William Peace's Blog, page 3

Trump vs Librarians

There is an article written by Rainesford Stauffer in the 7 April 2025 edition of the Guardian.

 Rainesford Stauffer is a freelance writer, reporter, and Kentuckian. She’s the author of An Ordinary Age and All the Gold Stars. Her work has appeared in TIME, The Guardian, Esquire, Teen Vogue, The Cut, and other publications, and she writes the Work in Progress column at Teen Vogue. She was a 2022-2023 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.

 Rainesford Stauffer

She said, “For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.

Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy.

Rebecca Hass, the programming and outreach manager at the Anne Arundel county public library in Maryland, has seen the effects of Trump’s second term ripple in.

“The impact [is] on many different community partners and customers that are represented in some of the executive orders,” said Hass. “We get everyone at the library. When people lose their jobs, they come to the library. When they’re not sure what’s going on, they come to the library.”

Hass said the library received some pushback about LGBTQ+ programming, including protesters showing up to its trans Pride event. But the library is undeterred in efforts to meet community needs and supply resources, creating new resource pages on immigration and LGBTQ+ communities, and updating others. They have expanded partnerships, including with social workers in the library. Usage of the community pantry has increased.

Much of this is work the library has always done, Hass said, adding: “But now it’s taken on urgency and additional responsibilities.”

Emily Drabinski, an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, said that what is happening to librarians now mirrors what is happening to other workers.

“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” she said.

Some librarians described the impact of institutions capitulating to censorship on their work. A librarian in the deep south, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect their safety, described tensions rising on their library board, and how the library is taking pre-emptive measures to make it challenging to find titles considered “controversial”.

“I see all that being as a measure of: ‘If we fly under the radar, we’ll be safe,’” they said. “But it’s sad because who gets left behind – for staff members of color, [or] who are visibly queer, who are disabled, we don’t get to turn off that part of ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Imani, an academic librarian in Texas who declined to give their full name for privacy concerns, is an active public library user, said “DEI removal” happened in her workplace in 2023. Now, they’re seeing increased scrutiny on how funds are spent, especially in regard to large databases.

“It’s really important that people know that this isn’t new at all,” she said, adding that she knew a school librarian who retired several years ago due to fears of criminalization. “At this point, many librarians have done every single thing they can to save things.”

Also, Imani noted, librarians are doing their work with “very little money, very little support [and] higher, higher demand”.

Elon Musk’s unofficial (sic)“department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.

While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state.

Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist who writes the The Handbasket obtained a copy of a letter sent by IMLS’s acting director, Keith Sonderling, announcing that state library grantee funding would be terminated immediately. (Sonderling previously declared his intention to “restore focus on patriotism” to the IMLS, which many groups noted as an attack of freedom of expression.)

The IMLS submitted a budget request of $280m for 2025.

“That’s nothing in terms of the federal budget, yet it’s going to affect every single library in the country,” said Jessamyn West, who works in a rural, public library in Vermont in addition to working with the Flickr Foundation. “It’s going to make them scramble, it’s going to make them worry, and it’s going to make them have to make really difficult choices for the services that they give to their patrons.”

In many cases, the money is already spent because of contracts libraries had with governments, West added.

“We’re all pretty furious,” West said.

Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram account issued posts appearing to mock grantees.

“It’s catastrophic,” Drabinski said, adding that IMLS funds significant library infrastructure, including ebook platforms and interlibrary loan systems. “Without those funds, many of those systems will grind to a halt. All of our work is about to become harder at the same time that the need for our resources and services will explode.”

Drabinski continued: “What we want is for people to be able to read, and for people to have enough. The problems that we face as American workers are similar to yours, and we share a fight.”

Liberation for Whom?

I’ve got to post some thoughts that have nothing to do with books or writing, but I’ve just have to get them off my chest. I’ll return to books and writing in a day of two.

Yesterday was Liberation Day in the States, according to Trump. My question is: Who was liberated? Abraham Lincoln took care of that problem over one hundred and fifty years ago. Any other Americans were not and certainly won’t be liberated by what happened yesterday. Nobody in the rest of the world was or will be liberated. Maybe it’s just the Big Man himself who was liberated from his hankering to try tariffs as the way to MAGA and to make America rich again.

I’ll come back to MAGA again later, but the rich part also appears doubtful. He seem to think that tariffs are paid by the importer to the government and that’s the end of it. But the importer (either a US company or an individual) has to take the payment from his/her/their own funds. Tariffs are, essentially, a tax on the importer. Yes, they make the government richer, but they also make the importing individual or company equally poorer.

When you consider the effects of tariffs, they definitely make the whole country poorer. First of all, they drive up prices for two reasons: they drive up the prices of imported goods and services, and no they longer provide a barrier against the lower prices of previously imported goods; as a result, domestic suppliers have an invitation to raise their prices. Inflation ramps up. Secondly, importing companies go out of business, because they can’t sell at the higher prices. (Think of foreign car dealerships.) Also, US companies that used to export are hit by the reciprocal tariffs find that they can’t sell either and close up shop. With companies closing, unemployment goes up, and our Gross National Product (a measure of our national wealth) goes down.

There are probably many imported items we can do without: Mercedes cars, French champagne, Japanese wagyu beef, and Chinese childrens’ toys. But what if we can’t sell our whiskey, Mustangs, soybeans, financial services, oil and gas, Levis and Harley Davidsons?

So how is this mess going to end? There are several. I don’t know which it will be.

Trump might back off and ‘cut some deals’. Yes, this is a possibility, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon. There are over sixty countries who’ve been hit with tariffs. Each one is angry. Each one has a particular US vulnerability they want to hit – maybe it’s a particular rare metal that they have a kind of monopoly of. Negotiations are going to be messy and time consuming, and each one of those 60+ negotiations has the be handled by the Big Man, not by the Department of Commerce.

Congress could take control. With Congress controlled by the Republicans, that won’t be a near term event. Yes, Congress is angry that Trump broke his inauguration vow to follow the Constitution, which gives the right to set tariffs to Congress and not the President. But it’s going to take plenty of renegade Republicans to break ranks. Don’t hold your breath.

The US Supreme Court could hear a constitutional case and rule against the President. Maybe, but the Court is stacked in the President’s favor, and the court doesn’t often set speed records.

The World Trade Organisation (or anybody else) says Trump is wrong. Are you kidding?

I said I’d get back to MAGA, and I have some questions about Great Countries: Does a Great Country

shut down its entire foreign aid program, leaving millions of sick, hungry, poor, and terrified people on their own?seek to do financial deals with countries which attack their neighbours and deprive their own people of human rights?disregard and belittle international rules of behaviour which have been codified and adhered to by the large majority of nations?

No, I don’t think so.

Review: The Moonstone

T S Eliot said, “The first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” That is a fulsome recommendation of The Moonstone. Edgar Allen Poe wrote several mysteries as short stories in the early 1840’s, but in 1868, Wilkie Collins pioneered the following features of The Moonstone:

an English country house robberyan “inside job”red herringsa celebrated, skilled, professional investigatora bungling local constabularydetective enquiriesa large number of false suspectsthe “least likely suspect”a reconstruction of the crimea final twist in the plot

which became became classic attributes of the twentieth-century detective story in novel form. At 436 pages The Moonstone is quite long.

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English writer and the son of an English painter. He published his first story in 1843. He wrote his first novel, Tahiti as It Was, in 1844, but it was rejected in 1845 and remained unpublished during his lifetime. He was introduced to Charles Dickens in 1851 and they became fast friends. In 1852 his novel, Basil, was published. In 1853 while writing Hide and Seek, he suffered his first bout of gout, from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. The novels Collins published in the 1860s are the best and most enduring of his career. The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone were written in less than a decade. They sold in large numbers and made him a wealthy man. The inconsistent quality of Collins’s dramatic and fictional works in the last decade of his life was accompanied by a general decline in his health, including diminished eyesight. He was often unable to leave home and had difficulty writing. During these last years, he focused on mentoring younger writers. In 1858, Collins had begun living with Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet. Collins disliked the institution of marriage, but remained dedicated to Caroline and Harriet, considering them to be his family. In 1868, Collins met Martha Rudd in Norfolk, and the two began a liaison. She was 19 years old and from a large, poor family. A few years later, she moved to London to be closer to him. Their daughter Marian was born in 1869; their second daughter, Harriet Constance, in 1871; and their son, William Charles, in 1874. When he was with Martha, Collins assumed the name William Dawson, and she and their children used the last name of Dawson themselves. For the last 20 years of his life Collins divided his time between Caroline, who lived with him at his home in Gloucester Place, and Martha, who was nearby.

The Plot: Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army officer who seized it in India. The diamond is of great religious significance and extremely valuable, and three Hindu jugglers/priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it. She wears the diamond at her birthday, but it has disappeared the next day. Superintendent Seegrave, an incompetent local policeman, investigates the Indians and Rosanna Spearman, a housemaid, without success. During the ensuing year there are hints that the diamond was removed from the house and may be in a London bank vault, having been pledged as surety to a moneylender. The Indian jugglers are still nearby, watching and waiting. Franklin Blake, a cousin and suitor of Rachel’s, and who attended her 18th party, returns from overseas and resolves to solve mystery left unsolved by Sergeant Cuff, the famous English detective. Franklin learns that he was given laudanum (an opiate) by Dr Candy, the family doctor, because of his anxiety about Rachel and the diamond. Rachel herself tells Franklin that she saw him take the diamond, but she has not revealed the theft because of the consequences for him. Franklin tracks down the holder of the diamond when he redeems it from the bank at an appointed time. That man turns out to be Godfrey Ablewhite, who has embezzled a large sum and wanted the diamond to repay his debt. He, too, is a suitor of Rachel, and he had convinced Franklin, in his drugged stupor to give him the diamond to place it in safe keeping. After recovering the diamond from the bank, Godfrey is murdered by the Indians, who escape to India. Rachel and Franklin marry and a noted adventurer, Mr Murthwaite, explains that he has followed the Indians and seen the diamond returned to its proper place: in the forehead of a statue of an Indian god.

The story is quite a bit more complicated than that with a dozen more characters, and considerably more involvement. There are also multiple narrators of the story. The characters are all unique, with their defects and attractions, and their motives are clear, even if not well reasoned. It is difficult to put the book aside, in spite of its length. A modern editor would have abbreviated it by at least 100 pages by cutting the passages where the characters review in detail what has happened after each event. Still, it is an enchanting story of a Victorian crime in a Victorian setting.

Having Fun with Tropes

On the Writers Digest website there is an article by Catriona Silvey dated March 12, 2025 about the use of tropes in fiction.

