Managing director of the Booksellers Association (BA) Meryl Halls has thanked publishers for their "ongoing support for the BA and bookselling" in an "unpredictable and sometimes unsettling" 2022 but called on them to be "commercially supportive of bookshops" and to invest practically and emotionally in the bookselling sector to ensure it survives what has the potential to be a "brutal" year in 2023.
Links of the week January 2 2023 (01)
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:
2 January 2023
Addressing publishers in her annual end-of-year letter, Halls said that despite resilient book sales, a continuing increase in the number of bookshops opening and a consequent influx of "new energy and verve" to the sector over the past year, "after the surreal boom time for book sales through the pandemic lockdowns and their aftermath, 2022 was always going to be a year of recalibration and consolidation in the UK and in Ireland". However, she didn't think "any of us could have foreseen the full extent of the combination of uncertainty, political upheaval and truly unsettling economic developments coming our way."
"Bookselling has never been easy," she said, "and despite the good news of the increase in the number of bookshops, I remain concerned about what 2023 might hold for high street bookselling."
After a three-year hiatus caused by the pandemic, PW's annual salary and jobs survey is back, albeit later in the year than usual. This year's survey gathers data on 2021 and includes many standard questions, while also looking at how the pandemic has impacted certain publishing practices.
Perhaps because publishing employees haven't received the questionnaire since 2019, we received 577 total responses, 60% from trade publishers-a relatively low number for the survey. Given that level of participation, we can't dig down into the data as much as in the past, but the top-level responses remain consistent with previous years, including perhaps the most telling result of all: white employees made up 83% of all respondents, down one percentage point from 2019.
The minimal change came despite efforts by various publishers to try to bring more diversity into the industry. Indeed, 59% of respondents said their companies had tried different approaches to diversify their staffs within the past 12 months. Those efforts included hiring more BIPOC employees and adding diversity officers. Sixty-one percent of white respondents said their companies had been making strides in diversifying the staff, compared to 51% of nonwhite respondents.
"Booksellers are constantly giving their patrons extraordinary bargains. In London recently a copy of an early edition of Keats' Poems, originally bought from a dealer for 2s was sold for £140, and a first edition of Burns' Poems bought in Edinburgh for 1s 6d brought £350."
- R.M. Williamson, Bits from an Old Bookshop (John Menzies, Edinburgh, 1904)
Williamson may well have been in a position to afford the luxury of giving his patrons extraordinary bargains. Not all of us are. In part, what he says remains true, though; provided you sell a book for more than you've paid for it, what happens to it after that is largely in the hands of fate. Buying and selling books prior to the advent of the internet was a matter of judgement based on experience and a pile of old auction catalogues and records. Now-if anything out of the ordinary falls into my hands - I tend to go straight online to see what other people are selling it for and base my price on that.
Eleanor Catton is sticking up for entertaining the reader. "Escapism gets framed as though it's an abdication of responsibility-like, who's reading novels while the world is burning?-but actually, what kind of world do we want? One where people are reading." Ten years on from The Luminaries, the labyrinthine epic set in gold rush New Zealand that made her the youngest-ever Booker Prize winner, Catton returns with her third novel, a satirical contemporary thriller destined to set 2023 ablaze.
Political but not partisan, Birnam Wood is a book that demands attention, not by pompously insisting on its own significance, but by engaging juicily and incisively with today's moral questions through the thoughts and actions of its vividly realised cast. Much of the past three years has been spent discussing the characters with her husband, so much so that they feel especially real to her. "I've never had a book like that before."
In a literary landscape where intricate, 19th century-style plotting has fallen from vogue, the New Zealand writer, currently based in Cambridge in the UK, stands out as its loyal defender. "The moral development of people in plotted novels where people make choices is fascinating and important. I'd like to see more books like that." In Birnam Wood, a social novel born of the political upheavals of 2016-the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump-she looks to that master architect of plot: Shakespeare.
Colleen Hoover is well on the way to selling more books in 2022 than Stephen King, James Patterson, and John Grisham. The numbers are staggering: according to NPD BookScan, this year alone her books will have sold about 12.5 million copies. Her latest, It Starts with Us, was published by Atria in October and sold more than 809,000 copies in its first week, making it, Simon & Schuster reported, the fastest-selling fiction book in company history.
