This week! Books!
Another week, another celebrity children’s book announcement, this time actor Keira Knightley writing a book called I Love You Just the Same for Simon & Schuster UK. Maybe it was the anodyne title, maybe it was a “last straw” that had been building, but for some reason this time around it struck a chord. Children’s book authors first sounded off online (Charlotte Levin announced she was becoming a film star), followed by articles by Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight in the Guardian and David Barnett in The Independent, among others, stoking the backlash.
Not even an extinction level asteroid could stop celebrity children’s books from being published, but I do find the backlash interesting. Is it another sign of the cultural pendulum swinging back toward authenticity? (For the record, by all accounts Keira Knightley actually wrote her book). Curious to hear your thoughts.
The latest innovation in querying? Authors are putting their PowerPoint skills to use and creating “agent and author guides” that are essentially pitch guides that summarize the plot, nuts and bolts, and create a sorta vibe. Erin Somers at Publishers Lunch credits Shardai Smith with starting the trend, and quotes a few agents who say they like them.
My take? Sure! If you think it sounds fun, go for it. You should have a website anyway, why not create a quick summary packet for agents who might be interested. But note that you don’t have to do this, and there’s ultimately no substitute for a good query letter. (If anything, distilling your story into a brief pitch puts an ever greater premium on crafting a good pithy summary).
Over at Writer Unboxed, the indispensable author advocate Victoria Strauss recommends a very good list of resources for writers.
It’s a boom time in book publishing, at least, if you write romantasy. If you don’t? Agent DongWon Song talks about waiting out trends and hoping to ride the next one.
In the Baffler, Dan Sinykin reviews Evan Friss’s new history of bookstores, The Bookshop, noting that it misses the extent to which the “indie” bookshop is a 21st Century creation that really marks the near-total victory of the hyper-capitalist box bookstore ethos, and where it “helps to be independently wealthy or a famous author.”
Books on (and adjacent to) politics are a huge part of the publishing ecosystem, but how exactly do publishers go about planning for something as uncertain as an election? Well. They only kinda sort of plan it, and there are always surprises like Hillbilly Elegy. Sophie Vershbow at Esquire peeks behind the curtain. And good luck to non-political nonfiction authors in an election year.
The author who writes as Freida McFadden would rather you didn’t know who she is. Nevertheless, she’s rocketed up the bestseller past the likes of Colleen Hoover and James Patterson, thanks in part to her fanbase, the “McFans.”
Like many of you, I remain unspeakably appalled by the ongoing genocide in Palestine being funded with our tax dollars. To even just stick to our little slice of the world as it relates to this conflict, the cost to Palestinian writers has been incalculable. At least 130 Palestinian journalists have been killed, and Ruwaida Kamal Amer checks in on three who are still working. It’s also worth reading Adam Schatz’s article on the forever war after the deaths of Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar for the London Review of Books.
And I love this article by Jessa Crispin, which zooms past the idiotic, perennial moral panics about whether teens are reading (“The kids! They don’t want to read the books! Because of woke!”) and zeroes in on the real problem: it’s always been difficult to get anyone to read William Faulkner but dammit they should. Not because it’s “important,” but because you just should, even if you hate it.
This week in bestsellers
Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):
Adult print and e-book fiction:
- The Waiting by Michael Connelly
- The Boyfriend by Freida McFadden
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
- Counting Miracles by Nicholas Sparks
- The Housemaid by Freida McFadden
Adult print and e-book nonfiction:
- War by Bob Woodward
- Framed by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey
- From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
- The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Melania by Melania Trump
Young adult hardcover:
- Murtagh by Christopher Paolini
- Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter
- Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma
- The Glass Girl by Kathleen Glasgow
- Heir by Sabaa Tahir
Middle grade hardcover:
- The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science by Kate McKinnon
- Priceless Facts About Money by Mellody Hobson
- Detective Duck: The Case of the Missing Tadpole by Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver. Illustrated by Dan Santat.
- Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
- The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
This week on the blog
In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:
And keep up with the discussion in all the places!
- Follow me on Threads and Bluesky
- Follow my page on Facebook
- Join the Facebook Group
- Check out the Bransforums
And finally, two very different reads for you to chew on this weekend. The incomparable journalist Clint Smith traveled to Rwanda to ascertain how survivors and perpetrators of the genocide are living side by side thirty years after the genocide (gift link), and Alex Barasch at The New Yorker has a deep dive on the K-pop hitmaker behind BTS, Bang Si-hyuk, who is now making a splash in the U.S. (not a gift link).
Have a great weekend!
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