Catriona Silvey

Catriona Silvey is the author of the international bestseller Meet Me in Another Life. She was born in Glasgow and grew up in Scotland and England. After collecting an unreasonable number of degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Edinburgh, she settled in Edinburgh where she lives with her husband and children.

Catriona says, “Time travel is the science fiction trope with the most mainstream appeal: see, for example, the huge success of The Time Traveler’s Wife, or the more recent hit The Ministry of Time. The attraction is obvious—who wouldn’t want to visit a seemingly unrecoverable past, or get a sneak preview of the future? Different kinds of time travel stories also allow the author to examine different themes. If the past can’t be changed, what does that mean for our ideas of free will? If it can, what happens to our sense of self when our history gets rewritten?

“In Love and Other Paradoxes, the question of what kind of time travel story they’re in becomes a subject of debate between Joe and Esi, and a driving force of the plot. Joe thinks they’re in a stable time loop, where the future will happen no matter what. Esi thinks they’re in a rewritable timeline, where she can make a change in the past and return to a different future. The stakes of who is right ratchet up over the course of the book, combining real implications for the characters with metatextual fun for the time-travel-savvy reader.

“Joe finds out he’s going to become a famous poet when Esi accidentally drops a published book of his future poetry. The book then becomes the catalyst for several key moments in the plot: When Esi tries to get it back, fearing that if Joe reads it, he’ll send the future chaotically off course; when Joe submits a poem from the book to a competition, borrowing from his future to enrich his present.

“From The Neverending Story to House of Leaves, the plot-triggering book has a time-honored history across genres. It’s a trope calculated to appeal to readers: A protagonist who’s glued to a book is automatically relatable. In Love and Other Paradoxes, Joe’s attitude to the book throughout the novel—whether he carries it around in his pocket, or shoves it in the bottom of a drawer—also serves the additional function of mirroring his changing attitude to his future self.

“Since long before Romeo and Juliet, we’ve been telling stories of people who fall in love but can’t be together. The twist on the trope in Love and Other Paradoxes is that for Joe and Esi, the reasons are more metaphysical than social: They both think he’s destined for Diana, the muse who will inspire his famous poetry. If Joe and Esi got together instead, it would put both of their long-dreamed-of futures in jeopardy.

“The joy of the forbidden love trope is that you can write two people who are perfect for each other, with all the flirting, banter, and warmth that entails, but maintain a bittersweet tension, since they know they can’t act on their feelings. And when those feelings become too strong to resist, the stakes of the characters giving in are deliciously high. It’s a built-in way to add intensity to a romance—no wonder it’s been one of the most perennially popular tropes in the genre.

“After his knowledge of the future derails his relationship with Diana, Joe enlists Esi as his dating coach to help him win back his future love. What follows is a classic case of the Matchmaker Crush trope, where two people who are ostensibly working to fix one of them up with a third party instead start to fall for each other.

“The scope for fun with this trope is huge. Makeovers, and the attending none-too-subtle hints at attraction; poking fun at the protagonist’s lack of romantic game; the ratcheting tension, as two people who are starting to become aware of their feelings for each other continue to maintain the charade that one of them is destined for someone else. As with many tropes, the key appeal of this one is that the reader knows where it’s going long before the characters do, leading to the potential for delicious dramatic irony.

“It’s in the nature of a Matchmaker Crush that it tends to lead to a love triangle. As Esi is falling for Joe, he is falling for her too, and he finds himself torn between her and Diana.

“A well-written love triangle is never just about being torn between two people; it’s about the protagonist being torn between two versions of themselves. A paradigm example is in The Hunger Games. While tough, militant Gale initially seems like a more natural match for Katniss, Peeta’s gentleness and persuasive powers make him a better fit for who she aspires to be. 

“In choosing between Diana and Esi, Joe is also deciding between two futures: a glorious, pre-defined future featuring a self he’s not even sure he wants to be any more, and a nebulous, open future, growing out of what he and Esi have learned about who they are in the present. Which one he chooses defines not just the romantic resolution, but also what the novel is trying to say about love, destiny, and how our ideas about the future can affect our present.”

Writer’s Block

Matt’s cartoon from last week’s Daily Telegraph!

Britain’s Wealth to Be Plundered?

Yesterday’s Telegraph has an article by Philip Johnston about the dangers of giving AI companies (particularly American ones) a free hand in training their artificial intelligence.

Philip Johnston has been with the Daily Telegraph for more than 20 years. He is currently assistant editor and leader writer and was previously home affairs editor and chief political correspondent.

Philip Johnston

He wrote, “Labour is planning to undermine copyright laws. The only winners will be the Silicon Valley tech bros.

Have you read any good books by Franklin Chase recently? Who on earth is he, you may well ask. I was on the Amazon site looking to pre-order Ungovernable, the diaries of Simon Hart, the former government chief whip, only to see another copy of almost the same book was already on Kindle. Moreover, it was “available instantly”, unlike Mr Hart’s which does not come out until the end of this week.

Only it wasn’t the same book, but an AI generated imitation with just 46 pages for £8.99. I downloaded it to find what might charitably be called a pile of old rubbish. “Politics is not for the weak,” its prologue begins. “It resembles a battlefield where alliances shift unpredictably, loyalty is often quickly exhausted and the difference between success and failure is extremely narrow. Few have navigated this perilous journey … Simon Hart is one of those exceptional individuals.”

