Over the course of my life, I have chosen names for two real human beings and approximately 200 fictional ones. The processes are surprisingly similar. Both involve a blend of logic and intuition, and both feel like deeply consequential decisions.
Links of the week June 24 2024 (26)
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:
1 July 2024
Of course, it's fair to say the stakes are higher when naming a baby. You're choosing a moniker that will (in most cases) follow another person throughout their lifetime, forming others' impressions at school, in the job market, even online. The responsibility feels weighty, and it is.
But choosing a name for a protagonist is also an important task. Apart from any portrait that might be on the book cover, a name is likely your readers' first encounter with the fictional person who will, one hopes, captivate them for hundreds of pages. How does a writer land on the right one for their main character-and for all the other characters, too?
'We are passionate about promoting a love and care for our natural world, as we explore the Extraordinary Extinct creatures of the past'
Mother-and-daughter team Jill Michelle Smith and Jennifer Watson were the winners of the children's category at the Selfies Awards 2024 with Extraordinary Extinct Prehistoric Minibeasts: A First Guide to Fossils. Together they run micro-publisher Dodo and Dinosaur, producing books about natural history. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the Selfies with their first book, An A-Z of Extraordinary Extinct Creatures.
What inspired you to start working together on your series of natural history books?
We're a mother (Jill) and daughter (Jennifer) team. We began working together during the first lockdown when my little boy was seven months old and I (Jennifer) was already on maternity leave from the National Trust, where I worked in marketing and design, including family activities and conservation trails. Jill has a background in graphics and illustration, and would sell her paintings of Norfolk wildlife locally.
We will discuss what a third-person omniscient point of view is in practice. Still, to understand this POV technique, you need to know what the word omniscient means. With these fancy-sounding words, we find the roots of omniscient in two Latin words. The first is omni, meaning ‘all' or ‘universal,' and the second Latin word is scire, meaning ‘to know.
With a third-person omniscient point of view, the author uses a narrator who knows everything about the story. The narrator has a ‘god's eye view' of the narrative. In third-person omniscient, the narrator can get into any character's head and describe their thoughts and feelings. This kind of narrator also knows the events of the plot. The narrator can foreshadow, to the reader, events yet to come.
The narrator is the author, which means they have complete knowledge of the story and its characters. For this reason, these narrators will usually not be a character in the story and remain unnamed figure who retells the story from a distance. In most people's minds, they will assume the narrator is the author.
'Writing different books at different times allows me to stay creatively fresh and engaged, as well as reach various kinds of readers, which in turn supports my business with multiple streams of income'
What made you decide to write Pilgrimage?
I've been writing snippets of memoir for many years, keeping notes and starting a number of projects based on my travels, but I never found a way to link them together.
In late 2019, I stopped sleeping and started feeling depressed, and then, of course, in 2020, the pandemic disrupted all our lives. I've always been a walker, but during those years, I started going on longer multi-day walks, and always alone. I needed the space physically and mentally, as I struggled with confinement and a loss of direction.
I thought I might write a series of walking guides, taking notes as I walked The Pilgrims' Way from Southwark Cathedral in London to Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, England; then the St Cuthbert's Way from Melrose in Scotland to Lindisfarne, Holy Island; and finally, the Camino de Santiago along the coastal route from Porto, Portugal, to Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
I'm sitting at a table talking to a friend when they tell me this astonishing, deeply compelling story about what happened to them when they were 15 and they had committed a murder, and yes, they did it, and yes, they served time. Early released, desperate to be forgiven, my friend then created a whole new identity and began to live a new life. Until their forties, when they were outed, losing friends and family. They had to start anew and create yet another identity.
Of course, I'm stunned and shocked by this story, but I'm also deeply sympathetic because I absolutely know this person is a good person and this story is raising all sorts of questions for me. Because I'm a writer, later when I'm alone, I can't help but think: God, this would make a great novel. Already the idea is spinning in my mind, trailing off into subplots and characters, but then I stop myself cold.
