When the COVID-19 pandemic caused bookstores across the United States to close indefinitely, many publishers decided to push back select publication dates for their titles in order to give them the best chance to succeed in the marketplace. Three publishers shared in interviews how they went about making these decisions and how they've approached marketing newly released titles during this time.
Links of the week May 18 2020 (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:
25 May 2020
"For books whose authors we planned to tour, it made sense to move some of those back and wait for travel restrictions to ease, and stores to reopen," said Bestler. "Certain non-fiction titles dealt with subjects that would perhaps be overlooked during this period or were heavily dependent on media coverage which is no longer available, at least for the time being." Bestler said the process was done "in collaboration with production, publishing, sales, publicity, editorial and author and agent."
As author Ashley Poston made her way through a to-do list in early March, she fired off an e-mail to her publicist with a list of bookstores that she wanted to read at for the release of her YA romance Bookish and the Beast (Quirk, Aug.). Poston says that as soon as she crossed it off the list, she realized, "Oh, that's probably not going to happen." She recalls, "It was sort of surreal, and I felt a little foolish afterward."
Yet Poston is not alone. Hundreds of YA book releases and publicity plans have been altered by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has upended the conventional publishing world's most tried-and-true methods for publicizing new works.
YA authors are now a vanguard in publishing, charting new territory online, trying untested methods of reaching readers, and honing tools that previously existed but were largely underutilized by a trade that prizes in-person interactions at conferences, bookstores, and community gatherings.
After weeks of speculation the Supervisory Board of 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. decided yesterday (Wednesday 27th May) that the fair will take place as scheduled from 14th-18th October.
However it will be a very different Frankfurt. The plan is to run the event not only on the fair's grounds but also decentralized at locations in the city, and as a virtual event.
The fair's director, Juergen Boos, is expecting exhibitors from throughout Europe and internationally, depending on travel restrictions. He called the 2020 event "a special edition" that will combine an on-site programme with a forward-looking digital offer. "This year, it is more important than ever that Frankfurter Buchmesse takes place," he said.
Boos said his team were currently exploring "a range of digital formats" to offer company and product presentations, events and venues for initiating business deals, making contact with business partners, identifying market trends and engaging in further training.
Hillary Clinton towers above American culture like a pant-suited Colossus of Rhodes. She is one of the most loved and hated, most admired and maligned, figures in contemporary politics-little wonder, since most adults in the nation not only remember her fraught tenure as first lady in the 1990s, but also cast a vote for or against her in 2016 in her turbulent candidacy for president. We all have an opinion about Hillary Clinton. It would seem that every facet of her existence-from her marriage to her law career to the tone of her voice to her hair-has been analyzed, criticized, politicized, demonized, and celebrated.
BLUME: Probably. Right now, looking at what people are doing today at home, being isolated with kids, and no helpers in the house, I'm thinking, "How did I ever do that, the young me, kids and household duties and still writing?" And yet, I also think I got more writing done in those days because I used my time really wisely. I had those two hours a day when they went to preschool. That's just what we got then.
In an interview with Publishing Perspectives, NPD books industry analyst Kristen McLean says with a wide-eyed laugh that being a data analyst during a worldwide viral pandemic turns out to be "like watching an IMAX movie from the front row."
"Demand has stayed up there," she says. "As far as actual units-out-the-door, people figured out how to get what they needed. And so I don't really think that demand is a factor." And this should sound good to most players in the book business.
"The book market historically is very resilient," McLean says. In the financial crisis that was triggered in 2008, "The book industry's worst year was 2009, and it was down four points."
But McLean's message is far from an all-clear, and it's important to point out, she says, that "how this looks depends on where you sit in the market."
The Covid-19 pandemic has had disastrous consequences across the economy, and with the IMF predicting a 3% contraction of the economy this year, that will only get worse. While this will hit many industries hard, there is a particularly deep fear for those in the relatively privileged cultural industries.
