Word Count

Plus genre hopping, top UK streamers, the ‘nivali’ mystery, and a fresh-faced Grabbity.

Hi there,

When I was a kid, my Dad defined summer as “Three sunny days and a thunderstorm”, and this week appears to be cleaving to that prognostication. And just as summer seems to be coming in random chunks this year, so is Covid, because I’m currently enduring my second bout in five weeks. It’s much milder this time round, which is something to be grateful for, I suppose. But I’m still hacked off that I missed out on seeing Deadpool & Wolverine on Sunday night. Bah.

Martin MacInnes wins Arthur C Clarke award

In Ascension, by Scottish author Martin MacInnes, was awarded the Arthur C Clarke Award for the best science fiction book of the year last Wednesday at an event in London.

Dr Andrew Butler, chair of the judging panel, said that the book was “an intense trip and for once it’s a winner that is in the tradition of Clarke’s own novels.” Another judge described it as showing us “vistas between the cellular and the cosmic”.

The Guardian said:

The novel follows marine biologist Leigh as she joins a team exploring a trench discovered in the Atlantic Ocean. “The whole novel is beautifully written,” wrote Adam Roberts in a Guardian review.

“Richly atmospheric, full of brilliantly evoked detail, never sacrificing the grounded verisimilitude of lived experience to its vast mysteries, but also capturing a numinous, vatic strangeness that hints at genuine profundities about life,” he added. “Nobody else writes like MacInnes, and this magnificent book is his best yet.”

The other books on the shortlist were:

1. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2. The Ten Percent Thief by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
3. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
4. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
5. Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner.

What I’m watching: When the editor has to fix it in post

I loved this 10 minute video on the editing of iconic 80s movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and how much had to change in order for the story to work. Writer/director John Hughes had slapped together a screenplay in less than a week and went on to shoot that first draft. But the initial cut came in at 2:45 and didn’t test well, so the story was reworked and shortened in the cutting room.

“Having the story episodic and taking place in one day…meant the characters were wearing the same clothes. I suspect that Hughes writes his scripts with few, if any costume changes just so he can have that kind of freedom in the editing,” said the film’s editor, Paul Hirsch.

It’s an amazing story, but it’s also a lesson: Do not shoot your first draft. It’s much quicker and cheaper to rearrange a story on the page than it is to fix it in post!

Stop, look, listen: Backlisted – Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr

Marianne Dreams was one of the most influential books of my childhood. I don’t remember how old I was when I read it, but it left such a huge imprint on my imagination that my first ‘proper’ story was a Marianne Dreams pastiche. My teacher even spiral bound my little book for me, complete with laminated cover. I think that was the first moment I realised I wanted to write. ( I should have listened more closely to that little voice.)

This episode of Backlisted, featuring children’s writer Rachael King and novelist Richard Blandford, along with hosts John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, provides a fascinating look at this children’s classic. They describe Marianne Dreams as “the eerie, disturbing tale of two sick children who meet in a realm of nightmares”, which is pretty much how I remember it too.

Why Aren’t I Writing?: Genre hopping is good for you

Over on my other newsletter, I wrote about how successful authors often write in a wide variety of genres and formats, and why you should consider sampling different types of writing.

Read this: iPlayer top streamer in the UK

Haunted scrotum Rupert Murdoch is launching a new ad-supported TV streaming service in the UK called Tubi, but what I found interesting about The Guardian’s write up is not the commentary on whether it’s likely to succeed, but the streaming service stats. The percentage of people watching the top ten streamers is:

• iPlayer: 52.7
• Netflix: 51
• iTVX: 38.6
• Channel4: 34.6
• Amazon Prime Video: 30.7
• Disney+: 27.7
• WBD (inc d+ BT/TNT EuroSport): 17.7
• Paramount+: 10.6
• Freevee: 8.7
• Apple TV+: 7.9

The new Labour government has committed to preserving the BBC, and this stat is just one example of why the political objections to the BBC are ill-founded. If you destroy the Beeb because you don’t like its news output (and there are some legit questions about their news operation), you lose everything else that the BBC produces. Which is a lot.

Tweet of the week: The ‘nivali’ mystery

This tweet is actually a BlueSky post (I’m there as @suw, btw) from Bill Ryan:

I’m reading this book [Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater], and on page 75 I came across this phrase: “I woke up with her words in my head, I showered with them in my head, I niveli off…” I like to think I’m up on British slang, but I had no clue what this could mean 1/3

So I looked it up, and found this on Goodreads (2/3):

The error seems to have been introduced during the conversion from UK English to US English, as all of the words affected are ones that have different spellings in the US:

• towelled
• sombre
• organize
• frappes
• citrussy
• sequinned
• levelled
• chiselled

But it’s not a straight find-and-replace error, because there isn’t a single common text string. Ray Newman considered “‘sniveling’ (US) versus ‘snivelling’ (UK) as a possible root cause somewhere along the line.”

Book blogger Gav suggested that it might be some “fancy macro” that got corrupted, which seems like the most sensible solution. And I did seem something elsewhere about an Excel spreadsheet getting corrupted by some weird AI-drive autofill.

We may never know exactly how this happened, but as Marie Phillips said, authors, your “new anxiety dream just dropped”.

You’re welcome.

Obligatory cat picture

Poor Grabbity is not having a great time of it this year, as she’s now dealing with toothache and possibly arthritis as well. She’s lost two teeth and may have to have a third removed because of resorption, where for reasons unknown the body decides to reabsorb the hard tooth enamel.

