Author, speaker, and photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström is Nigerian-American, and based in Sweden. Her debut novel In Every Mirror She's Black was published in 2021, and her second book, Everything is Not Enough, is out today with Head of Zeus. It tells the story of three women as they try to navigate life, love, prejudice and privilege in Stockholm.
Links of the week November 6 2023 (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:
6 November 2023
My journey to publication was a rough one with tons of rejections (70+) along the way. Those rejections also came with such high conflicting praise. Most of the editors didn't have the vision for publication as they stated. They didn't know who would want to read my book about Black women in Sweden and who would frankly care.
Some of those praise-rejection words: bold; ambitious; transfixing; intriguing; electric; engaging; well-wrought; sharp; smartly drawn; nuanced; poignant; textured; intelligent; energetic; entertaining; deftly captured; interesting; clever; brilliant; thoughtful; lovely; compelling; organic; unique voice; fresh; well-executed.
So the publishing process made me reflect on all the incredible authors we never got to read just because they gave up after the 30th or 40th rejection. I wish they had kept going.
According to publisher Gallery Books, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears has sold a total of 1.1 million copies through its first week on sale in the U.S. The combined sales figure includes preorders, sales of print books, e-books, and audiobooks formats. The book sold 418,000 print copies through outlets that report to Circana BookScan.
The audiobook, read by Michelle Williams with an introduction by Britney Spears, is the fastest selling in the Gallery's history, the publisher said. Gallery has gone back to press for a fourth printing of the book, bringing the number of hardcover copies of the memoir in print to more than 1.4 million.
The Woman in Me is published by Simon & Schuster in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and India, and is S&S UK's biggest ever week-one sale across formats in its history. The book has been published in 26 languages and territories, with an estimated 2.4 million copies in print globally.
Two decades after Christopher Paolini self-published his debut book, Eragon, which launched The Inheritance Cycle, this year is unfolding as a blue-ribbon one for the author. On November 7, Knopf will release Murtagh, a standalone novel spotlighting the eponymous Dragon Slayer and his sword Thorn from the cycle's world of Alagaësia. Set one year after the events of that series-which has been published in 50 countries and has sold more than 40 million copies-Murtagh has an announced U.S. first printing of two million copies.
Paolini, who holds the Guinness World Record for the youngest bestselling series author (an accolade he earned at 19), was homeschooled, and began writing Eragon at the age of 15. He self-published the novel in 2002 at 18. After Knopf picked up the novel and released it in August 2003, Eragon sold one million copies within six months, became a #1 bestseller, and paved the way for the similarly successful sales tracks of its Inheritance Cycle successors.
Published in 2005, Paolini's second novel, Eldest, sold more than 425,000 hardcover copies in its first week, making it the largest single-week sale ever recorded for a Random House Children's BooksClick for Random House Children's Books Publishers References listing title-hardcover or paperback-and the fastest-selling book in the publisher's history at the time of its release.
I went with a small press, but I didn't need my book to pay the bills."
"It was a nice rejection, but ‘great voice' isn't gonna pay the bills."
"A lot of really great writers still aren't getting paid enough to pay the bills."
In a writers group online, my colleagues commiserated-about how hard it is to sell books, about the "memoir industrial complex" that promotes a very few big-deal successes while other authors shell out thousands for classes and editing and invest their time in "building platform" that is still statistically unlikely to get a book deal. Over and over, I see this phrase: pay the bills.
While enough to pay the bills is a perfectly valid colloquialism for "an amount of money that emotionally balances the time and effort I've put in," it's also a terrible goal. I mean, first, screw this pay the bills crap, why not aim for a life-changing amount of money? If you're aspiring, reach high. But more importantly, very few authors earn enough to pay the bills in any meaningful way.
The prospect of reading a book filled me with anxiety and shame. But an ADHD diagnosis changed everything
I have a library of self-help books on the shelf in my living room. Dozens of books that promise to solve any personal issue, earn me millions and declutter my life. None of them have been read beyond the first five pages, but it's nice to know the answers are there, I guess.
