"I love to write thrillers about creeps and coercive controllers, and about letting the wrong person in," Lisa Jewell says via Zoom from the sun-dappled bedroom of her London home, which is packed with books and looks out onto a leafy communal garden. "You can literally wake up one morning, meet someone, and let them into your life, and that can be enough to destroy everything. With thrillers, there's so much to play with. So many emotions to investigate, so many secrets to uncover."
Links of the week July 17 2023 (29)
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:
17 July 2023
Jewell's novels, which include romantic and family dramas and psychological thrillers, can feel like hornets' nests pulsing with secrets. The 54-year-old has written 21 page-turners that have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide over the past 30 years and been translated into 29 languages, according to her publisher, Atria. Her next, None of This Is True, out in August, follows a successful podcaster in search of her next project who meets an odd, mousy woman at a restaurant and, at the woman's suggestion, agrees to interview her for her podcast. The podcaster then discovers that behind the woman's meek facade is a dangerous character with control issues - who may be trying to dismantle the podcaster's life.
The celebration of V.C. Andrews 100th birthday in June with the Gallery Books publication of my biography, The Woman Beyond the Attic, and the broadcast of a screen adaptation of the Cutler series on Lifetime has focused new attention on the 40-year-old book franchise, which still has a large, devoted fan base.
Many started reading Andrews when they were 12 with Flowers in the Attic. You can just imagine the wide demographic these novels command by attracting new readers while holding onto the older. It is also reasonable to say that there is a V.C. or Virginia Andrews title in almost every country that has a publisher, including mainland China. How did this happen and go on decades after her passing?
I came aboard as the ghostwriter largely because I had the same agent as Andrews, Anita Diamant, who knew many of my novels had young characters similar to those appearing in The Attic.
In September, 2021, while working at his desk in Philadelphia, Samuel R. Delany experienced a mysterious episode that he calls "the big drop." His vision faded for about three minutes, and he felt his body plunge, as if the floor had fallen away. When he came to, everything looked different, though he couldn't say exactly how.
Delany, who is eighty-one, began to suspect that he'd suffered a mini-stroke. His daughter, Iva, an emergency-room physician, persuaded him to go to the hospital, but the MRI scans were inconclusive. The only evidence of a neurological event was a test result indicating that he had lost fifteen per cent of his capacity to form new memories-and a realization, in the following weeks, that he was unable to finish his novel in progress, "This Short Day of Frost and Sun." After publishing more than forty books in half a century, the interruption was, he told me, both "a loss and a relief."
Ruth Ware's new novel Zero Days was published yesterday by Simon & Schuster. It tells the story of Jack, a hacker who arrives home after an assignment goes horribly wrong, to find her husband dead. It soon becomes clear that the police have only one suspect in mind: her.
I think the crime genre specifically has got ever more crowded and competitive - which is exciting, really. It forces everyone to up their game. When someone does something brilliantly, everyone else has to raise their ambitions. We keep seeing predictions of reader fatigue but I don't see that happening at the moment and I think the competition element is a large part of why. It's also got more diverse which is brilliant and probably a large part of why readers keep reading. I think crime, as a genre, is expanding outwards to meet its readers.
AI is changing everything, fast. I was recently speaking on a panel about AI in the creative industries, and to prepare I spent five minutes, and less than $5, using a program to write and illustrate a children's book about my dog. The book, Rosie Makes a Mess, wasn't perfect - it drew on an earlier version of AI program Midjourney for images so the fingers were... messy, but it was a indicative of how quick and simple (and tempting) it is to use AI to write a book.
But this isn't new.
In 2019, Springer Nature published Lithium-ion Batteries: A Machine-generated Summary of Current Research, and today Amazon is awash with AI-written books on topics as varied as adult colouring books to science fiction.
Authors such as Leanne Leeds has been using Sudowrite since 2021 to help her write her "whimsical contemporary paranormal mysteries" that have sold remarkably well on Amazon. And, NanoGenMo has been running on GitHub since 2013 as a month of code-writing that generates a novel (an echo of NanoWriMo).
