On November 7, Judge Florence Pan released her memorandum opinion blocking Penguin Random House from acquiring rival Big Five publisher Simon & Schuster-and in the final analysis, after a year of legal wrangling and a three-week trial that captivated the publishing industry, it wasn't a close case for her at all. In an economical 80-page decision, Pan found the U.S. Department of Justice showed the proposed merger would likely "lessen competition" in the market for book rights in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act.
Links of the week November 7 2022 (45)
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 November 2022
"The government has presented a compelling case that predicts substantial harm to competition as a result of the proposed merger of PRH and S&S," Pan concluded. DoJ attorneys properly defined a relevant market-"anticipated top selling books" with advances over $250,000-which, she noted, accounts for 70% of the advance monies paid to authors. The post-merger entity would have had a "concerningly high" 49% market share, more than twice that of its closest competitor in an already concentrated market in which "the two top competitors would hold 74% of the market and the top four market participants would control 91%." And, citing the publishers' previous actions a decade ago in the Apple price-fixing case, Pan found "strong evidence" of "likely unilateral and coordinated" effects that would further harm competition.
Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled today that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House could not go forward. The ruling was explicitly to protect the "competition" for the "anticipated top-selling books". In other words, the big books by big authors for which only the Big Five can compete regularly (with occasional bids coming in from a couple of other next-tier houses) will continue to have five well-funded suitors. The judge ruled that cutting that number from five to four would reduce the spend among that cohort of books, which is almost certainly true. (I comment on the fact of it; I have no idea about the law.)
What this decision says to me is:
1. None of the Big Five can merge with each other without triggering the same concern Judge Pan cited in making this decision. That will not be good news to Hachette and HarperCollins, both of which opposed the PRH-S&S merger but probably hoped they could pursue S&S if the publisher remained independent.
2. The five biggest publishers are probably at their high water mark for market share. The only way to expand a publishing house is to have a larger number of active titles. Publishing new titles profitably has become exceedingly difficult. But publishers can increasingly milk sales out of the long tail of backlist, thanks to the new digital marketing world we live in. So the biggest publishers have grown their title base by acquisition. This decision would appear to cut off that avenue, or at least cut publishers off from the biggest potential additions.
The price of books is likely to go up, say publishers - which are acting to avoid steep rises for readers.
Some presses are exploring printing on cheaper and thinner paper, postponing reprints for older books and publishing fewer titles to reduce costs and avoid increasing recommended retail prices.
But the hike in costs of paper and energy and the effects of Brexit mean price rises are likely in the long term if not in the short and medium term, "if the current high production and distribution costs stabilise at the current levels", said Juliet Mabey, co-founder of the independent publishing house Oneworld
For many rights professionals, the recent 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. was their first opportunity since 2019 to attend a fair in person. Attendees said they were delighted to be back, even amid industry challenges and world uncertainty on several fronts. We spoke with a number of savvy agents and scouts about their impressions of the fair, and asked them to talk about trends they were noticing.
"It was wonderful to be back at a fair, and to be among so many fellow book people again," said Sara Crowe, senior agent at Pippin Properties. "Being back in Frankfurt was energizing, emotional, and re-affirming," said Rachel Hecht, founder of Rachel Hecht Children's Scouting. "There is no replacement for the in-person connections to be made over tables while gasping over sample spreads, or the bolt of joy from waving down an old colleague while rushing between stands. We are a community of book people who thrive when we gather, and while Zoom is a convenient tool, it cannot replicate the alchemy that happens during a fair.
When AJ Ayer was asked what he would have done had he not been an Oxford philosopher, he said: "I would have been a publisher. That's the easiest occupation I can think of." Reading that remark just after attending a children's publishing conference made me realise that we need to shout to the outside world a bit more about how complex and important publishing is.
Publishers connect writers and audiences, bringing to projects their experience of what is possible, and making things happen that authors alone could never achieve. Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar would not have become a 50-million-copy book still in print after 53 years had his publishers not found a way to mass produce the holes. In more recent times imprints like Two Hoots and Nosy Crow have pushed the boundaries of foil and flaps, and Magic Cat is creating puzzles and toys to supplement its innovative books.
Publishers do more than enhance physical product. They open young minds to the possibility of lifestyles and values that differ from their own experience. Companies like Hope Road, Otter-Barry, Old Barn, or Sweet Cherry bring books into the UK marketplace from fresh and diverse backgrounds around the world. (I would like to highlight Juan Villoro's The Wild Book, from Mexico, which is not only a hugely engaging story but a wonderful celebration of why books matter.)
