Month: December 2019

Hachette’s Future Bookshelf Project

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There is an article in the winter 2019 edition of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, titled “Bursting the Bubble” and written by Francine Toon, who is an editor at Hodder & Stoughton, a Hachette imprint.  She writes about her involvement in Hachette’s Future Bookshelf project which is intended to get poorer and ethnic minority authors into print.  Ms Toon is herself a debut author: her first novel, Pine, will be published by Doubleday in January.

Francine Toon

Ms Toon says that being from the Highlands of Scotland, where literary events are rare, working as an editor for a publishing house, seeing many books in a wide range of genres, and having her first novel published made her realise that there may be other potential authors who are unfamiliar with the process, or don’t have the funds to go on an expensive creative writing course.  She therefore joined a small group of her colleagues who started the Future Bookshelf Project in 2016.  They used paid advertising and their outreach presence at different communities of writers to encourage writers to submit their manuscripts during the second year of open submissions.  In December 2017 they issued a call for submissions by unpublished, un-agented authors who self-defined as ‘under-represented’, owing to such characteristics as age, disability or race.  Authors were asked to write a short personal statement outlining why they felt under-represented when they submitted a sample of their work.  The top five reasons applicants gave were, in order, race, sexual orientation, age, disability and socio-economic status.

757 submissions were read by 59 in-house readers from across the four divisions of Hackette.  Since this reading was in addition to the day work commitments of the readers, it took almost a year to complete.  The most promising submissions were passed on the commissioning editors.  No decisions were made at the outset as to the number of authors to be published, and since the project ran in parallel to reading submissions from agents, the commissioning editors decided which books they felt passionate about and took those books through the normal submission process.  “The aim of the open submissions was to consider authors we wouldn’t see through the agenting route.  However, during the acquisition process, we tried our best to match authors with agents if they so wanted.”

“Among the three authors whose work we were thrilled to acquire, I found Elizabeth Okoh, a British Nigerian writer, whose transportive gem of a novel, The Returnees, held me spellbound.”  Rather than calling the selected authors ‘winners’, they are called the Class of 2018.

“As I write this, hundreds more submissions are filling the Future Bookshelf’s inbox.  This year we have spread our wings to include colleagues from Orion and Little, Brown, and are advertising the project through channels that might reach under-represented writers more effectively.”

More information on The Future Bookshelf can be found at thefuturebookshelf.co.uk.

Review: The Cut Out Girl

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The Cut Out Girl, by Bart Van Es, won the Costa Book of the Year prize in 2018 after being named biography of the year.  It is non-fiction about a Dutch girl of Jewish heritage who was placed by her parents in the care of others in 1942.  As such, it bears some resemblance to The Diary of Anne Frank, but the girl, Hesseline (Lien) de Jong is moved on multiple occasions to escape being sent to the to the death camps, where most of her family, including her parents were murdered.  The story is told by the grandson of the couple who were Lien’s principal foster parents.  Bart Van Es, who was born in the Netherlands in 1972, researched the story and is a professor of English literature at Oxford University.

Bart Van Es

Lien de Jong is now over 80, living in Amsterdam; she has children of her own.  Born into a middle-class, secular Jewish family, she was seven years old when, in 1942, her parents decided to place her into a Christian family for her safety.  At the time Jews were being deported to the death camps and had already been stigmatised.  Over 80% of the Jews living in Holland at the beginning of the war died in the Holocaust.  This is a gripping story of bravery on the part of many non-Jews in the Netherlands during the war; they risked their own lives to save thousands of children.  The story proceeds along two tracks: Lien’s story – her background, the events of the war years, and the after war years; and the author’s account of his thorough and painstaking research into the events, the people and the places that Lien experienced, as well as into the culture and circumstances as they affected Jews in Holland during the war years.  Since the author had heard that his grandparents had fostered Lien and that at one time she was considered part of the Van Es family, he wanted to understand why, after the war, Lien had fallen out with his grandparents.

The title is derived from Lien’s ‘poesy album’ in which she kept notes and little poems written by her friends, and in which there are pasted several cut outs of old fashioned girls.  But Lien, herself is a cut out girl being moved from one family to another without notice.

This story is timely, as Antisemitism is once again on the rise in Europe.  The author’s fear that this is just another Holocaust story is un-founded.  It is told with such detail of the events, the feelings and motivations of the people involved that it is difficult to put down.  One is almost literally trans-located to the cities, villages, and houses in war-time Holland.  The author’s writing is straight forward and without extra emotional embellishment.  One has to admire the meticulousness of his research into people, places and events.  He clearly established a remarkably close relationship with Lien, the central figure, nearly twice his age, who had fallen out with his family.  My only quibble about the book is that I found it difficult to keep track of the numerous families who provided shelter to Lien, and what their relationships were to one another.  Clearly, though, Lien didn’t know this either.

