Book Marks: Young SEA Authors, Authorship Is Tough

"Because I've always wanted to publish my own book since I was six years old, but I kept pushing it aside all these years. So in 2018, I self-published the first Diary of a Rich Kid, using my own funds, with the help of my sister who became my second pair of eyes and gave feedback on the manuscript." A brief profile of Kuching-born author Malcolm Mejin in Malay Mail Online.

Meanwhile, The Star reports that "The local picture book landscape has changed tremendously in the last decade, with illustrators and authors coming together now to produce wonderful reading materials to introduce kids to the joy of reading through depictions of their own culture."

And in Singapore, a ten-year-old and her younger sisters published a book they illustrated themselves, about a lion with no tail. A copy was gifted to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. "In the future, she hopes that her favourite local publisher, Epigram Books, will take on the book," reports Mothership. "The trio also plan to publish Chinese and bilingual versions of the book, and possibly in Braille and audiobook form as well." All the best.

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Contrasting the good news from our backyard is an author income study released by the Authors Guild suggests that "most authors have a hard time earning a living from their craft," according to Publishers Weekly. "While the combined income (book income plus other writing-related income) of full-time, established authors (those who had written a book in 2018 or before) rose 21% in 2022 (to $23,329) from 2018, the median income was still below poverty level."

Exacerbating this state of affairs is the surge of book bans happening in the US. Bans can trigger the Striesand effect, leading to a spike in attention and sales, but the long-term effects can take a much larger toll. "Kyle Lukoff, the author of 'Call Me Max' and the Newbery Honor book 'Too Bright to See,' among others, said the national publicity did little to nothing to improve sales of 'Max.' Instead, it introduced his work to people who want to remove it from bookshelves in their local schools and libraries," reports CNN.

Probably not as bad as in Cuba, where myriad problems have crippled the publishing industry. Not enough money, not enough paper, and subpar publishing houses. No thanks, perhaps, to the US embargo on the country. "For years, I have had texts, and long waits," writes Irina Pino in the Havana Times "With my first book of poetry I had to wait three years for its publication. I went once a week to the Extramuros publishing house to talk to the editor-in-chief. Even a writer friend talked to the director. They had misplaced it, and I had to take the manuscript again."

Wow. All the best, Cuba.


Elsewhere:

• Rory Cellan-Jones is upset to find a biography of him on Amazon that's apparently AI-generated. Speaking to The Guardian, Cellan-Jones added that Amazon "sent me an email saying: 'You might like this.' Their algorithm had decided this was a bloody book I would want rather than recommending my book that I've slaved long and hard over ... They're effectively allowing book spam and recommending it to the very person who is most annoyed by it." Seems Amazon's publishing limit of three books a day might not be enough to thwart AI-assisted bookspamming.
• "Mass market paperbacks were intended to be cheap, disposable alternatives to proper cloth-bound books. Indeed, paperbacks are so disposable that when bookstores return unsold paperbacks for credit, they only send the covers. The discarded, broken-spined contents are consigned to recycling. So, what’s to love in a format seemingly one step up from trash?" Over at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll presents five enduring reasons to love the mass-market paperback.
• "These reading platforms are subverting the notion that women's spaces are frivolous—full of gossip, Chardonnay, and small talk. In book clubs, women are claiming their rightful place in literary discourse, reading books that cater to their feminine appetites, proving that their voices matter and their insights are invaluable." In 34th Street, a bit about how women-led online communities are redefining literary discussions.
• "Shortly after New English Canaan's publication, the Puritans outlawed the text in their colonies, committing what historians consider the first act of book banning in the present-day United States. ... but far from disappearing, the book has cropped up continuously over the last four centuries in other works of literature and history." Banned Books Week is here and so is this story of the first book banned in America, now considered an anti-authoritarian icon.
• "[Graham] Greene's attempts to rescue the book that he described in 1955 as 'one of the three best novels I've read this year' from censorship followed a campaign to have it banned in Britain, where it was only published four years later." Graham Greene was "ready to go to jail for Lolita"? Apparently so, according to the diary of Véra Nabokov, the author's widow, which has been published.
• "I've managed to build a nice collection of nonfiction books over the years. Some are distinguished by The New York Times and USA Today, while others are less known but still as captivating, inspiring, shocking, and unbelievable as the bestsellers. Let me introduce a few that might be new to you." Grace Ly over at The Daily Beast shares some non-fiction adventure reads, first the bestselling title followed by a less-well-known one with a similar premise.
• "This is a movement that really I think ... that's been going on since the founding of the People's Republic of China nearly 75 years ago. And even before that, going back to before the party went into power, people who have been challenging the party's monopoly on history. But it is continuing today, even in Xi Jinping's China." NPR speaks with Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson about the handful of people chronicling China's "grassroots history" and his new book about these people and their mission.
• "I also feel ... a little bored by the idea that Meta has stolen my life. If the theft and aggregation of the works in Books3 is objectionable on moral or legal grounds, then it ought to be so irrespective of those works' absorption into one particular technology company's large language model. But that doesn't seem to be the case." Author and game designer Ian Bogost doesn't seem irate that his work was included in the infamous Books3 dataset. He explains why in The Atlantic.
• "The readers of today have collectively decided that anything published before 2020 is too racist, too anti-LGBT, too white, etc., to be worthy of any real ontological value. The politics that govern our news channels and social media feeds have invaded our bookshelves, especially our fiction, and what’s more, BookTok and the publishing industry have recognized a cash cow when they see one." Has liberalism ruined books?
• "According to a recent study, both men and women find reading to be the biggest 'green flag' behavior for prospective partners. And lately, it seems as if the boys I'm stalking on the Internet are taking this stat to heart. As I've turned 30, the evolution of my similarly aged 'single men on the Internet' has been a fascinating spectacle to behold." Seems men online are trying to look appealing by sharing what they're (allegedly) reading. I think this sort of strategy requires doing some homework.