The pandemic has thrown publishing and booksellers into crisis - and left customers struggling to obtain books when they most want them. But some in the industry sense an opportunity to drag it into the 21st century
Links of the week May 4 2020 (19)
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:
11 May 2020
When the lockdown began on 23 March, the ramifications for the book industry were extremely grave. Waterstones closed all 280 of its branches, its chief executive, James Daunt, having previously insisted the chain was no different to a pharmacy or a supermarket and would therefore stay open (the U-turn came after some staff complained they felt at risk, and had been given no protection or hand sanitiser). Britain's independent book stores also shut their doors (at the end of 2019, there were 890 such shops in the UK and Ireland). Supermarkets, which sell popular books in large quantities, focused their efforts on food and ceased ordering from publishers. Meanwhile, Amazon suddenly and dramatically "de-prioritised" book sales in favour of what it deemed to be essential goods (food, yes, but also, it would seem, hair dye and DIY equipment).
Last fall, Kyle Hall's bookstore was destroyed by a tornado. This spring, it was almost wiped out by a pandemic.
For the past two months, ever since Texas ordered nonessential businesses to shut down, Mr. Hall, the manager and co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, has taken one unprecedented step after another to keep the store open. In March, Interabang transformed from a brick-and-mortar shop into an online retail business. When the stay-at-home order was lifted at the end of April, it became a curbside takeout operation. Staff members redesigned the storefront display, cramming 100 titles in the window so that customers could browse at a safe distance.
Among retail businesses, bookstores, especially smaller independent stores, face particular challenges as they navigate reopening. Many indies occupy cramped spaces with warrens of bookshelves, and serve as community centers and cultural outposts as much as retail operations. Book lovers often come in to linger, browse and chat with the staff about what to read next, all behaviors that in a pandemic are potentially life-threatening.
The financial results of the four publicly held book publishers that recently reported on their first quarters all revealed the same pattern: sales were solid until the spread of the coronavirus forced most physical bookstores and schools to close. "Sales were fairly good for the first two months of the year and then dropped off in mid-March," said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster.
The quarterly results all had a second thing in common: solid increases for digital products, and not just for the rapidly growing downloadable audiobook market. E-book sales at S&S were up 13% in the quarter and were running 25%-50% over 2019 since the end of the quarter, Reidy said. Not that downloadable audio did badly at the trade publishers: Lagerdère reported that downloadable audio had a "sharp rise" at HBG in the quarter and accounted for 14.4% of the group's revenue in the period, up from 10% a year ago.
No longer able to take my long twice-daily walk from Penn Station to Rockefeller Center as I was no longer commuting into the city, I'd initially worried (along with dozens of other worries) that quarantine would turn me into a chair-potato. I needn't have fretted.
That very first day home, an unexpected form of exercise immediately presented itself. I call it "letting out the animals." It goes like this: Immerse yourself deep into a line edit of a manuscript. Hundred-pound dog will hit Let Me Outside bell. Let out the dog. Pick said manuscript back up. Count to four; let out one cat. Dog back in. 10 seconds later, another cat goes out.
Genre is a funny thing.
I've been a science fiction and fantasy nerd for as long as I can remember. And I'm not sure when I started to register that some of the speculative books I love weren't all marketed or categorized the same way.
What makes 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale more literature than science fiction?
And what makes James Rollins' or Michael Crichton's books mainstream thrillers?
You could argue - and many people do - that these genre divisions are, in some sense, imaginary. Writers write books; marketing departments at publishers come up with the most cunning angle to sell them. Or so the saying goes. Like almost any other attempt at categorizing broad or varied groups, genre boxes are clumsy labels that can never quite encapsulate all the fabulous tendrils of creativity. They're for convenience, marketing, signaling, nothing more - right?
New York - Novelist N.K. Jemisin was a teenager the first time she read Octavia Butler, and nothing had prepared her for it. It was the 1980s, and the book was called "Dawn," the story of a black woman who awakens 250 years after a nuclear holocaust.
"I remember just kind of being stunned that a black woman existed in the future, because science fiction had not done that before," says Jemisin, whose "The City We Became" is currently a bestseller. "There was just this conspicuous absence where it seemed we all just vanished after a while."
A revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. Her novels, including "Dawn," "Kindred" and "Parable of the Sower," sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary and the manager of her estate, Merrillee Heifetz. Toshi Reagon has adapted "Parable of the Sower" into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work.
