Literary agent Rachel Mills has called for mental health provision for authors of memoir, as well as mental health training for the publishers and agents who work with them. In a column for The Bookseller published today (Monday, 6th February), she argued that more should be done to support memoirists, who often delve into the darkest moments of their life by necessity. However, some say the onus is not on agents and publishers, but on the authors themselves, to take responsibility.
Links of the week February 13 2023 (07)
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:
13 February 2023
This comes following the release of Prince Harry's blockbuster autobiography, Spare (Transworld), which has already surpassed half a million sales in the UK and prompted an ongoing debate about author care. In her column, Mills wrote: "At a time when everyone is talking about Spare, it's hard not to think that the advice being given to Harry about the opportunity to ‘tell his truth' by the global army of agents, publishers, news editors, producers and publicists, was mostly to do with the dollar signs in their own eyes."
Shallow, fake, showy, and performative-these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don't understand.
I'm no BookTok tourist. I've lived here for nine months. As a chronically online millennial, I've become a translator between the readers on BookTok and the literary community that looks down upon them. On TikTok, I post a video about Mary Ruefle that gets forty thousand views and yields comments like: "this just gave a whole new perspective on my entire existence."
In a banquet room in South Carolina, I'm giving the keynote speech at a writing conference. To inspire the audience, I tell the Cinderella story of Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author in America. Three days before my speech, her novel It Starts with Us sold 800,000 copies on release day. There are 120 writers in the room; only one has heard of Hoover.
For every bestselling BookTok title, you can find a hundred videos from creators telling you it's overhyped-and recommending something else to read instead.It's a little lonely over here. I've been baffled by why my esteemed colleagues, who gather in the thousands at AWP to kvetch about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, are so incurious about the place on the internet where readers are buying a metric fuckton of books.
After a long run of surging profits from pandemic-era shopping sprees, Amazon is feeling the hangover. The retail and tech giant is reporting its first unprofitable year since 2014.
Amazon lost $2.7 billion last year, the company said on Thursday. This was despite holiday-season sales growing 9%. Amazon's shares fell in after hours trading.
By far, the biggest culprit for Amazon's losses over the year was the company's hefty investment in the electric automaker Rivian whose value plummeted last year and ate into Amazon's bottom line.
For Amazon, the loss on its investment comes right when it contends with the need to recalibrate after a pandemic-era upsurge.
During the pandemic, the appetite for online shopping seemed to promise exponential growth, and many believed the habit changes could be permanent. Amazon couldn't hire and built warehouses fast enough; its profits doubled and kept growing. But then people returned to physical stores, switched from cocooning to travel and outings, and eventually got more hesitant to spend as inflation rose.
"It feels like the castle we made is being swept off the table by a billionaire's tantrum," one writer says. Here, insiders tell Esquire how book publishing will change if Twitter goes under.
Elon Musk officially took the reins at Twitter HQ on October 28, 2022, following what can only be described as several months of bizarre business shenanigans that left the billionaire CEO of Tesla in control of the tenth largest social media platform. The months since have been chaotic both within the company and on the platform, where thousands of users have jumped ship, fleeing for new alternatives like Mastodon, Post, and Hive.
The recent chaos at Twitter has left many communities on the platform wondering-what happens if we wake up tomorrow and the lights are off for good? One such community is "Book Twitter," made up of writers, editors, agents, booksellers, publishers, literary organizations, and everyone in between. Recently, notable authors like John Green and Sarah MacLean have joined other prominent voices in either deleting or indefinitely locking their accounts, leaving many fearful that a slow bleed of influential players will eventually lead to the community's demise-if Twitter's code doesn't blow up first.
After three months of negotiations and two weeks after announcing plans to resume labor negotiations, HarperCollins has reached a tentative agreement with its employee union, Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers.
News of the tentative agreement came shortly after HC parent company News Corp. released financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2022. The company reported that earnings tumbled 52% at HC, falling to $51 million, from $107 million in the comparable quarter a year ago. Sales dropped 14%, to $531 million.
