Dragon Tamers -- part 93

In writing about Dragon Tamers yet again I recognise that I am in some danger of making a mountain out of a molehill. But there have been several readers of this blog who have not only shown an interest in past discussion of this book, but have followed up aspects of the story on their own. Furthermore, there is perhaps at least one point of principle buried beneath a pile of trivia, and I might be able to dig it out. So I think it is at least appropriate to discuss the matter one more time, and then perhaps we can leave it in peace.

The story so far is this. In December 2004, Aultbea Publishing, a Scottish firm which had previously specialised in publishing scientific and technical journals, published a book called Dragon Tamers by a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Emma Maree Urquhart.

In February, the Times published an article about this book in which various claims were made about sales, film rights et cetera. I wrote about the Times article on 7 February; I made the point that some of these claims seemed to me to be more likely to be publisher's hype than established fact, and I wondered aloud why a paper of the Times's standard should be publishing a press release apparently verbatim and without asking any obvious questions.

By the way, some of the links in my posts to old newspaper articles may no longer work.

Later in February, a similar article appeared in the Independent, repeating most of the earlier claims and carrying a headline to the effect that 'Schoolgirl's tale about dragons becomes hot stuff in Hollywood.' I wrote about this article on 18 February, saying, among other things, that, since there was no evidence that anyone had even bought an option on the film rights, this headline seemed, shall we say, a trifle premature.

The Independent published yet another piece (written, like the first, by the paper's Scotland correspondent, Paul Kelbie) on 21 June. This June piece offered nothing new. I commented on it in my post of 24 June.

By that time I was getting a little tired of what was, after all, a relatively trivial matter, but various readers pursued various aspects of the story (see the comments on my post of 21 June), so I decided to try to establish a few facts instead of groping in the dark.

Earlier this week, I sent an email to Charles Faulkner, who is the owner of Aultbea Publishing, and he has now replied. I shall reproduce my own email, and his reply, below, after which I shall make a few comments. And that, I hope, will be that.

I would like to say at the outset that I am grateful to Charles Faulkner for sending me a very civil and reasonable reply. In the circumstances he might have been forgiven for being a little testy. He could also have legitimately claimed that the questions that I asked were matters of commercial confidence and essentially none of my business. It is to his credit that he has replied as fully as he has.

Here then is what I wrote to Charles Faulkner of Aultbea on 27 June.

Dear Mr Faulkner

I run a daily book blog, the Grumpy Old Bookman (link below), which reports on and comments on the UK book business. Earlier this year, the GOB blog was listed by the Guardian as one of the top ten literary blogs worldwide.

The first press reports about Emma Maree Urquhart's Dragon Tamers appeared in February. On 7 February I wrote an article on my blog about the report in the Times.

I began by saying this: 'If Emma Maree and her publisher have managed to sell a decent number of copies of her book, congratulations to them. I am delighted. I am always pleased when anyone achieves even a modest degree of success in the book world, because God knows it doesn't happen very often.'

However, I noted that the Times report contained little in the way of hard fact, and I was sceptical that a publisher with virtually no previous experience in book publishing could have sold 50,000 copies in six weeks.

On 18 February I noted that a similar report had appeared in the Independent with a headline which was patently absurd.

Last week (24 June) I noted that there was a further lengthy report in the Independent which repeated some of the earlier claims but added nothing new.

It is not, of course, uncommon for publishers and commercial enterprises generally to sing the praises of their product, and to give optimistic assessments of how well those products are performing in the marketplace. However, in my blog reports I have expressed some dismay that newspapers of the quality and standing of the Times and the Independent should have accepted a publisher's publicity statements at face value, without asking some obvious questions.

That being the case, I would like to put to you some questions which would occur to anyone with a reasonable working knowledge of the UK book trade. I hope you will feel able to reply, and if you do the answers will be reported on my blog.

I would like to address three issues: sales of Dragon Tamers in the home market; sale of film rights; translation deals.

1. Sales of Dragon Tamers in the home market

Were sales and distribution of the book handled entirely by Aultbea, or did you use the services of some other organisation?

Was the quoted sales figure of 50,000 made up of many individual orders from high-street booksellers, Amazon etc., or was it, in part or in full, a bulk purchase by one company?

