Month: December 2020

Well, I handed in the final draft of my book yesterday and am waiting for the copyeditor to make sure I look like less of an idiot than I am, so it’s time to officially celebrate and begin the long, agonizing process of worrying about what I have done. Nine or ten months from now, a book will appear with my name on it and everything I did wrong will be standing out in bold type that only I can see. Well, not only me. I’m sure there will be a kind critic or two out there that will helpfully point out my foibles in a public venue. But hopefully there will be a reader or two that will go past all that into whatever it was I meant to say and find it jives with whatever it was they always meant to say as well, and the circle of life will continue. It’s a very glamorous literary life. Now I’m off to Costco to buy cheese and a barrel of mayonnaise. Have a good weekend, common folk.

• Emily St. John Mandel keeps picking up little endorsements... Today it’s someone named “Barack Obama”, for whatever that’s worth…;
• …It’s a small endorsement by another author who has sold mildly well;
• Toronto Star crunches the numbers on diversity in children’s books;
• Nita Pronovost, who happens to be S&S ed director and who I had a crush on in high school, just sold rights for her first book to Universal for a film starring Florence Pugh… Pronovost rhymes with Bravo;
• Bookninja hero William Gibson profiled at the CBC;
• RIP: Lucianna Ricciutelli, feminist publisher and advocate, dead at 62;
• le Carré didn’t invent the spy novel, but he did make it his own;
• It’s a Christmas Miracle! Electric Lit picks up the bad sex award so we don’t have to go without;
• When the corp closes your imprint, you strike out on your own;
• On what it’s like to be the president of a group of diverse voices like the IPA;
• While I would LIKE for there to be a Galactic Federation we can talk to, my rational mind knows that even old army dudes can go nutso in old age… but just in case, maybe we should read these books to get ready;
• George Saunders gets an all-star cast for his audio book;
• Stats guru Silver looks at what all those Trump books actually accomplished;

Just what the headline says: a master looks back on a masterwork after 30 more years of living. This is one of those books that lives permanently on Ms. Ninja’s nightstand.

When I wrote Devil I had a simple thought in mind. I wanted to tell a story about Los Angeles that highlighted black life and the black contribution to culture within a mirror-darkly that partially reflected the American experience within a shadowy landscape of national shame. In that book I talked about how poor black people migrated from the Deep South to Southern California, of how they flourished and ultimately failed; only to rise again, flourish again, fail again but in the end, pressing the envelope of that contest forward each and every time.

Sometimes within failure is contained magnificence. The characters introduced by the Easy Rawlins series hopefully displayed glimmers of hope and resistance.

As America gets ready to burn, let’s read about books!

• Q&Q’s (Canada’s PW/Kirkus/LJ) most read stories of 2020;
• What can you learn about writing from a career in making sound effects for movies? (Side note: is there a THX equivalent in books?);
• More grim news from the world of book sales;
• 2021 Booker judges announced;
• Frankfurter restructuring done, planning begins;
• Previously unseen Shirley Jackson story coming;
• Everyone needs a social media strategy these days, including libraries;
• Alan Dean Foster wrote the book on Star Wars… Literally… Polygon looks inside the complicated fight he’s waging to get paid by Disney;
• Superpoet Nikki Giovanni profiled in the NYT;
• Elizabeth Warren’s memoir will be called Persist;
• Wittgenstein’s wrote a dictionary for children.. but what does that mean?;

Book covers: which is better, the US or UK edition? I’m always fascinated by Ms. Ninja’s books and their multiple covers and international editions. So many ways to sell the same book inside. LitHub takes a fun and illuminating look at a series of books and makes some difficult choices.

…comparing US and UK covers; it’s fascinating to see different designers’ takes on the same book—and because the UK is most closely linked market to ours, there are plenty of opportunities. It’s extra fun at this point in the year, when we’ve seen some of these covers hundreds of times, and they’ve reified in our brains as being synonymous with the book itself; it makes that previously unseen version feel all the more exciting. It’s like seeing a good friend in a fresh new haircut. Or a fresh new face. But not in a murder-y way. So here are a few American book covers from 2020, side-by-side with their across-the-pond counterparts. Which ones are better? 

It’s Ms. Ninja’s birthday today, and in our house that marks not only a chance to celebrate a brilliant writer, mom, and partner, but the day we officially starting drinking a 3pm eggnog with Screech in it. So much giving.

• Mark Truscott wins inaugural Nelson Ball Poetry Prize;
• Allison Flood looks at how the indies thrived and survived 2020;
• Memories of Expos Past, a requiem in photos;
• How many people work in our industries? Some numbers;
• What’s André Alexis been up to?;
• On Eliot and revolutionaries;
• Grove Atlantic works to stave off unions with entry pay increase;
• Once Atwood joined Masterclass, I feel like it was open season… enter Rushie;
• The Master Stephen King ranks adaptations of his work;
• The most borrowed books at the TPL in 2020? Not a lot of Canucks;
• On becoming pen pals with Harper Lee;
• Letters between Simone du Beauvoir and Violette Leduc sell at auction for a pretty penny;
• Diversity within the Latinx poetry community, incl Ninja pal Eduardo Corral;
• NK Jemisin (nailed it!) on quitting “normal” life for writing;
• Moon Unit to publisher memoir;
• Publisher cancels Islamophobe’s book deal, bye byeeee, bigots;

I spent all of yesterday working on a poem a forgot (!) to post until later in the evening. It was worth it though. A tough little humdinger I’d been picking at for years finally came together. Anyway, any news of the day was eclipsed by the death of John le Carré, so I’ll try to catch up now.

