The London Book Fair 2017

As you guys know, I am super excited about a publishing career, so I decided to head to the LBF a couple weeks ago to put myself ‘out there’, and basically show publishers that, well, I exist.

If I had to describe the fair in one word: crazy. There are tons to see, people to meet and seminars to attend; in three days, it’s almost too short! It had roughly 1,500 exhibitors, split into various sections – trade, children’s publishing, and so on. There were over 200 seminars to attend on subjects covering all aspects of publishing. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to wander around for the day with your mouth open, amazed at all the publishers and areas of publishing you were never aware of, but not actually doing anything constructive.

The thing is I have a problem with being organised, so I had a plan. Here’s the short version, because I don’t want to freak you out with my borderline OCD:

1. Know in advance who to meet and when.
2. Look for, and approach, some potential publishers that I’d like to work for, and hand out business cards. (Note: you may need to practise your opening marketing chat first – in case, like me, selling yourself is not your best skill…)
3. Attend some interesting seminars, either directly relating to my areas of interest or to something completely new.
4. Check out the stand that I had commissioned for the APE.

The sheer scale of the book fair and the enormous variety in the publishing and technology on offer made me think about my role in the (much) wider world of publishing, and helped me to feel a renewed commitment. It can be hard to remember the bigger picture when you spend most days at home doing your coursework!

I found it was better to approach smaller publishers, who I found were much more interested in me and the skills I had to offer.The warmest welcome I received was from Quirkbooks’ Publicity Manager. I loved having coffee and discussing Pride, Prejuce and Zombies with this delightfully quirky lady whose hair reminded me of Cailtin Moran’s… But I’m getting sidetracked. I had nonetheless the opportunity to meet all the big five HR managers, and more. That was a brilliant opportunity to get direct feedback on my CV, how I presented myself, and tips on how to develop certain skills! I won’t drop names, but I found interesting how two of the big five were actually interested in me and liked my enthusiasm, and how another just told me to drop publishing altogether! I reckon I am just too stubborn to do that.

Existential Crisis

The publishers were mostly there to discuss rights and new book deals, and it definitely triggered a new interest in rights in me. As I wandered around the Olympia, I could distinctly hear a mixture of English, French, Spanish, German, Polish… and some languages I simply couldn’t identify! I loved the idea of being able to combine my passion for books and for languages, so what I got out of the fair was a fairly unexpected new interest in publishing rights.

There is a lot more to talk about, and probably not enough words. Would I go next year? I think I would – armed with a better idea of what to say to publishers to break the ice, and definitely again arranging some meetings – with publishers, friends or authors – in advance.

Pride, not Prejudice: Diversity in Publishing

As you may know already, I am currently undertaking a Publishing MA (and it’s amazing), and I have decided to focus my dissertation on diversity and inclusivity in publishing! I will focus on BAME and LGBTQ books, authors, and diversity within publishing companies. Go big or go home, right?

I would really appreciate if you could take a couple of minutes to answer my super short survey, and help me with my dissertation. Whether you’re a reader, writer, book reviewer, or work within a publishing company, your help will be precious.

 

Here’s the link: Diversity in Publishing Survey

 

 

As part of my degree I have realised that publishing suffers from a major diversity problem. It is obvious that the vast majority of books published are by white authors and about white characters. The majority of the staff behind the scenes, which includes publishers’ employees, and reviewers, are white. For decades there has been overwhelming agreement in the industry that there should be more diversity at all levels and in all areas of the book world, but even with greater awareness, the problem never seems to go away. Is this problem too big to solve?

 

The answer is, we have no idea how big the problem is. While there is now data available about diversity among books published, there is still no data available about diversity among publishing staff and reviewers. As in any business, when you have a problem you must understand it before you can solve it.

 

A Word About Privacy: Your answers to this survey will remain completely anonymous, and data will only be made public in aggregate form, as part of my dissertation.

Book Review: Go Set a Watchman

It is 20 years after Depression-era Maycomb, in the backwaters of Alabama, held its doomed race trial in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Jem is dead of a heart attack; Dill is away in Italy; Atticus Finch has evolved into a small-town bigot who reads pamphlets on “The Black Plague” and regards “Negro population as backward”. Scout, now aged 26, is the new moral compass and Civil Rights activist-in-the-making of Go Set a Watchman.

