Word Count 99: Saving a comedy archive, Sinners milestone, Cheers cold open
Plus should you italicise foreign words?, books sales explained, AI news, Unbound's debts, and Copurrnicus's very trying week.
Hi there,
I hope you had a lovely long weekend, if you had one where you are!
This last week has been a bit challenging for me, with three visits to the vet in six days for Copurrnicus. He got bitten by another cat – we suspect Mr Beef Cheeks, the local intact tom who’s got a bit of an aggressive demeanour – and it turned into a nasty abscess. He’s had a lot of drugs, although the new palatable antibiotics are a small miracle: he just eats them! But both the painkillers and the antibiotics cause vomiting, and so he’s had to go back for an anti-emetic jab, and then to switch painkillers.
He and I are really hoping that the rest of this week is calmer!
Suw’s News: Lessons from the Sycamore Gap
The illegal felling of the Sycamore Gap tree has elicited a lot of emotions from people who felt connected to the tree or outraged at the vandalism. There were also some fairly cross reactions from ecologists and rewilders. Last week I wrote about why, instead of getting grumpy, we should learn some lessons about how and why people come to feel connected to nature.
Next week, I’m off to the University of York to talk about Fieldwork as part of their Festival of Ideas. I’m really looking forward to taking part in the ABC: Art, biodiversity and collaboration panel discussion on Weds 4 June. I’ll be joining artist and art curator Dr Helena Cox, artist and digital culture lecturer Dr Richard Carter, biologist and artist Dr Veronica Ongaro, and photographer Paul Shields for what is going to be a fascinating and fun hour and a half! If you’re in York, why not come along?
Read this: Saving a comedy archive
Whilst I’m talking about the University of York, they are currently fundraising to save the archives of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, “two of the most influential figures in the history of British comedy” who created comedy classics including Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe & Son.
Although the majority of the money needed to secure this archive has been raised by other means, you can chip in to help get them over the finish line via their crowdfunder. They’re currently 40 percent of the way towards their £3,000 goal, and you can donate any sum, starting from £1.
Here’s ITV on the campaign:
As Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Research Collections at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, told BCG:
“This archive is so significant because Galton & Simpson invented modern British situation comedy as we know it, with their wit and humour leaving a profound and lasting imprint on the shows we watch today.”
Read this, two: Sinners passes box office milestone
Sinners has become the first original movie to make more than $200 million in the US since 2017 when Disney and Pixar’s animated Coco pulled down $210 million domestically. The last live-action movie to achieve this level of success was Gravity in 2013, achieving $274 million domestically. Sinners has so far made $215 million.
It’s brilliant to see a movie that’s not based on some existing property, whether franchise, video game, book or whatever, doing so well. Though I know it’s far too much to hope this might signal a return to Hollywood commissioning new and original writing.
What I’m watching: Cheers cold opens
With the sad news that actor George Wendt, who played Norm Peterson in Cheers from 1982 to 1993, died recently, lots of people have been sharing their favourite Cheers moments. But of all the clips that have been doing the rounds, this one has to be the most perfect.
It’s an absolute masterclass in how to set up a joke and how Wendt’s ability to just ‘be’ in the scene is utterly crucial to the punchline landing.
Tip-top tip: Don’t italicise foreign languages
This is a very timely tip for me. Tag, my magic-realism novel, includes some dialogue in Welsh and I genuinely don’t know why I italicise it. Next round of edits, I’ll be de-italicising the whole lot!
Industry insight: How many copies does a book sell?
I really enjoyed this piece from publishing services company Scribe Media about book sales, how little sales data is available and thus how hard it is to actually know from traditional publishers or Amazon how many copies a book has sold. They analyse sales patterns across their own 250+ titles to give some idea of what kind of sales numbers you can expect if you self-publish a non-fiction book of your own.
Be prepared for a very, very low figure.
Latest AI news
AI continues to be rubbish, obviously, though it seems (link two) that people are finally catching on.
Amazon/Audible screw over voice actors by making AI production tools available to publishers so that they can create fully AI-narrated audiobooks, “with AI translation to follow”. An AI may be able to produce the sound of a voice reading a text, but it can’t make creative choices about which words to emphasise or how to use tone to convey nuance and meaning.
Using AI screws your professional reputation. Outside of the fanbois, people really, really don’t like genAI. Researchers at Duke University found “Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI”, to which I can only reply, “Good”. If there’s no legal cost to using mass plagiarism engines, we need to make sure there’s a social cost.
Soundcloud has “refused to rule out the possibility that anything and everything on its platform might be scraped by Large Language Models”, and creators like Julian Simpson have taken down their audio files in response.
Read this, also: Unbound debts unpacked
Printweek took at look at the mess left behind by Unbound, the crowdfunded publisher that went into administration and then sold its assets to a new company, Boundless Publishing Group.
The tl;dr is that if you backed a book via Unbound or you were publishing via them, you are very likely screwed:
However, 238 authors and agents were collectively owed £657,000 by the failed business and are also unlikely to receive a dividend, along with the nearly 8,000 website customers owed £391,000.
Though the absolute gem of hypercapitalism is that things were ticking nicely over for Unbound as investors continued to pour in cash, but when:
it eventually reached profitability in 2023, it failed to secure the further capital necessary to stabilise its position, and ongoing trading losses and cash flow demands forced it to failure.
There’s honestly nothing like reaching profitability to utterly fuck a company.
Obligatory cat picture
Obviously this week’s picture has to be of Copurrnicus in his hand-crafted protective jacket, which I improvised out of some spare jersey, sterile wound dressings, and a few safety pins. I later found his Mynwood cat jacket which I put over the top to stop him wriggling out of it, but he’s largely been a very stoic and accepting lad.
I did buy a proper cat onesie for him, but despite being advertised as for an 8kg cat (he’s 6.7kg), it was way, way too small.
I’ve no doubt we’ll all be a lot happier when he’s healed well enough not to need dressing up at all!
That’s it from all of us here! See you again in a fortnight.
Best,
Suw
Italics! Good advice.