The Bluestocking, vol 315: Baby Literary Reindeer Switch Timezones

everyone in Spain feels jetlagged all the time

Happy Friday!

The next episode of Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat is my stealthy favourite, about the strange online rabbit hole that led investigative journalist Aric Toler to discover the identity of the leaker of military secrets about Ukraine. It involved a meme forum, a Flickr account and a videogame about zombies.

Today’s newsletter ended up with a literary publishing theme, which makes it even more depressing than usual.

Helen

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Photo by Tjaako Minnema on Unsplash

No One Buys Books (Elysian Press, Substack)

I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

Truly sobering stuff from the court documents that came out of the (failed) Penguin buyout of Simon & Schuster: Ninety-six percent of books in the US sell fewer than 1,000 copies, and publishers act like VC investors. (They place a lot of bets, and hope that one or two come off in spectacular fashion.)

Sometimes, even celebrity books flop. Try not to wince when you read this testimony from a literary agent: “Sometimes it’s just a timing issue, like Marie Kondo. She did a book about Joy at Work, about making your office sparked with joy because it’s not cluttered. It published in March of 2020.”

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Bluestocking recommends: Netflix’s Baby Reindeer, which Sarah Ditum argues, is a superb drama that probably shouldn’t have been made. The KateGate sleuths have moved on to trying to identify Richard Gadd’s stalker and rapist, and have caught at least one innocent bloke in the crossfire already.

I think it could only exist and get commissioned as a first-person true story, because it’s incredibly honest about our potential to be complicit in our own abuse—Donny is both a victim of stalking and someone who turned to his stalker for attention, like an alcoholic turns to the bottle, to push away negative emotions. (In this case, caused by the failure of his career to take off, and the legacy of a previous sexual assault.) Donny is failed by the people around him—the laddish workmates, the police—but he also fails himself.

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Photo by Kourosh Qaffari on Unsplash

Five Literary Historical Novels, Recommended by Paul Carlucci (Five Books)

The Voyageur was initially supposed to be published by a small Canadian press. About a year into the process, George Floyd was murdered. Around the same time, in Canada, there was sonar confirmation of a lot of unmarked graves around former residential school sites. The atmosphere was really charged. My publisher had always wanted to use a sensitivity reader, but initially, they said it was just to confirm cultural accuracy. For example, when I have Miigwan refer to his manitou and to Gitche Manitou—the publisher said they wanted to make sure I had stuff like that right. I did too.

But as the political atmosphere grew more intense, the editing got more and more difficult, with the publisher picking at almost everything, and when I would push back, they said we’d have to wait to see what the sensitivity reader thought, a person they hadn’t even recruited yet after almost a year. The whole thing just got more and more ridiculous, and when they finally brought in not one but two readers, both of whom were completely anonymous—I still don’t know their names—the readers couldn’t discern characterization from authorial voice, basically ascribing the traits of villainous characters to me personally. They kept on getting the characters’ races confused, and they made numerous factual errors, like saying the Algonquin are not a specific people. They even made inaccurate and kind of insulting judgments about aspects of my own identity.

I casually clicked this link in the excellent Browser recommendations newsletter because I love historical fiction and wanted some new suggestions. But then I stumbled into this tale of sensitivity reading gone very wrong.

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Can’t remember if I’ve already said that CIVIL WAR is a banger, but it is. Here is Rob Hutton’s review.

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Quick Links

1. “In 1997 the Tories won 28% of the vote of those under 44, and 36% of the over-65s. In a recent YouGov poll they are on just 11% amongst under-50s and 34% for over-65s.” What will happen to the Tory party after a crushing defeat? (Sam Freedman, Substack, £)

2. “For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games.” Gurwinder on gamification (Substack)

3. “Everyone in Spain feels jetlagged all the time, even if they haven't been traveling.” A compelling argument that Spain is in the wrong time zone (Washington Post, from 2013, £)

4. ‘“The shadow campaign” is what [Gavin] Newsom calls the theory, happily promoted by Republicans and the occasional Democrat, that he’s been plotting a clandestine effort to supplant Biden as his party’s nominee.’ A profile of the California governor who would love to run for president (The Atlantic)

5. “The sound eventually cuts back just in time for a story about a racist bus conductor being given her job back after union intervention: it’s not quite true to say that the first word ever heard on BBC2 was a racial slur, but it’s certainly within the first 20.” Jonn Elledge unearths video footage of the first night of BBC2, which was almost surreal in its badness (Substack).

6. Why is Google Search so bad now? Ed Zitron blames its current head, who was brought in from . . . Yahoo (Where’s Your Ed At, Ghost).

7. “Consider a conspiracy theorist or political ideologue who will never change their mind, no matter the evidence. That’s a uniquely resilient form of stupidity, more familiar to Marjorie Taylor Greene than to, say, the average porpoise.” Brian Klaas on animal intelligence (Substack).

8. “I don’t believe in the idea of appropriation because I don’t believe in property. And anyway, I prefer to live in a society of thieves than in a society of landlords.” The French author Edouard Louis on identity. The fact that this is being published in a leftwing magazine suggests that le vibe est shifté. (Jacobin).

9. Let’s end with some joy: a British child has won a seagull impersonation contest (BBC).

See you next time!