Because what my friend gave me was a private confession. What if my friend doesn't want me to use the story? What if my friend says yes, except they want to read it first, and then they decide it's not told the way they see it? I agonize that I am invading my friend's privacy. I worry that I could lose a friend, that I could even be sued.
And still, the story haunts me.
Horrible Histories TV writer Gabby Hutchinson Crouch explains how she adapts her satirical writing from screen to the page
I'm going to start with an admission - both Darkwood and The Rooks started life as rejected pilot scripts. I am a huge advocate for holding on to ideas and characters that you love, even if they get rejected at first; rewriting and recycling until you find a home for them where they can flourish. For Gretel and the gang, and for the Rooks family, those places happened to be comedy adventure book trilogies. This move from TV and radio to novels wasn't 'accidental' as such, it was more a result of writing in as many mediums as I could. With the entertainment industry and publishing being the way they currently are in terms of pay, opportunities and security, there is a lot to be said for constantly throwing words at the wall and seeing what sticks. Cast your nets wide, because the salmon shoal of commissioned work is depleting.
In this exclusive interview, Blake Friedmann Literary Agency's Vice Head of Books Juliet Pickering shares her advice for aspiring romance writers.
As an agent, what do you look for in a romance novel?
A fresh voice, and lots of smart fun. I represent romance writers who play with reality and romance, hand in hand. The characters are as real as their feelings, and their feelings are deep and often complicated. I don%u2019t want girl-meets-boy as the only thing going on, I almost want the romance to be incidental in the first few chapters. It can become important of course, but never all-consuming because that%u2019s not how most of us love in our lives!
Nine UK literary festivals including Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival have released a joint statement calling for "increased support" now sponsorship by investment firm Baillie Gifford has ended.
The statement was released ahead of The Bookseller's Marketing & Publicity Conference at which a number of festivals will present their strategies for the future. The Bookseller can also reveal that Bloomsbury has donated £100,000 to be shared between the nine festivals across the country that have lost their Baillie Gifford funding.
Book festivals have faced an unprecedented period of disruption. In June the Scottish firm Baillie Gifford withdrew its financial support from the UK's literary festivals after campaign group Fossil Free Books lobbied against its investments in fossil fuels and companies that operate in Israel. Both Hay and Edinburgh ended partnerships with the group amid author withdrawals and the threat of further protests. The remaining seven festivals had their funding withdrawn by Baillie Gifford, despite the investment group calling claims made by Fossil Free Books "seriously misleading".
At the end of another successful Independent Bookshop week, indie author Mo Fanning questions how he can help booksellers sell more copies than the online giants
Amazon is one of those habits that's hard to kick. When I need eight-hour tealights with next-day delivery or a copy of some buzzy new book, it's where I turn, knowing every two weeks I'll complain about 'all the bloody cardboard' while hauling the recycling kerbside.
I want to be the kind of person who supports local bookstores, despite the fact that my nearest is an eight-mile contraflow drive past roadworks that show no sign of ever ending. When a shop posts that it needs to sell just eight more books to keep the lights on for another week, I click through, determined to pledge support by buying from anywhere but Amazon.
First thing I check is: do they stock my book? Because there's no excuse not to list it on their site, even if limited shelf space precludes stocking a sale-or-return copy. It's available through Gardners, and three weeks back, I signed and sold a dozen copies at a local bookstore.
Rebuilding from a fire, competing with Amazon and launching during lockdown - how these indies continue to thrive
Against the odds, independent bookshops seem to holding their own: in 2022 the number of indies in the UK and Ireland reached a 10-year high of 1,072 shops, according to the Booksellers Association (BA). Though this year's figures have dropped a little - there are now 1,063 indie bookshops - bookselling has, on the whole "defied the high street trend for nearly a decade", a spokesperson from the BA says - especially "if we consider the 2016 figure of 867 shops". As we come to the end of Independent Bookshop Week, an annual celebration which has this year seen 100 events and 700 shops taking part, we shine the light on three of the UK's independent bookshops.
