What Are Grown-Ups Afraid of in YA Books?

by: Kelly Jensen

Many times, it’s big-name publications that get young adult literature all wrong. Their “experts” call anything published for the under-18 crowd YA, or they make claims that there aren’t any books written for boys (I covered this in my 5 Things to Know About YA post).

But really the blame might be grown-ups more broadly.

This month alone, an adult called Laurie Halse Anderson’s groundbreaking Speak ”child pornography” because it dare bring up rape. Speak also promotes abortion, theft, promiscuity, group sex, and profanity. Shoo Raynor, a children’s author himself, claims that books like Patrick Ness’s “Chaos Walking” series aren’t books for teens, but rather, they’re “adult books disguised as children’s books.” He goes on to suggest that Ness’s series encourages readers to pick up guns and to join gangs.

Neither of these are the first challenges to YA lit, nor will they be the last.

Another interesting grown-up phenomenon is that of suggesting that YA books today are nothing like they were back in the day. That when today’s adults were growing up, either there were no such things as YA books or that YA books were in no way as dark, scary, profane, or bleak as today’s YA books.

Neither of these are true.

YA as a recognized category began somewhere in the middle of last century, and the real rise in YA came in the form of some of the most ground-breaking, honest, sometimes-bleak classics we all know: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974), and Forever by Judy Blume (1975). None of these books have been without their critics, either. Technically, these titles promote violence, deception, cheating, and having sex.

“Technically,” because like Anderson’s book or Ness’s series or any number of other YA books that some adults like to raise hell about, these titles promote only what readers want them to promote. Because without context of story, you can make a book about anything you want it to be about! A story about a girl who is silenced following sexual assault is child porn when you tease out only those passages that discuss sex and you choose to read it that way. Ness’s book, which is “actually an adult book,” is so because . . . an adult is reading it through adult eyes.

Some grown-ups are afraid of context.

It’s clear not only in their claims about what it is YA books are promoting but also in their strong stances that YA books were never as “bad” in their day. 

Of course they were.

The difference is that back in their teen days, the context was different. They were teens themselves! The context was living, breathing, and experiencing the hard truths and sharp edges that come with navigating adolescence in the moment. The context was discovering that sometimes bad things happen to people or the realization that grown-ups are flawed creatures. That sometimes — more than sometimes — the world is a cruel and unforgiving place, no matter how much you play by the rules.

Teens don’t read books like Anderson’s or Ness’s, Blume’s or Cormier’s, or any other books published as YA each year as how-to guides. They don’t read them as prescriptions for how to engage in violence or how to join gangs or how to be promiscuous (which only ever applies to teen girl characters anyway). They’re smart enough to know the whole story matters. That challenges and situations matter in context — their adolescence.

Do adults read Gone Girl as a prescription for how to ruin a marriage?

Knowing that context matters won’t change things. There will still be adults who seek out YA books and claim they’re inappropriate for teen readers. There will still be adults who say the themes are “too adult” for teens to handle. And there will always be adults who reminisce about the good ole days when YA books were only sunshine and kittens.

With thousands of YA books published each year, it’s worth the reminder that it’s only a small number being called out as the problem. No matter how much YA advocates rally and fight, those grownups will still be pointing to fictitious arguments and digging out problems where no problems exist. And no matter how much success these adults have at pulling books from curriculum or bookshelves or crying to have awards given back to books that are about “real teens,” the truth is that they’re forgetting that real teens are reading these books and are getting the context because it’s a context they’re living every day.

Challenging the books doesn’t change the teen years.

These challenges are instead reminders that adults want to shield teens from their own contextual experiences. Because when you take away the books that are problematic, you are also able to take away rape, violence, gangs, sex, and every other scary trigger that is part and parcel of the lives of teens today (and the lives of teens in the past).

Listen, adults: you are welcome and encouraged to enjoy YA all you want to. There are great stories here! But the minute you try to take away the books from the teens who they’re intended to reach, then you’re overstepping your boundaries. Just because you don’t like seeing it doesn’t mean that teens aren’t seeing or experiencing these things. They need these books to help them remember they’re not alone. They need those reminders that this isn’t always a fair or kind world. The minute you see something as “child porn” is the minute you take away a book from a reader who needs to find his or her own voice through it to speak up about the cruelties inflicted upon them.

When you fear the books, you also fear the truth.

from: Book Riot

Twihaiku? Micropoetry? The rise of Twitter poetry

Intrigued by the 140-character limit – and its potential for instantly reaching new audiences – writers are publishing poems on Twitter. The results are surprisingly powerful, says Charlotte Cripps

by: Charlotte Cripps

Poetry in 140 characters? What would Sylvia Plath have made of tweet poems? Twitter poetry (also known as “twihaiku” or “micropoetry”) is still in its early stages, but could it bring poetry back to the forefront of the modern world? “I think Twitter poems will become a new form, the modern-day version of the haiku,” says Chloe Garner, artistic director of the Ledbury Poetry Festival. “Poets love writing to different forms, even just as a way of exercising the poetic muscles.”

Benjamin Zephaniah is one of a new wave of poets using their Twitter account to tweet poems: “Intelligence may not mean intelligent/ The news may not be new/ From where we are/ To be awake/ May not mean/ To be conscious.” He says: “I like to send out little treats of poetry every now and then to make people think a little bit. It’s a great way to connect daily with your audience. It is a better way of saying, ‘I’m in the shop.’”

When the mood takes him, George Szirtes, who won the TS Eliot Prize in 2004 for his collection Reel, will fire off couplets 140 characters a time. (“Should we close the door to keep the dusk out, asked child Helga. No, best let it in, grumbled her father. I like a bit of dusk in the hall.”) “I write in Twitter because I am interested to see what a form as short and as evanescent as Twitter can do: in effect, it does anecdote and shorter forms of poetry quite well, which is why I have written some 20,000 as an experiment,” says Szirtes.

Ian Duhig – twice-winner of the National Poetry Competition – wrote a tweet poem about the Bramhope Tunnel disaster: “They wove the black worm/ a shroud of white stone/ and thought it was nothing/ But the worm turned.” Would he ever publish his Twitter poems? “I’d have no problem using Twitter poems in a book and may well do in the next one,”  says Duhig, whose Twitter poem “Yew”, is more romantic: “Each root of church yew/ reaches a skull:/ mistletoe/ for kissing above.”

The director of the Poetry Society, Judith Palmer, says: “There’s a renewed interest in the form of British poetry at the moment and the constraints of the 140-character limit play to that, in the same way as the 14 lines of the sonnet or the 17 syllables of the haiku. Twitter poems tend to be playful and are often collaborative, but they’re also good for ‘Imagist’-style observation, or philosophical musing. They can reach a wide audience in moments but they’re also ephemeral, evaporating pretty as the Twitter-feeds roll relentlessly on.”

Elizabeth Alexander, a Yale University professor, author of Crave Radiance and The Black Interior, who delivered a poem for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, has also tweeted some beautiful poetry – “Inside the darkened bathroom/ we looked into the black mirror/ cracked the wintergreen candy/ watched sparks fly from our teeth.”

“Love” tweet poetry is also represented by the former poet-in-residence at the V&A, Sophie Robinson, a young contemporary poet and performer: “Love me without research, without qualifications – love me as an antidote to the paranoid librarian of my heart.”

The British poet Alison Brackenbury, says: “I have warmed to Twitter as a way of spreading good poetry. I post lines from my breakfast reading, as well as writing original poems that are now migrating to a printed anthology. Writing in 140 characters has taught me to slash sentences; it offers a public home for private passions, such as bicycles and bumblebees. Twitter can also market poetry in the most unexpected ways. Someone recently bought my new collection, Then, after reading my tweet poem about the snail in my bathroom.” 

Collaborative poetry projects are becoming popular, too. During Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, The National Gallery set a challenge to write a poem inspired by Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, The Death of Actaeon and Diana and Callisto in 140 characters or less. The winner was Jacqueline Saphra (@jsaphra) with, “How his painted virgins lie, suckling plump and ripe for sin: a blush of flesh, a yielding eye to coax each passing stranger in.”