She’s been refusing to eat kibble for a couple of months, eating only expensive pâté, which is a classic symptom of tooth resorption. She’s now on some hardcore painkillers, which really have breathed new life into her, and we’re due to take her for an X-ray soon to see what’s going on and what we need to do for her.

Just look at that fluffy face, though. You’d honestly never know there was anything wrong.

That’s it for this week!

Ta ra for now,

Suw

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Plus some more publishing industry angst and a detailed rebuttal.

Hi there,

At the end of the last newsletter, I promised to share my excess links on Substack Notes or Bluesky. Well, that was two weeks ago, and I’m afraid I got a bit busy. That’s probably a good thing, because I was so busy that I’ve not been doing my usual reading and listening and am a bit short of stories this week. This newsletter might be a bit lighter on links than usual, but as I was the right kind of busy, I hope you won’t mind.

Suw’s News: Writing has begun on Fieldwork

One of the core things I’ve learnt over my 26 years as a self-employed person is that if I don’t track my hours, I either don’t work enough or work too much. So it’s with some significant confidence that I can tell you I have spent at least 332 hours on Fieldwork before getting to the point of actually starting to write the thing.

But writing has now begun! I’m a third of the way through the first draft and I’ve two days to finish the rest of it before I send it off to Dave Cohen for feedback. Next week will be spent redrafting it for a final round of feedback before it’s technically “done”, in so far as this course with Dave is concerned. It will, obviously, not be done done.

In the following weeks, I have to rework it into a 10 minute short, which was the original plan, and a 30 minute podcast script, which is the current plan. The podcast version is going to be interesting, because I don’t think in audio, I think in pictures, so I have lots to learn about writing for radio.

Opportunity: Short story competition for USians

Four Walls whiskey is offering a total prize pool of $44,444.44 for “the best bar stories”. Five writers will win $4,000 each, with another 40 finalists getting over $600 each (by my calculations, it’ll be $611.11). The competition is only open to people over 21 who are living in the USA and the deadline is 23:59 on 14 June.

Four Walls is a new whiskey brand created by writer, actor and businessman Rob McElhenney, along with Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day, co-creators of their long-running bar-based sitcom, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. McElhenney also owns a bar in Philly, Mac’s Tavern, and Four Walls sponsors another of McElhenney’s businesses, Wrexham AFC.

There’s a whole thing here about portfolio careers that’s tickling in the back of my head, but I’ll have to write about that another day.

Tip-top tip: How to take general meetings

If you’re a screenwriter, you might get lucky enough to be invited to a general meeting to discuss… things… with a producer. But what is a general meeting, and what kinds of things get discussed?

Script consultant Philip Shelley has published a very useful guide to general meetings by producer Jamie Hewitt, with some great tips for how to prepare and what to expect.

Read these: Debuts fail to launch… or do they?

Kate Dwyer, writing for Esquire, argues that debut novels are largely failing to launch, creating a crisis for publishers. She says:

For writers, the stakes are do or die: A debut sets the bar for each of their subsequent books, so their debut advance and sales performance can follow them for the rest of their career. For editors, if a writer’s first book doesn’t perform, it’s hard to make a financial case for acquiring that writer’s second book.

Dwyer puts this largely down to the collapse in promotional opportunities for book publicists, and the need for authors to develop parasocial relationships with their readers — their readers need to feel that they know you as a person, not just as an author. But it’s become harder to do that:

the social-media landscape has changed in a way that disadvantages unknown novelists specifically, more so than first-time nonfiction writers.

Solutions appear to be hobnobbing at industry events, having the money to hire your own publicist, get lots of already or soon-to-be influential friends, and build your own community. Easy!

Industry insider Kathleen Schmidt has published a fairly detailed take-down of the Esquire piece, saying:

If this were true, hardly any debuts would be published. First, it is not a given that your book will sell like crazy if it is chosen for a major book club. The sales figures for Reese’s Book Club, Oprah’s Book Club, Reading with Jenna, and GMA’s Book Club wildly fluctuate.

She also refutes a lot more Dwyer’s points, but I particularly liked this line as a positive thing to take away from this latest paroxysm of publishing angst:

Book publishing is a long game.

Indeed it is. As with many things, overnight success often takes years.

It’s well worth reading Schmidt’s piece, even if you don’t read the Esquire one first, because in amongst the rebuttals there’s some useful advice as well.

For me, Dwyer’s piece, and all the pieces that have run along the same lines recently, are a sign of a widespread anxiety about the state of our cultural industries, in America especially.

Truth is, authors are finding it harder to make a living writing, and both success and wealth are concentrated in an ever decreasing number of hands. We’re seeing a decrease in the diversity of voices able to crack a cultural career — you need to have access to money to be able to spend the time developing your craft to a point where you’re even able to try to develop a creative career.

And in America, book bans are becoming more common in schools and libraries along with aggressive illiberal campaigns against books, schools and librarians, creating an atmosphere of fear amongst professionals, parents and children. All this against the backdrop of an election that could have a catastrophic outcome for not just the country, but the world.

We have to be incredibly careful when reading these pieces here in the UK that we don’t assume our industry and situation is exactly the same as in the US. Sure, authors are still struggling to make financial ends meet, and it’s still hard to break out, but I don’t think things are as bad as Dwyer makes out.

Read these two, too: Does the maths math? Does it matter?

We already know that the maths of being a writer is pretty dire. So many surveys, analyses and think pieces tell us that it’s nigh-on impossible to earn a comfortable living as an author.

Erik Hoel does some napkin maths and figures out that what he calls ‘cultural billionaires’, ie people who earn a comfortable living as a writer, are as about as common as actual billionaires.

Monica Byrne asks whether an author can live from their royalties, and comes to the obvious conclusion that no, it’s not.

