Never mind newly minted corona lockdown stories, authors are frantically rewriting existing projects to reflect a world turned upside down by the pandemic - or shelving them indefinitely
Links of the week June 1 2020 (23)
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 June 2020
Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour party, has been having a busy lockdown. Signed up to write a political thriller called The House, he and his co-author Imogen Robertson have been rapidly rejigging their novel to reflect a post-Covid world.
Their near-future setting now includes a national inquiry "about what's going on in the background", where characters - if they meet socially - "choose not to drink out of glasses and they wipe the bottle before they drink", and undergo temperature checks when entering public buildings, "which everyone is used to by then", says Watson, who is finding life away from politics as a newly minted thriller author "a relief".
My parents-good Protestants that they are-often ask me, "Why horror? Why can't you write nice things?" To which I generally reply, "Have you read the newspaper lately?"
Because there is nothing in the world of fiction that compares to the daily atrocities humanity inflicts upon itself, or to the seemingly chaotic and certainly uncaring universe that wields an ugly axe of natural disaster, disease and death. Want a truly frightening read? Try Modern Times: History from the Twenties to the Nineties by Paul Johnson, a galling account of our modern world that will leave you yearning for the comforts of Stephen King.
Genre fiction - namely, horror and noir fiction - embrace the dark side of life through fantasy and a grim, fatalistic pessimism. Horror fiction tends to veil true horror in a guise of metaphor. As cartoonish as they can be, zombies, vampires or supernatural monsters bent on inflicting death and chaos are merely masks over the true horrors of life. Noir fiction plots its way through corruption, politics and murder. Sometimes it's just fun, a way of stripping power from death, but, when done well, both have a unique way of imposing judgement against the world as it is.
My new novel Glorious Boy began with a dream. On a tropical island during an emergency evacuation, a young girl was hiding in a dense rainforest with a small, mute white boy in her care. The girl, local to this island, knew the boy's parents would not take her with them. She was hiding out of equal parts jealousy and spite. Only when the noise outside died down would she and the child emerge to find the streets abandoned, spectral plumes of smoke rising in the distance, and the little boy's parents gone. Only then would the girl realize what she had done.
A different writer might make it up, but I needed to base my fictional evacuation on real unrest. I'd have to visit the islands in person to decide if there was any actual "there" there for me. When I finally made that trip, late in 2010, what I found catapulted my own momentum forward even as it propelled my fiction half a century backward.
Once, a bush pilot who moonlighted as a leg-breaker for a minor crime lord offered my father a handful of cash to help collect a debt. The scene between this guy and Dad didn't go down like it would've in one of my stories. We'll circle back to that.
Pulp literature loves its heroes and villains. Loves ‘em larger and bolder than life and painted in broad strokes. Generic lit goes for poetic naturalism; Daddy hated me and Mommy loved me too much and it's oh so complicated because who's to say what is good or evil? Postmodern and brutalist types avow that the stars are to blame for our flaws. Neither heroes nor villains exist; there's merely action and reaction. We're all crushed under the heel of the military industrial juggernaut and it's dog eat dog, man. Dog. Eat. Dog. Of these, the naturalists and brutalists come nearest to the real affect. Yet, by necessity even these modes fall back upon style and stylization in the end.
Nobody called it that at the time, but the first realistic English novel was a genuine "beach read." Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," published in 1719, is a tale of exotic adventure literally set on a beach. Three hundred years later, a lot has changed, but we still crave stories with waves crashing on the shore.
My first "beach read" was a shameful, illicit affair. A middle school classmate with a wild older brother had gotten a hold of a copy of "Jaws." In my lily-white innocence, the naked swimmer on the cover of Peter Benchley's thriller was just as terrifying as the shark soaring up to eat her. Sitting cross-legged in my friend's attic, I tore through those pages, ricocheting between Thanatos and Eros.
I didn't know it then, but "Jaws" spent almost a year on the bestseller list and sold millions of copies. A sexy man vs. monster melodrama set on Long Island, the novel is in many ways the greatest beach read ever - so good, so bad.
Books scheduled for release this spring and summer are now on track for fall, when authors will be fighting for attention in the midst of a presidential election and an ongoing crisis.
In March, when parts of the United States began shutting down because of the coronavirus, the best-selling children's book author Jeff Kinney faced a dilemma.
"Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure," part of his popular Wimpy Kid series, was due out in April with a first printing of three million copies. His publisher had lined up a 10-city tour.
In a matter of days, those plans crumbled. "The book was about to land in stores that were closed to customers at the height of a pandemic," Mr. Kinney said.
He and his publisher decided to postpone the release until August, in hopes that by then, his tour could be resurrected. Millions of copies are now sitting in warehouses. "It wasn't an easy decision," he said. "We knew lots of kids would enjoy the book while in lockdown."
Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton has said the beginnining of the pandemic had a severely negative impact on Bloomsbury's sales, but that overall the company had "transformed surprisingly well".
Speaking to former Rowman & Littlefield International c.e.o Oliver Gadsby at the virtual IPG spring conference today (2nd June), Newton said the company had lost "100% of [its] retail customers, practically overnight". Newton said: "We basically had no customers over night, but the channels that are open have over-performed, Tesco has sold a lot of books because supermarkets are not only open, they are having the time of their lives, but they only sell a certain type of book."