Scout has been living by herself in New York City, where her feminist leanings have become more pronounced and her sense of social justice more refined. While in Maycomb, she learns of Atticus’s and Hank’s involvement in the “Citizen Council,” an organization devoted to maintaining the racially segregated status quo of the town.

The storyline is limited, hinging on this one incident – Scout’s shocking discovery that her father is not the unimpeachable moral force that she thought he was.  If Mockingbird is a story about childhood before it is one about racism, this is a coming-of-age novel in which Scout becomes her own woman. Her betrayal and hurt over Atticus’s change is also ours. If he personified the intrinsic Christian goodness of the Southern white male in Mockingbird, that Southern male has turned mean, racist and small-minded, now that the Civil Rights struggle, and prospect of equality for all.

There are various plot glitches: Scout’s romance with her childhood friend, Hank, brings with it the central question of the novel – whether she will marry him. But that romance is all-but-forgotten in the final chapter, and we are left wondering. And in spite of the many flashbacks, not one describes Jem’s death in any detail, nor Scout’s emotional response to it, which truly made me sad.

It is not a finely written story, it reads as a first draft which Lee has refused to rework. It is in a coarse state where scenes are sketchy, third-person narration shifts haphazardly and leaden lectures on the Southern States’ racial history stand-in for convincing dialogue. It is however the more radical, ambitious and politicised of the two novels Lee has now published.

Marketed as a sequel to Lee’s much revered and much studied To Kill a Mockingbird, Watchman was (arguably) written first. Many have spoken cynically of the marketing value of Go Set a Watchman, but one wonders whether Lee’s original editor was thinking about just that when she asked her to discard this angry, incriminating story, which incorporated the race issues of its day, and write something more ‘nostalgic’, perhaps in order to sanitise it, and make Atticus more palatable to White America. Perhaps it is simply another platform for the “Great White Saviour” trope. In the end, Go Set A Watchman was likely published for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time.

Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee, Harper Collins, £7.99.

(Illustrations by Tom Cole)

 

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

For every Harry Potter fan, the release of The Cursed Child was a dream come true. I was the first to be excited. Who thought an eighth part to the Boy-Who-Lived’s story would actually materialise so soon after the main series finished? As excited as I might have been, when I pre-ordered my copy of The Cursed Child, I decided to limit my expectations straight away. It says Harry Potter, it’s new and shiny, but let’s not get carried away. After all, it was a story that came with several caveats; it was written by Jack Thorne, not JKR, and it came in the format of a script. Scripts are not my cup of tea.

I sat down a couple hours and devoured it nonetheless.

 

Time to grab every Harry Potter-related books!

Nineteen years after the end of the last book, Harry’s story picks up from the epilogue when he’s sending his son Albus Severus off to Hogwarts, and takes it further.

The story largely follows Harry’s son Albus, who is accepted to Hogwarts and gets sorted into Slytherin along with Draco Malfoy’s son Scorpius.

The young Potter and his father have a strained relationship, a result of the mythos that has followed Harry since his showdown with Voldemort. Meanwhile Harry has his own problems. His office has recently confiscated a time turner, and in a fit of teenage angst, Albus and Scorpius decide to try and make one dark episode in Harry Potter’s past right: saving Cedric Diggory’s life during the Triwizard Tournament.

The results, as one might expect with a time travel story, are drastic. As they make one adjustment, everything leans precipitously in one direction, while a readjustment makes everything go the other way. But I won’t say more!

This story fits into the Potter canon, as there are plenty of references to the previous novels. The events depicted add on in creative and unexpected ways. However the script is almost inevitably less satisfying in earning the emotions it claims to evoke. Despite their best efforts, Rowling-Thorne’s stage direc­tions are functional things, describing atmosphere rather than creating it. The pacing was also inconsistent and chaotic, and the character development is near non-existent, which is probably the most disappointing part. But you can only do so much with a script.

 So, where does this leave us? The Cursed Child is billed as the “eighth Harry Potter story,” but it’s not really connected with the epic story that Rowling played out over those seven novels. What it does do, however, is provide an interesting insight into what the impact of the adventures of Harry and his friends had on the world down the road.

Read it nonetheless. Read it as if you were a child again, and you will still enjoy yourself immensely.

Harry Potter and The Cursed Child,  J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, John Tiffany – Little, Brown, £12.99

I’m Back!

I know it’s been ages since I last posted anything, and I am truly sorry.

I have been ridiculously busy. After :

I’m going on an adventure!

