It's never been more important to start your crime novel with high-stakes. Doesn't matter if it's life-or-death type peril, or if someone's marriage is about to go down the toilet. Maybe he's hanging from his fingernails from a cliff. Maybe she just arrived home from meeting up with her boyfriend, and hubby's sitting there in the dark kitchen waiting for her, his eyes full of dreadful knowing. Something has to be at badly at stake in your opening page, paragraph, line, because we're living in a time when readers don't have to tolerate anything less.
Links of the week May 22 2023 (21)
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:
22 May 2023
Elmore Leonard said it in his ‘Rules for Writers': ‘Never open a book with weather.' He was trying to say that what's going to hook a reader will invariably be a person and their problem. Readers are not going to sit waiting for you, the writer, to stop faffing around with your aerial shots of the city and its romantic rain haze and get to the actual story. These days, they're going to move on even faster than they did in 2010 when Elmore said it, because the digitization of the slush pile and the dominance of online bookstores means their patience is at an all-time low.
If we can all agree with the principle that avid reading has the potential to make one a better writer, then I would like to also assert the theory that writing in different genres and styles can make one a better writer too. Each type and genre of writing is its own beast with different rules and best practices. Sometimes, the rules are so different, that writing in a new style can feel like a learning a new language.
My writing experience is broad and has challenged me to write (and read) in a few different styles. I've learned the best copywriting is short and sweet. I think legal writing is closest to an academic paper (but it's not) with its need for sources and citing. Op-eds differ from essays, while journalism relies on truth above all.
But fiction is, by far, my favorite type of writing. I appreciate the creative license it allows; I love following the maze as the story reveals itself, and the building of a world. This is not to say that other forms of writing have not been useful in my fiction. It's quite the opposite.
All my favourite memories as a teenager - and I insist you fully judge me for this - are of sitting in my bedroom, reading. I have a huge family and, as the only black sheep introvert, my escape was hiding away with a novel. I would withdraw from all the loudness and reality of my life with a novel that made me laugh, cry and - above all else - pretend.
I loved nothing better than disappearing into those impossibly glamorous worlds from the safety of my Winnie the Pooh bed sheets (no, I didn't have a boyfriend until I left home, why do you ask?). I could sunbathe on a superyacht with Jackie Collins, or ride a horse in sunglasses with Jilly Cooper, or maybe just stare out moodily from my penthouse, watching a dark city skyline with Danielle Steel.
People ask writers about the best piece of advice they ever received. I haven't received many, but I recall one particularly well.
Many years ago I had a friendly acquaintance with the brilliant writer/producer/director Larry Gelbart, probably best known as having developed M*A*S*H for television and co-written the book for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was a real mensch, a gentleman who did not rub his fame in your face. And I asked him once how he could take something that made him very angry and turn it into genius-level comedy, which he often did.
"Go where the pain is," Gelbart said. It took me a long time to process that and even longer to be able to use it, but it was as valuable a tip as I have ever gotten.
Did he mean I should explore my pain, what was eating at me and making me want to write about it? Or was the advice to go to the character's pain and, being a sadistic writer, wring as much out of it as possible?
(I could have asked Larry those questions but I didn't want to seem like an idiot rookie to the master, even if he never would have made me feel that way.)
After much thought I realized it didn't matter. The character's pain, even if it came from different circumstances, would be mine because the character came from me. If a writer isn't empathetic and able to feel the emotions their characters are having, they're not going to be in the business for long.
Creative artificial intelligence provokes a strange mixture of contempt and dread. People say things such as "AI art is garbage" and "It's plagiarism," but also "AI art is going to destroy creativity itself." These reactions are contradictory, but nobody seems to notice. AI is the bogeyman in the shadows: The obscurity, more than anything the monster has actually perpetrated, is the source of loathing and despair.
Consider the ongoing feud between the Writers Guild of AmericaAssociation of writers in motion picture, broadcast, cable and new media. http://www.wga.org and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The writers are on strike, arguing, among other things, that studios should not be able to use AI tools to replace their labor. "It's important to note that AI software does not create anything. It generates a regurgitation of what it's fed," the WGA has claimed. "Plagiarism is a feature of the AI process." The AMPTP, for its part, has offered "annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology." Neither side knows exactly what it's talking about, but they feel they have to fight about it anyway.
Google's classic search engine is getting an AI makeover.