Which isn’t to try to dissuade anyone from being a writer. Indeed, quite the opposite. I internalised the lesson that I’d never earn money from writing a long time ago, so I didn’t write, and it made me incredibly miserable. If you want to write, you should absolutely write.

This is more to say that you must, absolutely must, diversify your income stream. Writing makes me happy, but it won’t make me much money, so the next few years of my life continue to be focused on searching for a way to facilitate my writing without tanking my income.

Which I guess is a great moment to suggest that you can, if you like, upgrade to a paid membership and help me along!

Obligatory cat picture

It’s too bright. It’s just far, far too bright. Copurrnicus buries his face as he takes a well-earned nap.

That’s it for this time! By my next newsletter, the Fieldwork pilot script should be complete, which is an exciting thought!!

All the best,

Suw

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Plus audiobook news, Colleen Hoover’s writer’s block, SFF book length advice, and the state of British TV.

Hi there,

I’ve got a veritable smorgasbord of links for you today, so I’m breaking away from my usual newsletter format and where I’ve got a lot of related links I’m grouping them by theme, otherwise this would be a very, very long newsletter!

Also, happy Three-Quarters-Of-A-Century Newsletter to me! Yes, this is my 75th Word Count newsletter, which also coincides with the arrival of my 300th subscriber! Thank you to all of you for being a part of my newsletter journey, and even bigger thanks to those of you who are supporting my writing with a paid subscription. I am incredibly grateful!

Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist announced

The shortlist for the 38th Arthur C Clarke Award, which celebrates the best of science fiction, was announced last week. The short list is:

• Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
• The Ten Percent Thief, by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
• In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes
• The Mountain In The Sea, by Ray Nayler
• Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh
• Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, by Isabel Waidner

Lots of good reading there!

Interview with Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman in The British Library © RLF

Neil Gaiman was interviewed by the Royal Literary Fund. Interviews with Neil are always good value, but I particularly liked this bit:

What was the proudest moment of your writing career?

The proudest moment of my writing career would be my first Hugo Award. I got it for American Gods. I was one hundred per cent certain that I wouldn’t get it -there were lots of amazing books on that shortlist. So I’m sitting there happily in the audience, not having written a speech, not even a list of thank yous, because I knew I wasn’t going to win. And then they called my name. I went up on the stage and I remember standing in front of an audience and saying, “F*** I’ve got a Hugo!”

Canongate first UK publisher to become a B Corp

B Corp certification is awarded to “companies able to demonstrate that they have a positive social and environmental impact on the world”, and British publisher Canongate has now won its B Corp status, the first UK publisher to do so. Caroline Gorham, production and systems director, said:

“Becoming a B Corp feels like a public commitment: we want to ensure our impact on our colleagues, authors, suppliers, booksellers, readers and the world at large is a positive one.”

I’d love to think that this could be the beginning of a trend, but I find myself doubtful given the poverty wages/advances most major publishers pay.

What I’m watching: The Fall Guy

If you haven’t yet gotten to the cinema to see The Fall Guy or, as we say in the UK, The Autumn Guy, hie thee to a picture house right now. I don’t often feel moved to review TV or movies, but The Fall Guy is fabulous. It’s that perfect blend of action and romcom that reminds me of Romancing The Stone. It never takes itself too seriously, yet someone somewhere (literally everyone involved) took the making of it very seriously indeed.

I love a film that takes us behind the scenes, and The Fall Guy does just that, showing us how stunts are done by a dedicated and large crew of experts who makes sure that the stunt men and women don’t hurt themselves too much. Though, as Ryan Gosling’s Colt Seavers says, it all hurts. But Gosling and Emily Blunt’s comic timing is perfect, their chemistry sizzles, and the whole thing is just perfection. You don’t need to have ever seen, or even heard of, the original TV series to enjoy this, so go see it on the big screen if you can.

And yes, I’m going to keep making that ‘autumn guy’ joke until someone laughs.

Audiobooks: The good, the bad, and the bad is also the ugly

The Guardian reports that in the UK, audiobooks are  are booming, with downloads  up 17 per cent since last year and revenue up 24 per cent to £206 million over the same period. Audiobook revenue has also doubled over the last five years, which is fabulous for authors and publishers.

But despite increases in the value of several publishing market segments, and overall growth for the industry, “major publishers have said that they are struggling with rising costs” and that there will be cuts, so the good news is tempered a little.

The Guardian also takes a look at “dramatised audiobooks” which feature dozens of, even over 150, different actors and narrators. I can’t see this become a major trend, simply because of cost. Only the most popular titles are ever going to get this treatment, so I don’t think that it asks quite the “existential question” that The Guardian claims in its headline.

Variety report that Spotify are being sued in the US over the bundling of audiobooks into its Premium Individual, Duo and Family subscription streaming plans, which will results “result in an underpayment of royalties”. Spotify recently increased its subscription prices, but Billboard calculated that because of bundling:

songwriters and publishers will earn an estimated $150 million less in U.S. mechanical royalties from premium, duo and family plans for the first 12 months that this is in effect, compared to what they would have earned if these three subscriptions were never bundled.

Ugly, indeed.

Colleen Hoover struck by writer’s block

Smash hit author Colleen Hoover hasn’t written anything for 18 months, and doesn’t know if she’ll write again. In this interview, she says that she has become a lot more famous than she ever wanted to be, and that has attracted a lot of cruelty from her detractors. That, and the pressure of needing to live up to now high expectations, seems to have damaged her confidence and she finds herself unable to develop anything beyond the idea stage.

