Two novelists, an agent and a publisher each share their top three golden rules for publishing a book
Links of the week July 22 2024 (30)
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:
29 July 2024
Does everyone really have a book in them? And if you want to write one, where do you start? The novelist and podcaster Elizabeth Day, host of the How to Fail series, has created a 'podclass' to answer those questions and more, hosted by three publishing pros: novelist Sara Collins, agent Nelle Andrew and publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove. Here, the four share their key advice for getting a book out into the world.
Five ways to use the past in contemporary crime fiction
Historical mystery with its portrayal of life in another time and place has long been one of the most popular subgenres of crime fiction. From ancient Rome and medieval monasteries to the pre-Civil War South, the foggy streets of Victorian London, and the trenches of WW1, readers like me relish the sense of time travel. But is it the glimpse of lost worlds that captures our imaginations, or is there something more meaningful at work? Is history only for historicals? I don'9t believe it is.
Costanza is about 'obsession, desire and control - and one young woman's incredible resilience in the face of male power'
Could you tell us about Costanza, and the inspiration behind it?
Costanza is set in Baroque Rome, 1636, and is the real-life story of Costanza, the lover and muse of rockstar artist Gianlorenzo Bernini. It's about a marble sculpture which altered the course of art history, but it's also about obsession, desire and control - and one young woman's incredible resilience in the face of male power.You have done extensive research into the history of facial disfigurement, which is used in the novel to punish Costanza. What did you learn from it, and what did you want to convey to readers?
Throughout history facial disfigurement has marked women who transgress sexual norms. In ancient times it was nose-cutting, then face-slashing in Costanza's era, and today it's acid attacks. In the Baroque period a woman's beauty symbolised her virtue, yet beautiful women were also thought to corrupt men.
The finances of indie publishing are broken. We need a radical rethink.
In an age when the price of a book often bears little relation to the effort invested in its creation, independent publishers in particular face a critical question: Should they charge more for their books?
The intrinsic value of independent publishing
As the managing director of Fly on the Wall Press (2024 Small Press of The Year, North, The British Book Awards), I know that independent publishers offer unique value propositions: they amplify diverse voices and stories that might be overlooked by larger publishers and they invest time in nurturing new talent. Despite these strengths, small publishers struggle to match the recommended retail prices (RRPs) of the "Big Five" publishers due to rising print costs and lower sales volumes.
The train has left the station, the ship has sailed, pick your preferred metaphor.
This week, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) announced the ability for publishers and other rights holders to include AI training rights as part of licensing arrangements. In other words, they're giving AI companies a one-stop shop for all their model training needs. Update: An article in Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ notes this licensing would be limited to internal use for licensees, which means it would not extend to public-facing models such as ChatGPT. However, it's easy to see how the CCC is taking steps to position itself to offer something more extensive.
What is the CCC? It is a for-profit company that manages collective copyright licensing for corporate and academic publishers. Generally, its mission is to help publishers earn money off copyright and expand copyright protections for rights holders.
In the CCC's announcement, the president of the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies says, "Voluntary licensing solutions are a win-win for everybody in the value chain, including AI developers who want to do the right thing. I am grateful to organizations like CCC, as they are helping the next generation marketplace to evolve robustly and in forward-thinking fashion."
Shortly after submitting his new book, The AI Revolution in Book Publishing: A Concise Guide to Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Writers and Publishers, Thad McIlroy found himself confronted with a surprise: Ingram had flagged the book, issuing a "Catalog Integrity Notice," and removed it from distribution.
It's not out of the question that a book about AI might have been written using AI, McIlroy told PW-and in fact, a small portion of the book did employ AI tools. "I would say that about 1% of the book overall was touched by AI," he explained, pointing out a section in which he leads readers through an exercise of chatting with Claude.ai, as well as a section demonstrating how he used ChatGPT to create all the alt-text for the images to make the book accessible, thus making them more accessible to people with visual impairments.
But as for using AI to write the book, McIlroy said, he didn't. Nevertheless, he surmised that Ingram's filters had mistakenly identified the book as having beengenerated using AI - a mistake indicative of the AI moment we now find ourselves in.
Hot Girl Summer author Sophie Gravia on her anything-but-ordinary publishing journey
My writing journey has been anything but ordinary. I stumbled into my new occupation as an author in what felt like overnight. But it has been a fantastic discovery which has allowed me to share stories across the globe, have financial freedom, and create a new sense of purpose within my life.
It was another era. Not easier, but maybe not quite so crazy hectic as today. The stakes were still high, and in their day - the early 1980s-getting your first book published was still hard work. In many ways, harder.
Bestselling crime author Heather Graham knows. She lived it back then. She started out like most writers buying a Writers Market and mailing her bricks of paper to publishers via snail mail. And then she waited. Of course, this created a two-way street that sometimes worked to your advantage, she says. "If you said a manuscript was ready and it wasn't, you could blame the post office."
"The publishing world has changed drastically since then," she says.
Doing the research for The Silent Killer was both frightening and fascinating, though also surprisingly heartening at times'
Award-winning author Trevor Wood's new novel, The Silent Killer, was published on 18 July by Quercus. It's the first book in the DCI Jack Parker series. Parker has a secret: he's been diagnosed with early onset dementia, and will do anything and everything to keep it hidden, as he investigates a serial killer stalking the Newcastle streets.
