Skip to content

Updates From Barnes & Noble Press, Thirty Influential Figures in Publishing, and More

DAILY NEWS   

Found on Poets & Writers Magazine

2.2.21

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.

Barnes & Noble has announced updates to its self-publishing platform, Barnes & Noble Press. The royalty rate for e-book sales has been increased to 70 percent; authors previously received between 40 to 65 percent. The platform also expedited its payment schedule from a sixty-day to thirty-day model. (Publishers Weekly)

Book & Film Globe has announced its inaugural Publishing Power 30, an “annual list of the book business’s most influential gatekeepers.” This year’s thirty professionals include publishers Reagan Arthur and Dana Canedy, and writers L. L. McKinney and Celeste Ng.

“When I revise, as I approach the hard parts, I remind myself that the work I am doing is for my younger self and for others who are out there suffering and might find use in my work.” In conversation with her editor Megha Majumdar, Randa Jarrar reflects on the writing process of her memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country. (Catapult)

Jarrar appears in this week’s installment of Ten Questions from Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I do believe that my legal education and work help me to do something important for my writing, which is to question my characters and to ask questions about them.” Cherie Jones discusses building complex characters for her debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. (Los Angeles Times)

“Anytime I’m going through a really difficult experience, I’m always trying to work it out in my dream life.” Jackie Wang shares how images from her dreams informed her debut poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void. (NPR)

“Have I mentioned that both books are very funny? This seems essential to writing anything good about the internet.” Emily Temple compares how two debut novels—Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler and No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood—represent life on the internet. (Literary Hub)

“If you’re having difficulty writing traditionally constructed poetry, the medium of found poetry can let you gain access to a vocabulary you didn’t know you needed.” E. Kristin Anderson recommends trying erasure poetry. (New York Times)

“Fiction’s espionage genre has long been a boy’s club.” Paul Vidich recommends ten spy novels that feature women in the lead roles. (Electric Literature)

Barry Lopez: ‘We Don’t Need the Writer. What We Need is the Story, Because This Keeps Us Alive’

 

From Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers‘ Conference

 

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

On Christmas morning 2020, the writer Barry Lopez died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world—in nonfiction classics such as Of Wolves and MenArctic Dreams, and Horizon—for half a century Barry traveled the globe—High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya—bringing back stories etched in luminous prose that explored our profound connections to the diverse, fragile planet we inhabit.

 

Continue reading "Barry Lopez: ‘We Don’t Need the Writer. What We Need is the Story, Because This Keeps Us Alive’"

Global ePublishing Revenues to Grow by 9% YoY to $27B in 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive hit to the offline bookselling and newspaper industries, with millions of customers turning to digital media and online content amid lockdown. According to data presented by Finaria.it, the rising demand for online content is expected to continue this year, with the global ePublishing industry reaching $27bn in revenue in 2021, a 9% jump year-over-year.
 
eBooks to hit $15.6bn in Revenue This Year
 
The ePublishing market includes eBooks, digital editions of the consumer or business magazines called eMagazines, and ePapers as online versions of daily or weekly newspapers. This type of digital content provides several advantages to customers.
The content is easy to purchase, and can be downloaded directly on the reading device itself. Whole libraries can be stored online without the need for physical space, which means easier transportation of books. Moreover, ePublishing is also a cost-efficient option for publishers, allowing them to save on printing, logistics, and sales costs. 
 
In 2017, the revenue of the global ePublishing industry amounted to $21.8bn. In the next two years, this figure rose by 13% to $24.7bn. Statistics show that revenues of the entire sector slightly increased to $24.8bn in 2020, despite the increasing demand for online content amid the COVID-19 lockdown. However, this figure is set to reach almost $32.3bn by 2025.
 
The global ePublishing market is dominated by eBooks, which are set to reach over one billion users and generate $15.6bn in revenue in 2021, a 6% jump year-over-year. eMagazines and ePapers play a considerably smaller role and are expected to hit $7.2bn and $4.2bn in revenue, respectively.
Amazon is the key player in the ePublishing business. With the launch of its eReader called Kindle and the associated Kindle Store in 2007, Amazon became an online distribution service for eBooks.
 
Following the streaming trend, Amazon also offers subscription-based access to its library, enabling an unlimited consumption of eBooks for a monthly fee. Today, the Kindle Store includes over six million eBooks and 60,000 audiobooks, making it one of the world's biggest ePublishing services.
Statista survey showed that Amazon dominates in the US, German, and the UK market, with 83%, 66%, and 84% of respondents using its services to buy eBooks. On the other hand, the Chinese market is highly competitive, with iReader, Amazon and QQ Reader holding around 30% of the market share each.
 
The United States, Japan, and China to Generate Over 50% of ePublishing Revenues in 2021
 
The United States has a leading role in the global ePublishing market and is expected to generate $9.8bn in revenue in 2021, an 8% increase in a year. Statistics show that eBooks account for more than 60% of that value. As the second-largest globally, the Japanese market is expected to hit $2.3bn value in 2021, 10% more than a year ago. Revenue of the Chinese ePublishing market, as the third-largest globally, is set to rise by 11.1% YoY to $2.2bn in 2021. Although China is far behind in this comparison, statistics show the number of eBook users in the country is set to reach 378 million this year, almost four times more than in the United States and Japan combined.
 
