June 2010 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• 'An article in a recent edition of the Bookseller has highlighted the ongoing pressure on acquisitions in publishing houses, which has now become acute. Helen Garnons-Williams, Bloomsbury fiction editorial director said: "Our entire business is based on confidence, whether among the publishers or the agents, and pretty much everyone is wobbling because no one knows what will sell." Auctions have often faltered because the recession is causing a massive loss of confidence and publishers are becoming increasingly risk-averse.' News Review has the story.


• 'A major recent study led by Nevada University has showed that regular access to books in the home had a direct effect on children’s long-term educational achievement. Involving 70,000 people in 27 countries, it showed that the effect of having 500 books in the home was to increase by three years the length of time that these children subsequently spent in education.' News Review reports.


• 'The excitement surrounding the arrival of the i-Pad in countries outside the US has caught the attention of the media, reinforcing the idea that a mass audience is waiting to buy one and start using it to read e-books. The arrival of the Kindle aroused similar expectations and many articles presaging the end of the printed book... ‘Reading the Future’, the Bookseller’s third annual survey into what readers and book-buyers are thinking, contradicts this view and shows that the publishing world is much more focused on e-books than book-buyers are.


• 'Stieg Larsson notwithstanding, what are the chances of a translated author selling well in the big English-speaking markets of the US and the UK? The received wisdom has always been that translations into English are tough going financially, with it proving virtually impossible to make the figures work without an English-language publisher on both sides of the Atlantic to pay for the costs of translation.' News Review looks at writers in translation in the headlines.

Comment

• 'I've always loved short stories. The process is probably less anxious than writing a novel. There's something about the intensity of a short story that I love... You can reinvent them all the time (whereas) with the novel there's the huge weight of tradition. There's something about modern life that suits the short story. It's a bit snipped up and jagged and raw and I think stories are like that...'  Michele Roberts, author of Mud, in the Bookseller.


• 'Books are not dead. They may appear besieged, ever more so as fragile retailers hunker down to re-examine their own business models. There may be fewer new titles published over the next several years...  but I am confident that the book business will evolve, as it has done for hundreds of years, and will occupy a considerable position as a ongoing and valued medium.' Laurence Orbach, CEO of Quarto, in the Bookseller


• 'I do try and remember what it was like writing books in the void, back when I had to worry about whether they were even going to see print. That was not a good place. I am very grateful not to be there. I feel I not only narrowly escaped obscurity but also having to give up writing novels altogether, which would have broken my heart. It is easy to be blase about having a bigger audience. I don't take it for granted.' Lionel Shriver, whose new book is So Much For That, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven.


• 'I know it's somewhat of an unpopular opinion, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that you can support yourself solely as a writer in this economy... In the end, the better you make the book, the better the chances that you'll get a healthy advance, and the harder you work with your publisher to promote the book by publishing stories or nonfiction essays to raise your profile, by blogging and keeping your website active, by thinking outside of the box in terms of marketing and publicity, the better your book will do. But at the end of the day it's the quality of the work that matters the most.' US agent Julie Barer on mediabistro

Writers' Quote

'Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.'
A A Milne