If you want to be the person who supports yourself with your writing career, then it's time to take a good look at money and how you are going to harness the inherent power of your creative work via your financial habits. It doesn't matter if you haven't made a cent for your creative work thus far. How you start looking at money now is going to determine how soon creative paychecks start rolling in.
Links of the week August 28 2023 (35)
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:
28 August 2023
A combination of issues make us hesitant to deal with the financial part of our creative career.
The deeply internalized acceptance of the starving artist myth.
The belief that accepting money for our art compromises our status as real artists and makes us sell-outs.
The conditioning that writers are bad with money and therefore must rely on other people to manage it.
The overwhelm at the thought of learning money management skills.
The personal money baggage that has to do with how you grew up and saw money being used around you.
Delegating your financial responsibilities puts your ability to support yourself through your creative work in other peoples' hands. This delegation allows others the opportunity to profit from and exploit your talents and body of creative work.
In this article, writer and NCW Academy tutor Molly Naylor shares five aspects of scriptwriting that she found the trickiest to absorb early in her writing journey.
Writing the script isn't the work
It's so tempting, after coming up with an idea, to immediately sit down and start to write. Dialogue flows... images spill out... writing is happening! I'm doing it mum! But so often in this case, we get to page 30 (or 20, or 10) and we lose momentum. That's because the real work is in the planning. With scriptwriting, beautiful sentences and witty dialogue matter far less than action and consequence. Scenes are units of action that build to create story. Everything happens for a reason. Before opening my script software, I'll have been working for weeks on planning documents, character profiles, story arcs and structure.
Novelist Anita Frank on how she created the eerie setting in her new novel, The Good Liars
Setting is an important part of any story, but in stories where something uncanny is occurring it can have a fundamental influence on the prevailing atmosphere - properties featured in books with a gothic bent often become characters in their own right and in some instances can affect the way the drama unfolds.
With my debut novel, The Lost Ones, a ghost story set during the First World War, I was keen to avoid the familiar dilapidated haunted house trope, but I didn't want to lose an unnerving ambience as a result. For this reason, I chose to set the story within a pristine grand mansion, luxuriously appointed and bedecked with rich swags of material and glistening chandeliers. It was the tasteless opulence on display that contributed to Greyswick's oppressive and inhospitable atmosphere. It rendered rooms grotesque and repulsive, designed, as they were, to impress rather than welcome. The house offered little comfort to its inhabitants, and instead seemed almost to radiate a strange hostility, as if protecting the dark secret concealed within its walls.
While some people might consider cozy mysteries the red-headed stepchild of the mystery genre, their appeal continues to endure nonetheless. Not everyone delights in blood and gore and that's where cozies come in.
Opinions vary, but the first cozy mysteries are generally considered to be Agatha Christie's Miss Marple Series. Whether you agree or not, her series certainly embodies many of the charxacteristics of the modern-day cozy. Cozies are the hygge of the mystery genre. They evoke the same warm, fuzzy feelings as the song My Favorite Things from the Sound of Music - whiskers on kittens and bright copper kettles (especially if those kettles are brewing tea.)
On April 7, frustrated with my progress on a third full revision and still dancing around my novel's central story question, I typed the following into my ChatGPT account.
Me: I am struggling with defining the one central thing my novel (currently in draft form) is about. Can you help me figure this out?
In roughly a millisecond, ChatGPT responded:
Of course, I'd be happy to help! Can you provide me with some more information about your novel? What genre is it, what is the general plot, and who are the main characters? This information will help me understand your story better and assist you in defining the central theme or idea.
I provided a short, rough synopsis. Seconds later, ChatGPT returned several paragraphs summarizing what I had provided and offering a possible theme: "The struggle to reconcile tangible and intangible aspects of reality, and the transformative power of belief in the unknown."
Okay, that's actually two themes.
We don't just love books for their text, but for the complex humans behind them.
This year, the entry requirements for the Women's Prize included a new specification: "All books must be unified and substantial works written by a single human author." Once upon a time, "human" was implicit. However, in the age of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, machines will soon be capable of authoring whole novels if they're not already.
The non-human-author is a divisive figure. For publishers and agents, it surely represents the ideal: inexpensive; reliable; amenable to edits. For writers, it's a terrifying spectre, poised to steal jobs and cut the heart out of creativity. Indeed, the ongoing writers' strike in the US is motivated in part by concerns about the use of AI in screenwriting.
But we needn't be so afraid. However beautifully machines learn to write, they will never inspire the same fascination as their human counterparts.
Adult fiction has been publishing's steadiest-selling category for the past 18 months. Unit sales of print adult fiction books were up 8.5% in 2022 over 2021 at outlets that report to Circana BookScan, making it the only category to post an increase last year. In the first six months of 2023, adult fiction was once again the only category to register an increase, with sales up 4.2%. The biggest driver of those gains, of course, has been books that have the backing of BookTok.
But a new analysis by BookScan shows that BookTok's effect on sales is diminishing. The most notable sign of that softening came in July, when, for the first time, sales from the roughly 180 BookTok authors BookScan follows fell compared to the prior year. The 4.5% July sales dip means that year-to-date sales, which had been up by as much as 38% through May, were up 23% through July. (Total adult fiction unit sales have fallen every week since late June and are now up only 1.4% through August 12.)
What do you get when you combine artificial intelligence with human stupidity? There are, unfortunately, numerous responses to that question. But in this particular case the answer can be found in Iowa's Mason City Community School District, where school administrators are using ChatGPT to help them ban books.
