Despite a slow December due to the omicron surge, 2021 was "another year of solid growth" at Barnes & Noble, according to CEO James Daunt, who spoke with PW from a hotel in Stamford, Ct., where he was on the final leg of a national tour to meet with store managers. Daunt, with the financial backing of Elliott Advisors, took over B&N in September 2019. He said sales in the first eight months of 2021 were running 5% to 6% above 2019 levels, and November was very strong, but then Covid infection rates started to spike again. (The interview took place February 28, the day it was announced the Elliott/Daunt team had acquired the U.K. chain Blackwell's.)
Links of the week March 7 2022 (10)
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:
7 March 2022
Daunt said book sales were strong in 2021, and that sales of toys, puzzles, and educational games were also up. The café and newsstand businesses, though, have still not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. Sales at physical stores improved over 2020, and while online sales dipped, they did not give back all of the ground they gained over the past two years.
Backlist titles drove the overall sales increase, sparked by the impact of BookTok, according to Daunt. The success of BookTok in getting young people interested in books is in keeping with a trend he said he has been seeing for years: teenagers and young adults are the main drivers of book sales. "I don't make money from old people, I make money from young people," he explained.
After opening its first bookstore with much fanfare on November 3, 2015, this week Amazon confirmed a report from Reuters that it is closing all of its physical bookstores, as well as its 4-star and pop-up stores, which carry a mix of items, including some books. All told, Amazon will close about 68 stores, including its 24 bookstores.
The first Amazon Books outlet was opened in the University Village shopping mall in Seattle, and the chain continued to grow, with stores popping up in 12 states as well as in Washington, D.C. Numbering 24 outlets, Amazon Books had been one of the largest bookstore chains in the country.
The company said closing dates will vary by location, and that to alert customers, it will post signs in the local stores. Employees will be given the option to work at other nearby Amazon stores, or to receive severance.
'In a strange way lockdown meant I fell in love with the business all over again as I experienced what the bookshop meant to me, our staff and our customers'
The early years of our business saw hundreds of independent bookshops close, increasing ebook sales prompting fears for the paper versions, and a global economic crash. Despite the gloom, we stuck to our core values of recommending books to people, creating a welcoming environment in the bookshop, going the extra mile, innovating and bringing high-profile authors to Chepstow, and we made it through the storm.
Amid a flurry of editors switching to becoming agents, those who have made the move suggest the pandemic and publishing's long hours have prompted the switch, as well as the two skill-sets becoming increasingly similar.
Tran Van Sang believes there is more movement within the industry overall, including publicists such as Emma Bal moving from Bloomsbury to The Madeline Milburn Literary Agency, and Emma Herdman who went the opposite way, from agent to editor.
The pandemic has inspired more introspection about job motivation prompting change in the industry, she suggested. "I think the reason for each shift is individual, but in trying to draw broader strokes, it's probably fair to say that a lot of people have been looking at their jobs in a new light since the start of the pandemic, and perhaps reconsidering what they feel is important, or what it is they really want to do, and whether their current role is giving that to them.
Transatlantic author Catriona Ward, 41, published two well-received gothic horror novels, both historical, before switching things up and setting her third, The Last House on Needless Street, on the edge of a forest in contemporary America. It became her breakout book, a bestseller described by Stephen King as a "true nerve-shredder". Now she's back with Sundial, a lyrical, twisty tale of a toxic mother-daughter bond that begins as suburban domestic noir and soon hurtles into weirder, more terrifying territory in the Mojave desert. Ward spoke via Zoom from her home on Dartmoor, where she ascribed a light switching itself off mid-interview to the quirks of country living - either that or a spectral presence making itself felt.
Does it chafe to be described as a horror writer?
Like most terms applied to books, it's both really useful and not useful at all, but I love horror. I think it's one of the most expressive, most empathetic genres you can work in. Everyone feels afraid at some point in their life. Reading is a sustained act of telepathy or empathy, and reading horror is even more profound than that: it's asking people to share real vulnerabilities of yours and open themselves up to their own. It is like going down a tunnel, and hopefully the writer is leading the way with a torch, taking the reader's hand.
