News | A BAMEless World Book Night

The notion of a “reading nation” is an unquestionably wonderful one, and making that fantasy a reality is what World Book Night is all about: celebrating “the enrichment that reading and books can bring to people’s lives” at the same time as “encouraging those who don’t already read for pleasure—an estimated 36% of adults—to get involved.”

How? Well, how else—by giving away hundreds of thousands of the things! Little wonder, then, that though it still struggles to reach some, the six-year old initiative has met with tremendous success. As Free Thought Research recently revealed, “80% of those who received a book on World Book Night had never read or read infrequently before the event, while 85% talked to others about books more, of which 47% reported an increase in the number of books they bought and 32% borrowed more from their local library.”

Thus, the announcement of the fifteen books to be distributed on the next World Book Night, on April 23rd, 2016, should have been a happy moment; a date to save. Instead, the lately-launched list—described by the organisers as “diverse” and “curated to appeal to a breadth of audiences”—has quite rightly come under fire for failing to feature a single Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) author.

In a blog post for The Bookseller, Nikesh Shukla, author and editor of Rife, dubbed World Book Night “a wonderfully charitable way of spreading your love of reading with friends and strangers alike,” but there’s a but, and it's a biggie:

Lists can do what prizes necessarily can’t—be inclusive. Prizes are effectively competitions. There’s an arbitrary standard of literary merit to be upheld. Publishers will submit subjectively to suit judges’ tastes. Lists, on the other hand, are a set of items, in this case books. World Book Night’s panels are looking for books that are “good, enjoyable, highly readable books with strong compelling narratives.” It seems problematic, thus, to not include any authors from BAME communities. 

If World Book Night is about getting that 36% of the country reading, what about the brown pound? It’s potentially a huge market, but one that will feel disenfranchised by not being visible in a high profile list such as this. For one, having BAME writers will encourage more BAME readers to become givers or to take a book, but also it’ll show that, on lists, we belong just as much as everyone else.

Saying that “some questions are too important to go unanswered,” and that this is one “we at World Book Night have been struggling with for some time,” Project Manager Rose Goddard responded to Shukla’s condemnation the next day:

World Book Night is an extraordinary industry initiative achieved through a wide coalition of authors, publishers, printers, distributors and other partners—not least the volunteer givers. However, like all charitable initiatives the funding model and submissions process which underpins it also shapes its delivery. The curation of the final books is not simply a question of choosing freely from publishers’ lists; publishers submit titles for the list and financially support the printing of the titles selected and the programme overall. Participation in the programme represents a significant monetary commitment for all of them, particularly for the smaller presses we’ve been delighted to welcome on board over the last few years. They all think very carefully about which books to suggest in the context of our drive to reach people who do not normally read for pleasure and WBN would not exist at all without the generous backing they provide. Each year we strive to strike a balance across the list. This year, despite our best efforts we have not been successful in respect of BAME writers.

In other words, World Book Night’s hands were tied.

But who by? Why, by the same, “increasingly out of touch” industry that was the subject of Spread the Word’s deeply dismaying survey of “writers from a variety of backgrounds, as well as literary agents, and mainstream and independent publishers” operating out of the UK.

In other words, as Writing the Future concluded, “despite all the hard work, good intentions and a ‘signing up’ to the principles of diversity, it seems that an old mono-culture still prevails” in publishing.

And none of this—none of this—is good enough.

Book Review | Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

Darcy Patel has put college on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds. With a contract in hand, she arrives in New York City with no apartment, no friends, and all the wrong clothes. But lucky for Darcy, she’s taken under the wings of other seasoned and fledgling writers who help her navigate the city and the world of writing and publishing. Over the course of a year, Darcy finishes her book, faces critique, and falls in love.

Woven into Darcy’s personal story is her novel, Afterworlds, a suspenseful thriller about a teen who slips into the “Afterworld” to survive a terrorist attack. The Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and where many unsolved—and terrifying—stories need to be reconciled. Like Darcy, Lizzie too falls in love... until a new threat resurfaces, and her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she cares about most.

***

As someone somewhen almost certainly said, the story is the thing... and it is, isn't it? Most readers read in order to know what happens next—to these characters or that narrative—rather than out of interest in much of anything outwith a given fiction; assuredly not the particular process of authors, though after Afterworlds, I've begun to wonder whether we mightn't be missing a trick.