– going back to France for a while (no, I haven’t completely abandoned my family)

– moving (who knew I had that much stuff?! Also made me realise the amount of books I’ve got)

– starting uni (MA Publishing !!!)

– working for a bit (=money =book shopping!)

I hardly even had time to breathe. Although I read a lot, I didn’t find the time to have a life and a blog at the same time.

I am really excited about being back to uni though. I am already working on loads of different publishing projects, attending book launches, meeting interesting people and authors, and I now have time to write and draw again. And I have a lot to write about!

Life is good.

Book Review: Career of Evil

I thought there would be some time before my next Cormoran Strike review, but I happened to have won a signed copy thanks to a competition organised by the Crime Vault, in association with Little, Brown Company. So, naturally, I devoured foresaid precious book as soon as it found its way to my letterbox.

When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible – and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.

With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them…

 The third crime novel from JK Rowling’s alter ego sees private detective Cormoran Strike and assistant Robin Ellacott haunted by their pasts, and it’s a pure delight to read. Her third whodunit leans heavily on shock factor as our PI duo tussles with the reprehensible realms of paedophilia, a spate of blood-chilling serial murders, and that darkest of wrathful revenge.

With its opening chapter, told from the killer’s point of view, Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. J.K. Rowling, indelibly marks Career of Evil as her grisliest novel yet. The novelty of the split narrative between Strike and Robin’s world and that of the killer — whose preference, when it comes to women, lies in the body-part-in-the-freezer variety — quietly ratchets up the tension-filled scariness of spending time inside a sociopath’s mind. The chapters told from the nameless sociopath’s point of view is a chilling yet highly enjoyable portrayal. These chapters also induce a sense of urgency, as the list of victims slowly increases, and Robin will be next…

At least when my parcel arrived it wasn’t that dodgy…

But Rowling also allows her protagonists room to grow. Robin’s relationship with Matthew is more unstable than ever, and Strike dates this beautiful yet uninteresting woman to forget his crush on his assistant. Both grapple with old memories as well; Strike revisiting his childhood spent with his peripatetic mother and abusive stepfather, while Robin reveals an event from her past that shapes some of the novel’s more salient and emotionally-charged scenes.

Rowling’s writing is velvety and fluid, making the book pure pleasure. She’s a great builder of worlds: she evokes the world of rainy modern London — the wet-wool smell of the Tube, the warm and bright pubs — with charm and skill.

That’s what makes these novels so good: They are clever, tightly plotted mysteries with all of the most pleasurable elements of the genre (good guy, bad guy, clues, twists, murder!), but with stunning emotional and moral shading.

Career of Evil, Robert Galbraith, Sphere, Paperback, £7.99

Book Review: The Silkworm

After being left somewhat disappointed by the first novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, I found myself enjoying The Silkworm more than Galbraith’s debut. As weird as it sounds, it was one of those occasions where the sequel is better than the first book.

Eccentric writer Owen Quine has written Bombyx Mori (Latin for “silkworm”), a nasty novel that maligns the people he knows, many of whom are part of the literary circle and none of whom would be particularly pleased if Owen exposed their secrets. When Owen disappears after a very public row with his agent, his dowdy wife Leonora Quine hires Strike to track down her husband. The missing person’s case eventually turns into a murder investigation, when the author is discovered brutally slaughtered in the same manner that was depicted in his book.

The plot is much more smoothly constructed than in The Cuckoo’s Calling, with Rowling giving her characters room to breathe while still taking a Christie-like delight in the cunning sowing of clues. The novel is very clever and, at times, certainly very gruesome! Guts, anyone?

The publishers, agents and writers who populate the novel are clear stereotypes and in Rowling’s hands they are thoroughly entertaining. Some lines are clearly making fun of publisher and writer habits and make the read rather amusing “those publishers and their lunches”. Many a time, tough, I found myself thinking of this book more of a veiled attack on eBooks, bad writers and bad publishing agents rather than of a pure investigative novel. Admittedly, it’s hard to read this book impartially now you know the brain behind Galbraith’s pen-name.

What gives the novel its heart, though, is the touching relationship between Strike – still a ladykiller despite his “pube-like hair, his boxer’s profile and his half a leg”– and his faithful Watson, the beautiful Robin, who longs to be given more responsibility at the agency but is afraid that her job is earning the disapproval of her snobbish fiancé Matthew.

