The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., running all this week, has provided a virtual forum for publishers to discuss how they have adapted to the changes caused by the global pandemic. True to its 2020 motto, Signals of Hope, conversations have been largely positive, with speakers all over the world emphasizing that the book business, while beleaguered, has proven surprisingly resilient and, contrary to cliché and accusations of being mired in the past, adaptable to the new conditions of bookselling and publishing.
Links of the week October 12 2020 (42)
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:
19 October 2020
The message of publishing's resilience was reinforced throughout the first three days of the fair, in official forums, such as Frankfurt's own conferences and B2B professional program, to unofficial events, like the ReBoot conference, which took place on Tuesday morning as the fair started. Many speakers overlapped and were faces familiar to Frankfurt regulars. Here are some highlights from the dozens of hours of programming so far.
The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., which ran October 14-18, was reimagined for 2020 as an entirely virtual event. The fair usually hosts more than 300,000 visitors, but this year, because of the spread of Covid-19 across Europe, all in-person events were canceled. Instead, the organizers channeled several million euros in government support into producing a broad slate of online activities. The schedule listed 3,627 events during the fair, including some 70 hours of business-to-business trade events and nearly 200 more hours of programming targeting the reading public. And dozens of writers gave talks at this year's Bookfest, the concurrent literary festival.
As of Friday, Frankfurt organizers reported 148,000 participants from 183 countries. The fair tried to replicate some of the networking and serendipitous interactions that are so essential to the Frankfurt experience by providing a matchmaking tool, which was used by 2,362 trade participants. Another such effort, dubbed the Hof (after the Frankfurter Hof hotel, a popular drinking and meeting spot), featured daily sessions that included live music, meditation, chair yoga, and fireside chats with industry professionals.
The rights activity went virtual this year too, with the introduction of pre-recorded pitch sessions conducted by publishing houses and the Frankfurt Rights platform, which sought to streamline deal making and attracted 4,165 sellers and buyers, who uploaded 31,100 titles for the fair.
The celebrated Israeli novelist David Grossman has called on his fellow writers to be "trenchant witnesses" to the Covid-19 pandemic, and to "sound warnings in every place" where civil and human rights are threatened as a result of the crisis.
The author and peace activist was speaking from his home outside Jerusalem on Tuesday at the launch of the Frankfurt book fair, which opens on Wednesday. Usually the world's largest trade publishing event, with more than a quarter of a million visitors, this year the event is mostly a digital occasion, with more than 4,400 online exhibitors from 103 countries, and 2,100 virtual events during the week of the fair.
The winner of the Man Booker International prize for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar, Grossman suggested authors can "Cease the burden" of the coronavirus outbreak with their "power of observation".
A number of big summer bestsellers, a surge in interest in books on social justice, and ongoing demand by parents for children's books that both educate and entertain combined to continue to push up unit sales of print books through this year's third quarter. According to NPD BookScan, print unit sales rose 6.4% for the nine months ended Oct. 3, 2020 over the comparable span in 2019.
Unit sales jumped 29.1% in the juvenile nonfiction category, led by huge demand for Big Preschool Workbook, which sold nearly 649,000 print copies in the period, and My First Learn-to-Write Workbook by Crystal Radke, which sold almost 595,000 copies.
YA nonfiction, which is the smallest of the six major categories, had the biggest gains, with 2.5 million units sold in the first nine months of 2020. Live by Sadie Robertson Huff was the top seller in the category, selling more than 101,000 copies. YA nonfiction also benefitted from the continuing misclassification of Johanna Basfords adult coloring books. Three of her backlist titles combined to sell about 120,000 copies in the period, and adult coloring books in general saw gains during Covid-19 lockdowns.
It wasn't what people were talking about late into the evening at the Frankfurter Hof. It didn't come up over drinks at the Hessischer Hof. No one was whispering about it between meetings in the window-less rights center at the show. Instead, during this year's virtual Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two., Bonnie Garmus's debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry, was discussed over email, on the phone and via Zoom. None of this, however, stopped it from becoming what is arguably the book of this year's event.