Mark Ravenhill is tweeting Voltaire’s Candide on the RSC Twitter feed before his own version of it opens in August. He says: “The direct, simple wit of Voltaire’s style is perfect for tweeting. It’s been a fascinating exercise. It has deepened my appreciation of his writing: it’s incredible to see how every single sentence of the book advances the story and how almost every sentence stands alone as a great quotation all by itself.”

#dawnchorus was a National Trust project last month – a mass tweet-in through the hours of dawn. The first official Canal Laureate, Jo Bell, wrote her poems from the Kennet and Avon Canal, including: “Daylight rubbing its eyes: the lockside poet, likewise :-)”

Likewise, the Poetry Society’s  Olympic project, Sting Like a Bee, last summer urged poets to tweet couplets in response to the unfolding action. And the poet and performer Inua Ellams ran a Twitter workshop in 2011 for the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network – he sent prompts out on Twitter every few minutes so participants could write a poem line by line. Emerging poet Andrew McMillan won Manchester University’s #micropoem13 contest last month with, “Train, backwards through town / river/the long, unbroken thought of it/ red kite/ chest burning/ phoenix rising from the ash trees.” 

The former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who tweets lines of his poetry, which although not intended as a tweet “could do double duty” says,  “Restrictions, like the rules of the sonnet, can be liberating in the right hands… So there’s nothing wrong with poets finding a new box to play in, even though Twitter has co-opted a once perfectly useful word to describe birdsong.” 

Jean-Yves Fréchette, of the Institute of Comparative Twitterature, who in 2011 published Tweet Rebelle, a compilation of 1,001 of his poetry tweets that he makes under the pseudonym Pierre-Paul Pleau, explains how to create the perfect poem. “A ‘twoosh’ is, in a sense, a perfect tweet. A tweet made up of exactly 140 characters, which is the Twitter limit. Writing a ‘twoosh’ is using Twitter’s input matrix to create a new stylistic standard, to invent a new fixed form – as the sonnet, the ballad, the ode or the rondeau were in their time.”

from: Independent

The austerity story: How Spain fell in love with

An unlikely effect of the Spanish  economic crisis has been a huge rise in the popularity of literature
by: Alasdair Fotheringham

Every evening in the heart of Granada’s working class suburb of the Zaidín, local residents nip inside their district library at the Plaza de las Palomas with one set of books, either under their arms or in shopping bags. They come out, moments later, with another batch: pretty much what you’d expect, except that this library officially closed two years ago, has no paid workers and, with the electricity cut off, operates by candlelight.

“We are at a critical juncture,” says Celia Calvo, one of the dozen or so volunteers for whom multi-tasking in her free time at the library - from archiving thousands of donated books and organising cultural activities and protests to registering book loans and returns - has now become almost automatic.

“The weather is warm now and there’s long summer evenings, but if we continue with no electricity when the winter dark and cold comes in, it’s going be very difficult.” The morning The Independent visited, the mains water supply was still working, but “we don’t know for how long,” she said.

Ms Cavos points out that as the Las Palomas library’s survival teeters on a knife-edge, and  drastic government recession-induced cuts see dozens of public library spending budgets cut by 60 per cent or more, Spain’s deeply ingrained resistance to reading for pleasure is finally disappearing. In 2003, Spain was one of three EU nations (together with Portugal and Greece) with the lowest average number of regular readers: just 47 per cent (compared to 70 per cent in Scandinavia and the UK) said they read at least one book a year. Now, though, that figure has risen to nearly 60 per cent.

However, while libraries are increasingly at peril from spending cuts, as part of the embattled country’s attempts to solve its financial crisis, the desire to use these institutions among recession-hit Spaniards is booming. In Andalusia, where Granada is situated, there has been a 50.6 per cent rise in library borrowers since Spain’s economic troubles began in 2008. In some extreme cases, such as in Seville’s libraries, it is up by 150 per cent.

“Above all there are more men,” says Roberta Megias Alcalde, a librarian working in a village near Granada, La Zubia. “Whereas before you’d mainly have housewives coming in for novels, now there’s a lot more unemployment and everybody in the household is borrowing books.” She and other librarians also say the recession has seen a large increase in the presence of the homeless in libraries, “many to read, others to get a wash and brush up”.

Her library, though, has faced dramatic cutbacks, with its staff reduced to just herself from January. As for Las Palomas, it was shut down by Granada town hall with no advance warning in August 2011, using the argument that a brand new library had been built on the far side of the Zaidín district. “Since then,” says Ms Calvo, “they’ve blamed the closure on the cuts too.”

Those supporting Las Palomas point out that according to regional Spanish laws, with its 44,000 inhabitants the Zaidín should have two libraries, not one. They also say the new library, well over a mile away, is too far from the district’s centre, too student-orientated for their elderly clients and does not respond to the needs of one of the poorest areas of Granada, where for decades families have lived jammed together in a labyrinth of cramped flats and houses and narrow streets.

“This library is small and can’t cope with all the district, it’s vast,” says Las Palomas volunteer Encarnación Gonzalez Martin, “and we supported the opening of the other one -  but on condition this library wasn’t closed.”

Nor was Las Palomas’ closure diplomatically handled. “That girl over there, Marta,” -  a six- or seven-year-old doing her homework at one of the low tables for children - “was in the middle of filling in the form for her first ever library card when a phone call came through telling the librarians to close the doors and ask everybody to leave,” Ms González Martín says. A sit-in protest 10 weeks later at the doors of Las Palomas, to try to ensure its books and shelves stayed, concluded with police lifting away each individual demonstrator, several of them pensioners chanting pro-democracy slogans. But the books went too - in a removal van to the new library.

The library support group re-opened Las Palomas under their own steam last December - “we just walked round the corner and the door was open”, Ms Calvo says with a big grin. Improvisation and goodwill have replaced public funds, with 8,000 books donated by local families, and shelves, pot plants and furniture from nearby schools.

Emergency electricity is available, but in the shape of a cable stuck through a window and across a road into a local resident’s power supply: hardly reliable.

Even so, Las Palomas is once again regaining a central role in the Zaidín community amid the recession and 30 per cent unemployment in Andalusia.

“There are children from families who come here because at home they would never have the opportunity to read books, they don’t have the economic or cultural resources. Maybe they’re a bit more reticent at first, but they know where their shelf is, they end up taking the books home,” Ms Calvo says.

With an estimated 40 per cent of Spanish schoolchildren currently having no access to the Internet, the same used to go for the library’s computers - when there was electricity. “People’s flats here tend to be very small, so the library acted as a study room for the kids,” Ms Gonzalez Martín says.

Outside libraries, Spain’s steadily increasing reading habits have had a patchy effect at best on its bookshops: there has been an across-the-board drop of 40 per cent in sales since 2008, yet Madrid’s recent bookfair saw an unexpected 9.8 per cent increase in sales. And as demand for books rises and public funds dwindle, libraries with “mixed financing” are beginning to appear more frequently too.

In the giant dormitory town of Guadalajara, locals are now funding the library’s book budget (which had shrunk from €150,000 to zero in 2012) and in Barcelona, at the Josep Pons library, volunteers manage the day-to-day running of it.

In the hamlet of Yaiza in the Canary Islands, an internet forum debate where householders discussed what they most missed in the village concluded, 18 months later, with them organising a library with 4,500 books on its shelves.

As for the librarian volunteers in Las Palomas, their highpoints are, they say, when their institution becomes part of ordinary people’s lives again. Ms Calvo tells the story of a girl who used to sit day-in, day-out on a bench outside the library with a laptop to branch into free internet networks - given her family could not afford it at home.

“I kept on wondering why she didn’t want to come in, and finally after many months, she did, picked up a book, borrowed it. For me, after so many months, that made it all worthwhile.”

from: Independent

How Amazon Became the King of Audiobooks

Recorded books are now a billion-dollar business, which Amazon dominates perhaps like none other.

by: Peter Osnos

If you are a fan of audiobooks -- and the numbers of people who say they are has grown impressively in recent years -- the odds are that Amazon is your preferred place to shop. Of all the ways Amazon has come to dominate the book market, especially in the digital arena, its share of audiobook sales probably represents its most formidable pre-eminence.

