"Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."
Links of the week June 29 2020 (27)
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:
6 July 2020
Labeled "the greatest contemporary writer of classic crime," "the best practitioner of the mystery novel writing today," and "a craftsman with a poet's vision," she was often said by critics to have "transcended" the genre. I have never liked that phrase myself. I've always felt that crime fiction has done quite nicely all by itself, thank you very much, with no need to be "transcended." What is true, though, is that James took the detective novel and helped to refine it, deepen it, amplify it. She liked to compare the form of the traditional detective novel with that of the sonnet-no one claimed that the fourteen lines and strict rhyming scheme of the latter constrained it from becoming great poetry; likewise there was nothing in the contours of the detective novel that kept it from becoming great literature.
Bolstering its expanding stable of original kids' and family programming, Apple TV Plus has signed a first-of-its-kind, multi-year agreement with the Maurice Sendak Foundation to develop children's series and specials based on the late author-illustrator's books and other artwork. Writer-director and author-illustrator Arthur Yorinks, who was a longtime collaborator of Sendak, will be developing the projects with Apple through his Night Kitchen Studios. The resulting programs will premiere around the world exclusively on Apple's streaming platform, which launched last November.
Globally recognized for his Caldecott Medal-winning picture book Where the Wild Things Are-which has sold more than 20 million copies-and other now-classic titles, Sendak's vast body of work encompassed other forms of media as well and has received numerous accolades. Caponera commented on this new chapter for his oeuvre. "We are delighted to be collaborating with Apple to bring the work of Maurice Sendak to screens around the world," she said. "Though most know him through his iconic books, Sendak's legacy also resides in theater, film, and TV, and this partnership with Apple will further the awareness of his unique genius."
Nicola Upson's crime novels featuring the author and playwright Josephine Tey have been widely praised as ‘historical crime fiction at its very best' and ‘a masterstroke of literary theft'. Set in the 1930s, each novel weaves an original murder mystery around a celebration of Tey's life and work, featuring events which defined those years and bridging the gap between the Golden Age and the contemporary.
You can never predict when an idea for a new book will arrive or what will spark it - a snatch of overheard conversation or a lonely stretch of landscape, perhaps just a quirk of history that not many people know about; the moment that it happens is thrilling and it's tempting to jump straight in - but of every dozen ideas for a novel, the chances are that only one of them will be rich enough to sustain a multi-layered plot and a memorable cast of characters. There's nothing worse - believe me - than getting 20,000 words in and wishing you'd never started, so make sure you choose wisely. My novels always explore something I'm fascinated by, something that troubles me or makes me angry, something I'm bewildered by and want to understand.
The final collection of early stories from the late Terry Pratchett, written while the Discworld creator was a young reporter, will be published in September. The tales in The Time-travelling Caveman, many of them never released in book form before, range from a steam-powered rocket's flight to Mars to a Welsh shepherd's discovery of the resting place of King Arthur.
"When it comes to Terry, there is always going to be an embarrassment of riches. His incredible talent and imagination knew no bounds," said Rob Wilkins, Pratchett's former assistant and manager of his estate. "With more tales of everything that would go on to make Terry Pratchett books the phenomenon they became - humour, satire, adventure and fantastical excellence - we just couldn't deny readers these gems, and the chance to read a Terry story for the first time, one last time. It will mean so much to fans."
James Patterson introduces a mystifying new character into his Maximum Ride universe in Hawk, a YA novel he wrote with Gabrielle Charbonnet, out this month from Little, Brown's Jimmy Patterson imprint. The original nine-book Maximum Ride series, published between 2005 and 2015, has sold more than 13 million copies.
I always start with an outline and I always want to involve a coauthor in creating that outline. It is vital to the success of the book. If writers are just looking for a payday, it is a disaster. If they are committed to making the book as good as it can be - a story they can be proud of - it is a success. When collaborating with another author, it is important to be in constant touch and read their scripts often - since occasionally books wander or march in place, and it's a lot easier to review stories every two weeks and talk it through if something's not quite right.
Britain's readers have been emerging from lockdown to restock their bookshelves, with book sales - and particularly crime novels - booming in the three weeks since booksellers were allowed to open their doors.
The print market continued its healthy run since England's bookshops reopened on 15 June, with 3.8m books sold in the last week, for £32.6m, up from 3.1m (making £26.9m) at the same time last year. This is a 15% increase in value on last week and 21% year-on-year.