Many musicians, DJs, artists and performers have seen their income drastically cut, and with companies across the world scaling back their advertising, and with shops selling non-essential items remaining closed, many magazines and newspapers are facing a threat to their very survival. So far, for the most part, the publishing industry has remained out of the news. Yet in an industry such as this, one whose future already seemed uncertain, squeezed as it is by the Amazon behemoth and huge corporations churning out pulpy biographies and endless cookbooks, the results could be just as catastrophic.
Smaller publishers and radical publishers, in many ways the cultural and intellectual lifeblood of the industry, face particularly increasingly uncertain times ahead. Often with tiny backlists, and little to no cash reserves, any halt to their distribution can be disastrous. While many of the major publishers have decided to delay the release of their big summer titles to later in the year, in the meantime hoping to ride out the uncertainty, for smaller houses the choice is far starker.
Julia Crouch is a former theatre director and playwright who has carved out a successful place for her novels in the genre of Domestic Noir - a term she herself coined. Below, she provides five important tips for keeping readers on the edge of their seat.
Viewpoint is your friend
Stories can be told from the point of view of many different characters, each with their own take on the events. Choose who is doing your telling very carefully, work with their voices, character, secrets and lies, reliability or lack thereof, and the spaces between different points of view. You can weave a wonderfully rich pattern this way. This doesn't mean that you have to write in the first person (‘I') - you can get right up close inside a character's head by using third (‘she'). A cool, detached, narrator can be helpful, too, but you have to be clear who and what they are, and why they are there.
In 1909, long before the invention of the World Wide Web or the prospect of a world where we must live socially distant from each other, the English writer E.M. Forster arguably predicted both. Each idea appears-in its own way-in one of Forster's most curious short stories, "The Machine Stops." All the more remarkable was the fact that Forster was not a science-fiction writer; "The Machine Stops" would be his only entry in the genre. Still, that Forster dabbled in the genre wasn't really that surprising, given his range as a writer, from his more realistic novels of social critique, like A Room with a View and Howards End, to his posthumously published narrative of queer desire, Maurice, or his more fantastical stories, like "The Celestial Omnibus." Forster delighted in moments of fantasy in his fiction, and so, in some ways, "The Machine Stops" was right up his aesthetic alley.
"The Machine Stops" would become famous a century after its publication for supposedly having envisioned technologies like social media-and the dangers thereof-long before they appeared. In particular, it predicted computer interfaces and programs like Skype that would allow us to communicate with people across the globe without leaving our rooms. People live in isolation in chambers, where they can call up music and real-time video-chatting at a click; the Earth's surface is, authorities declare, uninhabitable, so people are advised to stay in their cozy rooms, which everyone has adapted to as their standard for normality. In these ways, the story seems chillingly prescient, capturing dim-but-definite elements of the world we inhabit today, like an astronomer peering through a faintly clouded lens.
Romance Writers of America is attempting to turn the page on a damaging racism row, abolishing its top literary prizes and replacing them with awards in a new format it hopes will show "happily ever afters are for everyone" and not just white protagonists.
The association of more than 9,000 romance writers is developing proposals to encourage more diverse winners, including training for its judges, an award for unpublished authors and processes to ensure books are judged by people familiar with each subgenre.
The RWA has been at the centre of an acrimonious debate about diversity, criticised for the paucity of writers of colour shortlisted for its major awards, the Ritas, as well as its treatment of Courtney Milan after she called a fellow author's book a "racist mess" because of its depictions of Chinese women. Milan has been a prominent advocate for diversity in romance publishing, and her suspension prompted a widespread backlash, with the bestselling novelist Nora Roberts slamming the RWA for "a long-standing and systemic marginalisation of authors of colour, [and] of LGBTQ authors, by the organisation".
