Roy Miller's Blog, page 304
January 8, 2017
For Publishers Looking to Make Inroads into Big Data, Bundling is Key
By Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang
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How do Internet markets for books create value for consumers? In the late 1990s, the answer probably would have been lower prices—the result of a reduction in operating costs and an increase in competition. However, today a larger source of consumer value has become apparent: the long tail, which describes the sale—made possible by online retailing—of small numbers of many different books, rather than the traditional approach, in which money is made on a few blockbusters.
Our early 2000 economic research showed that Internet consumers gain nearly 10 times more value for their money from finding just the right book to meet their needs, thanks to the long tail, than they do from getting lower prices on bestsellers that they could find at the mall. The value of the long tail has grown over time and is driven by the increased availability, improved discovery, and improved promotion of books sold online.
These are big changes, and not just for booksellers. For nearly 100 years, each of the major copyright industries—publishing, music, and film—has been dominated by a small number of big firms. These firms maintained power by controlling three key scarce resources, the financial and technical know-how necessary to make content, the physical channels necessary to distribute it, and an artificial scarcity in how consumers access their content, made possible by copyright enforcement.
None of the assets are as scarce as they once were, however. Technological change has democratized the production of content, long-tail markets allow everything to be distributed, and digital piracy creates a world where it is nearly impossible to control consumers’ access to movies, shows, music, and books. What is scarce today—and what major firms need to compete for—is customer attention, and a detailed understanding of customer preferences.
The problem is, to capture this value, you need Big Data—the sort that Amazon collects about its customers. Unfortunately, as is well-known in the industry, Amazon doesn’t share any customer data with its “partners” in the publishing industry, or any other industry for that matter.
So if you’re a traditional publishing firm, what can you do? Economic studies have provided an answer: start selling books in bundles. These studies have shown that selling content in large-scale bundles is much more efficient than selling the same content separately, and that by setting the right price for the bundle, firms can make more money. Bundling also creates significant economies of scale, which in the extreme can lead to a single “winner-takes-all” outcome for the company with the largest bundle. Not only that: the bundler is in a perfect position to learn more about customer preferences.
Think of the amount of information Netflix is able to collect about its individual consumers’ behaviors and preferences: it is able to note every show a consumer watches, at what points in those shows that they pause, what scenes they watch over and over again, and even on what device and at what times they are mostly likely to watch them. Spotify can record similar data for its consumers, and both services allow consumers to explore content they might not have tried if it were sold outside the bundle. This, in turn, generates value for content creators, who can use these services to find new audiences and new fans.
No dominant firms bundle books. Google (Oyster) and Amazon (Kindle Unlimited) are trying to create such bundles, but as of yet they just don’t have the sort of first-run popular content that can be found on Netflix and Spotify. We believe this creates a huge opportunity for major publishers, who have, thus far, ceded control of data about consumer attention and preferences to Amazon and other Internet companies that they have mistakenly deemed to be mere “distributors.”
Our message is both hopeful and simple. Publishers can invest in a platform that provides direct access to customer behavior and the ability to promote content directly to the right audience. Such a service will allow publishers to continue to create direct connections between the people who matter most: authors and their readers.
Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang are professors of information systems at Carnegie Mellon University and are coauthors of Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment (MIT, Sept.). They codirect CMU’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics.
A version of this article appeared in the 08/29/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Knowledge Is Power
The post For Publishers Looking to Make Inroads into Big Data, Bundling is Key appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Free Speech Groups Defend S&S Yiannopoulos Deal
Free speech organizations including the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) have begun to speak out in defense of Simon & Schuster after a book deal the publisher's Threshold Editions imprint made with controversial Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos spurred widespread backlash, including calls to boycott S&S and to not review S&S titles.
The NCAC has released a statement that, while supporting the right to boycott a book or company for any reason, argues that to do so risks "undermin[ing] intellectual freedom and harm[ing] readers and writers."
"In the present case, the calls for a boycott stem not from the content of a book, which has not been published, but because of previous statements by the author which critics characterize as hate speech," the statement reads. "This kind of response will have a chilling effect on authors and publishers, which is undoubtedly the goal of those who support such boycotts."
The statement has has been endorsed by the American Booksellers Association, Association of American Publishers, Authors Guild, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Freedom to Read Foundation, Index on Censorship, and the National Council of Teachers of English.
“The ability to think and read freely lies at the heart of our democracy,” NCAC executive director Joan Bertin said. “Endorsing the right to express offensive ideas is not equivalent to endorsing the ideas themselves.”
The post Free Speech Groups Defend S&S Yiannopoulos Deal appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Something to Consider Before You Hire a Book Editor
Like eating fire, writing takes a healthy balance of confidence and humility.
I know, because I do both.
This guest post is by Cherie Dawn Haas. Haas is the author of Girl on Fire and loves all things that involve creativity. She has taught and/or performed fire eating and more, and is the Senior Online Editor for our sister sites, ArtistsNetwork.com and ClothPaperScissors.com. She lives with her husband and two sons in Kentucky, where they manage a small vineyard and take care of their two dogs, Hazel and Dammit Rusty. Visit her at cheriedawnlovesfire.com.