Walter Mosley has been awarded the Crime Writers' AssociationA networking society for some 400 British crime writers (widely defined) and links to their sites. Membership for published writers only, but award a Debut Dagger for the best unpublished crime novel. Some articles from their magazine Red Herrings are posted on the site and there are links to many individual crime writers' websites. (CWA) Diamond Dagger award for 2023.
US-based Moseley is the author of over 60 books which have been translated into 25 languages. Several have been adapted for screen, including his debut, Devil in a Blue Dress (Serpent's Tail), which stars Denzel Washington.
He joins a host of writers who have been recognised with the accolade, including Ruth Rendell, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin, PD James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, Peter Lovesey and John Le Carré.
Celia Killen, Walter Mosley's editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, said: "With over sixty books published, numerous bestsellers and multiple awards, Walter Mosley is a master storyteller and a true icon of crime writing. His career has been characterised not only by creative excellence, but by significant contribution to the publishing landscape, notably establishing The Publishing Certificate Program to encourage diversity in all levels of the industry. In 2020, the National Book Foundation presented him with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. We are incredibly proud to publish Walter and thrilled that his brilliant work is being recognised with this year's CWA Diamond Dagger."
Under book publishing's trending best practices, historical authenticity can be secondary to appeasing people's sensitivities. I'm qualified to say this based on my recent experience as a literary agent on behalf of a client.
The events in question began happily: my client received a Big Five contract for a book about his time as a Marine sniper during the Vietnam War, when he was 17. The original manuscript (written with the assistance of a coauthor) told his story in the context of its time and place, including florid verbatim language and descriptions that wouldn't be appropriate in other settings, then or now. Historical authenticity and truthfulness were the author's priorities.
The manuscript passed the publisher's editorial and legal protocols with relatively few revisions, and no additional hurdles were expected. In fairness, the editor's good news email included a brief statement that the manuscript still needed to pass a so-called sensitivity read, but we weren't told what that was or given any reason for concern. I had never heard of it and didn't give it a second thought. Instead, I asked the editor to request the second advance payment due upon acceptance for publication. But my assumptions were wrong.
Virago's 50th birthday-formally on 21st June, but being celebrated throughout the year-is not just a chance to review the past, but also to look forward, says its publisher Sarah Savitt.
The Little, Brown imprint has a host of events planned to mark the occasion, kicking off with Furies--a collection of new short stories in the tradition in which Virago itself was named, of reclaiming words previously used to denigrate women-featuring some of Virago's stellar authors, Margaret Atwood among them, as well as newer names.
Virago's ability to see what others missed was how the imprint first came to publish Maya Angelou in the UK: "Caged Bird was published in the US in 1969 and according to Angelou, every British publisher had passed-‘Who cares about the experiences of a young Black woman growing up in the South, for British readers?' That took until 1984 to be published [in the UK] and was a huge success for us. That still happens, but in 2017 it was the opposite, and that had its challenges in terms of being sane about advances and keeping our cool." Now that big auctions for books on feminism are quietening a little, Virago continues as it always did, she says. "Whether it feels boom or bust for feminism, because we have been going for 50 years, it doesn't bother us. We still feel Virago is necessary and that there are writers who have been marginalised or dismissed or silenced who deserve a bigger platform."
Prior to December 6, 2012, there was no standalone New York Times Best Seller list for young adult novels. At that time, young adult books were merged with other chapter books, creating a list that was a mix of young adult and middle grade titles. This change made it possible to better differentiate among the books for young readers - middle grade and young adult - and it opened up the possibility for more titles within each category to hit the list. The New York Times Best Seller list for Young Adults began by including sales totals that included hardcover, paperback, and ebooks.
Like other NYT Bestseller lists, the Young Adult lists have evolved over their ten years in existence. August 2015 marked the biggest shift since the lists development. Now, rather than a single list that captured sales of all formats of a book, the lists would separate out the Young Adult Bestsellers in paperback and hardcover; ebook sales were separated out; and series books would appear on a separate list that also included middle grade titles. This change made sense, as paperback titles dominated the bestseller list; it was much easier and cheaper to sell boatloads of copies of titles in paperback than in hardcover. This helped open up the lists to more titles and more accurately reflected what was selling and how.
