All those wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens in the bookstore? You have Lester del Rey to thank.
Links of the week October 9 2023 (41)
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:
9 October 2023
Lester del Rey wore 1950s-style horn-rimmed glasses, an unruly billy-goat beard, and his silver hair brushed back above a big forehead. He liberally dispensed cards that said: Lester del Rey, Expert. He sometimes said his full name was Ramón Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes. He was in fact born Leonard Knapp, son of Wright Knapp, in 1915 in rural southeastern Minnesota, subject to the Minnesotan fever-Jay Gatz, Prince Rogers Nelson, Robert Zimmerman-for reinventing oneself. In 1977, del Rey, then in his 60s, turned his proclivity for fabulism to profit: He invented fantasy fiction as we know it.
The Children's market is heading for its second biggest full year in value terms, dipping just 2.4% on the same period in 2022. At 41.9 million books sold for £255.8m up to 9th September, 2023 looks set to become only the second year to bring in over £400m, after 2022 surpassed the milestone to become the biggest full year for value of all time.
Kiera O'Brien, The Bookseller's charts and data editor, discussed the state of the market at The Bookseller's Children's Conference at London's County Hall today (2nd October). Though the market is currently 4.9% down in volume and down 2.4% in value on the same period in 2022, the year to date is still 14% up in value on pre-pandemic 2019.
David Walliams and Adam Stower's Robodog (HarperCollins) is the year's current number one, on 144,000 copies sold, with three World Book Day titles, Pippa Goodhart and Nick Sharratt's You Choose Your Adventure (Puffin), Marvel Spider-Man: The Amazing Pocket Guide (DK Children) and Adam Kay and Henry Paker's Kay's Brilliant Brains (Puffin) joining it in the top five. Holly Jackson's A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, published in 2019, returned to the annual top five for another year, after its biggest year of sales in 2022.
Will Atkinson, who has just left Atlantic Books after nine years as MD, contributes to our Q&A series
How has the industry changed since your first job?
Everything and nothing. The two tectonic plate shifts of the Net Book Agreement going and the arrival of American tech companies into the industry significantly changed everyone's behaviour. The arrival of Richard and Judy (which I have down as a very good thing, because it was the first time TV did books well) started the stacking of sales into bigger clumps of a smaller number of titles. This kickstarted an increase in the rate that titles failed, and I think that is still accelerating. The bestsellers and the backlist always had to pay the bills, and it used to be an 80/20 industry. I now think it is 98/2.
Prioritisation of titles and real focus have always been the watchwords for successful publishing, and that is now utterly critical. More people working on fewer books is vital. The market is ferociously competitive, but if you "win" there are bigger rewards. Publishing is about managing a portfolio - so how you manage the writers and books that are making their way but not paying their way has got more complicated and more sophisticated.
Or, a brief tour of the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunker from which Churchill staged his war efforts.
School field trips. Exhibitions. Guided tours.
It might be easy to dismiss museums as stuffy or even boring, but they are far from that-especially to an aspiring crime writer looking to write her first murder mystery.
The idea for my debut historical mystery, A Traitor in Whitehall, came to me while standing in the middle of the Churchill War Rooms (formerly the Cabinet War Rooms or CWR). Part of the Imperial War Rooms, the CWR is a unique museum that offers an incredible in-depth look at what living and working would have been in the underground bunker that once served as the top secret nerve center for the British Government during World War 2.
'No two imaginations work in the same way. As I travel alongside each new student, I discover more about the myriad ways a mind can work, and where it can go'
You teach writing at the University of Warwick. What advice do you give to your students, and what have they taught you?
When they arrive at age 18 with glittering A-levels, they have, for the most part, forgotten how to play. At least, they have forgotten how to play in the presence of teachers and other adult authorities. So the first thing I do is to try and trick them into playing again, or at least differently. I give them exercises with rules and constraints that call their imaginations into play in the way that all games do. At the same time, I introduce them to contemporary fiction that might bend their understanding of what is possible. Once they%u2019re playing fast and furiously again, we get on with the serious work of editing and revision. With my MA and PhD students, there is always more to work with. They arrive with stories they want to tell and do not yet know how to tell. What I hope to have given them by the time they leave us is the confidence and technical wherewithal to write in their own voice.
They're the bogeymen of publishing. Along with prologues, adverbs, and semicolons, flashbacks may be the most vilified-and most misunderstood-of storytelling devices, ones that work only if they don't seem like devices.
Yet flashbacks are inherently artificial. Even when we are revisiting memories in life, we rarely replay an entire scene from start to finish, chronologically and in full detail. Memory doesn't work that way; it's slideshows and not a movie.
But one prime reason that flashbacks are a common literary convention is that, used well, they can be an effective way to present essential information and backstory. Readers have become trained, as with so many fictional devices, to accept the artificiality of flashback provided it doesn't interrupt their experience of the story.
And there is where the trap lies that so often derails an author's attempt to use flashback: If not woven seamlessly into the flow of the story, a flashback can draw attention to itself, reveal the author's hand, and pull the reader out of the fictive dream.
But you don't have to avoid this potentially potent device as long as you follow a few key guidelines in weaving flashbacks seamlessly into your story.
Simon Pearson looks back over the three years that he and his wife, Fiona Gorman, spent researching and writing the biography of the eminent heart surgeon Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, which was published this week
When Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub and his daughter Lisa approached us about writing his authorised biography, we both hesitated.
We remembered Yacoub, who is now 87, from watching the television news more than 40 years ago when he was performing some of the first successful heart transplants in Britain at Harefield Hospital in west London - and early research revealed more.
