This week in books!
The Man Booker prize is one of the most prestigious awards out there, and its highly anticipated longlist was released this week. One American author made the cut, Lucy Ellman, along with luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. The winner will be announced in September.
In other awards news, the Center for Fiction released its longlist for the 2019 First Novel Prize.
It can sometimes feel like nothing really changes in the publishing industry, but it has been a pretty eventful decade in the book business. Mike Shatzkin, who literally wrote the book on the publishing industry, published an excellent summary of the major changes in the publishing industry in the past ten years.
It’s the bicentennial of Herman Melville’s birth and, as Jill Lepore notes in The New Yorker, the centennial since his revival after he died in relative obscurity. He was one very strange dude, and I really liked this look back at his home life.
Amazon made a high profile deal with bestseller Dean Koontz, which is notable because many bookstores refuse to stock books published by Amazon.
On the other side of the publishing spectrum, Jonathan Gallassi took a look at the rich history of Faber and Faber, one of the last remaining independents from the old days.
This week in bestsellers
Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories:
Adult print and e-book fiction:
- The New Girl by Daniel Silva
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
- The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited! by Clint McElroy et al. Illustrated by Carey Pietsch
- Under Currents by Nora Roberts
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- Educated by Tara Westover
- American Carnage by Tim Alberta
- Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
- Justice on Trial by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino
- The Pioneers by David McCullough
Young adult hardcover:
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- Five Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis
- Avatar, The Last Airbender: The Rise of Kyoshi by F. C. Yee with Michael Dante DiMartino
- Wilder Girls by Rory Power
- Ghosts of the Shadow Market by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link and Robin Wasserman
Middle grade hardcover:
- Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid by Jeff Kinney
- Wonder by R.J. Palacio
- Refugee by Alan Gratz
- PopularMMOs Presents Enter the Mine by Pat and Jen from PopularMMOs
- Katt vs. Dogg by James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein
This week on the blog
Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
Comment! of! the! week! goes to Marilynn Byerly, who recounts an experience with a publisher grabbing some rights:
Some years back, one of my publishers, an ebook and POD small press, blithely announced on his author list that he was going to invest in some expensive text-to-speech software and start selling our books in that format. I freaked out because nothing in our contracts included either audio or text-to-speech rights. So, I began to dig into this issue and raised an intelligent enough fuss to stop him from doing this.
And finally, the absolutely bonkers Cats trailer set the internet on fire this week. Tavi Gevinson notes what a big deal this must be for that plucky poet T.S. Eliot:
Have a great weekend!
Need help with your book? I’m available for manuscript edits, query critiques, and coaching!
For my best advice, check out my guide to writing a novel (now available in audio) and my guide to publishing a book.
And if you like this post: subscribe to my newsletter!
Herman Melville was a great author, but I thought MOBY DICK was a bit short and could have done with more details about the whales…
As for the Dean Koontz deal, I think it’s ironic that Amazon is building bricks and mortar bookstores and starting publishing houses, thereby becoming more and more like the Big Five publishers rather than the other way around.
Congratulations to Marilynn Byerly for her comment and her stand against theft!
T. S. who? He’ll never catch on! But seriously, Eliott appears to have been an Anti-Semite. I’m now tempted to assume that all public figures born before, say, WW1 are BAD people in some way unless otherwise proven!
Thanks for this, Nathan!
Thanks for the link to the Melville article. Even his description of a cow chewing cud evinces literary genius.