One of my greatest thrills as a college student was when I was let into the intermediate-level creative writing workshop. You couldn't just sign up and walk in-you had to submit a short story good enough for the professor to deem you worthy. That first day, I sat around the rectangular table with my future colleagues and was handed a set of rules for the class. It's been almost thirty years since I laid eyes on this single xeroxed sheet, but I can still remember one of them: You will not write stories about serial murderers, or even regular murderers.
Links of the week July 13 2020 (29)
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:
20 July 2020
After devouring the posh racehorse intrigue of Dick Francis and the hilarious tough-guy Spenser novels of Robert B. Parker for years, I was ready to try to write one of my own, but that particular dream would have to wait. Whatever. I shook it off, as one tends to do when young, when time and opportunity both still feel infinite. It wasn't a tragedy; back then I'd also gotten into the works of Raymond Carver and his ilk, those vaunted Vintage trade paperback authors like Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford.
For any author, being able to describe yourself as a bona fide bestseller is key to conferring your career with a certain gravitas - and will often bring you even more sales. In the UK, while most book charts are tallied by Nielsen BookScan, the Sunday Times bestseller list - like the New York Times chart in the US - has become the gold standard. But making the bestseller list isn't necessarily as straightforward as tallying sales. Not all is fair in romance and war (and other genres) when it comes to getting to the top of the charts.
Take the case of Mark Dawson, a British writer who just over a week ago hit No 8 on the Sunday Times hardback list with his thriller The Cleaner, released by the independent publisher Welbeck at the end of June. This is a great achievement for any author or small publishing house, but Dawson had done something remarkable: he bought 400 copies of his own book, at a cost of £3,600, to push his sales high enough to make the top 10.
Just before the world changed, about five months ago on February 18th, we wrote in this space about two initiatives that made sense for all publishers to employ to raise revenues and profits.
One was Ingram's Guaranteed Availability Program (GAP), which connects their Lightning print-on-demand capability to their ability to ship within 24 hours, delivering just about any quantity of books to justabout any account in the world. With just about any return address you want on the package. By mid-April, it was clear that the supply chain was already adjusting.
The other was Open Road's "Ignition" marketing program, a highly automated way to sharply improve the performance of ebook titles. The tactics employed include metadata improvements, pricing adjustments, search-optimized discovery that brings in tens of thousands of new readers every day, 8 unique newsletters touching millions of consumers (about whom more and more is known every day), and an array of genre-specific websites that funnel readers to books they love. Building this capability involved many thousands of ebooks tracked across millions of consumers for more than five years.
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt began his tenure with a baptism by fire. He took over the role in September and made some tweaks to B&N's holiday merchandising and a few personnel changes. He was expecting to make more extensive changes early this year. But then Covid-19 forced B&N to close all but 24 stores to in-person shopping.
By early July, all but one store had been reopened, Daunt told PW. The company is following all local mandates, including limiting the number of customers in each store at a given time, establishing social distancing protocols, and creating designated areas where customers can leave books they have touched but decided not to buy (those books are then sanitized before being returned to shelves).
From day one, Daunt has put his faith in booksellers' ability to turn around B&N's fortunes. That philosophy played a role in his decision to reorganize the company's buying efforts-a move that led to the layoff of many longtime buyers, such as literary fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley. Daunt said buyers will now buy across different categories. "How many buyers do independent bookstores have?" he asked. He sees the role of corporate buyers as acquiring enough copies to establish a book in stores. After that, it will be up to store managers to repolish stock as necessary. He believes stores have been filled with books that "no one wants to buy," which has made it harder for customers to find the books they want. He knows the change is a big one, but he said it is necessary to improve sell-through and lower returns, which are major objectives for him.
Affordable education and a buoyant economy help - but being a vagabond artist is still precarious. Could the Covid-19 pandemic create a moment of opportunity for writing?
There is a fact about me I've been known to trot out in smart company for the purposes of gaining the upper hand: I won a place at Oxford to do my DPhil and couldn't go because you needed to have £30,000 in your bank account before they let you in. I didn't have it and my family didn't have it and that was that.
I get asked quite a bit about writing and Ireland, specifically the perceived upsurge of writing from Ireland in the last 10 years. My understanding of it pivots on the cultural digestion of the Celtic Tiger and its boons right in time for the whole thing to implode. When Ireland was rich and celebrating itself, I was a moody undergrad, confident I would better describe the finer elements of accelerated modernity in the state because I had grown up in the midst of it. Whenever I got my shit together, that is. Then the crash hit, the illusion faded, but the breach between contemporary Ireland and post-independence Ireland was complete: the writing changed.
When Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck and murdered him, many white people said they were shocked. Perhaps they are shocked because they are used to seeing a different version of that scene: they are experienced in watching fictional portrayals where white law enforcement uses deadly force, the white officer is sympathetic, and the killing is always justified.
Every genre has its preoccupation, and the central preoccupation of crime fiction is justice. But in this moment of political upheaval, where our notions of justice are subject to intense scrutiny, we must ask what role has crime fiction played in getting us here.
The typical perspective of police procedurals has helped create the myth of police as heroes. White male police have dominated decades of crime literature, TV, and film, with Black people and people of color stereotyped as violent criminals. Since the first half of the twentieth-century, our popular culture has shown the world of crime from a white male perspective and has validated white male characters' right to use violent and deadly force according to their own judgment.
It's not that I think you can't be a writer if you don't write every day. It's that I know I can't be a writer if I don't make myself write every day. There are apparently people out there who can write a few days a week, or even a few days a month, and have that result in a book. I envy those people, and if you're one of them, I wish I could be you.
My newest book, Party of Two, came out last month. With this book, just like the four I wrote before it, once I started writing a draft, I worked on it - at least a little bit - every day until I was done. I've tried a variety of rituals and schedules and word-count goals: When I did NaNoWriMo, it was 1,667 words a day. Sometimes it's 1,000 words a day. Once, on a tight deadline I aimed for 2,000 words a day. Sometimes, when I'm having a particularly hard time (like, for instance, now), I handwrite and don't track my word count.
But the number of words doesn't matter. What matters is that I've spent that time with my work. The most important thing, for me, is to keep at it, day by day.
Bestselling novelist Josephine Cox has passed away at the age of 82, her publisher HarperCollins has announced.
At HarperCollins she was a flagship brand author, dubbed "the nation's favourite storyteller". Her most recent book, Two Sisters, was published in February this year, and was a Top Ten Sunday Times bestseller.
In the Nielsen BookScan era (since 1998) she sold 6.13 million books for £31.25m through the UK TCM. Her biggest seller was 2005's The Journey, which sold 280,958 copies in paperback.
Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins c.e.o. said: "Publishing is built on authors such as Josephine Cox, writers who know instinctively what their readers want and work diligently, and with the utmost dedication, to deliver it. This is what Josephine Cox did for many decades, becoming one of our most beloved writers. She was a joy to spend time with and will be missed by not just her countless readers, but by all of us who had the privilege of working with her."
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Preview The Big Book of Modern Fantasy
Fantasy, like any form of fiction or mode of fiction, can contain multitudes. At least, that is what we found when researching and compiling The Big Book of Modern Fantasy. In one sense, our task was made easier by the sheer immensity of the project: at 500,000 words, our anthology is the single largest post-WWII collection of fantasy stories ever published.
However, that word, "multitudes," made some of the decisions very difficult. Because one thing you discover as editors is a depth and richness to fantasy fiction that truly staggers the imagination. Nascent and early fantasy as collected in our prior The Big Book of Classic Fantasy felt like a simpler task due to the amount of time that has passed to let classics and hidden gems come to the surface and lesser works to fade. Although our usual self-imposed ten-year cut-off date - 2010, in this case - does help provide necessary perspective.
13 July 2020
The novel has died again. I've been baited into reading yet another obituary, this time written by the Secret Author (a "former professor of English and creative writing at a leading British university") who laments, in the Critic magazine, the decline of serious novels about middle-class morals and God, in favour of those focusing on "identity politics". Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith are cited as the writers who symbolise this supposed decline. It did not escape my notice that these writers happen to be women, while the literary God-botherers of the past have tended to be men. Over the years, the novel has died more deaths than a cat. It has died from loneliness, and it has died as a result of its own stupidity. This time, it has died because women have murdered it.
There's something about Sally Rooney that drives men wild, and not in the ways they are used to being stimulated (an attractive young woman's place shouldn't be an enthusiastic profile in the New Yorker. This was not part of the plan). It's all very well dismissing her work as "very simple stuff with no literary ambition", as Will Self did last year. Everyone is entitled to their opinion on the state of literature. But writing can be a petty business. A writer who claims never to be envious of other writers is as much a liar as one who claims not to care about sales. And Rooney, who has not only hit the publishing sweet spot of the literary and commercial crossover but is also very good at what she does, has provoked much jealousy.
