Roy Miller's Blog, page 285
February 2, 2017
Hillary Clinton to deliver verdict on Trump in new book | Books
It was one of the toughest presidential races in recent history and one that would have completely flattened many candidates, but Hillary Clinton is to reveal how she survived her bruising encounters with Donald Trump in a series of essays to be published worldwide this autumn.
The as yet untitled book will be a collection of essays inspired by quotations she has used to get through a life blighted by battles with political opponents, the media and her husband’s high-profile sexual scandals. It will also include her thoughts on the 2016 election campaign and Trump himself, her publisher Simon & Schuster said.
“These quotes have helped me celebrate the good times, laugh at the absurd times, persevere during the hard times and deepen my appreciation of all life has to offer,” Clinton said in a statement.
Though the book is not billed as a memoir, all eyes will be on what she shares about her unsuccessful campaign for the White House and the vituperative campaign waged against her: not just by Trump and his supporters, but also by Bernie Sanders, her Democrat rival.
Few people have needed as much sustaining inspiration during their career as Clinton. The 2016 campaign was marked by attacks on her integrity, claims that she had used her personal email to send classified information and questions about the Clinton Foundation, the charity run with her husband Bill and daughter Chelsea. It also saw Trump bring alleged sexual abuse victims of her husband to televised debates, allegations of Russian interference in the election to sway the victory for Trump and the intervention of FBI director James Comey over the email allegations in the week just before the election.
During her husband’s political career, Clinton was dragged into the media spotlight thanks to allegations of his having extramarital affairs, which ended with his impeachment and acquittal following his involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
How much Clinton received for the new book was not revealed by S&S president and chief executive Carolyn Reidy, though it is expected to be substantial. In 2004, Bill Clinton received $15m (£12m) from Random House for his memoir My Life, while a year earlier his wife, by then a US senator, received $8m from S&S for her memoir Living History. The advance paid to Clinton by S&S for her 2014 memoir Hard Choices was never disclosed, but it was speculated to be around $14m.
“We are delighted that Secretary Clinton finally thinks the time is right to share the words and thoughts that nourished and enriched her, and defined the experiences of her extraordinary life,” Reidy said.
The book will appear concurrently with a picture-book version of the former US secretary of state’s 1996 bestseller, It Takes a Village.
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Songs of Themselves – The New York Times
Outside the conservatory, it’s 1970s New York City, and Butler by default embarks on the hero’s journey particular to that time and place, stealing food and spare change from a roommate, riding the subway with fake tokens and sleeping with an assortment of grungy ne’er-do-wells, including one who winds up at Rikers Island for what Butler later learns was a rape at gunpoint. In one especially affecting scene, Butler plays a Harlem church gig and is discreetly acknowledged by a congregant who recognizes her from the bus to Rikers.
“That was the thing about being a girl who played the oboe and had a boyfriend in the clink,” Butler explains, in what is surely the only time such a sentence has ever been committed to paper. “It was easy for me to separate the two realities and carry on as if all were harmoniously blended.”
If the colluding forces of her father’s abuse, her relentless self-discipline, and her love of opera and similarly concupiscent classical works split Butler into two discordant and ultimately incompatible halves — dutiful nerd on one side, hot mess on the other — James Rhodes’s dysfunction broke him into the proverbial million little pieces. A late-blooming British virtuoso pianist who found celebrity in part by styling himself as a sort of rock ’n’ roll bad boy of the classical world — his albums have titles like “Razor Blades, Little Pills and Big Pianos” — Rhodes never landed in jail. But reading INSTRUMENTAL: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music (Bloomsbury, $27), you get the sense he wishes he could claim such dramatic levels of bottoming out. If his first love is music, his second is his own destruction. As a child he endured sexual abuse by a teacher that was horrific enough to result in long-term physical disability as well as psychological damage that led to promiscuity, substance abuse, dissociative identity disorder, suicidal ideation and self-injury. At one point, he takes off his shirt and shows his wife that he’s carved the word “toxic” into his arm with a razor blade.
