A bookseller in Kent has gone viral after tweeting a picture of her empty shop. Here, other retailers explain how they are surviving - even thriving - when many people are counting every penny
Links of the week March 13 2023 (11)
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 March 2023
A vase of hydrangeas sits among a crop of the latest releases, including What Writers Read and Blake Morrison's Two Sisters. There is a cosy rug and a bright window display. It looks like a lovely bookshop. What there aren't, however, are any customers. "Winter is killing us, it's soo quiet," tweeted Sapphire Bates, the co-owner of Book Bodega in Ramsgate, Kent, on Saturday afternoon. "We need to make £800 by Tuesday to pay our bills."
Her tweet has since been viewed 6m times and retweeted nearly 12,000 times. She has had messages of support from Ian Rankin, Sue Perkins and the historian and podcaster Tom Holland. Although she is reportedly still doing the sums, Bates thinks the support that has flooded in will cover the bills.
If you're strolling down the Marylebone High Street in London, you'll stumble across a popular bookstore called Daunt Books. Inside, sunlight pours through stained glass windows, dappling rows of books organized by country, rather than theme, to appeal to armchair travelers who want to explore the world through reading. "It's how I like to read, personally," says James Daunt, who opened the bookstore in 1990 when he was in his twenties. "But it muddles the books because you abandon traditional subject categories."
In 2011, Daunt was brought in to fix Waterstones, Britain's largest bookstore chain. It had been on a downward spiral since the Great Recession and further hit by the rise of Amazon's e-book sales. But under Daunt's watch as managing director, Waterstones became profitable in 2016 for the first time in nearly a decade. In 2019, he was appointed CEO of Barnes & Noble, where he has orchestrated a similar turnaround. (He still owns and operates Daunt Books alongside this new role.) This year, Barnes & Noble will open 30 new locations on top of the company's existing 600.
Waterstones managing director and Barnes & Noble c.e.o. James Daunt has hailed the "wonderfully robust" market as sales and footfall increase in the UK and US, but has said he expects book prices will increase due to rising costs.
Speaking to an audience alongside Bookshop.org's Nicole Vanderbilt at the Independent Publishers Guild's (IPG) Spring Conference on Monday 27th February, Daunt said: "I think we are generally [in agreement] on this side of the Atlantic, and I think I can safely speak for at least my European colleagues, in saying that we've all come out of the pandemic in a dramatically better shape than we could have ever expected as we entered it, with the market wonderfully robust."
However, he said "pricing and inflation generally is a problem", telling delegates: "You, everyone in this room, I'm sure will be looking at your paper prices, looking at freight costs and looking at labour. And thinking that everything doesn't add up at the moment-certainly for us, we have an expectation that it is going to drive book prices up."
A few years ago, Amber Harrison and Karen Brazier were both experiencing burnout in their respective careers. The neighbours turned friends worked long hours that often took them away from their beloved home town of Shaftesbury, Dorset.
They recognised in each other a sense of frustration that chasing career progression had not led to personal fulfilment. "Over a drink in the pub one evening, we started to sketch out what our ideal lifestyle might look like," they said. "We knew we wanted to own a business in Shaftesbury that would allow us simple pleasures such as walking to work and feeling properly rooted in our town."
Carole-Anne Warburton at her shop, The Book Rest, in Ilminster, Somerset.Inspired by an old photograph at the pub, they decided to set up an independent bookshop together. Today, they are part of a growing number of female friendship duos who have similarly decided to follow their dreams of running bookshops that cater to local communities, women and under-represented minorities.
Authors Abroad founder Trevor Wilson explains how the pandemic led to the business developing Caboodle Classroom, enabling virtual author visits to schools
In 2020 the whole world of education changed forever - COVID forced us all to evaluate how we taught. Teams and Zoom became household names overnight. For Authors Abroad this was no exception - we had to adapt to survive. Virtual became the norm and, much to our surprise, schools embraced the new medium with open arms. This is not to say it replaced the all important face-to-face author visits to schools, but it has led to a hybrid world of the two.