Kimberly McCreight on "the fraught push-pull of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic"
Beginning with my very first published short story-written long before I'd had children of my own-my work has often endeavored to explore the complexities of motherhood. This is, in part, because of the significant challenges of my own upbringing. As a result, I've always felt a bit on the outside of the experience. All those encouraging one-liners about motherhood-Don't worry, you'll love them more than you thought possible! Don't worry, everyone has maternal instincts!-never really resonated with me. That said, standing on the outside of something can also make it easier to see the forest through the trees. What I can say for sure is that motherhood is not only incredibly complicated, but these challenges manifest in as many different ways as there are women and children.
Edna O'Brien, one of the most influential and widely read Irish writers of her generation, has died "after a long illness," according to her publisher Faber. She was 93. O'Brien was best known for challenging literary taboos, especially with her candid depictions of the lives of Irish women in full revolt against the oppression of Ireland's traditional values, especially those of the Catholic Church.
Her writing career began with the publication, in 1960, of The Country Girls, a novel about the sexual awakening of two young women who moved from County Clare in rural Ireland to Dublin-much like O'Brien had done herself. The Country Girls was banned by the Irish state censor, and the parish priest in O'Brien's hometown of Tuamgraney is reputed to have burned the book. It became an international bestseller.
The acclaimed author of The Country Girls, which was burned in the market square of her home town, has died aged 93. Here, Irish novelists pay tribute to a titanic figure who liberated their country's fiction
Anne Enright: ‘She was all in, every time'
O'Brien blew open the possibilities for Irish fiction, not because of the taboos she broke but because she had broken them as a woman. In 1960, her first novel The Country Girls was burned in the market square of her home town of Scarriff, and every Irish woman who has published since is indebted to the hurt she took on there.
O'Brien's persona was a mixture of steely determination and an old-style feminine vulnerability. She seemed frightened of many small things - she never learned to swim or to drive, for example - but was unafraid when it came to speaking the truth. She had a beautiful speaking voice and used it marvellously well. Lyrical, playful and passionate, her conversation had a self-replenishing fluency. There were no half measures for Edna: she was all in, every time.
Last year, I finally realised that my habit of seeing everything through to the end was just a colossal waste of time
A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a creative writing workshop at my local university when the tutor made a confession. "I only give a book a handful of pages," she said. "If it hasn't hooked me by then, I put it down." I thought her approach seemed a bit hasty. Who knows what lies beyond a lousy opening. What if the book gets better as it goes on? What if a slow burn blossoms into a literary marvel? "What if it doesn't," the tutor said to my objections. "Anyway, you're young. You've got time to read to the end."
Well, no argument on that last bit. But the thrust of her point didn't sit well. Leaving a novel unfinished felt criminal to me, almost an insult to the author who had slaved over it. If I started something, I wanted to make good on the time I'd already invested. And if I wanted licence to form an opinion on it, surely that required reaching the finish line to see everything it had to offer?
The science fiction and fantasy prize says it has culled 377 votes mostly for ‘Finalist A', who will not be disqualified as there is no proof they were aware
The prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy writing has revealed that almost 400 votes - about 10% of all votes cast in this year's awards - were fraudulently paid for to help one finalist win.
The Hugo administration subcommittee, which tallies the votes for the annual awards, issued a statement on Monday saying that they had determined that 377 votes had been cast by individuals with "obvious fake names and/or other disqualifying characteristics".
These included voters with almost identical surnames, with just one letter changed and placed in alphabetical order, and some whose names were "translations of consecutive numbers".
The voting pattern was "startlingly and obviously different" to anything the members of the current Hugo adminstration subcommittee had ever seen, and most of the votes favoured one finalist, who the subcommittee called "Finalist A".
Half of UK adults don't regularly read and almost one in four (24%) young people aged 16 to 24 say they've never been readers according to research released by The Reading Agency.
The Reading State of the Nation survey was conducted with 2,003 UK nationally representative consumers. It has revealed that more than 27 million UK adults are missing out on the benefits of reading more, including reduced stress levels and improved focus.
This research follows the news of the recent What Kids Are Reading Report, which revealed that children are also reading fewer books for pleasure. That report showed that there has been a 4.4% decrease in the number of books read by children, and it was the first time in 16 years - with the exception of the first year of the pandemic - that a decline was recorded.
The Reading Agency's survey has also found that 15% of UK adults have never read regularly for pleasure, and 35% used to read but have stopped. Young adults face the most barriers to reading, according to the research, which is in line with the findings of the What Kids Are Reading Report that showed a "particularly acute" decline in reading among secondary school students.
Different genres come with different reader expectations that pertain to setting. For instance, readers expect cozies to be set in small towns and hard-boiled detective stories to be based in cities. In some genres, such as fantasy, world building is crucial.
In other genres, like historical fiction, readers want to be immersed in the period not only to see what was there and what wasn't, but to experience how people lived. In Diana Gabaldon's New York Times bestseller Outlander, the Scottish Highlands come alive with lush descriptions-but these descriptions occur only as characters interact with the environment.
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