But confirming what other big publishers have noted, Newton said it sales had recovered after initially being down by two-thirds. "Our sales are not anything like as far down as we originally imagined," he said, but declined to give specific numbers. He added that "the overall message is that total sales are not as completely awful as we thought, but we arrive at that position from many things being completely wiped out, and other things being way up."
Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charging the Internet Archive with copyright infringement. The suit asks the court to issue preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the IA's scanning, public display, and distribution of literary works, which it makes available to the public through such businesses as its Open Library and National Emergency Library.
In its suit, the publishers make clear it is not suing the IA over "the occasional transmission of a title under appropriately limited circumstances, nor about anything permissioned or in the public domain," but rather over the IA's "purposeful collection of truckloads of in-copyright books to scan, reproduce, and then distribute digital bootleg versions online."
Bookshops are experiencing an "extraordinary" boom in New Zealand as Kiwis commit to buying local to resuscitate the economy following seven weeks of lockdown.
Booksellers around the country say they're experiencing "Christmas" levels of demand post-lockdown, as many readers have sworn off shopping offshore following the Covid-19 crisis, which claimed 21 lives in New Zealand.
"People are really thinking about where they want to spend their money and the businesses they love. They got a taste of what it was like if you weren't there," says Jenna Todd of Time Out book store in Mt Eden, Auckland.
"We're in this space where people are wanting to spend money and support local. A lot of people haven't spent money in a long time. Some people have more money than they usually would from not commuting or going out to dinner."
Head of Zeus is launching Aries, a new action and adventure imprint, in August with books from Brad Taylor, Ethan Cross and Matthew Harffy.
The imprint will be overseen by Aria editorial director Hannah Smith and editor Holly Domney who has just joined from Canongate where she looked after authors such as Simon Brett, Caro Ramsay and David Hewson. Both report into publishing director Laura Palmer.
Publishing in e-book, audiobook and print, the imprint will release 30 titles in 2020, and double this to 60 in 2021. "Whether Dark-Age historical epic or near-future techno thriller, Aries will bring together a community of authors with readers who are looking for their next adventure read," Head of Zeus said.
The estate of Watership Down author Richard Adams has won back all of the rights to the late author's classic novel about anthropomorphised rabbits, in a high court ruling against the director of the famed animated adaptation.
The high court in London ruled on 27 May that Martin Rosen, the US director of the 1978 adaptation of Adams's novel, had wrongly claimed that he owned all rights to the book, in which a group of rabbits fight to survive the destruction of their warren.
The court heard that Rosen, who owned the motion picture rights to Watership Down under his original 1976 contract, had entered into contracts worth more than $500,000 (£400,975) while claiming that he held all rights to the novel. Rosen also made $85,000 from an unauthorised licence for an audiobook adaptation, and also failed to pay the estate fees and merchandising royalties from the 2018 BBC/Netflix television adaptation, on which he served as an executive producer.
By the time I finished my editorial work on this year's edition of The Best American Travel Writing-about five weeks into my state's mandatory stay-at-home order-I'd had plenty of time to think about the future of the form. During the first few weeks of lockdown, I was invited on to a podcast with several other travel writers to discuss "Coronavirus and Predictions on the Future of Travel Writing."
With gloom and doom, I speculated about magazines suspending publication, compared this to how travel had "irrevocably" changed after 9/11, and declared that this was "the extinction event" for a certain type of travel publishing. To be honest, I had no more idea of what might happen than anyone else, and I still don't. But I held forth anyway, and I am aware that whatever I write now, in the spring of 2020, may seem naïve, hysterical, or wildly inaccurate by the fall, when the anthology is published, never mind a year or five from now.
Roughly 100,000 Americans have died from what President Trump has disparagingly called "the Chinese Virus," as reported by a media he labels "fake news." Trump has accused China of deliberately obfuscating facts, possibly including the origin of the virus. Xenophobic fear-mongering aside, he might have found an unwitting ally in Fang Fang, a 65-year-old Chinese novelist who lives in the city of Wuhan.
Fang's "Wuhan Diary," which began as a series of blog posts, was published in English earlier this month in a translation by UCLA professor Michael Berry. Covering two months of lockdown, Fang reports details of privation and overcrowded hospitals that are embarrassing to the government, and she grows critical of its response, displaying a level of overt frustration not routinely expressed in China. The diaries, posted online each night, were read by tens of millions, making her a celebrity.
Shoppers will be cautious about returning to the high street but Waterstones will emerge from the coronavirus crisis and eventually have a wider range of shops, the firm's c.e.o. James Daunt has said.
Speaking to Boldwood Books founder Amanda Ridout in an interview for the IPG Virtual Spring Conference, recorded ahead of the UK government's confirmation that shops can reopen from 15th June, Daunt said his stores would reopen once necessary safety measures were in place.
The firm's branches will have clear social distancing markings and signs inside and out, sneeze guards, and gloves and masks, and will use contactless payment whenever possible, he said. He also confirmed plans to quarantine books taken off the shelves by customers for up to 72 hours.
Daunt said Waterstones online sales had "exploded" during the lockdown, but consumers were buying a different kind of book to the ones habitually sold at physical stores. He said: "In particular there is a segment of books which are not performing as well online. Particularly the new, the undiscovered, the slightly more esoteric doesn't, at least for us, perform online as well as it did in the shops and that clearly is associated with bookseller recommendation, the physical presentation of books in front of customers and the fact that as you browse you buy the book that you hadn't thought of you didn't know about. That's evidently much more difficult online."
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