The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

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The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale episodes

  • Kat McKenna on how Tik Tok's BookTok sells books
    I came across Kat McKenna's name in an article written by Alison Flood in The Guardian last year. I'd googled Tik Tok's "Book-Tok" because I'd heard it was moving a lot of YA books and wanted to learn more. Kat was quoted in Alison's piece. It was clear she knew what made BookTok tick. I contacted her and now she's on the show. Kat has worked in UK publishing for almost 15 years specialising in children's and teen/YA marketing and brand strategy, and "delivers exciting and audience driven marketing campaigns to most of the major publishers as a freelancer, working on brands including World Book Day, Jacqueline Wilson, Supertato and more." She bills herself as an early innovator of digital and social media in publishing, and today she's still very much on top of what's going on. She sent me a list of links to various examples of how young people are using Book Tok these days, here: Books that made me cry: (@justmemyselfandi) Here They Both Die At the End moodboard (@emmyslibrary): here Convincing you to read We Were Liars (@alifeofliterature): here If you like this Harry Styles song, read this book (@sophiebooks): here Want to work in books? (@hotkeybooks - publisher account!) here Why do books smell like they do (@hotkeybooks) here Translations of my book by country (@Caseymcquiston - author) here Aesthetic of The Inheritance Games (@.bookobsessed) here A book Tiktok made me read that was not good (@emdobereading - based on a sound trend - we can talk more about those tomorrow!) here Convincing you to read books based on their first line (@jennajustreads) here Heartstopper - page to screen love (@rafept) here So, lots to talk about. Re: my question about who owns Tik Tok: results are pretty murky. Yes, the Chinese government has a stake in it. How much control it has over operations is open to question. Lots, is what its American competitors would like people to believe. Relatively little it seems if you're a Tik Tok spokesperson. The Guardian again, here.
    49 min
  • Stephen Enniss on special collections libraries and value

    Stephen Enniss is director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Previous posts include Head Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Director of Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library where he made a series of impressive acquisitions including the archives of Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie and Ted Hughes. Since taking over at the Ransom Center in 2013, Stephen has overseen the acquisition of the archives of Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Michael Ondaatje, among others. We met via Zoom to discuss his role as director of a special collections library; where Martin Amis is, and Christopher Hitchens, Clive James and other members of their group. About fighting oblivion; about the value and challenges of email archives and negotiating or not negotiating with Andrew Wylie; about Texan "nationalism," and the goals of attracting books and people, and developing a "civilization;" about diversity, and hiring practices and collection development policies; about cataloguing, bureaucracies, acquisitions, books bridging political divides, the Gotham Book Mart, sweet little exhibition catalogues, and much more.

