Booming appetites for crime, sci-fi and romance drive fiction sales 20% higher than in 2019, with Richard Osman the year's bestselling author
Links of the week January 10 2022 (02)
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:
10 January 2022
Book sales continued to climb last year despite lockdowns, with more than 212m print books sold in 2021 - the highest figure of the last decade.
Driven by booming appetites for crime novels, sci-fi, fantasy, romance and personal development titles, sales last year showed an increase of 5% on 2020. The sales were worth £1.82bn - a 3% increase on 2020, and the first year on record that sales have topped £1.8bn. The figures were released on Tuesday by Nielsen BookScan, which was forced to fill in lockdown data gaps with estimates based on its monthly consumer surveys, which collect data from around 3,000 book buyers each month. Bookshops across the UK were shut for over three months at the start of 2021.
A federal judge in Washington has issued a default judgment against a major overseas e-book piracy operation known as the KISS Library after the operators of the site failed to answer a lawsuit filed in July, 2020 by the Authors Guild, Amazon Publishing, Penguin Random House, and a number of authors. In addition to a permanent injunction barring the service from operation, the court also awarded the plaintiffs the maximum amount of damages under the law, totaling some $7.8 million.
According to court filings, two Ukrainian nationals, Rodion Vynnychenko and Artem Besshapochny, created and operated Kiss Library through a variety of websites and domains to offer pirated copies of literary works. And though the court found that defendants were ultimately served, they did not participate in the lawsuit and "used a series of ruses to hide their identities and avoid both detection and accountability" for their actions.
I'm a literary agent and at the height of last year's Black Lives Matter protests I was sent a list, with accompanying photographs, of the top editors working across the major publishing houses in the UK. When I read it I burst into tears. It showed a sea of almost totally white faces, some of whom had been approaching retirement when I started out as an editorial assistant 20 years earlier. The stagnation in the industry was stark and filled me with despair.
Analysis of the industry since then, partly led by pressure from BLM and an open letter from the Black Writers Guild, has only further highlighted this imbalance. Two of the biggest global publishers, Penguin Random House and Hachette, revealed that just 2.7% of their staff - in both cases - are black; and the Guardian reported that you are eight times more likely to see an animal as lead character in a children's book than a person of colour.
The organizers of the Bologna Children's Book FairThe Bologna Children's Book Fair or La fiera del libro per ragazzi is the leading professional fair for children's books in the world. have affirmed that the fair intends to hold its event in-person this coming March 21-24. "We are monitoring the omicron Covid situation very closely and it is expected to peak in Italy quite soon, well before the fair," said Elena Pasoli, exhibition manager of the fair. The event will again include exhibitions, seminars, workshops, and lectures. This year will also see the first in-person edition of BolognaBookPlus, the new program for general and adult trade publishers. The United Arab Emirate of Sharjah is the guest of honor.
One important accommodation to the recent surge in coronavirus cases is that the fair has extended the deadline for submitting titles to compete in its prestigious BolognaRagazzi Award program, to January 28. In addition, where previously the awards were only open to those publishers who were exhibiting at the fair, they are now open to any and all children's publishers who would like to submit books.
Increased work on diversity and sustainability, new hybrid working methods, the growth of TikTok as a channel for books and the continued resilence of bookselling are just some of the predictions for the year ahead made by figures across the trade. Leaders across major publishing houses, retailers, indie publishers, agencies and trade associations have offered their insight on what to expect over the next 12 months. Ongoing challenges include the pandemic, supply chain problems and the task of making the industry greener and more representative of the population. Below, senior figures from across the book trade share their hopes and expectations for the year ahead.
Tom Weldon C.e.o., Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing
If 2021 taught me anything, it was that our industry is not only resilient, but also more dynamic, relevant and influential than it has ever been. Demand for books remains strong and channels such as TikTok offer an exciting route to discovery, particularly on backlist. We will continue to focus on digital upskilling and investment as we lean into online purchasing, while finding ways to partner with bricks-and-mortar retailers, who are so critical to a diverse retail landscape. Ethical purchasing and "shop local" are interesting consumer trends to consider in the year ahead.
I know that writers often feel that the screen adaptation of their work is an inferior-sometimes even an embarrassing-take on the original. Writers say: I told myself that a novel and a film are two different things. Once you sign that contract with Hollywood, let it go. It's out of your hands.
