Book Marks: Author Debut Stress, Digital Lending Concerns

A survey by The Bookseller is causing a few ripples. For 54 per cent of debut authors, publishing their books negatively affected their mental health. This group reported "anxiety, stress, depression and lowered self-esteem, caused by lack of support, guidance or clear and professional communication from their publisher." Only 22 per cent had a positive experience as debut authors.

The Mary Sue picked up on this and tries to get to the bottom of it. Reality checks lurk at every step towards publishing and beyond, but they seem to have singled out the lack of communication from publishers as a major factor for authors who engaged them. However, they conclude that: "The issues facing debut authors, then, seem to be more systemic in nature than a problem with any one individual editor or publishing executive."

Authorship isn't a smooth, straight path for most. Stories like this one highlight just how much of a slog it can be. Even for those who penned what would become bestsellers or classics, hurdles along the way can be too much to handle. Perseverance, hard work, and luck continue to play a role long after a book hits the shelves, with or without a publisher. If the process is too much, perhaps some time out is needed, or one should just quit.

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The Internet Archive case may have been a victory for the publishers involved but someone at The Walrus believes that the implications...

... extend beyond the case to touch the digital rights of all libraries—and, by extension, those of authors and readers. It has a bearing on which books (and which writers) libraries deem worthy of the expense to stock in digital formats and, ultimately, how much digital information will be freely accessible.

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A Taiwan-based bookseller has been detained and placed under investigation in China. Li Yanhe, also known by his pen name Fucha, "is known for publishing books that are critical of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) or are politically sensitive, including about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human rights abuses of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and corruption within the CCP," the Guardian reported.

Previously, several Hong Kong booksellers were also detained by Beijing. One of them, Gui Minhai, was apparently taken while holidaying in Thailand, raising concerns that those wanted by Beijing weren't safe even when they're overseas. Li, however, was in China when he was detained.

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If "an anthology of gender-bent, queered, race-bent, and inclusive retellings from the enchanting and eternally popular world of Greek myth" does not feature Greek authors, is it truly inclusive? On Twitter, writer and historian Ioanna Papadopoulou lamented the lack of Greek voices in Tor's Fit for the Gods and, as it tends to go on Twitter, discussions got ugly.

Papadopoulou responded to a bad take on this issue but the gist of it is, "Greeks are just tired of seeing Anglo writers hog all the oxygen in the room". Someone on Twitter claimed that apparently, many Greek authors wanted in but, from the list of contributors, (diverse, yes, but I don't see any Greeks in there) didn't make it. East Asians and Southeast Asians, for instance, are retelling and adapting their folklore for modern audiences – surely Greeks can do the same.

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Writers! Can't resist reading reviews of your work, even if bad ones are lurking within the pile of feedback? Here are some tips on how to do it without ruining your life. One reason some don't spread new stuff they write like butter on warm toast is the anxiety over the reception. Often, no news is good news, but what if you need to know, especially when your work performance hinges on how engaged audiences are with your output?

When all else fails to lift you out of the hole a negative review puts you in, remember the Lit Reactor writer's advice: "Your book [or article] doesn't need to do everything. Stop torturing yourself when your book [or article] isn't all things to all people."


Also:

• Book bans aren't new in the United States; National Geographic traces the history of such bans from way back when parts of the country were British colonies. One can argue the current scale and ferocity of the campaign to ban certain books in the States is perhaps unprecedented.
• Changes to Indian school textbooks have sparked discussions on the teaching of history to schoolkids. A chapter on Mughal rulers has been removed, as were references to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the 2002 Gujarat riots. The issue is contentious and not just because sectarian divides are being used by certain quarters to gain and retain power and influence.
• Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie ... now they've taken the scalpel to PG Wodehouse's books. Penguin Random House also placed disclaimers in the edited new releases of the novels notifying readers of the "unacceptable" language in them and that changes were made to fix that without affecting the stories.
• Somebody went through Moms for Liberty's guidelines for books and it's kind of bonkers. MFL is one of the biggest names in the drive to challenge books in the States and is tagged by some as another right-wing outrage factory. The MFL guidelines are supposed to help parents decide which books are right for their kids but it seems the guidelines talk more about why the books in the list are bad for young people.
• Mystery surrounds the TikTok poet Aliza Grace, who has been accused of multiple instances of plagiarism. But who is she? Is she even a real person or merely an online persona?