    1 hr 1 min
  • Sarah Miniaci on how to publicize a book in 2022
    Sarah Miniaci is a freelance book publicist with fifteen years of experience in the New York and Toronto markets. Ken Whyte's Sutherland House is one of her clients. Ken interviewed Sarah for a recent issue of Shush, his excellent Substack newsletter on the publishing business. Together they surveyed today's new publishing landscape. With the help of Michael Legat's An Author's Guide to Publishing, Sarah and I do the same here, only with our voices, tracing the evolution of book publicity from Legat's pre-2000 traditional publishing world, up to the present. We talk about the advent of the Internet and blogs, about gatekeepers and democratization, about how easy and boring life used to be for a publicist, about the shift to Social, about the importance of Goodreads, about producing trailers and Q & As for Youtube, about compiling lists, rocket science, passionate bloggers, influencers, the literary conversation, the continued relevance of the publishers' sales catalogue, ​geese, swans, "golden children," quality, and the imperative to make money, the Last Bookstore in L.A., and Toyota Corollas.
    1 hr 10 min
  • Bob Rae on Orwell's Politics and the English Language, totalitarianism and genocide
    Bob Rae is a Canadian diplomat, lawyer, former Premier of Ontario, and former interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. A Rhodes Scholar and graduate of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, he is currently Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations. He has been elected to federal and provincial parliaments 11 times (between 1978 and 2013), and reveres the English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic George Orwell.    Because of this I invited him to engage in a conversation with me about Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language."  Politicians have always abused language. Current political tensions have only ratcheted this up, here in Canada and around the world. It needs to be called-out, because, as Orwell reminds us, getting rid of bad habits in the use of language encourages clearer thinking, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration, something that we need big-time in 2022.    During our conversation we discuss: stale imagery, lack of precision, meaningless words, quotes from Alan Sandison's book George Orwell: After 1984, the use of cliche, Orwell's contradictions, the word "totalitarian," ramifications of using the term "genocide," U.N.-speak, the definition of "recent," and much more, on this, the most recent installment of The Biblio File Book Club.
    40 min
  • Stuart Kells reveals the truth about Allen Lane and Penguin Books
    Author/historian Stuart Kells has been chasing rare books and other bookish treasures since childhood. In the 1980s he went for classic sci-fi paperbacks from Ace and Dell, and authors such as Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein. When he moved to Melbourne in the summer of 1989 he was amazed by the city's bookshops, especially secondhand shops - notably Alice's and Sainsbury's in Carlton. When ​he wasn't looking for books​ here he was fossicking in the Co-op bookshop at Melbourne University, or hunting for ​them at markets and fetes. For the past 26 years​ he's been a regular at Camberwell Market where great books can be found, along with almost everything else. Vividly remembered finds include Iain Banks and Vikram Seth firsts; classic Australian crime pulps; rare maps; and advertising and ephemera of every kind. I connected with Stuart recently via Zoom to talk about Penguin and the Lane Brothers, ​his revealing, myth-busting book about the intimate partnership of Allen, Richard and John Lane – and how it explains the success of Penguin Books, the twentieth century's "greatest publishing house." We talk about the spirit of daring and creative opposition that drove the brothers to publish so many quality books on such a massive scale at such affordable prices – and how together they achieved a revolution in modern book publishing.
    1 hr 14 min
  • Laura J. Miller updates us on Reluctant Capitalists her book on bookselling
    Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail sectors, has evolved from an business dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. This transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process, especially so in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives this debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit? Laura and I discuss some of the answers to these questions which were first raised back in 2006 when her book Reluctant Capitalists Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption was published. Laura is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Brandeis University where she arrived in 2002, having previously taught at the University of Western Ontario and Vassar College. She teaches courses in the sociology of culture, the mass media, food studies, and urban sociology. Her research is centered on understanding the interaction between cultural and economic processes.
    53 min
  • Jonathan Kay on how to be a Ghostwriter
    Jonathan Kay is a Canadian journalist. He was editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine, and is a senior editor of Quillette. He was previously comment pages editor, columnist, and blogger for the Toronto-based Canadian daily newspaper National Post, and continues to contribute to the newspaper on a freelance basis. He's also a ghostwriter, best known in this capacity as the author of Justin Trudeau's memoir Common Ground. During our conversation we talk about Jon's ghostwriting practice - riffing off an article he wrote on the topic for Quillette entitled 'My Life as a Ghostwriter' ( https://quillette.com/2021/09/26/my-life-as-a-ghostwriter/ ) - about gaming influencing ghostwriting; storytelling, people hovering in the background, literary prostitution, humour checks, anonymity, Mitt Romney, eliciting details, the political messaging in Justin Trudeau's memoir, the best part about being a ghostwriter, lawyers wanting to know everything, well-rounded depictions, the truth, self-publishing; luck, alchemy and 50 Shades of Grey, The Making of the Bible by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, blurred stages and immersion, Tarantino, and kitchen design, among other things.
    1 hr 2 min
  • Kathryn Schulz on Death and Love, Memoirs and Essays, and

    Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a National Magazine Award for "The Really Big One," her story on seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Previously, she was the book critic for New York, the editor of the environmental magazine Grist, and a reporter and editor at the Santiago Times. She is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.

    We talk about Lost and Found, her just published memoir, about making the planet less lonely, dark places, a sense of the beautiful, math formulas, love, death, loss, discovery, commonplace experiences, the history of words, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, being proud of others, privacy, foggy grief, technicolour worlds, noticing details, surprises, essays and memoirs, bearing witness, and and.

    54 min
  • Larry Grobel on how he writes his short stories

    Larry Grobel is a journalist, author and teacher. He has written more than 25 books including Conversations with Capote (which received a PEN Special Achievement award) and The Art of the Interview (which has been used as a text in many journalism schools), most of his books however are short story collections. His latest is called The Narcissist. Over the years he's written for dozens of publications including the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, but he's best known for his Playboy magazine interviews. Larry created the M.F.A. in Professional Writing for Antioch University and taught in the English Department at UCLA for ten years.

    We met via Zoom to talk about how he conceives of, and writes, his short stories.

    1 hr 2 min
  • James Wood on his role as a book critic
    James Wood is a literary critic, essayist and novelist. He was The Guardian's chief literary critic between 1992 and 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic between 1995 and 2007. Since roughly that time he's taught the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker magazine. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. Books include How Fiction Works, the novel Upstate, and essay collections The Irresponsible Self, The Broken Estate and most recently Serious Noticing. We talk about James's role as a book critic - how and why he does it - about realism, the canon, 'lifeness', sameness, his intro to Serious Noticing, our shared love of the Russians, looking for great writing everywhere, Virginia Woolf, Joyce, Zadie Smith; Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad, what writers do when they walk into a room...plus, I quote Clifton Fadiman and Henry James at far too great a length.
    1 hr 5 min

About The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

From the publisher's feed

THE BIBLIO FILE is a podcast about "the book," and an inquiry into the wider world of book culture. Hosted by Nigel Beale it features wide ranging, long-form conversations with authors, poets, book…