Anthony Horowitz is missing.
Not the real Anthony Horowitz, of course. He's exactly where you'd expect him to be-hunkered down at his desk, toiling away at the next novel even as his newest is hitting bookshelves around the world.
Links of the week April 29 2024 (18)
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:
6 May 2024
But more than sixty pages into Close to Death (April 16, 2024; Harper) and the author's literary alter ego-the Watson to ex-Detective Danielle Hawthorne's Holmes-has yet to make an appearance. It's a strange case indeed.
"I think all my life I've had a fear of formula," Horowitz-whose prolific output includes the Alex Rider saga for young adults, Magpie Murders, and original works featuring James Bond and Sherlock Holmes-confesses. "I just don't want to write the same book over and over again. So, in other words, within the narrow confines of a writer's life, I try to be as varied as possible."
Consequently, the fifth book in the Hawthorne/Horowitz series takes some creative liberties-the risks of which are also the rewards.Consequently, the fifth book in the Hawthorne/Horowitz series takes some creative liberties-the risks of which are also the rewards.
"Having done four novels in which I had dutifully followed Hawthorne, five paces behind him, making inane remarks and getting myself injured, I decided that it was time to do something a little different," Horowitz says.
After a successful career as a talent agent - representing Michael Parkinson, Ulrika Jonsson and Adam Ant - Melanie Cantor became disillusioned with TV. So she took up writing - and refused to give up on her passion.
At 61, after a decade writing four unpublished manuscripts and receiving hundreds of rejections from agents and publishers, Melanie Cantor got an email in 2019 from the literary agent Felicity Blunt. "It started off positively and I was just waiting for the ‘but' to arrive, but it never did," Cantor says. "She said she wanted to represent me."
In 2020, Dorset-based Cantor's debut novel Life and Other Happy Endings, about a woman with three months to live who spends her remaining time writing letters to those who have wronged her, came out. Its publication was the culmination of a lifelong fascination with writing.
Psychotherapist Vicky Reynal on writing about attitudes to money for a general audience
When my publisher first approached me with the idea for Money on Your Mind, a book about the emotions and childhood experiences that drive our attitude to money, I found the prospect exciting (I had so much to say on the topic, having been working with clients as a financial psychotherapist). But it was daunting too. With two master's degrees and a postgraduate, I had no shortage of experience sitting in front of a blank page with a topic to develop, but it had always been academic writing. Here I was, being challenged to write a book based on psychoanalytic principles and knowledge, for an audience with no such background.
There are authors who have managed this successfully and whom I have always been in awe of (such as Irvin Yalom, Alain de Botton, my favourites), but was I going to be able to simplify without oversimplifying? Could I keep depth of thought without too much complexity? Could I create bite-sized insights without writing banalities?
The novelist reflects on reaching the end of a series
The Reaper Follows arrives out in the world this week, and I'm certainly hoping that it's a suspenseful novel readers will enjoy!
It's the last in my ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' series-which, naturally, includes four books. Each book stands on its own, of course, a case that must be investigated, that brings danger and mystery, a beginning, a middle, and an end!"
But working on this has been intriguing for me! I have always been fascinated by ancient texts of any kind, words that can be-and are-interrupted differently by different people through time.
And the Four Horsemen . . .
We've recently lived through a period in which all signs of the ‘horsemen' might be seen-we've encountered war (not sure what decade, century, or millennium we haven't) pestilence, famine, and disease. I can certainly say that as I was raising my children, I didn't think to warn them that we might be facing a pandemic in their future, so that one was . . . far from impossible, of course, but for me, at least unexpected.
'The one thing I take with me into my writing every single day, is that no one is ever really who you think they are. We're all projections of the person we think we should be'
Profile K, the new novel by Helen Fields, will be published by Avon on 25 April. It follows profiler Midnight Jones as she discovers that she's the next target of a killer. Fields is a bestselling author who practised criminal and family law for 13 years, and also runs a film production company.
Your new novel, Profile K, tells the story of a profiler who realises she is a murderer's next target. What inspired this novel?
The world can't stop talking about AI right now. Technology and how it affects our everyday life is something we're all vaguely aware of but we rarely pause to consider its impact. Profile K is based on existing, real technology, and imagines using profiling for everything from job applications to policing, and from childcare to dating apps. But the technology can see more than most of us would like it to see. This book explores what could happen if an analyst found something deeply disturbing in a profile before the subject even commits a crime. It's a cat and mouse game with high stakes, and researching it was a real eye-opener.
My publisher wife looks across at me reading a proof of one of her soon-to-be-released thrillers. 'The setting is great, isn't it?' she says. 'Really good,' I reply. 'Very generous.'