Can you give an indication of total sales to date? By 'sales' I mean the number of copies actually bought by readers, and recorded independently by Nielsen Bookscan; I do not mean the number held in stock by booksellers or in your warehouse.

2. Film rights

Have you succeeded in selling the film rights of Dragon Tamers outright?

Or have you sold on option on the film rights?

In either case, can you name the purchaser, and the price paid? A broad indication would suffice: e.g. a four figure sum (i.e. £1000 to £9,999 range), five-figure sum, etc.

3. Translation deals

Have you succeeded in selling any foreign rights in Dragon Tamers? If so, can you name the companies, languages, and give a broad indication of the price paid?

As one who has had practical experience of publishing in the past (and I still run a small press today), I am well aware of how difficult it is to sell books. To repeat: I admire anyone who can achieve even a modest degree of success in today's market. And I understand full well that, in order to attract attention to a book, it is necessary to plug it hard. However,unless you can provide me with more evidence than has been made public so far, I shall remain of the view that the success of Dragon Tamers has been overstated.

Michael Allen

As noted above, Charles Faulkner has now replied to my email, and here is what he had to say:

Dear Michael

Re: Dragon Tamers

Thank you for your interest in our young authoress Emma Marie Urquhart and her book Dragon Tamers.

I note from your letter that you are listed by the Guardian as 'one of the top ten literary blogs worldwide.' I am sure that you have worked hard to achieve this accolade with 'Grumpy Old Bookman' which I really enjoyed reading.

I thought that it might be a good idea for me to set the record straight and answer your questions as there has been a lot written about Aultbea and our young authors. To some extent I think that you are right in pointing out that the hard questions have not been asked yet.

The main thrusts of your various articles were, I think based on the quoted 'sales' figure of 50,000 copies. What I said at the time was that we had printed 50,000 copies and that I expected to have them sold quickly as the sales trend was encouraging. The press have used that figure and connotation since.

I will briefly cover your other points. There was a film contract that was at final stages of negotiation for a US Corp. to take an option. We pulled out. There is another multimedia deal that is in late stages of negotiation but I cannot give details until it is signed.

We have succeeded in selling the foreign rights to Dragon Tamers and again, once the deals have been signed, this information will be made public.

I want to hear what people think of our young author's tales and stories. Once we have read all of the critics, once we have given these young people a fair chance, then maybe we can look at the commercial aspects of this. The time for talking about numbers is not now; it is confusing the issue as was evident by the graphic definitions and explanations in your questionnaire.

[Paragraph omitted in which he gives me his private phone number.]

Do call me if you have any questions whatsoever.

Once again, thank you for your interest in Aultbea Publishing and our authors.

Kind regards

Charles Faulkner, Aultbea Publishing, Inverness

In addition to writing to Charles Faulkner, I also sent an email to Paul Kelbie, Scotland correspondent of the Independent, with the following covering note:

Dear Mr Kelbie

Set out below is the text of an email that I have today sent to Charles Faulkner, owner of Aultbea Publishing Company, about the novel Dragon Tamers. If you have any comment to make I shall be pleased to hear from you.

So far I have had no reply from Mr Kelbie. Well, he's probably on holiday. It's that time of year.

Finally (at last! I hear you sigh; if you have read this far), let us make a few concluding comments.

What we have here, not unexpectedly, is a publisher banging the drum for his book. Why not? It's what he's supposed to do. Authors complain loud enough when their publishers don't do it. And, OK, so he exaggerated a little here and there. It is hard to complain about that, when we have a Government that does the self-same thing.

What irked me originally, and irks me now, is that two newspapers (at least) should have printed what was clearly an overly rosy version of the facts. What, I think it is reasonable to ask, did they think they were up to?

Either the reporters who wrote these stories weren't doing a very good job, or else they knew full well that they were printing unsubstantiated claims, and were just desperate for something to fill up the white space. Which, in a quality newspaper, is deplorable.

Well, as I say, it's all essentially trivial, apart from the point of principle about what appears in the press. I do hope that Emma Maree Urquhart, and the other young writers who are now published by Aultbea, have been told that you shouldn't believe everything that the newspapers tell you.

