submissions are free and can come from anywhere in the world, but they must be written in the English language and must be previously unpublished. Writers and writer-illustrators must be aged 18 or older.'
More at: https://nosycrow.com/submissions2021
Kate Wilson, managing director, said: "With a third of our primary school age children coming from minority ethnic origins according to the Department for Education, it is more important than ever that the books we publish reflect the lived experience of contemporary children, and we look forward to redressing a balance and finding new writers, new stories and new perspectives."
Twice in the last three years I have taught an undergraduate course at Stanford called "Unfinished Novels." The plan is simple: my students and I read a selection of pretty old novels that were left unfinished, either because the author died at some point during the composition process, or (in one case) because they lost interest in a project that had once appeared worthwhile. Along the way, we talk and write about whatever we find.
Even if these novels sound good, maybe the prospect of reading them does not. With so many brilliant finished novels across world literature to choose from, why would you purposely suffer the defects of an unfinished one? Then there%u2019s the question of genre. Doesn%u2019t the payoff of a courtship novel by Austen, or a murder mystery by anyone, come from finding out how every loose end is tied up, every problem resolved, once and for all?
Giving away the audiobook for Michelle Paver's Viper's Daughter - read by Sir Ian McKellen, no less - may seem like a dumb idea to most publishers, but Head of Zeus are not most publishers.
I've been generally disappointed in audiobook sales this past year. I would have expected them to surge, given lockdown, and the fact that most of us now spend our entire working life AND recreational time in front of a computer. Surely a bit of "me" time with your iPod and a nice piece of escapist fiction would be just the ticket?
Giving away the audiobook for Michelle Paver's Viper's Daughter - read by Sir Ian McKellen, no less - may seem like a dumb idea to most publishers, but Head of Zeus are not most publishers. I've been generally disappointed in audiobook sales this past year. I would have expected them to surge, given lockdown, and the fact that most of us now spend our entire working life AND recreational time in front of a computer. Surely a bit of "me" time with your iPod and a nice piece of escapist fiction would be just the ticket?
By many measures, 2020 was an unusual year in publishing, and that extended to Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s bestsellers lists. In a rare occurrence, the Big Five publishers' hold over the adult hardcover and paperback bestsellers lists declined in 2020 compared to 2019, with independent publishers gaining ground.
PW runs two hardcover and two paperback lists each week, and each list has 20 titles on it, meaning that in the course of a year there are 2,080 hardcover and 2,080 paperback positions on the lists total. On the hardcover side, the Big Five controlled 89.1% of all available bestseller slots-down from 92.5% in 2019. They had an even greater loss in paperback, with their share of positions falling to 79%, versus 83.7% in 2019. And among the top publishers there was a bit of shuffling. Simon & Schuster gained ground on the hardcover side, moving it ahead of Hachette and Macmillan to become the #3 house in terms of bestsellers. Hachette paperbacks performed well, gaining ground on HarperCollins and Penguin Random House. Macmillan lost share in both hardcover and paperback formats.
Underestimate the significance of this deal at your peril. This is another seismic shift that will go largely unnoticed and unremarked for now, but will send ripples across the global publishing arena for years to come.
Print? Check. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing.? Check. Audiobooks? Check. Podcasts? We're getting there. Online reading? As in Wattpad? Be serious. That's for preteen girls who don't mind reading unedited drivel from talentless wannabe authors. There's no money to be made here! Well, except when there is. That $600 million South Korea's Naver is dropping to buy Canada-based Wattpad is not loose change. This is a serious business investment few could match and even fewer would squander on a business that had no profit potential.
Netflix's blockbuster show, Bridgerton, has led to renewed demand for the Regency-era novels by Julia Quinn that form the basis for the eight-episode program. Netflix released Bridgerton on December 25 and since that time, HarperCollins's Avon imprint reports that it has sold a total of 750,000 copies of books from the series, including 285,000 copies last week.
The official tie-in to the show, The Duke and I, is available in mass market, trade paperback, and e-book editions. Although Avon did not break out sales by format, the digital edition of The Duke and I, as well as e-book editions of the other titles in the series, appear to be driving sales.