Chapter one opens with the “August sun casting long shadows across the undulating hills of the Cotswolds” where a six-year-old Hart “dashed through the fields, his laughter carried by the breeze”. At least I hope this isn’t the real book. Who has got my wasted £8.99 I have no idea.

I called up Simon, an old acquaintance, and pointed out that this book by one Franklin Chase was basically pretending to be his and might be bought by an unwary would-be reader who had enjoyed the newspaper extracts of the real McCoy last week. He had recently been alerted to this but was told by his publishers that nothing could be done about it. “It is one of those those things in the new AI world” they said.

Indeed, it turns out that Mr Chase is quite a prolific mimic of other books. Among his recent publications are the memoirs of the actress Tuppence Middleton – Rising Through the Storm: A Journey of Fear, Fame and Fierce Resilience. Or the footballer Duncan Ferguson – From Prison Walls to Premier League Triumph. Or Robert Dessaix, the Australian author, Abandoned at Birth, Shaped by Love.

Each of these authors has a book coming out which these titles purport to emulate, all with the real name far larger than the enigmatic and indefatigable Chase, who is clearly an AI bot. These rip-offs are examples of the way generative AI is able to plunder massive amounts of data to create an almost instant book.

Since they are not plagiarised, they are strictly not a breach of copyright but doubtless they use information from some sources that should be protected. Amazon says it takes these fakes down if complaints are made but so many are appearing it is hard to keep up. Indeed, there is already another Simon Hart lookalike on the website: The Untold Story of a Modern Conservative by one Maeve Sterling, who also managed to publish a biography of Louis B Mayer this month.

The Labour Government now proposes to blunder into this brave new world by making it easier for tech giants to “mine” for creative material to feed into the voracious maws of their AI monsters. A 10-week consultation period into plans to remove copyright protections enjoyed by authors, musicians and others so that their work can be plundered to “train” their algorithms ended on February 24. This would be done by way of what is known as the text and data mining (TDM) exemption that currently applies to non-commercial research and would be extended to creative works still under copyright.

The work of British writers, composers and artists could be purloined allowing AI companies to profit from them and, in many cases, not repay the creator. The AI creations would then get IP protection despite having compromised the intellectual property of others. It is astonishing that a British government would contemplate this and yet this is the preferred option in the consultation paper.

Ministers are even planning to block an attempt in the House of Lords to preserve copyright laws by amending the Data (Use and Access) Bill now before Parliament. Baroness Kidron, a film-maker and crossbench peer behind the amendments, said this would be a “travesty”. She added: “The Government has just shown its colours again. It wants to make the UK an AI hub of America and they’re sacrificing the creative industries to do it.”

The Daily Telegraph in common with other newspapers has issued an eleventh-hour plea to ministers to drop the idea. If anything, they should be strengthening copyright against this wholly new and sinister attack on creative material.

Some big stars have joined the hue and cry. Brian May, the Queen guitarist, fears the industrial scale theft of other people’s talent by the AI behemoths cannot be stopped. Simon Cowell, the music producer, said the artistic livelihoods of many risk being wiped out. A letter signed by scores of artists said the Government’s approach “would smash a hole in the moral right of creators to present their work as they wish”, jeopardising the country’s reputation as a beacon of creativity.

The idea that a Labour government is bending over backwards to fill the coffers of Meta, Google and Elon Musk in this way is frankly baffling. So, too, was the Government’s refusal along with the Americans to sign a recent communiqué in Paris about controlling the growth of AI.

Sir Keir Starmer, who is to meet Donald Trump on Thursday, may have calculated that it would be better to be seen to support the AI Wild West that the new White House is happy to see and hope we get a slice of the action.

In the absence of anything else, Labour sees AI as the key to unlocking growth. Supporters say copyright restrictions get in the way of AI’s development and leave the UK struggling to catch up with America and China. Meanwhile, the people who invented AI are terrified about what it might do next.

Of course, the theft of creative material is hardly new. When a Christmas Carol was published in December 1843, knock-offs were on the streets within days claiming to be by Dickens. When a pirated version appeared in Peter Parley’s Illuminated Magazine the author sought an injunction against the publication.

He won but the magazine declared bankruptcy, leaving Dickens with costs of £700. It was thefts like these which necessitated copyright laws. It would be grotesque were Labour now to preside over their demise just to ingratiate themselves with J D Vance.”

Hows true! We’ll have to write to our MPs!

Trump’s Book Bann?

The Guardian’s website has an article by Ed Pilkington, dated 13 February 2025 under the title ‘Pentagon schools suspend library books for ‘compliance review’ under Trump orders’.

Ed Pilkington is Chief Reporter for The Guardian in the US

He wrote: “Tens of thousands of American children studying in Pentagon schools serving US military families have had all access to library books suspended for a week while officials conduct a “compliance review” under Donald Trump’s crackdown on DEI and gender equality.

The Department of Defense circulated a memo to parents on Monday that said that it was examining library books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”. The memo, which has been obtained by the Guardian, said that a “small number of items” had been identified and were being kept for “further review”.

Books deemed to be in possible violation of the president’s executive orders targeting transgender people and so-called “radical indoctrination” of schoolchildren have been removed from library shelves. The memo states that the titles have been relocated “to the professional collection for evaluation with access limited to professional staff”.

The censorship of library books in defense department schools provoked a furious response from Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee. He slammed the practice as “naked content and viewpoint censorship of books”, during a hearing on the “censorship-industrial complex” on Wednesday.

