Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

Penguin Random House sells Author Solutions

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Labeled more a vanity press than real self publishing service provider,  Author Solutions is controversial and faced a few lawsuits from unhappy authors. Enough so that Penguin Random House is distancing itself and basically ceding the self-publishing territory to Amazon. While I think Amazon provides some great services for indie authors, competition is healthy. I guess the problem is that Author Solutions wasn’t really competition as it was accused of making money off of authors, instead with authors. Please let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments, or even if you have some insight. I think we would all love to hear about anyone’s experiences with Author Solutions good or bad.

Benedicte Page and Katherine Cowdrey give us the details on the BookSeller site.

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PRH sells Author Solutions

penguinPenguin Random House has sold its controversial self-publishing division Author Solutions.

Author Solutions, acquired by Pearson in 2012 for $116m (£74m), for integration into Penguin, was sold to an affiliate of Najafi Companies, an Arizona-based private investment firm, on 31st December. Financial terms were not disclosed.

In a note to staff, PRH c.e.o. Markus Dohle said: “We thank the entire Author Solutions team for their hard work and dedication during their time as part of Penguin Random House, and we wish them all the best and much success under the new ownership. With this sale, we reaffirm our focus on consumer book publishing through our 250 imprints worldwide, and our commitment to connecting our authors and their works to readers everywhere.”

The acquisition of Author Solutions by Pearson/Penguin was always controversial, with then Penguin c.e.o. John Makinson having to defend the company against accusations that the buy would muddy its brand image.

Makinson said at the time: “This acquisition will allow Penguin to participate fully in perhaps the fastest-growing area of the publishing economy and gain skills in customer acquisition and data analytics that will be vital to our future.”

Author Solutions continued to be run as a separate business, with Penguin staffer Andrew Phillips transferred to run it in place of former c.e.o. Kevin Weiss in 2013. Phillips confirmed that he would remain as chief executive of AS.

The self-publishing division was the subject of a lawsuit in the US, which was settled out of court last August, during which the business faced accusations from plaintiff authors of seeking to make money from authors, rather than for authors. Author Solutions lawyers maintained the suit was “a misguided attempt to make a federal class action out of a series of gripes”.

Read the full post on BookSeller

Bonus article off the Quartz site with more details – Amazon has officially won the multibillion-dollar self-publishing market

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THE E-PUBLISHING REVOLUTION IS DEFINITELY NOT OVER (Regardless of what you’ve heard)

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Today’s offering is in the spirit of why Publetariat was created. Agent Laurie McLean gazes into the future to let us know what to expect on Anne R Allen’s Blog. Too bad she couldn’t give us the US winning Powerball numbers – I would totally share with you. What do you think of her predictions? Let us know in the comments.

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THE E-PUBLISHING REVOLUTION IS DEFINITELY NOT OVER (Regardless of what you’ve heard)

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We’re honored this week to host literary agent Laurie McLean of the Fuse Literary Agency. If you’re looking for an agent, we have great news for you! Although Laurie is not accepting unsolicited submissions, she will accept queries from readers of this blog! Scroll down for more info in Laurie’s bio. And now, here’s Laurie!… Anne 

Agent Laurie McLean, Founding Partner of Fuse Literary, Looks into Her Crystal Ball

Thanks, Anne, for once again sharing your audience with me for my annual predictions of the year ahead in publishing. From the title of this post, you can tell I’m at odds with the notion that the digital publishing revolution is now over, ebooks are slipping in popularity, print is once again king of the world, indie bookstores are back on a steady footing, and adult coloring books are saving the world.

Well, except for that last one. I agree with traditional publishing that adult coloring books are propping up print book sales big time. But as far as the other “facts” go, I say hogwash.

That’s a lot to digest, so let me bullet point these 13 predictions for ease of digestion…and hopefully inspiration…for 2016!

1) Ebook sales are NOT stagnating.

I’ve always been a firm believer that you can make numbers and statistics dance to any beat you play and I believe the Big Five are skewing these numbers with their newly won agency pricing models.

Last year I saw several of my clients’ debut novels come out with an ebook price that was higher than the print book price. Check it out on Amazon. I’m not kidding. That’s part of the “decline” scenario, because honestly who would not buy a hardcover print book if it was cheaper than a digital book. Most people would make that choice.

And because of this, ebook sales from traditional publishers large and small seem to be declining.