Perhaps now we can all turn to something else.

The Doctorow system

Cory Doctorow is a high-tech sort of guy and I have sung his praises more than once on this blog. See, for instance, his brilliant analysis of why digital-rights management systems don't work.

Doctorow is also a novelist, and as such he puts, so to speak, his money where his mouth is. On 19 June, he announced on his blog (boingboing.net) that his third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, had just been published by Tor Books.

More to the point, perhaps, than this 'so what?' news, is the fact that the text of this book, like the text of his two previous novels, is available for free online under copyright terms that allow the 'unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text.'

Major publishing houses, as we have noted before, are sweating bullets over the danger of having their stuff ripped off digitally, but Doctorow has managed to persuade his publishers that they can relax.

This particular writer invites his readers to send his digital book file to their friends, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend's PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. What is more, through the terms of Doctorow’s Creative Commons licence, people in developing nations are free to sell print versions of the book for their own profit! As long as they sell them only in developing nations.

Now here is some original thinking. I was going to say at last; but it isn't at last at all, because Cory Doctorow has been preaching this gospel for a while now.

The story comes (via booktrade.info) from the Book Standard, where you can read more about it and follow various links to a lot more good stuff as well.

There is much in this story to digest and think about. But one does wonder somehow whether anyone in the big-time publishers is really prepared to do any original thinking. Or at any rate to act upon such thoughts. It's a bit like politicians and the reform of the welfare state. It is, after all, so much safer to go on doing the same old thing. Trying something new could go horribly wrong. A chap might end up out of a job! Oh, calamity!

The Old Pals Act of 1898

This is a piece about doing favours for your friends. In other words, it's about operating under the terms of the Old Pals Act of 1898.

In fact, the relevant legislation goes back far further than 1898. There was a medieval statute, which was based on Roman law; and before that there were cavemen who had the stone-age equivalent. But it is recent manifestations of this ancient piece of legislation which will concern us today.

Back in 1962, the UK Sunday Times stopped being just a black and white newspaper and introduced a magazine-style colour supplement. The main purpose of this supplement was to enable advertisers to place full-colour glossy ads, for which the ST could charge oodles of money.

In journalistic terms, the colour supplement was a pretty high-class publication, with some good reporting and excellent photography. It seldom published fiction. But one day, in the mid 1970s, I opened the ST supplement and found that it was serialising a novel. It was a novel about the mafia by one Norman Lewis. (You can read an enormous article about Norman Lewis if you wish, and it is certainly interesting, but let us not get distracted.)

In the 1970s I will still a relatively young man, and still very naive and ignorant about the UK book trade. And so when I saw that the ST was serialising a thriller about the mafia -- and remember please that they seldom published any fiction at all -- I thought to myself Wow! This must be one hell of a book.

So I sat down to read the extracts. And you know what? I didn't think it was a very good book at all. Rather boring in fact. Run of the mill.

I puzzled over this phenomenon for some time. It worried me. Other people obviously thought that the book was brilliant, otherwise it wouldn't have been picked out from a thousand others. What was there in the book that I was missing?

The answer, as you will have guessed, is that I was missing nothing. The novel was indeed a pretty run of the mill thriller. What I had overlooked was the previously existing relationship between the author and the Sunday Times.

About ten years later, I read a reference in Private Eye, to the effect that Norman Lewis was a long-standing member of the ST staff; and it was then that the penny finally dropped. (I know, I know, I'm slow.)

In order get his novel serialised in the ST colour supplement, Norman didn't have to write the thriller of the century. All he had to do was wander down the corridor to see his friend the editor and say, 'By the way, George, I've written this novel that's coming out in a couple of months. Any chance of running a couple of extracts in the old ST?'

And George would have said, 'Certainly, old boy. No problem. How much do you want?'

And that, you see, is a deal done under the terms of the Old Pals Act of 1898.

Furthermore, as you may already have observed, the UK Act has its counterparts in almost every other part of the world which is known to man. And recent press reports suggest that there is a particularly powerful form of it in the state of Florida. Where it was probably enacted by that bloke Bush.

The story is told (link provided by booktrade.info) in the Miami New Times, which revels in the problems experienced by its (presumed) rival, the Miami Herald.