I guess this is just the kind of joke (or possibly wilful misunderstanding) that only makes sense in the arcane world of books. She meant the wilds of Dartmoor. I meant the typesetting, made for a Boomer's eyes.
Typesetting is one of the unglamorous, unsung heroes of the publishing process. A necessary step that used to be part of in-house publishing but that, through technology advances, has become more cost-effective to outsource. Available globally to buy by the yard, but also, at its best, a manifestation of the design sensibilities that can make or break the reading experience.
The market contracted overall-with non-fiction struggling in particular - but romantasy and crime sent fiction to a Q1 record high.
The British print books market shrank by nearly 5% in the first quarter of 2024, mainly due to a significant drop in non-fiction sales, but the decline was cushioned by Adult Fiction, which - led by the romantasy trend and a robust crime market - posted its biggest initial 12 weeks in a calendar year since accurate records began.
Overall, £360.9m was sold through Nielsen BookScan's Total Consumer Market (TCM) for the first dozen weeks of 2024, a decline of 4.8% on 2023 and 1% down against 2022. In volume terms, 40.5 million books were sold through the TCM, a drop of 7.1% and 6.8%, respectively, versus the previous two years.
The Publishers Association (PA) has criticised the government's response to a House of Lords report on AI, saying that it has failed to make "any tangible commitments to protect the creative industries against mass copyright infringement".
The Large Language Models and Generative AI report - published in February 2024 by the House of Lords' Communications and Digital Committee - called on the government to consider whether current copyright law sufficiently protects copyright holders, whose work is used to develop large language models (LLMs). If not, the report recommended setting out a clear plan to future-proof the legislation.
The report states: "The legalities of this are complex but the principles remain clear. The point of copyright is to reward creators for their efforts, prevent others from using works without permission, and incentivise innovation. The current legal framework is failing to ensure these outcomes occur and the Government has a duty to act. It cannot sit on its hands for the next decade and hope the courts will provide an answer."
Simon & Schuster has acquired the largest Dutch publishing group Veen Bosch & Keuning, including all of its publishers in the Netherlands and Belgium, as well as sister companies Thinium and Bookchoice.
Simon & Schuster (S&S) was bought by the private equity firm KKR in August 2023. At the time, KKR said it intends to support the publisher's growth in international markets.
S&S has said that said its "extensive international network of companies" will provide Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) authors better opportunities to publish their work outside the Dutch-speaking region.
The company added that VBK will continue to operate autonomously and will also maintain its editorial independence. VBK c.e.o. Geneviève Waldmann will lead the Dutch business and will join the S&S leadership team.
This represents S&S' first acquisition of a non-English publisher, and "fits well in its strategy to expand its publishing reach in key geographies". Through VBK, S&S will gain "greater access to the Dutch and broader European markets". The companies also aim to "provide a better avenue to sell, produce and distribute its titles in Europe and to publish more S&S titles locally".
Nikkolas Smith knows a thing or two about book bans. The illustrator has created five picture books over the last three years-four of which have been yanked off library shelves. There's I am Ruby Bridges, about the civil rights icon; That Flag about the confederate flag; Born on the Water, which explores slavery; and The Artivist which features a child supporting trans kids.
Book bans aren't new; the practice is centuries old. But over the past four years, right-wing organizations have been on a crusade to remove books from school libraries and classrooms. Last school year, these groups challenged more than 3,000 titles. The top reasons for contesting books is that they deal with LBGTQ+ issues or shine a light on racism. As someone who tackles both of these issues in his work, Smith has gotten used to his books being challenged. "In many cases, librarians don't even bother buying them, because they know parents will contest them," he says. "They don't even have a chance to be banned."
But while the book bans cut into his sales, Smith says he's more motivated than ever to keep working on issues that are important to him. "It fires me up to make more books about truth and history and justice for all," he says. "I want to live in a country where there is diversity of thought."
Publishers, agents, and authors reckon with readers' all-consuming passion for YA romantasy
Not since the Twilight parties of the mid-2000s have YA readers been energized enough to show up en masse for midnight releases at bookstores. Instead of teens in homemade T-shirts declaring Team Edward or Team Jacob, today's crop of book lovers are largely women and teen girls with Fourth Wing friendship bracelets or dragon-themed temporary tattoos, fans of the impossible-to-ignore publishing juggernaut that is romantasy. This category has generated a level of excitement on par with the dystopian and paranormal romance days more than a decade ago. It's also selling at a staggering volume, leading Circana BookScan to dub 2023 "the year of romantasy." Sarah J. Maas, hailed by many as the doyenne of romantasy (and also now considered an adult author), has sold close to 42 million books worldwide, according to Bloomsbury, her publisher, and in the first quarter of 2024, she was the bestselling author in any category. But she's far from alone at the top.
