By any measure, the first half of 2021 was a good period for trade book publishing. Revenue at the companies that report trade sales to 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' StatShot program rose 17.6% over the first six months of 2020; NPD BookScan reported that unit sales increased 18.5% in the period; and bookstore sales jumped 30% over what was a miserable first six months of 2020. So it comes as no surprise that the four publicly traded major publishers also posted strong increases in the period.
Links of the week September 20 2021 (38)
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:
20 September 2021
Of particular note is the fact that while sales were strong, profits were even better, with operating margins showing healthy gains. In general, the publishers cited higher sales of both backlist books and digital content, especially digital audiobooks, for the improved margins. Though supply chain issues and the uncertainty over the delta variant are causing some concerns about how the rest of the year will unfold, publishers are hoping that the increased interest in reading will carry over through the 2021 holiday season and beyond.
Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, insists that he is not, like so many media members before him, going to Substack-at least not full-time. He won't be publishing his next book on the newsletter platform. Instead, he's taken an advance from the company to fool around with "whatever comes into" his head. This will apparently include a serialized novella. "I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age," Rushdie told The Guardian. "Whatever the new thing is that's going to arise out of this new world, I don't think we've seen it yet."
"People have been talking about the death of the novel, almost since the birth of the novel," he continued. "But the actual, old fashioned thing, the hardcopy book, is incredibly, mutinously alive. And here I am having another go, I guess, at killing it."
Rushdie isn't wrong. The physical book has, somewhat improbably, maintained its supremacy in the digital age. Unlike the DVD or CD, nothing has truly emerged to threaten the analog; the printed page hasn't yet had to make a "vinyl comeback." At the same time, the book has hardly adapted to the internet age at all. Whatever the genre, books are simply not at all different than they were a few years ago, and no one seems particularly bothered about it. Not too long ago, there was a brief push to embrace things like QR codes to unlock digital supplementary material, but readers weren't interested; the Kindle, meanwhile, is dominant among e-readers in large part because it so eerily replicates the feel of reading a physical book.
In August 2016, Colleen Hoover's It Ends with Us was published by Simon & Schuster's Atria Books. By the end of its first month on the market, the novel had sold about 21,000 copies at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. The publicity was good-a nine-stop national book tour, blurbs from bestselling authors-and the book hit bestseller lists in its first week on sale, but sales flatlined after that initial month. For several years, weekly sales rarely broke triple digits. Then something changed.
Libby McGuire, senior v-p and publisher of Atria, first noticed a sales bump in November 2020. By the summer of 2021, the bump became a surge: since the start of June, weekly sales have averaged about 17,000. McGuire said Atria has gone back to press 24 times since November to keep up with demand. "We are printing as quickly as we can," she said, "and expect to go back several times through the fall." The novel has sold more than 308,000 copies since the start of 2021-with sales peaking at just over 29,000 copies in the week ended August 14-and just shy of 450,000 since its 2016 release, according to BookScan.
Perhaps you've noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don't know why I hate them. Maybe it's snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology and media, I'm a secret Luddite. Maybe I can't stand the idea of looking at books as computers after a long day of looking at computers as computers. I don't know, except for knowing that ebooks are awful.
If you hate ebooks like I do, that loathing might attach to their dim screens, their wonky typography, their weird pagination, their unnerving ephemerality, or the prison house of a proprietary ecosystem. If you love ebooks, it might be because they are portable, and legible enough, and capable of delivering streams of words, fiction and nonfiction, into your eyes and brain with relative ease. Perhaps you like being able to carry a never-ending stack of books with you wherever you go, without having to actually lug them around. Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why.
For our latest look at the middle grade category of children's books, we turn to the professionals who work in, well, the middle of it all: the literary agents who serve as intermediaries between authors and publishers. A handful of agents revealed some of the middle grade trends they are observing from their unique vantage point.
"This is a rich and wonderful time to be working in middle grade," according to Laura Rennert, executive agent at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. "I am definitely receiving submissions from a wider variety of voices than I have in the past," she says, "and that is part of what is making this such an exciting time for middle grade. There are so many voices, points of view, and stories that haven't previously been represented in middle grade. I think many authors are trying to write books they wish they had when they were young, and these stories are giving so many more readers the chance to feel seen and understood."