Rhodes would like us to know that he’s in good company. Musicians, even powdered-wig types like Bach and Mozart, are notorious for making train wrecks of their personal lives. As proof, Rhodes splices his own story with interstitial mini-bios of great composers, leaning heavily on the tortured nature of their genius and attendant psychosis. Schubert was “a walking, talking car crash,” Beethoven’s family was “riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse and cruelty,” and Schumann, a failed suicide, died “alone and afraid” in an asylum, but not before writing “Geister (Ghost) Variations,” a piece “so called because he said that ghosts had dictated the opening theme to him.”
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Butler’s book also contains italicized interstitial sections, which she deploys to show the grueling process of learning a piece of music, making reeds or the cobbled-together life of a working musician. But while “The Skin Above My Knee” is overwritten in places (it would appear the author never met an adjective she couldn’t find a job for), it ultimately succeeds because it leaves readers knowing a thing or two about an esoteric world they probably never thought about before. “Instrumental,” for its part, hews desperately to the well-trod conventions of the well-trod genre known as Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Self-Hating Narcissist.
Quoting from “Instrumental” is tricky, since Rhodes drops an unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper epithet at least once a page. He is quite good at articulating the often intractable dimensions of shame as experienced by sexual abuse survivors. But he seems almost chemically dependent on the F-word and its innumerable iterations. His use is excessive even by the standards of the digital age, according to which “voicey” writers on the web reflexively opt for lazy vernacular as a way of branding themselves as insouciant badasses. The effect, however, is nearly always tedious and soporific, the verbal equivalent of a weary double-reed player blowing nothing but remedial long tones.
An antidote, at least of a sort, can be found in Andrew Schulman, whose earnest but affable memoir, WAKING THE SPIRIT: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador, $25), uses the author’s own story as the first movement rather than the entire symphony. In 2009, Schulman was placed in a medically induced coma following a cascade of post-surgical complications and thought to be near death until his wife, Wendy, pressed an earbud to his head and played Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion.” Within hours, his vital signs stabilized, his life saved by “the passion of Wendy and Bach.”
Once recovered, Schulman pursues a second career as a volunteer “medical musician,” enrolling in the hospital’s music therapy program and eventually returning to the same intensive care ward where he was once a patient. If Schulman seems a little too dazzled by the notion of his own healing powers — several scenes show patients taking miraculous turns as he strums his guitar next to their beds — he redeems himself with his willingness to take on some real research and reporting. He talks with neuroscientists and psychiatrists and explores the legacy of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher who was among the first to recognize the healing properties of music. Along the way, Schulman posits that the relationship between the pain we feel and the songs and compositions we love has its roots in a tender, transcendent form of symbiosis. “Artists who used their music to alleviate their own suffering composed some of the greatest music ever written,” Schulman writes, “which in turn has the effect of ameliorating the suffering of others.”
Not that there will ever be a cure for the suffering that music can sometimes inflict on the very musicians playing it. But, hey, it’s nice work if you can get it.
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Malorie Blackman leads books world’s protests against US travel ban | Books
Former children’s laureate Malorie Blackman and The Humans author Matt Haig have vowed not to return to the US while a travel ban signed by president Donald Trump remains in place. The news came as Manchester-based Comma Press announced that during 2018 it would only translate books by authors from the seven countries named in the executive order.
Blackman led authors’ furious response to the travel ban with a tweet on Saturday night. “Thank you to all those who have invited me to various US lit fests/events, but I won’t be visiting the US any time soon,” she wrote.
Fellow author Philip Pullman, chair of the Society of Authors, expressed solidarity with the Noughts and Crosses author. “I’m fully in sympathy with Malorie’s decision, and I might well decide the same way myself if I had a journey forthcoming,” he said.
Haig, who also wrote the bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive, said he had cancelled a proposed family holiday to the US. Though he described it as a “small gesture”, he added: “It just seems like a lack of solidarity at this present moment to go on holiday there with the ban in place.” Urging fellow writers to “do what they can”, however small, he added: “I think writers, by their nature, can be very good at writing and tweeting about politics, but it doesn’t often translate into action. Now I think everybody feels a need to act.”
