How to make a bestseller

Think about the last book you bought. How did you choose it? Was it from a recommendation, a review, a TikTok video? Did the cover grab you, were you swayed by the quotes on the front, or did you just happen to spot it on an appealing table as you walked into the shop? Did you think about all the nudges that led you to that decision – by the publisher, the bookseller or that person you follow on Insta?

The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. “It’s all about the art of persuasion,” says Philip Gwyn Jones, who was a publisher for more than 30 years and is now a literary agent. And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from BookTokers and online influencers, social media videos, podcasts and Instagram posts. How is all this changing publishing? John Self, The Guardian

Wielding the Blue Pencil

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a man—who examined manuscripts sent in by prospective authors, wrote reports on them, and ultimately recommended whether they should be accepted or turned down was known as a “publisher’s reader.” Generally speaking, this functionary’s status was not high. He regularly operated from home or came into the office part-time. There were occasions when he worked simultaneously for several different firms, and in most cases his comments on the material he had to inspect were vestigial in the extreme. Evelyn Waugh’s older brother, Alec, employed by his father’s firm Chapman & Hall in the 1920s, remembered simply scrawling the acronym “NBG” (“No bloody good”) on the title page of anything that seemed conspicuously devoid of merit. D. J. Taylor, Portico

Nuclear Fiction

When Leslie Schover ’74 was a girl, she remembers, her father returned from a business trip with a lump of green glass—sand melted by an atomic test. “You can’t keep this because it’s radioactive,” he told her. Schover’s dad helped make nuclear isotopes for the Manhattan Project, and she partly grew up in Oak Ridge, the secret city in Tennessee where the project was located.

Her family stories were often woven around WWII-related intrigue. 

The novel she’s based on those memories, Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak, began germinating decades later when it was revealed that two of her father’s colleagues at Oak Ridge had actually been Soviet spies. “Did my dad know either one of them?” she says she wondered. “How indignant he would have been that they were spies!” Erik Ness, Brown Alumni Magazine

il libro di cui si parla è pubblicato da She Writes Press, una casa editrice interessante che si definisce ibrida, non tradizionale ma neanche self-publishing. Pubblica solo testi di donne. Nella foto: il padre e la sorella di Leslie Schover, nel 1946. 

Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat

The layoffs followed what New York Times publishing reporter Elizabeth A. Harris called a “difficult year” for nonfiction—a year in which only one of the 10 strongest-selling nonfiction books was a new book: the Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days. “The decline in sales of new nonfiction might reflect a changing information ecosystem,” Elizabeth Harris observed. “People looking for information can now easily turn to chatbots, YouTube, podcasts and other free online sources.” Last December, The Guardian cited NielsenIQ figures indicating a one-year drop of 8.4 percent in nonfiction book sales (twice that of fiction) and quoted a writer who had “heard publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn’t ‘Hollywood friendly.’” Paul Elie, New Republic

International Booker Prize 2026 Longlist

 “Many of the submitted books examined the devastating consequences of war, which is reflected in our longlist,” said judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown. “The list also features petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, big pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison, and obscure film references. The page counts range from ‘pocket-friendly’ to ‘doorstopper’. And while the books’ original publication dates span four decades, each story feels fresh and innovative.” Ella Creamer, The Guardian

UNABRIDGED

Journalist Fatsis, author of the kindred book Word Freak, talked his way into the headquarters of Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, after learning that “the company was overhauling its foundational book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.” The last major revision had occurred decades earlier, in 1961, totaling some 465,000 words—and, given that speakers of the English language were coining words (“Doomscrolling one year, cheugy another, rizz the next”) far faster than the dictionary could keep up with, there was plenty to do. Kirkus Review

Inependent Presses

Publishing’s Big Five (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster) still dominate bestseller charts and prize lists: this year’s Booker longlist features five titles from Penguin alone. But independent presses are increasingly moving into the spotlight.

Sheffield-based And Other Stories is one such example, having won this year’s International Booker prize with Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It was “instructive” that this year’s shortlist was entirely indies, says the press’s publicist Michael Watson. Indies are “frequently the ones publishing the most interesting and exciting writers and books in innovative ways, often in the face of enormous challenges”.

You may recognise the stripped-back design of And Other Stories books, with a black and white text-based cover, launched in 2023. Distinctive, homogenous covers are a running theme across many indie presses: Fitzcarraldo Editions publishes its fiction in an International Klein Blue cover, its nonfiction in white. While this perhaps simply comes down to financial constraints, the streamlining means titles are instantly recognisable for readers browsing bookshops.

[...]