What happened was this: the management of the Herald decided to serialise, and plug hard, a book written by six local women, at least one of whom was connected with the paper. So far so normal. But some of the staff took a dim view. The Herald's internal computer bulletin board lit up with staff demanding to know 'Why are we publishing this absolute drivel?'

Well, the bosses could hardly say, 'We're doing it under the terms of the latest Florida mutual back-scratching enactment, with which you all ought to be thoroughly familiar.' No. They wriggled and squirmed and talked about policy.

What is more, they pointed out that 'newspapers using material written by their staffers that is also a book is common.' Which indeed it is. The Act requires it.

And so on. Like many blazing rows, this one is terrific fun to read about, so long as you aren't in the middle of it. The Miami New Times enjoyed it immensely. The headline was 'The Miami Herald's shamelessly extravagant promotion of a lousy book sets the newsroom aflame.'

Meanwhile, there is a similar sort of ding-dong afoot in France (reported in the Guardian). The French government's anti-corruption squad has looked at the way in which big literary prizes are awarded and has found that it is all very incestuous, with a complete lack of transparency, extensive interlocking membership between jury members, literary critics, novelists, mistresses, catamites, hangers-on, brothel-keepers, fancy restaurant owners, et cetera. And really, in the eyes of said government watchdog, it is not good enough.

One small French publisher is quoted as saying, 'French publishing, and particularly the whole prize charade, is all about mutual back-scratching. It's scandalous really, and if it gets cleaned up that can only be a good thing.'

But just a minute. It was only at the end of March that we reported that, more than 150 years ago, Honore de Balzac was clearly stating that the French literary scene was corrupt. It was, according to Balzac, a world in which talent counted for nothing, and bribery, intrigue and unscrupulousness were the key factors in success.

So, if anyone is looking forward to the French version of the Old Pals Act being repealed, I fear they are in for a long wait. And ditto for everywhere else.

Authors' money

Last week I suggested that the supermarkets, among other market forces, would gradually bring about a reduction in the overall remuneration of writers -- however that remuneration was calculated, whether on a royalty basis or as a percentage of net receipts.

Well, some writers, pointing to their scars and bruises, would ruefully argue that such reductions have already been made, and I would not disagree. What I would say is that there is probably more to come.

Joel Rickett's latest missive on the current news from the publishing world (in the Guardian, via booktrade.info), reports that Tesco is running an ad campaign boasting about how it has driven book prices steadily downwards. (Tesco is, I think, the biggest UK supermarket chain and certainly makes massive profits.)

Tesco will runs ads in women's magazines saying the following: 'Books. Once upon a time they seemed pricey. So we decided to sell them cheaply. Er - the end.'

Lovely, isn't it? So short. So to the point. So, no doubt, effective.

The remaining small independent booksellers will not be pleased. In the UK (unlike the USA, I believe), publishers can give different discount deals to different customers. Thus the supermarkets are able to negotiate massive discounts on the retail price in return for massive purchases. Small bookshops, which buy perhaps six copies, can't get anything like as good a deal.

What this means is that it is sometimes cheaper (and quicker) for a small bookseller to buy stock from the local supermarket than it is for him to go through the usual trade channels.

Isn't the book trade fun? Who would want to work anywhere else?

Digital prisoners

Giles Foden is deputy literary editor of the Guardian and also a novelist. His book The Last King of Scotland is being filmed in Uganda. (Which makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Obvious place for it.)

Anyway, Giles is as well placed as anyone, one would think, to spot trends in such matters as copyright, film contracts, digitalisation, and all like that. And Giles's view, expressed in an article on Friday last, is that things are changing, rapidly; and not to the writer's advantage.

His view, generally, is gloomy. He tells us the he has 'a vague presentiment of doom, a feeling that new technologies and those who control the information they carry are in danger of making prisoners of us [i.e. creative people such as writers]. Some time in the future, there could even be revolutions about such things.'

Well, I'm not sure that I'm as gloomy as all that. As I have remarked before, it is often a grossly optimistic error on the part of writers to assume that their work has any serious commercial value at all. Hence, it may not be a disaster if, on those rare occasions when someone actually offers to pay for your stuff, you sign one of those contracts which Giles thinks are objectionable and much too far-reaching.