Once you add Amazon ebook sales into the calculation, however, it all falls apart. Unfortunately that is not what most reports have done. They only concentrated on traditional retail sales numbers from their usual cast of publishers. So you’re getting fed false numbers. Ebooks are healthy and should continue to be healthy throughout 2016 and beyond. They are here to stay.

Once ebook pricing stabilizes, because while I’m sure the traditional booksellers and publishers are trying to help their physical retail partners (aka bookstores) by increasing print sales, they will see that they went too far and the smart ones will adjust. At least that is my opinion.

2) Physical bookstore sales will continue to decline.

Amazon already sells the vast majority of print and digital books. They are a healthy company. Heck, they signed up 3 million new Prime members at $99 a pop during the third week of December alone!

So I’m betting that they will continue to discount books, support indie authors through KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, and the local bookstores and chains will simply not be able to keep up.

I’ll talk about Google and Apple as possible white knights a bit later, but for now I’m predicting that Amazon is just going to keep growing and taking market share from bookstores in 2016.

Read the full post on Anne R Allen’s Blog

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The big question: are books getting longer? – Does size matter?

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over at theguardian finds out that size really does matter, at least in the literary world. Some of this is due to the rise of the eBook. When you can carry your whole library with you, a 900 page tome is no problem.

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The big question: are books getting longer?Man Looking At Books Shows Education

A new survey of bestsellers and critics’ picks has concluded that the average book is now 25% bigger than 15 years ago. But not everyone reads things this way

Books are steadily increasing in size, according to a survey that has found the average number of pages has grown by 25% over the last 15 years.

A study of more than 2,500 books appearing on New York Times bestseller and notable books lists and Google’s annual survey of the most discussed books reveals that the average length has increased from 320 pages in 1999 to 400 pages in 2014.

According to James Finlayson from Vervesearch, who carried out the survey for the interactive publisher Flipsnack, there’s a “relatively consistent pattern of growth year on year” that has added approximately 80 pages to the average size of the books surveyed since 1999.

For Finlayson, much of this shift can be explained by the industry’s shift towards digital. “When you pick up a large book in a shop,” he says, “you can sometimes be intimidated, whereas on Amazon the size of a book is just a footnote that you don’t really pay all that much attention to.” The rise of digital reading is also a factor, he adds. “I always hold off buying really big books until I’m going on holiday, because I don’t want to lug them around in my bag. But if you have a big book on a Kindle, that’s not a consideration.”

The literary agent Clare Alexander agrees that long books are more portable in electronic formats, but points out that much ebook reading is focused on genres such as romance, crime and erotica. For Alexander, the gradual increase in size is evidence of a cultural shift.

“Despite all the talk of the death of the book because of competition from other media,” she says, “people who love to read appear to prefer a long and immersive narrative, the very opposite of a sound bite or snippets of information that we all spend our lives downloading from Google.

“The Americans have led the way – think Donna Tartt, Jonathan Franzen, Hanya Yanagihara and most recently Marlon James (Jamaican but living in America) – but they are not alone. Hilary Mantel from the UK or Eleanor Catton from New Zealand have both written long novels, and if you look through that list you will see how many of these have won prizes. So clearly the literary establishment loves long books too.”

The Man Booker prize has been a pillar of the literary establishment in the UK since the 1970s, and evidence of expansion can be found in the roster of winners. The first five years of Booker-winning novels average out at around 300 pages, but even taking into account Julian Barnes’s 2011 triumph with his 160-page novella The Sense of an Ending, the last five years of Booker laureates weigh in at an average of 520 pages. This year’s winner was brief only in name: Marlon James’s 700-page A Brief History of Seven Killings.

For Max Porter, the editor at Granta who published the 800-page Booker winner of 2013, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, it’s difficult to get a sense of a shift across the whole market but it’s “heartening to see these big, ambitious books appearing”.

“All across culture, people are trying to work out whether content is going to become mobile, what devices people are going to be using to consume it,” says Porter, “so I’m quite encouraged by the big, fat book sitting there saying: ‘read me’.”

The rise of the television box set, where viewers will commit to spending dozens of hours following a single narrative, has encouraged publishers to support writers exploring a bigger canvas, Porter continues. “It’s shown that people have the appetite, patience and stamina to stick with a plot and characters as they develop over a large span.”

