Not unexpectedly, year one of the pandemic was an e-book bonanza, with Britain's largest trade publishers chalking up record sales of 54.7 million units across the Big Six groups. As last year moved a bit towards normality there has been something of a correction, with sales dropping 13% across the six houses to 47.5 million copies. Five of the six groups' sales contracted, though Bloomsbury bucked the trend, helped by TikTok and the acquisition of Head of Zeus.
Links of the week February 7 2022 (06)
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:
7 February 2022
Overall, those 47.5 million units is still a very decent return, up a sliver (0.8%) on 2019, when Bloomsbury joined the e-book panel. Stripping out Bloomsbury to compare like-for-like across the decade in which we have been compiling this data, 2021 was the fourth-best year of e-book volume returns and the second-best since 2015.
Hachette is once again the UK's top consumer e-book publisher, shifting 17.6 million copies to Penguin Random House's 13.8 million. Even though Hachette has had that number one position ahead of its rival for most of the past decade, the giants had been quite close for most of the 2010s; in 2018, just 3,364 copies separated the two. Yet Hachette has been pulling away in the past three years. Acquisitions are a big part of this, particularly the ongoing bedding in of Bookouture (bought in 2017) and a company-wide filtering through of a Bookouture-esque strategy of more dynamic pricing.
The advent of AI-enabled audiobook narration has been a hot topic of discussion in audiobook circles of late, and according to a number of audiobook narrators and other industry professionals, an October PW article raised the temperature of debate further. In that piece, consultant and PW columnist Thad McIlroy discussed the state of AI-enabled audiobook narration and its potential appeal to audiobook creators and consumers. He also profiled several players in this nascent nook of the still-booming digital audiobook segment. As the audiobook industry begins to more extensively weigh the pros and cons of another new technology on its doorstep, a growing number of players are joining the conversation.
"It's practically all we talk about," said audiobook narrator Hillary Huber. "I am a member of the SAG-AFTRA [Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] Audiobook Steering Committee, and I am a board member of our newly formed Professional Audiobook Narrators Association, or PANA, and believe me we are circling the wagons." She noted that McIlroy's piece created an uproar in narrator circles-"much of it fear driven rather than informed," she admitted-and that it had "galvanized our community to get educated and get involved."
When voice actor Heath Miller sits down in his boatshed-turned-home studio in Maine to record a new audiobook narration, he has already read the text through carefully at least once. To deliver his best performance, he takes notes on each character and any hints of how they should sound. Over the past two years, audiobook roles, like narrating popular fantasy series He Who Fights With Monsters, have become Miller's main source of work. But in December he briefly turned online detective after he saw a tweet from UK sci-fi author Jon Richter disclosing that his latest audiobook had no need for the kind of artistry Miller offers: It was narrated by a synthetic voice.
Richter's book listing on Amazon's Audible credited that voice as "Nicholas Smith" without disclosing that it wasn't human. To Miller's surprise, he found that "Smith" voiced a total of around half a dozen on the site from multiple publishers-breaching Audible rules that say audiobooks "must be narrated by a human." Although "Smith" sounded more expressive than a typical synthetic voice, to Miller's ear it was plainly artificial and offered a worse experience than a human narrator. It made giveaway mistakes, like pronouncing Covid as "kah-viid" when referring to the pandemic.
Readers love bookstores. Even the most devoted library power user, audiobook aficionado, or ebook devotee enjoys wiling time away in the aisles. There's perhaps nothing more romanticized in the bookish world than a secondhand bookstore brimming with stacks of books precariously balanced on every surface. They make for great Instagram pictures - but do they make for a good business model?
Speaking of romanticization, books are often conferred a certain status that almost no other object is. Reading isn't just a hobby; it's a lofty pursuit. Books aren't just widgets; they're sacred objects. Reading and books aren't just associated with status and education. They're also often associated with a kind of moral weight. It's not unusual for everyone from BookTokers to booksellers to say they promote literacy, which certainly sounds like a noble pursuit.
I'm just one among many people who have been writing about accessibility for years. It has felt, frankly, as if our messaging was failing to register much. There has been virtually no overt resistance-nobody disputes that people with disabilities should have the same access to systems and content as everybody else-yet people have pretty much just kept going about their business, posting websites and publishing books with clear accessibility problems.
I'm a publishing technology consultant, so I get to see into the underlying code of a lot of books and websites. Though in my speaking and writing I've stressed how much easier it is to get accessibility right these days, thanks to advances in standards and technologies, the truth of the matter is that most books and websites still have accessibility issues.
So it was with what I can only characterize as shock to see a groundswell of interest in my recent column in PW, "How Publishers Can Get Alt Text Right." As I usually do, I shared a link to it via LinkedIn. Within less than a day, it had been viewed a thousand times; as I write this, it's up to 3,253 views. To put that in perspective, I would have been surprised to get 325 views, and not surprised to get 32. And that was just LinkedIn. PW reports the piece received about 1,400 pageviews-more than double that of the average number of views that week.