Last week I took a look at the four types of writer’s block and a dozen potential solutions. To me, it seems like the cause of Hoover’s writer’s block is motivational: She’s suffering from a very understandable fear of criticism, performance anxiety, and lack of enjoyment. I hope she can find her way out of what sounds like a rather unpleasant place to be.

How long should an SFF book be?

This set of posts from editor Jonathan Oliver on Bluesky (sadly, not formatted as a thread) explores not just how long a science fiction or fantasy novel should be, but also the pressures within the industry that are cutting page lengths.

Honestly, shorter often is better, because it forces you to make the hard choices and only keep the stuff that really, really works.

So, I have seen various comments on what length a work of SFF ‘should’ be, and as a professional editor I wanted to add my 10p’s worth. Firstly, I very rarely see novels over 150K that don’t need trimming down a touch. That’s not to say there aren’t great epic works out there…1/

Secondly, the current economy of print, paper costs, and shipping means that physical novels published in the mainstream are trending shorter. Couple that with that the fact that the latest trending genre (romantasy) tends to go for shorter novels (70-90K). 2/

Of course, with self-publishing, you can publish at whatever length you like. But, if you’re intending to produce physical copies via POD you still have to consider the longer the work, the more it’s going to cost to print, especially at that scale. 3/

On an artistic basis, a novel should be whatever length it should be. But, the longer epic works I see generally need squeezing to refine the narrative, and SFF audiences (especially with the rise of self-pub) tend to go for shorter works in series, rather than huge fat pbks by newer authors. 4/?

I love an epic when it’s done well, but they’re really really hard to do well. I’ve had one client over the past three years who has managed to nail it. But he’s struggling to get his book out into the mainstream because publishers are less likely to take a risk on a big work by an unknown 5/

So, in conclusion – stories should be whatever shape they need to be. But, in the reality of SFF publishing (taking into account boring real world economic factors and international situations’ effect on shipping) bigger books are on the wane, and slimmer, punchier titles or on the rise. 6ish?/

The rot at the centre of British TV runs deep

There’s no good news coming out of the TV industry at the moment, which is a bit miserable for anyone hoping to break into it. Channel 4 reveals that less than 10 per cent of “film and TV workers are from working class backgrounds, the lowest in a decade. And most of them are based in London.”

The Guardian talks about the misogyny that women in TV and film face. There’s way too much from this article that’s quotable, but I’ll stick to just this one:

The number of women in senior roles fell 5% between 2019 and 2022. One in three directors are women, yet they get only a quarter of director credits. Contributions from female writers fell from 43% to 32% between 2016 and 2022. Behind these figures, women are less likely to be employed on peak-time shows, which are generally more prestigious and have larger audiences, than men.

Oh, and this one:

“There’s tremendous cultural impetus,” Aust adds, “to get women to behave like men and not present any kind of disruption – don’t have a baby, don’t have IVF, don’t go through menopause, don’t have periods.” Reynolds knows an experienced documentary-maker who hides the existence of her son for fearing of losing work. Eikhof interviewed one woman who, when suffering from morning sickness on set, hid airline sick bags in her handbag so she could vomit discreetly.

Philip Ralph spoke to the Royal Television Society about how difficult it is for early career writers to get their foot in the industry’s door.

“What’s happening now is an existential-level crisis for the industry. Like what happened to the miners in the 1980s.” This is writer Phil Ralph (Doctors, Einstein and the Bomb), following the decision to axe BBC One’s daytime mainstay Doctors. […]

With its mix of long-running storylines and stories-of-the-day, Doctors was developed to train early-career writers. They would then move on to bigger series, some eventually creating their own shows.

I’ve deliberately put this section at the end, because dear lord it’s depressing reading. This thread by Kelly, a director on Twitter, pretty much sums up how hard it is for people who aren’t in London and aren’t connected to the right people to make any headway at all.

I do worry that we are gutting the future of the creative industries, which together contributed “£126bn in gross value added to the economy and employed 2.4 million people in 2022”, because industry leaders and politicians are all so bloody short-sighted. Yes, of course it’s cheaper to axe long-running training ground TV shows and replace them with ineffective and selective competitions, but in 10 years time, who’s going to be writing your hits?

We have already reached the point at which only people who don’t need the money can really afford to work in the creative industries, and it’s only going to get worse from here on in and idiots and AI decimate the jobs market.

Obligatory cat picture

To cheer you up after all that, here is Sir Izacat Mewton and Professor Grabbity Tinycat helping me to iron way back in 2013.

That’s it for this week… or is it? I actually have a bunch more links that I didn’t include because frankly this newsletter’s long enough as it is. If you’re on Substack Notes or if you follow me on Bluesky, I’ll be sharing them there.

All the best,

Suw

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Plus Fieldwork progress, character creation, and a sleepy Copurrnicus.

Hi there,

It was a long weekend here in the UK, which was much needed. It’s been really drab and rainy for a long time, and so dismal I’ve even had my SAD lamp on to lift the mood a bit. In May. I’m hoping that the sunnier forecast for the next week is correct.

Last week I also discovered a lot of Substack posts stuck in my Gmail spam folder. So if you’re reading this on the web or in the app and your settings are such that you should be getting the emails as well, please take a look and see whether you’re actually receiving them. If they are stuck in spam, please mark them as Not Spam, to increase the chances you’ll both see them in future and Gmail stops marking them as spam for other people. Thank you!!

Suw’s news: Fieldwork progress

A hawfinch, a bird I’d never heard of before last week.

I’m now in Week 4 of Dave Cohen’s Build A Script sitcom course and I’m having the time of my life. I always knew that having a program to follow would help me make progress on my script in a timely fashion, but I didn’t realise that it would be this much fun.