Read the full series on theguardian.com.

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Are small independent publishers doing the work for big publishers?

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Today’s post by Kevin Duffy, the co-founder of independent publisher Bluemoose Books, off of theguardian.com site dated December 22, 2015 .

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Are small independent publishers doing the work for big publishers?Tug Of War 3d Characters Shows Conflict And Adversity

While the giant firms sink huge sums into fleeting fads, the commitment and passion of the smaller imprints leave a larger impression in the long term

Here’s an observation: it sometimes feels as though smaller independents are the research and development departments for the big publishers, where literary fiction is concerned. We find great writers, nurture them, wipe their brows, polish their work and buff it until it shines. Then we send them out, readers love the books and they get shortlisted and win major literary prizes.

Then the big money imprints swoop in; whisking them away to put them in a sparkly marketing jacket and present them in their new package to the world. A few recent examples: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, originally published by Galley Beggar – subsequently taken up by Faber and Faber. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy, published by And Other Stories – and now by Penguin.

Why are independent publishers managing to get more of their authors’ work on to prize shortlists and win more awards than the bigger firms? Two of the last three Man Booker winners were published by independents. How could that be?

Well, we read unsolicited manuscripts. We read more stories. Big publishers only use agents, who have their own economic imperative, and they miss out on a host of brilliant books every day, every month, every year. Like John Murray, part of Hachette, which called Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney “the modern classic that we all missed” when it was shortlisted for the Costa first novel prize this year. They plucked it from Yorkshire publisher Tartarus, secured it a film deal, and it became one of the best-reviewed debuts this year.

Big publishing has tried to monetise creativity, kneeling at the altar of the pie chart and Venn diagram. And for new literary fiction it isn’t working.

I have been told on numerous occasions by agents and editors: “But Kevin, you’re not a London publisher,” as if geography has anything to do with finding cracking stories. This chiding does give you an insight into another problem for big publishing: the issue of “unpaid internships”, class, and a narrowing of the social backgrounds of people entering publishing, their limited life experiences, reading tastes and how this influences their acquisitions. They are missing out on millions and millions of readers because of a business model that isn’t really working.

Read the full series on theguardian.com.

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A reader’s manifesto

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Please read the full post on TheBookSeller website.

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Building Buzz Before Your Book Comes Out: 10 Strategies That Work

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Today’s post by  originally appeared on Writer’s Digest on November 4, 2015. He has some really good points about using social media.

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If you’ve got a book scheduled for release, whether it’s traditionally published or indie-published, the onus is on you to promote it. Here are some helpful strategies for making a big splash by using social media to build buzz before your book comes out.

1. Start early

It’s never too early to get your name and face out there. This gives you time to find your groove, make mistakes, and grow your social media following so that when you finally have news about your book, there will be an audience to hear it.

2. Explore social media

Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Pinterest? Goodreads? You can’t do them all. Start experimenting to see what works for you. If you started early, you’ve got time.

3. Post

Get creative, think out of the box. If you write historical fiction, post pictures of period clothing, dirty words from your époque, recipes from the era. If you write romance, update the public on the whereabouts of Fabio, post pictures of your favorite cover model. Review romantic comedies. If you write detective fiction, post a recipe for your character’s signature cocktail, or a diagram with the parts of a gun. Young adult (YA)? Post funny YouTube videos. Science fiction or fantasy? Announce and review cons. You get the idea.

Every tenth time, post book news—signing with an agent, book contracts, cover reveals, release dates, book giveaways, early reviews, announcement about pre-sales. People will endure your self-promotion because they like your other posts—kind of like a fundraising drive on public radio.

4. Use Facebook

It ain’t what it used to be, but it still rules across every age group. Last January, Facebook began sending out fewer and fewer posts to the people who like our pages, hoping we all would pay money to boost those posts to reach our followers. Also, posts from liked pages are now shuttled out of our “news stream” into a “page stream.” Here’s a simple trick to help circumvent that.

a. Post the following message on your Facebook page.

“When you like this page, remember to:
* Hover over the LIKED button.
* Click GET NOTIFICATIONS.
* Click SEE FIRST.

b. Pin that post to the top of your page. Followers who use this setting will be notified when you post.

Remember, you aren’t limited to your own Facebook page for promotion. Join existing community pages with members from your target audience. Find pages with a high number of engaged followers (lots of comments and likes). Every time you post, your name is out there. Mention your book when it’s polite to do so. It’s rude to over promote and it can backfire. Make sure you obey the rules.