We have to be confident enough in our work to share it with others on any level. And yet we must be humble enough to make the necessary changes when we receive feedback. When it comes to eating fire, for what it’s worth, my humility bows to the element and it’s self-confidence that makes the act possible at all.
But this isn’t Fire Eater’s Digest. We’re here to talk about writing. Having just self-published my first novel, Girl on Fire, I can look back at the years that led up to its actual birth (and final bill). It’s time to reflect on what I did right and what I will change when I go through the process again for book number two.
First, it should be noted that I’m frugal, although I think it’s important to invest in one’s art and creativity. After working with a few beta readers I wanted honest feedback on my novel at that point. I asked a friend (we’ll call her Gwen) with professional editing experience if she’d be interested in taking a look at the work. We agreed that I would pay her $100 for big-picture suggestions. “Don’t worry about copy editing it,” I remember saying because I figured she would have some major feedback on plot points and characters. I expected that she would tell me anything that was “wrong” with the work so that I could fix it before presenting it to agents or self-publishing it. What I got back, after much back-and-forth past our agreed deadline, was a copy-edited version of my novel, with less than $100 worth of feedback about the story itself.
I wrote the check, made Gwen’s edits, and moved on.
[The Lie I Told Myself About Self-Publishing]
After working with a couple more beta readers who gave both constructive and supportive feedback, somehow I got to the point where I felt all the novel could possibly need would be simple grammatical fixes that I might have overlooked. Now I realize that was completely hilarious.
Hire a Book Editor For Honest Feedback
I did eventually hire a professional freelance editor that wasn’t someone I knew. Together, we worked through a few more rounds of complete edits with massive changes that, while painful at first, brought the best out of my story. The markups were honest and ruthless. Just as importantly, my editor supported the project in a way that helped me stay the course through completion. Actually, a beautiful friendship has come from our working together.
My advice for you, dear fellow writer, is to make sure that your story is as close to perfection as you could dream. Do what your friends, writing partners, and beta readers say to do (perhaps) and let it sit for a while, then come back to it with fresh eyes. Then hire a professional to work with you on it. If possible, work with someone who isn’t in your circle of friends to begin with; that way there won’t be any hard feelings if things don’t go the way you anticipated.
I’m still friends with Gwen, by the way. I chose to look at the situation with humility and understanding that perhaps I wasn’t clear enough, or perhaps we should’ve had a signed agreement, or perhaps I made a mistake in my choice to begin with. It was just part of the challenge of self-publishing, and that’s okay. You’ll experience challenges in your writing path, and you’ll either overcome them and succeed or you won’t. The good news is that you haven’t given up—I know because you’re reading this.
Keep writing and rewriting, and stay humble and confident.
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Brian A. Klems is the editor of this blog, online editor of Writer’s Digest and author of the popular gift book Oh Boy, You’re Having a Girl: A Dad’s Survival Guide to Raising Daughters.
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The post Something to Consider Before You Hire a Book Editor appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The Evolution of Sex Writing
In setting out to write Future Sex, Emily Witt hoped to define what she once considered an “interim state”: the sexual identity of being a single woman unconstrained by long-term reciprocated love and partnership. The language used to describe relationship statuses within this state, such as the too all-encompassing “dating” and outdated “lovers,” she argues, has lost its meaning in the 21st century. This leads her to another query—perhaps this state isn’t so interim after all.
She sets out to probe the question firsthand. Witt has casual sex with a guy named Lunar Fox at Burning Man. She meets a female “Internet-sexual” who prances around nude in front of a webcam but doesn’t engage in physical sex. She practices “orgasmic meditation,” in which she lets a man named Eli rub her clitoris for 15 minutes through lubricated latex gloves. The result: a sexual ethnography of the modern-day American cisgender woman.
Future Sex is a work produced from the study of a human culture; in this particular case, it focuses on how women today are expressing their sexuality. And, while Witt executes her objective in an especially experiential way, it could be considered an ethnological sex study, something that was once just fodder for anthropological journals but has become increasingly visible as society collectively recognizes that sexuality is unendingly complex. Now that sex is widely viewed as not simply about orgasms and reproduction, but instead illustrative of how one relates to gender, fetishes, power, and institutions, the challenge comes in describing all of those relations. Sexuality is always evolving—and often so quickly that one will likely not find words that feel adequate in time. Sex culture research and reporting has, therefore, come to reflect that.
But before sexuality research became more visibly nuanced in mainstream writing, it was highly moralized and defined, and sex ethnologies documented it as such. Among certain communities, the understood binary still stands today: there’s the “right” sex—heterosexual and reproduction-oriented, and then there’s the Other Sex—oral sex, premarital sex, homosexual sex, nonmonogamous sex. Witt’s research methodology, however, delivers something much less instructional and more anthropological in nature.