On the publisher side, generative AI tools such as Midjourney or Dall-E have been used to create cover art and internal graphics, generate blurbs, and is being used more in marketing via tools such as Jasper.ai. It can be used to quickly generate contracts, summarise a synopsis or chapter, scrape and analyse data, build a website, or write specific code to do all of the above.
Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay allege that their books, which are copyrighted, were ‘used to train' ChatGPT because the chatbot generated ‘very accurate summaries' of the works
Two authors have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law by "training" its model on novels without the permission of authors.
Mona Awad, whose books include Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, and Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World, filed the class action complaint to a San Francisco federal court last week.
ChatGPT allows users to ask questions and type commands into a chatbot and responds with text that resembles human language patterns. The model underlying ChatGPT is trained with data that is publicly available on the internet.
Authors have now joined the growing ranks of concerned creators suing tech developers over their much-hyped generative AI technology. And a pair of copyright class action suits recently filed on behalf of authors is raising broader questions about the most effective way to protect creators and creative industries-including authors and publishers-from the potentially disruptive aspects of AI.
Filed on June 28 and July 7 by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on behalf of five named plaintiffs (Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay in one case, and Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, and comedian Sarah Silverman in the other), the suits claim that Microsoft-backed OpenAI (creators of ChatGPT) and Meta (creators of LLaMA) infringed the authors' copyrights by using unauthorized copies of their books to train their AI models, including copies allegedly scraped from notorious pirate sites. While the authors' attorneys did not comment for this story, a spokesperson for the firm suggested to Ars Technica that, if left unchecked, AI models built with "stolen works" could eventually replace the authors they stole from, and framed the litigation as part of "a larger fight for preserving ownership rights for all artists and creators."
For better or worse, artificial intelligence is poised to shake up the publishing industry. As a technologist who has authored over 50 books, I've been keen on its evolution in that space. From assisting in research to streamlining content creation and distribution, AI offers promising avenues for increased productivity and efficiency.
However, it also raises concerns about the preservation of human voice and original thought. In fact, with the increase in AI in content creation, we'll soon see the pendulum swing the other way: Works may be labeled as "Non-AI," just like we see "Non-GMO" in many food products. If you're a thought leader looking to publish a book, you may be wondering how to leverage AI while avoiding its pitfalls.
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain, a union that represents writers in such professions as books, film, and TV, has revealed the results of a survey about artificial intelligence. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that they believed that the increased use of AI will reduce their income from writing, while 61% were worried that AI could replace jobs in their craft areas. In response, WGGB has published "Writers and AI," a policy position statement outlining the challenges caused by AI and the risks that go with it, as well as the potential AI has to benefit the writing profession.
Current concerns about AI in the report include decreased job opportunities for writers, the suppression of writer pay, infringements of copyright and the use of writers' work without their permission, and lack of adequate regulation from the government. Eighty-one percent of respondents to the survey felt that writers should be paid a fee when their work is used by AI systems.
Courtesy Writers GuildWGGB "believes that while AI systems are not yet sophisticated enough to accurately mimic the standard of writing produced by professional writers this is a likely future scenario," its position statement reads. "However, the union does not believe that AI will ever be able to match the originality, authenticity, enthusiasm and humanity that professional writers put into their storytelling." It also "believes that, if used in an ethical, transparent and responsible way, there are potential benefits-including allowing writers to diversify and increase their income streams and sustain a writing career."
When it comes to the publishing industry, the domain has seen several changes due to varying trends. The amalgamation of brilliant minds, innovative ideas, and, most importantly, emerging technologies have encouraged its huge growth. For this reason, the publishing industry is standing strong, with $28.1 billion in revenue as of 2022.
Just like other years, 2023, too, has been witnessing the rise of some incredible trends that can certainly be leveraged by marketers. Here's a quick brief:
#1 Audiobooks
With 1.8 billion USD sales of audiobooks in 2022 in the US, there%u2019s no doubt that the genre is likely to go consistent in 2023 too. The sales figure has grown gradually in the past few years from 0.94 billion (2018) to 1.3 billion (2020) and 1.6 billion in 2021. Meanwhile, as per the data of the last decade (2010-2020), the total audiobook titles in the country expanded to 71 thousand from mere six thousand.