Families! Look no further for a source of fears. Having children can change your life-indeed, I think it should-and the changes may include how a writer writes. After he and his wife had their first child the late James Herbert declared that he would never subject children to horrors in his tales again. By contrast, Stephen King and I seem driven to imagine the worst that can happen, perhaps in a bid to inoculate reality against our fears. This produced at least two of Stephen's greatest novels. Pet Sematary grew out of an actual fear, happily proved baseless, for a child.
What would happen if your toddler died? What extremes might you go to in order to bring them back, and how dreadful might the consequences be? The author finds his own book lacking in hope, but I'm not so certain. Surely if interfering with the afterlife brings forth horrors, this implies the hereafter itself may be benign.
It's been 15 years since Little, Brown published Stephenie Meyer's Twilight-a book that sold more than 100 million copies, launched a multi-billion-dollar movie franchise, and kicked off a vampire craze in YA and adult fiction alike. The trend eventually flamed out, and for a few years, vampires were relegated to the literary shadows.
But then, in 2019, there came hints of a possible resurrection. Renée Ahdieh released The Beautiful (Putnam, 2019), a duology-launching bestseller featuring 1870s-era New Orleans vampires. (Book two, The Damned, publishes this July.) Kiersten White published Slayer (Simon Pulse, 2019), a book set in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, followed this past January by a sequel, Chosen. January also saw the release of Lana Popović's Blood Countess (Amulet), a novel based on the real-life inspiration for Countess Dracula. And this summer, Meyer will release Midnight Sun (Little, Brown, Aug. 4)-a long-awaited Twilight companion novel told from Edward's perspective.
Will 2020 be the year of the vampire? We spoke with a quartet of authors and editors whose new and forthcoming books promise to breathe fresh life into the centuries-old monster of myth.
You can't have a good thriller without a nasty and formidable opponent for your hero. But it isn't enough to just write a character and call him "the bad guy." Just as it's important to create a well-rounded, three-dimensional hero, you must create a villain who is well-developed and not just your standard killer, robber, or kidnapper.
So how can we write a well-developed villain who is a worthy opponent to your protagonist?
Create a backstory Unless you%u2019re writing fantasy or sci-fi or the like, your villain will also be human. They will have a personality all their own and, in most cases, they%u2019ll have a painful past, so you must tell their story, just as you would with the hero. You want him to be everything that makes us human%u2014fallible, flawed, and complete with a backstory that explains their motives and their reason for being so downright nasty. First, think about what made your villain turn out the way he did. Why is he killing people? Or why is he so hostile and angry?
4 May 2020
Roger Robinson's vision of Trinidad as a "portable paradise" of "white sands, green hills and fresh fish", has won the British-Trinidadian poet the Royal Society of LiteratureThis British site may seem rather formal (stated aim ‘to sustain and encourage all that is perceived as best whether traditional or experimental in English letters, and to strive for a Catholic appreciation of literature’), but has a lively series of lectures and discussions involving distinguished authors. Also administers literary prizes. http://www.rslit.org/index1.html's £10,000 Ondaatje prize, which goes to a work that best evokes "the spirit of a place".
Robinson's collection, A Portable Paradise, which has already won him the TS Eliot prize, moves from the Grenfell Tower fire to the Windrush generation and the legacy of slavery. In its title poem, he writes how "if I speak of Paradise, / then I'm speaking of my grandmother / who told me to carry it always on my person, concealed, so / no one else would know but me".
In particularly timely words for today, the poet, musician and political activist urges that "if your stresses are sustained and daily, / get yourself to an empty room - be it hotel, / hostel or hovel - find a lamp / and empty your paradise onto a desk: / your white sands, green hills and fresh fish."
Ever since early March, when the nation went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 outbreak, independent booksellers have been tweaking their business models in an attempt to remain solvent. And in doing so, a growing number have turned to hosting virtual author events.
There is a consensus among several indie booksellers contacted by PW that virtual events are more time intensive than in-store events, when factoring in how long it takes to set up the event as well as process and ship orders. And all of these booksellers noted that though virtual events pull in viewers and increase visibility for stores, it can be difficult to convert those viewers into paying customers.
A significant proportion of the UK and Ireland's smallest independent presses say their businesses are at risk as a result of the coronavirus lockdown, having seen sales plunge and cash quickly run out. A number of presses, including Jacaranda Books and Knights Of, have launched crowd-funders in order to ameliorate the damage, but others have called for the industry to step-up with a support scheme.