18 May 2020
The big adult fiction title of this past fall was Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. The sequel to the author's 1985 bestseller The Handmaid's Tale was unveiled with a 500,000-copy first printing. At the time, The Handmaid's Tale was benefitting from a surge of interest in its wildly popular TV adaptation on Hulu, and from a renewed interest in dystopian tales following the election of Donald Trump. Now, with the globe seized by a pandemic and millions of Americans hunkered down because of shelter-at-home orders, editors say they are interested in lighter fare-mostly.
So what are publishers interested in buying during a pandemic? According to a number of editors and agents who specialize in adult commercial fiction, escapism is on the rise, to an extent.
"This is the question I think we're all dealing with right now," said Harper editor Sara Nelson, when asked if she's looking for different kinds of books since the Covid-19 outbreak. "On the one hand, we're so obsessed with our current moment that it's hard to know what we, let alone most readers, will want to read a year, or a year and a half, from now. I don't generally buy dystopian fiction anyway, but I am pretty sure I won't find dystopian novels appealing for the near future."
As authors from Chaucer to Hollinghurst have shown, sex reveals our emotions, instincts and morals. The question is not why write about sex, claims author Garth Greenwell, it's why write about anything else?
There is a widely held belief, among English-language writers, that sex is impossible to write about well - or at least much harder to write about well than anything else. I once heard a wonderful writer, addressing students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, say that her ideal of a sex scene would be the sentence: "They sat down on the sofa ..." followed by white space. This is a prejudice I can't understand. One of the glories of being a writer in English is that two of our earliest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare, wrote of the sexual body so exuberantly, claiming it for literature and bringing its vocabulary - including all those wonderful four-letter words - into the texture of our literary language. This is a gift not all languages have received; a translator once complained to me that in her language there was only the diction of the doctor's office or of pornography, neither of which felt native to poetry.
World-building is an essential part of all fiction writing. Sure, with fantasy genres, writers have to create a whole new world (don't you dare close your eyes). But, If you're reading a novel set in New York, then you'd expect the author to tell how New York looks, sounds, and smells. You'd want to know absolutely everything about the people who live there, too. What they eat and drink, what they love and hate, what they do for fun. So, world-building is a vital skill that all fiction writers need to master.
Now, the nice thing about stories based in the real world is that you don't have to invent details about the setting. Stephen King sets his novels in his home state of Maine because he has an intimate knowledge of that world. When you read one of his books, even if you know nothing about Maine, King's knowledge comes through the text. There's nothing generic about one of King's fictional towns like Castle Rock or Derry. The people talk a certain way, they eat certain foods, they have particular vocations. They are unique. The challenge for fantasy and sci-fi writers is to match the unique charm of the real world in an imaginary one. When creating an imaginary world there are ten broad categories that you need to address.
Not going to Bologna was unthinkable. The shock of the pandemic and how life everywhere was being affected was the most horrifying aspect, but we also had to deal with the logistics and the loss of deposits and flights already booked and paid for. After we forced ourselves to put all that aside because those were issues beyond our control, we realized the specific impact of the cancellation.
What of the zillion conversations, both planned and impromptu, that happened during our time in Italy? We spend countless hours during many months before descending upon the Bologna Fiere preparing to meet face to face with publishers, editors, and subagents. Our goal is to talk about those glorious books that could perhaps be perfect for young readers beyond North America. Yet, we had to pivot-Covid-19 made sure of that-and so the Gallt and Zacker Literary Agency did. We shifted the way we thought about our rights guide, how we would present it, and how to have the fruitful conversations regardless of our location. Our clients and their books deserved that.
As the latest step in its efforts to become a global entertainment giant, Wattpad Corp., which began as an online platform that allows writers to self-publish, is starting to develop TV and film projects based on fiction that has appeared on their website.
The 14-year-old Toronto digital company has built one of the top Canadian-based consumer internet businesses, with more than 80 million monthly users, primarily young women. Millions of writers post fiction, often serialized, on its online platform. Readers access the content primarily on their smartphones and post comments as they read, often interacting with the authors themselves.
