Links of Interest: August 17, 2022

by

Traditional Publishing

  • On leaving your literary agent: An author frankly recounts a long but fraying relationship with her agent that hobbled her confidence. Read Jillian Medoff at Lit Hub.
  • Stealth-help and cli-fi are trending. That’s according to editors and agents in the UK. Stealth-help consists of memoir and personal narratives that aren’t overtly self-help but that can help people improve their lives. Cli-fi is science fiction about the environment. Other popular areas include rom-com, gothic fiction, horror, and cozies. Read at The Bookseller (subscription may be required).
  • The process of getting blurbs: Yes, it’s awkward. Here’s why it can be worthwhile. Read Catherine Baab-Muguira at Poe Can Save Your Life.

Digital Media & Publishing

  • Pearson considers NFTs a means to earn money off sales of used textbooks. The CEO is on the record as saying, “The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market.” Right now, it’s just an idea. Read Adi Robertson at The Verge.
  • A look at interactive serial novels: An author combines serialization on Kindle Vella with a complementary community on Patreon, where readers can help determine the direction of the story. Read Beth Revis at School Library Journal.

Culture & Politics

  • Is it a problem that women dominate publishing? Agents and editors are overwhelmingly white women. One publisher believes that lack of gender diversity has led to fewer men reading. Read Kenneth Whyte at SHuSH.
  • Colleen Hoover’s books include a little of everything. It’s not just BookTok that’s led to her massive success, critic Laura Miller says. Hoover offers a maximum dosage of crowd-pleasing story elements—“the everything bagels of popular fiction.” Read at Slate.
  • How artists get paid from streaming. If publishing becomes more subscription driven, it’s good to learn how musicians currently fare under such a model today. Read Elio Quinton at The Pudding.

Romance & Erotica

  • Werewolf erotica is driving online literature gigs. Writers from around the world are being paid to write English-language stories for platforms like Dreame, GoodNovel, and Webnovel. But rather than set stories in places and cultures they know, writers are being asked to set stories in Western universes. Read Viola Zhou and Meaghan Tobin at Rest of World.
  • Don’t call them trash. Can we ever stop the moralizing around sexually explicit popular fiction? Read Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic.

Comics

Legal

  • The author of The Last Unicorn gets his rights back. Peter Beagle lost control over his intellectual property to his manager and had to go to trial to put things right. Read Elizabeth A. Harris in The New York Times.
  • Two TikTok stars are getting sued for their Bridgerton fan fiction. The women produced a Grammy-winning “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” without a licensing or rights deal in place. One professor calls the case “what law school exams are made of.” Read Amanda Silberling at TechCrunch.
  • The lawsuit against Amazon and the Big Five publishers is likely to be dismissed. No one in the publishing industry thought this lawsuit was viable. Read Andrew Albanese at Publishers Weekly.

BookTok

  • BookTok is a confluence of melodrama and young people online. One writer argues that the novels beloved by sobbing TikTokers are in fact very bad (but that most novels are bad overall), and finds it “a little base” that such readers are seeking out books to make them cry. Read Elia Cugini at Gawker.
  • TikTok is a very democratic platform, and it sells books. But it is not so good at conveying complex information. A longtime book critic thoughtfully discusses how TikTok (and other social media) affects not just book culture, but news consumption. Read Ann Kjellberg at Book Post.