Crime! Mystery! Suspense! Oh, my! If this were Oz, crime/mystery/suspense writers would have paved the yellow brick road with vivid descriptions bathed in subtleties; they would have released clues as needed to move the story forward; they would have built in a side path or two that led to a blind alley; and, in the end, they would have lifted the curtain to reveal the Wizard hiding in Emerald City. Pulling back that curtain exposed hidden truths in L. Frank Baum's story. Yes, truths! Oh, my!
Packaged in many ways, truth is the backbone of every story that satisfies the reader, no matter if we write murder mysteries, thrillers with its many subgroups, historical suspense, or real-life crime novels. Truth can be the meticulous historical accuracy Ken Follett artfully portrayed in Pillars of the Earth. While Kingsbridge is fictional, we see, smell, and hear the sights how Follett builds the cathedral and the town around it, stone-by-stone, house-by-house, event-by-event. We are transported to that time to "live" in the book, to feel the tensions that run through it because we care about the characters. Likewise, we find an authenticity in Umberto Ecco's The Name of the Rose. Ecco immerses us in details and minutiae that give the book its air of verisimilitude. We believe it. We transfer "truths" to the story that may not have existed but were earned by its masterful descriptions. We care not that . . . Rose is not historically accurate.
Given the increase in book-to-screen deals in recent years, and the tendency of the TV/movie industry to build off existing intellectual property, it's natural for authors to wonder if their own work is suitable for adaptation-or if they can increase their chances of writing something that will be adapted. In a panel last year at the virtual Bologna Book Fair, several players in the industry discussed what they look for in projects.
Compared to scripts, books might have a better chance of becoming a recommended project. Annie Nybo, a reader for Netflix, sifts through more than 200 potential projects in a year for the streaming service. Her job requires her to read a book or script, write a three-page summary or synopsis as well as a one-page analysis, and rate the project on five criteria. Those criteria include premise, structure (hitting the plot beats), story line (how that plot is working), character, and dialogue. Even for books, Nybo is able to rate dialogue based on how the characters speak and if they sound unique (versus everyone kind of sounding alike).
Last year, Nybo read 215 scripts and books combined and recommended eight of them. That's about a 4% acceptance rate for projects coming to her. As far as books specifically, she read 22 and recommended four. That's a 14% acceptance rate and half of what she recommended. (Stand proud, authors, agents, and publishers!)
In the spring of 2019, I found myself tangled up in a writing riddle that on the surface seemed easy to solve but which became more and more difficult the longer I looked at it. I couldn't figure out how to order, or re-order, the chapters in my book. It seemed like a stupid problem to have, a problem I ought to be able to solve quickly. My first novel had just been published and I'd waded my way through all sorts of editorial wastelands with that one but this was a new problem. My agent had given me notes on my latest manuscript and in those notes he said something was off about the order of the chapters. His notes echoed almost exactly what my partner had said to me upon reading any earlier draft. My partner and my agent are the two people I trust most with my writing. Something was wrong.
I was making no headway - so I set the manuscript aside for a while and focused instead on preparing for the creative writing classes I was going to teach at my new job in the fall. I spent my afternoons reviewing notes I had taken on the classes I taught the previous year while in residency at UNC Chapel Hill and one day I stumbled onto a scribbled marginal scrawl that read, "Ask students if anyone still makes mixtapes?"
On April 13, 1922, two homemade bombs exploded in a tenement on Eldridge Street, in Manhattan's Lower East Side, destroying the building's top half and rousing the sleeping neighborhood into panic. Less than two years after the devestating Wall Street bombing, the city was on alert for any sign of anarchist insurrection. Rather predictably, the police arrested a pair of Italians, Gasparo Latiano and Rosario Ficili, accusing them of attempting to kill one of the tenement residents as part of an unspecified vendetta. It does not appear that they were ever formally charged.
