After a flurry of last-minute filings and orders, the U.S. Department of Justice's bid to block Penguin Random House's acquisition of rival Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster is ready for court. Oral arguments are set to begin on August 1 before Judge Florence Pan at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., with the trial expected to run nearly three weeks.
Links of the week July 25 2022 (30)
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:
25 July 2022
According to recent filings, 72 total hours have been allotted for arguments-38 hours for the government, and 34 hours for the defense. The witness lists include a few boldface names, including many of the Big Five CEOs, some major literary agents, and bestselling author Stephen King, who is listed as a witness for the government.
The closely watched case holds major implications for a publishing industry that has been grappling with consolidation for years. It also looms as a key test for the government amid growing calls for more vigilant antitrust enforcement, and in the wake of a stinging defeat in 2018 in its bid to block the massive $85 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner.
News of issues facing the two awards comes just weeks after the cancellation of both the Costa Book Awards and the Blue Peter Book Awards.
Andrew Holgate, outgoing literary editor of the Sunday Times, told The Bookseller the Short Story Award "may well have to discontinue" if another sponsor cannot be found to succeed Audible, which withdrew a year ago. The prize gives £30,000 to the published author of a single story written in English and is the most lucrative award of its kind.
"We've had to delay [the prize] by a year as another sponsor is yet to be found," he said.
"We found it very hard after Audible left us to go to the Women's Prize, to find another sponsor - I worked very hard to [secure that sponsorship deal]."
Leading industry figures have said literary prizes are under threat from a lack of sponsorship following a spate of recent cancellations and concerns over funding.
Prize organisers are increasingly concerned by the difficulty of attracting sponsors in economically straitened times, with others worried books are not valued by wider society, influencing the decisions of potential corporate backers.
Andrew Holgate, who pioneered the short story award and is the outgoing literary editor of the Sunday Times, is among those who think the constraints of the cost of living are partly to blame for sponsorship reticence.
"The climate has changed since lockdown, and I think people are thinking much more carefully about how they make and spend their money-we were very lucky the Charlotte Aitken Trust was out there looking for opportunities and we completely coincided," he said, commenting on the headline sponsor that took over the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award in 2021. The sponsorship deal saw the prize money double for both the winner and the shortlistees, to £10,000 and £1,000 respectively.
In the 2021 Netflix film "Don't Look Up", two astronomers played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio embark on a media tour to warn the public about an impending comet collision that will doom the planet. The problem: no one really cares. Publishing takes a different approach to such matters. As an industry we assume the sky is falling down, even when it isn't.
There are good reasons for this. Most books don't work. We are so accustomed to failure that when a success occurs, we spend months trying to work out what happened, and then years trying to replicate it. Usually with diminishing returns. And yet, for all that, the industry after nearly three decades of wear and tear-from Amazon to digital to discount to the pandemic-has rarely been healthier, with profit margins among the big publishers at levels that would have been unimaginable in the past.
From morality clauses to sensitivity readers: inside UK publishing's identity crisis - New Statesman
On 5 July Picador, which is part of the Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books conglomerate, announced that its publishing director, Philip Gwyn Jones, was stepping down "by mutual agreement" after two years in the role. Gwyn Jones, a respected publisher with long experience, had been criticised for his handling of a row over Kate Clanchy's memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. In 2021 concerns were raised by readers on Goodreads.com about the book's descriptions of pupils of colour, as well as of working-class and autistic children. Gwyn Jones had first defended Clanchy, their former teacher, and then distanced himself from the author, tweeting: "I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness to promote diversity, equity, inclusivity". Clanchy and Picador parted ways in January.
The changing of the guard at Picador was just the latest chapter in British publishing's increasingly furious fight with itself. There is a tacit assumption, naturally attractive to those who work in and around it, that the book business is inherently progressive, championing free speech and inclusivity. But in recent months many of its core tenets have been tested. Is publishing undergoing an identity crisis? Should it defend its authors at all costs, or realign itself with the values of the digital age?