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As with most of anthropology’s early publications and studies, the first definitive sex ethnographies were carried out by Westerners. Up through World War II, anthropological studies focused almost exclusively on “tribal people”; its earliest disciplinarians exoticized non-European cultures to justify the creation of a social science to study them. “Sexuality has been an intellectual concern of the anthropological tradition since the Age of the Enlightenment,” Liam D. Murphy writes in Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, and much of what originally constituted sexual ethnographies was rife with Western supremacism and condescension. “It was involved in the formation of representations about ‘primitive others’ in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries . . . and played a critical role in the formation of the fictions of primitive promiscuity.”
Early anthropologists like Edward Westermarck, Isaac Schapera, and Bronislaw Malinowski investigated sexuality everywhere from Botswana to Papua New Guinea to Morocco, but the documentarian to have gained some of the most mainstream visibility during this time was 23-year-old Margaret Mead. In her 1928 field-study-based book, Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead documents her travels in Samoa, focusing on the existence of different romantic relations, a healthier view of marriage, and promiscuity among young women.
Mead writes that while in Samoa, a “girl’s principal task is to learn to weave . . . all of her interest is expended on clandestine sex adventures.” Often, she’ll take as her first lover a widower or a divorced man, so “amatory experience is [not] jeopardized by double ignorance.” Beyond this first relation, there could be marriage, but there could also be adultery, same-age love affairs, late-night meetings “under the palm trees,” or elopement. The “civilized” world, she suggested, had much to learn from the Samoans, whose lack of inhibitions, healthy promiscuity, and acceptance of sexual “deviations” were better than the restrictive norms of the Western world.
“Romantic love as it occurs in our civilization, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa,” she writes. It was an argument that over the years would get unfairly twisted and criticized, due in large part to Mead’s politics.
From the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s, anthropological sex studies began to lose popularity, as “[disciplinarians] sought scientific respectability and therefore eschewed topics which were personal, not ‘serious’ and uneasily transcended the nature-culture boundary,” Murphy writes. In an argument that still persists today, sex writing had become too soft a topic. However, sex research and reporting didn’t altogether lose visibility; it just changed form and shift its focus. Sex writing would no longer be primarily anthropological, but instead more scientific.
It was during this period that Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1953) (and later, a female counterpart), a fundamental work in the science-forward variant of sex reporting. With the proposal of his iconic Kinsey scale, which puts human sexuality on a spectrum between completely heterosexual (0) and completely homosexual (6), the book cemented Kinsey as one of the most iconic sex researchers of all time. A decade later, acclaimed sex writers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson went on to document their research and laboratory studies in Human Sexual Response (1966), Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), and a handful of other books throughout the mid-90s. In 2008, science writer Mary Roach put a contemporary spin on the genre with Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.
But in the past few decades, sex research has ventured back from academia and into the territory of nonfiction literature that’s not only celebrated for its facts, but also for its literary merit. Future Sex, for example, has seen relatively mainstream success, garnering reviews in publications from W Magazine to the New York Times and Bookforum. While renowned in their respective fields, scientific and anthropological sex narratives have historically attracted niche audiences; Future Sex, on the other hand, has landed on many general interest Best Of lists.
The growing availability of information aside, much of this has to do with what the academic documentations have left absent: a narrator that is not only inquisitive, but relatable. Witt is not an outsider, writing exoticized accounts of American women’s promiscuity or analyzing their hormone receptors, but a subject of study herself. She feels familiar, which is due in part to her earnestness.
But while Witt’s essay collection is unique in its coverage of a modern-day and ever-evolving culture, it isn’t the first book to have tackled sexuality firsthand and made it down the mainstream media’s pipeline. In an interview with the New Yorker, Witt credits much of the model for Future Sex to Gay Talese’s controversial 1981 book Thy Neighbor’s Wife. In this nonfiction work, Talese, aiming for the encyclopedic, documents American morality and sexuality from post-WWII through the 1970s. Just like Witt (though in a more disputably unethical way), he experiments sexually and treats himself as a subject—something he, a married man, doesn’t reveal until rather far into the book.
“If you want to write about orgies,” Talese said in a 2009 interview with New York Magazine. “You’re not going to be in the press box with your little press badge keeping your distance. You have to have a kind of affair with your sources.”
Future Sex considers something far more shocking than polyamorous marriage or webcam girls. What feels most revolutionary in Witt’s book is the admission that she, a successful and nominally liberated woman, still craves that heteronormative ideology of love and partnership—and even more so, that desiring this sort of logical “end point” doesn’t necessitate that you’ll get there. “I had known love, but having known love I knew how powerless I was to instigate it or ensure its duration,” Witt writes in the book’s opening. “Still, I nurtured my idea of the future, which I thought of as the default denouement of my sexuality, and a destiny rather than a choice.” Her sex ethnography resonates because she’s looking for answers to describe the interim state in which many of her readers likely find themselves, as well.
Factual explorations of sex in writing are not only interesting illustrations of social norms and institutions of the time, but also essential to our understanding of taboos and differences. According to linguistic anthropologist Paul Manning, this kind of sex writing also helps diminish barriers. “One pedagogical value of using ethnography to approach sexuality is that it can challenge the naturalization of sexual and gender normativities,” he writes on his website.