Wattpad generates revenue from its mostly free platform in a range of ways. It sells advertising on the platform and offers an advertisement-free paid subscription service, and charges pay-by-the-chapter fees for access to certain popular stories.
It is a challenging time to be 16 and, like his peers, Dara McAnulty must currently endure a form of house arrest that means no seeing friends, no GCSEs. Unlike other locked-down teens, McAnulty is also dealing with the harsh mischance of having his first book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, published during the coronavirus crisis. He was supposed to be touring festivals but every date is cancelled. "I feel like my being is suffering from a slow puncture," McAnulty tweeted in March. "I honestly feel like my world is falling apart right now."
There is a genuine buzz around his debut, a combination of nature book and memoir, a warm portrait of a close-knit family and a coming-of-age story. Robert Macfarlane has hailed his "extraordinary voice and vision"; Chris Packham has become a friend; Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes, called him "inspiring". The teenager's environmental activism has led to comparisons with Greta Thunberg.
Unit sales of print books continue to defy expectations that the coronavirus crisis will lead to a plunge in sales. In fact, just the opposite is occurring. Last week, unit sales of print books had their second consecutive week of double-digit growth over the previous week at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. For the week ended May 9, 2020, print units were up 10.5% over the prior week, and rose 9.9% over the week ended May 11, 2019.
All four of the major categories had sales increases over the week ended May 2. In adult fiction, print units had a 14.7% increase over the prior week. Religion fiction led the increase, with units up nearly 44%, helped by the release of Karen Kingsbury%u2019s Someone Like You, which sold nearly 11,000 copies in its first week on sale. The action/adventure segment had a 31.6% unit increase, driven by the releases of the mass market paperback editions of The Oracle by Clive Cussler and Contraband by Stuart Woods, which were in the first and second spots on the category bestseller lists. The general fiction segment saw a solid 19.6% rise over the previous week.
The Sensuous Dirty Old Man (1971) is credited to "Dr. A"... but "the secret is out," admits a paperback edition, naming the author as Isaac Asimov, "undoubtedly the best writer in America" per the Mensa Bulletin. A response to a then-popular book called The Sensuous Woman, Asimov's book instructs dirty old men on how to leer ("don't peep at girls-STARE!"), make suggestive remarks ("What a magnificent dress... or am I merely judging by the contents?"), and fondle.
January 2, 2020 marked the centenary of Isaac Asimov's birth; at least, of the birth date the late author celebrated. (In his native Russia, the date of Asimov's birth wasn't precisely recorded.) The anniversary passed with little notice, although Asimov was a towering presence in science fiction and one of the most prolific writers to ever live. A Golden Age grand master and a protegé of Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell, Asimov coined the word "robotics" and wrote the Foundation series.
The Foundation stories beat J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to win a 1966 Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series. Today, Tolkien commands a much more visible pop-culture presence than Asimov, but the Foundation stories are still widely read; bring them up in any group, and one or two people are likely to say they devoured the books.
London, 19 May 2020 - The shortlist for the 2020 AKO Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced, featuring five stories that "speak eloquently to the human condition" through a diverse array of themes and genres. This year's shortlist was determined virtually by the judging panel.
The shortlisted authors for this year's Prize are from Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Tanzania.
The Chair of judges, Director of The Africa Centre, Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp CBE, said: "We were energised by the enormous breadth and diversity of the stories we were presented with - all of which collectively did much to challenge the notion of the African and diaspora experience, and its portrayal in fiction, as being one homogeneous whole.
"These brilliant and surprising stories are beautifully crafted, yet they are all completely different from one another. From satire and biting humour, to fiction based on non-fiction, with themes spanning political shenanigans, outcast communities, superstition and social status, loss, and enduring love. Each of these shortlisted stories speak eloquently to the human condition, and to what it is to be an African, or person of African descent, at the start of the second decade of the 21st century.
"Together, this year's shortlisted stories signal that African literature is in robust health, and, as demonstrated by the titles alone, never predictable."