Raskin invited other members of Congress to join him in “denouncing the purge of books, the stripping of books from the Department of Defense libraries or any other public libraries in America”.

The purge of library books will affect up to 67,000 children being taught in Pentagon schools worldwide. The Guardian understands that all 160 schools, located in seven US states and 11 countries, are subject to the censorship.

The Guardian has obtained a list of books that have been caught up in the blanket evaluation. They include No Truth Without Ruth, a picture book for four-to-eight-year-olds about the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to sit on the US supreme court.

The book, by the award-winning writer Kathleen Krull, describes the sexist discrimination Ginsburg had to overcome in her rise to becoming a supreme court justice.

Other titles that have been caught up in the review include a book by the American Oscar-winning actor Julianne Moore. Freckleface Strawberry, also for four-to-eight year olds, features a young girl coming to terms with her freckles.

The Guardian invited the defense department to comment on the review of these and other titles, but a spokesperson did not refer to individual titles.

In a statement, the Department of Defense education activity confirmed that it was carrying out a review of library books as part of an examination of all “instructional resources”. The purpose was to ensure that Pentagon schools were aligned to Trump’s recent executive orders, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”

All book banns, except those which include books advocating violence, are to my mind a violation of the concept of Freedom of Speech. In their enthusiasm for cancelling DEI and gender self-identity, the Trump administration has gone too far.

Soulless Fiction Factories?

There is an article in the February 6 issue of the Telegraph by Jake Kerridge which exposes a publishing process which is not well known and could mean ‘the end of original thought’.

Jake Kerridge is a UK-based journalist who specializes in writing about books and literature. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for storytelling, he has established himself as one of the leading books journalists in the country. As a regular contributor to The Telegraph, Kerridge’s work reaches a wide audience of book enthusiasts and industry professionals alike, making him a go-to source for the latest news, reviews, and insights into the world of literature.

Jake Kerridge

Jake says, “Reader demand for the world-conquering genre of “romantasy” (romance/fantasy) has grown so voracious that publishers are struggling to keep up the supply. That’s the conclusion I drew recently when I stumbled on an advert asking for “unpublished Young-Adult fantasy romance authors to audition for the chance to write a YA novel”.

One burden the successful applicant would be relieved of was thinking of a plot: this was already outlined in the advert. “Trapped on an enchanted cross-kingdom train to her wedding, a fiery princess works alongside her infuriatingly attractive new bodyguard to expose a killer onboard.”

Working Partners, the company that placed the advert, describes itself not as a publisher but as a “book packager”. The phrase might conjure up visions of people wielding bubble wrap in a warehouse, but for some decades now these organisations have played a vital role in the publishing ecosystem – though they tend to stay out of the limelight.

Book packaging companies vary in scale from conglomerate to cottage industry, but they usually comprise a permanent editorial staff and various freelance writers. The majority of them deal in fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, and they are collaborative affairs, with the writers fleshing out ideas given to them.

There are generally two ways for a packaging company to become successful at placing books with publishers: produce, through the alchemy of collaboration, brilliant ideas; or get your staff to churn out books far more quickly than the publishers could do themselves in-house. If it sounds like literature on the factory farm model, packagers seem reluctant to dispel such ideas by shedding light on themselves.

“I think part of the reason book packagers get a bad rap is that there is a secrecy around the process, so it feels all a bit smoke and mirrors,” says Jasmine Richards, who founded the packager Storymix in 2019. “For example, celebrity fiction titles are often produced by packagers and traditionally that’s not been publicly acknowledged, although publishers are now getting better at crediting ghostwriters.

The Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry is one of Storymix’s big successes

“Personally I’m really proud to be a packager and to say out loud that we find talent and support it. So many writers get their first break with a book packager: you come and get paid to work on a project, build up your writing muscle and learn about the industry. Then maybe go on to sell your own project.”

Nevertheless, publishers remain wary of being publicly associated with the packaging model. In the US the romantasy community has been rocked this month by a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against Tracy Wolff, author of top-selling girl-meets-vampire yarns such as Crave.

In mounting her defence, Wolff’s lawyer revealed that her publisher, Liz Pelletier, was heavily involved in the writing of Crave, “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff … the main plot, location, characters, and scenes, and actively participating in the editing and writing process.”

Pelletier, who runs the publishing company Entangled, has told The New Yorker that she commissioned Wolff to write Crave – “the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with” – to fill a gap in her publishing schedule when another author failed to deliver a book. Wolff produced the first draft in two months.

Commentators have dubbed Entangled a book packager in all but name, something Pelletier has denied almost as strenuously as the plagiarism accusations. If a conventional publisher gets a reputation for following the packager model in-house, they may struggle ever to woo big-name authors to their stable.

However, the romantasy genre does perhaps seem more suited to the packager model than to authors who want to express themselves artistically or come up with original ideas. Romantasy novels repeat tropes ad infinitum – love across class (or species) divides, love triangles, enemies becoming lovers – and the sales figures suggest that the more formulaic the book, the better romantasy readers like it.

With publishers able to see what tropes are trending on BookTok – #morallygreymen and #daggertothethroat are popular hashtags for romantasy readers – they are reportedly shaping books accordingly. (The New Yorker reports that Pelletier told another author: “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. Pelletier has said that she does not recall this conversation.)