It’s also been a fabulous way to bring my non-writing collaborators into the process. We’ve had some great conversations about the various ecological research projects that the characters could be working on, unsexy research areas, and ridiculous moth names. Dingy skipper, anyone?

I had a delightful moment when I realised that one character could be working on hawfinch conservation, largely because I learnt about them whilst practicing my Welsh watching Trefi Gwyllt Iolo (Iolo’s Wild Towns, expires 29 June) on S4C. There are only about 500-1,000 breeding pairs in the UK, but lots of them have decided that one garden in North Wales is the best place to be. Smart birds. I’d love to spend my time hanging about in a garden in North Wales.

If you want more of a Fieldwork update, plus a review of Joel Morris’s new book about comedy, Be Funny Or Die, take a look at the latest Fieldwork post.

Grist: Creating characters with personality

The last Grist video call was about how to construct characters with real personalities using frameworks such as the The Big Five personality traits. Because only a couple of people came, I decided to turn the conversation into a post for my premium subscribers.

I did send the preview post to everyone, but I never quite know if that’s what you want. If you’re a free subscriber, is it annoying to get previews for a paywalled post? Or do you like knowing when premium posts go out and what they are about, even if you can’t read them?

Please let me know via this poll so that I can get the balance right!

2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist announced

The 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist “features six brilliant, thought-provoking and spellbinding novels that between them capture an enormous breadth of the human experience”. The shortlisted books, in alphabetical order by author surname, is:

• The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright, published by Jonathan Cape
• Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshananthan, published by Viking
• Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville, published by Canongate Books
• Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad, published by Jonathan Cape
• Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, published by Faber & Faber
• River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure, published by Duckworth

What should you ask your newsletter readers in a survey?

If you’re writing your own newsletter, then Dan Oshinsky’s advice for what to ask in a reader survey might well come in handy. Oshinsky was Director of Newsletters at The New Yorker, and now runs a newsletter consultancy, Inbox Collective, so knows what he’s talking about. He suggests that a reader survey should always start with three types of question:

• Something numeric
• Something about the value of your newsletter
• Something open-ended

And then goes on to suggest other key questions you could ask in your next (or first!) reader survey. It’s great advice and well worth a look.

Do people buy books, or is claiming they don’t just clickbait?

Last month, self-published author Elle Griffin, published a post with the provocative headline No one buys books in which she suggested, based on documentation and transcripts from the 2022 Penguin vs DOJ case, that traditional publishing is unfairly weighted in favour of big authors and celebrities, and that most books “make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies”.

Her conclusions were that a lot of books don’t make money, publishers get most of their income from the backlist, “A ‘Netflix of Books’ would put publishing houses out of business”, and that publishing is essentially dead. The future features, according to Griffin, self-publishing and Substack replacing traditional publishers.

With 620 comments and 373 shares at the time of writing, she’s clearly hit a nerve. And she is right on some things — celebrity and major authors do earn the most, backlists are important, Amazon is a big threat to the industry.

But, as with many things, it’s all just a bit more complicated than that. The headline, in particular, is disingenuous nonsense. People do buy books. Lots of books, as Brooke Warner pointed out, in the USA “book publishing is a $30 billion-dollar industry that published over 3.5 million titles last year”.

Warner also adds some missed context:

The reason that 2022 trial focused so much on high-level “unicorn” authors getting $250K+ advances, which are qualified as the Big Five’s “anticipated bestsellers,” was because it was an antitrust case, meaning the DOJ was trying to prove that authors would suffer (ie, lose income) if Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster were to merge.

And:

When a publisher pays a million dollars for a book, it’s not typically for North American rights. They anticipate earning money on foreign rights and other subsidiary rights. Publishers make money all sorts of ways, and the profits work to pay off the author advances and earn publishers money. We’re talking about things like book-to-film rights; audiobook rights; translation rights; merchandising. Book publishing is lucrative beyond its most famous product: the book.

I recommend Warner’s post if you want a different viewpoint from someone who understands both the traditional and independent arms of the industry. Other relevant posts include:

• Is publishing broken? by Katie Sadler
• Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing by Kathleen Schmidt
• Publishers Actually Do a Lot for Authors by Michelle Richmond
• Publishing is Designed to Make Most Authors Feel Like Losers Even While the Industry Makes Money by Freddie de Boer
• Why the DOJ v PRH Antitrust Trial Doesn’t Change the Game for Authors, Regardless of Outcome (2023) by Jane Friedman
• No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies (2022) by Lincoln Michel

And, for a giggle:

• Yes, Substack Really Will Replace the Book Publishing Industry by Carlos Greaves

Remember, in publishing as everything else, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and Griffin does not actually have the receipts.

Obligatory cat picture

Copurrnicus, curled up on the sofa and sound asleep.

That’s it for this newsletter! See you in a fortnight!

All the best,

Suw

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Plus inside the Met’s book conservation lab, lots of AI news, and another rejection is balanced out by starting my Script in Eight Weeks course.

Hi there,

Suw’s News: Another rejection and a course started

The rejection emails from Discoveries 2024 arrived in inboxes, including mine, late last week. Whilst rejection is never a surprise, and no longer a disappointment, it is an irritation. I am rather fed up of the ‘competititionification’ of writing, not least because although a lot of competitions are free, many are paid and the fees soon mount up. And you get basically nothing from it – even the competitions that promise feedback haven’t provided me with anything actionable.

Last year, I set myself the goal of 100 rejections, but in the end I submitted fewer than a dozen times – though I did have a 100% rejection rate, which is something to be proud of, I suppose. This year, my goal isn’t to submit a lot, it’s to write and produce my Fieldwork sitcom podcast. The only submissions I’ll be making will be to open calls or competitions specifically for comedy. Everything else is on the back burner.