Musings On This World Book Day

For work, I dived into the origins of World Book Day and I was pretty surprised. The first Day of the Book in the Spanish region of Catalonia was the brainchild of a publisher and big fan of Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote what is considered to be the first modern novel.


Books, roses, and charities
What happened during the early World Book Days? Bookselling, I presume – specifically, outdoor bookselling, pasar pagi style, plus maybe some writer meet-and-greet sessions. The sources I searched don't say what happened during those early Book Days. But the original date was 7 October, to mark Cervantes's birthday.

The Day of the Book was moved to 23 April because fall weather can be a bit nippy for outdoor book-browsing, and book lovers can browse. This date coincided with the long-running St George's Day, and since then, the Day of Books and Roses became an annual Catalonian affair. Besides book stalls and author signings, roses are also sold on the day, in honour of St George.

UNESCO adopted the date as World Book Day, using it to commemorate several other authors besides Cervantes but there's some debate as to what the date signifies for each author. Some say Cervantes and William Shakespeare died on 23 April but no, no, others say, because the countries adopted different calendars, so Shakespeare died on some other date.

Rather than split hairs over this detail, UNESCO stuck with 23 April. But unlike the UNESCO event, World Book Day in the UK and Ireland is more of a charity do that kicks off on the first Thursday in March. Starting from 1998 in the UK, children in full-time education are given book vouchers. There's even a World Book Night, run by a charity organisation.

Besides World Book Day, Spain also gave us the World Book Capital initiative. Madrid once held a string of book-related events throughout a year, and some thought this practice should go global. Madrid became the first WBC in 2001 and, in case anyone has forgotten, Kuala Lumpur was designated WBC in 2020.


A gloom descends
How inspirational. Some of us would perhaps feel wistful at the thought of sparking something similar. Did Vicente Clavel envision that his idea would become a world event? And isn't the story of Don Quixote about the power of a dream?

Looking around though, being sanguine about books and publishing right now is kind of, well, quixotic. And following dreams didn't quite work out for Don Quixote.

Just as Michelle Yeoh's Oscar win has gotten folks asking questions, many in the book industry probably wondered what would our reading and publishing landscape look like "if things were different". Having ideals is well and fine, but they tend to wither in the face of realities.

In Afghanistan, women and girls are being denied an education, and a private library was forced to close by the Taliban (women "have no right to read books"?). The authorities appear unmoved by the support Afghan women are getting from some of their menfolk. Back home, our Indigenous languages and local dialects are in danger of dying out; some have gone extinct. And the theme for this year's World Book Day is Indigenous languages.

Books and copyright, the two things World Book Day celebrates, are being contended in the case of the Internet Archive vs Hachette. The Internet Acrhive, an American digital library, scanned and distributed books via its National Emergency Library during the start COVID-19 pandemic. Several publishers led by Hachette filed a lawsuit against IA, crying copyright infringement. A judge sided with the publishers, but a final judgement is still pending.


Books on fire
But perhaps the biggest pall cast over this year's World Book Day, besides what's happening in Afghanistan, is the stepping up of book bans in parts of the world. In the US, more books have become targets of censorship, particularly those that deal with racism and prejudices against ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. Right-wing and Christian nationalist groups are involved, and some state officials have enacted laws that prohibit certain titles from being taught in schools or made available in school libraries. And they are thinking of going after publishers too.

Book-ban proponents say they want to shield children from "obscene" material but what's obscene is how minorities in America are (still) treated and how ingrained prejudices against them are. Another obscenity is the rampant fetishisation of LGBTQ+ individuals that reduces them to what they do in bed, when that is just a tiny part of their identity.