According to Giles, typical media contracts now give the purchaser the right to publish your work, sell it, et cetera, 'in any and all media and by any and all means now known or hereafter invented, throughout the world and all parts of the universe, in any and all languages.' Without any payment beyond the original fee.

Well, in my opinion the loss that you suffer will often be theoretical rather than actual.

But we can all dream.

Michael Cunningham: Specimen Days

A while back I had an email from the internet marketing co-ordinator of Holtzbrinck Publishers in New York. She said that she had been checking out the GOB and thought that Michael Cunningham's new novel might be of interest to me.

Well, if she had checked out the GOB in much depth, she would have discovered that might is very definitely the word, because I don't usually enjoy literary fiction. And boy is Cunningham literary.

You can find lots of info about him on his own web site, but briefly his last novel, The Hours, won both the Pulitzer prize and the PEN/Faulkner award. His new book is entitled Specimen Days.

Here is the publisher's description of the book:

In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. 'In the Machine' is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. 'The Children's Crusade', set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, 'Like Beauty', evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

I was invited to download a pdf version of the text, which I did, but I was warned that I must not, under any circumstances, post the URL where any ordinary folk might notice it, and I must certainly not pass on the file to any other Tom Dick or Harry when I was done with it. We wouldn't want anyone reading the pdf and going Wow! and passing it on to a friend, now would we? Actually there isn't much likelihood of that, but more on that topic in a moment.

Well, I did read Specimen Days, and, as expected, I really didn't like it at all. It is not a book that I could recommend to anyone -- unless, of course, they happen to be keen fans of literary fiction.

In the first section, the writing struck me as self-consciously stylish. And if it is indeed true, as the Comte de Buffon said, that le style est l'homme meme, then I suspect that Cunningham is a bit of a poser.

The second and third sections of the book were much better, in my opinion, because to a large extent the narrative is conveyed to us through dialogue, a technique which I do endorse.

Part two is also an improvement in that it reads rather more like a regular non-literary techno-thriller, which seems to me to be an advantage. But then, as you will recall, the author is here 'playing with the conventions of the noir thriller'.

The poet Walt Whitman is in some way or other a common theme in each of the three sections of the novel.

As for the stories which these three sections of the novel relate: well, I'm sorry to say that they seemed to me to be incomplete. Each section had the glimmerings of a good plot, but they all petered out into nothing very much. Only the third had anything approaching what I would call a proper ending.

Overall, I'm sorry to say that the novel seemed to me to be rather an ordinary piece of whimsical fantasy rather than scifi, and fantasy of a kind that I don't like very much at that.

But can we say anything more useful than that? After all, what I have said so far merely reflects my own rather peculiar tastes in fiction.

Well, let's try this. Adherents of 'serious literature' as the fans of that genre like to call it, would insist, to a man and a woman, that serious literature is somehow inherently superior to crime fiction or science fiction. So how, I ask myself, could this book conceivably be regarded as superior to good work (not even the best) in either of those genres?

I am unable to come up with an answer. It isn't better plotted. It isn't better written (despite the fancypants flourishes). It isn't better in any way at all. From many technical points of view it's no sort of improvement on Tess Gerritsen's The Sinner, a flat-out commercial novel which, if you remember, I didn't like either.

That said, Specimen Days does seem to me to have a great deal in common with genres that are generally thought of as 'commercial'. It is carefully constructed to achieve a particular purpose.

I am quite sure that every literary writer lies awake at night dreaming of prizes, front-page reviews in the New York Times thingie, and all like that. To achieve such eminence, there are doubtless various devices and elements in a novel which are more or less compulsory: crime fiction has to have a crime, for example. And literary fiction has to have something that the present or prospective PhD students can get their teeth into. Which in this instance is the Walt Whitman theme and the 'same group of characters' as the publisher calls them, running through each of the separate parts of the book. And there is probably a deeper metaphor in the thing somewhere, because the lit lot absolutely orgasm over metaphors writ large.

Don't ask me to explain what the Whitman thing is all about, or what the metaphor stroke deeper theme is, because it's beyond me. But that, of course, is the whole point. You're supposed to sit around in the coffee shop or the senior common room, arguing long into the night about the significance of these devices.