Always put key words in the “topics” box on the “About” section of your Facebook page to make it more searchable.

5. Build relationships

Respond to everyone who comments with a like or a word. Check often so you can hide offensive posts. I’ve had Facebook followers duke it out over the pros and cons of corsets, so don’t underestimate the potential for conflicts.

Read the full post on Writer’s Digest.

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Secrets of the Book Designer: Paperbacks

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Today’s post by Linda Huang originally appeared on on October 22, 2015.

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Secrets of the Book Designer: Paperbacks

On Creating the Paperback Edition of Dept. of Speculation

THE DAY JOB

I’m a cover designer at Vintage & Anchor Books, the paperback imprint at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. On average, roughly half our covers are adapted from the hardcover design, and the rest are entire redesigns. Whether or not a book needs a facelift depends on a number of factors, including (most importantly) hardcover sales, the hardcover design’s commercial accessibility, and its reproducibility in paperback. The goal of the paperback is therefore to reposition a book, capture a wider audience, or target a new market. We give books a second chance.

What this means visually is democratizing the design: making it appeal to more readers by showing more of a sense of place, time, character, genre, or mood. Generally, hardcovers can afford to be a bit abstract while paperbacks prefer to be more concrete. Although this can sometimes result in graphic sameness, readers do need cues to help them decide what to buy. The goal is, after all, to sell books. The internal struggle as a designer, then, is finding a satisfying balance between commercial accessibility and artistic standards. We try to push boundaries to create covers that are graphically interesting—which has a pragmatic purpose because it helps them stand out—while maintaining a level of marketability.

Before I begin work, I read as much as I can of and about the book and author—reviews, marketing strategies, and similar titles, jotting down anything I find metaphorically significant or visually interesting. If necessary, I collect art research for inspiration, especially for era-specific books. It helps to have a mood board containing the visual language I am trying to capture. I then ask myself:

What is the overall tone or mood of the writing?

Does it call for a photograph, an illustration, or a collage?

Is the author important enough to warrant an all-type cover?

I design as many iterations of a cover as necessary until I am happy with at least a few directions. My art director might make suggestions or help me narrow it down even further to present to the committee, who then select one to be sent to the author for approval. All this communication is handled through the editor. Unless you have a relationship with the author, designers rarely interact with them in the design process.

Read the full post on .

Amazon Has an Absurdly Inconsistent Review Policy

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This post by Nate Hoffelder originally appeared on The Digital Reader on November 2, 2015.

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Amazon won’t allow paid book reviews, and they won’t let you review your friend’s books, but as the Seattle Times tells us, anything else goes.

Jay Greene brings us the sad tale of conspiracy nuts running rampant in the review sections at Amazon.com.

Most book authors know they need to endure critics, even comments that may be malicious and personal.

But the venom that runs through more than three dozen reviews on Amazon.com of Scarlett Lewis’ latest book are particularly scathing.

 “This Scarlet Lewis person is a real sick human being,” writes one reviewer named Kevin. “Scarlett Lewis is a fraud and a sellout to all of humanity,” writes another, anonymously. “Scarlett Lewis is a lying traitor,” writes a reviewer named David Weiss.Those reviews might suggest that Lewis is a polemic politician, treasonous spy or scurrilous financier. She’s none of these. Lewis is the mother of Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old boy who was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago.

She wrote “Nurturing Healing Love: A Mother’s Journey of Hope and Forgiveness” to describe her journey after the massacre and help others choose love and forgiveness instead of anger and resentment in their darkest moments.

The reviewers cited above were inspired to post bogus reviews by their belief that Sandy Hook was a hoax, but not all review spammers share that motivation nor is this problem unique to Amazon.

Read the full post on The Digital Reader.

Google may be copying your book without your permission. Here’s why that is a good thing.

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Similar to web searches, Google is trying to create an online searchable library through Google Books and the Google Library Project. Approximately 30 million books have been scanned. The only larger collection is the Library of Congress, which has 37 million items of various media, not all of which is accessible online and the Library of Congress doesn’t point potential buyers to Amazon, any other merchant, or even an author website.