So here's something you'll rarely hear a novelist say: The first time I saw the film of my first novel, A Simple Favor, I felt like someone had turned on all the lights in the house and uncorked a bottle of something fizzy and delicious. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, two suburban moms celebrate the pleasures of the afterschool martini. But to me the effect of watching it seemed more like French champagne: sparkling and bubbly in a way that makes everything seem funnier and more interesting.
Conventional wisdom in the Western literary tradition holds that character determines plot. A protagonist possesses a fatal flaw that dashes his otherwise charming character and sets him on a path to slay the dragon, save the world, and get the girl - all while resolving the problem of this fatal flaw. Captain America saves the day.
But that definition of plot presumes the existence of a world of background characters whose entire lives are shaped by one hero's fatal flaw.
"What about all these people who die in the background of these stories because of this guy's fatal flaw?" Matthew Salesses, a novelist and author of "Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping," asked in The Maris Review. "For them, it's not their fatal flaw that's causing all these problems, it's just kind of living in a world where some people's fatal flaws have vast and deep consequences and other people's fatal flaws are that they live in the world."
This is a question of focus, and who we writers and readers have decided are worthy subjects of our attention and money.
I come from a family of teachers. Both my parents taught at Barnsley Girls' High School, which meant from an early age I was immersed in stories of school life: the scandals, the fights, the rivalries of any small community. My mother-who took no pregnancy leave when I was born, conveniently giving birth to me on a Friday morning and returning to work on Monday-would leave my grandmother to babysit, and to bring me into school at lunchtimes to be fed during her lunch hour.
Thus I was literally breast-fed the atmosphere of the High School; the scent of floor polish and plimsolls, school cabbage, chalk and cut grass. Some of her pupils still recall a little girl who spoke French, who sat under the teacher's desk, drawing on pieces of scrap paper. With such a start, and with so many stories of teaching already in my head, I seemed predestined for teaching. The fact that I liked stories too came as a useful bonus: schools are full of stories, and though it may often be draining, demoralizing and hard, teaching is never boring.
Some writers won't read a word of any novel while they're writing their own. Not one word. They don't even want to see the cover of a novel. As they write, the world of fiction dies: no one has ever written, no one is writing, no one will ever write again. Try to recommend a good novel to a writer of this type while he's writing and he'll give you a look like you just stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. It's a matter of temperament. Some writers are the kind of solo violinists who need complete silence to tune their instruments. Others want to hear every member of the orchestra-they'll take a cue from a clarinet, from an oboe, even. I am one of those.
My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I'm too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I'm syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say; pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.
The theft of books occupies a complex place in our moral judgment, depending on motive. In Markus Zusak's 2005 novel The Book Thief, the actions of the title character are heroic - she steals books to save them from destruction. During the 2011 London riots, it was frequently observed, with a hint of reproach, that the looters pointedly left bookshops untouched and this deliberate spurning was seen as further indictment of the mob's character, as if we'd have thought better of the rioters if they had heaved a bollard through the window of Waterstones and made off with the latest Jeanette Winterson.
In the run-up to publication of the final Harry Potter novel in 2007, the publisher laid on extra security at the printworks after it was claimed that tabloid reporters were hanging about offering cash bribes to any worker willing to slip them a sneak preview. In this instance, the opprobrium was not because such a theft might have deprived the publisher and author of income, but because only a sociopath would deliberately ruin the ending for millions of children.
I've kind of given up telling non-publishing people that I write for young adults. They nod knowingly and then say something dismissive like "isn't that just vampire romances?"
This leaves me with two options. Option one: bite them on the neck. Or option two: explain very politely that young adult fiction is without doubt the most exciting, innovative space in publishing today.
Western society is experiencing a huge culture-quake, and young adults are at the centre of it, challenging age-old perceptions of gender, privilege, sexuality and race. They have been shouting for change, breaking down social norms. So it's hardly surprising they respond to authors who take the narrative rule book and make origami with it.
Take story structure - The World Between Us by Sarah Ann Juckes, switches between two first-person perspectives on the same page. Then there's This Can Never Not Be Real by Sera Milano which has five first-person narrators, sometimes switching perspective from one line to the next. And it works - it even adds to the heart-pounding tension. "YA readers are less critical of books that take risks with format," says Milano's agent, Molly Ker Hawn of The Bent Agency. "It may be that their priority is the story being told. If the story works, the reader is all-in."
The current generation of young adults are the first to have grown up with social media, where words and pictures are no longer seen as separate things. On the average WhatsApp chat it's common for sentences to run: word-emoji-word-emoji-gif and still make perfect sense. Graphic novels such as Alice Oseman's Heartstopper taps into this shift perfectly.