The Southbank Centre’s first Indie Night will take place in February next year, hosted by Okechukwu Nzelu, author of The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney, and Eliza Clark, author of Boy Parts. The series aims to celebrate indie presses and their authors. “Independent publishing is the nutrient base from which everything positive and progressive grows in UK literature,” says Max Porter, resident artist at the Southbank. “Without our indie presses we have no counter culture.”

If you’re wanting to dig into some exciting work by UK indies, Bogen suggests looking out for Fosse’s first novel since winning the Nobel, Vaim, translated by Damion Searls and publishing next month, while Watson nominates Dreaming of Dead People by Rosalind Belben, published in August (which “rivals anything by Virginia Woolf”, according to Melissa Harrison’s Guardian review).

 

Latin American authors on rise

Today’s boom in Latin American literature is spearheaded by women, from Fernanda Melchor, to Mariana Enriquez, to Samanta Schweblin, who engage with femicide, trauma and violence through horror and speculative fiction. Madeleine Feeny, The Guardian

 

Nella foto: Fernanda Melchor, Mariana Enriquez and Samanta Schweblin

 

si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024

Beware the sensitivity read

In addition to the aforementioned hick, hayseed, clodhopper, ridge runner, and towelhead, I was to omit, regardless of context, third world, homeless, white trash, whore, slut, slave, the Blacks, beaners and noble savages. Outlawed were Nazi, minstrel, blackface, homosexuals, boy, skinheads, dead animals, Rooskie, kike, spic, exotic and gumbo. Also Indians (cowboys and), dementia, shame, crazy, insane, ape, goddam moose, make love, fart, hell, goddam, screw up, asshole, along with some stronger expletives. Janet Burroway, Chronicle of Higher Education

la censura in America (ma non si può più veramente dire America) ai nostri giorni.

The Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World et al

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage. April White, Atlas Obscura

altro articolo interessante questa settimana:

In the first decade of the 20th century, it was both virtually impossible and virtually unheard of for a Jewish person, irrespective of their individual talents, to be hired for any job at a major American publishing company—even if they were Ivy League graduates, heirs to family fortunes, and had brilliant literary minds. They couldn’t get hired on the editorial staff of a widely circulated American magazine, or be granted a professorship in an English department at a prestigious university, either. But all that started to change in the decades after the 1910s, when Jews entered the industry en masse. In addition to founding many of the today’s largest publishing companies, Jews became so influential throughout the industry that by the 1960s American writers as different as Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mario Puzo began to complain about a “Jewish literary mafia.” In short, a minority group went from almost complete exclusion to full literary enfranchisement in a matter of decades. Josh Lambert, Public Books

Days of The Jackal

How Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business. Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end? Alex Blasdel, The Guardian

 

e per continuare a esplorare il lato commerciale della letteratura, da leggere è quest'altro articolo sui premi letterari:  "What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us about Who Will Win the National Book Award", Alexander Manshel & Melanie Walsh, Public Books

The Making of the OED

Henry Spencer Ashbee owned the largest collection of pornography and erotica in the world. Born in 1834, he began collecting clandestine material as a teenager and eventually amassed so much that he had to store it in a dedicated bachelor pad at Gray’s Inn, where he would invite fellow pornophiles to peruse the collection every Saturday. Ashbee’s unorthodox hobby went further: he sent in words related to genitals, pornography and bondage to the fledgling Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be included in its pages.

Ashbee was one of thousands in the late 1800s who answered the OED’s global call to send in terms – along with examples of how the words were used in books and newspapers – for inclusion in the dictionary. The ambitious crowdsourcing project was “the Wikipedia of the 19th century”, says Sarah Ogilvie, whose book, The Dictionary People, profiles a selection of those who contributed terms. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

recensione di: The Dictionary People, di Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus).

Meals and deals

Five biggest trends from London book fair 2023.

Over the course of three days in London, thousands of editors, publishers and agents, among others, decide what we’ll be reading in the coming year or so.

Here’s our round-up from London book fair, which took place from 18 to 20 April, taking in the essentials of what the publishing landscape will look like for the next 12 months, from what we’re going to buy, to the big issues occupying the industry. Sarah Shaffi, The Guardian

 

the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for. Justine Jordan and Katy Guest, The Guardian

e anche: perché sempre più autori pubblicano su Substack:

 The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee. [...] For Rushdie, the Substack deal is about finding “a slightly more complex connection” with readers, and to give him the space to talk about things that “are just too big to discuss in tweets … I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” he told the Guardian earlier this week. “I’m just diving in here and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.” David Barnett, The Guardian

New York’s Hyphenated History

In Pardis Mahdavi’s new book Hyphen, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York’s hyphenation debate.