At the last tally (now more than a year old), more than 60 percent of audiobooks were downloaded to digital devices, and nearly all of those came from Audible (an Amazon company) or through its long-standing license to supply audiobooks to Apple's iTunes. Amazon also owns Brilliance audio, the biggest producer of CD-based audiobooks. Audiobooks are now well over a billion-dollar business, and the available figures suggest that Amazon retains a far larger piece of that revenue than any other retailer.

Amazon is having an especially good run lately compared to major competitors in the book trade. Barnes and Noble's losses in Nook sales have become so large that the company is the subject of gloomy projections about its future. And Apple has suffered a resounding defeat in the Department of Justice's antitrust case alleging its conspiracy with major publishers to set e-book prices. Amazon has no such problems, and has actually been the beneficiary of the troubles facing these other companies. Whether the issue is the popularity of the Kindle in its various reading and tablet forms or the discounted pricing of most of its millions of books, consumers seem to be increasingly conditioned (or habituated) to the convenience of Amazon's one-click technology, its efficiency in service, and the vast scale of what it has on offer.

The power of Amazon's position as a bookseller in every respect is growing at a pace that makes publishers uneasy. With each passing year, the industry confronts an enterprise that can afford to be more aggressive both in its product promotion and in its negotiations. While Amazon's strategies on discount pricing and investment in infrastructure have kept its profits relatively low, shareholders are showing confidence in its prospects. Last week, on the day when Apple lost its antitrust case in federal court, Amazon's share price closed at $292.33, its highest ever.

Audiobooks are a particularly good example of how Amazon is recruiting its huge customer base. Amazon acquired Audible in 2008 for about $300 million, and now features well over 100,000 titles. Audible offers a membership model, which can amount to substantial savings over a la carte pricing.

Audible uses the clout it has amassed from this success to negotiate deals with publishers, who doubtless resent the low advances on offer -- $1,000 is typical -- for all but guaranteed bestsellers. But publishers are reluctant to pass up the opportunity to reach an audience of a size only possible on Amazon. With the CD market on a sharp downward curve, most bookstores have reduced their stock of audiobooks to a handful at most. In the next survey of audiobook use, which is currently being conducted, experts predict the digital percentage will surpass 70 percent.

While it has the overwhelming presence in audiobooks, Amazon is not the exclusive provider of them. There are a half-dozen or so independent producers, and the largest publishers maintain their own audiobook divisions and can sell downloads from their websites. Libraries prefer CDs, and some still carry audiobooks on cassettes, which have otherwise virtually disappeared. But Amazon's ability to serve the burgeoning digital demand is the reason it has achieved such a major place in the market. According to a recent story in The New York Times, Audible "says it produced some 10,000 recorded works last year." Donald Katz, Audible's founder and chief executive told the Times that the company employed two thousand actors to read books last year, "and he speculated that he was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area." While the Actors' Guild was unable to calculate the number for the Times, it did confirm that audio narration is "plentiful . . . (and) also lucrative enough to allow many of its members to survive on it."

Audible's momentum in audiobooks includes innovations that seem to be adding to its appeal. Along with the other subscription benefits, there is Whispersync for Voice, for example, which Amazon says allows you to "switch between reading the Kindle book and listening to the professional narration from Audible." Audiobooks are also available for as low as $4.99 if you purchase the Kindle version. And, there is something called the "Great Listen Guarantee" which enables the consumer to "exchange any book you don't like." For the consumer, these attractions are an indisputable plus. And assuming that the trend for greater output of audiobooks continues -- the Audio Publishers Association reported last winter that the number of titles in audio format had doubled in recent years -- Amazon's will surely exploit the market's potential as it has with e-books and print books as well.

Nearly half of audiobooks are still listened to by commuters, but the prevalence of digital devices makes it possible to multi-task, exercise, or work around the house, for instance. A current commercial on the Audible.com app has earphones shaped into a rose plugged into an iPhone, with Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic bestseller, on the screen. As reported in the New York Times, a woman's voice says, "Enjoy a steamy romance while you're ironing the sheets." The earphones morph themselves into a sword, and the voice intones, "discover an historic battle while battling the bulge at the gym."

Amazon's book business clearly has a great deal going for it these days, and audiobooks are definitely a factor in that ascendency.

from: The Atlantic

The murky world of literary libel

Lawsuits, pulped books, family rifts: when novelists base their characters on real people, trouble tends to follow. John Preston investigates literary libel.
by: John Preston

"It never occurred to me that it might cause problems,” says the Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, of his 3,500 page epic about his family, catchily if provocatively titled Min Kamp. In retrospect, this might have been a bit naive. Aged 40 and with an undistinguished literary career behind him, Knausgaard decided to write unsparingly about himself and his family. No punches would be pulled, he vowed, no confidences left unbroached.

Here at least he was as good as his word. Knausgaard wrote about his grandmother being an incontinent alcoholic, his father being a sadistic brute and his second wife being a depressive. While he was writing, his mother begged him to stop. “It’s too much,” she said. “Think of your family.” But Knausgaard ploughed on regardless. When he had finished, he showed what he’d written to his relatives. Not surprisingly, they didn’t like it – in fact they hated it so much that they tried to get publication halted.

Although they failed, they did persuade Knausgaard to change everyone’s name apart from his father’s. This, however, did nothing to lessen the fallout when the first volume of Min Kamp (Mein Kampf in Norwegian) came out in 2009. Knausgaard’s father’s family have refused to have anything to do with him since, and so has his brother. His former wife made a radio documentary about how traumatic she found the whole business, while his second wife, Linda, called him up after reading it to say that their life together could never be romantic again. Subsequently, their relationship was said to be in “deep crisis”.

While some critics have described Min Kamp as narcissism gone mad, Knausgaard must be doing something right – the book has sold 450,000 copies in Norway alone. Even so, Knausgaard himself is ambivalent about whether it’s all been worth it. “I get the rewards,” he admits, while “the people I wrote about get the hurt.”

While Knausgaard was busy trying to dodge his family’s flak in Norway, something similar was going on in France. Earlier this year, Christine Angot, a 54-year-old novelist who basks in the title of France’s Queen of Shock Fiction, was found guilty of “pillaging the private life” of her boyfriend’s ex-lover in her novel, Les Petits (The Little Ones). Elise Bidoit insisted that the novel had ruined her life – this despite the fact that her name had been changed in the book. She was so upset that she had tried to commit suicide, she claimed. A French court sympathised and ordered Angot and her publishers to pay her €40,000 (£34,500) in damages.

It turns out that Angot is no stranger to this sort of thing. In previous novels, she’s written about her incestuous relationship with her father, and about the athletically adventurous sex life she enjoyed with an earlier boyfriend. Remarkably, she had also written about Bidoit before – in a 2008 novel called The Lover Market in which Angot didn’t even bother to change her name. Angot ended up paying her €10,000 (£8,600) in an out-of-court settlement.

Also in France, the actress Scarlett Johansson is currently suing the author of a bestselling novel featuring a fictional character who resembles her. The author, Grégoire Delacourt, insists that his portrayal of Johansson is intended as a tribute to her beauty. But Johansson – or at least her lawyers – don’t see it that way and are demanding damages for “breach and fraudulent use of personal rights”. All these cases have focused attention on a perennially grey area in fiction: how far can you go – morally as well as legally – when writing about real people?

What’s not in doubt is that legally it can prove very costly indeed – as Francis King found when he wrote about a neighbour of his, a former Labour MP called Tom Skeffington-Lodge in his 1970 novel, A Domestic Animal. Skeffington-Lodge read a proof copy of the book and recognised a lightly veiled, far-from-flattering, portrait of himself.

The case was lent a peculiar piquancy by the fact that Skeffington-Lodge’s character in the book went by the name of Dame Winifred Harcourt – it transpired that King thought he’d be safe if he gave him a sex change. However, King then made the big mistake of writing to Skeffington-Lodge to apologise for what he’d done.

Skeffington-Lodge took this admission of guilt straight around to his barrister, the novel was pulped days before publication and King was forced to sell his house in Brighton in order to pay his legal costs.

But what about morally? Should writers be free to base characters on real people? “Of course they should,” says the novelist Philip Hensher. “As a novelist, your imagination has got to be free – you can’t spend your time worrying about what someone is going to think. As far as I’m concerned you can make a real person anything you like, just as long as people understand that this is not necessarily an accurate version of anything. If you were a historian, it would be different – but you’re not.”