A survey launched this week by The Bookseller and writer development charity Spread the Word
London organisation running creative writing workshops for writers at all stages, with a focus on new writing and live literature, and encouraging innovation and experimentation. www.spreadtheword.org.uk
received 72 responses in its first 48 hours, indicating the parlous condition of the sector and the need for immediate assistance. Publishers completing the questions included some of the most well-known presses from across the UK and Ireland, including Dead Ink Books in Liverpool, Bluemoose Books in Hebden Bridge, Norfolk press Galley Beggar, London's Pluto Press, Jacaranda Books and Orenda Books, September Publishing based in Kent, Scotland's Fledgling Press, Seren and Firefly Press from Wales, and Ireland's Lilliput Press. The vast majority of publishers polled had fewer than 10 staff.
Hello reader -
If you're in any way a member of the independent publishing community (or a former member, or a recovering member, or an aspirational member), welcome. I hope you and yours are staying healthy and staying home, if able.
I've been reflecting a lot on the notion - oft-circulated these past few weeks - that the world we want to see at the end of this COVID-19 crisis is the world we need to forge, right now, together and on others' behalves. As I rage and grieve, I also ask myself, "What kind of independent publishing industry do I want to see emerge from this exceptionally difficult time?"
On the occasion of publishing a brief collection of some of my older short stories-at the onset of the third decade of a century marked, so far, by our complete submission to market-driven technological distraction and surveillance-I am awash in a kind of nostalgia. Not for a better America. Not for my younger, healthier body and sharper memory, and not for the sweet innocence of my now eighteen-year-old daughter as an infant or toddler or opinionated eight-year-old.
What I miss is writing stories in which a life lived online does not figure - mostly. In three of the five stories in my collection The Beauty of Their Youth, the internet plays absolutely no role. In one there''s a bit of emailing. And in the final, title story, a middle-aged woman confronts the curated myths of a perfect self, both her own and those of friends from her youth, that circulate round the globe.
It's probably the single most despised document you might be asked to prepare: the synopsis.
The synopsis is sometimes necessary because an agent or publisher wants to see, from beginning to end, what happens in your story. Thus, the synopsis must convey a book's entire narrative arc. It shows what happens and who changes, and it has to reveal the ending. Synopses may be required when you first query your work, or you may be asked for it later.
Don't confuse the synopsis with sales copy, or the kind of marketing description that might appear on your back cover or in an Amazon description. You're not writing a punchy piece for readers that builds excitement. It's not an editorial about your book. Instead, it's an industry document that helps an agent or editor quickly assess your story's appeal and if it's worth them reading the entire manuscript.
The author on publishing when bookshops are closed, being an ‘exercise nut' and the dangers posed to writers by mob rule
What kind of lockdown are you having?
One of the most horrifying things about this experience is that it's having so little effect on my life. I live in lockdown all the time! I don't think this reflects well on me, but either I don't have a very keen social appetite or I'm under-aware of when I'm starting to get lonely.
AdvertisementHow do you feel about your new novel being published during this time?
Oh, that's a catastrophe. I'm ashamed of myself because I'm not supposed to care about what's happening to my book; it's nothing compared to losing a business you've spent your whole life building. But it's two years' work, and I'm publishing into a big, black hole; all the bookshops closed.
The Golden Age of British detective writing was dominated by four female authors who have predictably become known as the Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Josephine Tey. There was actually a fifth as well, Ngiao Marsh, but she is usually discounted as she was a New Zealander, although her books are predominantly set in Britain (and many of them are among my personal favorites).
By way of background, the Golden Age is commonly taken to be the period between the two World Wars although this is more a convenient label than an accurate description. In fact many of these books were written well after the Second World War, but they continued to follow the traditional pattern and to make use of such much-loved literary devices as mistaken identities and mysterious foreigners, not forgetting the convenient side door which is customarily left unlocked.
April 27, 2020
Dear Eavan,
We never met. But for several years I have been carrying around a letter to you that I was too nervous to send. I would like to send it now, but I cannot. Because you just died, in quarantine, in Ireland.
When I learned of your death, after a hard morning of feeling stuck in my writing and irritated by the walls and humans around me, I pushed my chair back and ran into my bedroom to sob-in a place clear from children's questions and sticky jam jars and school lessons, but still littered with laundry and books and dust. The detritus of domestic life. A space that you knew, and made beautiful and sacred through your work. A large part of the cutting sadness of your death is that now, in global quarantine, your clear, quiet poems of interior space, candles and knives, women's voices, and kitchen gardens have even more meaning and heft. We need the tender attentiveness of your words.