Veteran agent Sterling Lord: 'What have I learned from my long experience? What wisdom can I impart? Sometimes it's the unanticipated moments that clarify and offer a larger meaning...' A fascinating long look at the relationship between agents and authors.
Links of the week March 25 2013 (13)
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 April 2013
I realized, shortly after starting my literary agency in 1952 and after making a few sales, that my knowledge of what a New York literary agency does and how it works was very thin. Yes, an agent sells books to book publishers and articles and short stories (not much anymore) to magazines, but the day a friend who was editor-in-chief of all the Time Life magazines told me he didn't know what an agent did, I began to think.The agent has to know good writing and what is a good, interesting-to-the-publisher idea at that moment in order not only to judge what he can sell and what he can't, but also because often writers tried and untried will seek his advice. And he must know.
An agent is successful if he can attract and hold effective writers; these are two different talents. You have to know and understand the lives and problems of writers and devise how to help them with their lives. If you take on a young or new writer and his first book is a rousing success, you have a different problem: other alert agents - and there are a few around - may suddenly approach him or her offering to do more for him or her than you do, a situation you need to be ready for if you are an accomplished agent.
It's a time of re-invention, re-education, and revolution in children's nonfiction publishing - at least in the United States. New US Common Core Standards require children at every grade to read and respond to at least 50% nonfiction. At high school level it is 70%! In parallel, digital technology is changing information books into transmedia presentations to read or interact with on tablets, smartphones, and smartboards.
Patricia Stockland, Editor-in-Chief of Lerner Publishing Group and a Faculty member at the conference says: "This is an excellent time for writers, illustrators, and editors to find work in children's nonfiction publishing, and to bring their creativity to a burgeoning market. They may find themselves working with digital technicians alongside publishers and be challenged to learn new computer skills, but the rewards will be great - both in gaining an expanding skillset and in learning that we're no longer working in a publishing field or in digital fields, but in digital publishing for multiple platforms."
James Herbert, the author, who has died aged 69, sold more than 50 million horror novels, a tally bettered in the genre only by his friend Stephen King; Herbert wrote 23 books but was always - rather to his frustration - best known for his first two, The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975).
Despite the commercial success of The Rats and his later novels, Herbert remained dissatisfied with his literary status, feeling that the "literary snobs" should take him more seriously. I've always suffered from being labelled a horror writer - just because I didn't go to university, just because I still talk in my natural voice, just because I'm not as articulate as Martin Amis. We like to kid ourselves that we're in an equal society, but we're not." In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Herbert referred to a men's style magazine's recommended reading list of 20th-century novels that one should read by the age of 30: alongside books by Joyce, Salinger and Heller was The Rats, by James Herbert. He also pointed out that his fourth novel, Fluke (1977), had found its way on to the GCSE syllabus, and that a professor at an American university had written to him to say that he was analysing the Herbert oeuvre.
25 March 2013
The author said his contemporaries struggled with the problem of how to write about the intimate, striking the difficult balance of how much to explain, imply or omit.
Rachel Aydt writes: 'I've been dipping my big toe into the waters of how accessible literature is for those with print disabilities, something that recently grabbed my interest as I walked past the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskill Braille and Talking Book Library in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.'
Bookshare, a non-profit wing of the larger philanthropic agency Benetech, is a member-based organization that provides content to those with an inability or difficulty to read print (known as print disability) in the form of DAISY book digital files (Digital Accessible Information System). Of their 250,000 members, approximately 240,000 of them are students who don't pay for their memberships, largely thanks to a 5-year federal grant from OSEP (the Office of Special Education Programs). While this helps to push content into the scholastic population by offering free memberships, acquiring said content is a trickier and evolving issue.
NGO Room to Read has published 850 titles in Lao, Hindi, Tamil, Kiswahili, and 25 other languages. You've probably heard of John Wood, the former Microsoft executive who quit his job to change the world. The NGO he founded in 1999 - Room to Read - has reached out to 7.5 million children and built 15,000 libraries and 1,600 schools.
What you probably haven't heard is that Room to Read is also a huge publisher. In the almost 10 years since the NGO entered the publishing game, it has published more than 850 titles. That figure will hit 1,000 by the end of this year.
Room to Read's mission was straightforward from the outset - literacy is the cornerstone of learning and getting an education is the best way to escape from poverty. By providing children with books they are offering the chance of a better life, but they quickly realised that one of the without books in the children's mother tongue it was sometimes hard to get them enthusiastic about reading.
This itself is part of the poverty trap. "Their parents can't afford books so the publishers don't publish books in those languages and so the kids are destined to grow up illiterate which to me just seems like a humungous lost opportunity when you think about the tens of millions of kids who will never see a book in the language they speak," says Wood.