None the less, Hensher believes there’s a big difference writing about people who are alive, and those who are dead. “For instance, I don’t think anyone would worry about putting a real-life Victorian into a novel. But it does get trickier if someone is alive, or has only just died. When I was younger and much naughtier, I wrote the libretto for an opera [by Thomas Adès] about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who had only died three years earlier. People did think that was a little bit dubious. I must say I’m not sure if I’d do it now. As you get older, you do become a bit more sensitive to causing people pain.”

Ah yes, causing pain… Here we come to one of the trickiest areas of all when writing about real people. I once wrote a novel in which a real-life man appeared – an archaeologist who had been married to my aunt. I did my research, read his journals and generally felt rather pleased with the accuracy of my portrayal.
Then I happened to meet an old friend of his. He was so angry he could hardly speak. Apparently the man wasn’t remotely how I’d depicted him, and I’d done his memory a grave disservice. My immediate response was to say that he should write his own novel if he felt that strongly. The trouble is the sense of guilt has never quite gone away – the sense that if I was a portrait painter I wouldn’t have done a very good job of capturing a likeness.

Getting it wrong when writing about real-life people can take many forms. In 1976, Piers Paul Read wrote a novel called Polonaise which included a particularly nasty character called Lord Derwent who had incestuous relations with his daughter.

Read had chosen the name because he happened to be staying near the River Derwent in Yorkshire while writing the book. To his horror, he then found out that there was a real-life Lord Derwent – and that he was out for blood.

At Derwent’s insistence, the whole edition was pulped and the name of the character changed in subsequent editions. However, the American edition went ahead as planned – albeit with an erratum slip, guaranteed to leave readers in a state of puzzlement: “It should be noted that the Lord Derwent in this novel bears no resemblance to the real Lord Derwent.”

Much the same thing happened to DJ Taylor when he published his second novel, Real Life, in 1991. For reasons Taylor is still at a loss to explain, he used the name of someone he’d met fleetingly five years earlier for one of his main characters – a man who happened to be a Soho porn baron, a former associate of the Kray Twins and the maker of films such as Nazi Death Camp and Spank Academy.

Taylor had inadvertently given his character the same number of children as the real Mr X, and had him living in the same area of London. Nor did it help that he’d misspelled the man’s name – this was taken by his lawyers to be a ham-fisted attempt to cover his tracks. In the end Taylor and his publishers settled out of court for a sum “in the lower end of five figures”. Contractually bound to indemnify his publishers, Taylor ended up paying half of it himself.

“The whole thing was incredibly traumatic,” he says now. “I realised just how serious it was when I got a call from my solicitor advising me to put any property I had into my wife’s name. What made it worse was that it was plainly an innocent mistake. But looking back, I think I was an idiot and deserved everything I got. At the same time it’s unquestionably true that the libel laws are stacked against the writer.”

Traditionally, courts in the United States have come down much harder on novelists who libel real people than British ones. In 1971, Gwen Davis wrote a novel called Touching, in which one of her characters was a sadistic quack who ran nude encounter sessions for neurotic Californians.

Paul Bindrim, a real-life psychologist who staged his own nudie encounter sessions, claimed the character was based on him – and sued. In court, Davis admitted that she had once attended one of Bindrim’s “nude marathons” – but denied her character was based on him.

The jury disagreed and awarded Bindrim $100,000. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts for Davis. Her book, which had been a flop when it first appeared, rapidly became a collector’s item.

But 20 years on, the climate had changed a good deal. When the novelist Terry McMillan’s former boyfriend, Leonard Welch, read her 1989 novel, Disappearing Acts, he promptly blew a gasket. Launching a $4.75 million lawsuit, Welch claimed he was the model for the book’s central character, a drunken racist and homophobe called Franklin Swift. He wore the same clothes as Swift, he maintained, had the same pet, the same dodgy knee and even ate the same breakfast cereal.

Yet the judge decided that no one who knew Welch could confuse him with the fictional Swift. In essence, the differences between them outweighed the similarities. It seemed the balance had shifted from the plaintiff to the writer.

Over here, though, we still do things very differently. In 1999, when an anonymous British author wrote a satire about Tony and Cherie Blair called Holly Lester, its publishers, Pan, pulled it just before publication over fears that the Blairs would sue for libel.

And judging by a recent proposal made by Hachette, the French publisher which controls Little Brown and Hodder & Stoughton, the fear of ending up in court is greater than ever. Hachette now want “offer letters” to authors to include the clause: “This offer is made on the understanding that the novel would be purely fictional with no basis on real people or events.”

When I asked David Miller, a literary agent at Rogers Coleridge & White, how this would affect him, he said he’d ignore it. “How do you apply that to anyone who uses their own life to write a realistic novel? It’s bonkers.”

Some people, of course, seem only too happy to appear in novels. Several years ago, the crime novelist James Ellroy was at a book signing in Hollywood when he was asked to sign a book by Don Crutchfield, an LA private investigator. The two men got talking and Crutchfield told Ellroy how he often felt like a character from one of his novels.

Not long afterwards, Ellroy asked Crutchfield if he really would like to be a character in a book. Crutchfield was thrilled – especially when Ellroy offered him money into the bargain. He’s remained thrilled ever since, despite the fact that his character is none-too-bright and goes by the name of “Dips---” Don Crutchfield.

It’s probably best to tread carefully when putting real-life characters into your novel. Equally, though, there’s something to be said for going the other way – portraying them in the most outrageous light possible.

In 1982, a former Miss Wyoming sued Penthouse over a short story in which a fictional “Miss Wyoming” went in for “exaggerated sexual practices”. The jury agreed this was a grave libel and awarded her $28 million. However, an appeal court reversed the ruling. They did so, they said, because the sexual exploits in question were so fantastic that no one would believe a person could ever have performed them.

from: Telegraph

Food trucks inspire mobile bookstore

by: Larry Edsall

Combine a bookmobile with a food truck and what do you get? The Penguin Book Truck — and for good measure, the Penguin Book Pushcart.

By combining the concepts of bookmobile and food truck, book-publisher Penguin Group (USA) recently introduced its first mobile bookstore. And just like a good book, there’s a bonus inside: the Penguin Book Pushcart, which rolls out of the truck and down a ramp to make books even more accessible.

“The Penguin Classics people had a (promotional) car, a Mini Cooper, they launched a couple of years ago,” said Penguin Group (USA) publicist Erica Glass, who explained that the Mini Cooper’s tour helped bring attention to the book-publishing brand.

“Thinking back to the popularity of bookmobiles, and the popularity now of food trucks, it sort of all came together,” she added.

Bookmobiles were (and in some places still are) rolling libraries.

The first bookmobiles were horse-drawn wagons.

Later, buses and delivery vans were converted into mobile libraries. Food trucks have a long history in some communities, and recently have enjoyed more widespread popularity.

“We’re always looking for new ways to bring writers to readers, and this is one of those ways,” Glass said.

Penguin’s book truck came off an assembly line as a GMC Savana cargo van. It was outfitted with a large cargo box that not only carries books and the pushcart, but that has sides that open to display the bookshelves inside. The truck is 27 feet long and contains 96 linear feet of display shelving.

Awnings, LED lighting, cafe tables and chairs provide sheltered browsing day or night.

The pushcart was inspired by the classic New York hotdog cart. It also carries and displays books, and is covered with a pop-up umbrella.

The truck and pushcart made their debut at the recent Book Expo America, the annual convention of publishers, book store owners, authors and libraries in New York City. Their next stop was “Tom Sawyer Day” at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn., and then the American Library Association conference in Chicago.

The pushcart also will be at the Delecort Theater in New York’s Central Park for the 2013 season of Shakespeare in the Park.

In October, the truck and cart will help celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” by traveling old Route 66 from Sallisaw, Okla., to Bakersfield, Calif., with several stops along the way.

“It’s had a couple of great events already, and its trip to the West Coast on Route 66 will be cool,” Glass said.

She also explained that the truck and cart are not intended as competition for local bookstores.

“We very strongly believe in bookstores and want to continue to see them succeed,” she said.