How does a former social worker and mother of three living in the small Texas town of Saltillo become the top-selling novelist in the nation? Thanks in part to TikTok. Hoover's It Ends with Us, published in 2016, began gaining traction on the app in late 2020, mostly via word of mouth among teens and young women. By the following summer, It Ends with Us, along with several of Hoover's other 24 books, had exploded in popularity-and in sales. To date, It Ends with Us is her top title, with 3.4 million copies sold since its release. And though Atria is the publisher of some of Hoover's biggest books, Grand Central published Verity (nearly 1.9 million copies sold this year), while Reminders of Him (1.1 million copies sold) was released by Amazon Publishing's Montlake imprint.
"I'm still proud of that book. It convinced me I could write a book. I wouldn't be where I am today if it wasn't for that book."
That book, My Darkest Prayer, Shawn "S.A." Cosby's first thriller, was published in 2019 by a small Maryland publisher and few noticed. It got some nice reviews, but every book signing was sparsely attended. Not unusual for a first-time crime novelist.
Cosby, as every fan of crime fiction now knows, then went on to blow up the genre. His next two books, Blacktop Wasteland, and especially Razorblade Tears, rocketed up the best seller lists with movie rights in the wings, changing forever Cosby's relatively quiet life in rural Gloucester, Virginia along the Chesapeake Bay.
His parents separated when he was a kid, and he grew up with his uncles-his mother's brothers-as father figures. He was seventeen before he bought his first pair of name-brand shoes. He was poor and wanted to tell stories about Black life in rural Virginia-from love to anguish, the good and the bad, and every inelegant topic in between.
"Raymond Chandler says, if you're stuck with a book have a guy burst through a door with a gun. I don't do guns, but I was writing this funeral scene and they were in the chapel, so I had the door burst open. And really, almost literally, in came Vera"
It's hard to believe that Ann Cleeves, the bestselling author of some of the UK's most beloved crime series-her scruffy, middle-aged detective Vera brought to life by Brenda Blethyn; Shetland's Jimmy Pérez immortalised by Douglas Henshall-only became a full-time writer in 2006. She'd written more than a dozen books by then, but was also working as a reader development officer in libraries, to keep the money coming in.
Cleeves is in the Pan MacmillanOne of largest fiction and non-fiction book publishers in UK; includes imprints of Pan, Picador and Macmillan Children’s Books offices today, where the publisher is about to kick off celebrations to mark the 30 years she's been with them. Thirty years, six million copies sold worldwide, Pan Macmillan says; 38 weeks in the UK top 10, millions of viewers of her television adaptations, and a raft of reissues and appearances planned over the next six months. The earlier half of those 30 years, however, wasn't quite so gilded.
If you had told me I could make money by writing on the internet a few years ago, I would've laughed.
I never considered writing as a career because I didn't know it was possible.
Yet, I coincidentally published an article online in July 2018. It was the summary of a workshop I had hosted a few days ago.
Less than 100 people ever saw that piece. But I enjoyed the process and kept writing.
Four years later, millions of people have read my stories.
My work got featured in major publications like Business Insider.
I've grown a community of 10k writers and run a multi-6-figure business thanks to my writing.
When I started, I knew nothing about the industry and its opportunities. And even though some things have changed over the last few years, a lot has remained the same.
To build an audience and income online, you first need to study the landscape.
Here are the opportunities (and pitfalls) to watch out for in the online writing industry in 2023
On December 16th, 1901, 35-year-old Beatrix Potter printed 250 copies of a book that she had written and illustrated herself-a book about a mischievous bunny named Peter Rabbit. (Maybe you've heard of it?) Potter had originally written the story for the five-year-old son of her former governess, who suggested that Potter's drawings and stories might be turned into books for all children.
Potter liked this idea, and expanded the story she had written into a book called The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor's Garden, complete with black and white illustrations and a colored frontispiece. She submitted it to six publishers, but it was rejected by all of them. "From a book editor's point of view," wrote biographer Linda Lear, "her story was too long, her narrative lacked proper pacing, there were no colored illustrations, and the black and white outline pictures were too different from the familiar ones."
Undeterred (and unwilling to compromise) Potter decided to publish the story herself, ordering 250 copies from Strangeways & Sons, a printer in London, along with 500 copies of the frontispiece. It cost about £11, and soon after, she began distributing the copies to family and friends, and even selling a few-including to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who bought a copy for his grandchildren. By February 1902, she had to print 200 more copies, and these too quickly sold out.