Ahead of the new school year, school staff have been busy trying to comply with a new state law, Senate File 496, the Parental Rights and Transparency Act, requiring every book in Iowa public school libraries to be "age appropriate" and devoid of "descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act". Of course, nobody wants hardcore porn in school libraries, but this sweeping bill, which also restricts education about gender identity and sexual orientation, isn't trying to prevent that nonexistent problem: it's about indoctrination. Republicans don't want kids learning anything that goes against their narrow worldview so, over the past couple of years, they've gone on a censorship orgy, trying to ban everything from gender studies to psychology to African American studies.
The Knights Of editorial director contributes to our Q&A series
How has the industry changed since your first job?
I think a lot and also not at all, in that there is a bigger spotlight on inclusivity and diversity both in the books we publish and the teams/companies that publish them, but there are plenty of people who still don't understand why this is necessary. On a hopeful day, I think that the industry is making great leaps forwards; on a normal day, I focus on what we can do as an independent publisher to change the publishing landscape!
What's the biggest challenge in your job?
Managing my own level of personal investment. I think as editors we pour everything into our books and our authors, and that can be an immense level of pressure - even more so at a tiny publisher, where the stakes are high. It's far too easy to burn out when you're on a constant rollercoaster of emotions, so I try to remember that I do need to occasionally give myself a break in order to give my authors and their books the best level of support.
Authors call on FTC to investigate Amazon’s alleged monopoly in the bookselling industry - The Verge
Amazon is already facing a potential lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission, and now, a group of authors, booksellers, and an antitrust think tank is calling on the agency to investigate the e-commerce giant's stranglehold on the bookselling market, as previously reported by The New York Times.
In the letter, the Authors Guild, American Booksellers Association, and Open Markets Institute urge the FTC to look into Amazon's "monopoly in its role as a seller of books to the public." The three organizations accuse Amazon of dominating "almost every aspect of the book market," citing data that the company sells over 50 percent of all physical books in the retail market, 90 percent of physical books sold online, and over 80 percent of all ebooks on the market.
It's almost impossible to imagine.
Between 2010 and 2019, one of every seven crime novels published was by a single author-James Patterson. Working with co-authors, he became a novel writing phenomenon and much more, while many literary critics argued his work became much less.
Patterson is well aware of the criticism of his assembly-line style productivity. How can one author, even working with co-authors, churn out dozens of books a year and expect any semblance of quality?
The native New Yorker bonds with his audience and they're devoted to him. His readers have devoured more than 400 million copies of novels with his name plastered in large type across the cover. He regularly outsells John Grisham, Stephen King and Dan Brown combined.
It's a fact. The world loves James Patterson and his co-authors even if his critics don't. Why? Because Patterson understands story.
In the spring of 2020, I spent a lot of time staring out of my parents' kitchen window at Liddington Castle, a Bronze Age fort in Wiltshire, England. Rumored to be the site of King Arthur's last battle, all that remains of the castle are two concentric banks of earth atop a high hill, surrounded by fields of wheat and sheep-grazing. As the first lockdown tightened, as the skies emptied of planes and the traffic stilled, the intensive care units filled to capacity and the ambulances started queuing up outside the hospitals, I remembered that Arthur was prophesied to return when his people needed him most.
Now seemed a pretty good time.
The legend of King Arthur is to Britain what the Wild West is to the USA: our preeminent founding myth. Britain's sense of itself as the underdog, its belief that it invented the concept of fair play, can they not be traced back to the squirty little squire who astounded everyone by pulling the sword from the stone, the king whose knights sat at a round table to symbolize their equality? Is Arthur why Britain, despite its history, continues to see itself as the good guy, and why in 2016 in the run up to the Brexit vote, so many were willing to buy into the narrative that what was wrong at home was the fault of outsiders?
It was a surprise then when I dug out a copy of Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth century epic Le Morte D'Arthur and discovered that the story of enchantment, chivalry and honor, familiar from Disney's The Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot, is based on a frank tale of warfare, conquest and nation-building.
In April, Halima Khatun became the first two-time winner of the Selfies Awards, triumphing in the fiction category with The Secret Diary of a Bengali Newlywed, the third in a series that started with 2021 Selfies fiction winner The Secret Diary of an Arranged Marriage. She is a former journalist, writer and PR consultant.
Has your writing process evolved over time? My process is now much more streamlined. I have found my sweet spot is dictating the first draft on my iPhone notes. As a busy mum of two, much of this is done while I'm pushing my son in his pram! There are many stages after this, but over time, I have learnt to be more efficient with self edits, and ensure that I send a very clean draft to my beta readers, then my editor, then my advanced readers. Also, I spend more time plotting the outline of chapters, whereas before I would largely start with a blank page. However, I do leave elements of surprise in the book, for both myself and the reader! Often, the best plot points come when you see where the characters will take you.
Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed in collaboration with PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ Ukraine, English PEN and PEN International is to provide 25,000 new books, donated by UK publishers, in support of PEN Ukraine's Unbreakable Libraries project. The books are expected to arrive in Kyiv in September.
An announcement from Book Aid InternationalSupplies much-needed books to developing countries, raising funds from publishers and general public; 'Reverse Book Club' is masterly idea-for just £5 ($10) month you can provide 48 books to go to where they're most needed stated: "More than 570 Ukrainian libraries have been damaged and completely or partly lost their book collections [since the Russian invasion of the country]. Some of them have been forced to move to safer regions of Ukraine. The increasing number of internally displaced persons (IDP) - some 5 million people at the end of June 2022 - and the frequent power outages in all the regions of Ukraine, have affected the work of libraries, with a growing public interest in printed books, and a lack of them.