Book Marks: Author Angst, Pondering Publishing

Blockbusting authors aside, most authors tend to be paid peanuts in comparison. This guy Ian Winwood, writing in The Telegraph, seems to have realised that being number one in an Amazon subcategory or rave reviews doesn't boost sales, and how the publishing sector treats authors (and its employees) needs to be improved. Is an authorpocalypse looming ahead?

I'd like to think this piece is more than just an ad for Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey, a book about doomsday tropes and the stories based on them. After all, Winwood isn't the only author who has things to say about, for instance, how advances are paid in instalments that leave one a bit short on cash for an amount of time.

But as long as suits are more concerned with shareholder equity than making good content and taking care of employees and authors, little will change for authors, if at all. One silver lining is that we will keep telling stories all the way to the end.

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"Books don't sell"? "Everyone would be better off on Substack or similar platforms"? Not entirely true, apparently. Publishing is difficult, but the writer of that piece seems to believe publishers are good at their jobs but are downplaying their capabilities so they don't need to make the changes they need to get better.

This is in relation to the Penguin Random House–Simon and Schuster monopoly trial, where I think the two companies are trying to justify the merger by claiming it will make them work better. Do big firms have to do a merger every time they feel they're not performing? Can't they just, well, change? In the words of the writer: "Change, however, is only possible if we don’t just accept that self-interested words of people who were trying to get paid in a big merger."


Elsewhere:

• Considering how bookworms tend to grow their to-be-read piles, is it okay to throw away books when it's time to? Michelle Cyca seems to think that's fine, and has no problems using a book until it falls apart because books are, well, books. "At the end of the day, a book is just paper and ink and glue. Its soul is something else entirely, less tangible but more enduring than an object on a shelf."
• "Other than as a cautionary tale about hubristic zealotry, I doubt many people want to relive the reign of Mad Queen Liz and even fewer will want to hear her rant to them that none of it was her fault. So who on earth is this book intended for?" This review of former British prime minister Liz Truss's book will make you wonder how she managed to last as long as she did. Lettuce not do that again, please.
• "A 2023 study, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, of more than 10,000 young adolescents in the U.S. concluded that children who start reading for pleasure from an early age tended to fare better in cognitive testing and had better mental health in their adolescent years." A dad featured on Newsweek may not have heard of this study, but his practice of giving books to his kid instead of a phone seems to be paying dividends.
• Publishers may be fighting back on book bans, but I'd say it's more to do with optics than it is about doing the right thing, although a bit of the latter is a plus. More diverse points of view means more stuff to sell, and publishers seem to be aware that bookworms tend to be more interested in diverse material. Only a handful are pushing for books to be banned across the US, and shame on conservative figureheads riding high on this ripple sparked by frivolous reasons.
• "The Malaysian Indian community is central in a lot of my stories because that is my community, my voice. If I have other voices I want to write about, I take it upon myself to research and get input from members of that community. What's important is that we debunk the myths and misconceptions we have of one another." Malachi Edwin Vethamani has something to tell you in his new collection of stories.
• "Whenever I travel abroad, I am invariably introduced as China’s most controversial and most censored author. I neither agree nor disagree with this characterization—I’m not bothered by it, but neither do I feel particularly honored by it." Read an excerpt from Sound and Silence: My Experience with China and Literature by Yan Lianke, where he talks about state censorship, artistic integrity, and the market forces behind publishing.
• According to journalist and author Tracie McMillan, the advantages of being White all her life (thus far) came up to US$371,934.30. CNN interviews her, where she speaks about how she benefitted from "policies and practices that have systematically hurt Black Americans" – a topic she tackles in her book, The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America.
• Kristen Arnett at Literary Hub answers questions about what to do when someone sends you unsolicited writing for comment, putting summaries of books in book reviews, and paying for blurbs. Useful advice.
• "It's not the first time I've gotten irritated at book recommendations on social media," writes Danika Ellis on Book Riot. Someone will ask for recommendations for a very particular kind of book and receive replies recommending books that have no relevance to the original request. ... TikTok, Reddit, X/Twitter, and other social media are notorious for recommending the same books over and over again, regardless of whether they're relevant to the request. " So who does Ellis recommend for book recommendations?
• "The book preview list is a highly imperfect form of coverage that seems to be, along with best-of the year lists, the most widely used kind of book reportage in media. With overall book coverage being pared down at most outlets, such lists have grown widely outsized in importance for authors and publishers and readers, as well as the writers who contribute punchy blurbs to them." So how does Maris Kreizman put together a preview list of "titles to look out for"?
• "His reaction to The Magic Eye showed Kubrick's image-control obsessions taken to extremes. He didn't just make edits – he erased the entire project. Now, almost 55 years after Neil Hornick completed it, readers can finally make their own judgments about the book Kubrick was so implacably determined to keep from public view." The book Stanley Kubrick didn't want published will be released at the end of April. What's a film director who can't handle criticism?
• Since 2018, a schoolteacher in India has been issuing a call for book donations ahead of World Book Day on 23 April for the school's library. But his efforts don't stop at cultivating the reading habit among students. "Following his efforts to collect books for students and cultivate a reading habit in them, students have even begun writing their own stories," reports The Times of India.