When Andy Hunter was looking for US$1.2 million to create Bookshop.org, "It was actually an extremely lonely experience because I was wandering around New York City talking to big agents, like publishers, high-net-worth individuals or investors I thought might care about bookstores.
"And almost all of them were like, ‘Oh, you're competing with Amazon? No, sorry, can't do it right now.' Or they didn't return my emails or whatever. And I ended up raising about 60 percent of what I wanted to raise and launched with only $775,000 worth raised. Which is very small amount of money if you're trying to create a platform that's going to compete with Amazon."
Hunter, a canny and committed co-creator and/or publisher of Literary Hub, Counterpoint, Soft Skull Press, and Catapult, is lonely no more.
On Friday (January 28), Bookshop.org will mark its second anniversary as a digital retailer of books that channels 30 percent of the retail value of a book sale to the consumer's chosen local bookstore. Instead of making an online buy at Amazon, the customer elects to make it "at" her or his favorite brick-and-mortar store.
Before the pandemic, Deborah Yewande Bankole was on what she describes as a "steady diet of short stories". She loved seeking out emerging writers and admired the work of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Julia Armfield and Danielle Evans, but had not considered writing one of her own.
So during lockdown, when furloughed from her job as a creative producer, she found herself with the time to sit down and write, and was surprised when what materialised was her own first short story.
Such is the apparent appetite for short stories that a new independent press entirely dedicated to them - believed to be the first of its kind in the UK - is to launch in March. Scratch Books' first publication will be Reverse Engineering, a collection of seven short stories by authors including Irenosen Okojie, Sarah Hall and Mahreen Sohail.
Founder Tom Conaghan said today's "weird fragmented times" are ripe for short stories: "There's an appetite for it. Life is coming undone and the short story has that potential to reflect it more than anything."
Ben Okri has raised the alarm about online ghostwriting sites which falsely claim to have written or contributed to bestselling and award-winning books by himself and a host of other well-known authors ranging from Richard Osman and Delia Owen to Hillary Clinton and Will Smith.
These websites often have fake staff rosters with dubious credentials, and charge thousands of pounds upfront for ghostwritten books.
Okri first became aware of a scam, in which a ghost writer variously called Roseanne Wynter and Lisa P Whitle claimed she wrote his 1991 Booker-winning novel The Famished Road (Vintage) among others, when friends alerted him to people talking about it on Twitter. He said it was %u201Cabsolutely shocking%u201D that someone would claim to have written his book. %u201CI got hold of the Booker team to just make sure that this kind of scam is stamped down very quickly because it%u2019s very dangerous not only for writers, but also for the Booker reputation and [people] who want their books written, to pass money on to people who are clearly fraudulent,%u201D he told The Bookseller.
You'd think that being a senior publicity manager at a children's publisher, I'd be in a great place to do PR for my own book. Well, it took a bit of practice. The first time someone asked me about The Bird Singers, the only thing I could think to say was: "Um... I wrote it."
I'm happy to share that now if someone asks me about my debut, I can confidently say that it is "a mystery adventure about two sisters, set in the Lake District and inspired by Polish and Ancient European myths and folklore". Oh, and it's out now (3 February 2022), published in paperback by Hodder, in case you were wondering.
I love my job. As cheesy as that sounds, it's true. Being a publicist suits me. There is nothing more satisfying to me than a perfectly planned tour schedule or a beautifully tailored pitch email. But it's hard to move from talking about someone else to talking about yourself.
Aspiring authors must expect rejection. And I got a LOT of rejection when I started submitting my manuscript. Of course, if you work in the industry there's always the bonus of meeting those who rejected you at a launch party - "Ah yes! You're the one who sent me that fantasy nonsense about birds and cream scones! - more white wine?" I'm kidding! That never happened!
But I know the thought of being rejected by people you might meet professionally can be a real fear for those secret authors working in the industry. All the feedback I received from those failed submissions was vital in shaping The Bird Singers into the book it is today. It's all part of the process.
The ring of the doorbell, the pop of a champagne cork, a peal of laughter from another room. Wicked gossip, a meaningful glance across the dining table, a knife secreted in a napkin. The host must step away for just a moment to take an urgent phone call, would you all keep yourselves occupied? No, nothing is the matter. Unless something is?
Thrillers and mysteries are genres of danger, suspense, violence, murder. Not anything you'd want at an elegant soirée or holiday bash or a cozy dinner with close friends. But a startling number of thrillers and mysteries have at least one party in their pages or onscreen. All those cozy mysteries set at house parties at some grand estate; the Christmas party in The Thin Man (the movie adds a dinner party too); the pity party and the high school kegger in Sharp Objects; Rope, which takes place in its entirety at one cocktail party. Why so many parties, in these genres of secrecy and threat?
