Links of the week August 14 2023 (33)

AI art is something I never truly considered delving into. But when a curiosity about what AI generated fairy tale images would like took hold at Orion, I started experimenting. I found a free AI generator called StarryAI and began feeding it a few prompts (oddly specific things like, "A mermaid princess trying to dance with fish friends during a major drought," "Princess Belle visiting the Beast locked in a cage at the zoo," and "Witch in scary apple orchard full of poison apples at night"). Almost immediately, a host of problems started popping up, problems that have been well-documented as AI image generation has surged in popularity (and controversy).

In the past few years since TikTok exploded in North America, its lottery-like influence has touched every part of the book industry. BookTok, the corner of the network dedicated to literary content, has sufficient real-world power that one viral recommendation can pluck a debut author out of anonymity or boost the sales of a years-old backlist title. For readers, the notoriously specific algorithm might serve them something they've never heard of that aligns perfectly with their tastes. For writers brave enough to hawk their own wares, the platform offers a seductive, if capricious, avenue of self-promotion. For publishers, it is both threat and opportunity.

I'm a writer who also works in publishing. For my day job, I acquire and develop nonfiction books for a few different HarperCollins imprints. A good chunk of my time is spent reading proposals and evaluating their potential, both commercially and artistically. What kind of books are popular? Does this book add to its genre or is it derivative? Does the outline need to be reworked? How have the author's previous books sold? Acquiring, at its heart, is a balancing act between art and commerce. There are so many factors, and opportunity narrows at each stage: an author must successfully pitch a book to an agent, an agent must successfully pitch the book to an editor, an editor must successfully pitch the book to their publishing team, the publishing team must successfully pitch the book to readers.

In other words, I know how hard it is to sell a book to a publisher. I also know how hard it is for a publisher to make a book a success. Knowing this, though, hasn't necessarily made my work as a writer easier.

I first became aware of Cassandra Clare's fantasy oeuvre 10 years ago after devouring Clockwork Angel, the first instalment in her YA Infernal Devices trilogy. She has since written six more series, five of which are set in her renowned Shadowhunter universe. I recall this when we talk over Zoom about her adult fantasy début, Sword Catcher, the culmination of seven years of thought. Clare, usually based in the US, is in rainy Somerset on holiday with family, friends and fellow writers when we speak.

Sword Catcher, a deliciously vivid homage to high fantasy, where machinations and political intrigue abound, feels like a nostalgic return to Robin Hobb's Farseer trilogy with a distinctly modern edge. It is not only Clare's first adult book, but the first time she has constructed an entirely new world, and here the worldbuilding is intricate and utterly compelling. Clare leaves no stone unturned, raising from the pages the towering turrets, history and people of Castellane, a medieval-esque city of extreme hedonism and poverty.

 

Though below the $2.175 billion that Penguin Random House had previously agreed to pay for the country's third largest trade publisher, $1.62 billion is a healthy price since most trade publishers sell for not much better than 1.5 times sales, and S&S's 2022 revenue was $1.18 billion.

"We are very happy with this deal," Paramount CEO Bob Bakish said during an August 7 earnings call. "As we've discussed before, Simon & Schuster is a fantastic asset. But from a strategic perspective, it's not core to our mission of creating and monetizing world class video entertainment. And we think we found a very good home for S&S with KKR. Importantly, this transaction checks all the boxes from a financial perspective."

 

There were echoes of her faux pas at a crime writing festival that I attended as a panellist in 2021. On arriving, I asked a member of the festival team to point me towards the authors' green room. She studied me for a second and asked, "Are you a volunteer?"

For a writer who had spent years trying to get past the gatekeepers, this didn't exactly feel great. I did, however, understand to a certain extent. When you don't look like other people in a certain space, it's easy to assume that you dont belong there.

You published your first book, mystery novel Every Dead Thing, in 1999. How do you think publishing has changed since then?

Well, obviously it's contracted, at least as far as the larger publishers are concerned. I can recall Every Dead Thing attracting interest from four different publishers when it came down to the final auction. Three of those publishers are now under the Hachette roof, including Hodder & Stoughton, with whom I've remained since my debut. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. http://www.ebooks.com/ weren't an issue in 1999, Amazon wasn%u2019t the force it is now, and self-publishing tended to be the last refuge of the desperate rather than a community in and of itself. It seemed like a less complicated time, but it probably wasn't.

Similarly, on the trade side, we had Borders, Blackwell's, Dillons and more, alongside Waterstones, but now it's largely come down to Waterstones - which endures, thankfully - and the independents. There was a period when I was very fearful for the trade, at least when it came to brick-and-mortar bookshops and physical books, but we seem to have come through that.