For over two decades, the search site has been defined by a plain search bar and a list of results.
At its 2023 Google I/O event on Wednesday, the tech giant unveiled an AI-driven search engine with the overall goal of making "search smarter and searching simpler."
The search engine will now let users craft prompts as if they're asking questions more naturally. On top of the more familiar list of search results, there will be an AI-generated summary response answering users' questions.
Some in the book industry have already begun exploring automation of its pitches to readers. We took this functionality for a test drive
Blurb writing is a mini art form," Iris Murdoch once wrote in a letter to former Penguin blurb writer Elizabeth Buchan. And like many other art forms, companies have been experimenting with the idea that it could be created without an artist.
A German company that provides digital book distribution and marketing services to publishers has announced it will integrate ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers questions by drawing on publicly available internet data, into its software.
"During the beta phase, publishers can test the benefits of the artificial intelligence tool for their digital book marketing," states Bookwire, adding that it will only use ChatGPT if a publisher agrees and the disclaimer that the company "does not assume any responsibility for the content created by ChatGPT".
Almost 60% of LinkedIn's users are between the ages of 25 and 34, making it the single largest demographic to use the platform. And this is a demographic with a willingness to pay for news.
At a time when publishers are moving past seeing social media platforms as traffic drivers, and even a major publication like BuzzFeed News shut down because of a sharp decrease in Facebook referral traffic, LinkedIn is giving publishers a reason to smile. According to AOP's latest survey, Digital Publishing: Outlook and Priorities for 2023, LinkedIn is currently the leading choice for publishers to drive content discovery.
It is not hard - at all - to trick today's chatbots into discussing taboo topics, regurgitating bigoted content and spreading misinformation. That's why AI pioneer Anthropic has imbued its generative AI, Claude, with a mix of 10 secret principles of fairness, which it unveiled in March. In a blog post Tuesday, the company further explained how its Constitutional AI system is designed and how it is intended to operate.
Normally, when an generative AI model is being trained, there's a human in the loop to provide quality control and feedback on the outputs - like when ChatGPT or Bard asks you rate your conversations with their systems. "For us, this involved having human contractors compare two responses," the Anthropic team wrote. "from a model and select the one they felt was better according to some principle (for example, choosing the one that was more helpful, or more harmless)."
Problem with this method is that a human also has to be in the loop for the really horrific and disturbing outputs. Nobody needs to see that, even fewer need to be paid $1.50 an hour by Meta to see that. The human advisor method also sucks at scaling, there simply aren't enough time and resources to do it with people. Which is why Anthropic is doing it with another AI.
Any bookish person who has ever passed through an airport in the United States will tend to have been struck by a contrast. Airport bookshops in the UK are piled high with thrillers, spy stories, romantic comedies and how-to books: untaxing fare for a long flight.
But in the States, which we Brits like to sneer at as the lowbrow land of Walt Disney and Man Vs Food, those airport bookstores have a really striking amount of hefty hardback nonfiction: thumping great presidential biographies, weighty works of serious history, chewy books of business theory and popular science.
Americans don%u2019t half love their history, and they take it straight up, no chaser. It%u2019s a source of enduring wonder that the smash hit musical of the decade, Hamilton, is based on Ron Chernow%u2019s unimpeachably serious 800 page biography of a second tier Founding Father. I don%u2019t think the UK has an equivalent of Robert Caro%u2014who spent the best part of an entire lifetime writing the definitive biography of LBJ and warmed up with 1,300 pages on a long-dead town planner. Even David Remnick took time out from his day job editing the New Yorker to give us more than 600 pages on Barack Obama.
Do we need to care for authors better, rethink staff workloads and pay more attention to each book? Yes. But the short answer to "can we publish less, but better?" is: not necessarily.
Most would agree we don't want lists reduced, teams shrunk and only safe titles published. This wouldn't be serving readers, writers, the industry or society. So what we need is a situation where authors are better communicated with, books are given more attention, and the changed nature of publishing roles is recognised.
As someone who has tried to do exactly that, from the luxury of a fresh start with a new company, it's worth highlighting our aims and our realisations.
James Daunt keynoted the Association of American Literary Agents programme at Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s US Book Show in New York this week, telling home truths about Barnes & Noble, the company he has helmed since August 2019, in tandem with running Waterstones.