While sex reporting has progressed quite a bit from early 20th-century anthropologists’ exoticized field studies, what the genre has illustrated from its start is that sexuality is judged based on the Western world’s patriarchal and heteronormative standards. Only recently has that imperative become something deemed worthy of investigation and critique. And in Future Sex, Witt suggests that society’s perception of “normative” sexuality may not be so dominant at all. At the end of the book, she finds adequate words to describe “the future of sexuality”—and relatedly, the future of its documentation—in an appropriately meta way.
“I came to understand that sexuality had very little to do with the sex that you actually had . . . ” she writes. “A futuristic sex was not going to be a new kind of historically unrecognizable sex, just a different way of talking about it.”
The post The Evolution of Sex Writing appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Categorizing Nonfiction Books Is Not an Easy Task
Since before Melvil Dewey invented his decimal system in 1876, there has been the urge—even the need—to categorize books. This is a hurdle for those who write, publish, and sell books that are not easy to classify, such as my upcoming book, Inga: Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect.
Much as Hollywood spits out sequels to successful films, the publishing industry likes what is tried-and-true and easily understood. I learned this with my first book, Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation, when I noted in my proposals to prospective publishers that no one had ever done a book quite like it before. Wrong approach, I was told. Instead, the key to a good proposal was to identify books that had sold well and were similar to mine. Then it would be possible to understand and find the target audience.
“People like to read about people,” a wise editor told me, so I retooled the book, making it less a meditation on losing and more a series of short biographies of losing presidential candidates who still influenced American history. But the problem remained of where to shelve such a book: U.S. history, political science, biography, or current events? Fortunately, the book was well reviewed, so it sold well, even though it might have been hard to find.
I didn’t learn my lesson. Having written about losing, I wanted to write about two of the greatest winners in American politics: John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. My thinking was that we could learn something new by taking a fresh approach to a familiar subject—but by doing what I called a “comparative biography,” I again made marketing difficult.
Where do you put a book titled Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure? In biography under K, for Kennedy, or R for Reagan? Usually neither, I found out, and the categories chosen by booksellers were even more varied than they were for Almost President.
So for my third and newest book, I decided to focus on just one person, but it turns out this one is tough to categorize too. It’s the story of Inga Arvad, Miss Denmark of 1931, who was an actress, a foreign correspondent, an explorer who lived among tribes in the East Indies, a Washington reporter, a Hollywood gossip columnist, and a screenwriter for MGM. She was adored by Adolf Hitler and John F. Kennedy wanted to marry her.
Arvad’s historical significance is that she was perhaps the love of Kennedy’s life: they shared a romance at the beginning of World War II. But because she had been shown favor by Hitler while she was a journalist in Nazi Germany (and also because of the not inconsequential detail that she was still married to her second husband, filmmaker Paul Fejos, whom Charlie Chaplin considered a genius), Arvad and Kennedy’s relationship faced all sorts of complications.
The FBI suspected Arvad of being a Nazi spy and put her under surveillance, tapping her phone, bugging her apartment, and recording her most intimate encounters with Kennedy and others. This nearly led to Kennedy, then an officer in Naval intelligence, being court-martialed. Instead, it set in motion a chain of events that led to Kennedy’s eventual transfer to the South Pacific, where he became the war hero that made his political career. As he recovered from the sinking of the PT-109, Kennedy continued to pine for Arvad and hoped one day to marry her. That, of course, did not happen.
Arvad’s is a remarkable story, and I hope I have told it well, but now I wonder how readers will find it. It’s a little about Hitler and the Nazis; a little about Hoover, F.D.R., and civil liberties; a little about Hollywood during the war; a lot about Kennedy, his family, and how he became a politician; and all about Arvad, a woman no novelist could invent.
So where will Arvad be displayed? In biography, alongside books on the Kennedy presidency, or even in women’s studies? There is no obvious cubbyhole to place her—which is the magical aspect of her life.
Until a new shelf is created, called “Remarkable Women We’ve Never Heard of Before,” my solution is that booksellers feature her in the front store windows or the front page of their websites. For any author, undeniably, front and center is the best category of all.
Scott Farris’s newest book, Inga: Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect, will be published by Lyons Press in October.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/05/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: What Category Is That Book?
The post Categorizing Nonfiction Books Is Not an Easy Task appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Independent Booksellers End Year on High Note
By Judith Rosen, with reporting by Claire Kirch, Edward Nawotka, and Anisse Gross
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The election may have changed when people shopped, but it didn’t change how much they bought, according to Molly Olivo, book buyer at the Barstons Child’s Play stores in the Washington, D.C., area. At her stores, some customers began their holiday shopping in October, and Shirley Mullins, owner of Kids Ink in Indianapolis, reported an exceptionally strong November.
