Max Perkins didn't do as much administrative work as editorial assistants do today," said Daniel Vazquez, an editor at Astra House. Although he may not know exactly what the famous 20th-century editor's day-to-day was like-did Perkins work on The Great Gatsby in his office, or did he have to line edit at home because his nine-to-five was consumed by endless meetings?-Vazquez's statement is indicative of what a lot of younger publishing professionals say when asked about their workloads: namely, it's never been this bad.
Links of the week September 5 2022 (36)
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:
5 September 2022
Book publishing has long had a reputation as a low-paying industry, but one that offers its professionals enviable perks%u2014not the least of which is helping to influence the national discourse. Over the past few months, though, questions about whether that sort of trade-off is still working have been circulating on social media and roiling different factions of the industry. In March, a former assistant editor at Tor named Molly McGhee shared her resignation letter on Twitter. In it, she explained how she was finding success in a job she loved but was nonetheless overwhelmed by an insurmountable stream of work and frustrated by the murky path toward promotion. The post drew hundreds of responses (and more than 700 retweets). In May, the Bookseller released a report stating that 68% of publishing staffers in the U.K. felt burned-out in the last year.
On August 22, oral arguments ended in the Justice Department's antitrust trial to block the book publisher Penguin Random House from merging with rival Simon & Schuster. The result of the trial, which is expected to be decided later this fall, will have a massive impact on both the multibillion-dollar book publishing industry and on how the government handles corporate consolidation going forward. Perhaps fittingly for a case with such high stakes, the trial was characterized by obfuscation and downright disinformation nearly the whole way through.
It was clear that a new publishing house made of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster would dominate the industry in a way no one had seen before, but few in the industry appeared to believe that then-President Trump's apparently corporate-friendly Justice Department would actually care enough about the proposed merger to try to interfere.
"A new publishing house would dominate the industry in a way no one had seen before""I'm pretty sure the Department of Justice wouldn't allow Penguin Random House to buy us, but that's assuming we still have a Department of Justice," joked Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp in an email with an author.
The three-week trial over Penguin Random House's $2.2bn merger with Simon & Schuster has caused widespread debate in the UK trade over the role of advances and the Department of Justice's "absurd" focus on high-earning authors.
An antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice ended on 19th August in Washington DC, with the US government arguing the merger would drive down advances but PRH claiming it would actually increase competition. Post-trial briefs will now be submitted by both sides before Judge Florence Pan announces her verdict.
During the testimony, PRH US c.e.o. Madeline McIntosh's claim that the size of an author's advance did not define a book's marketing plans as other factors including market feedback came into play between acquisition and publication has stirred a debate in the UK trade. Her claim was echoed by S&S chief Jonathan Karp and summed up by PRH's lawyer Dan Petrocelli. In his closing argument he said that unless the book came from franchise or celebrity authors, "we see the same bargaining processes, the same editorial process, the same marketing methods, the same sales process".
The point was made in response to the Department of Justice's attempt to establish that acquisitions where the author earned over $250,000 were a distinct category within the publishing market, a claim opposed by PRH.
The assertion about advances came as a "big shock" to some in the UK industry, although others said the issue was more nuanced.
A deep drop in orders and sales from Amazon at many companies since mid-July has prompted rumors and speculation among industry players about the cause and whether it portends more buying changes at the online sales giant. A few companies contacted by PW reported orders down as much as 80% over the last four weeks for no apparent reason and with little explanation from Amazon.
One indie publisher told PW he was surprised when orders starting declining at the end of July since sales with Amazon have been strong since the pandemic. One company said that the automated Amazon Vendor Central response it received said the lack of new orders was based on Amazon's forecast and needs. A person at an other company said he heard orders would return to a more normal pattern in September.
The most discussed reason for the slowdown is the decision by Amazon to slow its plans to add more warehouses following a disappointing first quarter financial report, where expenses jumped as online orders fell. Faced with a slowdown in online shopping, Amazon has canceled, closed or delayed the opening of 49 delivery processing facilities across the U.S., according to logistics consultant MWPVL International. That decision, the theory holds, has led to high inventory levels, making replenishment difficult.
