Praises and Prizes

"Fresh from being named one of Britain's best young novelists, and from making the final cut for the Women's prize for fiction, Zadie Smith today received her third literary garlanding in just three days after she was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje prize.

     For a book in any genre which best evokes 'the spirit of a place,' Smith was picked for her latest novel NW - also shortlisted yesterday [April 16, 2013] for the Women's Prize. The shortlist's 'places' range from South Africa to the Antarctic, but NW is set in Smith's childhood home of north-west London. Judges Julia Blackburn, Margaret Drabble and Ian Jack described the novel as 'tender and witty,' and said it 'shows London as chaotic and unfair, by turn happy and unhappy.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Terry Fallis [author of Up and Down] , who claimed the Stephen Leacock Medal For Humour in 2008, is one of five authors short-listed for the honour this year.
     'He won for Best Laid Plans, which was a self-published book,' recalled Todd Stubbs, vice-president of the Stephen Leacock Associates. 'So it was quite unique, the fact that it made it through the short list and was eventually chosen. We do get a large percentage every year of self-published books. They are long shots, without a doubt.'
     The Leacock Associates have awarded the medal annually since 1947 to honour the late author [Stephen Leacock], and to support humour writing in Canada."
— Frank Matys, Simcoe.com
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You can meet Terry Fallis on Sunday, May 26, at the Elora Writer's Festival; get the details here…

Find out more about Terry Fallis here…

"Politics beat out art on Monday [April 15, 2013] as historian author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, won Andrew Preston, the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.
     Considered a long shot, the book on U.S. diplomacy by an expatriate Canadian at Cambridge University beat three books devoted to culture and one other on high politics to win the prize."
—John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Meet the winner of last year's winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, Andrew Westoll, at the 2013 Elora Writers' Festival; find out more here... 

 Buy all the books mentioned in this post (and books by Stephen Leacock)  here...

Mid-listless

From: nathaniel stuart

"[…] The true dinosaurs of the new age are authors. Once happily enclosed in the 'stables' of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called 'mid-list' authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market. And that throng is most likely to produce tomorrow’s bestsellers, even if they begin life as obscure, self-published digital texts that, only after they find a following, are taken up and heavily marketed to mainstream prominence by major publishing houses.

     Many mid-list authors have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated, widely available sales data, according to agents and publishers. Publishers can now assess every author’s lifelong sales thanks to such services as Nielsen Bookscan in the United States and BookNet Canada.
     And once reduced to pure numbers, those track records determine the fate of proven writers looking for cash advances to begin their next books. 'Everybody knows the numbers now,' Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski said in an interview. 'You can’t lie about the numbers.' Retailers don’t order books from authors whose previous work sold indifferently, she added, so publishers respond by cutting them loose.
     The upheaval is such that an author like Dan Brown 'would never get published now, because his first three books sold nothing,' Bukowski said. But as everybody knows, Brown’s fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 80-million copies.
     Even when they agree to publish the fourth book of a mid-list author, publishers today hedge their bets by paying minimal advances based on past sales of the author’s work. In that respect, Bukowski said, it is better to be a beginner. 'At least a first novelist doesn’t have a track record,' Bukowski said."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Giller Long List Announced

"Familiar names and former winners made little impression on the three-person jury that chose the long list of semi-finalists for the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Among the baker’s dozen of authors nominated this year, only one – Annabel Lyon, author of The Sweet Girl, sequel to her bestselling The Golden Mean – has made a prior appearance among the finalists for Canada’s highest-profile literary award."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Go here to see a slideshow of the nominees...

Land Grab

From: digitalaudrey

Intellectual property is just that—the landscape of the mind subdivided and developed into something marketable. And for writers, especially fiction writers, tilling the soil of that "plot" of land, using the imagination to build fanciful constructs that readers enjoy inhabiting, is the only way we can earn a living.
     But the digital world has changed all that. Books are no longer tangible, frangible, (burnable too, as history has taught us) hefty lumps of pulped wood that smell good and bow the shelves of libraries... and like slow food, take longer to digest. To new generations of readers books are mere fleeting flickers of binary code; no more valuable (in terms of RAM) than a few seconds of a cell phone video recording of grandma playing with a kitten. It has changed the way we perceive books, read them, market them, and value them (a knock-off is no longer second best: it's a replica, indistinguishable from the original).
     And Amazon and e-readers like the Kindle have changed the way we publish books too; by blurring the boundaries between the professional and amateur writer they have compromised quality. The boomer bulge of retirees and unemployed computer-savvy twenty-somethings have turned the cliché ("If I had the time, I'd like to write a book too.") on it's head. Now everyone seems to have the time—the market is being flooded (a tsunami of wannabes and boomers eradicating fence lines, protocols: standards of all descriptions) with a deluge of product.
     And like any real estate bubble—even a virtual one—when supply exceeds demand, the bubble bursts.
— Michael Hale

"Ewan Morrison is an established British writer with a credit-choked resume and a new book out, Tales from the Mall, that the literary editor of the venerable Guardian newspaper hailed as 'a really important step towards a literature of the 21st century.' By his own account, Morrison is also being driven out of business by the ominously feudal economics of 21st-century literature, 'pushed into the position where I have to join the digital masses,' he says, the cash advances he once received from publishers slashed so deep he is virtually working for free. [...]
     The economic trajectory of writing today is 'a classic race to the bottom,' according to Morrison, who has become a leading voice of the growing counter-revolution – writers fighting fiercely to preserve the traditional ways. 'It looks like a lot of fun for the consumer. You get all this stuff for very, very cheap,' he says. But the result will be the destruction of vital institutions that have supported 'the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.'”
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Buy Ewan Morrison's books here...