The title, which sold for a rumored $2 million to Lee Boudreaux at Doubleday, is, according to multiple sources, one of the biggest books of this strangest of fairs. One scout called it "the clear book of the fair from a foreign rights perspective." Another insider said "it's what everyone is talking about."
While Boudreaux took North American rights to the title (in a deal brokered by ICM's Jennifer Joel, on behalf of Felicity Blunt at Curtis BrownSee Curtis Brown listing UK) a swath of foreign sales have also been closed. At press time, Blunt confirmed that, in addition to the English language sale, the book has sold in 22 other deals.
Oh Bill! This isn't the kind of news we need now. The legendary Bill Bryson, purveyor of funny, insightful, warm-hearted books on everything from travel to popular science, for most of my life to date, has announced his retirement.
The 68-year-old author told Times Radio: "I don't know how much of this is pandemic-related [but] I'm really quite enjoying not doing anything at all. For the first time in literally decades I've been reading for pleasure and I'm really enjoying it. Whatever time is left to me on this planet I'd like to spend it indulging myself, rather than going out and trying to cover new territory."
Let's talk about toxic masculinity in the thriller genre.
Nearly all violent crimes are committed by men, around 90% in fact. Equal amounts of men and woman are victims of violence, which means that men are responsible for nearly all the violence committed against men and women. They are certainly responsible for virtually all the acts of sexual violence perpetrated in the Western world, and an unhappy percentage of criminal and domestic violence.
My publicist suggested that I might like to write about the issue of toxic masculinity for this essay, as my latest novel, Invisible Girl, is absolutely jam-packed with men behaving badly. The book deals with violent sexual attacks, marital infidelity, gas-lighting and the Incel community. Lots of nasty, nasty men doing nasty, nasty things. Which might suggest that I have an issue with toxic masculinity myself.
But actually, when I think back across my nearly nineteen novels, I find that no, I don't have a particular axe to grind. Quite the opposite.
The literati is splitting into two rival camps in an incendiary argument over trans rights - and JK Rowling is at the centre. Katie Law reports from the increasingly toxic front line
JK Rowling's new book Troubled Blood turns out to be a brutally apt description of the current state of play in the literary world, as a growing number of high-profile authors are becoming embroiled in the transgender war that began earlier this year after she posted a tweet mocking the use of the word "people" who menstruate instead of "women. "We live in an extremely polarized era and this is a matter of piling on what is perceived to be the "right" side," says Lionel Shriver, who was one of 58 names to sign an open letter "In Solidarity with J K Rowling" to the Sunday Times at the end of September. "This has become one of those trigger issues for getting on one's high horse."
The Society of AuthorsThe British authors’ organization, with a membership of over 7,000 writers. Membership is open to those who have had a book published, or who have an offer to publish (without subsidy by the author). Offers individual specialist advice and a range of publications to its members. Has also campaigned successfully on behalf of authors in general for improved terms and established a minimum terms agreement with many publishers. Recently campaigned to get the Public Lending Right fund increased from £5 million to £7 million for the year 2002/2003. Regularly uses input from members to produce comparative surveys of publishers’ royalty payment systems. http://www.societyofauthors.org/' third survey of the financial impact of Covid-19 on author incomes has found that the pandemic is taking a rising toll on earnings, with 65% of authors, illustrators and literary translators now saying they have suffered a loss of income, up from 57% when the last survey was conducted in May.
Nearly half (49%) of the 511 respondents to the society's latest online poll, which ran from 7th September to 12th October, said that they were suffering a loss of more than a quarter of their income, compared to just 34% who, when asked in the spring, said that they were anticipating losses of that level.
Meanwhile, income from author events has not recovered after the initial lockdown, the survey found, with nearly two in three authors (63%) reporting no increase in bookings since the spring and almost one in three (31%) confirming that bookings are continuing to be cancelled into next year.
The survey also indicated that book advances may be falling for many: of the 18% of respondents reporting that they had been offered advances since lockdown, just over half (53%) reported that the amounts remained unchanged, compared to one in five who reported "considerable decreases" relative to earlier works, the SoA said.
SoA chief executive Nicola Solomon said: "This latest in our series of income surveys highlights what many of us had feared: most authors are being significantly financially affected by the crisis without proper government support and without any prospect of authors' appearances picking up.