With the Google Library Project, Google partnered with libraries who provided select materials for scanning. The materials are often out of print, or rare books and publications. However, authors are not contacted for permission to use their works, which brought the attention of the Author’s Guild.

Google uses the scanned items to provide better literary searches along with “snippets” of relevant text, while the libraries have access to scanned copies of their materials. The libraries are still restricted by copyright law on how they handle the scanned content. A win-win for both parties, but what about the authors?

According to Google’s website “The Library Project’s aim is simple: make it easier for people to find relevant books – specifically, books they wouldn’t find any other way such as those that are out of print – while carefully respecting authors’ and publishers’ copyrights. Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers. ”

The Author’s Guild filed a lawsuit on behalf of the authors, with claims that the snippets of text shown in the search results through Google Books and the Google Library Project are against “fair us” and could be used to compile a copy of the text by enterprising hackers. It should be noted that Google does not make any money off of the links or run ads against the search results. Author’s benefit because links are provided to purchase the titles when available.

“Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.” – copyright.gov

Recently the Second Circuit Appeals Court unanimously exonerated Google from the lawsuit brought forth by the Author’s Guild.

As part of their findings the judges said “The ultimate goal of copyright is to expand public knowledge and understanding, which copyright seeks to achieve by giving potential creators exclusive control over copying of their works, thus giving them a financial incentive to create informative, intellectually enriching works for public consumption.””

The “snippets” show up as text in the search, just like the text of websites shown by Google currently, but as excerpts from the scanned books. There is an option for authors and rights holders to opt out. If there is an alternative source that will fulfill the search request, such as a dictionary, then that source is used. Parts of the scanned books are “blacklisted” and won’t show in the search results. You can see yourself, in the sample below.

Google search snippet example

In one part of the litigation process, The Author’s Guild and Google had come to terms where Google would pay a nominal fee to have exclusive rights to use the scanned texts. This was dismissed by the judge as providing an unfair advantage to Google and if approved would have stopped anyone else from providing an online book search.

From the judge’s statement “Google’s program does not, at this time and on the record before us, expose Plaintiffs to an unreasonable risk of loss of copyright value through incursions of hackers.”  With less than 16% of a book used for the snippets, it is not possible for someone to recreate the book even if they wanted to take the time and effort to do so.

The judges went on to state “Google does not sell its scans, and the scans do not replace the books. While partner libraries have the ability to download a scan of a book from their collections, they owned the books already — they provided the original book to Google to scan. Nor is it likely that someone would take the time and energy to input countless searches to try and get enough snippets to comprise an entire book.”

While the judges conceded that theoretically the snippets might mean some lost sales to authors, reality is that someone looking for factual validation has many resources, such as Wikipedia.  If more than a snippet of text is needed then the likelihood increases that the user will purchase the book and be able to use the handy links provided. While the majority of the current scanned texts are more esoteric and hard to find publications, who knows how far Google will take this project in its bid to become the comprehensive online library catalog. One thing all authors struggle with is getting their material in front of likely readers. Someone searching for specific material online is the author’s target audience and will be more likely to make a purchase.

In response to the ruling, The Author’s Guild is planning to present the case to the Supreme Court. From their website:

“We aren’t challenging the benefits of Google Books search engine, just the seizure of copyrighted material,” explained Authors Guild President Roxana Robinson.  Indeed, Authors guild members are perhaps the greatest users of Google Books search and know its benefits better than anyone. “But Google should be willing to compensate an author for copying her work for use in its database,” continued Robinson.

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com

Resources:

Click to access agvgoogle.pdf

http://copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html

Authors Guild

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/library/

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happened-to-google-books?mbid=rss

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151016/08010632559/appeals-court-explains-yet-again-to-authors-guild-that-googles-book-scanning-is-fair-use.shtml

http://consumerist.com/2015/10/16/appeals-court-says-googles-book-scanning-project-is-legal-fair-use/#more-10220932

Reality 301 With @heidicullinan

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This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 5/15/13.

Tonight Twitterverse roared with outrage over Kendall Grey’s post on Authors for Life where she bemoans the fact that sometimes, publishing is hard. Grey spent four years writing and a great deal of money and effort promoting an urban fantasy trilogy; it tanked. She wrote an erotic novel she describes as a “piece of trash” in two months, spent much less in promotion and gave it much less effort, and that book made some decent money. She’s angry that she wasn’t rewarded for her “beautiful, artistic” book and that by selling out she made money. Grey writes:

I know it’s depressing to hear that in order to find success, you may have to compromise your principles. I’ve come to grips with the fact that in the current market, trashy smut sells, and urban fantasy does not. Tough shit for me. If you want to sell books, you have to feed the market what it craves.