On the subject of Fieldwork, Dave Cohen’s Build A Script sitcom course has started, and my weeks of pre-writing are paying off. I finished up Friday’s homework in an hour and a half, with an extra twenty minutes of polishing this morning, and it all flowed fairly easily. I’ve managed to work for an average of 5 hours 45 minutes per week on Fieldwork this year, so if I keep that up and continue my pre-writing exercises as I go along I think this will all come together nicely.

Opportunity: Write Start Competition

Whilst I’m eschewing competitions this year, that doesn’t mean you should! Write Start is an American competition for novelists costing $35 and with a submission deadline of 31 May. All you need to do is submit 20 pages from a completed manuscript and you might win a meeting with an agent.

Read this: How a font tweak saves paper

I absolutely loved this story about how designers at HarperCollins have spent the last three years experimenting with fonts, layout and ink in order to reduce book page counts whilst maintaining readability. “[S]o far, these subtle, imperceptible tweaks have saved 245.6 million pages, equivalent to 5,618 trees.” And looking at the sample, the eco-friendly font is easier to read for me than their standard, so that’s a win all round!

Stop, look, listen: Origin Story

Origin Story, from Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, is one of my favourite podcasts that’s not about writing but is essential listening for writers. If you want to quick explainers for not just political concepts but also broader cultural phenomena, then you can’t do better.

I recently listened to and loved their episodes on the origins of zombies and their role in fiction and the secular side of the apocalypse, in which I learnt that Mary Shelley did not just write the first science fiction book with Frankenstein, but one of the first pieces of apocalypse fiction with The Last Man.

Read this, two: Inside the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Another delightful read, this one from the New York Times who sends Molly Young to take a peek behind the scenes in the Met’s book conservation lab (gift links but paywall possible).

“For people who love books, entering the lab is like getting hit with Cupid’s arrow,” [Mindell] Dubansky said. “People walk through this door with a dazed expression on their face, wanting to dedicate their entire lives to making sure the books are OK.”

It me. It definitely me.

Read these: More ‘AI’ news, none of it good

Vox does a deep dive into Amazon’s problem with shite AI-generated books and the problems caused by human grifters out to scam people who are desperate to be authors:

Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

Astrolabe covers the stooshie caused by SFF publisher Angry Robot deciding to use AI to sort submissions during their open window.

Controversy arose, however, when the fine print for the open submission period revealed Angry Robot would be using an AI-driven application called Storywise to help sort submissions and deliver them to appropriate editorial staff. Despite recognizing the potential blowback resulting from the use of an AI tool, and preemptively developing an extensive FAQ explaining its use, Angry Robot met with a lot of Angry Writers. Five hours later they announced they would no longer be using Storywise and would revert to a more traditional email inbox-process.

Not everyone was convinced by Angry Robot’s climbdown, and author Lili Saintcrow pointed out their inconsistencies in a BlueSky thread.

The Bookseller reports that HarperCollins and ElevenLabsAI are using AI voices to create audiobooks for foreign titles, which has voice artists worried. Although HarperCollins are starting with niche titles that wouldn’t otherwise warrant an audiobook, the obvious concern is that once AI has been accepted by the listener, it will be used to replace voice actors. Except, obviously, the celebrities who can pull an audience of their own.

This is an opportunity to expand the library of audiobooks available, and that’s great from accessibility and market growth points of view, but I do understand voice actors’ worries. Big corporations don’t have a very good track record of drawing boundaries that protect us humans.

Public Citizen raises concerns about dangerous AI-generated apps and books on foraging for mushrooms which misidentify toxic, even deadly, mushrooms. Mushrooms are notoriously difficult to identify accurately and it’s very easy to make a mistake, as author Nicholas Evans did in 2008 when he and some family went foraging and accidentally picked, cooked and ate some deadly webcap mushrooms. Evans and three other family members nearly died, and three of them lost kidneys.

Mushroom identification requires real expertise and shouldn’t be left to AI. There’s a reason that we don’t eat mushrooms called things like Eastern Destroying Angel, Death Cap, Poison Pie or The Sickener, (although lots of mushrooms with pretty names are also toxic).

Tweet of the fortnight: Fantasy maps

The best map ever published at the front of a fantasy book has been located by Twitter user @Thinkingabtbooks in the opening pages of Kyle James’ Hierophantasy.

Obligatory cat picture

The only way to win an argument with a cat is not to argue. I’d suggest a nice game of chess, but Grabbity would only knock the pieces over and sit on the board.

That’s it for now! See you next time!

Suw

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Plus the state of UK TV, the power of curation and an early morning Grabbity.

Hi there,

The rain has finally stopped, the sun is trying to come out, the pigeons are ‘courting’ on the flat roof above my desk, freaking Copurrnicus right out with their noise, and I am feeling loquacious! So this issues sees fewer links and more analysis, which I hope you’ll find interesting! Plus, a photo of an early morning Grabbity for those of you who reach the end.

Read this: Why bestseller lists aren’t all that

Agent Kate McKean argues that authors really shouldn’t care about whether their books gets on to the New York Times bestseller list, largely because, “If it happens that is AMAZING and a BIG DEAL but also not the golden ticket you think it will be.”

Instead, she says, you should worry more about:

Selling through that print run so your publisher has to go back to press for more books (i.e. a reprint). If they have to order a reprint before your book even comes out, because stores have called dibs on all their existing stock, EVEN BETTER. What’s going to make a publisher look at your next proposal or manuscript with heart eyes? Reprints and low returns. Stores ordering more of your book(s) because people keep buying them, long after your “launch week” marketing extravaganza. How do you sell your next book? Sell your current one.