News that Salman Rushdie had been stabbed on stage at a New York literary festival shocked the world. It prompted an outpouring of sympathy for the author, who has spent more than 30 years with a fatwa placed on his life. Amid concern for Rushdie's health, some have begun to ask whether The Satanic Verses, his 1988 novel accused of blasphemy against Islam, could even be published today.
It's not an unreasonable question. Attitudes toward free speech, blasphemy, and Islam have all changed considerably over the last three decades. Horrific crimes such as the murder of journalists at the French publication Charlie Hebdo in 2015 still prompt support for press freedom. But it took precisely two days for some to suggest that #JeSuisCharlie solidarity would "play into the hands of the racists and fascists." Rare is the defense of free speech that comes without caveats: free speech, but not for racists or Islamophobes; but not without consequences; but not the liberty to say things that I, personally, find offensive.
The upshot is that many who work in journalism, universities, or publishing are now more concerned to avoid offending than to test the limits of what can be said. In this context, arguing for free speech often arouses suspicion. Defenders are said to be aligned with racists, transphobes, deplorables. And no one wants that. Rather than publish and be damned, the message is to self-censor in line with fashionable woke values, or risk being cancelled. How has this happened?
Colleen Hoover was thrilled when her novel It Ends With Us suddenly shot to the top of The New York Times bestseller list late last year - and also a little bewildered. The book had come out four years before.
"You know at first, I didn't really know what was going on and even my publishers were like, why are we seeing an uptick in sales?" she recalls.
Hoover soon discovered that young readers were talking about her book on TiktTok, using the hashtag #BookTok, and Hoover had become a BookTok sensation.
People are buying a lot more books these days, in part because the pandemic has trapped everyone indoors with little to do. But among younger readers, another factor is driving sales up: The social media site TikTok, where users post short videos they create themselves. It's hard to quantify how big BookTok is, because TikTok doesn't release a lot of analytics. But publishers say it has become a major force, especially in the market for young adult and contemporary romance books.
I've been leading writing workshops for over 20 years and am still gobsmacked by how stubbornly writers cling to certain myths that suck up a lot of emotional energy, and reinforce practices that undermine the creative process. If you buy into any of the myths below, let them go, and see how quickly you'll write more, write better, and even be happier (because what writer isn't happier when writing more and writing better).
1. The myth of the "real writer"
"I'm not a real writer."
Why do so many aspiring authors feel as if there is some exclusive club to which we don't belong? Of course, I get it. Writing lends itself to insecurity because our stories, real or imagined, matter to us. Otherwise, why would we take on this meaningful, albeit time-consuming and often payless effort. But who are we to lay claim to such a title, especially if-Let's see, what are some of the reasons I've heard?
"I'm not a real writer because I'm not published."
"...I'm 88 years old."
"...My work isn't literary."
"...My spouse hates the way I write..."
For anything that [you're] consciously trying to get to the finish line, move it forward. I make a joke to my students: if you decide mid-stream that all of the characters live on the moon, they're on the moon from now on. Just don't go back and spend a bunch of time, like, changing Earth to Moon in chapters one through five. Just keep going. You're going to have so many things that you have to contend with once you have the full structure of a draft that you're just, in my opinion, wasting time if you go back and tinker before you figured out what that structure is like.
I wrote my first two books that way, in circles, just going in a circle and then going forward and then going in another circle and then backing up and going in a circle. And it was very, very confusing and frustrating.
I hate to say this, but ... sometimes the first draft is best. I don't mean the first draft of a whole thing, but sometimes the first version of a moment or a scene, or even a line of dialog, is the best one. And sometimes the twentieth or fiftieth is the best one. It's really weird and hard to account for. There are things in Trust Exercise that I feel that I never got right, and there are things in the book that I tried multiple versions of, and finally felt like I got them right. And there are things in the book that are very much as they were when I first put them down on paper.
There's something so satisfying about meeting a person and thinking, "She really does look like a Jenny!"