Grey goes on to state that

once you’ve done your part to feed the reader machine, and you get paid ridiculous amounts of money for publicly shaming yourself and lowering your standards, you’ll be armed with the power to write what you want.

I think the best place to start in response is to take a moment to acknowledge where this kind of selfish, angry thinking comes from, and like most things gone awry, it starts from something well-meaning. We could build several acres of affordable housing out of the stacks and stacks of books, blogs, and inspirational memes urging writers to write from the heart, to follow your vision, to let your voice ring out and be heard. The problem is that almost always after that advice comes the promise that should a writer (or any artist, really) follow this path of purity, success and happiness will unquestionably follow.

It’s not that this promise isn’t true, exactly. It’s that for far, far too many writers “success and happiness” gets equated with “lots of money and fame.” Here’s the reality of making art: the brass ring is BRASS, not gold. To believe even for a moment that simply producing the work of one’s heart means one will now be a bestseller is beyond naive. To proceed as if commercial success is due because of one’s effort or expenditure is embarrassingly foolhardy. But most of all, publicly ridiculing readers, especially one’s own, is a hanging offense, and anyone who commits it will very quickly feel the cinch of a brutal noose.

 

Read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog. Note that it contains strong language.

 

People Are Not Reading The e-Books They Buy Anymore

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on Good E Reader on 9/20/15.

Are people reading the e-books they purchase from companies such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kobo? There is growing research data that is supporting the notion that people are not reading the digital titles they buy online and for the most part, they are never even opened.

At Book Expo America last April, Kobo dived deep into global reading behavior and analyzed the data.  They found that 60% of e-books that are purchased from their complete line of apps, e-readers, tablets and via the web are never opened. Interestingly, the more expensive the book was, the more likely the reader would at least start it.

There are other companies that are also checking out reading behavior and providing some very interesting data. Jellybooks is a young startup and they have developed e-book tracking software that users opt into getting their reading habits tracked in exchange for free or discounted items. Over 100 publishers are now using their API for their own e-book library, including Harlequin, which uses the code for free romance novels from their new loyalty program.

 

Read the full post on Good E Reader.

 

Round-Down: On Women Writers And the Fallout from ‘Confession’ in the Digital Age

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This post by Cathe Shubert originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/22/15.

Social media is in the spotlight—or crosshairs, as it may be–in the literary landscape this week. Several articles and author interviews have touched upon both the benefits and the tremendous costs known to an author maintaining their online presence, none of them coming to a firm conclusion about whether it’s better to be Harper Lee or Hanya Yanagihara, Cheryl Strayed or Elena Ferrante when promoting a book. All of the attention being paid to how we market ourselves online has me asking: Does social media pose yet another disadvantage to women writers? Or is it a blessing that gives us easier access to mainstream audiences? Women are particularly vulnerable to the lure of public confession that the internet seems to demand—and they are most likely to be the ones to suffer fallout from it.

After Laura Bennett’s piece in Slate raised the question of whether publication of personal confessions is exploitative, The Guardian interviewed a variety of editors for outlets that often publish gone-viral first person essays. Curiously, all of these editors were themselves women and not all of them agreed on whether women were more likely to write confessionals than men.

 

Read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

I Gave A Speech About Race To The Publishing Industry And No One Heard Me

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This post by Mira Jacob originally appeared on Buzzfeed on 9/17/15.

We are ready for a publishing industry that represents the world we live in, and it will ignore us — writers and readers of color — at its peril.

Last night, I walked into a mini-disaster. Or to be more precise, I stood on a chair in it.

A few weeks ago, when Publisher’s Weekly asked me to give the keynote speech in a night honoring the industry’s young publishing stars, I jumped at the chance. Talk about your last year, they told me. Talk about what it was like getting published.

My last year has been intense. My book The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing came out, I spent a few months touring internationally, and from a distance, it looked like one big party. Up close, it looked a bit different. This was something I really wanted to get into, as sometimes when we talk about the sad statistics facing writers of color in publishing, they become just that: statistics. I wanted to back that up by talking about what it actually looks like.