By the way, I only recently learnt that the little daggers next to some books in the NYT list means that they think the numbers have been in some way fudged:

Institutional, special interest, group or bulk purchases, if and when they are included, are at the discretion of The New York Times Best-Seller List Desk editors based on standards for inclusion that encompass proprietary vetting and audit protocols, corroborative reporting and other statistical determinations. When included, such bulk purchases appear with a dagger (†).

Read this, two: How important is author promo? 

In the post above, McKean suggests that as an author, you must keep your “book in conversations by doing what you can do online—writing, posting, videoing, whatever you can do that makes sense for your market—whether it’s about your book or not.”

She goes on to say:

This is work only you can do in support of your career, so you can keep publishing books. The publisher cannot build your platform or following or fanbase of readers who automatically buy your next book as soon as you post a pre-order link. Readers are not looking at publishers for news of those pre-order links. They are looking at you. You do not hear about new books from publishers. You hear about them from friends and articles and random posts that get shared in your feeds and from the bio at the end of that great article you just read and oh look they have a new book coming out.

However, author Melissa Caruso suggests on Bluesky that we should not focus on making any given book a success, but should take a step back and make sure our careers are a success (my bold).

Here’s the thing. There’s not much that you, the author, can do personally to move the needle in the short term on sales for a specific book. That’s really up to your publisher, who has far more resources than you do.

Once you accept this, it’s actually kind of nice?

It’s very easy to put WAY too much effort, time, and/or money into book promo, but the truth is that all the things debuts feel like they should be doing—social media, preorder campaigns, events, you name it—will make very little difference for most people and are only worth doing if you enjoy them.

It’s important to remember that there is no empirical way to understand what makes a given book a success, or not a success. There are so many factors that combine to propel a title to the top of the bestseller list or sink it without trace that it’s impossible to predict which books will sell well and which won’t.

Some factors are always going to be important, such as author name recognition and track record or the amount of marketing spend devoted to a book. But they aren’t guarantees of success, even if they help it along. Other factors are completely unpredictable and uncontrollable, such as whether a similar book comes out at the same time, general zeitgeist, and virality.

So I think the key point from Caruso’s thread is to do what you enjoy. If you like being on BookTok, or writing newsletters, or doing outreach to indie bookshops, or organising author events, then go for it. It can’t hurt and it might help.

But don’t sacrifice your next book, or your health or happiness, on the altar of promo.

Read this, three: The state of UK TV 

BBC New Broadcasting House by Diamond Geezer on Flickr.

It’s really nice to have your career decisions exonerated by a report, even if that report makes for less than happy reading otherwise. Televisual.com summarises a report from Ampere Analysis on current TV commissioning trends, and it doesn’t make for fun reading.

The report shows an 18% decline last year in the UK’s market for scripted TV commissions as major UK broadcasters cut spend and most global SVODs trimmed investment in international content.

So trying to get a TV script commissioned, especially as an early career writer, is essentially futile. Worse, trying to get a sitcom made is now just an act of self-flaggellation.

Comedy fell out of favour, enduring a 27% drop. It was the most heavily impacted of all scripted genres in 2023 with an overall decline of 41% among UK commissioners.

There is something to be said for being countercyclical, so perhaps still worth working on comedy, but maybe not in TV. I’m focusing on writing a sitcom podcast as well as working on a version of the script for submission to the BBC’s autumn open call, just in case.

Perhaps the ‘easiest’, if anything in the creative world can ever be said to be easy, is get your book published first.

In another risk-mitigation move, the BBC increased its investment in IP with an existing following. Roughly a fifth of BBC scripted commissions last year were book adaptations.

I decided a while back to stop working on the scripts for Tag and start novelising it. That project’s shelved for now as I focus on Fieldwork, mind, but as a CGI heavy urban fantasy, it’ll be a much easier sell as a book rather than a TV show. I always knew that, but this news confirmed that novelisation is the right choice.

However, if you’re writing in the Kids, Family or Crime genres you stand more of a chance.

Children & Family grabbed the most orders of the BBC’s scripted commissions, up by 23% year-on-year. Crime and thriller titles were up 16%.

Getting into TV through the front door is basically impossible now, so it’s really a matter of working out whether you can slip in unnoticed through a side window.

Read this, four: The power of curation

Lovely piece from Russell Nohelty about the important of curation in media, saying that:

[the problem for] every media company struggling right now is they have become terrible curators for their audience

This is true not just for large media organisations, but also for us newsletter writers too, whether we are curating links, as I do here, or our thoughts, as I do over on Why Aren’t I Writing?.

This gives me the opportunity to ask you what you’d like to see more/less of? This issue has been particularly wordy, but how do you like the usual mix of topics and number of links? Please do leave a comment if there’s something you particularly like and would like more of!

Obligatory cat picture

Grabbity does love to come and pin me to the bed just at about the time my alarm goes off, so I frequently wake up to this view. She’s very keen that I stay in the prone position so that she can nap in comfort, after a very tiring night of yelling at us from the bottom of the stairs.

Right, that’s it for now! See you again in a couple of weeks, or maybe in the comments!

All the best,

Suw

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Plus the London Festival of Writing, Coyote vs Acme, and Copurrnicus being Copurrnicus.

Hi there,

Catch up with Dr Dean Burnett

If you missed last week’s webinar with bestselling author Dr Dean Burnett, you can now catch up with the recording at your leisure!