Anyone who attended the virtual event in June, when BookBrunch and Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/ announced the winners of this year's US Selfies Book Awards, can testify to the fact that I was completely blindsided when my debut novel L'Origine appeared on the screen as adult fiction winner. I remember being totally speechless (I'm pretty sure I was gaping like a fish). Then came the tears. This may sound melodramatic but any writer who has put his or her blood, sweat and tears into their literary baby understands the powerful emotions that come with that sort of validation.
As a general rule, we writers are a sensitive bunch. We labour over our keyboards in solitude, alternating between thinking that our words will change the world, and being convinced that those very same words have no business ever seeing the light of day. That's why book awards - especially for self-published authors like myself - are a critical litmus test in the writing journey. They provide an impartial, objective barometer of where your book stands relative to other books and, more importantly, whether your book connects with seasoned judges who wade through hundreds of submissions.
Charlie and Lola creator Lauren Child is calling for attitudes towards children's books to change, criticising the "lazy" assumption that "creating work with children in mind is easier or less demanding".
The former children's laureate will launch a manifesto this evening in which she lays out her belief that in considering work created for children - from books to illustration, art and music and more - to be lesser, we are undervaluing what it means to be a child.
"There is a common, and lazy, assumption that creating work with children in mind is easier or less demanding, and that a writer or artist would approach it with a lesser degree of seriousness or sincerity than when creating for an adult audience. I do not believe that to be true," writes Child in the manifesto.
"One might as well suggest that shorter books hold less meaning than longer ones, or large paintings are better than small. Nevertheless, the view prevails, something which leads one to wonder: what unhappy reality does its existence reveal about the way many view our children, and our child selves?"
'I've written bits of Dick Francis novels for years,' I hear myself saying, 'So, before you ask anyone else, I'd like to have a go at writing a full one myself.'
Under Orders is published in 2006 under my father's sole name. If it is to stimulate sales of his backlist, I argue, it has to be a 'Dick Francis'. It sells well, of course, with that name on the jacket, going to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. However, I am worried about the reviews, believing they will all say that 'Dick has lost it.' But they don't. Instead, they all announce that 'The Master is back.' Now we are 16 years on from that Gay Hussar lunch, and Iced, my 15th book, is published this September.
Much has changed. My name is now writ large on the front, but still with 'A Dick Francis Novel' printed under the title. That is my choice. I feel that, in spite of Dad's death in 2010, he is as much a part of my books as I now feel that I am part of all of his.
There's the New York we see. The streets and neighborhoods, townhouses and office buildings, stoops and bodegas. That's a damn good city, electric and irrepressible, but there's another place just beyond that surface and it's populated by our ambitions. A city of nighthawks and hustlers. Around every corner, a new scheme. That's the heady undergirding of Colson Whitehead's newest novel, Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021).
Colson Whitehead: Whether I'm writing about zombies amok or a heist, this is stuff I like. I have to give myself permission, though. Can I write a crime novel? I'm not an expert. Can I write a zombie novel? I've read very few zombie novels, although I do like zombie movies. Or it might be about slavery or, say, coming-of-age in 1980s Sag Harbor. I try to come at it from my own point-of-view and to make a contribution. I enjoy it. Hopefully if you do that right, other people will come along and enjoy it too.
I have the unlikeliest of excuses for writing about disobedient spies, but here goes: the government censor made me do it.
Rewind seven years or so, to the day I sat down to write the first page of my first novel. Scribbled notes from the time suggest that the anxious author had in mind something fairly conventional for his first outing: a mysterious incident; largely decent spies in thoughtful pursuit of less decent spies; ensuing confusion, mayhem and occasional brilliance.
But within a chapter or two, I had encountered an obstacle so high, wide and heavy that there was no way past it. How do you describe an intelligence operation in anything close to realistic terms if the conditions of your employment stipulate that you have to submit your manuscript to the censor in advance of publication? Can you list the technical resources that spies might deploy to track someone down? No. Can you identify the various stones investigators would overturn in their hunt for a terrorist? No. Can you describe what a bug looks like? Of course not. Can you have a covert entry team bypass an alarm system and break into - no, no, no.
Seven years ago, Louise Ross swapped her career in financial law for a life of crime (writing). She has eschewed the traditional model of agents and publishers deciding instead to do it all herself, selling more than seven million copies in the process. Howdunnit?