The Guardian calls Irish-Indian poet Nikita Gill "Britain's most-followed poet on social media"-she has 780,000 Instagram followers and 180,000 TikTok followers, and her Instapoetry has been reshared by the likes of Khloe Kardashian, Alanis Morissette, and Sam Smith-and she has published seven volumes of poetry and two novels in the U.K. But she is far less known on this side of the pond. Margaret Raymo at Little, Brown acquired Hekate and its sequels, a loosely connected trilogy of novels in verse about the Greek goddesses of the Underworld, at auction in February, and hopes to make Gill a big star in the U.S. as well. The first book is due out in fall 2025, with the next two tentatively scheduled for summer 2026 and winter 2027.
Hekate is the legendary Greek goddess of witches, crossroads, and necromancy. The novel follows its eponymous heroine from a refugee child of war who heals from the trauma of her separation from her parents to a fearless, feminist woman and goddess.
Gill, who is now based in Hampshire, England, spent her childhood in Jammu-Kashmir and Belfast, Northern Ireland, "in spaces where there's no real stability, just the illusion of stability," she told PW. "Things that are not normal to other children are very normal to you-curfews and gunfire and bomb scares." This insecurity, and its resultant vulnerability, is central to her craft. "My work reflects on the meanings of ‘home,' " she said. "I keep coming back to it."
Lawyer turned novelist who enjoyed huge success with his bestselling Shardlake historical mysteries
The novelist CJ Sansom, who has died aged 71, saw the dream of many aspiring writers come true when in mid-career he swapped a routine occupation for the life of a widely acclaimed, chart-topping novelist. By 2020, the former lawyer's Shardlake historical mysteries had sold almost 4m copies. He built up a fan-base vast enough to guarantee that a new title would enter the UK bestseller charts at number one.
Sansom's switch, however, was no lucky break but the fruit of deep thought, hard work and struggle against stiff odds. He overcame the blight of intense early suffering to create a much-loved series of novels conspicuous for their intelligence, integrity and humanity. An underlying idealism united the two, very different, halves of his professional life.
For the past five years or so, I've read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. When a publisher provided a choice between a PDF of a book and a physical copy, I would usually ask for the PDF, because I didn't want my house to fill up with books that I might end up not reading. But what was at first a matter of clutter-free convenience became a habit, and now I encounter nearly every written work, regardless of its length, quality, and difficulty, on the small screen of my iPhone.
I use a variety of e-reading apps: Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Libby. The last three books I downloaded onto the Apple Books app are Rachel Cusk's novel "Second Place"; Malcolm Lowry's 1947 classic "Under the Volcano," which I bought because I wanted to see if I would enjoy it more than I did when read it twenty years ago; and Gary Indiana's essay collection "Fire Season." According to the little readout beneath the cover image for each book, I am nine per cent through the Cusk, a distressing three per cent through the Lowry reread, and a hundred per cent through the Indiana, a book I found liberating, both for its style and for its freeing expression of unpleasant thoughts.
Listen up, Potterheads: J.K. Rowling's seven original Harry Potter books are getting a massive new audiobook series.
Amazon's Audible and Pottermore Publishing, the global digital publisher of Rowling's Wizarding World, will co-produce a brand-new audiobook series for the original seven Harry Potter stories. The new audiobooks are scheduled to premiere in late 2025, with each of the seven English-language titles to be released sequentially for a global audience, exclusively on Audible.
The companies said the full-cast audio productions - with more than 100 actors - will "bring these iconic stories to life as never heard before." The new audiobooks will provide "immersive audio entertainment through high-quality sound design in Dolby Atmos, stunning scoring, a full range of character voices and real-world sound capture," Audible and Pottermore Publishing said.
How a viral post got some key statistics wrong.
Last week the article "No One Buys Books," by Ellie Griffin, went viral, topping Substack categories and being shared widely on social media. It's easy to understand why. Publishing is an opaque industry, and Griffin's piece-which collects quotes and statistics from the 2022 Justice Department suit against Penguin Random House, in which the government successfully blocked PRH's $2.2 billion purchase of Simon & Schuster-is filled with shocking claims. Over 90 percent of books sell fewer than 1,000 copies; 50 percent of books sell fewer than 12 copies. The article paints a nearly apocalyptic portrait of traditional publishing, in which nothing works, few make money, nobody reads, and the whole industry might go poof at any moment. This vision is appealing to many people, including writers who (fairly or unfairly) feel stymied by the industry, popularists who think reading itself is a snobby hobby, and tech types who mock "paywalled dead trees." The only problem is, the picture isn't true.
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