As one fantasy novelist (who asked not to be named) put it to me, publishers do seem to be following the packager model more. “It is expensive to build up an author’s career over time, especially if you invest in them and then they turn out to be, say, Neil Gaiman. There’s a sense among publishers that the TikTok generation responds more to individual books than authors.

“It’s cheaper for publishers to hire packagers, or work like packagers, and tailor a book to its potential readership. One outcome of that is books become not just formulaic – they’re indistinguishable.” (I asked the big five UK publishers whether they were increasingly using packaging companies when it came to fiction; none responded to my request for comment).

If it’s easy to see why publishers commission work from packagers, what’s in it for the writers who toil away for them? Certainly not the money, says Honor Head, a veteran writer of children’s non-fiction for numerous book packagers. “It’s really badly paid. Usually if you work in packaging you don’t get a royalty, you get a flat fee. And if the publisher comes back and says ‘I don’t like what you’ve written’, you don’t get any more money for doing it again. But I love writing for children, and I’ve got to a stage of my life now where I don’t need to make as much money.”

There is a suggestion of the salt mines about working for book packagers. In 2010 the packager Full Fathom Five, founded by the author James Frey, was denounced by the New York Times as a “fiction factory”, with creative writing students or graduates writing up Frey’s story concepts for the unprincely sum of $250 per novel.

In China, the phenomenal popularity of wuxianwen, a type of serial fiction published straight to smartphones and tablets, is maintained by the equivalent of packagers: editors map out story arcs and farm various portions of the story out to different writers, each of whom is expected to produce 10,000 words daily.

Head recalls that when she started her own packager some years ago, she and her partner “were working dawn to dusk seven days a week”. Life is more relaxed now she freelances writing children’s non-fiction for other packagers, although her rate is impressive: “I would say the longest I’ve spent on a single book – researching, writing, and then doing any checks – would be a week. It depends on the age group, but I can get a book done in half a day.” She enjoys the discipline of writing to guidelines, although it can be frustrating working on, say, a book on dinosaurs for the US market and being obliged not to write anything that contradicts creationist theory.

Storymix founder Jasmine Richards favours an organic approach to packaging, devising ideas for YA and children’s fiction with her writers and then approaching publishers rather than being commissioned. Her aim is “to put kids and teens of colour at the heart of the action”.

“When my son was about five we were in the bookshop and I couldn’t find a single book on the shelf that featured a character that looked like him. As an editor and author I thought: what’s the best way to change the look of that shelf as quickly as possible? As an author I can write one book a year, but if I start my own book packager I could get several books on that shelf.”

Among Storymix’s big successes is the Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry, which was sold by Richards to Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury.

“My job is often to matchmake the right idea with the right writer,” says Richards. “I had thought about a fantasy novel with a setting based on Holnicote House, which in the 1940s and ’50s took care of the children who came from relationships between African-American GIs and white British women. I knew exactly the writer I’d love to work on this project: Emma Norry, because I knew she had grown up in care and was of mixed-race heritage. I gave her a storyline, and I remember when she sent me the first chapter, I let the dinner burn in the oven while I read it. That’s a good example of how this method can unlock something amazing.”

Factories undermining the traditional autonomy of the author, or crucibles of collaborative magic? Whichever way you look at them, it’s clear that, despite most of us being unaware of their existence, without packagers the publishing landscape would look very different.”

This is a segment of the publishing market in which most of us would have no interest, either as writers or readers, but it clearly exists to serve the interests of some (perhaps a large group) of readers.

The Unreliable Narrator

There is an intriguing article by Carter Wilson on the Writer’s Digest website on how and why to use an unreliable narrator in fiction – dated 29 January 2025.

Carter Wilson is the USA Today bestselling author of nine critically acclaimed, standalone psychological thrillers. He is an ITW Thriller Award finalist, a five-time winner of the Colorado Book Award, and his works have been optioned for television and film. Carter lives outside of Boulder, Colorado. 

Carter Wilson

Carter says, “Crafting a convincing unreliable narrator might be one of the most difficult things a thriller writer does. Of course, a narrator doesn’t have to be unreliable. A perfectly dependable narrator is often just what the thriller reader needs. A voice of reason and stability thrust in the midst of chaos. Sometimes we want that level-headed hero to guide us through those dangerous waters.

But sometimes…

Sometimes we, as readers, don’t want stability. Sometimes, in the middle of that chaos, we don’t want to believe anyone, including the voice that’s at the helm. Occasionally the fun is figuring out who to trust, if there’s anyone to trust at all. The best thrillers are often the ones in which the protagonist is not only fooling the reader, but themselves as well.

I specialize in writing unreliable narrators, and when I try to dissect why exactly that is, I can think of a few reasons. There are likely many more, but that may take thousands of dollars of therapy to tease out. But top-of-mind, these reasons stand out.

1) I don’t know what I’m doing. 

I mean that with 82% sincerity. I don’t outline, and usually I only have the vaguest notion of a plot idea, or sometimes I only know the first chapter. My stories unfold to me one day at a time, which means my narrator is just as lost as I am. I’m writing from my subconscious, which lends itself to a labyrinth of twists and turns, many of which the narrator has created for themselves. Simply put, my narrator is unreliable because the author is unreliable.

2) Life is unreliable. 