Literary advocacy group PEN America's report on the growing censorship in US schools and libraries paints a gloomy picture. Its Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 titles by 1,261 authors, from July 2021 to June 2022. Authors of targeted books are fighting back, and libraries, institutions and other advocacy groups are joining in.

Filipino author and journalist Miguel Syjuco warned about creeping censorship in his opening keynote for the Cooler Lumpur Festival of ideas back in 2014, saying that "the house is on fire". Didn't take too long for the flames to grow fiercer and spread wider, and not just because of climate change.

I'm keeping an eye on this, as is Book Riot, though standing in solidarity with besieged writers, librarians, educators and students in affected places feels like a hollow gesture when considering our own censorship issues. Fighting a state can be financially and emotionally taxing if one is not prepared, so kudos to those taking a stand.


A quixotic undertaking?
World Book Day 2023 looks set to be dismal. But should it be? Books and other literary materials are a soft target for censorship hounds during shaky sociopolitical situations. That such materials are targeted this way can be a testament to the power of the written word, validating the Catalonian reverence for books that led to the creation of their own day.

Banning books to "arrest social change" is "irresistible to short-termist authorities" despite its tendency to fail, wrote book critic John Self last year for Banned Books Week, but he also noted that it is a miracle "that marks on a page or screen can enable communication from one brain to another on the far side of the globe, or the other end of the century."

And that miracle comprises works of all genres under the sky, from the lone nom de plume on Wattpad chiselling out chapter after chapter to blockbusters by marquee authors under publishing titans. All of whom deserve a place in the sun, in an e-reader, or on a bookshelf. It must be preserved, even as others try to erase it.

Also, everyone in the book industry plays a role in the development of minds and the progress of a people and a nation, so we must demonstrate that we can be entrusted with that role and carry it out responsibly. That would include fighting unwarranted censorship, even though it would mean working within the framework of a country's laws and norms.

The struggle doesn't have to be violent or law-breaking, nor should it. Someone at Tor.com spoke out against book bans and suggested ways to help the fight against them. And here are some stories about how some parents, teachers and librarians are pushing back against challenges to books.

We've all come a long way since language and writing were invented, and the road ahead is longer still. But I believe we're well on the way towards an ideal book-loving society that nurtures and defends the craft and industry of words.

Getting there will feel like tilting at windmills, but the day of the book will come.

Book Marks: Typewritten Tales, Obama's Reads

An independent bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan, left a typewriter – yes, the clack-clack variety – as a sort of social experiment where one person would type a few words that would be continued by another, and another, until a story developed. Instead, what came out of it were dozens of stories, and while not all the output was usable, there was enough that ended up in a book. In a way, the book wrote itself.

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Those curious about former US president Barack Obama's book picks are likely to wonder: does he pick them himself? Sceptics would say no, he has people do that for him. And while this article doesn't seem to be a clear yes/no to that question, perhaps it's not important because his lists of favourites are so eclectic, no one but himself could have made them...

Of the 13 titles included in Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, there are nine works of fiction and four works of nonfiction, including books by eight women and eight BIPOC authors. There’s a novel about a dystopian school for mothers; a graphic novel about labor and survival in Canada; a journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South; and a beautifully crafted short-story collection.

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Zeenat Book Supply, perhaps one of the oldest bookstores in Dhaka, is closing down. Besides the COVID-19 pandemic changing habits in reading and studying, the owner cites piracy as one main reason for the decision to close; for some, the original prices are too high. Long-running, family-owned bookstores like Zeenat used to be a familiar sight in Malaysian neighbourhoods, and they also face the same pressures.

And piracy is a problem, especially for e-books, which can be hard to detect. One article sums up the issue with e-book piracy and its impact. Digital rights management technology is no barrier to determined pirates with the tools to "crack" DRM-protected books.