It was hard to miss the fact that Amazon Prime had a sale this week. Newspapers and magazines covered the event as a celebration of consumption. This on top of a coronavirus pandemic that has accelerated the collapse of already struggling bricks-and-mortar retailers.
It is not surprising that so many of us shop with Amazon. The prices seem low. Purchases arrive promptly. But an examination of this gift horse's mouth also raises serious concerns. Even before the pandemic Amazon's aggressive pricing strategies made it difficult for smaller companies to compete. This is exacerbated by the fact that the company does not pay enough back to the state. In 2018 it paid £14.3m in corporation tax on £13.7bn in UK revenues. Without shops on the high street, it pays less in business rates than more traditional competitors such as Tesco.
It is an intolerable situation that a company that depends on the public services run by the state does not pay an appropriate level of taxes. To add insult to injury, this week it was reported that while the new digital services tax excludes Amazon's earnings from products it sells directly, the services tax is being passed on by Amazon to small traders using the site. It has also been reported, though denied by the Treasury, that the UK might abandon the tax to get a US trade deal. The issue is one of fairness, and making sure big tech is taxed properly needs urgent government attention.
Literary Events in Days of Yore
One Saturday each month, the gallery-esque space of a United Methodist Church serves as an intimate venue to showcase writers from all around, its white walls and deep hardwood floors the perfect backdrop for the Argenta Reading Series. In what began as a one-off, the series started in 2017 when Guy Choate refused to let Little Rock, Arkansas, be another flyover spot for writers on tour. Seventy-five people turned out that first night when Nicholas Manieri showed up to read. Many hadn't heard of Manieri, but that didn't stop them from buying the book or asking Choate when the next reading was scheduled.
"It changes the cultural landscape of a place like Little Rock to have a literary event like this that didn't exist before," says Choate. Writers like Molly McCully Brown, Kai Coggin, Allison Joseph, and Maurice Carlos Ruffin have stopped there, and they not only increase the city's literary profile but also open up residents to a more diverse-and often more challenging-scope of literature. When you pair that with wine, conversation, and even homemade cookies from Choate's mother, you have a reading series that does more than promote any one writer's work-it fills a need in the community. "I want to help shape [Little Rock] in a way that ... my son will grow up in the city and be proud of it," Choate says.
12 October 2020
What's plot? Discover the definition of plot, different types of plots, the various elements of a great plot including Vonnegut's story shapes!
In fiction writing, a plot is the cause and effect sequence of significant events that make up the story's narrative. These events can include things like an inciting incident, mid-plot point, climax, and resolution.
But there is so much more to plot than this boring definition. So, today we are going to talk about what plot is all about.
Let's take a deep drive on plot and figure out how to use it for our own stories! We'll start with types of plot.
On February 8, 2018, at 10:22 p.m., Donald J. Trump opened his Twitter app and name-checked a private detective. "Steele of fraudulent Dossier fame," the president wrote. "All tied into Crooked Hillary."
It was a remarkable occurrence: an American head of state publicly acknowledging the work of a private eye, in this case a former British spy named Christopher Steele.
Trump had reason to fear, and disparage, Steele. A veteran of MI6, the United Kingdom's foreign intelligence service, with expertise in Russia, Steele helps run a private intelligence firm in London called Orbis Business Intelligence. In mid-2016, during the U.S. presidential campaign, Steele uncovered what he believed to be salacious and treasonous behavior by Trump, who was then one in a crowded field of Republican candidates.
The leads Steele and his contacts developed - about Trump's sexual proclivities (potential blackmail material) and what Steele suspected was evidence of Russian collaboration with Trump's campaign (potential impeachment material) - so alarmed him that he alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom he had consulted on other projects.
Akwaeke Emezi, who became the first non-binary transgender author to be nominated for the Women's prize in 2019, has said that they will not let their future novels be entered for the award after the prize asked them for information on their sex as defined "by law".
When Emezi made the running for the Women's prize last year for their debut novel, Freshwater, judges said they were not aware of Emezi's gender when reading submissions and described their longlisting as a "historic moment".
