You cannot create right-thinking in a population by controlling the literature it consumes
Links of the week February 27 2023 (09)
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:
27 February 2023
Roald Dahl was, in many respects, a horrible man. He was a narcissist, a bully, a liar, an anti-Semite, a tax-dodger, a faithless husband and - if his daughter's account is to be believed - a cruel and thoughtless father.
None of which has anything whatever to do, it scarcely needs saying, with the content of his books. But for once it's the contents of the books, rather than the adult prejudices of the author, that are drawing heat.
Puffin books, as the Telegraph reported at the weekend, has quietly reissued edited versions of Dahl's canon: ‘This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.' Many dozens of small changes have been made by sensitivity readers to remove sexism, racism, ableism, fat-shaming and violence, and the resulting brouhaha has hit the culture wars right in the sweet spot.
Handing down beloved books to your children is one of the best things about being a parent. And so like countless others raised on Willy Wonka's golden ticket and the BFG's jars of dreams, of course I was thrilled to relive the Roald Dahl books with my son all over again.
On bored, rainy afternoons we copied George's Marvellous Medicine by mixing potions from the contents of the kitchen cupboards. We made the pilgrimage to the Dahl museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, with its magical recreation of his writer's hut and its collection of homesick letters the author wrote back from boarding school as a boy, which shed a sad kind of light on the cruel adults who stalk his fiction.
All that said, am I shocked that the Dahl empire - and it's quite the empire, with Netflix buying up the rights from the writer's estate for a cool £500m in 2021 - would move to protect its investment? Do I find it Orwellian that before long you'll find the originals only in charity shops? No, not enormously.
In the fallout following the news that Roald Dahl's books have been sanitised, there has been a puzzling discussion around the meaning of censorship. More than one commentator has stated that Puffin Books and the Roald Dahl Story Company (now owned by Netflix) are not censors because this was a business decision.
It's a curiously old-fashioned view of censorship-that it's only when the state gets involved that we should worry. It's also concerning that the chair of the trade union for writers does not feel moved to protect the work of all authors on principle. The implications of Harris' statement are that it's fine to rewrite authors' work so long as it's to ensure sales.
The idea of editing Shakespeare to eliminate doubles entrendres and naughty words to fit in with 19th-century social mores now seems preposterous, although presumably his publishers-Messrs. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown-thought it was a pretty good idea at the time.
Their 1818 The Family Shakespeare offered the assurance that "Nothing is added to the original text but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud by a family." Thomas Bowdler's work on this gave rise to the term bowdlerize, meaning "to remove matter considered indelicate or otherwise objectionable," per Merriam-Webster.
Doubtless, the Roald Dahl Story Company and Messrs. Bertelsmann, PRH, and Puffin also thought it was a pretty good idea to subject the works of Roald Dahl to the same sort of treatment for the same sort of reasons.
Founding editor says 500 pitches rejected this month and their ‘authors' banned, as influencers promote ‘get rich quick' schemes
One of the most prestigious publishers of science fiction short stories has closed itself to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated pitches overwhelmed its editorial team.
Clarkesworld, which has published writers including Jeff VanderMeer, Yoon Ha Lee and Catherynne Valente, is one of the few paying publishers to accept open submissions for short stories from new writers.
But that promise brought it to the attention of influencers promoting "get rich quick" schemes using AI, according to founding editor Neil Clarke.
As the HarperCollins strike shows, TiKTok has the power to punish publishers, not just reward them.
Ahead of this past week's "tentative" agreement between HarperCollins and its union members, one of the requests made by the union was for reviewers and "blurbers" to pause reviews of HarperCollins titles and to post content around the strike to maintain what has become known as the digital picket line. Union workers had begun a strike in November 2022 over contracts, pay and diversity intiatives.
Anyone in publishing or even tangentially linked to the book world will be familiar with the changes TikTok has wrought, not only on the industry, but on readers and authors alike.
The question of the digital picket line was mentioned in an off-hand comment by a TikTok creator when they said other creators were avoiding talking about HarperCollins titles. As an interesting aside, I thought, could this be a prelude to BookTok's politicisation-a community of readers becoming the inverse, as active non-readers? A show of solidarity, not with publishing houses as brands, but with the workers who make them up? A subculture turning from the joy of reading towards examining what you read?
Small presses across the UK and Ireland have had a "year of exceptional sales and profit growth in the face of Brexit and escalating running costs", according to the British book awards' chair of judges.
Independent presses have also told the Guardian they are optimistic about the future, a very different picture from just three years ago, when research found that more than half of the UK's small publishers feared they could be out of business by autumn 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which led to the cancellation of author events, delays in titles being released and poor bookshop sales.
These smaller publishers are "showing that even in a toughened climate, grassroots book making is alive and well", said Philip Jones, chair of judges for the British book awards, which on Wednesday announced the regional and country finalists for the Small press of the year award, which celebrates those presses delivering diverse, innovative and risk-taking publishing.
Recent challenges for independent presses have included increases in the costs of heating, printing and distribution, but Jones said those in the running for Small press of the year had "responded magnificently" whether "staking their claim to the mainstream or mining their niche".
Publishing houses have set the cat among the pigeons. They have introduced "sensitivity readers". Some authors are claiming this amounts to censorship. But what is the truth of this relatively new practice?
Sensitivity readers are contracted by a publisher to provide editorial feedback on omissions, discontinuity, cliche and credibility issues in a book draft - specifically where they relate to subject matter about people from marginalised groups.
Part of being an author is writing outside of personal perspectives and experiences. Sensitivity reads provide tailored feedback to help authors feel confident about narrating subject matters beyond their own experiences.