But for most stores, Christmas and Hanukkah sales came late (Hanukkah began on December 24). “Overall, people were not in the shopping spirit until basically the last second possible,” said Christine Onorati, owner and buyer at Word Bookstores in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J.
“It was a cliff-hanger,” said Dana Brigham, general manager of Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Mass. Sales were down at her store by double digits for the first three weeks of December over the same period in 2015, then rose 37% in the final week of the year. In the end, the Booksmith finished the holiday season “a tiny bit” above 2015’s record-breaking season.
Although no single title emerged as the “it” book of the year, many booksellers reported strong sales for titles that explained the election or used it as a starting point, such as Hillbilly Elegy and former Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution. That was the case at 10-year-old Beaverdale Books in Des Moines, Iowa, which finished the year up 4% over 2015, according to owner Alice Meyer. Other popular titles at her store and at indies throughout the country included The Hidden Life of Trees and Atlas Obscura, both of which were sold out at her store just before Christmas.
The election gave an added boost to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land, which did particularly well at Octavia Books in New Orleans. Co-owner Tom Lowenburg compared customers’ search for trusted information in books after the election to what happened following Hurricane Katrina. “Books offered much more reliable and insightful reflection on the tragedy,” he said. Lowenburg and other booksellers also noted the continuing interest in Alexander Hamilton sparked by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical.
At Bookazine in Bayonne, N.J., one of the last remaining regional wholesalers, the holiday season was solid. “We had a modest gain in the mid- to upper-single-digit percentage over 2015,” COO Richard Kallman said. On the adult side, in addition to more political titles, customers reached for Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project; Mary Oliver’s essay collection Upstream; Anthony Bourdain’s first cookbook in a number of years, Appetites; and Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time.
Two books that were strong last holiday season, A Man Called Ove and Milk and Honey, continued to sell in December at Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., reported director of marketing Kim Sutton. Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad and Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All be Feminists were also among the store’s top sellers. “Overall sales for 2016 were flat, but are now trending back up again,” Sutton said.
Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., was up 17% at December’s end, co-owner Bradley Graham said. “Some of that, no doubt, reflected an outpouring of community in support in the wake of the Pizzagate fake news story, which affected several businesses on our block.” Graham also thought the increase was due to a turning toward books in reaction to the election of Trump. In general, books that reflected on the implications of the election, including Evicted, did well. Another top-selling title at P&P was Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime.
In addition to books with a political connection, many stores reported strong sales for local titles and regional presses. “Our local titles were huge, and local was the highest category,” said Beaverdale’s Meyer. Younkers, from History Press, about the Midwest, “blew off the shelf,” she noted. At Scout & Morgan Books in Cambridge, Minn., owner Judith Kissner said that the lack of a blockbuster enabled the store to sell a lot of titles from regional presses such as the Minnesota Historical Society and Milkweed Editions, as well as regional authors from major houses such as Peter Geye (The Lighthouse Road and Wintering). Skylight Books in Los Angeles reported a lot of sales for Jessica Koslow’s debut cookbook, Everything I Want to Eat, about local restaurant Squirl. Local authors Pete Fromm (The Names of the Stars) and Chris Dombrowski (Body of Water) sold especially well at Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Mont., noted bookseller Mara Panich-Crouch.
Although middle grade and YA series have frequently topped store lists over the holidays, sales at indies for Wimpy Kid and Harry Potter, two of the biggest long-time franchises, were mixed. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was the top seller for 2016 at Brookline Booksmith. Cursed Child, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Double Down, the 11th entry in Jeff Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series, were three of the top four children’s titles at Powell’s.
Sales for the Kinney book were softer than those for his previous titles at some stores, and many smaller booksellers in particular experienced softer sales for the Fantastic Beasts screenplay. That was the case at 10-year-old Harleysville Books in Harleysville, Pa. Customers didn’t want to read that format, said owner Stephanie Steinly, but the illustrated Harry Potter books were “successful.” Andrea Beaty and David Roberts’s picture book Ada Twist Scientist appeared on more store bestseller lists, including that of Skylight, where manager Steven Salardino reported that it was the fourth-biggest-selling children’s title.
As for the year ahead, “I am optimistic,” said Octavia’s Lowenburg. “I feel reaffirmed that the book is here to stay. It is still a fragile situation that needs to be nurtured and protected.” And Onorati at Word noted, “I think that our role as safe spaces in our communities will be more important than ever.”
A version of this article appeared in the 01/09/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Happy Holidays for Indies in 2016
The post Independent Booksellers End Year on High Note appeared first on Art of Conversation.
How to Make More Time For Your Writing
Let’s face it; unless you’re in the upper echelons of the writing business, you’re quickly discovering that writing won’t make you rich. I’m a full time math teacher in Nashville. I learned early on that writers, by and large, are one of the few professions that make less than teachers. So, until you become the next J.K. Rowling or James Patterson, you’ll need to manage your writing efforts in conjunction with your day gig. Here are some steps on how to do that.
(11 ways to assist a friend in promoting their new book.)
