People in the book community have strong feelings about Goodreads. Some readers see it as a simple tool they use to track their own personal reading, while others spend hours writing and reading reviews, commenting on others' reviews, and participating in its many features. Some people view it as a necessary evil, especially now that it's owned by Amazon, and some people flat out refuse to engage with it.
Links of the week March 21 2022 (12)
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:
21 March 2022
I have been a user of Goodreads since 2007, the same year it launched. I have used it as a reader, author, book reviewer, editorial assistant, Pitch Wars mentor, publicist, journalist, library event planner, podcast producer, author's assistant, and probably more. I am a Goodreads Librarian, a volunteer with minimal power to edit some book and author information.
As a reader, I use the most basic of functions. Early on, I also used it to see what friends were reading, but my friend list is unwieldy now. As a publicist, I used it to update and promote my authors' titles and get early feelers of how reviewers were receiving the books. In many of my various publishing roles, I use/d it to do comparative title research. As an event planner and podcaster, I use it to gauge how well-known an author might be. As a journalist, I use it to fill out lists; I can't read every book and Goodreads lets me get a lot of people's opinions on a book at once.
They arrive after school, still in their uniforms, in groups of up to 12. Mr Rubbo says the number of teenage girls coming to buy books has "increased exponentially".
What's going on? Well, ladies and gentlemen, reading is cool again. A growing online community of young book lovers emerged out of the video-sharing app TikTok during the pandemic.
As people the world over were locked down with plenty of spare time, "BookTok" took off. It's a corner of the internet filled with videos of people talking about their favourite books or giving recommendations and reviews.
They arrive after school, still in their uniforms, in groups of up to 12. Mr Rubbo says the number of teenage girls coming to buy books has "increased exponentially".
What's going on? Well, ladies and gentlemen, reading is cool again. A growing online community of young book lovers emerged out of the video-sharing app TikTok during the pandemic.
As people the world over were locked down with plenty of spare time, "BookTok" took off. It's a corner of the internet filled with videos of people talking about their favourite books or giving recommendations and reviews.
When the owners of a Tennessee comics shop learned that a local school board had voted to remove Art Spiegelman's Holocaust classic Maus from its curriculum, they sprang into action with an appeal calling for donations to fund free copies for schoolchildren. Within hours, money started pouring in from all over the world. "We had donations from Israel, the UK and Canada as well as from the US," says Richard Davis, co-owner of Nirvana Comics.
Ten days later, they closed the appeal, after raising $110,000 (£84,000) from 3,500 donors. "We bought up all the copies the publisher had in its warehouse and we're now in the process of shipping 3,000 copies of Maus to students all over the country, along with a study guide written by a local schoolteacher," says Davis, who has relied on volunteers to help with the distribution.
I have a confession to make: until I started doing research for this article, I had no idea that Book of the Month is almost 100 years old. That tells me two things: for one, it seems that I live under a rock; for another, it speaks to the level of success of Book of the Month's rebranding strategy. Now, does this mean that it is all-around successful for everyone, authors included? That's an altogether different question.
What is Book of the Month?
The short answer: Book of the Month (BOTM) is a subscription service that lets you choose from seven (as of March 2022) books, then it sends you a hardcover copy of the one you picked. If you like more than one of the choices, you can opt to buy add-ons for an extra fee.
The long answer: throughout its history, Book of the Month has been a book club, a subscription service, and a cultural phenomenon. It launched in 1926, the brainchild of Harry Scherman, Max Sackheim, and Robert Haas. Based in Camp Hill, Cumberland County, Book of the Month Club identified a market for a mail order book distribution service. It became an incredible success in a relatively short time: its initial 4,000 subscriber list expanded to 60,058 by 1927.
The Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. will run March 21-24 in its usual venue at the BolognaFiere exhibition center in Bologna, Italy. It will be the first time since 2019 that the fair will be held in person. Organizers say they've booked 950 exhibitors, down from 1,200 in 2018 and 2019. Sixty American companies, primarily small and medium publishing houses, will attend. Among the largest publishing houses, Random House says it will not be sending anyone to Bologna, while HarperCollins says it will send two people from its rights team and Simon & Schuster says it will send one. Chronicle Books says it will send three people, including Jack Jensen, president of the McEvoy Group. From Abrams, CEO Michael Jacobs plans to attend.
Longtime fairgoer Christopher Franceschelli, publisher of Handprint Books, says he "can't wait to get back to the fair, because I think that good publishing only happens when there's a necessary creative friction between authors, artists, editors and publishers." His schedule is "definitely lighter" than in previous years, but, he adds, "I think that's a terrific opportunity to go out and find new publishers whom I haven't worked with in the past."