With $1.7bn in revenue, the United Kingdom ranked as the largest ePublishing market in Europe and fourth-largest globally. Statistics show that eBooks also represent the largest segment of the UK's market, expected to hit $965 million value this year. South Korea follows, with $956 million in revenue, respectively.
 

The Literary Risk-Takers: On New Migrant and Refugee Fiction

Article from LitHub

John Domini Considers the Work of Viet Than Nguyen, Teju Cole, Dubravka Ugresic, and More

I can’t attend, for the road between my poem and Damascus is cut off for postmodern reasons.
–“I Can’t Attend,” by Ghayath Almadhoun

No ISBN sequence can keep track the world’s recent homeless, but the books won’t stop coming. As the refugee crisis grows unremittingly, with people out of Syria, El Salvador, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Bosnia… as the numbers mount, so do the novels and short stories. Fiction that grapples with the dislocation, the desperation, has surged over the past decade or so, and the output includes some celebrated recent titles. This year, our purgatorial 2020, has seen a fresh flurry, and several prove highly distinctive, both fine and strange.

Myself, attracted to such imaginations (and perhaps prodded by the ghost of my father, an economic refugee out of Southern Italy), I’ve been struck especially by that last element: the strangeness of these creations. Dream passages, nutty exaggeration, linguistic somersaults, disorienting shifts of frame and focus—these devices and others distinguish a surprising number of the imaginative works that struggle with these broken lives. That goes as well for authors working in their second or third language, a situation that you’d think would make them rely on the simple and standard. Instead, they embrace the subversive, and this refusal to conform gives me my essay. I’d argue that a norm-busting impulse distinguishes the most authentic fiction about migrants and refugees.

 

Continue reading "The Literary Risk-Takers: On New Migrant and Refugee Fiction"

Why Does Goodreads Have a Problem with Fiction by Women, About Women?

Introducing the Madievsky Rule

If you’ve used the internet to read book or film reviews in the last decade, you’ve probably heard of the Bechdel test. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel introduced the test in her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For in 1985 as a means of assessing the ways women are portrayed in fiction. The test consists of a simple yes-or-no question: Does it depict two women in conversation about something other than a man? The Bechdel test doesn’t assess the quality of representation, nor does it determine whether the work is told through a feminist lens. It’s less a summative evaluation than a quick-and-dirty assessment of whether the work meets even a basic representational standard.

Continue reading "Why Does Goodreads Have a Problem with Fiction by Women, About Women?"

Writing a Book? Here’s How Authors Make Money.

Writing a Book? Here’s How Authors Make Money.

Posted by  | Dec 16, 2016 |  | 13  |     

Writing a Book? Here’s How Authors Make Money.
 

Have you been thinking about writing a book, but wondering if it’s worth the time and effort? Have you been wondering how exactly do authors make money? How much do authors make per book? Whether you write books on how to make money or romance novels, this advice is actionable.

Maybe you’ve already written a book to build you brand. Now you’re wondering how to get the most out of your efforts.

Continue reading "Writing a Book? Here’s How Authors Make Money."

What’s Your Definition Of Success As A Writer? How Do You Measure It?

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well.”

Stephen King

A lot of the creative dissatisfaction comes from not being clear about your definition of success.

For many writers, publishing a book is a nebulous goal that has dollar signs and media mentions attached to it, but often hasn't been specified clearly enough. So whatever stage you're at on the writer's journey, identifying your definition of success will help a great deal. Watch the video below or here on YouTube.

Why are you writing?

Why do you want your book published and out in the world for others to read?

 

Continue reading "What’s Your Definition Of Success As A Writer? How Do You Measure It?"

Indie Success: “The Best of All Possible Worlds”

By Matia Madrona Query | 

Nov 20, 2020
 
photo credit: CHRISTOPHER MICHEL

Hugh Howey

For many in the self-publishing community, bestselling author Hugh Howey needs no introduction. He has written numerous sci-fi novels across multiple series, including the Bern Saga, the Sand series, and the postapocalyptic Silo Saga, which began with Wool, published in 2011 through Amazon’s Kindle Direct program. The series is set in a future when humanity has escaped an uninhabitable surface world by moving into underground silos.

This year, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published all three Silo books—Wool, Shift, and Dust—individually and as a box set. The books have new covers, and the set features original tie-in essays and a chapbook of short stories.

 

 

Continue reading "Indie Success: “The Best of All Possible Worlds”"

Rewriting the History of 1970s Gay Liberation

Found on LitHub

From the New Books Network's Book of the Day Podcast

In Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016), the acclaimed historian Jim Downs rewrites the history of gay life in the 1970s, arguing that the decade was about much more than sex and marching in the streets. Drawing on a vast trove of untapped records at LGBT community centers in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia, Downs tells moving, revelatory stories of gay people who stood together—as friends, fellow believers, and colleagues—to create a sense of community among people who felt alienated from mainstream American life.