A twofold story about storytelling, Scott Westerfeld's insightful new novel alternates between a pair of coming of age tales. In one, we meet Lizzie: a typical teenager, to begin with, who's too busy texting to notice the start of a terrorist attack:

I'd never heard an automatic weapon in real life before. It was somehow too loud for my ears to register, not so much a sound as the air ripping around me, a shudder I could feel in my bones and in the liquid of my eyes. I looked up from my phone and stared. 

The gunmen didn't look human. They wore horror movie masks, and smoke flowed around them as they swung their aim across the crowd. [...] I didn't hear the screams until the terrorists paused to reload. (pp.5-6)

Luckily, Lizzie comes to her senses eventually. As quietly as she can, she calls 911 as the bullets fly by. The operator on the other end of the telephone tells Lizzie her best bet is to play dead, and in lieu of a safer location, she does exactly that.

A touch too well, in truth, because she faints, and awakens in another world. There, in the land of the no longer living—a grayscale place where "the air [tastes] flat and metallic" (p.20)—she promptly falls for a foxy psychopomp:

These terrorists had tried to kill me but I'd gone to the land of the dead and now could see ghosts and apparently had acquired dangerous new powers and this boy, this boy had touched my fingertips—and they still tingled. (p.76)

In the aftermath of the attack, it beggars belief, a bit, that this boy is Lizzie's priority. Not the loss of so much life. Not her own nearness to nothing. Not even the realisation that she can move between worlds at will. Rather, Yamaraj, "a hot Vedic death god" (p.77) "modeled [...] on a Bollywood star" (p.121) by his faithless creator, debutant Darcy Patel.

But I Digress | Orbit Angers Fans

Orbit has been riding high recently. As an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, it was named publisher of the year at The Bookseller Awards, and a number of the novels it published in 2013 have been nominated for something of a smorgasbord of genre honours. Most notably, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie has won a slew of said already, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association’s Award for Best Novel. It’s also up for a Locus, and a Hugo, too.

And here’s where the situation gets iffy. Last week, you see, Orbit released a statement saying that they wouldn’t be giving away thousands of copies of three of their books for free this year, and people on the internet got a little pissy.

But let’s start at the start, with the press release that explained the imprint’s decision to include in the Hugo Voters Packet extended extracts of the nominated novels—namely Parasite by Mira Grant, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross—as opposed to electronic editions of the texts in their entirety:

We are of course very much in favour of initiatives that help readers to engage with important awards, and we are always looking for new ways to help readers discover new authors. However, in the case of the voter packets, authors and rights holders are increasingly feeling that if their work is not included in the packet it will be at a disadvantage in the awards. It’s difficult for anyone to know for certain whether this is the case, but either way we don’t feel that authors and rights holders should feel under pressure to make their work available for free. There are a lot of different attitudes to the idea of giving work away for free, but we hope most people would agree that writers and rights holders should be able to make their own choice, without feeling that their decision might have negative consequences.  

We would like to make it clear that this was our decision, and not one requested by any of our authors. It is a complex issue, with many different perspectives and opinions, and we believe that we are acting in the best interests of our authors while continuing to support the voter packet.

Orbit can’t have expected this "complex issue" to gather the negative momentum it has, however. More than fifty comments followed the blog post above, many of which we might politely describe as declarations of outrage. Boycotts have been plotted; Orbit has been called any number of names; and several of its employees have been singled out on social media.

Which is to say—and I hope we can agree here—the situation’s gotten rather out of hand, hasn’t it? Because whether or not Orbit’s decision to include excerpts rather than entire texts was the right one, at the end of the day, this is not how a community which we all wish the wider world would treat seriously behaves.

To be clear, I’m also disappointed in Orbit’s decision. It stinks of business. But it is what it is—a perspective reflected by the three authors implicated in the publisher’s policy, who put out the following open letter together:

It has become customary in recent years for authors of Hugo-nominated works to provide the members of the World Science Fiction convention who get to vote for the awards with electronic copies of their stories. The ball started rolling a few years ago when John Scalzi kindly took the initiative in preparing the first Hugo voters packet; since then it has become almost mandatory to distribute shortlisted works this way. 