Organisers of the Frankfurt Buchmesse have announced the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre (LitAg) has sold out after record interest, and that the new Publishers Rights Centre is also expected to also reach full capacity.
A total of 548 work tables have been reserved - a record number that exceeds the figures of the pre-pandemic years of 528 tables in 2018 and 522 tables in 2019. Overall, the fair expects to welcome 326 agencies from 31 countries at the 2023 fair, taking place this year between 18th and 22nd October.
The countries with the most representatives in the LitAg this year are the UK, the United States, Germany, Spain and Sweden. For the first time, representatives from the United Arab Emirates will also be present with a table and, after a hiatus during the pandemic, agencies from China will once again be on site.
Obama speaks out against ‘profoundly misguided’ book bans in school libraries | Books | The Guardian
In an open letter to American librarians, Barack Obama has criticised "profoundly misguided" rightwing efforts to ban books from libraries in public schools.
"Some of the books that shaped my life - and the lives of so many others - are being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives," the former president wrote.
"It's no coincidence that these ‘banned books' are often written by or feature people of colour, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community."
Obama's letter on Monday supported Unite Against Book Bans, a campaign led by the American Library Association (ALA).
After unit sales of print books were basically flat in the first quarter of 2023 compared to 2022, they finished the first half of the year down 2.7%. Sales fell from 363.4 million in the first six months of 2022 to 353.5 million this year at outlets that report to Circana BookScan.
First-quarter sales were given a big boost by Spare by Prince Harry, which sold about 1.1 million copies during the period and was also the bestselling book for the first half of the year. But no title came close to matching its sales level in the second quarter. (More bestselling books of the year so far will be featured in next week's issue.)
The 2.7% decline in the first half of 2023 followed a 6.6% drop in the first six months of 2022 compared to 2021; unit sales were 387.5 million in the first half of 2021, 8.5% higher than in the same period this year. In taking the longer view back to prepandemic times, units were up 12% in the first half of this year compared to 2019.
It has been 20 years since the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) started running its annual CLPE Children's Poetry Award (CLiPPA), after the Signal Poetry Award was discontinued in 2003. Charlotte Hacking, learning and programmes director at CLPE, says: "We didn't want that award to be lost, because there isn't any other children's literature award that solely recognises the importance of children's poetry. And we know throughout our 50 years of research at CLPE just how essential poetry is as a genre for children."
To mark the 20th year of the CLiPPA, CLPE has partnered with Macmillan Children's Books, which is also celebrating 30 years of its poetry list, The Big Amazing Poetry Project, to deliver professional training to 30 primary school teachers on how to teach poetry. The initiative kicked off with a Poetry in Primary Schools 2023 survey in January looking at how poetry is currently shared and taught in primary schools. One statistic that came out of it was that in 74% of primary school classrooms, poems are heard or read less than once a week.
As well as being overlooked in the curriculum, Hacking believes children's poetry is often underserved by the book trade. CLPE hears that poetry "is a hard sell" for publishers, however Hacking believes progress can be made if they "work with the wider market - with us and with schools - on being really able to highlight the benefits that poetry has for children".
For most readers, acquiring a newly released book means heading to your local bookstore, hitting the library, or logging on to Amazon. For others, however, it involves opening up a thoughtfully designed box that includes a copy of the book, alongside gifted items like a custom tote bag, a scented candle, beauty products, and maybe even a box of tea. If you're a book influencer, the latter is often the case.
One might say that Sally Rooney started it all when it comes to covetable book merchandise that takes over the internet, though she'd likely reject that attribution. I anxiously awaited the release of Rooney's latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You back in September 2021. I placed my pre-order at my local bookstore because, at the time, I thought that this was all a reader could do. Oh, how wrong I was! Leading up to publication day, I started seeing authors, journalists, and generally cool internet people post about the Beautiful World tote bag and the Beautiful World bucket hat and even the Beautiful World umbrella.