Felines And Farewells

Beware the cat, dear reader. Though it may be a relentless killer of small animals, its antics feed an appetite starving for cute cuddly things, and its yowls can rend even the hardest of cat-hating hearts. What is behind the spell this creature casts upon us?

If you're looking for answers in The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa, author of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, you may be disappointed. What you'll find instead are more examples of the magic that cats weave into the lives of those who adopt them.


The full review can be found here.

How Much Tech Should Be Involved In Books?

...The CEO of a major international publishing house expressed hope that AI will help boost book production and keep the number of hires low. Tech-assisted spelling and grammar correction, plagiarism detection, and perhaps marketing tagline generation would be great.

But heaven forbid that algorithms will learn to write so well, their words will pluck at our heartstrings like the fingers of a practised harpist. Also, enough of making it so that we can download books into our brains...


Read the full piece here.

Book Marks: Closures, Employee Welfare

"...book publishing should be more than a vehicle for Dr. Phil or Tony Robbins or even the bestselling books that rightly deserve their place on the list. It doesn't mean that everyone should get to have their book published—but rather that there should be more room for more perspectives and less gatekeeping or curating the trends and landscapes that dictate what sells and what sinks." Kristen McGuiness is all for more diverse voices in publishing, and independent publishers are helping out.

Sadly, one independent bookstore won't be part of that effort. Mount Zero in Hong Kong closed down "after weekly government inspections spurred by anonymous complaints forced it to put up the shutters." Things haven't been well for the territory's cultural sector since Beijing imposed a national security law and bookstores and other establishments have had to toe the line.

Meanwhile in Orange County, California, the sudden closure of a book distributor has left a bunch of independent presses and authors wondering how to move forward. Some of these appear to be writers and publishers of titles that aren't considered mainstream, and with this distributor folding, these titles may now be even harder to source, unless an alternative is found.

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As BookTok makes waves in reading and publishing, some feel that the community could use their pull to make life better for authors and people in the publishing industry. The Gateway, the University of Alberta's official student newspaper, argues that if BookTok could get a certain book out just months after its predecessor, surely it could demand that publishers treat their workers and authors right.

Employee welfare is also the focus of Maris Kreizman's piece in Literary Hub, where she says there are too many books out there being pushed by major publishers, and the people working on these books can't keep up with the schedules. Volume doesn't necessarily mean productive or profitable, not when quality has to be sacrificed. "What a remarkable change it would be if corporations would allow their employees to do the best job they can with each book that the company has chosen to buy, rather than allowing them to flail."


Right, what else is up?