Emezi said that when Faber got in touch with the Women's prize about submitting The Death of Vivek Oji, they were informed: "The information we would require from you regards Akwaeke Emezi's sex as defined by law."
"Forget about me - I don't want this prize - but anyone who uses this kind of language does not fuck with trans women either, so when they say it's for women, they mean cis women," wrote Emezi. "And yes, this does mean that them longlisting [Freshwater] was transphobic. It's fine for me not to be eligible because I'm not a woman! But you not about to be out here on some ‘sex as defined by law' like that's not a weapon used against trans women."
"I'm a very sociable person. The fact that I dislike interviews doesn't mean I'm a recluse," the poet Louise Glück said early on in our interview.
Glück had been put in an uncomfortable spot. On Thursday morning, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Journalists were lining the street outside her home in Cambridge, Mass. Her phone hadn't stopped ringing since 7 a.m., an onslaught of attention she described as "nightmarish."
By now, Glück should be accustomed to acclaim. In a career that has lasted more than five decades, she has published a dozen volumes of poetry and received virtually every prestigious literary prize: The National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Humanities Medal, among others.
She's revered by literary critics and her peers for her spare, direct and confessional verses.
Amazon is the opposite of our romantic imagination of Italian villages lined with bakeries and old cobbler shops. But the pandemic persuaded Italians to overcome their reluctance to online shopping - and Amazon.
Adam Satariano, who writes about European technology for The New York Times, talked to me about his article on why Amazon's playbook started to work in Italy, and if the country is a template for other parts of the world where Amazon hasn't caught on.
Adam: Online shopping has never been as common there as it is in the United States or elsewhere in Europe. Italy has the oldest population in Europe, and people tend to prefer shopping in stores and paying in cash. Roads in many parts of the country, especially in the less affluent south, are pretty bad.
Author Rumaan Alam kept his expectations low, even as the film rights to his upcoming book "Leave the World Behind" became the center of a bidding contest among Hollywood studios this summer.
During two brisk weeks in July, the Brooklyn-based novelist kept interrupting his family vacation on Fire Island to field phone calls from agents, producers and executives. Sam Esmail, creator of USA Network's "Mr. Robot," was on board to direct a feature based on the socially conscious thriller. Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington had agreed to star and produce. Studios including Netflix, Apple and MGM were making offers.
Alam remained skeptical until that Monday when, while on the beach with his husband and two sons, he got the call from Michelle Weiner, head of Creative Artists Agency's books department, who was handling the auction, saying they'd scored a deal with Netflix. "I was waiting for the day when Michelle's assistant would have to send me, like, a consolation bottle of Champagne," Alam said. I was sitting there in the sand kind of dumbfounded."
From her offices in White River Junction, Vt., Chelsea Green president and publisher Margo Baldwin says she has every reason to be pleased. To date, sales are up 40% this year over the same time last year. The company did more than $1 million in sales in April and again in May. Nor is one category thriving more than others. Every genre, from health books to cooking, gardening, health, and politics, is up.
But as the publisher prepares to release a highly controversial title later this week, it's the politics of American publishing that worries Baldwin, and are driving a radical edge at the 36-year-old publishing house. The title in question is Naomi Wolf's Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (Oct. 9), which was previously acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and canceled amid a firestorm of allegations about inaccuracies in 2019.
At the time, Wolf was challenged for mistakenly describing the sentences of two Britons tried for sodomy in the 19th century as having been executed when they were not. In fact, while gay men were put to death for charges of sodomy, her critics pointed out that the term Wolf had misinterpreted meant that death sentences for those two individuals had not been carried out.
Baldwin, who published Wolf's The End of America in 2007, said the book's cancellation was an overreaction by HMH to a relatively small number of errors, all of which have been addressed in the forthcoming edition, and none of which have altered the premise of the book.
The Women's Prize has issued a statement saying that eligibility for the prize extends to "all women" where a woman is defined as "a cis woman, a transgender woman or anyone who is legally defined as a woman or of the female sex".
The clarification was provided after writer Akwaeke Emezi, who identifies as non-binary, said on social media they would be required to provide information on their "sex as defined by law" by organisers. They were longlisted for 2019's prize for their debut novel Freshwater (Faber) but under the new terms and conditions will not be able to enter new novel The Death of Vivek Oji (Faber).