Cunningham's publisher says that he is one of the most original and daring writers at work today, but I'm afraid I couldn't find anything to justify either adjective.

But hey, you know what? On reflection, I do feel that Cunningham may secretly be the most ruthlessly scheming novelist that I've come across since, oooh, Alexander McCall Smith. In Cunningham's case, his aim is to achieve lengthy, thoughtful reviews, bestseller lists, and literary prizes. What he wants, in short, is to outsell the crude commercial fiction and, at the same time, to be thought intellectually superior to it. And, in his cold-blooded calculating way, plus his previous track record, he may just have put together the right package.

Follow-ups

A couple of commenters have recently pointed me in the direction of web sites which have proved to be more than usually interesting (to me, at any rate).

'Interesting', by the way, is a word that I seem to be typing more and more often these days. I suppose it is redundant. If a topic wasn't interesting (to me) I wouldn't be mentioning it. However, the word will probably continue to appear from time to time.

And, also by the way, one should not, I suppose, be worried about repeating a word if it is in fact the most appropriate word for one's purpose. It was the great Fowler who, in a famous essay of 1926, deplored attempts on the part of 'second-rate writers' to avoid using the same word twice in the same sentence. Fowler referred to this as the 'elegant variation' error. (And there is a rather good book blog named after the essay.) Given what Fowler says, I probably shouldn't worry about using 'interesting' in more than one post.

But I digress. As usual. Back to the follow-ups.

I was advised by a commenter to have a look at a relatively new blog, Short Term Memory Loss, and indeed it is worth a look. It will probably get added to the blogroll (on the right) shortly, but the roll is beginning to look mighty long and I don't suppose one can list every book blog in the known universe. Never mind.

If the author of Short Term Memory Loss has given his name, it has escaped my notice. But one of the books that he mentions is John Preston's Hustling: a Gentleman's Guide to the Fine Art of Homosexual Prostitution. Which is, at the very least, an intriguing title.

So I followed it up. And Google led me to a site called Topman. This is dedicated to the life and work of John Preston, who, as you would expect, was a writer. He was also, by sexual inclination, a homosexual sadist (hence Topman, in the jargon of that world), and he died of AIDS complications in 1994.

During his lifetime, in fact during a period of fifteen years, Preston authored or edited some 49 books. A short introduction to the man, on the Topman site, says that he 'brought pornography to the literary world, [and] he also fought over the years to bring literature to the world of pornography.'

Now that is interesting. It may not be too everyone's taste -- won't be, in fact -- but once again I have come across a writer that I've never heard of before but who clearly had some talent, a great deal of determination, and some success.

In particular, Preston was the author of an essay called 'The right to write', which I would like to read but I have not yet been able to locate an online copy. The Topman site/archive evidently has a scanned copy, but if it's accessible I ain't found it yet. (Note the elegant variation.)

Another commenter made reference to fan fiction, and this led me to a truly astonishing site: the home of Harry Potter fan fiction.

Fan fiction is a phenomenon that I had kind of heard of before but never really come across, much less studied. As its name suggests, fan fiction is fiction written by those who are great enthusiasts for a particular writer's work, and have borrowed his or her characters and contexts to write fiction of their own.

The Harry Potter fan fiction site has no less than 14714 stories, 68032 chapters, and 7482 authors. Now that is serious productivity.

The issue which immediately came to my mind, on encountering this site, was that of copyright. If there are 7482 writers (so far) cheerfully and passionately churning out stories featuring Harry and his friends, what is the copyright position?

I used the site's search facility to see what the organisers/owners have to say about copyright. The answer is nothing much. But there is a short statement at the foot of the search page:

All stories remain the property of their authors and must not be copied in any form without their consent. This is an unofficial, non profit site, and is in no way connected with J.K. Rowling, Scholastic Books or Bloomsbury Publishing or Warner Bros. It is not endorsed by any of the aforementioned parties. Rights to characters and their images is neither claimed nor implied. Although we provide links to other websites, we are not responsible for any material at these sites. You acknowledge that you link to these other websites at your own risk. All original administrative content is copyright of the site owner and must not be copied in any form (electronic or otherwise) without the prior consent of the owner.