1. Never ever ever leave the house without a way to record your ideas. Inspiration for a new book, a change to a scene, or even a character’s distinguishing feature strikes at the most inopportune time. Keep pen and paper, or a voice recorder, your smartphone, something with you at all times.
Guest column by Patrick Carr, who was born on an Air Force base in
West Germany at the height of the cold war. He has been told this was
not his fault. As an Air Force brat, he experienced a change in locale every
three years until his father retired to Tennessee. Patrick’s day gig for the last
five years has been teaching high school math in Nashville, TN. He currently
makes his home in Nashville with his wonderfully patient wife, Mary, and four
sons he thinks are amazing. Sometime in the future he would like to be a jazz
pianist. Patrick thinks writing about himself in the third person is kind of weird.
His first novel is the Christian fantasy A CAST OF STONES (Feb. 2013,
Bethany House), which was a finalist in the ACFW Genesis Competition
for Speculative Fiction. The sequel launches in June 2013.
2. Take advantage of small moments. Let’s be realistic. If you work a full-time job and have any kind of life, sometimes small moments are all you’re going to get out of a day. If you’re in the doctor’s office (okay, that may be a large moment), or waiting for your kid to finish his/her oboe lesson, or chilling during halftime of your NFL team’s latest victory, you have time to write. Remember: It’s like eating an elephant. Case in point: I’m writing this in the lobby of the high school where my son is trying out for the mid-state orchestra.
3. If you can’t give it your best, then give it what you can. There are a lot of days I feel like I’ve left it all in the classroom and I’m totally convinced that anything I write will be worthless. So why bother? Because it’s not worthless. Granted, it may not be Leo Tolstoy. Heck, it may not even be Leonard Nimoy, but it will have value and there will be something in there you can use. And if not, hey, you know what not to write next time. Nothing is ever wasted.
4. Train your mind to think like a writer. If you want to write, you have to adopt the Sherlock Holmes credo of life: notice everything. I write epic fantasy which requires a lot of world-building, but even within the freedom that offers, I still have to find new ways of describing things we’ve all seen and read about before. The next time you’re at a meeting (teachers have lots of meetings) or function that’s more of a requirement than a joy, take time out to observe, really observe, the people there. Then play my favorite game. Take a photograph in your head of what you’re seeing and try to put it into words so that we see what you do.
(Writing a synopsis for your novel? Here are 5 tips.)
5. Make writing a priority. I’ve wasted more time on a momentary game of spider solitaire than I care to admit or remember. Thirty minutes for me is the equivalent of three hundred words or more. If that’s all I could do in a day, I’d still have a full-length novel at the end of a year.
So do it. Set your mind to writing. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
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January 7, 2017
Your Essential Literary Guide to the 2017 Golden Globes
This weekend, as the television-savvy among you are no doubt already aware, brings us the 74th Golden Globes, a ceremony that aims to honor the best of the year in film and television—but is also famous for being a total drink-a-thon. Which is actually perfect for literary types—as long as they have whiskey. While the event is not explicitly literary, there are plenty of literary adaptations up for prizes, so if you happen to be attending a Golden Globes party with a bunch of book people (or just want to snob up the room a bit), here’s what you need to know, from the literary origins of the nominees to a few frankly outrageous literary snubs. Add a stiff drink, and you’re good to go.
The Literary Nominees
The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story: Best TV Miniseries or Movie · Best Supporting Actor (John Travolta) · Best Supporting Actor (Sterling K. Brown) · Best Actor, TV Miniseries or Movie (Courtney B. Vance) · Best Actress, TV Miniseries or Movie (Sarah Paulson)
The top literary nominee of the year, with a total of five nods, is The People v. O. J. Simpson (actually the first season of FX’s American Crime Story anthology series), based on Jeffrey Toobin’s 1997 bestseller The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. Toobin acted as a consultant on the series.
Lion: Best Picture, Drama · Best Supporting Actor (Dev Patel) · Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman) · Best Original Score
Picking up five nominations is Lion, based on Saroo Brierley’s memoir, the #1 international bestseller A Long Way Home, which documents his experiences after being lost on a train in India when he was only five years old.
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The Night Manager: Best TV Miniseries or Movie; Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Laurie) · Best Supporting Actress (Olivia Colman) · Best Actor, TV Miniseries or Movie (Tom Hiddleston)
Who doesn’t love a good British miniseries? Especially this one, which is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by John le Carré but set in the present day.
Nocturnal Animals: Best Director (Tom Ford) · Best Supporting Actor (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) · Best Screenplay (Tom Ford)
A dark, visually-engrossing adaptation of Austin Wright’s 1993 novel Tony and Susan, which takes its title from the novel within that novel—a disturbing and somehow threatening book sent to a woman by her ex-husband.
Arrival: Best Actress, Drama (Amy Adams) · Best Original Score
One of the best films of the year (I’d say there’s a snub in here somewhere with these paltry two noms) was based on a short story—Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” which won both the 1999 Sturgeon award and the 2000 Nebula for Best Novella. It’s literary in nature as well as in origin, too—the story and film are essentially based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which posits that the language we speak directly affects the way we perceive and understand the world.