• "At the age of 29, I was anxious just like many others. When you turn 30, you feel like you really have to become an adult. So what should I do with my life? I didn't have an answer, but I knew that was not the way to live." Hwang Bo-reum, author of the bestselling Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, talks to the media about her writing and journey to publication, and how she found herself in a similar situation as the book's protagonist. A review of the book can be found here.
• "Evelyn Waugh once wrote, 'We possess nothing certainly except the past.' But how do you write about the past when the common ground we stand on isn't settled, and history keeps intruding on the present?" For author Peter Blauner, writing historical fiction is like treading on constantly shifting sands. Writers have to be mindful of the context of the times they write about and how some things might be triggering. But seems he's here to write, not to coddle readers.
• "... [Australian crime author Garry] Disher says there was 'a kind of cultural cringe that if it is Australian, it can’t be good enough and if it is crime, it is therefore junk fiction.'" Enjoy this snapshot of Disher's decades-long career from the Guardian.
• "Crouching over piles of books in a market stall in Cairo one day in the fall of 1993, Iman Mersal stumbled upon a slim volume with a gray cover and a catchy title: 'Love and Silence.'" What Mersal read sparked a years-long quest to learn about this novel's author, Enayat al-Zayyat, who battled depression for most of her life and ultimately committed suicide in 1963. The result was Traces of Enayat, translated by Robin Moger and published in April.
• "One big mistake that we make is believing that if we are writing for children, we need to dumb it down. We don't. It actually has to be a lot smarter when you are writing for children. Because you not only need to ensure that you're holding their attention with every single word, but also bring the message across without being too verbose." A Q&A with author Abhishek Talwar on his writing career and writing for children.
• "The trend towards apps that summarise books so that you can 'think better' is likely to have the opposite effect – if we don't use our minds to reflect deeply, we may lose our ability to think critically at all." So says writer Susie Alegre in the Guardian, regarding the use of book summary apps, especially those powered by AI. Summarising key points in big books, particularly non-fiction, may provide an easy way out for busy people, but it may backfire, making our brains lazy and messing up our ability to absorb, process, and retain information and knowledge. Eventually, we may forget how to read and think.
• On the subject of AI: Kester Brewin wrote an AI transparency statement for his book, God-like: A 500-Year History of Artificial Intelligence in Myths, Machines, Monsters, even though he wasn't asked to. Brewin included it in his book to promote discussion on what tools authors are using in their craft, "partly because research shows that a lot of generative AI use is hidden." It's not perfect but as there's yet no reliable way to screen AI content, "we at least need a means by which writers build trust in their work by being transparent about the tools they have used," writes Brewin.
• In The Washington Post, several super readers share tips on how to read more. These people's reading capacity is incredible. Between 150 and 400 books a year! And they tell you how they manage.

Book Marks: FanFic, Banned Book Club

Quite a few things going on. So let's get to it...