One of the biggest "first-world problems" to arise during 2020's necessary isolation in response to Covid-19 has to do with e-books. I'm specifically talking about e-galleys, the early versions of books that critics, reviewers, and librarians often receive from publishers in place of paper versions.
Back in 2005, I ordered the first-generation Kindle straight away. I loved it, too. But it wasn't my first go-round with electronic reading. At two magazines where I'd worked, I'd tested different e-readers. I was an early adopter, and I'll never apologize for it.
However, in the 15 years since buying that first device, I'd fallen off the e-reading bandwagon. I'd moved on from working at the intersection of publishing and technology to a role as a literary journalist and book critic. As I began writing more and more, I began receiving more and more print books. No longer did I have to request a galley or a finished book; the floodgates burst, those floodgates being the shelves in my home office, which now groan with galleys, ARCs, trade paperbacks, and hardcovers.
When the first coronavirus-related erotica appeared on Literotica, one of the largest erotic fiction websites, in mid-March, the moderators were not sure if it was fit to print. Within a week, they were receiving a handful of sex stories relating to the virus every single day. As billions around the world went into lockdown, some people had seemingly found a new inspiration in isolation; quarantine-related porn started to appear online, and erotica writers began to self-publish lockdown romances on Amazon. "Quarantine has given me time to get back to writing," Silkstockinglover, one popular writer on Literotica, tells me. "I wrote a dozen stories so far."
"I don't think there's anything explicitly sexy about the pandemic itself, but any extreme situation is going to bring about fascinating experiences to explore in terms of sexuality," says Ian Snow, one author who entered the contest. "Add in isolation, boredom, and plain physical need to the mix, and you've got a recipe for some pretty hot stories."
On Monday, Simon & Schuster announced that Dana Canedy, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and a former reporter for the New York Times, will become its senior vice-president and the publisher of its flagship imprint. Canedy won a Pulitzer two decades ago, at the Times, for her work on the series "How Race is Lived in America." Canedy also published a book, "A Journal For Jordan," in 2008, about the death of her fiancé while he was serving in Iraq. She will become the first Black person to take over a major publishing imprint. Simon & Schuster, which is owned by ViacomCBS, is one of the largest publishers in the country, but it is also up for sale as changes and mergers continue to roil the book world.
I think people have broad interests, and I think that to some extent it's the role of the publisher to lead in terms of what people are reading. But it's also the role of the publisher to respond to what people are already reading and asking for. So there''s a place for both. I mean, Trump's a huge story, and he insists on being a huge story just in the way he approaches his job. And so I think it would be a dereliction of duty for journalists and authors not to focus on him to the extent that they are.
Authors, shut out of holding in-person events at bookstores, are getting more creative and collaborative when it comes to promoting their books. For the publication of Melanie Conroy-Goldman's debut novel, The Likely World (Red Hen), this means inviting as many people as she can to join her for what could be the world's first drive-in book launch. The event will take place August 4 at the Fingerlakes Drive-in in Auburn, N.Y., where Conroy-Goldman will have a conversation with author Bob Proehl and attendees will be treated to swag bags, free popcorn, and a screening of the 1989 movie Say Anything.
Silva's launch is just one of more than 40 virtual events that Poisoned Pen is hosting in July, including programs with bestsellers like Brad Thor and international authors such as Camilla Läckberg. Owner Barbara Peters said that, though the store has livestreamed its big events for several years, there was a bit of a learning curve involved in becoming, essentially, a broadcaster. "Every day we are learning new things and embracing new opportunities," she added.
In the last two weeks, Hong Kong publisher Raymond Yeung has hastily made changes to a draft paper copy of a book entitled "To Freedom," replacing the word "revolution" with "protests," tweaking a banned slogan and cutting passages that advocate independence for the Chinese-ruled city.
The changes were hard to make, he told Reuters, but impossible to avoid since China passed a national security law on June 30, making the broadly defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison.
"This is really painful," Yeung said as he flipped through pages of the collection of essays by 50 protesters, lawyers, social workers and other participants in the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Hong Kong last year.
I think some of the spinout that happens in social media has to do with people being inside a dynamic that allows them to forget that there's another person on the other side of it-and also to forget the subject on the other side of it, and the origin, and the context in which they were initially speaking. But if a peace prize could be given to a thing, social media should get it. Because without it, policing never would have been held accountable in the way that it has over the last few years.