When I first read The Lord of the Rings in 1957 I had the now-impossible experience of reading a book I had never heard of by an unknown author. It was an unforgettable and unrepeatable experience, and I've never lost the sheer wonder of that discovery, compared by C. S. Lewis to lightning from a clear sky. I still envy my past self, getting to read Tolkien for the first time. If I could live one event in my life over, it would be that one.
Failing that, I did the next best thing; I read it to my children. Then, as a newly-returning graduate-school assistant, I read it to my students and found in them an audience ready and waiting for what Tolkien had to offer. In the face of academic skepticism, I wrote my PhD dissertation on Tolkien and have been lucky enough to teach and lecture on and write about J.R.R. Tolkien for the past fifty years.
I'm still doing it. The popular notion is that J.R.R. Tolkien single-handedly transformed the genre of modern fantasy. This is just plain wrong. Tolkien did not transform modern fantasy. He invented it.
When Charlotte Bonner saw Barbie last summer, she was blown away by how much the film spoke to her. "It was very motivational," says Bonner, a marketing assistant and book blogger in Gloucestershire, England. "The themes were very poignant for the time that was going on."
An avid reader, Bonner likes to annotate books with different colored pens and highlighters. While watching Barbie, she remembers thinking to herself, "This is something I could annotate quite a lot in."
A few months later, she got her wish. In December, Faber & Faber published the Barbie screenplay as a 138-page paperback, with full-color photos and a new introduction by the film's co-writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. "I went round to all the bookshops and just happened to find it," Bonner recalls. Meanwhile, in a real-life literary Barbenheimer, her father bought the Oppenheimer screenplay - also via Faber & Faber, which has published most of Christopher Nolan's screenplays since 2001's Memento. "He's very much a history person, and he likes to read a lot," Bonner says of her dad.
Increasingly, blockbuster movies aren't just making an impact at the box office or on streaming. They're resonating at bookstores, too, many of which prominently displayed the Barbie and Oppenheimer screenplays last year as though they were buzzy new novels. The sales seem to justify this strategy. In August, Variety reported that the screenplay to Nolan's acclaimed biopic was selling out fast on Amazon.
Maris Kreizman on Independent Publicists, Books Tours, and Vanishing Book Coverage
Last week The Guardian ran an article about how some authors are seeking help outside of their in-house publishing teams to promote their books. This is nothing new. There are lots of independent publicists who've been working with authors to supplement the work of their in-house teams for years. But this piece seemed to strike a particular chord with literary Twitter, probably because of one particular line: "Book tours can cost $15,000, publicity campaigns up to $16,000, and marketing work up to $100 an hour - figures that can be considerable when compared to authors' advances and distant promises of royalties."
That's a lot of money, I think we can all agree. So yes, (some) commercial authors are spending significant amounts of money on outside help, and the authors featured in the Guardian piece are happy with their investments. But I think a lot of readers came away from that piece feeling like they could not be successful without spending extra money. Not true! Here are some other things to keep in mind.
Thinking of defecting to the dark side? Here's what I've learnt.
Early autumn last year I steeled myself to take a call. I was publisher of Sphere Non-Fiction and lighting up my screen was an agent whose client I was due to be publishing the following year, except my boss at Little, Brown had just told him I was leaving to become an agent myself. I already felt guilty about leaving my authors, so I was self-centredly imagining that he was about to add fuel to that fire. In actual fact, he was just calling me for a nice gossip - about why I'd done it, how great it was to be an agent and how if I ever wanted a chat he'd be around. "Welcome to the dark side," he said and I laughed.
The next day, I had a conversation with a similarly helpful agent. "Let's get lunch. Welcome to the dark side," I laughed again.
But then when the next agent said it and literally every other agent after that, à la Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn't help but wonder what the hell this dark side was I was letting myself in for.
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