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Good news about self-published authors arrived in a survey commissioned by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), a UK-based professional association for self-published authors: Out of 2,200 respondents, nearly 60% said their income had gone up in 2022 over 2021. Is it a good time for aspiring authors to take the self-published route? With so much tech at one's disposal, why not? But one still needs to put in the work, and Ren Lowe, an author and self-publishing coach in Atlanta, shows us how she did it.


In other news:

• Anybody who still remembers right-wing commentator Glenn Beck's tirades describing the Obama years as if it's the Third Reich would probably look back with some incredulity when seeing what's happening in the US right now. However, even with book bans all the rage, driven by right-wing populism, it's still jarring to hear or read about Americans saying things like, “It looks like there needs to be some book burning.”
• A discussion at a Bologna Book Plus event mulled the concept of translators as scouts for publishers, sourcing work that publishers might want. As works go global and networks expand and ignore borders, publishers would naturally want to explore farther. In this frontier, translators are more than interpreter of works; they are bridges connecting local authors and publishers looking for the next big thing.
• Publisher Scholastic was going to license author Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s latest work, Love in the Library, but with one condition: the removal of a paragraph in the author's note and elsewhere in the book that mentions racism. The illustrated book is based on the story of the author's grandparents and is set in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War, and the censorship looks like another instance of a publisher cowed by the growing movement in the US to whitewash unpalatable truths about US history.
• The Kathmandu Post provides a snapshot of the state of academic publishing in Nepal, the ecosystem of which comprises "state-supported, commercial and non-profit academic publishing". While there are encouraging signs, more can be – and needs to be – done. Main issues include money and transparency in the editing and peer review process.
• “For the foreseeable future, Russia will be associated not with Russian music and literature, but with bombs dropping on children.” The English edition of Mikhail Shishkin's new book, My Russia: War or Peace?, is featured in The Japan Times. As the war in Ukraine rages on more than a year later, perhaps one should look at how Russia ended up here. Shishkin delves into Russia's history to answer that question, plus many more.
• "I love talking about books," Laura Sackton writes in BookRiot. "I’m guessing you do, too. But there are some words we’ve been using that we should not be using. There are some phrases ingrained in our book vocabularies that it is time to excise." She then makes the case for why some book terms need to be kicked out of the lexicon. As a reviewer, using certain terms is a hard habit to kick when one is groping for words, but it's worth thinking about.

Book Marks: Book Bans, Women In US Publishing

As they say these days, "how the turn tables". Months after taking effect, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's signature law to censor books in Florida schools, Florida House Bill 1467, might be used against DeSantis's own book.

In a clever bit of trolling, Florida Democrats are subjecting DeSantis’ new tome—“The Courage To Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival”—to the rules that he and GOP lawmakers established to weed out books with allegedly inappropriate content on race, sexuality, and gender from school libraries.

The Democrats highlighted 17 instances in the book that might violate the state's law, including uses of the terms "woke" and "gender ideology", outdated claims of countergenocide from a proposed ethnic studies curriculum, and several depictions of violence.

DeSantis, who seems to be aiming for the top job in the US in 2024, has been running Florida like his little kingdom, shaking things up with gestures in line with the GOP's war on "wokeness" and such. This blueprint for banning books is but a ripple in the current wave of censorship fever gripping the country.

On the subject: Claudia Johnson, author and free speech advocate, talks to Publishers Weekly about the newest book-banning wave and the need to speak up.

...80% of Americans are opposed to book banning, according to a 2022 CNN poll. But there’s a disheartening gap between the 80% of us wanting book banning to stop and the stark reality that it’s raging across our country, worse than it’s ever been. We 80 percenters clearly have the conviction that book banning should end ... but we need to convert our conviction into effective action.

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A study by Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, suggest that in the US, women are dominating the book industry but lag behind men in other creative sectors. The report highlighting this research offers some insight as to why female authorship of books "began to explode" around 1970, citing factors such as the use of time-saving technologies and birth control among women, giving them more time and freedom to pursue careers beyond homemaking.