A young woman brutally slaughtered in a ritualistic killing on Holy Island. A skeleton concealed by a murderer in Hadrian's Wall. A robbery of ancient artefacts from Durham Cathedral.
While most visitors to the picturesque landmarks of north-east England enjoy the views, it would seem Louise Ross spots an opportunity for crime.
"I'm not sure what it says about my personality," the 36-year-old from Northumberland laughs, speaking via phone from a family holiday in Cornwall where, funnily enough, she has also set a mystery novel. view of Cornwall sea
When I was 14 I shaved my head, stayed in a room alone for three days, and then dipped in the cool morning waters of the Ganges. It was all part of a common Indian ritual, a rite of passage between childhood and adolescence. The alone-in-a-room-for-three-days part was meant to be a time for contemplation and meditation, but I took it as an opportunity to read David Copperfield cover to cover. "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," wrote Charles Dickens in the voice of David Copperfield, and as a teenager searching for my own story, I was enraptured.
I was also trying to write my first novel. There's little that I remember about this manuscript other than it served as a mimicry for the writers I was reading at the time - Dickens and a few Bengali authors who wrote similarly long and complicated plot lines - but I still remember the feeling of being stuck. I remember that feeling as viscerally as having my head shaved.
Every reader goes through phases with their selection habits. Last year, for example, I wanted as little to do with the modern world as possible, for reasons I'm sure you can understand. I didn't want to read anything set in the last decade and I certainly didn't feel like reading any dystopian novels written to reflect an ominous future. I wanted out of these times and, for about nine months, out of this place as well. Escapism. Nostalgia. My fiction intake was a pretty steady diet of P.G. Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Vita Sackville-West and Anthony Powell. I wanted to read about British people from the last century and their very British problems that were sometimes funny, but often just sad enough.
But by the new year I was looking for something else. I wasn't sure what. I knew I was watching a lot of neo-noir films from the 1980s and liked that particular vibe. I wanted something gritty but fun.
And then I read about the writer Carl Hiaasen retiring his column at the Miami Times, and I thought about how Hiaasen is a writer who has been in my life in varying ways since I was a little kid, and how I had read two of his books in the past and really liked them, but I%u2019d never immersed myself in his work despite remembering my family talking about something he wrote in the late 1980s over dinner at some restaurant in Miami, and how mature I felt at a young age hearing adults talk about something they had read. So I decided maybe a trip through Hiaasen's Florida was in order. I read five of his novels, including his most recent, Squeeze Me, a sendup of the Trump years in South Florida, the first novel directly referencing these recent times that I read and enjoyed amid, well, these recent times. There was just something about the way Hiaasen told the story - the attention to certain details, the way the story felt almost reported - that grabbed me and didn't let me go.
Submitting your poems to a magazine, journal, or press is the first step to sharing your work with an audience and building up a readership, which is crucial if you're looking to publish your work in a pamphlet or collection later down the line. To help you in this process, we have compiled a list of places to submit your wonderful poems this year!
Publishers avoid highlighting the people who choose every word of the books they bring to English readers. This lack of transparency is misguided and unfair
Since I began an MFA in literary translation at the University of Iowa exactly 20 years ago, there have been numerous positive changes in the way translators are paid and perceived. Take the International Booker prize, which since 2016 has split the generous sum of £50,000 between author and translator, thereby genuinely recognising the work as a fundamentally collaborative entity that, like a child, needs two progenitors in order to exist.
Despite this type of extraordinary progress, there is ample room for improvement still. Often enough, translators receive no royalties - I don't in the US for Flights - and a surprising number of publishers do not credit translators on the covers of their books. This is where the author's name always goes; this is where you'll find the title, too. People tend to be surprised when I mention this, but take another look at the International Booker, and you'll see what I mean.
Netflix has bought the rights to Roald Dahl's classic children's books from the author's family.
The deal means the streaming giant will own creations like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG.
Netflix will control what happens to them in publishing as well as TV and film - and receive the royalties.
It will also create numerous spin-off games, stage shows and other live experiences. Neither side would reveal how much the deal is worth.
The takeover means The Roald Dahl Story Company - which is run by Dahl's grandson Luke Kelly and was previously owned by the family and other employees - will now become a division of Netflix.
It earned £26m revenue from the author's work in 2019, according to its latest accounts.