As harrowing as his (George Floyd's) death was, the response has asked our population - not our Black population, but our population - to respond differently to their relationship to protesting, differently to their appetite for holding Black death, differently to their understanding of policing, and differently to their expectations from the justice system. So yes, I think this is an unprecedented moment, one that brings me hope that we're not as entrenched and as final as we have seemed.
"You can really write anywhere, you know." So my non-writer friends love to say, usually as they attempt to convince me to accompany them to places I do not wish to travel to, or to move me out of their holiday homes. They are at once entirely correct and spectacularly wrong, because how can some uncertain "anywhere" guarantee me the combination of circumstances necessary to get any writing done on a given day? The basic prerequisites - electricity, water, a bathroom - are obvious and fairly easily obtainable, but at certain times I might also work best with solitude or company, silence or noise, high speed internet or technological isolation, a dog that needs walking every four hours, or a cat curled up asleep in the corner.
I suspect the punitive aspect is what makes the Reading Room such a productive place for so many of us self-flagellating writers. The atmosphere is spectacularly oppressive, the competitive shushing of our fellow readers combining with the deliberately full-voiced chit-chat of the librarians to endlessly remind us just who are the wardens and who the inmates in this institution. It does not necessarily make for the most enjoyable of working days, but perhaps that is the point, as I have still never found anywhere I get as much work done as in the Reading Room of the British Library.
With a new Ripley television series in production, and her diaries at long last to be published next year, Patricia Highsmith is enjoying an unparalleled moment in the spotlight. Europe has long embraced her antiheroic writing, but for decades she was ignored in her home country of the US. Will it be any different this time around? Let us hope so, not least because Highsmith's writing-often eviscerating, always uncomfortable-has never been more relevant.
Those seeking the reason behind her overdue renaissance might like to consider the parallels between our current socio-political climate and that of the Cold War, against the backdrop of which her most famous novels were written. Are we again in the grip of the paranoia and neurosis which typified so much the 1950s? Certainly were anxious, polarized, in a state of knuckle-biting instability. Our sense of belonging eroded, our sense of justice outraged. Were she at work today, Highsmith would find herself busier than ever, since writing about these feverish insecurities was her talent and her pleasure.
Imagine the first writer's block: perhaps a caveman with a rudimentary stick staring at a large, blank rock. Today's equivalent of the blank rock may be a computer screen, and your process may seem like the pie chart below.
When you sit down to write (and there's a problem right there; you may not do well sitting down), do you find yourself with a sudden urge to clean out a file drawer? Throw in a load of laundry? Search the internet for ways to clean wine stains out of carpet? Check the refrigerator for the third time? Bake a cake instead? You have something to say, but what's holding you back?
As an award-winning children's poet, Joshua Seigal uses poetry to inspire confidence and creativity in schools, so he is an enthusiastic supporter of poetry on the curriculum: ‘I think poetry's hugely important for the development of children's literacy - it gives them freedom to explore a whole toolbox of writing techniques and it's instrumental in exploring identity and self-expression, which helps foster confidence in all aspects of communication.
"I see it being used in numerous ways, and frequently embedded across the curriculum. Children love poetry as it allows them to be creative with language and to explore issues that are relevant to them. In my experience, they also love the humour, the wordplay, and the interaction of performance poetry with a real, live poet. After I've gone, schools will often continue to develop the skills that pupils explore during my sessions. They'll send their edited poems to me to put on my blog, which gives them a real sense of achievement."
In what is perhaps the biggest surprise in publishing since the Covid-19 pandemic began roiling the U.S. economy this spring, unit sales of print books in the first half of 2020 were up 2.8% over the same period in 2019 at outlets the report to NPD BookScan. The number of copies sold was 322.1 million in the first six months, up from 313.5 million in the first half of last year.
The increase was led by a combination of children's nonfiction books aimed at helping parents educate and entertain their children following the closing of most schools in March, as well as a spike in sales of books on race relations and social justice following the killing of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis police department in late May. The juvenile nonfiction segment had the biggest gain in the first half of the year, with units jumping 25.5% over 2019. The sales leader in the category was My First Learn-to-Write Workbook by Crystal Radke, which sold more than 379,000 copies, placing the $8.99 workbook in ninth place on the overall bestseller list in the first half of the year. The strongest subcategories within the segment were education/reference/language, which had a 64.6% jump, and games/activities/hobbies, where unit sales increased 41.2%