The prize emphasised it seeks to celebrate "the experience of being a woman in all its varied forms". However, organisers confirmed that "anyone who wishes to enter must also be legally defined as a woman or of the female sex to be able to do so". The two key documents required to demonstrate this are birth certificate or a gender recognition certificate.
The policy means transgender women who have yet to legally change their gender would not be able to enter. In 2018, the government revealed that only 4,910 people had legally changed their gender since the Gender Recognition Act came into force in 2004. Individuals who identify as non-binary would only be able to enter if legally their gender is female.
The first time I ever saw one of my books on a "best of crime fiction" list, I felt sure that someone had missed an important piece of information. I wasn't sure if it was me or the writer of that list. In my mind, "crime fiction" was exclusively written about crime and criminals from the perspective of detectives trying to thwart the criminals and their crimes.
I'd grown up on Dell Shannon and Ed McBain novels I got from my grandfather, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton books from the library. A child of the 70s and 80s, I'd been exposed to an endless stream of cop TV show-Adam-12, Kojak, Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey.
The problem for me was that none of these stories aligned with what I'd been taught about the police or detectives. My first lesson from my father was never to trust the police. This isn't too surprising, when you consider that my father has a long history of criminal behavior and incarceration. Even my grandfather, who was a law-abiding citizen, cautioned me about the police.
While other kids at school were learning to call 911 in case of an emergency, I was learning that the police were not necessarily there to help people like us, people with a "history" with law enforcement.
The prestigious TS Eliot prize has revealed a shortlist that shows that poetry is "the most resilient, potent, capacious and universal art we have".
Announcing the 10 titles in the running for the £25,000 award for the year's best collection, the most valuable prize in British poetry, the poet and chair of judges, Lavinia Greenlaw, said the jury had been "unsettled, captivated and compelled" by the books they chose.
"When the pandemic hit, certain concerns of ours began to seem rather trivial," said Greenlaw, who together with the poets Mona Arshi and Andrew McMillan read 153 collections to come up with the shortlist. "We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received."
A previously unpublished writer has described the "extraordinary" moment a publisher offered him a six-figure advance on a three-book deal.
Egmont Books snapped up Jack Meggitt-Phillips' children's novel The Beast and the Bethany before it could go to auction.
Film rights are being chased by a firm headed by a Harry Potter producer.
"I did have to check a few times that it wasn't spam," said Mr Meggitt-Phillips, originally from Cardiff.
"I felt very sorry for the neighbours at the time because I jumped up and down and squealed not unlike a pig."
When I made the extremely practical decision to abandon my career in publishing to become a writer, I didn't know I wanted to write children's books. I thought I wanted to write for adults. Accordingly, my first published work was an illustrated book about fortune-telling; my second was about opera; my third, about urban legends; my fourth, I'm not exactly sure, because right about that time, I stopped being interested in adults.
I had had some babies, you see, during this period, and suddenly, I was spending all my time with children; I read only children's books; I talked only to children; I thought only about children. I had nothing to say to grown-ups, and most of the time, I didn't understand what they were saying to me. Why did they want to talk about real estate when they could talk about pterodactyls? Why were they obsessed with traffic when they could be obsessed with buried treasure? Adult conversation had become incredibly dull, and adult books, duller.
It was in this spirit that I decided I would become a children's book writer.
The poet Rita Dove was once asked what makes poetry successful. She went on to illuminate three key areas: First, the heart of the writer; the things they wish to say - their politics and overarching sensibilities. Second, their tools: how they work language to organise and position words. And the third, the love a person must have for books: "To read, read, read."
When I started mapping out How to Write It, I wanted to focus on the aspects of writing development that took in both theoretical and interpersonal aspects. No writer lives in a vacuum, their job is an endless task of paying attention. How do I get myself an agent? What's the best way to approach a publisher? Should I self-publish?
There is never one way to assuage the concerns of those looking to make a career out of writing. Many labour tirelessly for decades on manuscripts that never make it to print. The UK on average publishes around 185,000 new titles per year, ranking us the third largest publishing market in the world, yet the number of aspiring writers is substantially greater.