At Comma, CEO and publisher Ra Page said it had decided to translate only writers from the countries affected by the ban – Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sudan – at an emergency editorial meeting on Monday. “If the only narrative America wants to export right now is the narrative of hate, then we need to look elsewhere. We need to consciously turn our backs on the circus that America is descending into,” he said. “We need to fight this. And make no mistake it will be a fight.”
The not-for-profit press, which specialises in short-form writing, has a number of writers directly affected by the ban, including all 20 contributors to two prose collections. Hassan Blasim, the Iraqi-born writer and broadcaster, is now unable to travel to the US, despite huge success there with his 2014 novel The Iraqi Christ.
Blasim was a firsthand witness to the brutality of Saddam Hussein and the cruelty of border patrols at the entrance to Europe, Page said. He added: “Now he finds himself starting all over again; with a new monstrous demagogue, and a new set of inhumane border policies.” Other authors affected include Atef Abu Saif, Nayrouz Qarmout and Talal Abu Shawish.
Specialist Arabic press Saqi Books, which published Sara Khan’s The Battle for British Islam and a number of other affected authors, announced it will publish a satirical collection called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, this year, with contributions from writers, comedians and cartoonists from around the world. Publisher Lynn Gaspard condemned Trump’s order as “inhumane, dangerous and reckless”.
Many Middle Eastern authors have expressed confusion over whether they can travel to the US, while US-based authors feared deportation if they left the country. “Anoud”, an Iraqi woman now living in New York with family in Mosul, said: ”I haven’t got my green card yet and it is very confusing about what will happen, because we are being given conflicting evidence.”
After contributing a heavily critical piece about Islamic State to the Iraq + 100 anthology, she could face danger if returns to her home country. “Unless [the authorities] give a very clear official statement that only people from x, y and z will be affected or that they will accept exiting visas but not grant new ones, I won’t travel,” she said.
Somali-born author Nadifa Mohamed also expressed concern about the ban. “I still don’t know if British citizens like me, who were born in the banned countries, are allowed into the US,” she said. Citing an incident at Washington DC’s Dulles airport in which a Somali woman and her children were held for 20 hours without food or water, she added: “Instances like that make me very worried, as does the fate of refugees from Dadaab who have been waiting years for resettlement to the US and have planned their whole futures around it.”
Authors urged one another to fight the ban using every means at their disposal. Washington-based Aminatta Forna, issued a rallying cry to writers around the world to speak out. “At the moment, I think the more outside voices of outrage Americans hear the better,” she said. “Those of us who can give voice must do so, for the benefit of those who can’t.”
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February 1, 2017
15 Books by Contemporary Mexican Writers That Make America Greater
Now that Donald Trump is president, a lot of horrible things are happening. One of these, of course, is the executive order he signed last week, reinforcing his promise to “build a wall” on the Mexican-American border. Now, let’s set the (non)practicality of this monstrosity and the freaking-out about the price of avocados aside for the moment, because above all else, this wall is a symbol. Mexico: out, it says. America: in.
But cultural contact with Mexico—like cultural contact with almost any other country, because we don’t live in a vacuum, so why pretend we do—actually makes America better, not worse. Safer, not more dangerous. Knowledge in general tends to do that. Case in point: some of the marvelous books coming out of Mexico—and from Mexican-American writers—in recent years. Now, of course, a wall won’t exactly keep literature out. After all, there’s that pesky internet to consider. But the psychology of the wall—the message that the people and products coming from Mexico are inherently less-than, that these books are by “bad hombres” from whom we must protect ourselves—actually might. So just as a reminder—and perhaps as a gift guide for any readers you know who might for some reason be supporters of said wall—here is a selection of great works by contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American writers. I, for one, celebrate the freedom to read them.
Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd, trans. Christina MacSweeney
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This slim novel is a study in fragmentary feeling, a book of overlapping fictions—the story of a woman telling her own story, and translating newly discovered work by a Mexican poet, except maybe that when she’s doing that she is also telling her own story, or possibly a ghost story. To say what it is “about” is somewhat pointless, because what it is about is the nature of reality, identity, storytelling and time. So, basically everything.
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Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, trans. Lisa Dillman
In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Herrera, whom Francisco Goldman has called “Mexico’s greatest novelist” has written a lyric myth of a novel: the story of a young Mexican woman who crosses the US border, hoping to bring her brother back to their mother—and to deliver a package from someone who may not have their family’s best interests at heart.