“This thing—this hyphen—is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the dark … you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and have a surgical operation on it! We won’t be hyphenated by anyone!” Pardis Mahdavi, The Paris Review

Sempre molto interessanti le discussioni sulla punteggiatura! 

Anche questa settimana: Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: Et Tu, Brute? Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder, Michael Burleigh (Picador), Jonathan Meades, Literary Review

Ancora sulla cancel culture: "Publishers today are teetering on a tightrope. Which voices should they amplify with a publishing deal – those their staff agree with, or those with an audience who agree with them? How far does an author have to go before their views are deemed unpublishable? What about when the personal views of an author, say JK Rowling, are condemned and staff object to working on her next children’s book? Where to draw the line?" Alison Flood, The Guardian

What does it mean to edit a cover?

A questa domanda risponde l'art editor del New Yorker, Françoise Mouly, disegnatrice francese che ora vive a York (tra l'altro è la moglie di Art Spiegelman e tra l'altro è stata l'ideatrice della copertina tutta nera dopo l'11 settembre 2001).

Even in the visual field, there are not many editors. There are art directors, but that’s slightly different. Art directors often illustrate a topic that’s given to them—the editor decides whom or what to put on the cover, and then it’s a matter of illustrating that concept or taking a photo of a politician or celebrity. With New Yorker covers, we aren’t usually illustrating a story. Our cover is a work in and of itself.

 

My job is twofold: to generate and collect ideas, and then to work with the artists to make the ideas as clear and effective as possible. Each December, I send out a calendar for the coming year with the hallmark dates: holidays, news events, the Oscars. (Everyone always wants to do the Halloween cover.) The calendar starts a dialogue with dozens of artists ...

Inside America’s Most Interesting Magazine

Now, Harper’s is the weirdest place to work in New York media and yet an unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out in part because of its wide range, in style and substance, amid a homogenizing media landscape. Ben Smith, New York Times

Nella foto: John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s.

 

Ho trovato questo interessante articolo, sull'estremamente interessante newsletter "Charlie" del Post.

Big Publishing Pushes Out Trump’s Last Fan

 

If you were a certain kind of distinctly Trumpy public figure — say Donald Trump Jr. or Corey Lewandowski — looking to sell a book over the last four years, there were surprisingly few options. The Big Five publishing companies in New York, and even their dedicated conservative imprints, had become squeamish about the genre known as MAGA books, with its divisive politics and relaxed approach to facts. And small conservative publishers probably couldn’t afford you. [...]

But Hachette, like The New York Times and other media companies, has been torn in recent years between the politics of its staff and its historic commitment to publishing conservative speech. Its liberal proprietors, of course, always abhorred the conservative content while cashing the checks. At Hachette, this meant employees having their salaries paid by Donald Trump Jr. while objecting to publishing liberals who had fallen out of favor, like Woody Allen or J.K. Rowling. Ben Smith, The New York Times.

Beh, leggetevi tutto l'articolo per capire meglio quel che sta succedendo in ambito culturale in America. MAGA è l'acronimo per Make America Great Again.

Metto la foto di Woody Allen, perché è uno degli autori rifiutati da Hachette.

Lorem Ipsum

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.

Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless. ... Nick Richardson sulle possibili traduzioni di "lorem ipsum", tls.

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Sometimes, when we’re putting together an issue of the LRB, we use Lorem Ipsum, a chunk of phoney Latin dummy text that’s been used by printers and typesetters since the 16th century. We paste it into a layout so we can tell what a page will look like before the copy’s ready. The practice is known as ‘greeking’ because the Latin’s so mixed up it’s all Greek.
Only it isn’t. The text itself has been designed not to communicate, to have the look of text but no meaning – but meaning bubbles up through it nonetheless.
- See more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/03/14/nick-richardson/translating-lorem-ipsum/#sthash.X3b9abwx.dpuf

Anxiety Is Not Only a Jewish Disorder

One of the liberating lessons of My Age of Anxiety, the amazingly candid and compassionate new book by Scott Stossel, is that Jews have no patent on anxiety. It is not a parochial problem but a human one, with universal implications for the way we think about our minds and ourselves. Stossel’s own family history makes the point clearly. His father’s family is Jewish, with just the kind of history that one might expect to breed anxiety: His grandparents were exiles from Germany in the 1930s, and Stossel was raised with this part of his background a complete secret, not finding out he was part Jewish until he went to college.
Yet when he comes to examine the sources of his own anxiety, Stossel finds that it is not a legacy from his father’s Jewish family, but rather from his mother’s WASP one ... Adam Kirsch on tablet.