This is without a doubt the best biography I’ve read in a long time.  It’s one that gives you faith in human nature is spite of all the evil around us.

Royalty Rates

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There is an article in the Nov/Dec issue of the IBPA Independent magazine written by Stephanie Beard, ‘The Royalty Rates Publishers Are Actually Offering’.  Ms Beard is the executive editor at Turner Publishing, and industry-leading independent publisher based in Nashville, Tennessee.  Turner has a backlist of over 5000 books and publishes 36 new books per year across all genres.

She says, “Over 100 publishers offered data for this article and responded to questions about royalty rates and release formats.  For these purposes, I am defining traditional publishing as a publishing house that releases books in print and, usually, e-book form that are then distributed through retailers, libraries, online sellers, etc.  These books are acquired by the publishing house’s editors and the rights are granted to the publisher through the signing of a publishing agreement wherein the publisher bears all or most of the editorial, marketing and distribution costs, and the author is, in exchange, pair royalties on sales derived from their books.

“With respect to responses about royalty rates, authors should expect to see rates based either on a percentage of the retail price set by the publisher or a percentage of net receipts or sales.  For royalty rates based on retail price, most publishers responded that their rates for paperback and hardcover formats were as low as 5%, averaged 7.5%, and were as high at 10% on hardcover.  In our poll, most publishers who responded pay their royalties based on net receipts or sales, which is the amount actually received by the publisher for sales of the books after discounts.  These amounts were surprisingly quite varied.  For paperback books sold. most publishers responded that their rates were between 10-15% (with the average being just shy of 12%) of net, with nearly every publisher noting that their hardcover rates are the same as their paperback rates.  The most surprising revelation came from e-books, which average 25%, but were sometimes as low as 10% and as high as 50% – proving that we are quite far from consensus across the industry when it comes to digital books.

“Publishers were also asked to share their subsidiary rights rates, which traditionally include audio, book club, foreign language, and other rights depending on the publisher’s  own abilities and rights programs.  The majority of publishers responded that their subsidiary rights are 50% of net, while there were some who offered as low at 10% and very few who offered rates as high s 70-80% (typically for audio rights).”

For me, a quick summary of all this is that authors working with a traditional publisher can expect royalties of about $1 per copy sold.

Review: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

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I decided I had to read this book which is considered one of the best American novels of the 20th century.  It is written by Carson McCullers, who was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of three children of Lamar Smith, a jeweller of French Huguenot descent, and Marguerite Waters.  As a child, she was encouraged both to play the piano and to write stories.  At the age of seventeen she went to New York City to study music at Julliard School of Music, but she lost her enrolment money on the subway.  She returned to Columbus temporarily to recover from rheumatic fever.  Back in New York, she studied writing and produced her first piece of writing.  She married Reeves McCullers, and ex-soldier and aspiring writer in 1937.  In 1940, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was published to considerable critical acclaim.  She went on to write three more novels, several plays and short stories.  She divorced Reeves in 1941 and remarried him in 1945.  In the interim, she fell in love with several women, including Gypsy Rose Lee, but, reportedly, her attempts to have sex with any of them came to naught.  Reeves committed suicide in 1953, having failed in his aim to persuade his wife to commit suicide with him.  Carson McCullers was an alcoholic who suffered from strokes; she was paralysed on her left side from the age of 31 and died at the age of 50 in Nyack, NY.  Her writing style is described as Southern Gothic.

Carson McCullers

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, originally titled The Mute, takes its name from the poem The Lonely Heart by William Sharp: “Deep Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

The novel has six main characters: John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos who are both deaf mutes and close friends.  Spiros is hospitalised when his mental health deteriorates.  Singer stays in the small mill town in Georgia, where he works as a silver engraver in the 1930’s,  There are also Mick Kelly, a tomboyish girl who loves music and dreams of owning a piano, but, out of necessity, has to work at Woolworths; Dr Benedict Copeland, an old black doctor who is filled with anger at the plight of blacks in the South; Biff Brannon, the observant owner of a twenty-four hour diner; and Jake Blount, an alcoholic, violent labour organiser.  Each of these latter four is attracted to John Singer by his placid demeanour and his apparent sympathy with their individual angst.  The well-drawn characters suffer from loneliness which McCullers interprets with deep empathy.

When the book was first published, it was unusual for a young author to write with such effective sympathy about those who are rejected, forgotten, mistreated or oppressed.  She also highlights the oppressive race relations in the South in the 1930’s.

For me, however, the book moves at too slow a pace, and while this largely matches the pace of the setting, I found myself losing interest now and then.  The characters, the setting and the emotions are very real; the writing is excellent, if only it moved a little faster.