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Manuel Gonzales, The Regional Office is Under Attack!
I loved Mexican-American author Manuel Gonzales’s first novel, a weird, witty comic book-infused opera that uses genre like a trampoline, while also digging into questions of loneliness and the essential unknowability of other people. But, you know, on a trampoline, so it’s fun!
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Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, trans. Natasha Wimmer
For me, this book—by Valeria Luiselli’s husband, FYI—was one of the best books of 2016, a bizarre and rewarding meta-fictional novel about a 16th-century tennis match between Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and Italian painter Caravaggio, playing with a ball stuffed with the hair of Anne Boleyn.
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Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
In this exceptionally beautiful YA novel, two Mexican-American teenage boys fall in love. Saenz wrote purposefully towards illuminating the idiosyncrasies of his characters’ blooming sexuality but also their Mexican-American identity: “We have a long history in this country, and we’re not all workers with our hands. There are a lot of professional Mexican-Americans, and it’s just not presented in literature,” he told NPR, “and I wanted very much to do that.”
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Daniel Saldaña París, Among Strange Victims, trans. Christina MacSweeney
París is a Montreal-based writer, but he was born in Mexico City, and his first novel to be translated in the US is the story of an apathetic Mexico City slacker who accidentally marries one of his co-workers and winds up communing with the equally slackerish boyfriend of his mother in the countryside.
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Laia Jufresa, Umami, trans. Sophie Hughes
A story about grief and loss told in several voices, all of them from the same slice of Mexico City, all swirling around the girl that drowned there years ago—and around her sister, who lives there now, planting seeds in the backyard.
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Guadalupe Nettel, The Body Where I Was Born, trans. J.T. Lichtenstein
Nettle was once cited as one of the best untranslated authors by Granta, but now she is untranslated no more. This novel is a tense and beautiful story of a girl trying to feel at home in her imperfect, “cockroach”-like body, forever feeling edged out of society by her obscured eyesight, forever finding her way.
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Isabel Quintero, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces
First-generation Mexican-American Quintero’s first novel was the winner of the 2015 Morris Award—which, in case you don’t know, is the award for debut YA novels. It tackles being a Mexican-American in contemporary California head-on—along with drugs, sex, pregnancy, poetry, being “fat,” being a good daughter, and just about everything else that might come up in a senior year of high school.
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Carmen Boullosa, Leaving Tabasco, trans. Geoff Hargreaves
Agustini is a town you’d have to see to believe—and once removed from its magic (magic like witches and transfiguration and hails of amphibians), hard to remember exactly. Or such is the experience of Delmira, who tells the story of her childhood in Agustini from her current life in Germany, her journey a sort of reverse trip to Narnia, where the strange world she travels to happens to be the one the rest of us recognize.
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Sergio Pitol, The Art of Flight, trans. George Hensen
Pitol is another of Granta’s best untranslated writers, a winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize in Mexico, and a man whom Daniel Saldaña París described as a “total writer” (that is, a complete one). This book is not quite novel, nor memoir, nor essay, but a complex blend of these, and the first in his “Trilogy of Memory,” a Borgesian, Sebaldian masterpiece that I hope comes to America in its entirety very soon.
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Luís Alberto Urrea, The Water Museum
A music-infused collection from the Tijuana-born bestselling Mexican-American writer that, in thirteen stories, investigates identities from both sides of the border.
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Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo
I’ll assume you’ve already read The House on Mango Street and instead recommend Cisneros’s 2002 novel Caramelo, the story of a family straddling the border between Chicago and Mexico City—much like Cisneros herself, who is a dual citizen of the US and Mexico.
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Manuel Muñoz, What You See in the Dark
Muñoz’s first novel (after two short story collections) sets a 1950s small-town love affair (doomed, of course) against the story of the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. But the famous shower scene is the least of the violence that will creep into these lives.