Although Penguin can sell the books in the truck and on the cart itself, it prefers to partner with local bookstores on those sales. Glass said Penguin is open for requests from bookstores and book festivals interested in scheduling visits by the truck or cart.

For information, visit www.penguinbooktruck.com.

from: Detroit News

Share the love: vinyl lending library opens in London

Volunteer-run lending library in north London offers access to records donated by the public for just £1
by: Ian Watson

In an empty shop beside a luxury kitchen shop on a residential street in Stoke Newington, north London, Elly Rendall and Sophie Austin are dreaming of kickstarting a kind-hearted and impeccably behaved revolution. This unassuming space has opened as The Vinyl Library, a volunteer-run, non-profit, vinyl-only lending library stocked entirely with donations from the public. While many of their fellow twentysomethings spent the past four days caught up in Glastonbury festival, Rendall and Austin were sourcing tables, crates and shelves, and starting to turn an inspired pub-idea into reality.

"We were DJing UK garage sets," begins Austin, who until recently worked in advertising, "and we wanted to build up our vinyl collection. We didn't have the budget to buy a whole new collection, there's no vinyl in libraries any more and we have quite eclectic tastes, so we thought: 'Wouldn't it be great to have a vinyl library?'"

Canvassing opinion down the road in the bars of Dalston, they were greeted with instant enthusiasm for the idea. Which is when Rendall, who combines working as a teaching assistant with participating in community arts initiatives, realised The Vinyl Library could be more than an instant record collection. "The DJ scene was very male-dominated and everyone was very knowledgeable and it wasn't necessarily a sharing space," she says. "In record shops, you can feel a bit nervous about asking questions. So the library will be about creating a welcoming, open space. There's a library in Crofton Park [in south London] that was being shut down and it was taken over by pensioners, and it became their social space. There's people there playing games and there's always someone who will talk to you about the gardening book you're taking out, and we were inspired by that."

Thus the idea of a communal vinyl record collection tended by a co-operative of volunteers was born. "People can share their knowledge with people who are new to vinyl and lot of the kids that might come to us may never have touched vinyl before," Austin says. "We like the idea of getting people tactile with a piece of vinyl and getting everyone connected to that again." Rendall nods. "Soulseek is soulless. You just take tunes and you don't know the history behind them, whereas actually holding something, seeing the artwork, looking at the back, reading the dates, is wonderful."

Since Rendall and Austin announced the scheme , The Vinyl Library's Facebook page has gained more than 2,000 members and they have been inundated with offers of donations. "Someone from New Orleans is sending us three records, which is amazing," says Rendall. "The biggest donation so far has been 300 records. Most donations are over 50. I think a lot of it is potentially partners at home saying 'get those records out of the house … now!'"

"The great thing about the library is that people can house their records here," Austin adds. "They don't need to keep them at home, and they've got access to them all the time. So you don't feel like you're giving them up forever."

Joining The Vinyl Library will cost a pound, and there will be a further rental charge for taking out up to a maximum of five records. All of which sounds perfectly reasonable, until you broach the tricky subject of what happens when someone doesn't return their records. "We're hoping that because people will feel that it's a shared collection that they'll respect it," says Rendall. "If someone does take those five records, they'll have lost out because they could have a whole collection at their feet but they've just got away with five records."

Austin says they're still working out the details of exactly how the library will work. To cover rental costs in the first month, they're sharing the shop space with a clothing and jewellery stall, and then they're hoping to find funding. They say they need help with cataloguing, building shelving and running the library, and when I spoke to them days before opening, they still hadn't decided how much to charge for borrowing a record. But they're certainly not short of ideas. They're planning to run DJing lessons, with a particular focus on attracting female DJs. They talk about screening music documentaries in the evening, and about the library becoming a social hub. And most of all, they're excited by the thought that this could be the first of many vinyl libraries across the country.

"We'll be the guinea pigs," Rendall says. "Finding out if people will run off with records or if there's a way to stop that. Working out how much to charge for rental. We don't have the answers yet because it's new and there's nothing to base it on. But we've already had a guy get in touch from Birmingham saying he wants to do this. And once the pattern is set, people in different places can run their own and we'll help them set it up. Hopefully it'll work. It's exciting."

It's a test of human decency, almost.

"Exactly," nods Austin.

Let's see if everyone is up to it.

"I'm sure they will be. I've got faith."

The Vinyl Library is now open at Unit 1, Foulden Road, London N16 7UU, from 11am-9pm, Monday-Sunday

from: Guardian

Dan Brown, diets and Swedish fiction: what we've read so far in 2013

Official sales figures of digital and print books for the first half of the year show a preoccupation with diets and thrillers.
by: Liz Bury

The nation's reading in the first half of the year has been dominated by Dan Brown and diet books, with a peppering of literary and break-out fiction, sales figures reveal.

The 5:2 Fast Diet, a regime of intermittent fasting during which dieters eat normally five days a week and then for two days cut calorie intake by three quarters, has sold 402,887 copies – making it the No 2 bestseller.

The lifestyle and recipe book, penned by medical journalist Michael Mosely and fashion writer Mimi Spencer, taps into the nation's obsession with staying healthy and living longer; the pair even claim their diet can ward off Alzheimer's disease.

In fiction, the break-out hit is The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Swedish writer and media entrepreneur Jonas Jonasson, published by the small indie press Hesperus. First out in July last year, it has found an audience through word-of-mouth recommendations to reach bestseller status, and charts at No 15 with UK sales of 128,061 during the first half of 2013.

Philip Jones, editor of book industry magazine the Bookseller, said: "The Hundred-Year-Old Man … was a quiet sensation that got supercharged by its inclusion in the Sony 20p ebook promotion. It and Life of Pi were the biggest sellers across print and e in the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, with digital outpacing even the strong print sales."

He added: "It's a game-changer for Hesperus, as such hits always are for small presses."

Life of Pi, first published in 2001, was reissued to coincide with the release last year of Ang Lee's film adaptation of the book, and charts at No 7, with sales of 149,373 copies.

Notable by its absence from the bestseller list is any serious non-fiction title such as a prominent biography, significant science book or weighty history tome. Robert Macfarlane's nature book The Old Ways (A Journey on Foot) has sold well but misses out on a spot in the Top 20.

"Publishers traditionally keep their big non-fiction books back until the end of the year, so they can benefit from the huge gift market that coalesces around Christmas, or any television adaptations," said Jones. "Publishers are quite wedded to these schedules."

As a counterpoint to extreme diet regimes, a more traditional low-calorie recipe book, Hairy Dieters: How to Love Food and Lose Weight, the tie-in to Dave Myers' and Si King's BBC TV series of the same name, is at No 4, having shifted 263,055 copies.

The fiction entries are led by Dan Brown's Inferno, still at No 1. It has sold more than 500,000 copies in hardback since 14 May 14, having swept into the top spot in its first week of release with sales of 228,961 copies. Although Brown tops the list, overall sales are lower than the first-week sales of his previous novel The Lost Symbol, which sold more than 550,000 during publication week in 2009.

Rachel Joyce's debut novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which was longlisted for the Booker prize, has found a broad audience for a first-time writer, selling 236,163 copies. It tops the fiction bestseller chart (which excludes '"genre" fiction such as crime and thrillers), and is at No 5 in the overall list. The Guardian's review of Joyce's book, about a man who sets out on a long walk after finding that a former colleague is seriously ill, said it delivers "unexpectedly savage emotional blows … tempered with a sense of quiet celebration".

Official book sales figures are compiled by Nielsen BookScan.