Another factor is the nature of book-writing, which Waldfogel typifies as a "solo endeavor" where the author has more control. "Maybe the fact that book writing is done mostly alone means there is less discrimination and fewer female-disadvantaging biases and social dynamics in the industry," the report, written by Greg Rosalsky for NPR News, adds.

It also mentions surveys where "about 78 percent of staffers at all levels and 59 percent of executives in the publishing industry identified as women" and that "American women are more likely to read books than American men, especially when it comes to fiction".

Even some of the more famous channels that popularise books are run by women, such as Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon. Speaking to Rosalsky, Jessie Gaynor, senior editor at online lit portal Literary Hub and debut novelist, bring up BookTok, also a driver of sales and a channel that tends to be populated by, yes, women.

This bit of heartening information is probably not new for those who have always known. However, given the ferocity of calls for books being banned or contested in places like the US, with some resorting to threats, harassment and even violence, the safety of women in the industry must be looked into – as if they haven't endured enough already outside their jobs.

Juno Dawson, author of This Book Is Gay, sat down with Rolling Stone for a chat. Her book "went under a formal review as part of investigations into bomb threats sent to several public schools. And much of the fervor against the book in recent months has been stoked by popular right-wing accounts on Twitter and Reddit."

And hurdles keep getting in the way of women authors, particularly those of colour. Nigerian-Swedish author and award-winning travel photographer Lola Akinmade Åkerström, for one, had trouble translating her novel, In Every Mirror She’s Black, "about Black women and Swedes set in Sweden", into Swedish because of concerns over how Swedes would handle its subject matter.

Progress doesn't happen overnight, but the most important thing is to make small steps incrementally towards it. Ultimately, all sectors must become places where women can compete and thrive based on merit and not merely a refuge from sectors hostile or outright detrimental to them. We need to keep pushing for this.


In other news:

• Singapore’s Asian Festival of Children’s Content is expected to be an all-physical event, running from 25 to 28 May at the National Library. Among the confirmed speakers is Xiran Jay Zhao and our own Hanna Alkaf. Events running throughout the festival include include workshops, lectures, masterclasses, and panel discussions.
• Empty chairs at author signings? Janet Manley at the Literary Hub explores the phenomenon, citing factors such as "a flagging economy, the death of local media, Amazon controlling market share, and the arms race of the attention economy", plus the drop in the number of bookstores in the US.
  
  Will in-person events no longer be a thing in the age of Zoom, Meet, and BookTok? I think as long as some readers feel invested in a author and their works, author appearances will remain a thing for some time, especially when the urge to peel one's eyes off the screen to go out and touch grass becomes overwhelming.
• The fallout from the recent Nashville school shooting continues: a children's book illustrator was dropped by his publisher and faces legal charges after he spread notes with anti-trans messages across Juneau, Alaska. Sadly he's not the only one using this incident to hate on the trans community after it came out that the Nashville shooter was trans.

The Salt In A Publishing Star

If you're a bestselling author who has sold tens of millions of copies of more than 260 titles, and whose titles often feature in the New York Times bestsellers lists, would you be salty if your latest title ends up at a lower ranking on an NYT list than you thought?

If you're James Patterson, you probably would be.

At Slate, Laura Miller drops her two cents about this, pointing out that the NYT bestsellers lists are not reliable yardsticks for a book's popularity because they "are the product of a lot of math, but also a good deal of art." And there are ways of getting onto those lists that can be considered unethical.

However, Miller suggests that the "disdain" heaped upon Patterson's oeuvre has made him thin-skinned. She also notes that...

Publishers Weekly magazine has declared Patterson the best-selling author of the preceding 17 years. Yet in the same magazine’s list of the 150 bestselling books since 2004, not a single title out of Patterson’s hundreds of books appears. Patterson sells boatloads of books; he just hasn’t sold boatloads of any particular book. He makes up for the difference in volume.