The history of self-publishing, like that of publishing itself, is a history of access. Who has the opportunity, skills, and resources to write, design, lay out, print, and distribute a book? And who has the means to alert an audience that a book exists, or the business savvy to make it profitable?
From the dawn of publishing to Brandon Sanderson's record-smashing Kickstarter campaign, established authors have always enjoyed an advantage, though that didn't make the process easy.
In 1843 Charles Dickens, dissatisfied with his payout earned from Chapman & Hall for Martin Chuzzlewit, self-published A Christmas Carol, selling out an initial print run of 6,000 copies in just weeks at five shillings a pop. Yet freed from publishers' penny-pinching, Dickens designed so gorgeous a book-fancy bindings, gilded pages, lavish illustrations-that, despite it being an instant hit, the author barely broke even.
I started this year's Year in Review blogs with traditional publishing partly because that Department of Justice anti-trust case produced such juicy tidbits that I couldn't ignore them, and partly because I have always started with traditional publishing. Back in the day, I saw all of us (writers, readers, and publishers) as creatures that emerged from traditional publishing.
Reading the opinion in the attempted merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, a merger that the courts ultimately blocked, giving a big (if twenty years too late) win to the Department of Justice, made me realize just how different the various areas of publishing are now. It also gave me a glimpse into the future, with more clarity than I think I've had on the entire industry maybe ever.
When I mentioned to friends and colleagues that I was thinking of writing a memoir focused on my mother, they looked quizzical. Why would I bother switching genres after so many years writing successful fiction?
It's often hard to tell where and why a project starts in a writer's head, but I can pinpoint some beginnings.
My historical novel, Counting on Grace, was inspired by a Lewis Hine photograph of a little Vermont girl working in a textile mill. Although I fictionalized the child and created her life out of a combination of research and imagination, I continued to be haunted by the world-weary face in the photograph. Soon after I finished the novel, I went looking for Hine's model, a girl named Addie Card, who married and divorced a fellow mill worker and died of lung cancer at the age of 93. Once the novel was published, I realized I knew more about Addie than I did about my own mother. Even though I wasn't aware of it at the time, looking for Addie had begun to build my creative bridge from fiction to memoir.
You are here because you love mystery stories. I understand. I am like you. I enjoy them so much that I write them, and I've just written one that takes place at an English country manor house. Everyone loves a manor house! And wouldn't it be fun to go! After all, they aren't really full of murders and dead bodies. Those are just stories. Visiting a manor house would be fun!
If you hold these naïve views, you fundamentally misunderstand the manor house and its occupants.
The manor is not a house or a home; it is an extension of a biological line, a symbol of dynastic power. Now it stands-barely-a shell of its former glory. The manor is too expensive to maintain in the modern world, now that people are so fussy about "working conditions" and "salary." The poor aristocrat is a geode of privilege and anger-what you end up with if you compress all the entitlement and rage of collapsed empire into solid matter. They've had to sell the lesser Turners and the staff is down to eight. Most of the income is derived from tourists who have come to watch the manor crumble to dust.
If you've ever written a novel or tried to write a novel, you'll understand the immensity of building out a book from nothing.
I'm currently circling my next novel, knocking on doors and peering through fences, trying to find a way in. The most visceral way I can describe this is by having you listen to Rebecca Luker sing the opening few lines of the 1991 Broadway adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. A little trill of hammered dulcimer, the siren of Luker's soprano-it's a thirty-second peek into a luscious, blooming world before we jump to poor, sallow Mary Lennox in India watching everyone she knows die of cholera. Throughout the show, Mary will, as in the book, be sent to her uncle's estate in Yorkshire to discover the key to the eponymous garden, then the door, and then she'll enter and bring the whole thing to life.
Vidich discusses his new novel, a Berlin tale with a nod to Hitchcock and a fascinating basis in the memoirs of Stasi spy chiefs.
The novels of Paul Vidich are far removed from the sheen and opulence of James Bond, and feel more at home with the wry wit and stuff air of John le Carré's George Smiley. In Vidich's world, few can be trusted and the double-crosses often become triples, creating a gray, murky world of uncertainty and intrigue that propels his lush prose. Vidich's latest, The Matchmaker (available February 1, from Pegasus), could very well be his best yet-and it features some unexpected influences. I had the chance to discuss the new novel, Vidich's views on the spy genre, and what role-if any-comic books play in his literary DNA.