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Chloe Aridjis, Asunder
The London-based Mexican-American writer’s second novel is a cerebral meditation on the life of a guard in the National Gallery, her days infused with silence, boredom, time. She’s primarily obsessed with the cracks in the paintings: “the allure of the crack, the lure of the crackle, the lair of the kraken. The crack of dawn, the crack of doom…”
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Romance, However You Find It
A romance novelist shares some unlikely sources that have served as inspiration for romance plots.
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NYC Announces One Book, One New York Program
New York City has announced its One Book, One New York program, which will encourage residents of each of the five boroughs to read the same book once the title is announced in March. The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME), which is spearheading the initiative, has hailed the program as "the largest community read program in the country."
New Yorkers will be encouraged throughout February to vote for the book from a list of five finalists: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
“Being that New York City is the epicenter of the publishing industry, it struck me that we should be doing something really significant to support the publishing industry, to promote literacy, and to support independent bookstores throughout the city,” MOME commissioner Julie Menin said of the program. “We want to make sure that in every single borough we are promoting literacy and supporting local bookstores.” In announcing the program, New York joins hundreds of other cities and regions that have adopted one Book, One Read programs.
Menin added that the publishers of the five books up for vote have donated more than 4,000 copies of the books to more than 200 libraries throughout the city—and once the book is chosen, the city will host an author event at the New York Public Library, as well as a number of ancillary events at bookstores throughout the city that will, Menin said, "depend upon the book chosen."
Voting will be available online and at the digital kiosks located throughout the city's subway system, Menin said. An ad campaign featuring five celebrity advocates—actors Bebe Neuwirth, William H. Macy, Giancarlo Esposito, and Danielle Brooks, along with comedian Larry Wilmore—will include videos produced in partnership with Buzzfeed and more traditional advertising on subway platforms, at bus stops, and in NYC taxis.
"Something that makes it incredibly timely in this moment our country is in is that all five of these books deal with themes of immigration, of race, oftentimes of being an outsider," Menin said. "These books are incredibly timely. These are really thought-provoking books that really speak to the age that we’re in."
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Whitney Gardner & You’re Welcome, Universe
This post is part of a series called Successful Queries. It features actual query letter examples to literary agents that were successful for authors. In addition to the query letter, you’ll also see the thoughts from the writer’s literary agent as to why the letter worked. Today’s features debut novelist Whitney Gardner and her agent Brent Taylor (Triada US, Inc.).
Whitney Gardner is an author, illustrator, and coffee addict. Originally from New York, she studied design and worked as an art teacher and school librarian before moving to Portland, Oregon, where she lives by a bridge with her husband and two pugs. In the rare moment Whitney isn’t writing or drawing, she’s likely to be reading comics, knitting, and tending her garden or apiary. YOU’RE WELCOME, UNIVERSE is her debut novel.
Brent Taylor is an associate literary agent and foreign rights manager at Triada US, Inc. He represents upmarket fiction (novels that are well-written, robust with emotion, and appeal to a wide, commercial audience) across a broad range of categories: picture books, middle grade, young adult, graphic novels, women’s fiction, crime fiction, and literary fiction. You can find him on Twitter @btaylorbooks.
Whitney’s Query:
Dear Brent,
Thank you for the book recommendations on Twitter! I checked out your bio on Publisher’s Marketplace and I immediately thought of sending you my contemporary, illustrated YA novel, YOU’RE WELCOME, UNIVERSE.
When your favorite after-school activity is tagging walls, friends are a liability. Julia learned this the hard way, when she covered up the slur about her best friend with a beautiful (albeit illegal) mural. Sprayed right across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf.
Her best friend snitches, her principal expels her, and her mothers set Julia up with a one way ticket to a mainstream school in the suburbs. Utterly deserted, the only thing she has left is her art. Not even Banksy himself could get her to give that up.
Out in the ‘burbs, she paints anywhere she can, ready to claim some turf and make a new name for herself. A tag on a sign, a piece on an overpass. An artist can’t help but create, but Julia soon learns that she might not be the only vandal in town.
Someone has been adding to her tags, making them better, and showing off. She expected her art might get painted over by cops, but she never imagined getting involved in a graffiti war. Now, Julia must show up her rival or face being painted into obscurity. But when her opponent takes it a step too far, Julia has to decide between anonymity or getting caught.