The latest set of accounts published at Companies House also show pretax profits increased to £14.4m, from £13.2m the year before. TRDSC's former directors Luke Kelly and Claire Wright said the performance "exceeded expectations" with revenue 13.2% ahead of budget.
They noted: "While the outbreak of Covid-19 during 2020 impacted some revenue streams due to operational issues and the enforced closure of theaters and cinemas, overall revenue increased, partially due to securing a new publishing contract with income receivable at the year end."
The report also appeared to refer to the major Netflix deal announced last year, adding "a significant sale of rights to a production company" guarantees further receipts "which secures income for several periods".
The latest set of accounts published at Companies House also show pretax profits increased to £14.4m, from £13.2m the year before. TRDSC's former directors Luke Kelly and Claire Wright said the performance "exceeded expectations" with revenue 13.2% ahead of budget.
They noted: "While the outbreak of Covid-19 during 2020 impacted some revenue streams due to operational issues and the enforced closure of theaters and cinemas, overall revenue increased, partially due to securing a new publishing contract with income receivable at the year end."
The report also appeared to refer to the major Netflix deal announced last year, adding "a significant sale of rights to a production company" guarantees further receipts "which secures income for several periods".
Most children enjoy stories about kids getting away from their parents, even the ones who are perfectly happy at home. The young Jim Grant was never very happy at home. For as long as he could remember he had sought out books about feuding brothers, orphans and changelings, daring escapades and survival against the odds: reading, for the boy who would one day become Lee Child, was all about escape.
The first book he fell in love with was My Home in America, a twelve-page picture book he discovered at the library aged four. On each page was an image of a different type of American home: a California bungalow, a New England salt box, a Pennsylvania log cabin, a prairie farmhouse with windmill and water pumps. One page was captioned "New York skyscraper" and featured a fair-haired blue-eyed boy of around five years old, sitting on the window ledge gazing out at the Empire State Building, with the city lit up like Christmas around it. It was like Jim was seeing himself for the first time, more clearly than in a mirror.
I‘m writing this on January 1. It's exactly 50 years since I turned up at the side entrance of George G.Harrap & Co., at 182-184 High Holborn, London, WC2, on January 1, 1972, having been interviewed and accepted for the job of a "Young Scientific Assistant Editor." January 1 wouldn't become a bank holiday in England until 1974.
I owe my career to Ron Hawkins, the interviewer and my first boss. I also owe a lot to the Harrap family, which owned the business-Mr. Paull, Mr. Ian, and Mr. Olaf-for allowing me a paid apprenticeship and bearing the losses I inevitably incurred through my inexperience.
Most publishers opened their eyes to inequality and attempted to put right many decades of unfairness to authors, employees, and readers from minority groups. Audits have been commissioned, published, and acted on. Committees have been established to try to ensure compliance with new rules about what to publish and, specifically, what not to publish. Human resources departments have tried to ensure prejudice is eliminated from the recruitment and advancement processes.
The pressures on all our mental health have never seemed greater, and every parent or carer, whether biological or adoptive, bears the additional burden of worrying about their children's wellbeing. Are they healthy? Are they safe? Are they happy? Although the challenges change with each stage of a child's development, they never go away. Friendships; social isolation; bullying; exam stress; peer pressure; social media; developing a sense of their own identity.
Much of my counselling work after qualifying as a psychotherapist was with young people, which gave me an incredible insight into all these issues, and more. It also taught me a lot about personality development - what shapes us as people, and what we need to thrive - as well as how to unpick this with clients, using reflective practice to "hold up a mirror" to help them understand their own feelings and behaviours, and learn how to feel and live better. I draw on this experience continually in my writing. In fact, alongside become a parent myself, I would say that my psychotherapy training has been the best preparation for becoming a writer - even more so than my publishing career!
Joelle Taylor has won the TS Eliot poetry prize for her look at butch lesbian counterculture in the 1990s, C+nto & Othered Poems, praised by judges as "a blazing book of rage and light".
A mix of memoir and conjecture, the collection, Taylor's fourth, reveals the underground communities forged by women where they could reclaim their bodies as their own. It was announced on Monday night in London that C+nto had beaten collections by major names including Raymond Antrobus, Selima Hill and Michael Symmons Roberts to the £25,000 prize. The TS Eliot award is one of the most prestigious prizes in British poetry and has been won in the past by Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy and, last year, Bhanu Kapil.