So she suspects that "Patterson can’t help but be nettled by the fact that for all his dozens of bestsellers, no single one of them has had the iconic staying power of, say, The Stand or The Hunger Games."

I get that some authors want to be remembered for certain things, and a pile of negative reviews on the likes of Goodreads is not one of them. By now I would think someone like Patterson has outgrown the need for bestsellers lists. At least he's still in the news, and doing better than Dan Brown, John Grisham and, uh ... EL James?

As a publishing titan, he can contribute by nurturing more writers. Doesn't he have an online masterclass in writing? He could also provide something of a boost to other writers, particularly the lesser-known co-authors of some of his works. "I wrote this with James Patterson" might elicit a raised eyebrow or a snooty snort, but at least it gets one's attention. That is a vital first step in the publishing world.

And considering how competitive the book industry is, being able to strike gold as an author is a huge deal. I think Patterson should come to terms with the fact that he's making big bank churning out "boilerplate thrillers that snoots love to look down on" and he's doing well out of that, compared to many others.

The guy's pushing eighty. He should just roll with it and ignore the snobs. Too much sodium is bad for one's health.

Book Marks: No Jail For 'Script Thief, Plus Annoying Things About Books

Either someone was listening to the Literary Hub or perhaps the crime wasn't severe enough: Infamous manuscript thief Filippo Bernardini won't be jailed for his little scam where he tricked people into sending him unpublished 'scripts so that he could read them before anyone else. According to the Guardian:

The former publishing employee, who worked for Simon & Schuster in the UK – the company has not been implicated in any of Bernardini’s crimes – had said in court documents that he had a “burning desire” to feel like he was a publishing professional. He added that he had no desire to leak the manuscripts he acquired.

Instead, Bernardini has been sentenced to three years of supervised release, after which he will be deported.

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The Internet Archive has been operating on an open library concept where people can sign up and borrow digital copies of books. I was pointed to this place when I asked about books I can read for reviews or at least cross-check details such as ISBNs. Publishers aren't happy about this, citing copyright infringement, and recently a US court ruled in their favour:

“The publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement,” writes Judge John G. Koeltl of the United States district court in the Southern District of New York in his 47-page decision, which includes a firm rebuke to the controversial concept of “controlled digital lending.”

IA isn't shutting down yet and of course I'll be tracking this.

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Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and now Agatha Christie? Yes, sensitivity readers are taking their scalpels to the works of the doyenne of crime fiction "in new editions of Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries published by HarperCollins."

I'm not a fan of this move and I might talk about this in more detail later. This risks putting new generations of readers in the dark of what these works read like originally and the kind of environment that shaped the minds of the authors involved. Whitewashing the past, that's what this is.

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Claire Handscombe at Book Riot talks about things readers find annoying about books. And she has quite a bit to say, having been...

...a writer, a bookish podcaster, a blogger, a Book Riot contributor, a bookstagrammer, a bookseller, and a marketing exec in publishing. So this is my world, and I love it.

But I love it the way we love our families. We know they’re not perfect. Sometimes we fondly or exasperatedly laugh at how not perfect they are. There are things that drive me round the bend about this whole word and its absurdities.

In other news:

• Here's a story of a widower's quest to keep his late wife's book alive, captured in his son's documentary, The Book Keepers. This looks like something many of us should watch: a dad's labour of love, told through his son's – at least, I hope so regarding the latter.
• This year's shortlist for the Stella prize, which celebrates “original, excellent, and engaging” writing by Australian women and non-binary writers, is dominated by books from small and independent publishers.
• For writers and authors at various stages and of all stripes, Electric Literature introduces seven newsletters that "offer the best insights and advice from abstract aspects of publishing to the smallest details, including market analysis, writing query emails and proposals, navigating contracts, marketing your work—and don’t forget much-needed emotional support and a laugh or two."
• Not one mention of chatGPT or AI in an op-ed titled, "Take That, ChatGPT!". Genius? I'm not sure. But how it just goes on.