I've been transfixed by this forgotten piece of New York history since first stumbling on it over a decade ago. I was struck by the stark horror of the New York Times report, which runs just 350 words and includes details of plummeting staircases and flying chunks of plaster that left the residents "with bodies and faces bruised and cut and with bleeding feet." It's a mesmerizing piece of storytelling with absolutely no historical significance, and it captures something essential about writing historical fiction: the research is my favorite part.
No city has been a deeper well for espionage fiction than Berlin. There is a long and growing list of novels that contribute to the city's image as a hotbed of spies and conspirators. The fifty-one years bookended by Kristallnacht in 1938 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 provide the rich historical dramas that continue to excite writers' imaginations. Berlin has preserved the iconic symbols of those years in the Stasi museum and at Checkpoint Charlie's hop-on, hop-off tourist bus stop, but it is the canon of Berlin spy fiction that excites the popular imagination. Two novelists, Joseph Kanon and Paul Vidich, have published Cold War novels this month and both are set in Berlin. Kanon's The Berlin Exchange, is his third novel set in the city, and Vidich's The Matchmaker, is his first set there. We asked both authors: Why Berlin?
Joseph Kanon: One thing led to another. In The Good German, I was really writing about the Allied occupation. That, in turn, led to an interest in how the city finally split and became the epicenter for the Cold War, which I explored in Leaving Berlin. And that, in turn, led to a fascination with the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany/ GDR) which in retrospect seems an Alice In Wonderland kind of political entity- everything upside down.
If you write about Berlin, sooner or later you have to deal with the wall. The Berlin Exchange is set in 1963, after the wall went up and changed everything-including espionage. Before that, with people able to go back and forth, espionage was a kind of cottage industry in Berlin. All the major powers had operations there, with everyone rubbing up against each other. Your question made me think of Willy Sutton, who, when asked why he robbed banks, said, ‘Because that's where the money was.' Why Berlin? That's where the spies were.
Ah yes. Writing. Life. When? Where? How? That's the problem. You can have a life or you can do some writing, but not both at once, because although life may be the subject of writing, it is also the enemy. For instance:
MONDAY: My daughter drives us back to Toronto from the small house in the snowy woods acquired, in part, for writing. But we hadn't done any writing. Instead, we'd colored in the white spots on the walls left by the previous owner's pictures, using aquarelle crayons. We'd filled the bird feeders, then watched the winter birds- chickadees, nuthatches, hairy woodpeckers, goldfinches-a soporific activity that causes you to drool if you overindulge. We'd gone for a snowshoe, she striding along, me puffing. I did write a dozen long-overdue snail-mail notes. I'd also obsessed about: (1) the editing of the novel that will come out in the fall; (2) my piece on birdwatching; (3) other procrastinations. Obsession is the better part of valor.
All of us-to a greater or lesser extent, and often without realizing it - tend to expect less of women, listen to them less attentively and feel uncomfortable with them in positions of authority. But there are men who do not expose themselves to women's voices in the first place, across the cultural spectrum, whether the women are on social media, writing books or appearing in films. If these men are not listening to, reading or watching women, how can they accord them any authority at all? How do they even know if the women are any good?
The easiest way to measure this phenomenon - of women whistling into the void - is to look at the books that men and women read. Non-fiction books are sources of authority on a subject; fiction takes us into other humans' worlds and minds, broadening our empathy and understanding. Before going any further, may I ask you to take a moment to think about the last five or ten books you've read, and count how many are by male and how many by female authors? If you're a man and your tally is roughly 50:50, congratulations, you are very unusual. As the writer Grace Paley once said, "Women have always done men the favor of reading their work and men have not returned the favor."
The popular author and illustrator of Dogger and the Alfie series has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute
Michael Morpurgo: ‘Shirley must have begun the reading lives of so many millions'
British children's author of War Horse, Why the Whales Came and Private Peaceful
We have all grown up with the stories and drawings of Shirley Hughes deep inside us. We've enjoyed them for ourselves, with our children, with our grandchildren. Shirley must have begun the reading lives of so many millions. That moment when you've read a book like Alfie and sit back and think that was wonderful, tell me another. Thank you Shirley from all of us, the children of today and children of yesterday.