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:
Let me just start with: I do not condemn "telling." There's a place for it in every story, and that's mainly in the interstices between scenes.
But there's a reason we must show things when we are in scene and not tell: readers attach to clear actions and emotions. And that's key to pulling the reader into your story.
Here's what I see in stories that "tell" too much: two people are having a conversation, but the dialogue is stilted and expositive. Or a character is reacting in a scene, but we don't understand why because the emotion is not on the page. Or two people are interacting (a fight, a love scene, a heist, a whatever), but we really can't tell what they want or need.
In an earlier post, I discussed the use of elision to show emotion and to elicit it in the reader. Today's post comes from the opposite angle: specific in-scene craft techniques.
There are four ways to show in scene: through dialogue, interiority, gesture, and sensory detail.
Writers say investments in book promotion to augment publishers' in-house staff are key to success
Katherine Reay has written a dozen novels. When The Berlin Letters, her most recent, hit the shelves earlier this year, she embarked upon a 30-stop promotional book tour.
"I love the personal connection," she says. "So when I was given the opportunity to hire someone who had a specialty in bookstore events - events that I did not have the time nor the knowledge to plan myself - I thought that was a good use of my time and resources."
The tour was not organized by Reay's publisher, Harper Muse, an imprint of HarperCollins, which organized its own promotion of the book. Reay footed the bill for the tour herself.
In 2023, romance fiction was the top-earning subgenre of fiction in the United States. Even if you're not a romance reader-yet-you've likely picked up on the buzz. Romance readership has grown exponentially since the hellish year that was 2020, and it was not a small market to begin with. New romance-focused bookstores are popping up all over the country, from Portland, Oregon to Deerfield, Florida.
While bestselling romance fiction remains overwhelmingly white and straight, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ authors are publishing more in the genre than ever before. On TikTok content creators post gleeful odes to their favorite romance tropes, while readers get granular using search terms to locate the exact story they want. And the enthusiasm for romance isn't fringe. Rumor has it that Roxane Gay and Channing Tatum have cowritten a romance novel. Athlete power-couple Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe will produce a film based on a soccer romance by Meryl Wilsner. Political leader Stacey Abrams recently re-released her romantic suspense novels, previously published under a pen name. And who do you know who is not watching Bridgerton?
Like any social construct, genre can be a site of creativity and invention.Romance genre-fiction is not just having a moment; it's more like a long-building groundswell, originating from the wide-open ocean that is the basic human need to tell a love story.
Show of hands, writers, how many of you love book marketing? I can't see through your screen, but I know very few of you have your hands up.
Authors hate what they think marketing is. Like most writers, I was not initially thrilled with marketing. But the more I learned, the more my feelings about marketing shifted. Not only is my marketing more successful now, I also enjoy it! (Yes, really!)
I've seen the same thing with other writers-their feelings about marketing shift. Not everyone comes to love it, but they can approach it with less dread and more success.
Freakslaw is your debut novel - how have you found the publishing process so far?
To be honest, my process of querying agents was a brutal trial that felt designed to sap every ounce of affection I'd ever had for writing. I thought I'd become accustomed to rejection in all my years of submitting short stories, but I wasn't prepared for how different it would feel to have a whole novel turned down, nor for how pervasive ghosting would be at every stage of the process.
But when I found Marina de Pass at The Soho Agency, everything changed. Her joy for Freakslaw from the very beginning convinced me that people would see this book the way I wanted it to be seen. And working with Doubleday has been better than I could have ever imagined. I'd always hoped to find an agent and editor who had my back, but I hadn't thought about all the other people involved.
To take this thing that existed only in my mind for so long, and suddenly have a team of people who love it and are invested in putting it into the world, is utterly magical. Freakslaw has always been my weird baby but I trust Doubleday entirely with it, and I love that feeling.
Julia Boggio was the winner of the fiction category at the 2024 Selfies Awards. Originally from New Jersey, she became an author after 15 years as a professional photographer. Shooters is a romantic comedy that follows Stella, who is determined to become a successful wedding photographer - and then she gets entangled with Connor, a photographer with rock star status and an ego to match...
Where did you find inspiration for Shooters?
I worked as a professional photographer for 15 years and knew it was a world I wanted to explore in my writing. I had plenty of stories! When I was out for coffee with a fellow photography friend, I told her of my plan to write romances about photographers, and she said, 'Oh! You want to be the Jilly Cooper of photography!' In that moment, a title, characters, and plot came to me and that was it.
