12 Celebrating Black Voices 27 Remembering RBG 33 Revising
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FALl–WINTER 2020 12 Celebrating Black Voices 27 Remembering RBG 33 Revising Section 512 Articles THE AUTHORS GUILD President BULLETIN Douglas Preston 9 Vice President Two Lawsuits Chief Executive Officer Monique Truong Mary Rasenberger 12 The Case for Revising Section 512 Treasurer General Counsel Peter Petre 15 In Memoriam: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Cheryl L. Davis Secretary 1933–2020 Editor Rachel Vail Martha Fay Members of the Council 17 Celebrating Black Voices Copy Editor Rich Benjamin Heather Rodino Amy Bloom 20 Q&A: Judy Allen Dodson and Kelly Starling Design Mary Bly Studio Elana Schlenker Alexander Chee Lyons Pat Cummings Cover Art + Illustration Sylvia Day 28 Busier Than Ever: In the Time of COVID-19 Lindsey Bailey W. Ralph Eubanks lindseyswop.com Peter Gethers 44 Authors Guild Foundation Benefit, 2020 All non-staff contributors Lauren Groff to the Bulletin retain Tayari Jones 52 Regional Chapters Update copyright to the articles Min Jin Lee that appear in these pages. Nicholas Lemann Guild members seeking Steven Levy information on contributors’ John R. MacArthur other publications are D. T. Max Departments invited to contact the Daniel Okrent Guild office. Published by Michelle Richmond Julia Sanches 2 The Authors Guild, Inc. Short Takes James Shapiro Hampton Sides The Authors Guild, 4 From the President T.J. Stiles the oldest and largest Jonathan Taplin association of published 6 From the Home Office Danielle Trussoni authors in the United Nicholas Weinstock 32 Legal Watch States, works to protect and promote the Ex-Officio & 35 Advocacy News professional interests Honorary Members of its members. The Guild’s of the Council 38 Books by Members forerunner, The Authors Roger Angell League of America, was Roy Blount Jr. 41 Members Make News founded in 1912. The Bulletin Barbara Taylor Bradford was first published Robert A. Caro 41 In Memoriam in 1912 as The Authors Susan Cheever League Newsletter. Anne Edwards James Gleick The Authors Guild Erica Jong 31 East 32nd Street, Suite 901 Stephen Manes New York, NY 10016 Victor S. Navasky t: (212) 563-5904 Sidney Offit f: (212) 564-5363 Mary Pope Osborne e: [email protected] Letty Cottin Pogrebin authorsguild.org Roxana Robinson Jean Strouse Nick Taylor Scott Turow Advisory Council Sherman Alexie Judy Blume Jennifer Egan Louise Erdrich Annette Gordon-Reed CJ Lyons Frederic Martini Cathleen Schine Meg Wolitzer “ OVERHEARD ” “Our motto is changing minds one book at a time. That’s what we want to do. That’s what we are here to do. And that’s what needs to happen.” Clarissa Cropper, co-owner of Frugal Bookstore, Roxbury, Massachusetts, NBC/10 BOSTON, June 8, 2020 HOT MARKETS AND in 2019, with YA fiction out front, a Amazon cause got a boost from the trend that held through the end of American Book Sellers Association’s EMPTY SHOPS October. And it was plenty good for “Boxed Out” campaign, in which “If you want to sell books during a Amazon, once it returned to ship- bookstores around the country pandemic, it turns out that one of ping books. boarded up their window displays best places to do it is within easy The book business cohort that and stacked faux-Amazon boxes reach of eggs, milk and diapers,” has not benefited from the boom out front, with signs reading “Don’t wrote New York Times reporter are the indie and traditional book- Accept Amazon’s Brave New World.” Elizabeth A. Harris in late July. stores that rely primarily on walk-in As hundreds of indie and chain customers. Mandated or simply pru- dent shutdowns across the country, BOOM IN BLACK bookstores across the country were AUTHOR TITLES forced to close their doors, tempo- with painful furloughing of staffers rarily or for good, and Amazon cut and dramatic revenue losses, were AND BOOKSTORES back on book shipping in favor of followed by cautious and costly overnight deliveries of toilet paper, re-openings, as store owners re- One good-news outcome after a shoes, and thermometers, big-box invented their businesses, spend- harrowing summer of Black deaths stores, officially designated “essen- ing huge sums to reconfigure their has been the boom in sales at tial,” doubled down on book orders. spaces for social distancing and Black-owned bookstores around The dominant players were Costco, stocking up on PPE and plexiglass the country, boosted by a flood of Walmart and Target, which have shields, hand sanitizers, and mailing lists of books by Black authors and long had book sections. A signifi- envelopes. Black-owned bookstores posted on cant number of pharmacy and su- Some of the biggest names in traditional and social media. permarket chains