Unfortunately, as professionally published authors, we can't do this without obtaining the consent of our publishers. We are bound by contracts that give our publishers the exclusive rights to distribute our books: so we sought their permission first. 

This year, Orbit—the publisher of Mira Grant's Parasite, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and Charles Stross' Neptune's Brood—have decided that for policy reasons they can't permit the shortlisted novels to be distributed for free in their entirety. Instead, substantial extracts from the books will be included in the Hugo Voters Packet. 

We feel your disappointment keenly and regret any misunderstandings that may have arisen about the availability of our work to Hugo voters, but we are bound by the terms of our publishing contracts. The decision to give away free copies of our novels is simply not ours to take. However, we are discussing the matter with other interested parties, and working towards finding a solution that will satisfy the needs of the WSFS voters and our publishers in future years. 

Finally, please do not pester our editors: the decision was taken above their level.

At the very least, let’s take that last statement seriously—and please, leave off the authors also.

So what now? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. The backlash has been bad enough that Orbit could conceivably admit their mistake and put aside a policy that is undoubtedly detrimental... though I dare say the damage is done.

And not just to Orbit’s image; the fact is that this negativity is apt to have an impact on the three awesome genre novels nominated in the first for a Hugo Award—and that’s not just right, readers. Agreed?

But I Digress | Guilt by Amazon Association

I dare say everyone will be talking about the J. K. Rowling reveal today—I certainly will in Wednesday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus—but I wanted to take this time to talk about a topic that didn't quite make it into the column.

In a recent blog post for The Bookseller, you see, Keith Smith had a bit of a righteous rant about how certain authors—including Joanne Harris, Julia Donaldson, Alison Weir, Ian Rankin, Kate Morton and Patrick Ness—seemed to back Amazon and various other chain retailers despite having vouchsafed their support for smaller stores. For instance his:

“As someone who owns two independent bookshops I feel angry that these authors, unthinkingly or by design, have chosen to support Amazon, W H Smith or Waterstones without giving a fig for independent bookshops. Many of these are authors who, when asked, will say they couldn’t imagine life without their local bookshop. But words need to be matched by deeds if they are to make a difference.”

In principle, I agree with this part of Smith’s argument entirely—and so, it seems, do many of the authors he specifically took to task.

But Smith draws a hard line later in the originating article that I can’t quite get behind, by insisting that “the Booksellers Association should contact all authors immediately and ask them to stop supporting Amazon directly.”

Which strikes me, at least, as rather tyrannical. And a number of authors responded to Smith’s comments in kind. Alison Weir, for one:

“Linking to Amazon does not mean that I do not support independents. [...] The fact remains that publishers can shift large quantities of books through Amazon, W H Smith, Waterstones and the supermarkets, which are their main clients. Amazon also pays authors on their associates programme fees based on the number of books sold. Authors do have a living to make and Amazon can provide a great source of income which, sadly, independent book shops could not possibly meet. I understand the concerns of independent booksellers, and I think that there is a case to be made for Amazon to pay corporation tax, so that there would be fairer parity between its prices and those which independents with overheads have to charge. But accusing authors like me [...] of not 'giving a fig' for independents is not only ignorant but untrue; I think my deeds over the years give substance to my words."

Here’s Diana Kimpton, co-creator of the Pony-mad Princess picture books, speaking by way of The Bookseller again:

“I sympathise with small independent bookshops struggling through a recession, but authors are struggling too. Only a few get the high advances mentioned in the press. The rest earn much less, and many don't even get the equivalent of the minimum wage. As a result, the fact that the Amazon Associate scheme pays commission on sales resulting from links is very important. Because I have to split the royalty on my picture books with the illustrator, I actually earn more from the Amazon commission on a sale than I do from the publisher.”

Ultimately, I think Smith’s anger is a mite misplaced. Though it’s certainly the case that authors should be squarely behind independent booksellers, let’s face it: these days, most books are bought from the bigger names in the business, and to simply sever a supplementary source of income because Amazon and its ilk are, you know, completely evil, seems... well, selfish.

Let me be clear here. I sympathise with the plight of independent booksellers, but to ask for authors to support said stores solely goes against the real issue here: our right to choose where and from whom we buy our books. Why deny readers that? That they’re buying literature to begin with is, I think, the most important thing.

In one respect, then, Keith Smith is spot-on: authors should be seen to support choice.

But so should he, surely.