Sensitivity readers understand the nuances of the writing process and may be writers or editors themselves. Like freelancers, they are contracted by authors or publishers. They mostly evaluate characterisation, offering historical context or experience on circumstances, cultural attitudes or speech styles that may be unfamiliar to the author.
One in five parents and carers are spending less on books for their children because of the cost-of-living crisis, and a quarter have asked children to borrow more books from the school library, new research has found.
The research, which surveyed more than 3,000 parents and carers across Great Britain, also found that the cost-of-living crisis is having a concerning impact on children's education, with one in six respondents to the survey saying their child was struggling more at school now compared with 12 months ago.
Despite working under the uncertainty of who their new owner will be, employees at Simon & Schuster were able to deliver a record year for the country's third largest trade publisher.
In his letter to the staff, CEO Jonathan Karp wrote, "It is my pleasure to share the news of our extraordinary, stratospheric year, which all of you made possible." Sales in the year were up about 10%, and at $1.1 billion, revenue topped the $1 billion mark for the first time since S&S operated as a standalone trade publisher. Operating income rose 16%, to $248 million.
Description is critical in good, immersive fiction. It first and foremost enables the reader to richly imagine the world that a writer has created. But good description does more than provide the sensory and physical details crucial in setting, characterization, action, and world building. The ways in which characters see and describe their worlds deepen personality, establish point of view, convey motivation, ratchet up tension, and move the plot along. Ultimately, the description is the thread that connects the who, what, when, where, and why in any narrative.
Creating mood and atmosphere centers on the manner in which something is described.
The sound of words matter: hard vowels and sibilants can imply a sense of threat. Soft vowels create a more muted feeling. For others, it depends on context. "Oo" sounds can be soothing, or a little spooky, depending on context.
Using menacing or grotesque imagery to describe ordinarily innocuous objects can increase the tension and sense of threat: referring to a dark hallway as a "hungry throat", for instance, or using imagery involving knives or teeth for other objects.
Serial killing - both fictional and IRL - has long been the realm of men. Netflix has shown us the public hunger for these stories, from their movies about Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, to documentaries like Making a Murderer.
From Jack the Ripper to Joe Goldberg, it's pretty much always been the men doing the murdering. And the victims have generally been women. So, when a certain Villanelle hit the screens in 2018's Killing Eve and started taking out people while wearing some of the most amazing outfits since Carrie Bradshaw, the public was hooked.
Up until this point, fictional female killers were usually portrayed as being completely, irrationally unhinged and hysterical - think of Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. And when a woman did take a life, she would usually pay the price with her own. Women in books and movies were constantly being warned of the dangers of getting drunk, going home with men they didn't know, and wearing outfits that somehow would turn men into insatiable lunatics.
If there's one lesson my agent and editors drilled into me about publishing, it's this: know your reader. Luckily, as a doctor of audiences at the University of Bristol, I've been able to think about this a lot!
So what does it mean to know your reader?
In the 1970s, the cultural critic Umberto Eco published his famous essay "The Role of the Reader". Eco argued that the reader's job was not just to consume texts and precisely decode the creator's intended meaning, but to create meaning via an active process of interpretation. The author's job is to consider a variety of possible readers, understanding that different people likely have different interpretative codes and will therefore find very different meanings.
Because there's no way to reader-proof your writing by forcing everyone to read it in the same way, everybody involved in the publishing process needs to have in mind a core 'model reader' - an idea of the kind of person they especially want to reach and touch and persuade.
"From start to finish the research and writing process takes about 18 months per book."
How do you go about making history so exciting?
It's simple. Tell a good story. People love stories. But, traditionally, history was taught with facts, figures, dates, and places, most of which is boring. But if you tell a good story, making it fun and interesting, folks listen. The primary goal of one of my novels (or any novel for that matter) is to entertain. The secondary goal is to inform and educate. So as long as I remember to entertain first and foremost, I'm okay.
There was laughter coming from the foxhole between bursts of the Germans' anti-tank guns. The American servicemen were in a tight position, pinned by the Boche, but they'd made it to an interesting part of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and everyone knows how hard it is to put down a good book. The novel-being read out loud by one of the men-kept their spirits up even as they fought for their lives.
This was just one of thousands of stories from soldiers, foreign correspondents and military leaders that flooded into the Council on Books in Wartime praising the Armed Services Editions - lightweight paperbacks that were sent to the boys overseas during World War II. The audacious and revolutionary project became one of the Army's best morale boosters, offering a bit of light during those dark days. It also helped shepherd in an era of paperback supremacy and create millions of voracious readers in the process.
Crime writer James Patterson's long-running streak as the most borrowed author in UK libraries has been broken by children's author Julia Donaldson.
Patterson had been the most borrowed author for 14 years in the Public Lending Right (PLR) data, which collates information on library loans and pays authors for every book borrowed, up to a maximum of £6,600. Patterson spent 13 consecutive years at No 1, and was the most borrowed author for the 14th time in 2020 to 2021; no data was produced for 2019 to 2020.
But for the latest data, covering July 2021 to June 2022, Gruffalo author Donaldson was the most borrowed author overall, moving up from third place the year before, and shifting Patterson into second place. Donaldson was also the most borrowed children's author.
A collection of 20 recently rediscovered short stories by late fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett is to be published later this year.
Sir Terry wrote the stories for a regional newspaper under the pseudonym Patrick Kearns in the 1970s and 80s.
They had not previously been attributed to him, but have now been collected after a search by "a few dedicated fans", publishers Penguin said.
Sir Terry, known for the best-selling Discworld series, died in 2015.
The Quest for the Keys, one of the longer stories in the new collection, had been framed for 40 years on the wall of Pratchett fan Chris Lawrence.
He got in touch with the Pratchett estate about it, resulting in the others being found by fellow fans Pat and Jan Harkin after they raked through decades' worth of old newspapers.