If one really considers what makes a narrator unreliable, a few choice adjectives pop up. Deceitful, delusional. In denial. Okay, do those words not describe all of us, at least in some part of our lives? Unreliable is honest. What’s not honest is a hero who can do no wrong, always has the answers, and is always willing to save others before themselves. Is this an admirable protagonist? Yes, of course. But it makes for a helluva boring thriller.

3) The intimacy of the POV. 

I typically write from a first-person, present-tense point of view. That means I’m seeing the world through my narrator’s eyes, moment by moment. This makes writing an unreliable narrator most effective, because the reader experiences the thoughts and actions as the protagonist does, and offers a fractured, almost stream-of-consciousness narration. What’s more unreliable in our daily lives than our swirling thoughts, our sudden fears, our whimsical and wholly unattainable daydreaming?

Striking a perfect balance

Writing an unreliable narrator brings me great joy, because I know readers will be lured into thinking one way until suddenly they’re forced to face an altogether different reality. But it’s also a tricky way to write, and the writer has to strike the perfect balance between believability and deus ex machina. An unreliable narrator shouldn’t be approached as a literary device; rather, a narrator’s unreliability should be an organic result of who they are and the decisions they make. 

No author should set out and think to themselves, “I’m going to write an unreliable narrator.” That leads to clumsy and shoehorned writing. Rather, the author should pen the novel as it occurs to them from the subconscious, and only after reading the first draft should they themselves realize their protagonist is not to be trusted. The best writing comes from ephemeral, naturally occurring thoughts rooted in decades of life experience and keen observation. The worst writing comes from market-conscious intentions.

In my newest release, Tell Me What You Did, my protagonist Poe Webb’s unreliability is less a device than a simple fact of life. She lies to the audience because she lies to herself. Poe committed a horrible crime in her past, and though that experience has largely informed who she is in the story, she’s suppressed the memory enough that she struggles to even admit to herself what she did until events force her to reckon with her past actions. Her unreliability is, at its core, human.

The final key in writing an unreliable narrator is to avoid coyness. Too many times an author hints over and over that their protagonist is not to be trusted, building up an anticipation that’s so great the payoff never quite satisfies. Rather, the best unreliable narrators are those who never wink at the camera, and when they look into the mirror they’re just as convinced as we are that the person in front of them is telling the truth.

Like I coach all my students, write from the heart, from the soul, from instinct, from the subconscious. From that perspective, an unreliable narrator is not a trick but rather a fully formed individual who is convinced they are doing the right thing, despite all evidence to the contrary. This results in a hero—or anti-hero—who is, above all else, uniquely flawed and morally gray. Just like all of us.”

How Did Waterstones Become a High Street Success?

There is an article in today’s Telegraph, by Claire Allfree that explains how Waterstones became a high street success in the face of on-line giants like Amazon. The article focuses on James Daunt, Waterstones CEO. Excerpts are below.

James Daunt

“James Daunt is running between meetings and apologies for having to dash off for a minute before we can begin our chat. While he is gone I squint at the books in his New York office, but alas the Zoom screen is such that I can make out only one title – a biography of the artist Andy Warhol. Quite what a bookshelf would tell you about Daunt though is a moot point: he reads anything and everything.

“I try to knock through a non-fiction book once a week. I’ve just finished The Quiet Coup by Mehrsa Baradaran [about the market failures of American neoliberalism]. I’m reading a book on inflation. Although I’m having a tough time with novels at the moment. I haven’t hit upon something that’s made me feel ‘wow’.”

On second thoughts, perhaps you can deduce from this that Daunt cares very much about the health of new fiction, and that he is deeply concerned about the economy. Neither should be a surprise: Daunt is, after all, the most powerful man in Western bookselling. His footprint has been all over the books we buy and where we buy them ever since he founded the six-store Daunt Books chain, opening its first location on Marylebone High Street in London in 1990 at the age of 26.

Daunt Books’ Marylebone location is one of London’s most famous (and photographed) independent bookshops 

In 2011, he was appointed managing director of Waterstones at a time when the chain was in a seeming death loop of forced branch closures and collapsing profits; by 2024 sales had reached £528.4 million, up 17 per cent on the year before, with profits for the same year soaring by £20 million to hit £32.8 million.

In 2019, he became the chief executive of the then floundering US book chain Barnes and Noble (he splits his time between New York and the four-storey Hampstead home he shares with his wife Katy Steward, who works in health care; the couple have two adult daughters) and has overseen an aggressive reboot and expansion, opening 50 stores last year and with another 50 planned for this.

So successful have both companies become that rumours are circulating that Elliott Management, the private equity firm that owns them, plan to float them on the stock exchange. Daunt, though, 61, dismisses such corporate gossip as though it were a bad smell. “These are not my plans at all,” he says, reluctant to disclose any further details for both companies beyond their steady and remorseless growth. “Much of it is pure speculation: one sees that a private equity firm buys a business and assumes that five years on, if the business is doing well, they will sell it. To be honest I lack the imagination to see why one would do things any differently to how we do it now.”

Indeed. The success of Waterstones in the UK is a rare, possibly unique bright spot in a retail market otherwise dominated by the collapse into administration of big brands (Ted Baker is among the latest to be plunged into crisis) and declining profits (Asda announced their worst Christmas since 2015, with sales slumping by more than 5 per cent over the festive period).

“What makes us different is that we stubbornly and tenaciously held on in places where other people have left, so you’ll find us in Grimsby and Middlesborough long after M&S have abandoned these places,” says Daunt. The Waterstones vision is as much ideological as financial. “We have a bookshop in Ayr because it matters that we are there.”