The UK Top 20 bestsellers January-June 2013

1. Inferno (Robert Langdon Book 4) by Dan Brown (Bantam) 501,384
2. The Fast Diet by Mimi Spencer & Michael Mosley (Short Books) 402,887
3. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (Phoenix 391,923)
4. The Hairy Dieters (How to Love Food and Lose Weight) by Dave Myers & Si King (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) 263,055
5. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (Black Swan) 236,163
6. Entwined with You (A Crossfire Novel) by Sylvia Day (Penguin) 167,495
7. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Canongate) 149,373
8. A Wanted Man (Jack Reacher 17) by Lee Child (Bantam) 140,662
9. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien (HarperCollins) 135,581
10. A Street Cat Named Bob (How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets) by James Bowen (Hodder) 135,534
11. The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year by Sue Townsend (Penguin) 135,349
12. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel by Jeff Kinney (Puffin) 132,466
13. Horrid Henry's Guide to Perfect Parents by Francesca Simon (Orion Children's Books) 131,515
14. Kill Me If You Can by James Patterson (Arrow) 131,083
15. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (Hesperus Press) 128,061
16. Best Book Day Ever! (So Far) by Tom Gates and Liz Pichon (Scholastic) 125,364
17. The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes (Penguin) 124,566
18. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Penguin) 117,718
19. I've Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella (Black Swan) 115,764
20. Eloise by Judy Finnigan (Sphere) 114,844

from: Guardian

Guest opinion: why libraries should get into the book-selling business

In the June 2013 issue of Q&Q, Vancouver librarians Shirley Lew and Baharak Yousefi argue that libraries should get into the business of selling books.
by: Q&Q Staff

It may be sacrilegious and antithetical to everything libraries stand for (and as librarians, we appreciate this more than most), but we ardently believe it nevertheless: libraries should get into the business of selling books. Now.

The crisis in Canada’s once vibrant book industry is negatively affecting our reading lives and communities. Growing evidence suggests that the increasing dominance of big corporations and discount giants is resulting in less diversity of ideas.

Canada’s publishing industry is facing tremendous instability and transition. As Canadian-owned publishers struggle to remain independent, the impending merger of Penguin and Random House will further shift the balance of power into fewer hands.

Similar pressures are affecting booksellers. Discount giant Target is set to become, by some estimates, the second largest book retailer in the country. Target’s strategy is similar to Costco’s: bestsellers stocked in large quantities and deeply discounted. Meanwhile, Canada’s largest bookstore chain, Indigo Books & Music, has rebranded itself as a “lifestyle store for booklovers,” allocating more retail space for home décor and gift items, and less for books. While many independent booksellers withstood the arrival of Amazon in Canada, the rise of ebooks has mostly shut them out of the digital marketplace.

The impact has been swift and harsh. The Canadian Booksellers Association estimates that 300 independents across the country have shut their doors over the last decade. (Earlier this year, the CBA itself surrendered its charter and merged with the Retail Council of Canada, ceasing to exist as an independent organization.) In the past several years the closures have included Collected Works in Ottawa, Duthie’s Books in Vancouver, Nicholas Hoare in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, and four Book Warehouse locations in B.C. Together they represent a loss of more than 175 years of bookselling experience and service to our communities.

What else has been lost? For some consumers, perhaps very little. Bestsellers are cheaper than ever, and finding almost any book online is simple. If saving time and money were all that mattered, we may never have been better off.

But the actual damage is incalculable. The loss of independent bookstores is accompanied by the loss of diversity, possibility, and sense of place. Publishers, writers, and the readers they serve all lose in a market that rewards blockbusters but ignores alternative voices and ideas.

Instead of being bystanders to this devastation, libraries have compelling reasons to seize the opportunity it presents. We have a mandate to help preserve our literary and cultural landscape; we have the space, often in rent-controlled buildings; we know how to buy and promote books; and we are not constrained by the need to turn a profit. We are uniquely equipped to sell books and support writers, publishers, and reading in Canada.

Ours would not be a traditional business venture, but an extension of the service we already provide. It would operate on a self-sustaining, cost-recovery basis. The inventory would highlight books from Canadian publishers and writers, and reflect a range of voices across social, cultural, political, economic, and artistic spectrums. It would be a dynamic, jumbled, and chaotic collection of books and ideas.

When Target announced it would open in the same mall as McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg, Paul McNally commented, “Our cultural industries need a zone of protection, certainly more than potash does.” Libraries in Canada can, and should, be that zone.

Shirley Lew and Baharak Yousefi are readers, former booksellers, and librarians in Vancouver

from: Quill & Quire

Actors Today Don’t Just Read for the Part. Reading IS the Part.

by: Leslie Kaufman

Gabra Zackman is a new kind of acting star: she is heard, but unheard-of.

Ms. Zackman had classical training through the Shakespeare Theater of Washington, has worked in regional theaters for the last two decades and has had a sprinkling of appearances on television shows like “Law and Order.” Those performances, however, have brought neither fame nor fortune.

Instead, like a growing number of actors, she has found steady employment as a reader in the booming world of audiobooks.

 

In recent years, Ms. Zackman has recorded more than 200 titles, and she says she can now count on steady work of two books a month, earning $1,000 to $3,000 a book. The income helps her make the payments on her one-bedroom Manhattan apartment while giving her the freedom to travel around the country and perform.

 

Once a small backwater of the publishing industry, in part because of the cumbersome nature of tapes, audiobooks are now flourishing. Sales have been rising by double digits annually in recent years. A recent survey by industry groups showed that audiobook revenue climbed 22 percent in 2012 compared with 2011.

 

Much of the growth can be attributed to the business’s digital transformation — from how books are recorded (increasingly at studios in the actors’ homes) to how they are sold (through subscription or individually on the Internet) and consumed (downloaded to mobile devices).

 

That development is good for publishers and authors, of course. But it has also created a burgeoning employment opportunity for actors pursuing stardom on the stage and screen, allowing them to pay their bills doing something other than waiting on tables.

 

Ms. Zackman says the demand for her work is tied in part to her dedication to her craft, and she does extensive research before each book, with the aim of infusing intonation and emotion into each character’s voice. She also gives credit to Audible.com, a company in Newark that is pushing the digital revolution in audiobooks, and which has become her main employer.

 

“I get to have a whole flourishing life as an actress because they have given me an opportunity to practice and to be employed,” she said.

 

Audible, the biggest producer and seller of audiobooks, says it produced some 10,000 recorded works last year — either directly or through a service it provides that allows authors to contract directly with actors. Each book amounts to an average of two or three days in the studio, but can be more, for the person voicing the book.

 

Donald R. Katz, the founder and chief executive of Audible, which was bought by Amazon.com in 2008, said that his company employed 2,000 actors to read books last year, and he speculated that he was probably the largest single employer of actors in the New York area.

 

The actors’ guild says there is no way to calculate such a number but it confirms that not only is audio narration work suddenly plentiful, but that it is also lucrative enough to allow many of its members to survive on it.

 

As with other forms of acting, compensation varies according to fame. An unknown actor might earn a few thousand dollars for a book, while stars like Nicole Kidman, who recently narrated Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” for Audible, can be paid in the hundreds of thousands.

 

Still, Michelle Lee Cobb, president of the Audio Publishers Association, said “there are hundreds of actors who make their living reading books and we are seeing more and more people trying.”

The field is so promising that drama schools, including prestigious institutions like Juilliard and Yale, have started offering audio narration workshops.

 

Courtney Blackwell Burton, director of career services at Juilliard, said: “It is very exciting because it is a new source of income and work that really uses their training. We are really pushing this idea of entrepreneurship, and with narration you can even have your own studio in your home.”

Since the workshops started in 2008, eight Juilliard actors have recorded 62 books for Audible, she said.

 

Katherine Kellgren has led narration classes at various acting schools. She said she was excited that audio narration, which is different from other forms of acting, is finally getting recognition as a craft.

Ms. Kellgren attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for three years, where she says she trained intensely in dialects. She did radio plays early in her career, which helped prepare her for audio work.

For her first book, she auditioned for the producer over the phone by reading selections from “Out of Africa.” She got the job, which was for a bodice ripper called “Wicked Widow,” just the mention of which still makes her giggle with embarrassment.

 

Now, Ms. Kellgren, who refers to herself as an audiobook narrator instead of an actress, can command as much as $450 for each finished hour of narration and can be picky about the work. “When books get too spicy for me, I turn them down now because I dissolve into hysterics,” she says.

Ms. Kellgren’s style is to perform demonstrative dramatic readings, giving each character a distinct voice. She even has a dialect coach. She has recorded nearly 200 books and says she even has a fan base.

 

“It is not exactly people stopping me and saying, ‘didn’t you read “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”?,’ ” she said, “but I have been at various book festivals and people recognize me by my work.”

