Earnings up 50% in a year as income for self-published writers outstrips traditional publishing models, according to research
Links of the week July 3 2023 (27)
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:
3 July 2023
Self-published ‘indie' authors are earning up to double the amount of those using traditional publishing models, according to analysis by the University of Glasgow's CREATe (UK Copyright & Creative Economy Research Centre) of a first of its kind global study undertaken by the Alliance of Independent Authors, and sponsored by Self-Publishing Formula.
According to the report, Indie Authors' Earnings 2023, the average incomes of self-published authors are rising, 'with a 53% increase in 2022 over the previous year. The median revenue in 2022 for self-published (indie) authors was US$12,749, in contrast to the median of US$8,600 for authors with third-party publishers.
What do you think is the most important element of a story? Some people say the plot. Others say the characters. They're both wrong. The most important element you need to develop for your story is a theme! So, today we'll learn how to write a strong theme.
Sure stories are meant to entertain us with gripping plots and complex characters. Good stories will always do that. But great stories do more. They teach us about life and about ourselves. Great stories have something to say that a plot and characters can't.
But a solid theme can. That' why were going to talk about how you can develop a theme for your story.
What is a Theme?
In the simplest terms, a theme is an idea. It's not what your story is about. That would be the plot. The theme is what you, the writer, are trying to say about life, and the human condition. It's the moral of your story, or the lesson that you want readers to take away.
A theme can usually be distilled to a single, sometimes wordy, sentence. A simple theme would be, "love conquers all." However, a theme cannot be expressed in one word. "Love" is not a theme because you need to actually say something about love.
Your plot answers the who, what, where, and when. A well-developed theme answers the most important question- Why? As in why are you writing this story? And, why should a reader care?
A solid story, compelling characters, and strong writing are a great start (especially when you combine that with an accurate understanding of the business of publishing).
But if you want your novel to stand out from the competition, in my experience, it has to have something extra.
It has to have a sense of meaning.
Meaning is subjective, of course. But even so, there are story elements that intersect directly with issues that we as human beings tend to find important, moving, and compelling: Moral questions, and the way they stir strong emotion. Characterization, and what it reveals about human nature. The way the story reflects the truths of our own reality-and the sense that this story actually has something to say.
This is not to say that superficial stories don't get published all the time, especially in genres that privilege plot over character-and there will always be stories that fit this mold that get published, simply because their "something extra" is something else: a sparkly new speculative conceit, or a mind-blowing plot twist that's going to get everyone talking.
But debut novels like that are the exception. And as I see it, increasingly endangered-not only because readers are hungry for meaning, but because superficial stories are the type that are most amenable to reproduction by AI.
Clémence Michallon On the Ethics of Writing Violence and the Banality of Serial Killers ‹ CrimeReads
Clémence Michallon is an award-winning French journalist, a dog owner, a New Yorker, and a Sopranos convert/superfan. Her US debut, The Quiet Tenant, which comes out this June from Knopf, is poised to be a major summer blockbuster. The book has been sold in over thirty territories and is garnering comparisons to another famous captivity novel-Room by Emma Donoghue.
Clémence Michallon: I moved to the US in 2014 to study journalism. I'm a staff writer now at The Independent, a British newspaper, and I still cover true crime in my work. Building a library of personal knowledge is part of the job, but when I sit down to write fiction, I only allow my journalism brain and my fiction brain to communicate as little as possible. I don't want people to feel like they might talk to me for a journalism piece and then have something end up in a novel.
Crime fiction has a relationship with true crime. I wrestle with the boundaries of that. Some stories aren't mine to tell. Building a fictional serial killer was an interesting exercise. I knew I was entering a very rich field, and I didn't want him to feel like a fictional avatar of a real serial killer.
Earlier this year, I took a week-long writing retreat at the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony in Temecula, California. I had an idea for a new project and had written about 10,000 words, but I wanted some focused time to dive in and figure it out.