The only time I think about my gender is when I'm forced to," says Sara Gran, author of the popular Clare DeWitt mystery novels and, as of 2020, founder and owner of Dreamland Books. "People like to say that publishing is female dominated, and it is, at the lower levels. But the people who own the companies are still male, still almost 100% white. Don't be telling me it's a female-dominated industry."
Gran, whose company has thus far published only one title, her own The Book of the Most Precious Substance, might be a newcomer when it comes to the business side of women in publishing-most of the women owners and publishers featured in this piece have robust lists, not to mention robust bottom lines-but her words would probably resonate with all of her colleagues. Almost all of the women-owned publishing companies exist because their founders wanted to do things that large, corporate, white-male-dominated companies weren't interested in trying.
That's the case for Dominique Raccah, who founded Sourcebooks 35 years ago. Asked about the relevance of writing an article now about women-owned publishers, Raccah says, "In a way it's never been more relevant. We had no financing back in 1987. Nobody was going to fund a woman."
The Long and the Short of It: Hilma Wolitzer on Returning to Short Fiction in Her 90s ‹ Literary Hub
When I was a child and asked for a bedtime story, my weary mother sometimes recited:
I'll tell you a story about Jack A Nory
And now my story's begun.
I'll tell you another about his brother
And now my story is done.
Of course I knew that I was being played, and when I protested, my father was enlisted to fill in. But as he lay at the foot of my bed, telling me once again about Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the Three Bears, he often fell asleep in mid-sentence. I would kick him awake and demand to know what happened next. Although I knew those fairy tales by heart, I couldn't shake the expectation that this time things might end differently. Maybe the wolf would eat Red Riding Hood instead of her grandmother. Maybe the bears would adopt Goldilocks and they would all live together happily ever after.
I believe it was this curiosity that led to my lifelong passion for reading, and to my career as a writer. It's not surprising, after those early threats to instant gratification, that I began by writing short stories. Other factors weighed in, too. I was in my thirties by then and busy raising a family; there was hardly any time for an extended narrative. I wanted to find out and to say what happened next-how things turned out-before I was distracted by a needy child or a hissing teakettle.
But it wasn't merely a matter of enough time to write. Despite the shining examples of writers such as Chekov and Alice Munro, I believed that the short story was my creative adolescence, or apprenticeship, and the novel would be my maturity. I was a late bloomer and a slow learner. But I was also ambitious. When the editor of a literary magazine in which a couple of my stories had appeared inquired if I were writing a novel, I decided to try to do it.
On November 11, 1922, one of the all-time greatest American writers was born in Indianapolis: the hilarious, kind, and wise Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
"His early life shows the kind of aimless lateral peregrinations of someone who was in the process of inventing a kind of person that hadn't really existed before," wrote Lev Grossman in 2007. Vonnegut was a biochemistry major at Cornell before dropping out and enlisting in the army in 1943; after he was captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he was sent to a prison camp in Dresden. He was there when it was bombed by Allied forces and survived by sheltering in a meat locker in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5-Slaughterhouse-Five. "On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden-possibly the world's most beautiful city," Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."
Is your child having problems learning to read? Are you looking for help to improve progress in learning literacy skills? According to a Canadian team of researchers headed by Corinne Syrnyk of the psychology department at St. Mary's University in Calgary, if you own a relatively calm family dog, you may have all the help you need.
Reading is a vital skill. Virtually no matter which of the many available methods is used to teach them, most children do learn to read. However, unless they receive some supportive help, the data suggest that more than one out of every five kids won't be able to properly master this important task. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren't reading at a basic level.
On 31 August 2021, before last year's 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., writer and literary translator Jennifer Croft (right), known for her International Booker Prize-winning translation of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, made a resolution and shared it with her 10,000 Twitter followers: "I'm not translating any more books without my name on the cover," she wrote. "Not only is it disrespectful to me, but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they're going to read."
Replies poured in from writers supportive of her decision and from other translators who have felt overlooked by publishers. Croft, who translates from Polish and Spanish into English, had clearly struck a nerve. One month later, for International Translation Day on 30 September, Croft turned her personal resolution into a public campaign. In an open letter published on the website of the UK's Society of Authors and co-written with novelist Mark Haddon (best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time), Croft called on writers to ask their publishers to give translators cover credits and coined the hashtag #TranslatorsOnTheCover. "For too long, we've been taking translators for granted," the letter reads. "From now on, we will be asking, in our contracts and communications, that our publishers ensure, whenever our work is translated, that the name of the translator appears on the front cover."
The master storyteller on finding a voice, creative originality and why he has never suffered from writer's block
My first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, published in 1979, is fewer than 200 pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it. I ran a jazz cafe, and I spent my 20s labouring from morning to night to pay off debts. But the real problem was that I hadn't a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff - my favourites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks - I had never read modern Japanese novels (of the "serious" variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in Japanese.