 

Another actor, Jonathan Davis, also can command a premium price for his services. He has narrated over 30 Star Wars books for Lucasfilm and Random House, as well as critically acclaimed books like the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” for Audible.

 

Mr. Davis cautions that narration is not for everyone. “You need endurance, patience, and you need to do a lot of research,” he said. “I am in the booth from 9 to 4 and the average book could be three days to seven days.”

 

The upside, for him, has been a connection with authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Oliver Sacks and also a tremendous amount of freedom to define the project artistically. “I feel like they have a great respect for what I do,” he said of Audible, his most regular client.

 

His style is more restrained than Ms. Kellgren’s. “You paint the whole picture but you are very controlled,” he said.

 

“A fan once said to me that my narration was like ‘a modern version of sitting around a campfire listening to tribal elders,’ ” he added. “That is what makes me feel I am on the right track.”

from: NY Times

Matt-touch book covers: a feast for your fingers

by: Sam Muston

Are you a fondler? Or do you keep your hands to yourself in a bookshop? The question is seen as a vital one for publishers keen to preserve the traditional paper book. Why? Because a tactile, finger-friendly cover can often mean the difference between a strong seller and one that bombs at the tills, or so the thinking goes.

“Publishers are putting a lot of the time, money and love into covers,” says Cathy Rentzenbrink of The Bookseller. Once, that might have meant more elaborate graphic design, perhaps a more artful photograph on the front, but today the vogue is all for varying the paper finish.

“When I design a book cover, I’ll always consider what paper type best suits the book. But quite often with the teen books I design, that means matt. For me, it is the first stop in making books that are quality items,” says Jack Noel, who has designed covers for books such as Edward Hogan’s Daylight Saving and Black Spring by Alison Croggon.

The notion of judging a book by its cover may strike one as facile. But it is in fact part of what Noel terms “the fightback” against the rise of the e-book – a laudable desire to preserve tangible, fully sniffable paper books.

“We have to ensure traditional books look amazing and are beautiful objects that people want to pick up and keep,” says Sara Granger, production manager at Penguin.

Her publishing house was one of the first big players to recognise the necessity for a change in mindset and now produces books of startling chicness. To peruse the Penguin range is to find a feast for the eyes, and fingers. It uses countless cover finishes, not least the eminently touchable “soft-touch matt laminate” (velvet-feel, to you and me). The new Penguin classics use coloured cloth overlaid with foil, which, again, couldn’t be much further from the standard “shiny paper, big pic” trope of yesteryear.

The battle against the e-book is not confined only to the front page, however. Endnotes are also increasingly popular and the publisher Indigo uses the edges of the leaves as a canvas (especially niftily done on Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher, which features a flock of birds in flight picked out by UV varnish).

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether winning these small-scale artistic skirmishes will mean the physical book survives – but for dedicated page-sniffers the labours can only be to the good.

from: Independent

25 Greatest Takeaways from ALA 2013

by: Kathy Dempsey

The American Library Association’s Annual Conference took place between June 27 and July 2. Each summer, tens of thousands of library people take over a host city for days of committee meetings, continuing education sessions, and exhibits. They fill lots of hotels. They descend upon the bars and restaurants. They discuss the latest technologies. They bestow awards. They install their new ALA president. They learn hard and they party hard.
This year, Chicago hosted 15,918 attendees and 6,125 exhibitors. These folks fought (or joined) the crowds of Chicago Blackhawks fans that flocked downtown to celebrate the latest Stanley Cup victory on Friday. They blended in with Jimmy Buffett fans on Saturday. They made pilgrimages to the Harold Washington Library Center on State Street. They came, they saw, they conquered, then they went back to work.
I brought home 25 quotes, tidbits, and ideas so I could share the experience with you:

1. Brilliance is being able to see the obvious thing that no one else sees. ~ Steven D. Levitt, author of Freakonomics, opening keynote speaker
2. You need to have statistics and data to inform and convince others of libraries’ value. Warm, fuzzy anecdotes don’t cut it anymore.
3. Striking up conversations with complete strangers can lead to amazing things, even job offers.
4. Use studies and advice from the ICMA (International City/County Management Association) when talking to public library stakeholders.
5. No convention center could possibly have enough bandwidth to support Wi-Fi for thousands of technology-addicted librarians.
6. You must use social media well and learn to evaluate your followers’ engagement. If your patrons use it, and your library doesn’t, you risk being irrelevant to them.
7. “Pew is a family name, not an adjective.” ~ Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, RUSA President’s Program speaker
8. Mothers of minor children are the biggest users of public libraries.
9. You need to tell your library’s story: What it does, why it matters, what it returns for the community’s investment, how it serves as a foundation of democratic society. Laymen need to understand these truths in order to continue using, supporting, and funding public libraries.
10. The old scarcity was information. In the Internet Age, the new scarcity is time.
11. Plenty of librarians have wild-colored hair and tattoos.
12. Three things are changing the publishing paradigm: Print-on-demand technology, ebooks / tablet readers, and self-publishing. These combine to make the “Big 6″ publishers (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, which have been giving libraries a very hard time over ebooks) “terrified about their future.” ~ David Vinjamuri, brand expert & Forbes contributor, PR Forum speaker
13. Librarians’ “rugged individualism” does not help them take collective action.
14. Most librarians are behind the curve when it comes to marketing, partly because very few library schools teach marketing, even though it’s now vital for survival.
15. Clearly, nobody who’s designed or planned a convention center building has ever done usability testing.
16. ” ‘Doing good’ is not the same thing as ‘making a difference’.” Public librarians need to find out where they can make the most difference and concentrate on those areas instead of trying to be everything to everyone. ~ Diane Knoepke,  consultant, Chicago Public Library: Impact Measurement speaker
17. See Bill Gates discuss the importance of measuring societal impact and read his annual letter.
18. If you don’t measure change, you don’t know how to make more of it.
19. Measure your online social influence with tools such as Klout and SocialMention.
20. On Facebook, your Edgerank affects how many of your fans actually see your posts in their newsfeeds.
21. Librarians will sell their soles (yes, those “soles”) to get free books, posters, bags, t-shirts, swag, and chocolate in the giant exhibit hall.
22. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
23. “Output” is how much you’re doing; “Outcome” is what’s changed as a result of your actions. These terms are often confused.
24. Kids who read just 20 minutes a day can avoid the “summer slide” (where they lose some of their reading ability while school is out).
25. ALA brings in some mighty big speakers: Cory Doctorow, Khaled Hosseini, Temple Grandin,  Giada De Laurentiis, Oliver Stone, Alice Walker, Octavia Spencer, Congressman John Lewis, Jonathan Maberry, and many more.

Hungry for more? There’s a conference wrap-up from ALA here. You can also search social media for the hashtag #ALA2013

 from: LibraryScienceList

Hours spent reading books around the world

by: Carolyn Kellogg

An infographic of time spent reading around the world. (Russia Beyond the Headlines)

How many hours a week do you read?


If it's 10 hours or more, you might try moving to India -- you'll be among your people. According to this infographic, Indians spend more time reading books than the residents of any other nation. Each week, the average Indian reads for 10 hours, 42 minutes.

Americans read books only about half that amount: 5 hours and 42 minutes. Interestingly, Americans and Germans spend exactly the same amount of time reading.

The big reading nations, after India, are Thailand (9 hours, 24 minutes), China (8 hours), the Philippines (7 hours, 36 minutes), Egypt (7.5 hours) and the Czech Republic (7 hours, 24 minutes).

Of the 30 nations surveyed, Koreans spent the least time reading: 3 hours, 16 minutes each week.

The data comes from the World Culture Score Index from a survey of 30,000 people worldwide. Americans were 23rd in reading books, sixth in watching TV, and 19th in using the Internet for non-work purposes.

Since the survey was taken in late 2004 and early 2005, it would be interesting to see if, and how, any of those measures changed.

The infographic was created by Russia Behind the Headlines and spotted by Publishing Perspectives.

from: LA Times

Akashic Launches Infamous Books with Rapper Prodigy

by: Diane Patrick

Brooklyn independent publisher Akashic Books is partnering with Infamous Records, a music label founded and run by the Hip hop artist Albert “Prodigy” Johnson, to launch the Infamous Books imprint, a line of urban fiction. The imprint will launch July 16 with its inaugural title, H.N.I.C., an urban crime novel written by Johnson and British novelist Steven Savile, timed to coincide with an international tour of Mobb Deep, the two-man Hip hop group of Prodigy and his partner Havoc.