• "If someone wanted to nourish a child into loving literature, you could hardly do better than the Folletts. Wilson was a Harvard graduate who worked in publishing, first at Yale University Press and later Alfred A. Knopf, all while finding time to contribute to The Atlantic. His wife, Helen, was a former teacher and Wellesley graduate who gave up her career for their children." The story of child novelist Barbara Newhall Follett, who vanished into thin air.
• Meet Natalia Cheong, the teen author of The Cat on the Bridge. Not just an author but also the manager of a virtual book club and a host of her own online talk show. And the book? It's about "Toby the cat navigating the Rainbow Bridge – a realm for departed animals. Natalia weaves themes of pet loss, human-animal bonds, and personal insecurities, drawing from her own experiences as a teen."
• "...fanfiction is some of the best writing out there, excelling at hooking readers and keeping them enthralled. Given that this is the goal for any writer who wants to gather and grow an audience, studying fanfiction and how it pulls off this particular magic trick can help unlock the secrets to telling a story that captivates fans." Author Laura R. Samotin makes the case for fanfic and what the writing community can learn from it to transform publishing.
• Books that can't be published in Russia are being released elsewhere. Get acquainted with the practices of tamizdat and samizdat, which are returning as Vlad the Impaler's regime tightens its grip. I know few governments who'd literally poison people who write books they don't like, whose thoughts they can't control. Shudder.
• Free Malaysia Today spoke with Malaysian-born poets Malachi Edwin Vethamani and Shirley Geok-lin Lim for World Poetry Day on 21 March. More recently, FMT reported that the national book policy will be reviewed, an exercise that hasn't been conducted "since the policy was introduced 39 years ago on Nov 27, 1985."
• Australian author and journalist Paul Malone pays tribute to the forgotten and unsung World War II heroes from Sarawak with a book titled Forgotten Heroes. The book was was launched in Bario "in conjunction with the 79th anniversary of the landing of eight paratroopers under the Z Special Unit of the Allied Forces ... led by Tom Harrison on March 25, 1945 in the Kelabit homeland of Bario," Borneo Post Online reported.
• "I'd wanted to quit copywriting for years, hated office jobs, felt my time, abilities, and soul were being wasted in them. I'd felt secure as a single, independent woman with no want for children because Mom was there to call on when I felt alone. In her absence, I was unmoored; I needed a change." After her mother passed away, Mickie Meinhardt moved back home and opened a book-and-wine shop. Reminded of Hwang Bo-reum's Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop, but sadder.
• The shortlist for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award is out and our nominee, Hades by Aishah Zainal, didn't make the cut. Ah well, this batch has some serious contenders, and to choose six out of 70 titles? The winner will be announced on 23 May, during the International Literature Festival Dublin.
• Get acquainted with the genre known as fabulism, which "fights against being placed in a neatly wrapped box," according to Lyndsie Manusos at Book Riot. "When fabulism is at play in a work, it often resists the why. Fabulism does not explain the magic system or fantastical elements. It doesn’t go into why a character suddenly sprouts branches as limbs, or why a character is back from the dead. It — the fantastical, the magical, the weird — just is."
• A graphic novel about books being banned in Korea is facing the heat from the book-banning fever in the United States. Banned Book Club is set during the 1980-87 military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan and depicts the situation in Korea during that time. "The book is based partly on co-author Kim [Hyun-sook]'s own experiences growing up in 1980s Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province," reports The Korea Times. "[Co-author Ryan] Estrada says it was researched thoroughly via first-hand memories, interviews with the real people who experienced similar events, primary documents and historical documents."
• "Despite possessing the talent and capability to write, many women find themselves confined to the role of homemakers due to the lack of conducive environments for reading and writing at home. ... For many of us, the time dedicated to creating art is stolen time, squeezed in between household chores and employment." An interview with author Manisha Gauchan in The Kathmandu Post, on her writing and the lack of support for women writers in Nepal.
• "The best kinds of books are the ones with attributes that are unquantifiable, which is a big reason why people are so much better at recommendations than algorithms are. ... What is unquantifiable is horrifying to the corporate overlords, of course, but it's the magic that connects readers with particular books." Lo, the seven types of book recommendations asked of Maris Kreizman at Literary Hub, and her replies.
• A Latinx reimagining of classics such as Frankenstein, Hamlet, and The Great Gatsby? From The Sacramento Bee: "These stories are among the classics reworked in a new book to ensure more youth read stories by and about Latinos. West Sacramento author Sandra Proudman, 35, spearheaded the effort, recruiting more than a dozen diverse Latino writers to each produce their own contemporary twist on canonical tales." Hell, why not?
• Were enslaved people employed to write the Bible and spread Christianity around the Roman empire? Theology professor Candida Moss says "yes" in her book, God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. Among her aims is to highlight the contributions enslaved workers made to the Bible and the religion. "The writing, the editing, the copying, the movement of those early Christian texts – what you might call 'missionary activity' – all of that’s being done by enslaved workers."
• "I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before." Holly Black speaks about, among other things, the romantasy boom, BookTok, and making hooves sexy. Whut.