Writers Kathleen Kent and Alma Katsu are both known for their historical fiction and mysteries, but did you know that, in real life, both worked in the shadowy world of national security and intelligence? In this interview, the authors of BLACK WOLF (Mulholland Books, February 14) and RED LONDON (G.P. Putnam's Sons, March 14) compare notes on what it's like to write thrillers on matters close to home.
ALMA: When people find out you once worked for CIA or the Defense Department, I think they're surprised to find out you've written anything else, but one thing we have in common is that we've both written in a variety of genres. For you, it's been historicals, crime thrillers, and now espionage. How did you come to write a spy thriller?
KATHLEEN: Before I committed to writing full time, I lived and worked in New York City for over twenty years. Ten of those years were spent as a civilian contractor to the Dept. of Defense working in Belarus and Kazakhstan dismantling weapons of mass destruction. I grew up reading Russian spy thrillers, but as relations between the West and the reformed Soviet Union became friendlier, novelists turned their attention to other countries posing a threat to national security. Unfortunately, recent events have once more resurrected tensions between the U.S. and Russia.
Blurb is a funny sounding word. It's phonetically unappealing, beginning and ending with unattractive voiced bilabial stops, and its definition-an advertisement or announcement, especially a laudatory one-carries some of the same meaning as another unattractive word, blubber, which evokes excess in its dual definition as both an expostulation of unrestrained emotion as well as excess fat. For these reasons alone, any sensible person should beware of blurbs.
Blurbing has always had discontents. In 1936, George Orwell decried the use of blurbs in his essay "In Defense of the Novel." He feared for the novel's "lapse in prestige," for which he partly blamed "hack reviews" and "the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers," which were dishonest and served the interests of the publishers. Half a century later, speaking to students in MIT's writing program in 1991, Camille Paglia called "for an end to the corrupt practice of advance blurbs on books." She maintained that "this advance blurb thing is absolutely appalling, because it means that they send your book around to your friends, they scratch your back, and you scratch theirs. This is part of the coziness of the profession that I think has just been pernicious... That has got to stop."
In the mid 1970s, just after he set up his eponymous literary agency, the great, much missed Ed Victor saw an opportunity.
At that time film rights were a side hustle for agents and not even on the radar of publishers. Throughout his life Ed loved turning side hustles into mainstream operations. In this case, he used his contacts to sell film rights to Stephen Sheppard's historical crime novel The Four Hundred for $1.5m (£1m in those days), and set up an office in Hollywood on the back of it. More deals followed, including those for his friend and client Freddy Forsyth. Agents saw the potential and over the years piled in. Publishers, not so much.
In 2018 Forbes stated that in the previous 10 years movies derived from published material accounted for 61% of UK box office gross and 65% of worldwide gross. "Across any of the common measures of viewership," said Forbes, "book adaptations on average outperform shows based on original scripts or on comic books and other sources."
Last year Netflix, HBO, Disney , Apple, HBO, Starz, Paramount , Hulu, Amazon, BBC, ITV, C4 and a few others had a combined production budget of around $30 billion, creating thousands of hours of mostly TV, mostly from existing IP - i.e. not original scripts - including games, but the majority from books.
A visit to the burial place of her uncle was to set Elsbeth Lindner on an investigations of her Jewish family's history
If you're going to start digging up family history, a graveyard is a fine place to begin, I have learned - and not just for the symbolism. It hadn't occurred to me until three or four years ago to look up where my uncle, Richard Lindner, a famous artist whose work is owned by major museums around the world, is buried. It turns out he rests no more than 15 miles from where I now live, on the banks of the Hudson River, north of New York City. Richard is buried at Westchester Hills in Hastings-on-Hudson, an upscale Jewish cemetery, the resting place of Gershwins, Guggenheims and other major establishment figures. Having found him and visited him, I didn't think much more about it, until the phone rang a couple of days later, the cemetery calling to tell me that as Richard's blood relative, I had inherited a grave alongside him, free, "all taxes paid".
Harriet Muncaster is the bestselling author of the Isadora Moon series and the middle-grade Victoria Stitch series (Oxford Children's Books). Her new book, Emerald and the Ocean Parade, was published on 2 March and introduces Emerald, Isadora's mermaid friend.