YOU’RE WELCOME, UNIVERSE is an honest look into the life of a girl who is trying to make her mark on the world, and ends up making her first life long friend. It’s THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN meets EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP. It has been read by interpreters and Deaf beta readers to ensure a full and accurate picture of Julia’s experience as a Deaf girl. I’ve drawn sample images from the book which can be viewed here: http://bit.ly/HEREART. It is complete at 58,000 words. You will find the first ten pages below.
Thank you for your time,
Whitney Gardner
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Commentary from Literary Agent Brent Taylor:
When Whitney’s query showed up in my inbox, I was immediately intrigued. The first line is filled with tension: after-school tagging, the hint of a friendship betrayal. I immediately connect to Julia, because Whitney has shown that she’s fiercely loyal to her friend (by being proactive and covering up a slur about her) and that she possesses a rebellious, bold personality (by covering up the slur … with a huge graffiti mural on their school building!).
In the third and fourth paragraphs of the query letter, Whitney effortlessly takes us into the impetus of the story: Julia feeling like a fish-out-of-water in her new school, and clinging to her art as the one thing she abso-freaking-lutely refuses to give up. I felt incredibly sympathetic to Julia when I read this. The hint that Julia might not be the only vandal in town sealed the deal for me: at this point, I had to get my hands on this manuscript and find out what exactly that meant for Julia and her art.
The fifth paragraph of Whitney’s query introduces the high stakes. Julia must show up her rival, or she risks losing the most important thing in her life … her identity as an artist. There are so many turns-of-phrase in this paragraph that are exciting and stand out: “graffiti war,” “rival,” “anonymity or getting caught.”
Whitney closes the query letter by giving a terrific sense of what the heart of this story is, and where it fits in the market. I love her comparison to THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, because it helped me visualize what the manuscript would look like since she’s pitched it as an illustrated novel. In this paragraph, Whitney also makes it clear that she’s done her research, and this entire paragraph lead me to believe that Whitney had a great sense of the YA market.
Other writing/publishing articles and links for you:
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
You might also like:
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LitHub Daily: February 1, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1902, poet, playwright, activist, and columnist Langston Hughes is born.
Mark Greif on how Thoreau would handle Trump. | Literary Hub
15 books by Mexican-American writers that make America greater. | Literary Hub
Pooja Makijhani on the Asian detective novel’s evolution from racist caricature to authentic representation. | Literary Hub
Laura Pritchett on the many stories of the West, from the front lines of climate change. | Literary Hub
“Language matters and sometimes, like the word diversity, it becomes an empty container for whatever people want to fill it with.” The full text of Roxane Gay’s keynote speech from the ABA’s Winter Institute. | Publishers Weekly
On Dr. Seuss, political cartoonist and “America’s first anti-Fascist children’s writer.” | The Atlantic
“What does it mean to come of age in modern dystopia, alongside the contemporary parallel forces of the Internet and globalization?” On recent bildungsromans by Joni Murphy, Natasha Stag, and Tommy Pico. | The New Inquiry
“It’s very difficult to invent shocking things, because everything is shocking now.” An interview with Riad Sattouf, author and illustrator of The Arab of the Future. | Los Angeles Review of Books
Young people from Greenland, they drink and rave and fuck and kiss: On the breakout success and striking modernity of Greenlandic writer Niviaq Korneliussen. | The New Yorker
“She was always telling him, you can’t understand everything.” An excerpt from Jesse Ruddock’s novel, Shot-Blue. | BOMB Magazine
Go trot with love: Erotica author Chuck Tingle will donate all the proceeds from his most recent work, Redacted In The Butt By Redacted Under The Tromp Administration, to the ACLU. | The A.V. Club
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When the Sharing Economy Comes to Publishing
The idealized vision of writers toiling away at their art in solitude may not be going anywhere, but it’s also not the sole vision of how writers will produce quality work in the near-distant future. Let’s face it: we are experiencing a cultural revolution brought on by the sharing generation, and sharing-economy practices will not ignore the publishing industry. After all, why do all stories need to be a one-way exchange of ideas from writer to reader? Why can’t stories be written collaboratively by multiple authors and shared as they are written?