The long, frustrating process of querying seems so one-sided. Most queries receive form rejections with cryptic phrases like "I didn't connect" or "just not for me," or fall into the deep valley of No response means no.
Author after author asks on Twitter, in writing groups and workshops-why can't they just say what's wrong? Make a checkbox or a copy-paste? At least tell me, is it the writing or the story or what? It would take thirty seconds!
Well, no. Responding with brief-but-helpful feedback to your query takes maybe 10 minutes, after the agent has read the query and enough of your first pages to know the book is not a fit and why, then copy-paste "Sorry I didn't believe your hero" or "Vampires are over." But agents get upwards of 200 queries each week. Two thousand minutes a week is 33 hours. When are they supposed to, you know, work?
What would it be like to travel back in time? That depends on whether you're ready for it. If you're hopping into a time machine, you'd likely have a chance to prepare yourself, and that's certainly the comfortable way to go.
But imagine being flung back in the blink of an eye. One minute you're in our world, and the next, you're in another time period. It would be terrifying and overwhelming.
In fiction, though, the narrator is the one tossed into the chaos. We don't need to worry about how to find food and shelter, how to survive and thrive, how to avoid being thrown into a jail cell or a mental institution. We don't need to figure out how to lace a corset, how to find hot water for bathing, how to hail a hansom cab...and how to pay for the fare. It's the narrator who'll be forced to figure it all out, making mistakes both hilarious and dangerous...and as the reader, we get to experience it vicariously, catching a ride with this poor character hurled back through the ages.
"Kill your darlings."
This venerable nugget of writing advice is often attributed to William Faulkner, though in fact the British writer Arthur Quiller-Couch said it first. In a 1913-1914 series of published lectures at Cambridge University titled On the Art of Writing, Quiller-Couch said:
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it-whole-heartedly-and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
In his faintly pompous way, Quiller-Couch-who, incidentally, is thought to have inspired the doggerel-composing Ratty from The Wind in the Willows-is admonishing writers to excise preciousness from their prose. But notice that he tells writers to go ahead and write those purplish perorations and then cut them. Embrace the bad, he seems to be saying. Wallow in your pretentions to greatness, then edit them out before the public sees them.
Great advice, but I'd argue it doesn't go far enough. Just as you have to cut the precious phrases from your early drafts to make a book come alive, you have to excise the preciousness from within yourself, that vision of yourself as a great and important author, before you can write freely in your own voice. To do that, you have to fail-and not just fail, but learn to incorporate failure into your process.
Diaries have lots of appeal. The diaries of Nella Last of Barrow-in-Furness (four volumes have now been published) reveal a great deal about one woman's marriage and housekeeping and relations with her friends and neighbours; and Kathleen Hey's The View from the Corner Shop (2016) offers vivid details on the ins and outs of a Dewsbury grocery shop in wartime and the lives of the working class people who shopped there.
Our most recent edited diary from the Mass Observation archive in Brighton is Kathleen Johnstone's A Nurse's War: A diary of hope and heartache on the home front. It is rooted in her daily experiences of work in a hospital in Blackburn, Lancashire, and her days-off spent mainly at the home of her parents in the beautiful village of Downham, near Clitheroe.
A key value of most diaries is that they capture the moment. There is a sense of immediacy - a passing emotion (which is likely soon to lose intensity); vivid details that will quickly fade from mind; a fleeting thought, perhaps soon to be forgotten; a conversation overheard on the bus; a short-lived irritation or frustration that had at the time importance in a person's mind. A diary may be like a camera constantly at work, recording passages of time that would otherwise not be remembered, since new feelings and experiences will tend to erase them - or largely erase them - from consciousness.
Ah, series. Most readers love them, and most writers love to write them. We get to know the imaginary world we've created, and it is fun and rewarding to slip back into that headspace and get caught up on what our protagonist has going on.