Social media is opening publishers' eyes to a new demographic of younger and more diverse readers of romance novels. BookTok, a corner of TikTok where readers post content around books such as reviews, recommendations, and reactions, has changed the publishing industry rapidly. Where sales have traditionally been driven by retailer merchandising and press coverage, bookshop displays and bestseller charts are now often dominated by TikTok favourites, with bookshops introducing BookTok tables to help customers pick up the latest viral hit. You only have to look to bestseller lists around the world to see just how influential this demographic can be. And their behaviour has changed the way we view a book's lifecycle; influential posts with millions of views have the power to catapult writers into the charts years after their book was first published.
Romantic fiction has always represented a huge part of the market - often overlooked in literary round-ups and coverage, yet representing millions of pounds' worth of sales every year in the UK alone. But the genre has come further into the spotlight recently given its popularity on BookTok. And if, like me, you spend (arguably too much!) time on the app, it's easy to see why. Romance, from rom-coms to erotica and everything in between, is a form of storytelling that naturally generates word-of-mouth buzz. Authors, agents and publishers all have their eyes on what can drive this sort of frenzy. And, beneath the algorithms, influencers and reactive strategy, the love stories grabbing readers' attention have a few things in common.
I did my best to stay away from BookTok for as long as I could but, in my defence, I was stranded in the rural Irish tundra for Christmas and I'd already worked through the latest series of Emily in Paris. Of course, I'd heard all about how it has allegedly changed the books industry forever and made some authors millionaires practically overnight. But I didn't need another addiction in my life, I already have Coca-Cola and Byredo candles. Yet, there I was, scrolling and scrolling. BookTok had got me.
It became my latest obsession in much the same way that one might become obsessed with sticking your tongue in plug sockets. But there was just something about watching the same twenty books being flaunted again and again; people openly confessing to owning hundreds of unread books; the flagrant abuse of sticky tabs in novels that absolutely do not require that much citation; bookshelves that are so perfect that arouse suspicion; people calling themselves "certified bookworms" but, like, entirely earnestly; frequent references to people's "yearly reading goals"; something called New Adult? It was like entering a parallel universe where reading wasn't just something that someone did for fun, it was a lifestyle, an aesthetic, people were "readers" like Lorraine Kelly is "Lorraine Kelly". But one thing just wouldn't leave my head as I scrolled endlessly through this cursed landscape: I think I'm responsible for this.
Josh Gabbatiss was nine when he precociously decided he was going to write an encyclopedia of every living creature, beginning with corals, worms and jellyfish.
More than two decades later, aged 30, he has finally completed the project and could not be more proud. His final entry is one of our closest relatives, the chimpanzee.
Gabbatiss, a climate journalist from south London, began %u201CJosh%u2019es Book of Animals%u201D [sic] in 2001. His drawings and grammar have come a long way but the handwriting, he said, %u201Chas remained pretty terrible%u201D. He recently shared his finished creation on Twitter, recalling that he copied the format he saw in %u201Crival%u201D animal books. %u201CYou can tell that I was in it for the long haul because instead of going straight for the big charismatic species I started with corals, worms etc.%u201D Josh Gabbatiss now. Josh Gabbatiss now. Photograph: Ellie Demetri/PA The book is composed of 118 pages divided into six sections, including invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. It includes descriptions and terminology, as well as an index at the end of each section %u201Cin case any of my readers wanted to find something specific%u201D.
Kingsley Amis's relationship with Elizabeth Jane Howard, known as Jane, was a stabilizing force, at least for him. Both were ambitious writers, but only one could achieve success. The other was expected to lend unconditional support and forsake all personal desires. If Jane could not tolerate in herself the ruthlessness often required in fully realizing one's talent, Kingsley did not give it a second thought. He pursued his vocation in a headlong way, with no regard to the fallout on those closest to him.
Even though he had been seduced by a sexy novelist, what he really needed, day to day, was an attentive housewife and caregiver. Theirs was a hierarchical relationship in which Kingsley was always on top, rather than the equal partnership Jane had hoped for. He was encouraging and supportive about her work-but only to a point. She tried not to mind. After he read her 1959 novel, The Sea Change, Kingsley praised it in his own way. "That's a very good novel indeed," he said. "I am so relieved. I was afraid you wouldn't be any good."