Each book I have ever bought has received the same treatment. I read the introduction as part of a new "no screens after 9pm" routine that I am going to commit to for life, I smugly put it down on my bedside table, and then a month later I put it back on the shelf after it has served its purpose as a coaster.
I've spent a lifetime struggling with reading - not the ability to read, but the activity of reading. I always felt as if I ought to have read all of the "classics" first before reading anything modern. Nonfiction didn't come with that same pressure, but whether fiction or nonfiction, knowing quite how much of a book was left to read felt like a suffocating burden.
It feels like we live in an era of constant distraction, but the truth is more complex
Since at least 2008, when the US tech journalist Nicholas Carr asked: "Is Google making us stupid?", there has been a sense of crisis around our concentration spans. Distraction is everywhere, and so are its putative antidotes. Apps such as PawBlock, offering cute animal pictures instead of your social media fix, and screen modes such as Microsoft's Focus, are the tech versions of mindfulness, the perceived panacea for all modern ills. On the other hand, speed‑reading programs such as QuickReader hold out the promise of absorbing more content in less time. We are utterly conflicted about the relationship between concentration and distraction.
Behind these worries and their remedies are two connected assumptions, typically blamed on our addiction to the dopamine highs of social media. The first is that our distractedness is both recent and negative; the second, that our concentration was better in the past. Carr recollects that formerly he would read immersively, engaging deeply with narrative, like a scuba diver. Now he is a jetski reader, skimming across the surface at speed. It is a compelling, and immediately recognisable, assessment.
The private equity firm KKR has completed its $1.62 billion acquisition of Simon & Schuster. KKR emerged as the winning bidder in early August after Penguin Random House's acquisition for S&S was blocked by the government in late 2022. Not many new details were disclosed about how S&S will operate that were not already revealed when the purchase was first announced. The publisher will continue to be led by current CEO Jonathan Karp and COO and CFO Dennis Eulau.
In his letter to employees, Karp highlighted the fact that, with the purchase by KKR, S&S will no longer be part of a media conglomerate for the first time since 1975, when it was acquired by Gulf Western. Instead, it is now part of a portfolio of companies owned by KKR, which includes the digital distributor OverDrive. As of December 31, 2022, KKR's traditional private equity portfolio consisted of more than 125 companies, with approximately $290 billion in collective annual revenue.
The shadow chancellor's new book has come under scrutiny for lifting passages of text from other sources without acknowledgment. Academic writers explore how this can happen
Rachel Reeves's mea culpa over her failure to properly reference some sentences in her new book has thrown the spotlight on the thorny issue of plagiarism and the pitfalls of tedious factchecking.
Publishers and authors agree that if your name is on the book cover, the responsibility to properly reference any borrowed phrases or facts in the bibliography lies squarely with you.
"One thing that is quite curious," one publishing insider said of the industry, "is that there doesn't seem to be much formal factchecking. The author warrants to deliver something that is original, not plagiarised. It's in the contract." The publisher, they added, "is taking it on trust".
Amazon this week announced that it has filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California against some 20 individuals scamming authors by falsely claiming an affiliation with Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing. According to the suit, the scammers run fake Amazon knockoff websites designed to lure would-be authors into paying a fee to publish, and then deliver either substandard or no service at all.
The suit includes details of unnamed authors who were taken in by the scams, including one who visited one of the defendant sites thinking she was accessing Amazon's legitimate self-publishing services. The authors "corresponded with Defendants or their agents, who not only claimed to be Amazon representatives, but sent documents making further uses of the Amazon Marks," the complaint states. "Believing she was working with Amazon, [the author] paid Defendants $4,000.00 for purported editorial and publication services." The woman learned she was scammed after the service failed to materialize.
To protect the human creativity and knowledge that underpins safe and reliable AI,' the UK's publishers, authors, agents, and ALCS join forces.
