March 2010 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• At the report back from the annual UK Books and Consumers report this week, Book Marketing Limited’s Research director Steve Bohme pointed out some interesting changes in consumer behaviour relating to books. Nearly half of all book purchases were gift purchases, an increase from one-third in 2005, a stunning proportion which shows that books have not lost their attraction as gifts... Purchases were down 4% in 2009, compared with 2005. News Review reports.
• 'This year’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair runs from 23 to 26 March and provides a good opportunity to have a look at the children’s publishing industry. Not everything in the garden is lovely but children’s trade (general) publishing is undoubtedly doing a lot better than its adult counterpart.' News Review on the biggest children's book fair.
• 'The staggering number of 285,000 new titles and editions were self-published and published by community presses in the US last year, balanced against a slightly lower figure of 275,000 coming from traditional publishing houses... The Nielsen figures for the UK are 133,224, quite modest by comparison...  So, what do these huge figures mean for authors? At a time when it’s increasingly hard to get published, why are there so many titles coming out? The main answer of course is self-publishing and print on demand in general. News Review reports.
• ‘I am saddened that yet another claim has been made that I have taken material from another source to write Harry. The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have certainly never read the book.' J K Rowling News Review looks at the latest plagiarism claim
• The end of the slush-pile is upon us. Big publishers don't even bother to read it and it's a rare author who can make it into print that way. News Review looks at the odds and at the big writers who have beaten the trend.

Comment

• (Historical novels) are just novels that have a past location and are therefore not swept away by the tide of present day life so fast. This is the great agony of trying to capture the present in a novel - it's a very slow thing to write and present life moves on in a hideously unexpected and overtaking kind of way.' Rose Tremain, whose new novel is Trespass, in the Bookseller
• 'Whatever the future, a new generation of agents and publishers sees the old publishing model as broken. There must, they say, be a marriage between virtual and old text worlds. This generation speaks the jargon of "disintermediation" (roughly, commercial streamlining). The boom days are over. Writers will have to adapt.' Robert McCrum in the Guardian.
• 'If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer.' Henry Porter in the Guardian.
• ‘Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of the ordinary world... Should we, who read books and believe that books and the stories within them contain such power, be surprised that kids read, that books survive? Of course not. We should be celebrating these facts.’ David Almond, author of Skellig, in The Times
• 'I think John Irving said in an interview something which nobody says about writing, which is that writing is sitting down and typing that sentence, and that sentence creates the next sentence and the character grows and the story grows from the physical act of typing what is going on in your head.' Deborah Moggach in Scriptwriter.
• 'The idea of what constitutes literary value has changed or become less consensual. It’s harder to establish what is good and what is not, and that is one of the things that forms the canon. Barnes, Amis, McEwan were the last people through the door, and then the door closed, and then the building fell down.’ Giles Foden, author of Turbulence, in the Bookseller

Writers' Quote

'Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living.'
Gustave Flaubert