Can you tell us about your writing process?
First, I let the idea percolate at the back of my brain. Then I'll scribble down a loose plot, so I have a blueprint of where the story is heading. After that, I like to do a more detailed, chapter-by-chapter summary, pulling out the three things I want that chapter to achieve. Finally, I start writing... and realise most of the planning and plotting I did was wrong and the characters have other ideas.
I have been trying to convince writers of the value of a consistent email newsletter for more than a decade. Recently I dug up a 2014 presentation I gave at the James River Writers Conference, where the first slide says, "Email is not dead." After that slide, I quoted novelist Dana Stabenow, who gave an inspirational talk where she couldn't resist offering a practical tip at the end:
"Remember this if you remember nothing else from my speech tonight. It turns out that an active buy link in a newsletter targeted at people who really want to get it is the most effective means of selling your book."
She's 100% right. But that message is ironically harder than ever to get across in the era of Substack.
Substack launched in 2017 and in its early days, I saw it as a fantastic, easy-to-use platform for starting a paid newsletter. At that time, launching a paid newsletter was not straight forward. I know because I started mine (The Hot Sheet) in 2015. My tech stack was Mailchimp + ChargeBee + WordPress, which worked pretty well and cost a fixed fee of roughly $100 per month. The Hot Sheet was profitable from day one, mainly because I already had a blog and free newsletter reaching 20,000 people. Growth for The Hot Sheet has been steady but slow, with about 2,500 paid subscribers after eight years of continuous operation. It now earns six figures annually.
The world's favourite French misanthrope writer Michel Houellebecq is too controversial for the world's new AI tools, which find his views so offensive that they cannot be repeated.
The president of renowned French publishing house Gallimard wrote an article published Thursday in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise saying he had asked Meta's AI tool, Llama, to write a scene in the style of Houellebecq.
Llama responded in French that it could not write something considered "offensive or discriminatory".
Instead, it offered in English to write a scene that was "respectful and inclusive" such as a "group of friends in the park on a sunny afternoon" who sing songs "to celebrate the beauty of diversity".
Houellebecq, arguably France's biggest literary star internationally, is known for novels with a deeply pessimistic view of the modern world, in which the sexual revolution, consumerism and globalisation have led to alienation and societal decline.
The publishing house behind the books has already completed a content rights project with one major tech company this quarter
After decades of catering to "dummies," the publishing company John Wiley & Sons is expanding into intelligence - or at the very least, artificial intelligence.
The publishing house is known for its "For Dummies" series, which provides how-to guides on subject matter including foreign languages, sports and interpersonal relationships. Now Wiley is seeing stock growth after announcing its partnership with an unspecified "large tech company."
The Writers' Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) has called on the next government to "enshrine protections for writers" in its manifesto recommendations ahead of the forthcoming general election.
The trade union representing writers wants the next government to implement its recommendations around fair pay, fair treatment, sustainability, and copyright and AI.
Ellie Peers, general secretary of WGGB, said: "Writing is a highly skilled job and everything starts with the writer - without them there would be no feature films, TV or audio dramas, no plays, no books, poems or videogames.
"They provide the fuel that fires our creative industries, which in turn makes a major contribution to the UK economy."
Peers added: "We call on whoever forms the next government to enshrine protections for writers on fair pay and fair treatment, ensure that the creative sector is sustainable and, in a world that is being transformed by AI, introduce robust protections on copyright."
The UK's general election is set to take place on 4th July.
If you ever want to feel a sense of awe, try standing near an erupting volcano. The late author Michael Crichton was fascinated with volcanoes for most of his life. And even now, 16 years after his death, among the countless books and papers at his office in Santa Monica you'll find stacks of volcano research.
For his widow, Sherri Alexander Crichton, it's almost as if he's still here. "I feel his energy around all the time," she said.
And in the mountain of papers he left behind, she found parts of an unfinished novel centered around a huge volcanic eruption. It struck Sherri as something he would've wanted to share - a posthumous blockbuster from someone who, in his relatively short life, gave the world so much, including genetically-recreated dinosaurs.