Since your first Isadora Moon book was published in 2016, your writing has become a huge success. How has the publication process been for you? What has changed since then? My first published books were picture books that were only published in America, so they felt very distant. Although I'm very proud of my first few picture books, they weren't very successful or well known. Some of these early books I created on my own before they were published, but others I developed with the publishers on board from the start. I learned from this that my best work tends to come when I have time and space to develop the characters and stories in exactly the way that I envision them so that I can be really passionate about them. This is how I developed Isadora Moon. I was really pleased with my first Isadora Moon story, all about this little vampire fairy girl who wasn't sure which school she should go to, and I asked my agent to send it out to publishers. I was delighted when Oxford University Press expressed an interest and invited me and my agent for a meeting. They were also really passionate about my vampire fairy character, and they contracted me to write an initial four Isadora Moon books.
In the late afternoon of Sunday, September 19, 1819, 23-year-old John Keats struck out for his daily walk from his lodging in Winchester, England. He'd arrived in the city a month prior, leaving behind southern England's Isle of Wight for a change of scenery in the cathedral city of Winchester. It was, potentially, his farewell tour as a poet: one last gasp to get it right or forsake his art forever. "My purpose now is to make one more attempt in the Press," Keats wrote to his friend Benjamin Haydon the previous June, "if that fail, ‘ye hear no more of me' as Chaucer says."
No matter that the previous month had been the most productive of his life-"Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on Melancholy" are all believed to have been composed that May. In Keats's view, he was a failure. Much of this sentiment was rooted in financial hardship; his lack of steady income not only prevented him from marrying his fiancé, Fanny Brawne, but also precluded him from bailing out his brother George from a bad business venture. Adding to his troubles was a slew of negative reviews for his 1818 poem "Endymion." One critic described it as "imperturbable drivelling idiocy," while another confessed that despite his "superhuman" attempts, he was unable to "struggle beyond the first of the four books."
The 60th 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. kicked off today, drawing 1,456 exhibitors hailing from 90 countries and regions of the world. This is more than in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when there were 1,442 exhibitors. In addition to the children's-focused programming, also taking place are the Bologna Licensing Trade Fair and BolognaBookPlus, an extension of the fair dedicated to general trade publishing.
Although the fair had returned in-person in 2022, publishers seem even more delighted to return this year as Covid anxiety continues to fade. The halls are filled with enthusiastic reunions-more hugging and less elbow-bumping. Scholastic v-p and group publisher Lori Benton told PW, "It's so exciting to be back and a little surreal but it also feels like we were just here. It's a perfect blend of excitement and familiar. And just to be back in Bologna feels like seeing an old friend."
That energy is reflected in the books as well. "I'm only five appointments in," said Paula Wiseman, v-p and publisher of Paula Wiseman Books at Simon & Schuster, "but I feel like there's a joy in the books I'm seeing-bright colors, a real vibrancy. It feels like people want to be happy."
The backlash to Puffin Books' decision to update Roald Dahl's children's books has been swift and largely derisive. The publisher has been accused of "absurd censorship", "corporate safetyism" and "cultural vandalism."
At its core, however, updating Roald Dahl's children's books is really about the rights and control copyright grants to authors and copyright holders. Those rights are exercised to update children's books more frequently than many of these critics may realise.
Over the past decades, authors, copyright owners and publishers have edited and updated children's books. They have removed racial stereotypes, reflected changing gender and cultural norms and in doing so, maintained their books' relevance and appeal to the modern reader.
Hugh Lofting's The Story of Doctor Dolittle (1920), Dr. Seuss's And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street (1937), Helen Bannerman's The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and classic children's books series such as Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew have all changed to keep up with increasing sensitivities to racial, gender and other social stereotypes.
As books become intellectual property assets, publishers become asset managers trying to future-proof their toxic investments
The news that many of Roald Dahl's books had been edited by the publisher Puffin to excise "offensive references to gender and race" has unleashed a brouhaha among the literary establishment, anti-woke crusaders and just about everyone online.