increased their the indie world, including Powell’s Oprah’s list of 44 titles included book orders as well, stocking up on in Portland, Vroman’s in Southern Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We pandemic-driven educational titles, California, and McNally Jackson in Should All Be Feminists, Marlon adult and children’s fiction, puzzles, New York, are just hanging on, and James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, and board games. ABA reports that at least 35 of its and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an The chief executive of member stores have closed dur- Antiracist. Essence’s list included ReaderLink, a book distributor that ing the pandemic, with 20 percent James McBride’s Deacon King Kong, caters to non-bookstore chains, told of the remaining indies at risk of Brandy Colbert’s The Only Black the Times that in the first week of failing. Girls in Town, and Kent Garrett’s April his company saw a 34 per- Trying to stave off ruin, nearly nonfiction title, The Last Negroes at cent spike in sales over last year’s a thousand small indies have signed Harvard. The Washington Post’s list earnings. Eight months later, the on as affiliates with Bookshop. ran to 13 titles, and two weeks after mid-western giant Meijer — a brick- org, an online portal for book sales George Floyd’s death, the New York and-mortar “everything” store to launched back in January by Andy Times’s bestseller list was domi- rival Amazon — is proceeding with Hunter, the founder of Literary Hub nated by classic titles and new re- its pre-pandemic plan for enlarging and Electric Lit, in hopes of divert- leases on race issues. “We’ve seen its book presence at a quarter of its ing some of Amazon’s massive numbers we’ve never seen before,“ stores. share of the book business to indies. Boston bookstore owner Clarissa It was also a good year for Bookshop currently sells books at a Cropper told a local TV reporter in print books, with Publishers Weekly 10 percent discount, with 10 percent early June. “We are fulfilling orders reporting a roll-back-the-clock of the sale price going to a com- all day and all night. We are order- surge of print book sales for the munal pool for official indie affiliates ing books all day and all night.” second week of August, a 14.3 per- or to an indie of the buyer’s choice. The surge began within days cent increase over the same week In mid-October, the save-us-from- of George Floyd’s murder and 2 Authors Guild Bulletin shows no signs of slowing in the editor at the Siftings Herald in as the title made it to the top of the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.K., two Arkadelphia, Arkansas, when the Times bestseller list, helped along landmarks were registered in June paper was shut down in 2018, after by a $94,000 bulk purchase by the when Reni Eddo-Lodge, the au- 127 years. “The chroniclers of high Republican National Committee. thor of Why I’m No Longer Talking school sports teams are missing. To Other recent releases include to White People About Race, be- say that this is a sad thing for these John Bolton’s The Room Where It came the first Black British female counties is to understate the case.” Happened, which broke the one author to appear at the top of the It also eases the path to cor- million sales mark in late August, nonfiction paperback lists, while ruption. In a report on the April and Disloyal, by Trump’s former Bernadine Evaristo (Girl, Woman) 2019 staff culling of the once-great lawyer Michael Cohen, which re- did the same in the fiction list. Cleveland Plain Dealer, Governing. leased September 8 at the top of Eddo-Lodge, 32, posted a poignant com reported that one in five the New York Times bestseller list. acknowledgement of the moment Americans have no access to local Rage, Bob Woodward’s second on Twitter: “Can’t help but be dis- reporting, leading to “more parti- book on President Trump in two mayed by . the tragic circum- san polarization, fewer candidates years, came out in early September, stances in which this achievement running for office, higher munici- and though the author’s biggest came about. I really don’t like pal borrowing costs, and increased revelation — that Trump had told the idea of personally profiting ev- pollution. him in February that he knew that ery time a video of a black person’s “ ‘Inarguably, no matter what COVID-19 was not a seasonal nui- death goes viral” — and urged her side of the political fence you sit, sance but a deadly airborne vi- readers to make a contribution to [in the absence of] a decent robust rus — had already broken, the book the Minnesota Freedom Fund equal newspaper, politicians are going to sold 750,000 copies the first day, to what they paid for her book.