He spoke of this being an "interesting moment", with B&N's situation "clearly evolving". In 2008, the chain consisted of 728 stores; by 2018, about 630 were left, but the company was "fast heading in the direction of closed doors...failing". This was not because of Amazon, he insisted, but because the stores were "not good enough", too "predictable and boring". Front-of-store had for years been arranged according to co-operative promotions paid for by publishers. Daunt ended that practice, and generally reduced the initial quantities for frontlist buy-in.
But he, too, closed stores, often the largest. At present, there are roughly 600, but B&N is beginning to open new ones - often to replace ones that had been shuttered - except these will have less square footage. The chain should grow by 30 stores this year, back to the number that existed when he arrived, giving booksellers "confidence that we'll protect their jobs".
Today in good news, the American Booksellers Association announced that membership is at its highest level in 20 years. Per reporting by Hillel Italie at the Associated Press:
The ABA added 173 members last year, and now has 2,185 bookstore businesses and 2,599 locations. Three years after the pandemic shut down most of the physical bookstores in the U.S. and the independent community feared hundreds might close permanently, the ABA has nearly 300 more members (under stricter rules for membership) than it did in 2019, the last full year before the spread of COVID-19.
The intellectual property rights to the novels of British-South African author Wilbur Smith are up for sale, with ACF investment bank handling the process.
Smith, who died in 2021, published over 50 novels in genres such as adventure and historical fiction. Smith's first novel When the Lion Feeds was published in 1964.
More than 50 years after his debut, Smith signed an eight-figure deal with Bonnier's Zaffre in 2017, described by then Bonnier Publishing group chief executive Richard Johnson as "one of the biggest in publishing history". He signed a further 10-book deal with the publisher in December 2020. A further 12 of Smith's novels are set to be published between 2023 and 2027.
Up for sale are all non-literary media rights, such as TV, film, and merchandise. AFC investment bank, who were appointed by the author's estate, said the books had "significant financial potential" to be adapted into films, TV shows and animations.
Accepting the coveted Caldecott medal in 1964, an annual award honouring the "most distinguished American picture book for children", the author Maurice Sendak addressed the rumbles of disapproval his winning book had received from some quarters about it being too frightening by wryly commenting, "Where the Wild Things Are was not meant to please everybody - only children."
Of course, far from only appealing to children, after initially sending shockwaves around the literary establishment, over the decades the book has beguiled almost everyone who has encountered it, young and old, from world leaders to film directors. It has inspired films, songs, books, an opera and even a spoof on The Simpsons. For this poll, children's authors and experts from Singapore and Iceland to Portugal and Peru voted for it in their droves, with one respondent, Pam Dix, chair of the UK section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), calling it "a perfect, multi-layered picture book that reveals new dimensions on each reading". Most importantly though, it has indeed captivated generations of children thirsty for mischief, mastery and a cracking wild rumpus.
"The information is telling me -" wrote Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information. "The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye." It was an intimation of mortality typical of Amis, who died on Friday at the age of 73 - as interested in how stylishly the thought was expressed as in what it was expressing.
The Information was published when Amis was 45 years old: for almost half his life he was overwhelmingly interested in the end of life. In London Fields (1989), written in his 30s, he said that "Death gives us something to do. Because it's a full-time job looking the other way."
It was an odd preoccupation for a writer whose work, and whose success, was characterised by its liveliness and energy, its bright-eyed and pink-tongued vigour. Amis's supercharged prose style, all heft and twang, raced past his contemporaries and left them standing.
Amis was "the crown prince of literary hipness" according to the New York Times and "the good-looking bad guy of late 20th-century Eng Lit" (Melvyn Bragg) who, some felt, was marked for success from birth. As the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, he joked, it was "just like taking over the family pub".
Less than a year after an attempt on his life, author Salman Rushdie made a rare public appearance at an awards ceremony Thursday to warn of the dangers of banning books and of related movements in the US to roll back freedoms of expression.
"The attack on books, the attack on teaching, the attack on libraries, in - how can I put this - Florida, has never been more dangerous, never been more important to fight," he said.
Rushdie spoke at the PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ America Gala in New York City, praising the literary and free speech advocacy group for its latest efforts to block politicians and local officials seeking to ban literature concerning race and gender identity.
PEN America, along with book publisher Penguin Random House and several parents and authors, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging Florida's Escambia County school district's removal of certain books on race and LGBTQ issues from school libraries.
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