Most people receive their names as a newborn baby, so it seems like the probability of the name and the person being a good match would be very small. Yet I feel like I meet a lot of Kevins who just really seem like Kevins. Is it that people take on personalities to fit their names? Or do we change our idea of a name to suit the person?
For that reason, I believe one of the most important decisions you can make in creating a character is their name.
For example, would Ebenezer Scrooge have been as intimidating if his name were, say, Jimmy Pop? Would Mary Shelley's book have been a classic of the centuries if it were about Dr. Brown's Monster?
With that in mind, I'm going to let you in on a few of my super-secret tricks for picking the perfect names for characters.
Are you considering writing your first non-fiction book? If so, how do you start?
The reason I pose this question is that I was recently approached by someone who had read one of my books, Squandered (published in 2008) and this had inspired them to produce their own book. They had sent their book to the usual agents and publishers and got the usual, mostly automatic standard rejections. So, they approached me and asked if I could help.
I read the book and felt that hidden inside was a really powerful story. Unfortunately, the book was 137,000 words long and had a title that was far too subtle for me to understand. Though, perhaps I was lucky. At least the author didn't send me the original 200,000-word version - about the same length as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
I suspect that the basic problem with the book was that it contained everything the writer wanted to say in the way they wanted to say it rather than them thinking through what the reader really wanted to hear and how to best communicate that.
Over the last couple of years, it's been tough not to notice the increase in dramatic rights deals in the book industry. A quick search on Publishers Marketplace reveals a new film or television deal almost every week. Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s "page-to-screen" news feed is equally active, and The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a piece on How the Publishing World Is Muscling In on Hollywood Deals.
These deals don't appear to be limited to a particular genre or category. Streaming services and film producers are expressing an interest in a wide range of book properties - fiction and nonfiction for both adult and children's audiences. And from the outset, it looks as though they are inviting authors - bestselling and debut - to take part in the adaptation process, at least to an extent.
Author Val McDermid has said Agatha Christie's estate has threatened legal action against her publisher for promoting her as the "queen of crime".
That phrase is trademarked by the descendants of Christie, who created Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
McDermid, the author of almost 50 crime books, said her publisher had been told not to use the title otherwise "our lawyers will be in touch".
The author said the Christie estate's reaction was "astonishingly pitiful".
McDermid is known for her best-selling novels about Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, which were adapted for the Wire in the Blood TV series.
She is also among the modern writers who have been asked to write new Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie Ltd, which is run by the original crime queen's great-grandson, James Prichard.
"It's all been going great guns and we've all been doing lots of publicity and interviews and writing articles for the papers and stuff, all at the behest of the Agatha Christie estate," McDermid told the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
After its sponsorship model changed from a single-headline partnership with Baileys, the Women's Prize is enjoying a golden summer of talks, workshops and a booming merchandise line backed by high-profile influencers.
If any lesson has been driven home in this summer of our literary prize discontent, it may be that the funding model of a headline sponsor ponying up most of the dough for a book award can be precarious.
The climate that has seen the Costa and Blue Peter gongs go, and a Damoclesian sword quivering above the Desmond Elliott and Sunday Times Short Story prizes, surely begs the question whether the literary award in general is facing something of an existential moment.
The average victim of a kidnapping is dead less than 48 hours from the point of abduction. Captivity is an unusual choice for a murderer, both in life and in fiction. It requires resources, introduces variables, and produces a bizarre form of intimacy. What scares us most about captivity-centered narratives is that they break the immediacy and predictability of even the grisliest murders. The corpse is to be expected, the shock is rote. Captivity spools out endless time, interstitial between the disruption of normal life and the end-whatever the end may be. Captivity breaks the clock, and renders horrors we couldn't have dreamt.
I was working my way through college at a Home Depot checkout counter when Jaycee Dugard was liberated from eighteen years in captivity in Antioch, California. The story made national headlines: kidnapped at eleven years of age from a school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe, Dugard was presumed dead by all but the most hopeful. In reality, she was being held prisoner by a man who had already been convicted of another kidnapping and rape in 1976. Too late, far too late, everyone wondered what could have been done during those eighteen years to shorten Dugard's time in hell.