• LPG’s indie press campaign launches;
• Canada Reads Prose is coming again, inevitable, like Thanos;
• CIBA blames Amazon for PRH/S&S merger;
• Hey! There might be more than one reason to divest yourself of JK Rowling books;
• Jay-Z is in a publishing empire state of mind;
• A year-end retrospective of the clusterfuck that was 2020 in books;
• Back in 2016, PW did a visual retrospective of ke Carré’s remarkable career;
• And the Guardian covers remembrances of him from friends and colleagues;
• What are you doing this NYE? Listening to a Japanese novelist? Go easy there, rockstar;
• Sunday Times names its young writer of the year;
• ‘Ninja pal Zoe Whittall ruminates on making art in the pandemic;
• CrimeReads looks at the lost art of “the cast of characters” in mystery novels;
• LitHub looks at the glory days of the American trade paperback;
• Was Tattered Cover the right choice for Black Bookstore of the Year?;
• New York Magazine recommends Scrivener to get that novel done… This is what Ms. Ninja uses, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe my two languishing novels in Word need a boost…;
• Cyberpunk: a primer for the uninitiated who haven’t been devouring it since the late 70s;

Beloved espionage writer, dead at 89. A giant has fallen. There’s not much more to say than that.

Ur-blogger and upstart publisher Dennis Johnson writes in The Atlantic about his experience testifying before the Department of Justice about big publisher mergers. This guy is a badass and I love him. Everyone should buy some Melville House books just to say thanks. Also, he’s wicked funny in person and his blog MobyLives (which I spent many years as an unofficial proofreader for before starting my own blog), was a foundation of the “industry”, such as it is, and is much missed.

As the big houses have become bigger and bigger, their business has become more about making money than art or protest, so that small publishers now provide a far wider variety of literature, politics, history, and journalism, of art making and truth-to-power-speaking, of actual risk taking—and from a far more diverse group of authors —than the commercial conglomerate publishers. And the bigger the big publishers get, I told the DOJ attorneys, the more risk-averse they become. The less willing they are to lose money. Audiences need to be expanded, not necessarily diversified. And then the safer, less boat-rocking, bigger-demographic-satisfying stuff they publish becomes what the marketplace they dominate adapts itself to sell. The risk aversion becomes systemic.

The attorneys didn’t disagree. And when the interview was over, I felt a huge sense of relief. They got it, I thought. They definitely got it.

The merger, of course, was approved shortly thereafter.

Thus a publishing behemoth was born, a behemoth that now, a mere seven years later, is once again taking over a leading competitor, Simon & Schuster. PRH has purchased S&S for $2.2 billion, or twice the asking price—a fee none of the other big publishers could match. News Corp, the owner of HarperCollins, blasted PRH for “buying market dominance.”

This is exactly right. Just seven years ago, the industry had six dominant giants. Now three of them have merged together. The other giants, let alone the numerous independent players, are not just smaller; they’re smaller by billions of dollars. I said it in 2012, and I’ll say it again now: The DOJ needs to stop the consolidation.

This woman spends some thought on Time’s Best Fantasy Books of All Time list, checking off books she’s read, and finds herself arguing with many of the choices made by the team that compiled it. Of course. I realize there’s a movement out there to do away with terms like “Best”, but once you realize that any such choice is just an opinion expressed for the purposes of arguing, you should be fine. Same with awards. It’s just that-particular-jury’s choice, not the actual best. And even history doesn’t always get it right, as we see with the article linked in the post below about Gertrude Trelevyan. It’s just a bunch of factors of chance and opinion that decide. But it’s always good to challenge the gatekeepers, so givver, lady.

But even as I totted up my “wins” (A Wrinkle in Time, Dragonflight, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Crystal Cave, Watership Down—check, check, check, check, check) and argued (where the heck is Charlotte’s Web?) and wondered (was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory left out due to the racism underlying the characterization of the Oompa-Loompas?), I was heartened by the prominence of children’s books on the list—it’s a rarity for children’s books to appear in such numbers, if at all, in any general list of great literature.

Well, here we are. Another milestone. One of my buddies is retiring today, which both pleases and shocks me. Pleases me because I am happy that he gets to do something with his time other than Dilbert his life away in a cubicle and shocked because: YOU CAN DO THAT? Yes, sir. If you spend 30 years in the same job, you can do that. Sadly, I am only five years behind him and I will never be able to retire. The artist’s/freelancer’s life. Work until you die. That said, I will spend two hours after this playing a video game that I’ve been waiting two years to play before I move on to editing poetry. Choices were made.

• Canadian publishing hit hard in the nads: publishers report 40% losses;
• Random and Knopf parting ways after 11 years (sounds like a midlife crisis);
• Smart move, Giller: new monthly bookclub featuring longlist;
• Obama is the Wayne Gretzky of politics… just keeps breaking records;
• Kellyanne Conway is releasing a book… 10 bucks says it’s either just blank pages the president can write whatever he wants on or there’s one of those wee electronic gadgets in the gutter so that when you open it, you hear her voice yelling FAKE NEWS over and over and over;
• Books of the Year:
  • People;
  • Vanity Fair;
  • LAT;
  • ElectricLit;
  • Slate;
• Yeats’ teenaged letters sold at Sotheby’s… imagine… (I shudder);
• Nora Roberts: sex ed instructor;
• Friday fun: GK Chesterton proudly believed in Santa Claus;
• Heard of Gertrude Trevelyan? You would had she been a he;
• Why do we call radicalized authors “raw”? And why we should stop;