Akashic Books will distribute the titles and co-handle editorial and marketing duties with Infamous; Prodigy’s talent manager Marvis Johnson (no relation) will oversee the daily operations of the imprint. The release of H.N.I.C. will coincide with Prodigy’s Mobb Deep tour as well as his own solo album Albert Einstein, which released last month.

Prodigy’s first book was a memoir, My Infamous Life (Touchstone, 2011). The new book, Prodigy told PW, began as a movie script he wrote in 1999. “After My Infamous Life came out, I decided to take the H.N.I.C. script and [work with] somebody who was a book writer.” The co-author he chose is Steven Savile, an award-winning British fantasy, horror, and thriller author.


“Steve brings the European style and mixes it with mine,” Prodigy says. “I love street slang, and I listen to the street slang of other countries. So Steve added twists and turns and changed the language.” Savile added, “each of us basically added our own unique skill set to the book. It's certainly a book neither of us could have written alone.”

Akashic Books publisher Johnny Temple said Infamous fiction titles will be in novella format–between 80 and 100 pages with a small trim size of 5” by 7”–and will be published simultaneously in hardcover, paperback, audio, and as e-books. “We’ve had a lot of success with small trim sizes: Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno, and Adios Muchachos by Daniel Chavarría, which won an Edgar–that was even smaller. With the Hip hop street esthetic, there’s something about being able to slip it in your back pocket. If the book is too big and thin, it’s a little floppy.”

Infamous plans to publish at least four titles a year, with forthcoming titles by bestselling urban fiction authors K’wan (Hood Rat, Welfare Wifeys), JaQuavis Coleman, half of the duo Ashley & JaQuavis (The Cartel, Murderville), and Miasha (Secret Society, Diary of a Mistress). “Prodigy is an avid reader,” Marvis Johnson explained, “and he’s familiar with urban authors who have a style that is not repetitive and who come up with creative angles.” Johnson explained that “K’wan weaves sci-fi into this stories. JaQuavis interweaves good character development. Miasha has a series with main characters who travel the world. So we look for people who stand out and who are great storytellers, who take the urban fiction model and expand it.”

Marvis Johnson, who is president of the production company Buck 50 Productions, which includes an audiobook publishing arm distributed through Blackstone, plans to use his book publishing and music industry knowledge to create innovative marketing strategies. “The statistics are that 90% of urban music is not purchased by African Americans. But urban books, when they are released, are only promoted to African Americans,” he said.

Johnson said he wants to market and promote Infamous Books to “to an international audience. With Prodigy’s memoir, we created a marketing plan with Simon & Schuster to do unique events with really well known people, such as appearances on nightly news programs.” Johnson said that authors often feel they are not supported properly by their publishers and he emphasized that, in this case, there’s a potential audience beyond an author’s obvious fan base.

“For instance, we are doing interviews on Sirius XM with all their DJs; because Prodigy’s a musician, that outlet is available to him. We are also doing tours with [hip hop producer and rapper] Alchemist and Mobb Deep, meeting and greeting fans,” he said. “We learned a lot from the music business model: just having it on Amazon is not enough.”

from: Publisher's Weekly

Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi Is the Future of E-Books

by: Graeme McMillan

One of the biggest success stories in U.S. publishing in recent years has been the continued growth of digital book publishing. Last year, total revenue for e-book sales in the United States reached $3.04 billion, a 44.2% increase on 2011′s numbers and a figure all the more impressive when you realize that growth is additive to the print publishing industry. Even more surprising, publishers have focused much of their attention on genres like sci-fi, fantasy, mystery and romance fiction – markets that have traditionally lagged behind “literary fiction” in terms of sales.


In the last few months, however, Random House and Harper Collins launched their first digital-only imprints, and all of them focused on genre fiction. Random House announced the sci-fi/fantasy line Hydra, mystery line Alibi, “new adult”-targeted Flirt and romance-centric Loveswept, while Harper Collins created the digital mystery imprint Witness in April. Although this focus on genre fiction might seem counter-intuitive according to traditional print publishing sales, Random House VP and digital publishing director Allison Dobson says there’s a simple reason for it: The digital audience wants different things.

“Certain categories [of eBooks] have a much larger digital adoption than others,” Dobson said. “The genres were among the first where readers took to the digital format and the ratio of readers of digital, as opposed to physical, are much, much higher.” In the case of some genre titles, as much as 60 to 70 percent of the sales are digital. “I think there is an enormous audience in digital right now,” Dobson said. “It’s actually where the action is.”

There are multiple theories for the genre dominance in digital publishing, including the appeal of anonymity offered by e-reader devices, which don’t display the cover of a potentially embarrassing book for all the world to see. As Antonia Senior wrote in The Guardian last year, ”I’m happier reading [trashy fiction] on an e-reader, and keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.”

But the digital delivery system also offers immediacy and ease of access for material that often is serialized and written to make you want to know what happens next, as soon as possible. Liate Stehlik, senior vice president and publisher at Harper Collins, subscribes to that idea, at least partially. Genre fans, she says, became “early adopters” of the digital format because e-books are the optimal format “for people who want to read a lot of books, quickly and frequently. Digital has replaced the paperback, certainly the paperback originals. I think the audience that gravitated to eBooks first really was that voracious reader, reading for entertainment, reading multiple books in a month across multiple genres.”

For both Random House and Harper Collins, moving to a digital-first publishing model not only offers a higher return on investment for genre publishing, but also opens the door for those publishers to experiment in a much more cost-effective way than print. “It’s not that we couldn’t publish these books before,” Dobson said, “but [now] that a certain consumer has migrated online, and the ease of buying these books has grown that consumer base substantially.”

“The thing with digital is that you’re not as adhered to a single format or price point as you were in the past,” said Stehlik. “You can do a novella, you can do a short book that leads into a longer book, or a book that bridges two different books from the same author. Before, you might have thought, Oh, there’s nowhere to put that, we’ll have to put in paperback with the next one, but digital presents a different market to promote shorter works. And the audience responds… We don’t have to feel limited by format in the way that we may have done before.”

Digital publishing also allows books to go to market much more quickly than printed books, and offers publishers the benefit of both rapid consumer feedback and the ability to adapt to reader response. “Before, you had to wait, you had to put the books out there, wait six months to see what came back and you’d have to think, ‘Well, maybe if it had a different cover it would work, maybe if it had a different title,’” said Stehlik. “Now, it’s a lot more instantaneous, and you can change the cover, change the title, and see how people respond. You can even engage the audience before you publish, which gives them a kind of ownership over the book.”


But if the digital market opens up new opportunities and options for mainstream publishers, it also puts them in competition with smaller and self-publishers in the digital market. According to a recent survey, more than a fifth of all genre e-books sold in the United Kingdom are self-published, and the phenomenal success of Fifty Shades of Grey (originally self-published digitally by author E.L. James) has handily demonstrated that digital self-publishing doesn’t necessarily bear the same print stigma of “vanity press.”

Both Random House and Harper Collins hope their digital imprints will appeal to new writers and those who have self-published digitally in the past, particularly since it can lead to print publication as well. “With the new authors we’ve worked with this far, at least half of the titles, we’ve been able to sell print editions of those books as well, some in some of the bigger chains such as a Target or a Walmart,” said Stehlik. ”For us, it’s the first time in about fifteen years that we’ve actually increased the number of authors and books that we’re publishing. It’s a great opportunity for us to grow our list, and our reach.”

Both Dobson and Stehlik says that they’re excited by the potential of digital publishing, and the tools it gives authors and publishers to experiment with new content and interacting with their readers in different ways. ”It’s hard to say that books have one single monolithic future, or path to the future,” said Dobson. “That’s thrilling for people who love this business, because there are lots of ways to take it depending on what kind of content you’re involved in.”

“There’s so much potential,” agreed Stehlik. ”It’s very freeing to know who your customers are, and it’s very exciting to have that ability. We’re very lucky to have that today.”

from: Wired