The revisions brought simmering debates about censorship in the name of creating a more genteel, accepting society to their head. An added valence, that the books are for children, seemed to weigh in favor of those who believed references to women as "hags" or to a "weird African language the monkeys spoke" should be scrubbed so that future generations can be shielded from prejudiced thoughts.
Yes, Roald Dahl was a bigot. But that's no excuse to re-write his books
I'm skeptical of the motives of those desperate for works of fiction for children to remain hateful - even Dahl himself, a known racist and antisemite, changed his Oompa Loompas from Black to orange when it seemed expedient - but I'm equally wary of a publishing and film industry that hides behind humane ends in order to safeguard the value of blockbuster intellectual properties.
World Book Day organisers urge focus on reading for pleasure, as National Literacy TrustUK-based organisation which has campaigned since 1993 to improve literacy standards across all age groups. Excellent research information and details of the many initiatives the charity is currently involved in. www.literacytrust.org.uk. It also has a useful page of news stories on UK literacy, which links to newsletter http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/TheLibrary.aspx survey reveals decline
Ahead of World Book Day on Thursday 2nd March, the charity by the same name is urging teachers, carers and parents to encourage reading for pleasure as it continues on a sharp decline.
Reading was the only core subject which saw attainment levels improve in 2022, with Department for Education Key Stage 2 statistics revealing that 75% of pupils at Key Stage 2 met the expected standard in reading, up from 73% in 2019.
However the National Literacy Trust (NLT) Annual Literacy Survey shows that the number of children who say they enjoy reading is in serious decline, with reading for pleasure at its lowest level for 18 years.
The survey found that fewer than one in two children aged eight to 18 said they enjoyed reading in 2022, the lowest level since 2005. For children growing up in poverty, this number is even lower, with fewer children and young people who receive Free School Meals (FSMs) saying they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who do not receive FSMs (43.8% vs. 48.8%). The percentage-point-gap between these groups has more than doubled from 2.1pp to 5pp between 2020 and 2022. The cost of living is also squeezing family budgets, creating further barriers to reading for pleasure. A total of 500,000 (one in 15) children in England aged eight to 18 say they do not own a single book, which rises to one in 10 for those eligible for Free School Meals, according to the NLT.
Writing and publishing a book about a controversial public figure is like diving into shark-infested waters, says ABC investigative journalist Louise Milligan. She told her Adelaide Writers' Week audience that if she'd written her 2017 award-winning book Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Cardinal Pell today, she wondered if it would even be published. "There's a lot more caution in the publishing world. It's a defamation-happy climate."
Her fellow investigative journalist, Nine's Adele Ferguson, agreed: "We have such punitive defamation laws, some of the worst in the world. People should be marching in the streets."
The Writers' Week crowd were probably not the kind to march in the streets, but they were keen that all voices should be heard and read - even the two Palestinian authors whose social media comments had led to boycotts by some sponsors and writers. Yet one of the themes of this peaceful and respectful gathering was how many voices were being silenced.
Sometimes this happened through the timidity of publishers, even with no threat of legal action. Publishing veteran Hilary McPhee said she was very concerned about the Australian industry today.
Hilary McPhee says there is a lot of cautiousness in Australian publishing, thanks to the country's defamation laws.Hilary McPhee says there is a lot of cautiousness in Australian publishing, thanks to the country's defamation laws.
"We have fewer and fewer publishers and we have poorer and poorer books as a result.
Former Simon & Schuster staffer Filippo Bernardini has said stole more than 1,000 unpublished manuscripts because he wanted to read books before they hit stores.
In court papers published on Friday (March 10th), Bernardini apologised for his crime but claimed he did it so he could dive into the stories before they were available to the general public.
"I never leaked these manuscripts. I wanted to keep them closely to my chest and be one of the fewest to cherish them before anyone else, before they ended up in bookshops," he wrote.
"There were times where I read the manuscripts and I felt a special and unique connection with the author, almost like I was the editor of that book," he added.
He explained: "While employed, I saw manuscripts being shared between editors, agents and literary scouts or even with individuals outside the industry. So, I wondered: why can I not also get to read these manuscripts?
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