Sales in the last three weeks are up 19% on the same period in 2019, according to book sales monitor Nielsen, with almost 11m titles worth £94m sold over the period. Readers have been pouncing on stories of murder and revenge, with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June, when compared to the same point last year.
The nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice have set off conversations in nearly every industry about the treatment of Black workers, and book publishing is no exception.
The industry has long been criticized for hiring and retaining so few employees of color - according to a survey of the work force released this year by the children's book publisher Lee & Low Books, only 5 percent are Black. But the calls to diversify have intensified in recent weeks, as Black professionals have publicly shared long-suppressed frustrations about how racial prejudice has affected their work. In publishing, that has included discussions of hiring practices, workplace microaggressions and publishing companies' treatment of books by Black writers.
Eight publishing professionals - working in different facets of the industry, including an author, literary agent, marketer, publicist, editors and booksellers - told us what they are seeing now and what they've seen before, how being Black has affected their careers, and what they hope the future will bring. Here are their responses, which have been condensed and edited.
A group of best-selling authors is teaming up with Amazon in a lawsuit that aims to bring down an alleged counterfeit e-book publishing site described as "the biggest pirate book site the world has ever seen."
John Grisham, Scott Turow, R.L. Stine, Sylvia Day, and other top American authors are named as plaintiffs in the suit, along with Amazon Publishing and Penguin Random House. The complaint was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle against the operators of Kiss Library and affiliated websites
"In the last decade, and especially the last couple of years, the number of piracy complaints handled by the Authors Guild has skyrocketed, which is why we no longer could sit by and allow book piracy entities like KISS Library to continue to rob authors and publishers of their ability to earn a living," Preston, president of the Authors Guild, said in a statement. "We are filing this suit not only on behalf of ourselves but for the thousands of authors who labor years to write a book, putting their hearts and souls into every sentence, only to see their income lost to book piracy."
50 celebrated authors, academics and journalists including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Noam Chomsky have signed a letter slamming 'cancel culture' after JK Rowling was attacked for speaking out about trans women.
Ms Rowling has also backed the movement spearheaded by Pulitzer-prize winning writer Anne Applebaum who warned that 'Twitter mobs' including Donald Trump were placing 'very important restraints on freedom of speech'.
The letter, published in Harper's calls for: 'The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted' and demands that they want to 'uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter speech from all quarters.' It later adds: 'It is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.'
Boys Surveyed Said Audio Comprehension Was Higher
The United Kingdom's Publishers Association is pointing out that while the government fast-tracked its plan to remove its 20-percent VAT (value added tax) on ebooks in late April-in light of the country's lockdowns at the time for the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic-audiobooks were not included in that move.
This week (June 6), the association tells Publishing Perspectives, it's hoped that the VAT removal will be made to include audiobooks, and they're arguing for this in part on what a new report from the National Literacy TrustUK-based organisation which has campaigned since 1993 to improve literacy standards across all age groups. Excellent research information and details of the many initiatives the charity is currently involved in. www.literacytrust.org.uk. It also has a useful page of news stories on UK literacy, which links to newsletter http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/TheLibrary.aspx has indicated is benefits to children in audiobook listening.
The top-line conclusions of the report are that audiobooks can benefit children and young adults by: Improving reading skills and enjoyment of reading Supporting emotional intelligence and well-being Improving reading comprehension Widening access to books
29 June 2020
Jack Reacher, VI Warshawski, Harry Hole ... Leading crime writers reveal how they came up with their most famous creations, what it's like to live with them over decades and if they'll last the distance
"I've been doing it 24 years now and I couldn't do it any more," says Lee Child as he hands over the reins of his Jack Reacher series to his brother Andrew Grant. He's not the first to tire of his most famous creation. By 1938, Agatha Christie had grown entirely sick of Hercule Poirot, asking: "Why did I ever invent this detestable bombastic, tiresome little creature? Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head." And nearly 50 years earlier, Arthur Conan Doyle was equally wearied by Sherlock Holmes: "I think of slaying Holmes ... winding him up for good," he told his mother.
Creating a long-running series featuring a much-loved character can be both a blessing and a curse. As time passes in the real world, the writer has to decide how to deal with a fictional timeline. Is it best to age a hero in real time - Ruth Rendell had Inspector Wexford still solving crimes in his retirement - or to let the world move on but keep your hero young, as Patricia Cornwell does with Kay Scarpetta, who remains around 40 years old for ever ? And how does the character develop as social mores change?