The story of his life - from Egypt to Britain and back - was a compelling one by any measure. His was a classic tale of success against the odds, an outsider who triumphed. Rejected for a junior post at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary in 1962, Yacoub took a phone call from the Queen fifty years later when she asked him to become a member of the Order of Merit, the highest award in her gift.
So why the hesitation?
An attorney examines what artificial intelligence will mean for the publishing industry
The balance between copyright and free speech is being challenged by generative AI (GAI), a powerful and enigmatic tool that mimics human responses to prompts entered into an internet search box. The purpose of copyright law, according to the U.S. Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their exclusive writings." The problem is that GAI's ability to incentivize progress and innovation threatens the entertainment industry's dependence on copyright to protect creative works.
As a thousand-person online audience clicked in to the Artificial Intelligence Revolution and Opportunity conference organised by Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ on Wednesday (27th September), former PRH global c.e.o. Markus Dohle provided the cheerleading keynote, describing himself as "super-excited" as he outlined many of AI's possibilities for publishing.
Yet the ebullient Dohle also expressed some cautions, among them: "We have to carefully navigate and regulate to protect authors," for "if we lose [the copyright protection battle], we lose everything".
Four hours of panels later, excitement and fear had looped through every discussion like a double helix, whether it concerned writing, editorial, marketing, production, design, or any other aspect of the business. One speaker even raised the possibility that the use of generative AI might endanger the mentorship that editorial assistants have traditionally received, or make it a thing of the past.
Speaker after speaker agreed this was an "earthquake moment" as London-based Michael Bhaskar, co-founder of Canelo Digital Publishing, proclaimed: "We're looking at a core property of the human species - language - that has become susceptible to being automated. It's really significant that the human relationship with words has changed forever."
Spotify is hoping to jump-start its push into audiobooks - announcing that paying subscribers can access up to 15 hours free listening per month from among 150,000 titles.
A year ago, the audio streamer announced that users would be able to purchase and listen to 300,000 audiobooks on Spotify. Spotify's entry into the audiobook market came after closing its acquisition for audiobook distributor Findaway in June 2022, paying about $119 million in cash for the company.
About half of that catalog will be available as part of Spotify Premium subscriptions. Initially, the company is offering all Premium individual accounts, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month. The feature will be available for Premium users in the U.K. and Australia starting tomorrow, with the U.S. following later this year.
For more than a decade, digital audio has been a bright spot for publishers, growing by double-digits year over year, with digital audio revenue expected to soon surpass that of e-books. But will a new foray into the market by streaming service Spotify-with its more than 220 million premium subscribers-be the spark to take digital audio to the next level?
"Just like in music and podcasting, audiobooks today has one big dominating player," Ek said, referring to Amazon's Audible service. "And just like in music and podcasting, we believe that many more consumers want to consume audiobooks and want to listen to audiobooks. And just like in music, and podcasting, we're really excited to be able to bring all the amazing tools that we built for creators and consumers alike to enable more discovery of these amazing audiobooks to the entire world. So today, we're doubling down on audiobooks."
Sweden’s ‘queen of Noir’ Camilla Läckberg accused of using a ghostwriter | Publishing | The Guardian
Crime novelist has been forced to deny claims that she tricked readers into buying books she didn't write herself
It is a gripping detective story typical of the queen of Nordic noir, leaving fans pondering the ethics of relationships and the dirty secrets of people with power and influence.
But for once, bestselling crime novelist Camilla Läckberg is not the author of this particular literary whodunnit, but its protagonist.
Läckberg, a star in her native Sweden who has been hailed as the country's answer to Agatha Christie for her output of thrillers, kids' stories and cookbooks, last week had to deny that she had tricked her admirers into buying books that were not written by her, after data analysis suggested she had used unattributed ghostwriters for some of her recent novels.
By the time Sir Terry Pratchett died in 2015, at the age of 66, he had completed 53 novels (one of them twice), co-authored another six and written close to 100 short stories. It represents a writing career that had begun in 1963 when he was just 14. But those wonderful words eventually dry. Following the posthumous release of his final few novels, there could never again be a new Terry Pratchett book.
Until now.
A Stroke of the Pen: The Lost Stories, published this week, compiles short tales written by Pratchett for newspapers in the '70s and early '80s and not republished since. It's not the first such collection - before he died, Pratchett himself approved several volumes of his early tales, originally published in the Bucks Free Press newspaper where he wrote children's stories under the inherited nom-de-plume ‘Uncle Jim'. The Lost Stories are different, though - until last year, nobody knew they existed.
In the eighth decade of my life and after having three books traditionally published-a travel memoir 50 years ago and two novels more recently-I am pondering the wisdom of writing a very personal memoir.
What has moved me most to think about this is the #MeToo movement: I was the victim of date rape while working as a civilian employee on an American army base in France from 1963-1964. While my time in France was indeed a wonderful one, a dream come true, tarnished only by this one incident, I sometimes reflect on the high percentage of women who have suffered sexual abuse, many while serving in the military. I was advised not to report this case by my immediate superior with the very real threat that the perpetrator (an officer) most likely would not be punished, and it would likely mean the loss of my job.
A new Authors Guild survey finds that median book and writing-related income for authors in 2022 was below the poverty level.
A new author income study released by the Authors Guild provides a dizzying array of numbers and breakdowns about how all types of authors-traditionally published and self-published, full-time and part-time-fared financially in 2022. With such a deep trove of statistics, the survey offers something for everyone, but the main takeaway is that most authors have a hard time earning a living from their craft.
The survey, which drew responses from 5,699 published authors, found that in 2022, their median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total annual median income was $5,000. The median book-related income for survey respondents in 2022 was up 9% from 2018, adjusted for inflation, with all the increase coming from full-time authors, whose income was up 20%, compared to a 4% decline for part-time authors.
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