Finally, something to make the skin crawl: Harvard has removed the human-skin binding of a book in its library. AFP reports that "A copy of the 19th-century book Des Destinées de l’Ame — or Destinies of the Soul, a meditation on life after death — was found in 2014 to be bound in the skin of a deceased woman." Apparently, anthropodermic bibliopegy – what the practice is called – used to be a thing, until it wasn't.

At This Cafe, Coffee Comes With A Second Chance

If you could return to the past, what would you change?

Tales premised around time travel have been told ever since the concept gained a foothold in the public imagination, and it often stems from lingering desires (changing the past) or unbridled curiosity (what lies in the future).

But what some may find remarkable about Toshikazu Kawaguchi's Before We Say Goodbye, about a café that serves a trip to the past along with a cuppa is how anime it feels. A good anime, that stays with you long after you leave the cinema hall or switch off YouTube.


Full review here.

Book Marks: Márquez, Authors Equity, Feline Fee Waivers

The release of Gabriel García Márquez's Until August had people talking, and over at Book Riot, Rebecca Joines Schinsky thinks that's okay, as long as publishers are upfront with regard to the reason(s) for publishing something posthumously. "There are plenty real reasons for readers to be interested in a posthumously published work, publishers and estates don't need to fudge the backstory."

While some are willing to give Márquez's sons the benefit of the doubt, for the publishers, one reason will always be money. Is it grotesque if money was the only reason? Perhaps, but as long as the publishers are ready for the brickbats that come their way if word ever got out... . For someone as famous as Márquez, anything he wrote will be read and discussed, so whether Until August was a good decision is probably best left to readers to judge. Published and be damned.

In Esquire, Alex Belth dives into the world of posthumous publishing and ponders whether it is a betrayal to release an author's unpublished works after they're dead, in defiance of their wishes to have them destroyed. The answer seems to be "yes", with a huge "but". Belth appears to build a case for posthumous publishing, stating that pretty much anything goes once a writer passes on and how deprived the literary world would be if some choice titles had been destroyed. And if writers don't want their works published, they should dispose of them while they still can.

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Maris Kreizman at Literary Hub is dismayed to learn about the business model adopted by new publisher Authors Equity, specifically their use of freelancers for publishing projects. "Rather than offering book workers the stability and benefits of full-time employment, Authors Equity will rely on the gig economy to get the job done," she writes. "Look a little more closely, and 'growing pool of freelancers' is a terrible euphemism for 'jobs are disappearing and more and more of us are fighting for scraps by competing for freelance gigs.'"

Dan Sinykin also touches on the gigification of publishing in The Baffler, with a detailed look at the players in Authors Equity and wonders if it or any others like it will ever disrupt publishing at a time where further conglomeration of the industry seems increasingly less viable.

Years ago, I pondered whether a publishing model based on crowdsourcing would upend the landscape. Instead of a firm like Authors Equity, alll the freelancers would gather for a project and disperse when it was done. I still think it's an option, especially for indie authors.

Of course, those involved need to work well with each other, and a corporation provides the framework for that. But I see the collaborative spirit when it comes to projects involving VTubers and I can see that happening in publishing.

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Cats rule the home and the heart. Now they're helping forgive fees for late and even damaged library books in Massachusetts. According to MiNDFOOD...

"A librarian is a book lover, a cardigan lover and a cat lover," Jason Homer from Worcester Public Library said. "Our staff has a lot of cats. Some of the staff were in a meeting and they were coming up with ways to bring people back to the library, and they thought, 'What if we removed as many barriers as possible and told people they could show us a picture of a cat, draw a picture of a cat or just tell us about a cat?'"

What an a-meow-zing idea. A picture of a cat in exchange for getting your fees for late or damaged library books waived is the cat's whiskers. I see this working only as a time-limited deal or libraries in the US will be short of books at a time when they're struggling with costs, sourcing issues, book bans, and adminstrative and legislative woes.