or most readers, acquiring a newly released book means heading to your local bookstore, hitting the library, or logging on to Amazon. For others, however, it involves opening up a thoughtfully designed box that includes a copy of the book, alongside gifted items like a custom tote bag, a scented candle, beauty products, and maybe even a box of tea. If you%u2019re a book influencer, the latter is often the case. One might say that Sally Rooney started it all when it comes to covetable book merchandise that takes over the internet, though she%u2019d likely reject that attribution. I anxiously awaited the release of Rooney%u2019s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You back in September 2021. I placed my pre-order at my local bookstore because, at the time, I thought that this was all a reader could do. Oh, how wrong I was! Leading up to publication day, I started seeing authors, journalists, and generally cool internet people post about the Beautiful World tote bag and the Beautiful World bucket hat and even the Beautiful World umbrella.
Melissa Taylor is a former teacher and literacy trainer as well as a mother of two, blogger, and children's book expert. She created and writes the popular blog Imagination Soup. She is also a contributor for publications such as Adobe Education, Brightly, Storey Publishing, and Parenting. Here, Taylor makes the case for the importance of shorter middle grade novels that hold young readers' attention.
In the past two months, publishers have sent me 41 middle grade books to review for my 16-year-old website, Imagination Soup. It's a place where parents, teachers, librarians, and grandparents can go to find thousands of children's book recommendations and reviews, 99.9% of which I've written.
Usually, I love all the books. And I'm a fast reader. But when I look at the books on my shelves and my apps, I notice that in the past few months, I've finished 17, abandoned 19, and have yet to read five.
This gives me pause. Even more interesting is the fact that most of the recent books I've abandoned are around 350-400 pages.
How becoming an author has changed the way I approach my publishing day job.
The problem with working in publishing is that everyone knows when the book you've written goes on submission. You think people are talking about you because people are talking about you. I thought I'd prepared myself (colleagues knew I was writing, and I wasn't shy when it came to discussing the process), but the reality was bizarre.
An editorial director mentioned they brought up my book at lunch and again at drinks. "Who are they?" Scouts, apparently. A colleague in another division told me there were whispers among editorial of "a girl in sales with a book on submission". That's me, I thought. I'm the girl in sales with a book on submission. A third person said that her scout friend loves it. Scouts again. Who are these scouts? Are the scouts in the room with us now? "It's a good thing! Scouts talking means people are excited about your book." I didn't even know what a scout did, but I came to understand it as some sort of literary insider trading. I smiled and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling office windows and pressed my forehead against the glass, looking down at the ant-like crowd swarming the city. Sonofabitch is down there somewhere, I thought, like that boy from that film.
The best children's fiction "helps us refind things we may not even know we have lost", writes the author Katherine Rundell, with many books proving subversive, emboldening - and awe-inspiring.
I've been writing children's fiction for more than 10 years now, and still I would hesitate to define it. But I do know, with more certainty than I usually feel about anything, what it is not: it's not exclusively for children. When I write, I write for two people: myself, age 12, and myself, now, and the book must satisfy two distinct but connected appetites. My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food, and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also: acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart. So what I try for when I write - failing often, but trying - is to put down in as few words as I can the things that I most urgently and desperately want children to know and adults to remember. Those who write for children are trying to arm them for the life ahead with everything we can find that is true. And perhaps, also, secretly, to arm adults against those necessary compromises and necessary heartbreaks that life involves: to remind them that there are and always will be great, sustaining truths to which we can return.
Charity aims to give 10 million young people across the continent the books they need by 2030
Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed is announcing its Generation Reader campaign, which will see the charity work with its partners across Africa 'to give a generation of African young people access to the brand-new books they need to unlock their potential', according to the charity.
'The UN predicts that by 2030 over a third of the world's under 25 year olds will live in Africa. They have the potential to become doctors, teachers, business leaders, writers and more, but millions of them lack access to books. Without books they'll find it far more difficult to become confident readers, thrive in education, and school leavers with the confidence and ambition to succeed.
'In response Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed is scaling up its work across sub-Saharan Africa to give young people access to books. By 2030, the charity aims to provide 10 million young Africans with access to 1.5 million brand-new books, create 300 new reading spaces where younger readers feel welcome and train 1,500 teachers and librarians to promote reading and guide children and young people so they can discover the power of books.'
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