When profits and sales soared in the first half of 2021, the heads of the major publishing companies knew they would face some difficult comparisons in 2022, and that's largely been the case. As had been anticipated, demand for books slowed this year, and the combination of softer sales, high inflation, and ongoing supply chain issues put a serious dent in earnings at three of the big four trade publishers in the first six months of 2022. Those same factors have kept publishers' expectations for the remainder of the year guarded.
Links of the week October 3 2022 (40)
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:
3 October 2022
Penguin Random House parent company Bertelsmann cited high inflation and supply chain challenges as the primary reasons earnings at the world's largest trade publisher fell 20.7% in the first half of 2022. EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) fell to €257 million, from €324 million in the same period last year. Revenue rose 6.2%, to €1.92 billion, but excluding the favorable impact of currency exchange, sales declined from 2021.
The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. returns Wednesday to Sunday, October 19-23, with two and a half days dedicated to professional events for publishers and two days solely for the general public. More than 4,000 exhibitors from 85 countries are registered. Seventy national stands will showcase publishers and books from around the world, and the Literary Agents Center's 450 tables are sold-out.
"We expect there to be much the same feeling as there was at the fair before the pandemic," says Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. director Juergen Boos, who estimates attendance will be 70% of that of 2019. "While many publishers have adapted to doing business digitally, people seem to need to be in Frankfurt to meet face-to-face." The German government, which continues to support the fair with financial subsidies it began providing in 2020, has lifted restrictions demanding mask wearing and social distancing and, Boos adds, no new mandates will be imposed, provided there is no obvious crisis.
This year's book fair is focusing on the topic of translation. "It is the only way for words to make their way out into the world and is the basis for the rights and licensing business and for understanding between cultures," Boos notes.
A new audiobook platform which aims to create a "lovely, welcoming, independent bookstore kind of vibe" has launched, as audio giant Spotify also enters the fast-growing audiobook market.
Spiracle features titles from a variety of publishers, but its focus is on independent presses and on offering a range of literary fiction and nonfiction, including books in translation.
Director Kate Bland said that the aim was not to offer "every single book that's ever been made into an audio, but we are selecting what we hope is a really wonderful array of international books and translations".
And yet, a book surfaced. All because of the power of incremental writing, a kind of compound investment. I wrote every workday, five days a week, for a scheduled half-hour. Be in the chair, manuscript up, cursor blinking, even if on that day the word pipe is clogged. A half-hour's writing might be only 300 words, 500 words, sometimes a mere 100 words. But a half-hour's writing over 7 or 8 months: a book's worth of words.
That's the subtle little secret to traveling from a work's first word to its last: walk, don't run. I don't recommend a pandemic to move you to a long composition, but some of its isolations were helpful, at least in half-hour retreats. The allegorical wisdom of the tortoise vs. the hare-wise indeed.
And yet, a book surfaced. All because of the power of incremental writing, a kind of compound investment. I wrote every workday, five days a week, for a scheduled half-hour. Be in the chair, manuscript up, cursor blinking, even if on that day the word pipe is clogged. A half-hour's writing might be only 300 words, 500 words, sometimes a mere 100 words. But a half-hour's writing over 7 or 8 months: a book's worth of words.
That's the subtle little secret to traveling from a work's first word to its last: walk, don't run. I don't recommend a pandemic to move you to a long composition, but some of its isolations were helpful, at least in half-hour retreats. The allegorical wisdom of the tortoise vs. the hare-wise indeed.
My years spent writing adverts were never as much fun as I thought they'd be. I arrived in the industry several years after the glory days - filled with exotic shoots on endless budgets, working with the next generation of Hollywood directors, and inviting the coolest actors to record your voiceovers.
That's not to say none of those things happened to me. I did get to work with some great and very cool people, and won some prestigious awards. (Stories for another time.)
But the hours were gruelling. There were countless cancelled weekends, holidays, dates and family events. Once I turned up for work on Monday morning and didn't sleep again until Wednesday lunchtime. It was stressful and always a struggle to get anything out into the world.
But it wasn't without its lessons. The most valuable thing I learned was that no matter who you're working with, movie stars and mega clients included, the most important person in advertising isn't whoever writes it or directs it, or even puts their logo on it - it's the person who reads it. Because if you don't know them, you can't get their attention and speak to them.