Speaking of libraries, there are several little ones set up at Taman Wawasan Recreational Park in Puchong. The books are mostly donated, while others are purchased from recycling centres. "Everybody can borrow up to five books at a time," said retired headmaster Lee Kim Siew, who established the reading stations. "One family can take over 30 books! There's no limit: you can return after one year, two years or three! No limit, no fee!" No need for cat pictures here.


Elsewhere:

• "I try to come back every year for Chinese New Year, and call it good juju or fate, but all the good things that have ever happened with this book have coincidentally happened while I was in Malaysia." Debut author Vanessa Chan returned home to promote her novel, The Storm We Made.
• Chinese Nobel laureate Mo Yan, author of Red Sorghum, has become a target of fanatical Chinese nationalist trolls for allegedly insulting China's "national heroes and martyrs". Criticism against China is being pushed back against by these "pinkies": an army of angry, jingoistic and mostly young netizens who swarm over any perceived insult to China and Xi Jinping's government, however minor or remote – a throwback to the days when Mao Zedong unleashed the Red Guard on those seen as his adversaries. The country may have 99 problems but this ain't one of them.
• "Charissa Ong's tale of success in publishing begins with a scenario that would be relatable to many. While working at an advertising agency, the mindless drag of routine work was getting her down." A profile of Charissa Ong, author and publisher of the poetry and short story collection Midnight Monologues, in Tatler Asia.
• "Like most ghosts, I became one unexpectedly – when a publisher I'd previously worked with on my own memoir ... asked if I would be any good at writing someone else's. I said I'd never tried. Then the publisher told me what my fee would be, at which point I agreed, on reflection, that I was perfect for the job." A ghostwriter speaks his mind and reveals what he feels about seeing his work – all without his name on them – on display at a bookstore.
• A dispatch from the London Book Fair details the hot trends during the event, including #BookTok and romantasy, the imapct of AI, the climate, and Palestinian voices.
• "Thus begins a series of stories that unfold back and forth between 1921 and 1910, a period Tan [Twan Eng] captures in vivid detail, especially the changing hues of the tropical landscape; the culture and behaviours Willie absorbs and stores away; and imposing mansions where masters and memsahibs command a host of the local help — all-too-familiar characters who hold no surprises — and throw regular parties at which gossip is lapped up with the same relish as the liquor." Late, but this review of Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors in The Edge is worth a read.
• The Hindu posts a tribute to Sir Terry Pratchett days before the anniversary of his death nine years ago, praising his world building and noting the unique format of his novels.
• Is Russia so strapped for bodies that it's "encouraging" schoolchildren to sign up for the army? Because that's what a textbook on a new subject seems to be hinting at. What's more is that this new lesson, "Fundamentals of Security and Defence of the Motherland", is reportedly "compulsory for high school students aged 15 to 18 in Russia and occupied territories in Ukraine." And this lesson replaces one called "Fundamentals of Safe Living".
• When Microsoft design chief Jon Friedman's son wanted to write a book about him coping with anxiety, the dad turned to generative AI program DALL-E for the illustrations. The results are incredible, but is it really the way to go? Especially when generative AI is a source of anxiety for many artists and other content creators?
• Companies are offering immersive fantasy events targeted at #BookTok audiences and they seem to be taking off. As avid readers of fantasy or romantasy novels making their rounds on the social media channel, they would be receptive to a night out, dressed as their favourite characters and reliving the books' choicest scenes. Do authors get a cut for their universe coming to life in this way?
• Some people don't like Robert Kiyosaki, and after reading this article, I'm firmly entrenced on that side. Bragging about being US$1.2 billion in debt is one thing, but calling those with "contrasting economic ideologies "communists"? While he also seemed to pan another author who pitches a debt-free ethos, Kiyosaki acknowledges that not everyone can manage debt like he does. I don't know how I can sleep at night while owing US$1.2 billion.