Squatters Write

"Once secreted away in the crannies of liberal arts colleges and assigned to the dull torture of reading undergraduate manuscripts, writers today are just as likely to be taking up residence in bookstores and libraries, prisons and scientific research stations, cruise ships, safaris and almost any semi-public enterprise that happens to include an extra chair in the corner.
     Some seek a new version of the traditional sanctum where they can devote themselves wholly to their work – without paying rent. 'I was honoured and thrilled to have a space with a door that closed,' says Manitoba children’s and young adult writer Anita Daher, author of Spider Song and the first-ever writer-in-residence at Winnipeg’s Aqua Books. 'It was a room of my own when I didn’t have one, and there’s nothing nicer for a writer than being surrounded by books.'

     Others, like Cape Breton-born Jean McNeil, pursue novel residencies in search of experience. 'I’ve been writer in residence in the Antarctic, in the Falkland Islands, Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic, and on a ship’s expedition to the west coast of Greenland,' McNeil said this week by phone from the banks of South Africa’s Selati River, where she is undergoing training as a safari guide – 'my own kind of bespoke writer in residence.'”

— John Barber, The Globe and Mail

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Buy books by these peripatetic authors here...

Paper Backlash

From Samuel Johnson's  A Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) Internet Archive

"Canada’s Indigo Books and Music has joined forces with U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble in refusing to stock or sell any books published by online rival Amazon.com – including upcoming titles by James Franco, Deepak Chopra and Ian McEwan – with both chains now accusing the online giant of using predatory tactics that weaken an already struggling book industry. [...]
     The three-chain defensive front is the first setback Amazon has experienced since it began its aggressive and highly publicized move into the business of producing as well as selling books last year. Among the other authors whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers as a result of the ban are actor/director Penny Marshall, self-help writer Timothy Ferris and politician Ron Paul."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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"Kindle is an ingeniously sly name, because it’s designed to connote a variety of 'warm' feelings, including 'kin' (for cozy associations; Kindle’s one of the family—that cyborg cousin from your father’s side); 'kindred' (think of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, kindred spirits!); 'kindling' (ahh—a natural reference: kindling wood to start a fire, and wood also makes paper); and 'kindle' itself (to illuminate [knowledge?]; to light)."
— Miss Cavendish
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Books, Bücher, Bøker, књига

"The biggest literary mystery in Scandinavia is not the fate of Stieg Larsson’s last manuscript. It’s not even how many dead bodies will pile up by the end of the latest bestseller by Jo Nesbo, the Norwegian crime-writing king who recently sold the film rights for his international bestseller, The Snowman, to Martin Scorsese.
     The real mystery is how a 10-year-old first novel by little-known Canadian writer Lori Lansens ended up as the second-best-selling work of fiction in Norway last year. Even many Norwegians are mystified by the success of Rush Home Road, a historical drama set in a Southwestern Ontario community founded by runaway slaves. 'I’ve spoken with many, many journalists there and they all ask me why,' Lansens said in an interview from her current home in southern California. 'I wish I had an answer.'[...]




     More recent beneficiaries of success abroad include Toronto mystery writer Linwood Barclay, who managed to forgo an apprenticeship in the domestic market to become an instant star on the international scene with his crime books; and former Saskatchewan technologist Alan Bradley, whose Flavia de Luce mystery novels (named for their 10-year-old heroine) currently epitomize life in a cozy English village for hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking readers.
  

     While Bradley made a triumphant press tour of Germany following last fall’s Frankfurt Book Fair, fellow Canadian writer Annabel Lyon watched her image gleam from a six-metre banner touting a new Serbian edition of her award-winning novel, The Golden Mean, at the Belgrade Book Fair."
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Get all the books mentioned in this article here...

Book Baksheesh?

Photo: Michael Hale

"Having already done three book-signing events at Saskatoon’s McNally Robinson bookstore in support of his regional bestseller, The Saskatchewan Book of Musts, author D. Grant Black balked when asked to pay a $25 fee prior to appearing at a fourth, pre-Christmas signing this month. [...]
     Although squeezed booksellers are under increasing pressure to 'make events revenue-bearing,' bookstore owner Paul McNally said in an interview, the $25 appearance fee is not a response. 'It’s not a fee,' he explained, rather a share of the costs involved in promoting events. 'And we’ve been doing it for a million years.'
     Other booksellers expressed surprise at the practice. Chapters/Indigo stores 'encourage author participation wholeheartedly,' company spokeswoman Janet Eger said in an e-mail, 'and do not charge publicity fees to host.' "— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Books in a Bind

"Kobo's decision to enter into competition with its own suppliers further complicates relations already strained by the decision of its part-owner, Indigo Books and Music, to promote Kobo e-readers aggressively in stores formerly dedicated exclusively to selling traditional books.
     Thousands of bookstores across North America have closed in the course of the digital revolution, falling prey first to online book sales and more recently to e-books that can be delivered automatically to such devices as the Kobo and Amazon’s market-leading Kindle. Some fear that traditional publishers will be the next to suffer as online operators move onto their turf.
     But Writers’ Union of Canada chair Greg Hollingshead welcomed the news, saying the new competition could encourage traditional publishers to pay more for electronic rights and to stop forcing authors to do 'what publishers are supposed to do – editing and promotion.'
     Traditional publishers generally remit 25 per cent of a book’s cover price as a royalty to authors, while Amazon pays as much as 70 per cent, according to Hollingshead. If the new e-publishers make good on their promise, he added, 'conventional publishers will need to look hard at how they treat authors and how they compete in the digital market.' " — John Barber, THE GLOBE AND MAIL
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Read more about Kobo here...