But fate wasn’t with me last night. The sound system at the event was terrible, which was a real problem. But even as I stood up on a chair and yelled to deliver my speech, half the room turned away and started talking over me. By the time I was done, I was talking to a very small ring of people, which felt, well, awful. More awful were the disappointed faces of the minorities in the crowd, the few who hugged me as I walked out and whispered, We wish they had heard it.

Well, I do, too. Anyone got a chair?

True story: A few months ago, a producer from a literary show on Boston Public Radio asked me to read a section of my book on air. I sent it to him and he said he would need to edit it down. I totally got it. Radio is a different medium. Stories need to change. Sure! Change away. Then I got the edits back. Some of them were normal cutting 300 words to 25, but there were others. My characters’ names, he wrote, were confusing. There were three in the scene, could I cut them to two if I was going to stick with the unfamiliar names? And then there was this other note, even stranger. In a sentence setting the scene up, I had written “three East Indian teenagers, kids of immigrants, sit talking on the roof of the house.” In his notes, the producer had crossed out East Indian and written “ASIAN INDIAN.” Asian Indian. As if that is a thing that anyone has ever said to anyone else, excluding the sentence — “Not like American Indian, like Asian Indian.” And the note went on: “Alas!” — not kidding, he really said Alas! like he was some Victorian maiden — “Alas! Americans aren’t familiar with the term East Indian — it’s just not something we say over here.”

This is when my soul kind of made a Chewbacca noise. That horrible howl.

 

Read the full post on Buzzfeed.

 

The First-Person Industrial Complex

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This article by Laura Bennett originally appeared on Slate on 9/14/15.

The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price.

A few months ago, Natasha Chenier submitted a piece to Jezebel about her sexual relationship with her dad. She described meeting her biological father for the first time at age 19 and being gradually overtaken by lust for him. She recalled being so wracked by disgust and shame after the second time they had oral sex that she dry-heaved over the toilet in his bathroom. “He lay on his bed looking aloof during those episodes,” she wrote, “spouting empty assurances like, ‘You’ll be fine.’ ”

Writing that essay, she recalls now, was “terrifying.” But in a way, it felt inevitable, too. Chenier, now 27, had always kept a diligent journal and had been reading Jezebel for years. “I had this story I’d always wanted to tell,” she says, “and suddenly I felt like the world was ready.”

Jia Tolentino, Jezebel’s features editor, contemplated the draft. It was sure to be a blockbuster. It had graphic and devastating details, yet a matter-of-fact narrative voice. It would feed the Internet’s bottomless appetite for harrowing personal essays. But she tried to explain to Chenier just what airing this story could mean for her life: “Since she was new to writing, I just wanted to confirm—was she ready for this to be on her Google results forever?” Tolentino gave her the option of publishing under a pseudonym. But Chenier seemed confident that she knew what she was getting into. “She was sure she wanted to build her writing career around this,” Tolentino says. When Jezebel published the piece, titled “On Falling In and Out of Love With My Dad,” it ran with a bright red illustration of a bed between the words “I” and “Dad.” Of course, the essay went viral.

 

Read the full article on Slate.

 

A Manifesto For The Future Of The Book

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This post by Tom Abba originally appeared on Futurebook on 8/27/15.

How easy it is to keep replicating the same old same old. Want to stop replicating print in digital? “Lock your marketing department away for six months,” advises narrative theory specialist Tom Abba in today’s manifesto. Lamenting, as do many others, the “books under glass” disappointment of most ebook efforts to date, he writes: “Print is kicking and the novel is breathing. Writers are poor and you are squandering opportunities.” We should, he tells us, take better advantage of “this chance for change, for real disruption.” — Porter Anderson

This is not good enough.

Repeat after me.

This.
Is.
Not.
Good.
Enough.

What are we building? What is it we’re making?

The best we have are books under glass, enhancements with video and clicking and audio. Imprisoned and ridiculed and not what was promised. 

The book is not dead. Print is kicking and the novel is breathing. Writers are poor and you are squandering opportunities. This chance for change, for real disruption.
Repeat after me.

This.
Is.
Not.
Good.
Enough.

Digital is different and digital’s new.

It’s going to break you, or it’s going to ignore you (as it’s already done). If you don’t engage it, nothing will follow. It can remake your business, but only if you let it.

 

Read the full post on Futurebook.