Dean and I kicked off our conversation with the story of Blue Monday — not the New Order song, but the confected PR nonsense that claims one particular Monday in January is the ‘most depressing of the year’. Dean, already a keen blogger and stand-up comedian, debunked it and soon found himself writing a regular blog for The Guardian.

We then moved on to talk about how Dean came to write his first book, international bestseller The Idiot Brain and then his second book, The Happy Brain, how he does his research and how he made the decision to go full-time as a writer. We also talked about our childhood assumptions that other people wrote books, not us, and how that’s affected our writing careers, as well as Dean’s experience of doing stand-up comedy, the weirdness of having his book optioned by Whoopi Goldberg, and a bit about what he thinks writer’s block might be.

Watch now!

Opportunity: BBC Writers’ Studio: EastEnders

BBC Studios Drama Productions have launched a new scheme for anyone who wants to write for EastEnders.

BBC Studios TalentWorks Writers’ Studio: EastEnders is an open script call for those who are looking to take the next step in their writing career and join the ranks of the EastEnders writing team. The initiative intends to find writers with some experience, who are actively keen to pursue a career in continuing drama. The open call process will shortlist 8 writers who’ll each write one paid trial script with the full support of the in-house development editor. Of the 8 shortlisted writers, up to 5 commissioning slots will be available on the main show.

Applicants must have an existing broadcast credit, or an agent, or various other credits/experience in order to apply, and the deadline is 22 April.

The BBC also runs The Writers’ Studio: Casualty, and a similar scheme for cosy crime.

Tip-top tip: Gary Gibson on building a sustainable writing career

Sci fi writer Gary Gibson has written about the things he’s learnt as a “formerly traditionally-published author” about building a sustainable career as a writer.

Gary, who hasn’t been under contract with a major publisher since 2015, talks about the conflict that sometimes arises between what readers want and what writers want, risk-taking and experimentation, marketing and BookBub, promotion and much more.

It’s a useful post with valuable advice not just for independent authors, but for anyone interested in a writing career.

Event: The London Festival of Writing

Jericho Writers’ annual writing festival will be running over the weekend of 29-30 June, at the Leonardo Royal Tower Bridge Hotel in London. Tickets aren’t cheap, at £420 for the whole weekend, including lunch and Saturday night dinner, but excluding accommodation.

The weekend consists of seven workshop slots with three to choose from in each session, and they cover topics such as character, first chapters, working with small publishers, dealing with your midpoint plot, genre, how to write query letters and a lot more.

Watching: Coyote vs Acme might be lost forever

There’s been another wave of fury about the loss of Coyote vs Acme, the completely finished Warner Bros. Discovery movie that massive arsehole David Zaslav canned for no good reason. It was reported last month that Warner Bros. Discovery said that:

in an earnings filing it wrote off $115 million in content due to abandoning films in the third quarter of 2023 as part of a “strategic realignment plan associated with the Warner Bros. Pictures Animation group.”

Actor Will Forte, who played Wile E. Coyote, got to see the finished film and called it “incredible. Super funny throughout, visually stunning, sweet, sincere, and emotionally resonant in a very earned way.”

The film tested really well, and Amazon offered $40-$45 million for it, but that wasn’t enough for enormous wanker Zaslav, who wanted $75-$80 million for it. So, it seems Coyote vs Acme will by now have been deleted. All we have left of it has been compiled by All Things Lost into this 38 minute video:

As someone points out in the comments, “You can’t burn down your own business for insurance money. You shouldn’t be able to destroy your fully filmed, expensive project, for free money either.”

Whilst the buck stops with contemptible scumbag Zaslav, the underlying cause is perverse incentives in the tax regime. Now that despicable shitweasel Zaslav has normalised the deletion of finished films, regardless of quality or prospects, we can expect this to happen more and more often.

The only question now is whether creatives will start to shy away from, or even boycott, film studios who have shown themselves willing to destroy movies for the tax breaks.

Read this: Recently on Why Aren’t I Writing?

It’s been a while since I gave you a round-up of my newsletters over on Why Aren’t I Writing?, so for those of you who aren’t subscribed over there, here’s a bit of reading for the long weekend:

• What if the doors to the creative industry are all closed? How do we find a window to climb through?
• The paradox of originality. Trying to be original ensures you are not.
• Tell that watcher at the gates of your mind to eff off. Creativity is about radical acceptance of your first ideas and resisting the urge to second-guess yourself.
• Maybe it’s not us who are broken. Maybe it’s the system. How do we survive in an industry that that has commoditised us?
• When do you get the opportunity to really observe people? And I don’t mean through binoculars.

Grist & author webinars

This month, I organised both a Grist conversation and an author webinar with Dr Dean Burnett. I really enjoyed doing both, and I get a lot out of them, but they take a lot of time and they’re causing me quite a bit of stress. So, rather sadly, I’ve decided not to do any more webinars for a bit. Grist will become a monthly newsletter, and I’ll do another author webinar when I really can’t resist the urge any more.

Obligatory cat picture

After the first Christmas of the pandemic, my husband and I decided to leave up the fairy lights and to then decorate the lounge seasonally. Sadly, we had to leave all the themed lights back in the US, but we are slowly rebuilding our collection of decorations here.

Copurrnicus pretty much ignored the hearts we put up for Dydd Santes Dwynwen, which is also the anniversary of our engagement, and which we left up until our wedding anniversary in February. But he has taken rather a shine to our spring decorations, which at the moment consist of eggs and paper flowers.

Grabbity doesn’t care, because none of the decorations are made of tinsel.

Right, that’s it for this time! See you again in two weeks, or on Notes or Bluesky.

All the best,

Suw

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