Sharing technologies such as Uber and Airbnb have proven that huge efficiencies are available when you take a Dickensian business model and share the resources within a network. The sharing model can actually thrive more easily in publishing than in other industries, because stories can be easily crowdsourced and consumed in real time.
Before you pronounce the death of great literature, it’s important to examine how publishing has evolved.
Traditional print publishing is gatekeeper driven. The traditional publishing model has focused mostly on large-scale print production and relies on a small number of retained authors with a proven track record of generating commercially successful work. The relationship between publisher and author is nurtured at a high cost. Publishers control their ROI by focusing on a small number of proven writers. With the emergence of e-books, the risk of picking the wrong author is reduced, but because of print’s continued focus on big authors, large publishing organizations are still a tough nut to crack for new authors or hard to categorize material.
Digital publishing is automation driven. Digital publishers saw an opportunity to automate many of the steps of traditional publishing, including digitizing books. This created cost efficiencies and increased the size of the market but the essential process of creating content remained the same. Hundreds of Internet-based publishers emerged to sell digital books, which gave birth to self-publishing and hybrid models in which authors pay partners to be published in exchange for a higher percentage of royalties. While digital publishing has expanded the number of published authors, it has not generated the revenues of traditional publishing, or garnered much respect for its content.
The sharing model of publishing is profile driven. In the newest sharing model of publishing, bits of stories are crowdsourced, and the community defines the best writing. Whereas the other models rely on the market to determine quality after the publishing process is complete, with customers using their wallets to vote, the sharing model publishes stories that have already been embraced by the crowd, eliminating the risk of publishing unwanted material. Instead of being process driven, the sharing model is profile driven. Readers and writers sit at the heart of this ecosystem of content generation, with their profiles defining the value they bring. A good analogy for how this model has evolved is the job postings market. Monster automated the process of scanning newspaper job postings. LinkedIn then focused on the profile of job seekers and allowed the community to crowdsource their careers.
Today there’s a similar opportunity for writers with the new sharing models of publishing crowdsourced original content through “competitive collaboration,” with writers competing to write sections of a story, and readers voting to determine which sections are published. Models like this turn the storytelling process into a social media experience.
By now, everyone in publishing knows the precedent for fan fiction developing a commercial product. Fifty Shades of Grey started as a self-published twist on the Twilight series before evolving into a bestselling book series and movie franchise. This illustrates how publishing models can support one another. The best stories emerge and can be turned into e-books. If they are exceptional, traditional publishing can take them far and wide. Collaborative content will reduce the risk for publishers by having the next generation of authors self-select.
Hollywood and the entertainment industry can also benefit from collaboration and expand engagement with licensed brands and characters. The sharing model of publishing can provide a valuable source of discovering content and fostering interaction with loyal fans of a show or character. The sharing model is here to stay and holds great promise for the future of publishing, entertainment, and other forms of content. Nevertheless there will always be writers toiling away at their craft in solitude.
Chris Twyman, founder and CEO of Skrawl and BoomWriter Media, is a technologist, entrepreneur, and expert on digital publishing trends and innovations.
A version of this article appeared in the 11/23/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: The Future Of Content Creation
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Children’s Bookstore Makes the Shortlist for PW Bookstore of the Year
For the first time in the nearly 25-year history of the PW Bookstore of the Year Awards, a children’s only bookstore, Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis, was named one of five finalists.
The shortlist was announced in Wild Rumpus’s hometown during Winter Institute 12, which was held at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis from January 27–30.
Children’s books are well represented at the other four finalists, which are general bookstores with strong children’s sections: Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga.; The King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City; Parnassus Books in Nashville; and Prairie Lights in Iowa City.
“The 2017 PW Bookstore of the Year Award shines a light on some of the most creative and energetic bookstores in the business,” said PW executive v-p and publisher Cevin Bryerman. “The awards come at a time when many experienced a strong year despite the tumultuous election.”
The winner of the 2017 PW Bookstore of the Year Award will be named in March and will be featured in the pre-BookExpo edition of Publishers Weekly on May 15. The awards will be presented at the Celebration of Bookselling at BookExpo in New York City.
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