October 2013 - Writers Magazine

News Review

• Last week's news of the departure of Larry Kirshbaum, the respected and successful publisher turned agent who Amazon hired to head up their trade publishing venture, was greeted with a certain amount of glee amongst all those who are fearful of the giant online retailer. But what does it really mean?
• The shortlist for the 2013 T S Eliot Prize for Poetry is an interesting and diverse one. Including new work by well-established poets Robin Robertson, Michael Symmons Roberts, Sinéad Morrissey and Geroge Szirtes, it also has newcomer Helen Mort's debut collection, Division Street. Daljit Nagra's interpretation of The Ramayana and Moniza Alvi's powerfully felt At the Time of Partition invoke a wider world. Anne Carson is unpredictably experimental, as always, in her verse novel Red Doc >, which contrasts wonderfully with Speak, Old Parrot from veteran poet Dannnie Abse.
• This has been a week full of prize announcements, with Alice Munro being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Eleanor Catton winning the Booker. Alice Munro's was a popular win, with many people feeling glad it has gone to the veteran Canadian writer, who had only recently announced that she would not be writing another book. Maybe this will make her change her mind, but the sad news that she is too ill to travel to the Nobel ceremony suggests otherwise. She has a much wider audience than many Nobel Prize-winners and was awarded the Prize as ‘a master of the contemporary short story'.
• 'The Frankfurt Book FairWorld's largest trade fair for books; held annually mid-October at Frankfurt Trade Fair, Germany; First three days exclusively for trade visitors; general public can attend last two. seems to have been a great success this year, amidst signs that publishers have been having a better time than in recent years and are more actively buying and publishing. Amongst the reasons for this are an improved outlook in Europe and the fact that for many publishers ebooks are making a solid and cost-effective contribution...' News Review reports form the world's biggest book fair.
• 'Nielsen research made public at the recent Bookseller Children's Conference suggests that the number of UK children who rarely read, or do not read at all, has risen in the past year from 20% to 28%. As in the US and elsewhere, children's reading is being affected by alternative activities, particularly games, watching videos online and texting...'
• The news that bestselling author Wilbur Smith is, as he puts it, in search of a new Wilbur Smith, a younger writer who will take over the job of writing his books, has been in the papers. At 80, he is ready to go into semi-retirement so that he can spend more time with his much-younger wife, while someone else carries on writing. When he signed a £15 million deal with HarperCollins recently there was speculation that he would get some younger writers to help write the books, as both Clive Cussler and James Patterson have done. Both keep some control of the storylines of their books, and can thus claim authorship.

Comment

• 'The nice thing about agenting is that you can carry on until you annoy everyone. I'm going to do it until I don't enjoy it. And I do enjoy it, not every single minute, but more than 90% of it. Even the negotiating is good fun up to a point. And that moment you get your authors' new manuscripts, and your heart is in your mouth because you want to be able to love it - that's still the most exciting part... Publishers as people aren't risk averse, as corporations they are. Often editors would like to buy books that they aren't allowed to.' Carole Blake of agency Blake Friedmann in the Bookseller.
• 'When I'm working at full tilt, I average about 1,000 words an hour. I sit at the keyboard and it all comes out. It's an extraordinary thing, but I think it's because fiction is created by the unconscious mind, which is always exploring situations and possibilities. I suppose that's the thing I love about writing, what got me into it in the first place...' Alexander McCall Smith, author of The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon in The Times.
• I've met a lot of authors weighing their options, seen a ton of hands shoot up in panels hoping for that one last piece of advice to push them off the fence one way or the other. There's a path on both sides of that fence, and writers can see crowds beating the grass flat. They can see the books that lie along either way. My advice, for what it's worth, is to stop looking at those crowds and those books. Look at the work in your hand. Claire Tomalin, author of Charles Dickens: A Life in the Evening Standard
• ‘When that happened I thought it was the most natural thing in the world. I had no idea; I'd never written a book before. I wrote this book, someone said they would publish it. I always thought they would, I didn't know books got turned down. The one night they rang up and said, "You've sold it in America for $40,000." They said, "Are you sitting down?" I thought "You're being a bit overwrought, aren't you? What's to sit down about?" Then it was the prizes. It really seemed to be just what happened to you.' (His next book did not sell, or win any prizes.)... Jim Crace, whose Harvest was the favourite for this year's Booker, in the Evening Standard
• 'The overwhelming number of readers of crime fiction are women, but most of the people who write about crime are men. Women are still conditioned to defer. We are less likely to push ourselves into the limelight and we are less likely to get our agents or publishers to run to the papers with every little thing we do.' Val McDermid in The Times
• 'I didn't know the first thing about publishing, I didn't know anybody in publishing, I didn't care about having anything to do with publishing during those six years I wrote it... I did it (self-published) for my mental health. The frustration was starting to get to me. You think, "Gee, I spent three years of my life sending letters to agents - three years of my life, for God's sake." Sergio De La Pava, author of A Naked Singularity, which won the 2013 $25,000 PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ Literary Award for a debut novel.

Writers' Quote

‘Books say: she did this because life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own,' Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot