Links of the week April 15 2024 (16)

There are good runs, then there are good runs. Claire Wilson is having the italicised kind: she is the reigning British Book Awards (aka the Nibbies) Agent of the Year, saluted for shepherding clients - including Alice Oseman, Katherine Rundell and Hannah Gold - to prize podiums and the top of bestsellers lists. And though she did not put her hat in the ring for 2024's awards, she probably had a better 12 months since she was crowned the Nibbies champ. On a pan-industry level, she has just stepped up as president of the 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. (AAA). Meanwhile her agency RCW recently acquired the Caroline Sheldon Literary Agency

Special interests: fiction - all fiction for women, sagas, suspense, contemporary, chick lit, historical fiction, fantasy and comic novels; non-fiction

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(CSLA) adding to the fold the world's biggest picture book star, Julia Donaldson (among many others), while launching a new illustrated children's book division, which Wilson oversees.

Publishers are eager to return to business as usual after the disruption and lingering effects of the Covid crisis. For Rosemary Stimola, owner of Stimola Literary Studio, "It was my first Bologna in five years, since before the pandemic. Everyone is very happy to see people-it feels so wonderful to see faces and hug people."

Judy Brunsek, sales and marketing director at Canada's Owlkids, said, "We're all trying to figure out, what's the new normal? During the pandemic people were going crazy for books. But now all the funding is gone and sales are flatter. What are we using for comparison year over year? The pandemic is finally behind us and I'm thinking this is the baseline year."

 

Nielsen BookScan reported 2023 as the biggest year since accurate records began for the Horror & Ghost Stories category, up 54% year on year by value, to £7.7m. Though it should be noted that the category is relatively small compared to other categories, this year has already started out a massive 55% up on the same period in 2023.

Horror themes are also increasingly creeping into other broader categories such as literary fiction and more commercial thrillers, with the industry describing it as a recurring theme at last month's London Book Fair, with a string of horror-infused literary debuts in particular and more hotly contested auctions.

 

Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app. Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.

The Silverblood Promise is my love letter to fantasy fiction and adventure stories. While I've always enjoyed the high fantasy trope of heroes on quests, it's the grimy, gritty settings usually found in low fantasy that appeal to me the most, so I wanted to try to put these two elements together. Then it was just a case of packing the story with as many of my favourite things as possible: mysterious artefacts, scary monsters, lost civilisations and a dash of sharp wit. I essentially wrote the sort of book I love to read.

The supernatural has always fascinated me. I remember, as a child, my Aunt Sally taking me to our local spiritualist church. At the time, I had struggled to make sense of how generic statements from the medium such as ‘I have a man trying to make contact, who has brown hair', or ‘I have an elderly women here who used to like cake' could result in so many raised hands, so many tears.

So much hope.

 

After nearly 150 conversations with writers of all backgrounds (from NYT bestselling thriller authors, to hopeful debuts, to historians, science writers and poets), I'm still amazed how much connective tissue binds us writers together. A few commonalities I've evidenced throughout my interviews:

• Most writers can name a specific person or event that happened in their teenage years that made them want to write.
• Writing is less a plan than it is a purpose. Despite all efforts to do anything but write, the act of writing will burrow its way to the surface at some point in a writer's life.
• No one sets out to write because it's a solid business decision...

 

The research explores the experiences of those in creative careers with AI systems, and their views and concerns about the future impact on creative careers. The survey's respondents include writers of fiction and non-fiction, scriptwriters and poets - both traditionally and self-published - as well as journalists, illustrators and translators.

Illustrators are the least likely to have used AI in their work, with only one in 10 reporting having made use of its systems, compared to a fifth of fiction writers and a quarter of non-fiction writers. Meanwhile, around three in 10 illustrators and writers say that they have used generative AI to brainstorm ideas, while 8% of translators - and an even smaller proportion of illustrators (5%) - report that the reason they have used AI in their work is because they were asked to by a publisher or commissioning organisation.