For several months, I operated on pure guesswork, adopting what seemed to be a likely style and running with it, but when I read through the result I was far from impressed. "Good grief," I moaned, "this is hopeless." What I had written seemed to fulfil the formal requirements of a novel, yet it was rather boring and, as a whole, left me cold.
The two most common questions I've been asked about my new book, Uncanny Times, is "why historical fantasy" and "why this particular time period?"
The answers are distinct, but also inevitably intertwined. History - specifically American social history - has always fascinated me, from childhood through my college years, culminating in a B.A. that would do me absolutely no good in my chosen career - or would it? Dear Mom and Dad: you'll be pleased to know I am, in fact, making use of my college education.
For Uncanny Times, I wanted to write an adventure about a brother and sister (and their hound) taking down things that lurked dangerously in the shadows. Rosemary and Aaron are Huntsmen, part of an ancient, worldwide organization designed to keep humanity safe. A simple enough idea, and it could have become a superficial, if dark, modern romp. But from the start I knew that I wanted to set it, not in the 21st century, but the opening years of the 20th.
But why historical fantasy?
I had been living in Berlin for almost 15 years when I moved with my family from east to west across the axis of the city, into a typical late 19th-century apartment building on the banks of Berlin's Landwehr Canal. A building with its feet in the west but looking east, across the water's glassy surface, toward the historical city center. Along with a change of perspective, this move brought with it a return to the irregularities of working from home. When we lived in our old apartment, I had rented a separate ground-floor room in which to work. In this room, just big enough to fit a desk, with a single window facing the street, I could extract myself from the daily entanglements of domestic life and focus on the singular task of writing.
In our new apartment, working from home once again, I struggled to summon the discipline to write amongst the countless distractions of home and family. At various points throughout the working day, I would find myself in the kitchen, looking out of the window while waiting for the kettle to boil. The kettle is strategically positioned on the marble work-top, between the sink and kitchen window. The cups, tea leaves, coffee grounds and filters are all in the drawers below. I can prepare my cup of tea or coffee and organize my interlude without moving more than a pace or two away from the kitchen window. A quick glance outside reveals a broad sweep of sky, assorted treetops, and a heterogeneous patchwork of Berlin%u2019s buildings leading to the horizon. These breaks for cups of tea or coffee, this looking out the window, became habitual motions, refrains that interrupted the working day. But the more I looked out of the window while waiting for the kettle to boil, the more I realized that the view from this new apartment did not just form a pause. It was also material, a riddle looking for an answer. This place in which I found myself began to insinuate itself so deeply into my thoughts that it became my subject matter.
Participants in November’s National Novel Writing Month challenge are cautioned not to rush their work out the door. Indeed, it’s wise not to send the draft completed on November 30 off to agents or editors on December 1, like an overeager chef serving a partially baked cake. Typing “THE END” is just the first of many steps in getting a manuscript ready for the prime-time glare of the submission spotlight.
Plenty of writers fall to the other end of the spectrum, though. They finish a draft, then a round of self editing, a round of critique group input, another round of self-editing, a round of professional editing, a round of rewrites, a round of beta reading - and round and round and round for years. These are the chefs who tinker endlessly with the recipe, leaving the dinner guests to expire from hunger or search for another meal.
I think it's fair to say that The Child Left in the Dark (and the Take Her Back trilogy as a whole) is pretty far removed from the real world. Genetic engineering resulting in supernatural abilities, human/animal hybrids, slavish soldiers with their humanity altered... It's science fiction with heavy emphasis on the fiction (though I would argue that some of the ideas have bases in real experiments and theories). But through this world of largely made-up science, there are themes that are very much not made-up. Issues which stretch through the veil of storytelling and unreality to strike a chord. From body autonomy to adolescent identity struggles, money-driven corporations wielding too much power with too little accountability to the dangers of social media; there are many things about Take Her Back which speak to and of the world in which it was written.
Take adolescent identity, for starters. Thirteen-year-old character Ariana undergoes a transformation throughout The Child Left in the Dark, taking her from the innocent child we met in The Girl with the Green Eyes into an unsure, morally grey adolescent who admits that she "doesn't know what she is anymore". The idea of a 13-year-old struggling with their own identity isn't exactly a new one in fiction or real life, but I think that the teenagers of today are facing a whole new world of challenges. Gender dysphoria, for example, has increased tenfold in the last few years, with many young people unsure of where they fall on the spectrum of different gender and sexuality categories, or if how they feel can even be categorised at all.
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