In the literary world, Michael Crichton was a colossus - the only writer to have a number one book, movie, and TV show in the same year. He was also a Harvard-educated doctor, a prolific genius who created scientific thrillers that brought millions along on heart-pounding rides, from big city emergency rooms in "ER," to the tornado-ravaged heartland in "Twister," to places that exist only in our dreams (and nightmares), like "Jurassic Park."
Children in the UK and Ireland are reading fewer books than they did last year, according to a new report, as post-Covid absences from school and a lack of dedicated reading time contribute to lower reading abilities.
The 2024 What Kids Are Reading Report surveyed more than 1.2 million pupils across the UK and Ireland, revealing a 4.4% decrease in the number of books read by pupils. According to the study, this decline in reading is "particularly acute" in secondary schools, and affects the difficulty of books being read as well as the volume.
The pupils surveyed were shown to read progressively more challenging books until year 6. After that, the difficulty level of books being read tended to plateau until year 9, before a "sharp drop" in the difficulty of those read by older secondary students.
This is the first year since the research began in 2008, apart from the first year of the pandemic, that there has been a decline in the number of books read.
Diana Urban is the author of several YA thrillers, including All Your Twisted Secrets and the upcoming Paris catacombs survival story, Under the Surface (Putnam, Aug. 13). In this essay, Urban reflects on why young readers are so enthralled by murder-centric stories, making mysteries and thrillers such hot genres in YA publishing today.
Sometimes at publishing events when I share the pitch for my debut (six teens locked in a room must pick one of them to kill or they'll all die) or for my upcoming novel (four teens lost in the Paris catacombs must outrun masked sadists for days), I get weird looks.
One time, someone literally asked me if I was okay.
Regardless of my personal well-being, here's the thing: teens eat this stuff up.
UPDATED You have to go all the way down to number 81 on Amazon's bestseller list to find a book by a "literary" writer.
That would be "All Fours," by Miranda July, the writer-filmmaker-artist.
Otherwise most of the top 100 is taken up Father's Day books, Mother's Day books, self-help, and airport fiction. The latter comprises paperback reads by authors like Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas.
There are a few oases: Griffin Dunne's memoir about his family is at number 51. Stephen King, the rare commercial author who is also a writer, has a new title.
But things are so bad that Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," originally published in 1936, is at number 96.
What's missing? What we used to call literary or quality books. There is no breakout hit. We used to read the bestseller list and count "real" books by Philip Roth, John Irving, Margaret Atwood, VS Naipaul, and so on. Even Amazon's Literature and Fiction list is cluttered with pedestrian commercial fare, not the stuff that comes from the Iowa Writers Workshop, or Yaddo.
UK literary festival organisers face an uncertain future after losing the funding provided by investment group Baillie Gifford, with many paying tribute to the group's "commitment to the industry" pointing to the security the money offered to smaller book events.
Last week Baillie Gifford withdrew its financial support for all UK-based literary festivals after campaign group Fossil Free Books lobbied against its investments in fossil fuels and companies that operate in Israel. Both the Hay Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival withdrew from long-term partnerships with the group amid author withdrawals and the threat of further protests, with Edinburgh's organisers describing the pressure as "intolerable". Other festivals had their funding withdrawn by Baillie Gifford. The Bookseller understands that the Hay Festival has filed a serious incident report with the Charity Commission and passed on information to the local police.
Maris Kreizman on the Importance of Acknowledging the Labor That Goes in a Single Title
The perks were few and far between when I was an editorial assistant in book publishing in the early aughts. Mostly I did the job for the books and the proximity to authors and the occasional access to free leftover sandwiches from some lunchtime meeting or other (I was also lucky to do this work when it was still possible to rent a room in a Manhattan apartment on a $30,000 salary). But there was one reward that cost nothing, but that made me feel rich: a credit in the Acknowledgments section in the back of a book I worked on.
"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument: the individual mind and spirit of man," writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden. "Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy."
From Archimedes' cries of "Eureka!" to Don Draper's maverick tag lines, we often think of creativity as a personal trait that has little to do with the people around us. When I started writing The Laws of Connection, however, I was surprised to find just how important our social relationships can be in the conception of new ideas.
Think of it as a kind of cross-pollination. Our conversations are constantly exposing us to fresh experiences and perspectives. Their feedback, meanwhile, can help us refine our ideas and prevent us from pursuing purposeless dead ends. Even if we do not actively collaborate, the back-and-forth will inspire new approaches to our endeavours.