Fences: Best Actor, Drama (Denzel Washington) · Best Supporting Actress (Viola Davis)
Fences is based on August Wilson’s 1983 play by the same title—the sixth play in his ten-part “Pittsburgh Cycle”—which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1987.
Mozart in the Jungle: Best TV Series, Comedy/Musical · Best Actor, Comedy (Gael Garcia Bernal)
Amazon may be the Big Bad of the literary world, but sometimes they do something good. Mozart in the Jungle, based on oboist Blair Tindall’s 2006 memoir Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, won last year’s Golden Globes in both categories it’s nominated for this year—so either a champion is about to be toppled, or a reign is about to begin.
Elle: Best Foreign Language Film, Best Actress, Drama (Isabelle Huppert)
Elle is based on French writer Philippe Djian’s 2002 novel Oh…, which won the Prix Interallié, an annual award given to the best French novel written by a journalist. Isabelle Huppert’s performance in this film has already been much lauded, earning her the New York Film Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, and the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Actress, so I’d say she’s a contender.
Game of Thrones: Best TV Series, Drama · Best Supporting Actress (Lena Headey)
No explanation required.
Hidden Figures: Best Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer) · Best Original Score
Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling book of the same name, the much-acclaimed Hidden Figures is the untold story of three black female mathematicians who were instrumental to NASA’s success in the 1960s. More prizes for smart ladies!
My Life as a Zucchini: Best Animated Feature Film
This adorable French-Swiss stop-motion film about a boy sent to an orphanage in France is based on the 2002 novel Autobiographie d’une Courgette by the French writer Gilles Paris.
Outlander: Best Actress, Drama (Caitriona Balfe)
Diana Gabaldon’s sexy historical time travel series became a show in 2014. This nomination for Balfe (who plays Claire Randall, of course) reflects her work in this year’s second season, based on Dragonfly in Amber. Never fear, fans—the third and fourth seasons have already been ordered.
Neruda: Best Foreign Language Film
This last one isn’t a literary adaptation—but hey, it’s about Pablo Neruda (though something of an anti-biopic), so I’m counting it.
Notable Literary Snubs
The Handmaiden
The Golden Globes has chosen to ignore Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, based on the novel by Sarah Waters, and my personal favorite film of the year. I can’t understand it. The movie is gorgeous, sensual, terrifying, and an utterly captivating experience—more captivating even than its source material. It’s a stunning achievement, and it should really get every award.
Orange is the New Black
The best season of the show (based, as you may remember, on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir) gets not even a nomination, breaking a three-year streak of nods. Just a matter of burnout?
Love & Friendship
A generally underrated (or at least under-discussed) film this year, but actually great. Whit Stillman! Kate Beckinsale! Chloë Sevigny! Jane Austen, except meaner than you remember! Well-acted, lively, and satisfyingly acerbic.
Certain Women
I have a soft spot for films based on short story collections—in part because they’re just so hard to do. But this movie, based on short stories from Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, is undeniably good, a slow-burn masterpiece. To be fair, I’m totally not surprised that this film didn’t get a nomination, so I don’t know if it’s really a “snub.” But in a perfect world…
The Girl on the Train
Just kidding. Even Emily Blunt couldn’t save this movie.
So, for a fully literary ticket, here are your winning picks:
Film
Best Picture, Drama: Lion
Best Picture, Comedy or Musical: No opinion
Best Director: Tom Ford, Nocturnal Animals
Best Actor, Drama: Denzel Washington, Fences
Best Actress, Drama: Amy Adams, Arrival (or Isabelle Huppert, Elle)
Best Actor, Comedy: No opinion (but Colin Farrell in The Lobster)
Best Actress, Comedy: No opinion
Best Supporting Actor: Dev Patel, Lion (or Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Nocturnal Animals)
Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis, Fences (or Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures, or Nicole Kidman, Lion)
Best Screenplay: Tom Ford, Nocturnal Animals
Best Original Score: Arrival (or Lion or Hidden Figures)
Best Original Song: No opinion
Best Animated Feature Film: My Life as a Zucchini
Best Foreign Language Film: Elle (or Neruda)
TV
Best TV Series, Drama: Game of Thrones
Best TV Series, Comedy/Musical: Mozart in the Jungle
Best TV Miniseries or Movie: The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (or The Night Manager)
Best Actor, Drama: No opinion
Best Actress, Drama: Caitriona Balfe, Outlander
Best Actor, Comedy: Gael Garcia Bernal, Mozart in the Jungle
Best Actress, Comedy: No opinion
Best Supporting Actor: Hugh Laurie, The Night Manager (or pick a winner from the People v. O.J. Simpson face off—John Travolta vs. Sterling K. Brown, ding!)