The week started off well. I wrote 13,000 words in the first two days, exploring characters and drafting scenes that had been percolating in my head, but on the third day everything slowed down. I simply couldn't think of what else to write.
In the past I would have called it writer's block, but I don't believe in writer's block anymore. In fact, in my coaching program, I devote an entire hour-long lesson to dismantling writer's block because I believe fervently that it's not a thing. It's just a catch-all phrase we use to describe other things that keep us from writing.
Replacing news editors with AI is a worry for misinformation, bias and accountability
Germany's best-selling newspaper, Bild, is reportedly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to replace certain editorial roles, in an effort to cut costs.
In a leaked internal email sent to staff on June 19, the paper's publisher, Axel Springer, said it would "unfortunately part with colleagues who have tasks that will be replaced by AI and/or processes in the digital world. The functions of editorial directors, page editors, proofreaders, secretaries, and photo editors will no longer exist as they do today".
Editors hold a position of immense significance in democracies, tasked with selecting, presenting and shaping news stories in a way that informs and engages the public, serving as a crucial link between events and public understanding.
Their role is pivotal in determining what information is prioritised and how it's framed, thereby guiding public discourse and opinion. Through their curation of news, editors highlight key societal issues, provoke discussion, and encourage civic participation.
My ideas about how the book industry can work together to be more sustainable were inspired by reading ecologist Susan Simard's scientific memoir, Finding the Mother Tree. Simard discovered that trees were super co-operators, communicating through underground networks of fungi, rather than competing with each other. This network, known as the wood wide web, is now recognised internationally.
Simard's life's work demonstrates the power of networks. As books are produced from trees, it is entirely appropriate that we learn from nature's example of collaboration as we try to evolve the publishing industry to reduce our carbon footprint. I believe we need to develop a Book Wide Web network of supply printers, print-on-demand and distribution hubs to reduce the number of miles a book travels.
My views on this issue are formed by working in a bookshop in Central Europe that imports English language books from UK publishers; I hope my voice can add to the debate already surrounding the Book Journey Project created by the Independent Publishers Guild's Sustainability Taskforce group.
Author Judy Blume delivered a rousing keynote message to officially open the 2023 American Library Association Annual Conference program on June 23 in Chicago, thanking librarians for defending the freedom to read in their communities and insisting that more be done to combat a politically-organized surge in book bans. "If ever there was a chance to say thank you, this is the year this do it," Blume told to a packed ballroom at Chicago's McCormick Place convention center. "To tell you all how much we appreciate you, and to give you all our support."
In an insightful and fun yet serious 30-minute talk with her publisher, Justin Chanda, senior v-p at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, Blume said she was inspired to come to the conference after hearing ALA executive director Tracie D. Hall speak about banned books. "I was just was so overwhelmed by her that I went up to her and I introduced myself and I said, ‘can I please come to ALA?'" Blume said. "She didn't say I'd have to do a keynote, but she said yes, you can come."
Publishers have hailed "excellent growth" of English language exports to Europe, as BookTok encourages a new generation of readers to pick up and read books in English on the continent.
The Publishers Association's Year in Publishing report for 2022 showed the export market played a "huge" role in the industry's success over the year, with an 8% increase taking its total to £4.1bn. Statistics released exclusively to The Bookseller showed Germany was the biggest buyer in Europe, with £130.1m worth of books exported from UK publishers in 2022. This was up 27% from £102.7m in 2021. Although it was down slightly on Covid-hit 2020's high of £132.4m it shows interest in English language books in Europe remains high.
Chris Turner, international sales director at Penguin Random House, said: "The European market has always been very important to us, but in recent years there's been an incredibly positive trajectory. BookTok has been a real driver for this, along with increasing English language levels among younger readers, and a willingness from our trade partners to give more retail space to English language titles. It's a market we're excited to continue to publish for and invest in going forward."