When our parents were all out carousing, my older cousins, in the guise of babysitting, let me stay up and watch these films, which were certainly not "Snow White," which, come to think of it, was darned scary as well. They schooled me carefully, on pain of banishment, that I must never tell that I was allowed to stay up and watch terrifying cinema. I promised. That's how I first saw Frankenstein, and my cousins were horrified when, after the movie ended, I burst into tears.
"Look what you did," one said to the other. "She's going to tell."
But I wasn't going to tell. I confounded them by saying, "It's so sad. I feel so sorry for him!"
I meant the monster.
The ability to go on loving someone even when that person has done something awful is one of the hallmarks of who we are. All primates, from humans to gorillas to bonobos, forgive - although (this should be no surprise) cats never do. Until Robert Enright's pioneering work on the psychology of forgiveness began in 1989, almost no one asked analytically, was this tendency a human weakness or the purest expression of humanity?
This post is about another resolution, one I made some thirty-three years ago, at a real turning point in my life. My older son was six and the younger one just toddling around the coffee table. This would have been the cusp of 1986. My husband and I had been out of graduate school for a couple of years-he'd finished a Ph.D. in psychology, and I'd completed an MA in English/Creative Writing. We were in the thick of things, and the dream I'd nurtured for most of my adult life-publishing a book of short stories and then a novel, teaching creative writing at the college level-seemed entirely out of reach.
Newly ensconced in Ames, Iowa, both of us were teaching semester to semester at Iowa State University. Noses to the grindstone, we were paying our dues and eking out a monthly payment on school loans. Foremost in our minds were our responsibilities to others: first family then students. Lots of students. I was teaching four classes of composition and professional writing a semester, and every spare moment went to grading an endless round of papers. Other people's writing always took precedence over mine. Something had to give.
So, when New Year's Eve of 1986 rolled around, I made a desperate resolution and framed it in the imperative: Get up an hour earlier than necessary six days a week and spend those sixty minutes writing short fiction. To make myself more accountable, I shared the plan with my husband and a couple of writing friends.
Good thing I did. Those first few weeks were hard as hell. I was rusty as a writer, and, worse yet, I was weary and uninspired. More than once, I fell asleep at the kitchen table. Only desperation kept me going. When the alarm went off, I rolled out of bed and tiptoed into the kitchen, anxious not to wake the kids. Fixed a cup of instant coffee and sat my butt in the chair.
Weeks passed, and I yawned a lot. But I also found some words and wrote them down. A month or two in, I saw progress: Words lined up in neat little sentences. Sentences lined up in neat little rows. Each morning, I began by reading what I'd written the day before. My first achievement was getting my writing life back.
It was Christopher Hitchens, the much-celebrated author and critic, who claimed, "everybody does have a book in them but, in most cases, that's where it should stay."
Hitchens would, somewhat ironically, publish more than 30 books before he died in 2011, a year after the launch of Instagram, which now has about 1 billion monthly users.
For Allira Potter, her book is "a way for me to reach a new audience who want to learn what I am all about."
For Allira Potter, her book is "a way for me to reach a new audience who want to learn what I am all about."Credit:Don Arnold/WireImage
It's this platform, alongside TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, that is now undermining Hitchens' commandment. Those who have mastered the art of influence, attracting social media followers and fame, do have a book inside them - and it seems publishers don't want to let it stay there.
Along with skincare and smoothies, social media stars are increasingly spruiking their latest books. Publishers have always sought out celebrities and public figures for book deals, but influencers are a different beast because rather than mass appeal - as, for example, a Kylie Minogue memoir might have - their books target a niche audience. The authors are not often household names, but they have a devoted fan base.
By the time the invasion of Poland officially kicked off the Second World War, the Germans had been engaged in strategy sessions for years-probably even before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Versailles. Eager to redress their losses and keen to demonstrate the imagined superiority of the Aryan race, the country had been zealously preparing its youth, citizens, infrastructure, military, and factories (not to mention its pigeons) for another chips-all-in fracas. The Brits, meanwhile, were thoroughly occupied in moving on after the devastating war years and were eager to downplay the indications that another war was looming on the horizon. They may as well have been an island of optimistic ostriches. But on September 1st, 1939, war was once again upon them. One by one, the Allied countries fell, and as the Luftwaffe blitzed across the Channel, and the threat of a British invasion seemed imminent, the situation was desperate indeed.
Britain may have been ill-equipped to go up against the military might of Nazi Germany, and a bit slow out of the gate, but it did have a few tricks up its sleeves. The various intelligence organizations managed, with cunning cleverness over the course of the war, to throw all manner of kinks into the works, slowly but surely gumming up the Nazi war machine. They matched James Bond in sheer diabolical thinking, cool composure, and ingenious gadgets.