"It's just great to be back in Bologna," said Margie Wolfe, publisher of Second Story Press of Toronto, Canada. "It's a little quieter than usual, but the meetings have been good." Wolfe echoed what many publishers are saying: the pandemic, which kept people at home for long stretches, helped fuel a boom in book sales. "We were up 100% in sales for 2021," said Wolff.
Several publishers noted that 2021 saw a similarly significant surge in sales, and many publishers had pushed 2020 books into 2021. One newly hot category is books about refugees - a subject many publishers have on their backlist resulting from the refugee crisis prompted by the war in Syria several years ago. Today, the war in Ukraine, which has sent some three million people into neighboring countries in Europe, is inspiring publishers to look for related material once again.
The war in Ukraine has prompted many companies and institutions to stop working with Russian publishers and organizations. Publishers are canceling or not renewing contracts, while organizers have banned Russians from participating in international book fairs and there are a growing number of calls in different countries to ban imports of Russian books.
Today, Evgeny Kapyev, general director of Eksmo, issued an open letter asking the world to reconsider this ban on Russian books and interaction with Russian publishers.
Eksmo is the largest general trade publisher in Russia, publishing some 10,000 titles a year and is responsible for approximately 30% of total book sales annually. Eksmo is currently barred from operating in Ukraine, having been accused of distributing propaganda, a claim Eksmo says is the result of its titles having been pirated in 2014 and its trademark misused.
During my awkward teenage years, I produced a lot of angst-ridden poetry on topics such as boredom and unrequited love. I kept those poems in a trunk with a stack of short stories that were also about things that seemed important to teenage me, like the unfairness of parents and teachers. I always thought that one day I would try to write a novel. I never once aspired to be a screenwriter in the glamorous world of film. It simply didn't occur to me.
Until I moved to Los Angeles.
I escaped Kansas for California, where my older brother lived. He'd left a few years earlier to pursue a career in acting. At first, I had no interest in his obsession, the television and film business. My original plan had been to get accepted to UC Berkeley, where I would be able to wear long skirts and sandals, hover around musicians playing bongo drums in the quad, read and write poetry, and generally be arty and enlightened.
Berkeley did not want me. As it turned out, UCLA did. I relinquished my dream of becoming a northern California hippie. Instead, I moved into a dorm adjacent to the addictive splendor of Beverly Hills. Hollywood was a short cab ride away. It didn't take me long, as an idealistic and somewhat ambitious newcomer, to pivot from poetry and patchouli to screenwriting and martinis.
It is a truth universally acknowledged - at least among romance readers - that whenever someone brings up the Regency romance, the sentence that follows must inevitably mention Jane Austen. To the average book reader, Austen is among the most well-known writers of this frothy genre, so named because it explores the passions and privileges of British aristocrats during the short but heady period between 1811 and 1820, when the country was run by the indolent prince regent, the soon-to-be George IV.
But if there's a single mistaken apprehension about Jane Austen, it's this: Her books aren't romance novels at all - at least not what modern readers think of as historical romance.
In terms of form and impact, we might think of Georgette Heyer (pronounced "Zheorgette Hay-er") as the Agatha Christie of romance novels. Like Christie, Heyer was British and hailed from an upper-middle-class family. Like Christie, her sprawling career spanned the 20th century, from the 1920s to the '70s; Heyer's first novel, The Black Moth, was published in 1921, just a year after Christie's famous first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Like Christie, Heyer was extremely prolific; by the time she died in 1974, she had published 56 novels, most of them historical romances. Heyer also similarly transformed the genre she wrote in: She essentially invented, all by herself, what we now think of as the "Regency romance" subgenre of romance novels, which also happens to be the backbone upon which all other romances are built.
When George Saunders went out to his writing shed to start a Substack newsletter last fall, for the first time in a long time, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, famous for such works as Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December, didn't know what he was doing. "I'll just write 80 posts and then take a vacation," he thought to himself. But upon hitting publish, something surprised him: the comments section exploded, with thousands of readers chiming in on his inaugural post (that still-growing comment count currently sits at 3091). Everywhere from Scotland to India to Australia, devoted followers and aspiring writers wrote in with passionate messages, eager to connect with one of their literary heroes. Suddenly "don't read the comments," that old digital age chestnut, felt like the worst advice in the world. There was nowhere else Saunders would rather be than here, chopping it up with commenters young and old, near and far, longtime fans and first-time callers.
"The fun of it has been reading the comments," Saunders says. "People are so honest, earnest, and heartfelt. Somebody will confess to having a certain blockage, and it's hard for me not to respond to their comment, or come up with a writing exercise to help them. That's going to be the thing that allows me to keep doing this for a long time, just getting in there and mixing it up wherever people are."