Best Supporting Actress: Olivia Colman, The Night Manager
Best Actor, TV Miniseries or Movie: Courtney B. Vance, The People vs. O.J. Simpson (or Tom Hiddleston, The Night Manager)
Best Actress, TV Miniseries or Movie: Sarah Paulson, The People vs. O.J. Simpson
The post Your Essential Literary Guide to the 2017 Golden Globes appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Why Historical Fiction Will Never Go Away
Kelly Kerney recently wrote a piece for Publishers Weekly titled “The Impossible Task of Writing Historical Fiction.” In it, Kerney proclaims her dislike for the term historical fiction and its rigid connotation—one that conjures bad memories of boring tomes written by authors with penchants for superfluous descriptions and romanticized characters. Meanwhile, other genres, such as near-future, have evolved into clever evergreen categories. But historical fiction writers should not be dismayed. The genre isn’t vanishing—it’s changing.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the sudden proliferation of the neo- prefix. The term neo-historical fiction is a relatively new trend in literature. Neo-Tudor, neo-Victorian, neo-Georgian, neo-’40s—the list goes on. Paradoxically, the neo-historical label claims a novel can be something both new and old. For the writers working in these subgenres, their understanding of the prefix neo- could instead imply something that is revived or modified. Their writing may represent a new attitude toward a particular historical subject, whether it be a character, a manner, or an event. These new categories give life to a seemingly diminished genre. People like new things, so why not brand the same old, same old into a refreshing package, one colored with relevancy?
Like Kearny, writers and publishers shy away from the traditional name. It’s why Bernard Cornwell’s wildly successful Saxon Tales is marketed as a “testosterone-infused action-adventure”—which, I have to admit, sounds a whole lot more exciting than a stuffy old standby. Does it sound better because people don’t like reading historical fiction, or is it because it’s so hard to write? Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize, but it took him 10 years to write it. Don Snyder, an author and mentor of mine, told me that “attempting to write historical fiction is just about the toughest thing a young writer could do.” I tried, and I agree.
When I interned for a local literary agency this past year, I noticed a dearth of historical fiction submissions. In an attempt to avoid the stigma, writers called it something else, evidence they’re catching up to market trends. On top of these concessions to rebranding, I noticed these writers had something in common: they still drew from the same historical tradition laid down by the father of historical fiction, Walter Scott.
Scott’s Waverly pretty much established the historical fiction genre in the 19th century; he wasn’t so much a historical novelist as he was a novelist with a theory of history.
And here is the point I want to make: historical fiction might be changing, lagging in popularity, or losing ground in the “is it sexy?” competition, but it isn’t going away. It isn’t going away because for as long as there are people on this Earth, there will be novelists with a theory of history. Like an albatross, the title may be claimed by fewer writers (including Kerney), and more publishers might shy away from the genre, but the novelists who hold to a theory of history will continue to write it.
I believe all of these neo- subgenres borrow from the fundamental formula laid down by Scott. Think about them. Do you notice similarities? You can call it whatever you want, but if your story deals with collective moments of revolution—such as wars or physical conflicts—or if it shows characters caught between two conflicting factions or ideologies, you’re writing in the vein of Scott. I would even argue that it doesn’t matter if you set your book a thousand years ago or sometime in the future; a theory of history is still a theory of history.
But history isn’t really about the past. It’s about human nature. We use the genre as a lens to see ourselves in a different age. To write on the human condition is to write with a reliance on history. Elements such as political consciousness, large-scale conflicts, revolutions, opposing factions, questions about government, economy, society, culture: all of these contribute to that theory.
Kerney wrote that “history is all around us, a continuum on which the past, present, and the future interact constantly.” It is precisely this interaction—this conversation between past and present, and present and future—that is driving this “new” trend in literature. Historical fiction is not vanishing at all, but changing for the better.
Justin O’Donnell is a writer and marketer living with his wife in Brookfield, Conn.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/12/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: What’s in a Name?
The post Why Historical Fiction Will Never Go Away appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Milo Yiannopoulos Book May Not Be Coming To a Store Near You
Like many booksellers, Kim Sutton, director of marketing for Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., is cautiously optimistic about sales in 2017. “We look forward to the strong list of titles to be published in the first quarter,” she said.
But one late addition to the Threshold Editions list, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, is giving some indies pause. The imprint will be publishing Milo Yiannopoulos’s Dangerous on March 14. The editor at Breitbart and far-right pundit, who has been permanently banned from Twitter, received a $250,000 advance, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Although the book has quickly moved up the ranks at Amazon, where it’s firmly entrenched in the top 100, most independents are planning to special order the title. “We’ll get it for anybody who wants it,” said Mara Panich-Crouch, bookseller at Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Mont.
Even booksellers embedded in Trump country, where Bill O’Reilly’s books are particularly strong, are planning to carry Dangerous as a special-order item only. That’s the case for Caroline Chesser, owner of Bayou Book Co. in Niceville, Fla. “I would be shooting myself in the foot by staging some kind of protest,” she said, and special order seems like a compromise.
One exception is Greg Danz, co-owner of Zandbroz Variety in Fargo, N.Dak. “We will probably carry it,” he said. “If people will buy it, we will sell it to them.”
A version of this article appeared in the 01/09/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Dangerous Books Ahead
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