Links of the week March 3 2025 (10)

The series debuted in September 2023 to great fanfare in the U.K., where it was a Sunday Times bestseller, a Children's Book of the Week in the Times, the Independent, and the Daily Telegraph, and the winner of the Waterstones Book of the Year award. Knopf released Impossible Creatures in the U.S. in September 2024; it has remained on the New York Times bestseller list since debuting at #1, and was named Barnes & Noble's Children's Book of the Year.

Book two, The Poisoned King, is scheduled for global release on September 11 with a 750,000-copy first printing in North America. It will be available in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats, with exclusive editions from Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart in the U.S., Indigo in Canada, and Waterstones and Indies in the U.K. Launch events will be held at bookstores and libraries worldwide in the fall.

 

Dance of Shadows, the second in Gourav Mohanty's The Raag of Rta fantasy series, was published by Head of Zeus on 27 February. Inspired by the Mahabharata, it continues the struggles between the Mathuran Republic and the Magadhan Empire - and meanwhile, storm clouds gather over the Eastern horizon...

How did the Mahabharata inspire the books, and how did you blend it with grimdark fantasy?

Mahabharat is the garden, the soil in which the antiheroines and antiheroes of the Raag of Rta have germinated. To put it simply, the Raag of Rta is to the Mahabharata what the Lord of the Rings is to the Silmarillion.

Retail is an ever-changing environment, and the UK book trade has certainly experienced plenty of change. This industry of ours has reinvented itself multiple times over the centuries, yet arguably the last four decades have witnessed more change than ever before.

Having run an independent bookshop [Robbs Bookshop in Chelmsford] through those last decades, I have first-hand experience of these shifting tides, and wanted to understand them better. It is not only important to document them, but to put them into historical context - and then try to assess where the trade goes from here. Shelf Life is not just a history of the British book trade, much as it tries to give a whistlestop tour through the past two thousand years. It is also a call to action on many issues, including the impact of AI, how we can get more people (especially children) reading, and how we can help secure the future for print books and bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

Trump has touted the value of tariffs since his first first term as president, when he instituted tariffs on a wide range of products, including books, coming from China. Efforts led by various publishing players were successful in exempting Bibles and other religion books and reducing the tariffs on children's books from 15% to 7.5%; eventually, even that lower rate was suspended. Other books printed in China remained subject to the tariffs throughout the Biden administration. The most pressing question now facing publishers with books produced in China is whether the exemptions granted in the previous tariffs will remain in effect.

Launched in December, the consultation closes at 23.59pm Tuesday (25th February) after already receiving thousands of responses, it was recently reported.

Conway, of the PA which represents over 150 UK publishers, emphasised the need for government intervention to protect authors' work.

He said: "The extraordinary strength of support shown in recent weeks for copyright and our world-class creative industries is something the government ignores at its peril. When Booker, Grammy, Oscar and Nobel prize winners are united in calling on the government for a fair hearing, we have to hope they listen.

 

Knowing if a book is done can be difficult because, as the writer, you know the story better than anyone else. To help you decide if the book is finished, it can be useful to put the manuscript aside for a few days, or even a few weeks. Then, return and read it beginning to end as though it were a book you didn't write. At this stage I find it useful to print the book out and read the manuscript on paper. For me, this helps create a new connection to the book and allows me to read the story more objectively. Are you enjoying the story? Do the characters feel engaging and compelling? Are there problems with the plot that are distracting you? If the answer to these questions is no, your book might be ready to publish. On the other hand, if there are issues jumping off the page at you, that's a good indicator the manuscript probably needs another revision.

The writer, who has several decades of both in-house and freelance editorial experience, responded to The Bookseller's recent investigation on fact-checking in non-fiction. In a comment piece entitled "I care about carelessness" they said: "I must admit I snorted at the idea that we might employ fact-checkers for non-fiction titles as a matter of course. .. there's not a snowball's chance in hell any adult non-fiction divisions are budgeting for a fact-checker."

Social media profile has overtaken expert credentials, they said. "When commissioning non-fiction, it always used to be that you looked for expertise... but increasingly what is valued more is profile. Compared to millions of followers on TikTok or YouTube, qualifications and years of know-how pale into insignificance."