Crime fiction, what is it, anyway? And how can it be spun out of sources as divergent as both retiring old ladies knitting charmingly dumpy cardigans and perversely wrong-headed but wholly sympathetic psychopaths? Regarding the corpus of crime writing, it might seem the only common element in these narratives is that a crime is or has been committed. One which begs redress-be that through the full force of justice or simply the reader's disapprobation, granted not even the apprehension of murderers here is a given.
Look a little deeper, though-and far broader-and one can see the entirety of crime writing falling into either of two camps, each evolving out of sources that, for the most part, don't cross over.
Paramount examples of these camps of crime fiction can be found in the novels of Agatha Christie-and of Patricia Highsmith.
Having enjoyed both greatly, I would argue that, while Christie and Highsmith both provide pleasures, they do so in significantly different ways, and from different sources-let's even say the two writers work out of radically different DNA, and writers as well as readers of crime fiction would best be aware of that fact.
Is it possible to write a contemporary spy novel that lives up to the Cold War classics? This may seem an odd idea for someone in my line of work to entertain, let alone allow through the front door, but it keeps coming back like an uninvited guest. At times it wants to sit by the fire, put its feet up and talk about the past: did the Cold War give rise to a set of conditions uniquely favourable to spy writers? At other times it rolls up its sleeves and gets straight down to business: what ingredients are required to create a modern classic? In the middle of the night it jabs an accusing finger: you're wasting your time, it says. Well? Am I?
The Cold War had it all, or so it seems: ideologies people actually believed in, the threat of nuclear annihilation, even the most ominously picturesque of backdrops. It's no wonder that so many spy writers have tunnelled their way into East Berlin over the years. Hanging over this world was a mood of paranoia made all the more thrilling by the fact that the threat that was not just out there - it was right here, right where we live. A Cold War protagonist might watch a German businessman through binoculars or surveil a Russian diplomat around a European capital, but they would just as likely find the enemy closer to home. No one trusted anyone - colleagues, friends and lovers could all turn out to be double-agents. This generous gift to the period's novelists came courtesy of the Cambridge Five and the revelation that Britain's ruling classes were riddled with Soviet agents. Even the Director General of MI5 between 1956 and 1966, Sir Roger Hollis, was at one point suspected (although later cleared) of being a Russian spy.
Why would anyone be interested in authors? It's not as if they're a charismatic, or even good-looking, breed. I mean that lovingly. Having spent my life in books, publishing, editing, reviewing, teaching and writing them, I can exclusively reveal that most of the writers I've met are exactly as you'd expect; formerly Indoor Children, socially awkward little weirdos who, with diligence and too much time alone, become thin-skinned pasty show-offs, prone to backache, voracious for praise. If we'd been attractive, confident teenagers, we'd have spent our free time taking drugs and snogging, not fancying Keats and reading Orwell at lunch.
OK, that was me. But creative types do attract curiosity. We want to know not only how and where they work (Book Event Question no 1: "Do you write with a pen?"), but what they're like as parents, lovers, friends: writers behaving badly. Marriages, too, are fascinating to the nosy. There is little more gripping than a really molecular insight into how a relationship works, or fails; the public flirtations, the discreet acts of cruelty. So what could be more delicious than the secrets of one artist married to another?
Nancy Allen spent her career prosecuting felonies in the Ozarks. She urges readers not to turn away from the dangers women face.
Women in peril is a common theme in fiction. Crafting storylines about damsels in distress has long been a trope in the thriller genre. That theme dominated the subject matter of pulp fiction way back in the twentieth century.
A broad hint of the plot within those paperback novels was provided by the cover art: garish color images of attractive young women, invariably bound, eyes wide with terror, popping out of a form-fitting dress (usually red).
From our contemporary perspective, were those women-in-peril stories lurid? Absolutely. Did they objectify women? Most certainly. But the market for those stories didn't end with pulp novels. It still exists in fiction, nonfiction, films, and television.
‘Glasgow is a magnificent city,' reflects one of the characters in Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981); ‘Why do we hardly ever notice that?' ‘Because,' another character replies, ‘nobody imagines living here.' Over the past half-century, some of the most vivid attempts to imagine living in Glasgow have been crime novels, from the Laidlaw trilogy of William McIlvanney to the fictions of Frederic Lindsay, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh, Christopher Brookmyre and others. And despite the assertion that ‘nobody imagines living here', those novels take their place in a venerable tradition of writing about Scotland's western metropolis.
One of the first novelists to write about Glasgow did so, not in a work of fiction, but a travelogue. In his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-7), Daniel Defoe presented Glasgow as an elegant ‘city of business', a boomtown whose prosperity depended on the recent Act of Union with England which ‘open'd the door to the Scots in our American colonies', allowing merchants on the Clyde to grow rich on the Virginian sugar and tobacco trades.