A key development in world publishing's response to artificial intelligence technologies, today (October 31), four of the United Kingdom's most prominent publishing-industry organizations have issued an adamant message to the government led by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak.
The Publishers Association; the Society of Authors, a trade union; Association of Authors' AgentsThe association of UK agents. Their website (http://www.agentsassoc.co.uk/index.html) gives a Directory of Members and a code of practice, but no information about the agencies other than their names. The association refers visitors to the UK agent listings from The Writers' & Artists' Yearbook on the WritersServices site., and the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (referred to by its initialization, ALCS) are making an appeal that points to the importance of this week's AI Safety Summit led by Sunak's offices-and outlines the critical nature of its mission.
Louis Ferrante recalls the meeting with George Weidenfeld that led to a seven-year writing project
My last book about the mafia, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, was an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. Because of the book's global appeal, I was invited by the German media conglomerate Axel Springer to speak at their annual retreat for editors, being held at the Hotel Villa Athena in Agrigento, Sicily.
The first evening, I met an older gentleman who introduced himself as George. We struck up an enjoyable conversation that centred on our mutual love of history, and, at some point, George said to me: "I would like to publish your next book." This softly spoken man, who conversed with me as if we had known each other forever, was Lord Weidenfeld, one of the most talented and influential book publishers of the 20th century.
What JR, Alexis, and Domingue Taught this Mystery Writer
One of the best compliments I've received from readers about the Lady Mystery series is that each mystery unfolds like an episode of television. The vivid nature of the storytelling, the feeling that you're in the room watching the events happen, is high praise for a kid who spent her youth as a TV junky.
Yes, I must confess.
I was an addict. As much as I'd love to say that my inspiration was birthed from the high-quality ITV/PBS broadcasts like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I can't.
The show was great, but I fancied others more; the more soapy or dramatic, the better. I confess Dallas and Dynasty cemented my love for intrigue.
There is little doubt that in recent years the reading public's taste in crime writing has shifted. Cosy crime, it seems, is king. The hyper-realistic, blood and guts style of novels about hard-bitten detectives with drink problems, broken marriages and potty mouths is giving way to something different. A hark back to happier times, maybe.
What lies behind this trend?
Nobody on the planet will ever forget the impact that Covid-19 and its many variants wrought upon us. Quite simply, the spectre of death was all around. Many of us lost family and friends in a global hurricane of misery and sorrow.
And perhaps that's part of the answer.
Rather than relentlessly dark noir, the trend is for more uplifting books. Yes, people are still being murdered. But there's tea, jam and scones at the rectory, and the "F" word has been consigned to the dustbin.
This step-change has more to do with the sensibilities of the modern audience than a swing to the prudish. Yes, we've been through the wringer in the last few years. With wars and rumours of wars tragically unending, the existential push to save the planet, not to mention the daily struggle to keep a roof over our heads and families fed amid a fiscal crunch not seen for generations, is all-consuming. It has brought about an altered sense of reality. Maybe the precious nature of our existence has suddenly dawned.
This was my first anthology and the opportunity for J.G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts, Bob Shaw and many others to be published in France for the first time. This was my debut anthology and, by default, I became a serial anthologist and, for my sins, have now edited around 130.
Overnight I became known as a crime specialist and other publishers began soliciting me to edit anthologies for them as I was by then reckoned to be reliable and professional (and my anthologies might possibly lose less money than others in a domain where short story collections have always been awkward to market and make a profit from!).
The much-missed Nick Robinson at Robinson Publishing suggested an annual anthology, conceived as a crime fiction magazine in book format and I signed up in a flash. For the first time, it would provide me with the opportunity to commission brand new stories from authors whom I greatly admired as well as hopefully discovering new ones through an open call for new material, alongside a couple of classic reprints I had in mind (uncollected stories by Ed McBain and John Le Carré) which would allow us to feature ‘big' names on the front cover.
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