At 24 I'm classified as Gen Z, but I'm very much on the cusp. When I was a teenager, everyone smoked cigarettes, not flavoured vapes, I don't have an iced coffee addiction, and as I must warn my friends: no, I don't have TikTok. So for those of us who are Gen Z, but don't have the app, where do we hear about the books we want to read, what's trending? And how might publishers and booksellers better reach us?
Now, though I'm still loyal to bricks and mortar, I buy many of my books online. This means I usually need to have a better idea of what I'm searching for, as I don't find that the "top charts" or "suggested" lists ever really hit the spot. This is, I think, why so many young people turn to tailored recommendations on sites such as TikTok and Goodreads that adapt to their data-the algorithm gets to know them like a good friend. It's a parasocial relationship, in which users follow their favourite "bookfluencers", because they trust that their recommendations will be nuanced enough.
However, I find myself pulling away from the TikTok hype, because if that book is made for the masses, how do I know that I'm going to enjoy it? I don't equate online influencers with the right level of trust. Instead, I rely on my own revolutionary method: I ask my peers in real life what they're reading, because young people love sharing their discoveries.
In April, Richard North Patterson-author of 16 New York Times bestsellers-published an essay in the Wall Street Journal about his difficulties finding a publisher for his first novel in nine years. The book, Trial, tells the story of a Black teenager charged with the murder of a white sheriff's deputy in rural Georgia, and the efforts of his mother, a prominent voting rights activist, to prove his innocence. According to Patterson, the novel was rejected by "roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers" thanks to a "new ideology of identity authorship"-"literary apartheid"-dictating that "white authors should not attempt to write from the perspective of nonwhite characters or about societal problems that affect minorities."
To judge by the many irate comments this essay prompted, and the response to similar controversies in the past, this idea really ticks people off. Skeptics have been known to point out that Dickens didn't have to be French to write A Tale of Two Cities, and to offer up such reductio ad absurdum scenarios as a world in which only farmers would be allowed to write novels about farmers, etc. Of course, no one is actually arguing that writers should depict only people of their own ethnicity. Most of the controversies over this issue have arisen in a case-by-case manner, with critics making specific claims about individual titles.
As my flight descended over the turquoise Caribbean, I asked myself, Who'd go to the Cayman Islands and attend a literary event of mine? I soon learned the answer: nobody. Just empty chairs, awkward booksellers. "Maybe you could swim with stingrays tomorrow?" one suggested. "They always turn up."
Promoting a book can derange you. After years of quiet toil and noisy typing, you clutch a published book, and step forth to meet the public, eight billion humans who, mystifyingly, seem not to know that your new novel just came out.
Occasionally, someone treats you like the important writer you long to be (but probably aren't). They rave about your prose, and frown attentively when you speak. It's an adrenalin shot, directly into your ego. Then you're at a signing table, the pile of hardcovers all unsold, and everyone has gone. You're just another needy nobody, your ego mashed underfoot.
'A good historical novel is just like any novel: it needs to be compelling with great characters, an authentic setting and a storyline that satisfies'
The novel is set in the Victorian era. How did you research it, and what do you think makes a good historical novel?
I have a Masters in Victorian Studies so I've got a good foundation in terms of the period. That said, I still had a lot to learn about seances which were so different to seances being held today. I immersed myself in diaries and accounts written by mediums of the time like Georgiana Houghton and Elizabeth d'Esperance. These gave me such a rich resource to make my seances realistic you'd probably not be surprised to know that there was scant information available on how the tricks were done, so that's where my imagination came in.
A good historical novel is just like any novel: it needs to be compelling with great characters, an authentic setting and a storyline that satisfies. Yes, you need to be historically accurate, but I think it's so important that you wear your research lightly. One of my favourite reads of recent years is The Smallest Man by Frances Quinn which is set in the English Civil War - I was so held by this brilliantly told story and character, that I didn't realise how much I'd absorbed the historical facts until I got to the end. That's great historical fiction.