 

Continue reading "Rewriting the History of 1970s Gay Liberation"

What make comfort food what it is...

 

Doughnuts or Donuts? Krispy Kreme or Dunkin’? All of the Above?

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant Embrace a Gluttony of Options

 

There is a famous deleted scene that didn’t make it into Pulp Fiction where Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) interviews Vincent Vega (John Travolta) with a video camera while he waits to take her to dinner at Jack Rabbit Slims.

Mia says that on important topics there are only two ways a person can answer, and how they answer tells you who they are. “For instance, there are only two kinds of people in the world,” she says, “Beatles people and Elvis people. Now Beatles people can like Elvis, and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere, you have to make a choice, and that choice tells you who you are.”

 

Continue reading "What make comfort food what it is..."

Your Week in Virtual Book Events, Nov. 16th to Nov. 22nd

Including the Kick-Off of the Online Miami Book Fair

 

Miami Book Fair Online
Sunday, November 15 – Monday, November 23rd
The Miami Book Fair is virtual this year, with all free and on demand content available starting November 15th. More than 300 authors in conversation will be streaming including, but not limited to Margaret Atwood (Dearly), Kwame Alexander (The Undefeated), Tommye Blount (Fantasia for the Man in Blue), Judy Blume (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret), Mahogany L. Browne (WOKE: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice), K-Ming Chang (Bestiary), Billy Collins (Whale Day), Tony DiTerlizzi (The Broken Ornament), Mark Doty (What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life), Glory Edim (Well-Read Black Girl), and more. Sign up to create your profile and build your watchlist in advance here.

Ten Evenings with Lily King
Monday, November 16, All-day
Pittsburg Arts & Lectures brings prize-winning novelist Lily King to speak about her newest book, Writers & Lovers, for their virtual event season. Tickets are $15, $10 for students. Registrants will receive a link to the pre-recorded event you can watch at any time. Get your virtual pass here.

 

Continue reading "Your Week in Virtual Book Events, Nov. 16th to Nov. 22nd"

Oscar Levant and Oscar Wilde: Masters of Staving Off Melancholy with Wit

 

David Lazar on Two Wounded Men Who Frustrated Expectations

 

Oscar Levant is a melancholy figure, full of barbed wit, self-loathing, and “Rhapsody in Blue,” which he performed more than any other 20th-century pianist. You may not know who he is, though Jack Paar used to go off the air after a time saying, “Goodnight Oscar Levant, wherever you are.” Jimmy Durante used to say, “Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,” and no one ever knew who she was, which he must have found disconcerting.

Oscar Wilde, you undoubtedly know, but you may think of him staring languidly into the camera, dressed as a dandy, self-pleased.

 

Continue reading "Oscar Levant and Oscar Wilde: Masters of Staving Off Melancholy with Wit"

Take a break from the news by reading about voter shenanigans in William Kennedy’s Roscoe.

Found on LitHub.com

John Freeman

November 3, 2020, 12:40pm

As you read this sentence, voting is underway in a historic US election, a stressful contest, to put it mildly, but in this season of taking heart in the dark cackle of historical déjà vu, perhaps it’s worth remembering that while our times are strange and dangerous, chaos has been here before. A vote is a mighty thing and so it has always been under threat. Buffeted by disinformation and robo calls, stormed by forces of intimidation and violence, by the besuited bigotry of legal challenges, it has never simply been secure. Indeed, one meaning of democracy is not just the right to vote: but the responsibility to protect it.

 

Continue reading "Take a break from the news by reading about voter shenanigans in William Kennedy’s Roscoe."

The 2020 Albertine Prize shortlist features stories of visceral excess and identity-seeking.

The 2020 Albertine Prize shortlist features stories of visceral excess and identity-seeking.

Aaron Robertson
October 30, 2020, 12:34pm

 

The voting period is open for the fourth edition of the Albertine Prize, an award administered by the French embassy that invites readers to choose their favorite work of translated Francophone fiction from the previous year.

The honorary co-chairs of the prize, author Rachel Kushner and literary critic François Busnel, led the staff of the Albertine bookstore and the book department of the French embassy in selecting the five shortlisted titles. The winning author-translator duo will share a $10,000 prize, to be awarded in December.

Last year’s winner, Negar Djavadi’s Disoriental, was among the best books I’d read in a while, so I was excited to see what 2020 had in store. The books don’t disappoint.

Click here to read the full story and see the winners

 

Good News: Mary Ruefle Can’t Keep Up with All the Books Being Published, Either

From LitHub.com

October 30, 2020

By How to Proceed  

How To Proceed is a bi-monthly conversation about writing, creativity and the world we live in. Author Linn Ullmann talks to some of the world’s most exciting literary voices about their books, their writing process, and how they view the world and current events around them.

We have a globally out of control situation, says Mary Ruefle. In this episode, she talks about reading and writing, clarity and fear, menopause and the freedom of invisibility, and being in the margins. And, of course, about dogs.

Continue reading "Good News: Mary Ruefle Can’t Keep Up with All the Books Being Published, Either"