The Silkworm is an interesting whodunit staged amidst London’s literary scene and it’s a book to gulp down. Can’t wait to read Career of EviI!

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith, Sphere, £7,99

See also: ALL J.K ROWLING BOOKS !

Book Review: Persepolis

Another of my feminist book for you!

Persepolis presents a funny and deeply personal coming-of-age tale about finding one’s place in the world.  Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a young girl’s life under the Islamic Revolution. The result is a heartfelt and original portrait of a spunky and rebellious girl who surmounts countless obstacles to grow into a wise young adult.

Mixing memoir and graphic novel, Persepolis is an absolutely breathtaking piece of writing. The black and white illustrations are simple but they eloquently convey Marjane’s perceptions and memories of her childhood in Iran, where she gradually became dissident and nonconforming. Satrapi’s writing style is straightforward, and the story is told in a way that is easily accessible. Although terrorism and war form the basis of Marjane’s childhood experience, we learn through her story that the actions of a few extremists do not reflect the attitude of an entire nation.

As a graphic novel, it purposefully rejects the Islamic rule that there should be no iconic representations of the faith. It boldly denounces the brutality of the regime and calls into question the legitimacy of its rule. The book challenges the legitimacy of the regime’s war with Iraq as a move to keep control of its people by sending hundreds of thousands to die.

This is presented in a non-traditional format; however, its curricular advantages should not be overlooked. It gives the people of Iran a face and a voice through their spokeswoman, Marjane Satrapi, and the humanization of a people who often appear far away and different is a benefit not to be ignored.

Intensely personal, profoundly political, and wholly original, Persepolis is at once a story of growing up and a stunning reminder of the human cost of war and political repression. It shows how we carry on, through laughter and tears, in the face of absurdity. It has a lot to teach us.

Persepolis The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi, Jonathan Cape Editions

See also:

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Marjane Satrapi, Jonathan Cape Editions ; Persepolis animated film.

15 Bookish words that should exist

1. A word for the smell of a new book. And for the smell of an old book. If you’re telling me you’ve never smelt a book, you’re lying to me

2. A word for the guilt you feel when you accidentally tear part of a book. I never meant to hurt you, I swear…

3. A word for the exquisite ache you feel when waiting for the paperback version to be published. I need to read it now, and I need it to not weight and cost me 20 pounds.

4. A word for owning 10,000 bookmarks yet never finding one when you need it. Oh look, a receipt! I’ll use that.

5. A word for reading something you’ve always felt, but could never articulate. It all makes sense now.

6. A word for never wanting a book to end. Where is the rest? Was that it?

7. A word for finishing a book out of a sense of duty. Don’t look at me like that book. You will be read.

8. A word for that one book you read over and over and over. It’s not my fault it’s that good. I blame the author, really. 

9. A word for the totally unnecessary annoyed feeling you get when seeing a book you love reissued with a movie poster as its cover. If they’ve seen the film first, they’re wrong already.

10. A word for the despair you feel when someone spoils a book’s ending for you. The ultimate betrayal.

11. A word for laughing in public because of something you’ve just read. I’m not crazy, I swear.

12. A word for when you read a steamy section of a book in public and sense that EVERYONE KNOWS. I am, however, paranoiac.

13. A word for the creeping horror you feel when someone informs you that “I don’t like reading”. Where shall I start…?

14. A word for owning more books than you technically have space for. One does not simply cease buying books because one has run out of bookshelf space.

15. A word for reading a phrase in a book and needing to pause and just bask in its beauty for a moment. Man, that was deep.

 

Book Review: The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, offering fierce and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story includes Nelson’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy. It offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

The Argonauts is philosophical and deep. It took me a few pages to get into it, but once I did, I found it highly interesting. It is very short, but not exactly a quick read; it requires a lot of thought and attention.

I expected The Argonauts to read more like a typical memoir, but Nelson actually dives heavily into feminism and gender theory, with a collection of swirling thoughts. The book is all detached paragraphs, no indentations and no visible chapter breaks. For a work that was largely composed in sections, The Argonauts is a keenly conceived whole.

Writing in the same spirit as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to an exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson tells, in no particular order, of getting sober, falling in love and getting married, supporting her partner’s morphing gender expression, becoming a stepmother, getting pregnant, giving birth and parenting a newborn.

And this is how one realizes just how powerful this little book is.

The Argonauts is a thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.

 The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson, Melville House UK, £9.99