Like everyone in the book industry, writers have experienced considerable change over the last few months. Although they might be used to working from home, being forced to do so has impaired creativity and made it nearly impossible for some writers to focus. For others, being under lockdown has provided just the right push for them to finally finish their book project and research agents and publishers.
For those writers who are able to work at this time, questions loom:
- If they're writing fiction, should they adjust their story to reflect current events?
- If they're already published, can they effectively promote their book through social media?
- What's the best way to help fellow writers, booksellers, and others who may be struggling?
For years, RWA's members of color had felt stigma and hostility like that experienced by Huguley and Malone; they'd felt unwanted, disrespected, or simply shut out. So had the queer members, and the poly members, and everyone else who didn't quite fit into the traditional romance mold. And in December 2019, all those years of slights, of aggressions both micro and macro, of implicit and explicit bias, would finally become impossible to ignore.
RWA imploded in a spectacular public meltdown, an imbroglio that led to the resignation of the president, executive director, and, eventually, the entire board. It was a wildly convoluted controversy that involved secret backroom committees, public denunciations, and no small amount of schadenfreude from popcorn-munching onlookers in publishing and media.
There's an unkind stereotype that romance novels are for sex-starved spinsters with too many cats. So to those observing on social media, the spectacle of one romance figure after another toppling like dominoes appeared to be coming out of nowhere. "Who knew that romance novelists were so wild?" was the general response. But the chaos was the culmination of a long-simmering culture war within the insular world of romance publishing, one that played out for years through microaggressions, attempts to censor queer authors and storylines, and the refusal to recognize the work of authors of color.
Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave trader that has long provoked offense. Statues of colonial conquerors of Africa and South Asia have followed, along with a robust discussion of the ways in which such actions make history rather than erase it. These movements abroad are not merely echoes of BLM; BLM itself is global.
The shared impetus is a common opposition to racism, of which anti-Black racism has been the most lethal and traumatic. But the history of policing also bridges them. No historical figure makes this clearer than George Orwell, whose name has been increasingly bandied about in recent weeks - by those fretting about the erasure of history as well as those calling out the euphemistic language around policing, such as the use of "nonlethal" bullets against protesters.
Now more than ever, as the Black Lives Matter movement appears resolute on toppling racist and imperial structures, we need the words and radical ideas of black poets - to reimagine the kind of world we want to arise once the ash has settled.
Kadish Morris
It was clear to me early on that there are no black editors at any of the larger publishers which have poetry lists. My books were rejected from those major presses, and read in a reductive, isolated way. I kept being told my books were about identity, then I'd read books by white poets, and think, how are these not about identity? I was being told theirs were about nature and philosophy, but mine were also about those things. I wasn't allowed that complexity, just given this unimaginative pathology. I'm proud to be part of the Black Writers' Guild, who are addressing how this racism is systemic in many ways.
Raymond Antrobus
Book publishing is unlike many industries in that its fundamental product, the writing, is not, for the most part, an in-house commodity. Publishers wait for their next new bestselling authors to arrive on no known date, writing about no pre-arranged topic, and in many if not most cases as people previously unknown. A Nielsen- or NPD-style point-of-sales tracking system of each authors' progress is impractical. The rankings of book sales on retail platforms like Amazon can offer only clues to how titles are navigating a bottomless marketplace of millions of books.
- 64 percent of respondents say they anticipate losses because of postponed publications of their work
- 40 percent of respondents say they anticipate losses because of postponed contracts and reduced advances against royalties
- 97 percent of respondents say they have experienced a "high loss" of income primarily because of canceled appearances including lectures, workshops, and readings
- 60 percent of respondents say they'd classify the effects on author income as "very" to "extremely" severe
Jhalak Prize co-founder Sunny Singh has called out the industry's "moral failure" to reflect diversity at every stage of publishing.
Speaking in a video conference panel discussion on the future pipeline of publishing, held on Friday (26th June), Singh said she could "no longer believe the industry thinks it's acting in good faith" where championing diversity is concerned.
Singh urged the industry to confront the problem structurally. "We need to see agents, publishers, writers, sales and marketing people of colour. Why aren't we seeing people of colour at the executive level? I want to see those changes at the top of the ladder. Just one person is not good enough. For the publishing industry to convince me that they're doing something, I want to see those changes at the top, not just, ‘Oh we've recruited another batch', who will all end up leaving in five years because they're burned out, exhausted and frustrated. That's what I need the publishing industry to do."