So why is Waterstones soaring and everywhere else floundering? Covid helped: sales rose 73 per cent in 2021-2022 as half of adults doubled their reading time during lockdown and an artfully curated bookshelf became a Zoom must-have accessory. “Most retailers appeal to a relatively small demographic – teenagers, or older men and so forth. We sell to everyone.”

“We have huge advantages,” he argues. “What we sell has a fixed price that we don’t set [book prices are set by the publishers]. So we are remarkably well protected from the consequences of excessive inflation.” Fair enough, but that fixed price is creeping up – it’s now common for literary hardbacks to sell at £22. 

“But inflation has been remarkably modest in the UK book market, much less than it is in any other. When I first started selling books in 1990, a paperback was £6. Nor do we sell items that go out of date. Also we are aspirational. Our reach goes beyond the middle class bracket. Many parents want their children to read.”

Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.

“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”

“I was a nice middle-class child who was taken down to Caledonian Road library to pick out my books from a very early age and had my nose in a book from the moment I could read,” he says. “Clearly if one is privileged enough to grow up, in my case with library books, it helps foster a love for reading. We were a nuclear family, although because of my father’s job I was sent to boarding school [Sherborne, in Dorset] which is a way of being educated I suppose. I certainly haven’t subjected my own children [Molly, who works for a security and counter terrorism think tank and is also completing a masters in Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS university, and Eliza, who is studying history at Yale] to that.”

Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.

“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”

In person, Daunt has an air of careful affability. He was born in Islington in 1963. His father, who died in 2023, was the diplomat Timothy Daunt, while his mother, Patricia, brought up James and his two younger sisters – Eleanor, who works for a fragrance company, and Alice, who runs Daunt Travel, a high-end travel business. The house was bookish and he remembers school holidays as being “very intellectual”.

Daunt read history at Cambridge and on leaving joined JP Morgan in 1985, until Katy, at that point his girlfriend, suggested that perhaps he might want to do something else with his life. He set up his first Daunt shop in 1990, taking over an antiquarian bookstore on Marylebone High Street. “Running a business is not at all the tradition of the Daunt family,” he says. “Daunts tend to be either school teachers or public servants, and if you are neither of those things, you tend to join the church.”

There is a vaguely ecclesiastical beauty about the original Daunt shop, with its gorgeous Edwardian gallery and lofty calm. It set the image for the subsequent five Daunt stores that followed, which, given their locations (Holland Park, Hampstead, Belsize Park), retain an air of monied exclusivity, something of which Daunt is well aware.

“There has always been the accusations [with Daunt Books] of being leafy or snobby, and it’s a type that we undoubtedly are: you only have to listen to my accent to hear who I am. But the customer I could always identify was the taxi driver. They are and remain a really good customer base for us because they keep lots of books.”

When he was asked to take over Waterstones by its new owner, the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, no one thought he could do it. Amazon was selling books online at aggressive discounts, and there were apocalyptic warnings about the rise of the ebook.

Instead, Daunt set about applying the independent Daunt ethos to Waterstones and, in what seemed a particularly kamikaze move at the time, severing its relationship with publishers. No more in-store promotion displays paid for by publishing houses, a revenue stream that had brought in £27 million a year. And no more three for two discount tables either. He cleared out the management at a loss of 200 jobs and handed buying power to individual stores. “I hate homogeneity,” he says. “The idea is that each time you are creating a bookshop for the local community.”

He has his critics. Some accuse him of being ruthless, an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Is he? “I don’t know if I’m ruthless but I am single-minded as to what a good book shop is. And I don’t compromise on that and I never change my notion of what that is. I will never let people be useless. The key to that, and the bit people have found a bit ruthless, is that I require my bookshops to be run by booksellers. And if you are not interested in books and you don’t read and you don’t care then work somewhere else.”

With such reach and influence can come accusations of excessive curating, even censorship. Daunt bats them away. “We get accused periodically of going all woke, it’s nonsense. Or you get a bit of outrage from some author who says we are no longer stocking their book. And over the years I’ve been accused of not stocking almost every sort of book.”

All the same, does he agree the book industry is increasingly convulsed by the subject of what can and cannot be published? As leading publishers shy away from books with a gender critical perspective, or books with a pro-Israel stance.

“I don’t recognise that. Of course publishers make missteps. They go and clean up Roald Dahl and it’s just absurd. It was a bit of a stupid thing to do. But publishing is such a vigorous landscape that these missteps are soon corrected.”

Do these “missteps” affect what Waterstones select to buy? “Our job is to curate a sensible array of books. And when it comes to books about the Israel and Gaza conflict, we’ve had some real bestsellers such as The Genius of Israel [by Saul Singer and Dan Senor, about Israel’s strength as a nation]. Admittedly, this has been in areas with strong Jewish communities but it was ever thus. We are not dictating to anyone.”

“Yes, sometimes we make mistakes. We made a mistake with Hannah Barnes’ book about the Tavistock Clinic [Time to Think, an exposé of the Tavistock NHS gender clinics which multiple publishers refused to publish; it was eventually published by Swift in 2023] by underestimating how many copies we would need [when it was first published]. So when it sold out, we had to go back to Swift and ask for more copies. It’s a problem for about 10 days. People say ‘you are boycotting it’. We are not boycotting it; we’ve just sold out our initial order.””