I don't believe most authors set out to write a series that lengthens from three or four to eight or more. We start out with what we know, then readers demand more so we happily oblige. Of course, we all hope the work we've put into planning out that series will be rewarded with avid readers, but what elements cause readers to care enough to keep reading? I decided to take a look at my favorites and why I love them.
When I started writing my novel Dark Earth five years ago, friends asked what this new book of mine was going to be about. When I told them it was going to be set in the ruined city of Londinium in the sixth century, they raised their eyebrows.
"Sixth century?" one said. "Sixth? Really? Isn't that a bridge too far?"
Another said:
"Isn't the sixth century, like, the darkest corner of the Dark Ages?"
"Yes," I said, "but it's only dark to us. It wasn't dark to the people actually living there."
An archaeologist friend was equally flummoxed.
"Why would you do that to yourself?" he said. "There are no written records of life in Britain in the sixth century. Londinium was unoccupied, abandoned, crumbling. How do you even begin to make it come to life?"
During the winter of 2013, I sought refuge in Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. 'Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write.' For a half hour each day, I leaned into her words as though they were the reassurances of a beloved friend, and she made me forget the exhaustion I felt as a mother of two babies under the age of three, or how lonely I was having recently moved out of town away from my friends, or my worries about the repercussions of an extended second maternity break on my legal career.
There was something spiritual about Goldberg's memoir that reminded me of how writing had always been my lifeline, giving me a sense of connection with, and understanding of, both the world and myself. I had been writing short stories for a few years by then, but I still thought of writing as my guilty pleasure - one which took me away from more pressing family and career responsibilities. Reading Goldberg convinced me that if I really wanted to write, I had to commit. Writing practice is a way of life.
According to Scottish crime fiction author Denise Mina, Glasgow- her hometown where she lives and works and gets around as a pedestrian and a bicyclist-is a city of brutal frankness where a thick skin is a necessity of life and it's very hard to feel special. "Glasgow," Denise says, "is a place where people come up and talk to you, ... my whole career has been people walking up to me in the street and saying, ‘I read your last book. And I thought it was shit. And this is what you did wrong.'" And, at least according to Denise, that's okay because "everyone is a central character in Glasgow."
A perfect example of this Glaswegian-as-central-character occurred during a recent photo shoot. There was Denise posed for the camera on Sauchiehall Street-a pedestrianized street in Glasgow's city center-wearing a magnificent green feathered stole as two young men photobombed the shot directly behind her. The result was in turn photographed and tweeted. Denise was delighted right down to the ground. "That's such a great picture!" she said. So great, in fact, she tracked down the photographer, "The guy printed a copy, and I met him in the street and bought it. He's a student, but what a fantastic photograph, his focus was so great. And he said, it was the first print he's ever sold. But those wee guys [who photobombed the pic], I mean, honestly, and they're perfectly aligned. They're like backup singers!"
In the early 1990s, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth almost became a setting for Dungeons & Dragons. At that time, TSR, the company that created D&D, saw a window of opportunity. Tolkien and his works already had a worldwide following. Creating a game in one of his worlds might bring countless droves of Middle-earth fanatics into the ranks of Dungeons & Dragons. Furthermore, TSR wanted to create sequel novels to Tolkien's iconic trilogy. The man in charge of this effort would be editor and now internationally renowned Tolkien scholar, John Rateliff.
He discovered the works of J.R.R. Tolkien while attending Magnolia Junior High School in Magnolia, Arkansas ("Home of the Cubs!"), by methodically consuming the contents of his school library. He began his digestion of the texts by looking at all the authors whose last names started with A. He chose all the books that looked interesting and read them.
Task complete, he moved on to B. Th is continued until he reached T. There, he encountered The Hobbit, and he fell in love. He remembered, "The thing that appeals to me most about Tolkien is I'd never met anyone who thought about trees the way I did. I think of trees as individuals, not interchangeable." He said that cutting down old trees to plant new ones never made any sense to him. "Tolkien really liked and appreciated trees, and he conveyed that," he said.
Rateliff's life was forever changed by reading the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.