And that's just as true when you're writing children's books.
The author on the underrated brilliance of PG Wodehouse, taking inspiration from Harper Lee, and the play that made her think differently about Northern Ireland
The book that made me want to be a writer I was 19, it was late at night. I was reading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities in a very damp, cold attic in a condemned house in Bromley, south-east London. I could see my breath crystalising in front of my face and hear pigeons coo in the eves. But my heart was racing because I was also tearing through the streets of Paris during the revolution and ascending a scaffold. I thought it was astonishing that someone could reach through time to another human being, and make them sweat.
If there's one thing we love here, it's plot structures! And we've talked about a lot of them, but today we're going over one of the best plot structure tools yet- Dan Wells' Seven-Point Story Structure.
As usual, we'll discuss what it is, how to use it, and look at a couple of examples of this plot in action. Along the way, I've got some guiding questions for you to think about as you craft your narrative.
So, let's get into it with and obvious question:
What is the Seven-Point Story Structure?
The seven-point story structure is a set of sequential story beats that most fictional stories follow. Author Dan Wells first described this structure at the 2013 Life, the Universe, & Everything conference. Wells doesn't take full credit for the system, though; instead, he borrowed it from the Star Trek Roleplaying Game Narrator's Guide.
Philip Pullman has called for an external review of the Society of Authors (SoA), the UK's largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators. Earlier this year he stepped down as president of the organisation because he felt he "would not be free to express [his] personal opinion".
The letter from the His Dark Materials writer, which was leaked to Private Eye magazine, is the latest in a line of controversies to hit the SoA, which began after comments Pullman made about Kate Clanchy's controversial memoir, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.
Pullman spoke in support of Clanchy and the book, which was criticised for racial and ableist stereotyping. In a now-deleted tweet, made in response to a comment he incorrectly assumed was about Clanchy, Pullman said those who criticised the book without reading it would "find a comfortable home in Isis or the Taliban".
The author on his latest ‘whole-life' novel, the brutal realities of modern publishing and the inspirational influence of Catch-22
William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) - adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart - and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. His new book, The Romantic, is set in the 19th century and presents itself as a biographical fiction inspired by the personal papers of one Cashel Greville Ross, a Scots-born Irishman who fought at Waterloo, met Shelley, smuggled Greek antiquities and set out in search of the source of the Nile, among other adventures. Boyd, whom Sebastian Faulks has called "the finest storyteller of his generation", grew up in Ghana and Nigeria and lives in London and the Dordogne, from where he spoke over Zoom.
It's a Wednesday afternoon in Bala, in mountainous North Wales, near the glacial lake known to locals as Llyn Tegid, and British author Clare Mackintosh is at her 18th-century Georgian manor house, reflecting over Zoom on the pleasures of small-town living. "We have a high street, shops, and a supermarket, then not a lot more for an hour or so," says Mackintosh, who impulsively moved from England to Wales in 2016 with her husband and three kids to start a new life and reconnect as a family. "If I walk out my front door, I'm in town, and if I walk out the back, I pass my chickens and my sheep; say hello to my goat, Pete, who's quite the local celebrity; and then get to the lake across the fields. It's wonderful. And Welsh is spoken everywhere."
Lauded for her novels' twisty plots and surprise endings, Mackintosh made her debut with the 2011 psychological thriller I Let You Go, about the hit-and-run of a five-year-old boy; her books have sold more than two million copies worldwide, according to her publisher, Sourcebooks Landmark, and have been translated into 40 languages.
The beloved writer of the Wolf Hall trilogy and Beyond Black has died. Here, leading contemporaries pay tribute
Margaret Atwood: ‘She had a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature'
Canadian author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin, and twice Booker winner
I was shocked and saddened to hear of Hilary Mantel's death. It was always a pleasure to read such a smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, and one with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature - and a pleasure to review her too, which I did both early and late. A Place of Greater Safety was an eye-opener about the French Revolution, and the Cromwell trilogy was a well-known stunner. She never shied away from the difficult folks, and doled out a tad of redemption for even the most hardened cases. What might she have written next? I don't know, but I will miss it.
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