In other words, the issue of whether or not these fans, and the site, are systematically breaching J.K. Rowling's copyright on a substantial scale is neatly sidestepped. But the owners of the site make it clear that they will sure as hell defend their own copyright! Mess with them and the heavy mob will call round and break both your legs.

The technical term for this kind of thing is naughty.

Should you be intrigued by the fan-fiction phenomenon, there is an interesting starting point for further investigation on the wikipedia site (a site which, incidentally, is become not merely useful but almost the first port of call for reliable and extensive information). And it is here that you will find a most valuable discussion of the legal aspects of the practice.

In the wikipedia article you will find it stated that writers and copyright holders vary greatly in their attitude towards this stuff. Some take a firm stand against it: Lucasfilm (Star Wars) and Anne Rice, for example. Others tolerate it, in order to avoid alienating their most frequent buyers of product; and some even encourage it. J.K. Rowling is said to be relaxed about the matter, though she is troubled by 'adult-themed' Harry Potter stories. Whatever they are. Harry Gets Laid?

In order to shed some light on the position under UK law, I went poking through various archive boxes in my study. I was, as usual when I do this exercise, somewhat appalled to note the amazing amount of work that I did in the past, much of it abortive, but I eventually found what I was looking for.

The item in question was a 1994 article by Nicola Solomon, entitled 'Sequel Opportunities'. And, very much to my surprise, it turns out to be available online. It is posted (as one might have guessed) by the indefatigable Andrew Malcolm on his AKME site. (Andrew Malcolm's online law library, by the way, is a massive resource, and not just for UK writers; he offer it for free.)

Nicola Solomon is described by Malcolm as a leading literary lawyer, a Deputy District Judge and Partner of Finers Stephens Innocent. Her article makes startling reading, and I remember being taken aback by some of the statements which appeared in it when I first read it; they are still pretty jaw-dropping today.

Nicola begins by saying this: 'One might assume that it would be an infringement of copyright to use characters and style developed by another person. Not so; copyright protects the words and form in which ideas are expressed, not the ideas or characters themselves. The type of copying envisaged by the law, taking large chunks of original text, is unlikely in the case of sequels which aim to develop an original story, not replicate it.'

Well bugger me, I thought. And still I do think. I find that legal advice very surprising.

Nicola suggests various precautions for the writer of a sequel, such getting an endorsement from the original author or making it absolutely clear that the sequel is not endorsed by the original author; and also ensuring that your publisher does not land you in hot water by suggesting (falsely) that there is a connection with the original author. But apart from that, open house seems to be the order of the day.

At least, it is under English law. As for elsewhere, Nicola says: 'In the US, copyright in characters is far more established and the rules preventing unauthorised use may be more restrictive.' So writers would be well advised to take separate advice on the legal position there.

As ever, it is staggering to be be given proof of what a vast resource the internet is. And virtually none of it was available ten years ago.

William Donaldson

The Times seems to be back online. And although I have the impression that Times obituaries are not often made available online, or at any rate not for long, you can today find an obituary of William Donaldson; which I read over breakfast.

It's an entertaining reminder of a man whose work is familiar to me although I've never read it.

Donaldson was educated at Winchester and Magdalene College Cambridge, and you will not convince me that a man can get a better education anywhere in the world -- either in Donaldson's day or now.

Born into a privileged background, he proceeded to lose several fortunes (inherited), and went through whatever he managed to earn (considerable at times) at a rapid rate of knots.

He went through women at a rapid rate of knots too, blaming his sexual immaturity on the single-sex culture of Winchester. On the whole he seems to have preferred call-girls, but he had a couple of marriages (at least) and numerous affairs, including Sarah Miles and Carly Simon.

He dumped the lovely Carly while she was in the US arranging for their wedding. But years later she described him, nevertheless, as 'a wonderful, wonderful person: the funniest man I have ever met.' Not everyone, the Times notes, held him in such high regard.

Donaldson was also an enthusiastic user of illegal drugs, first cannabis and then crack cocaine. This habit seems to have bankrupted him fairly regularly, and on one occasion he found a temporary home with an old girlfriend who had taken to running a brothel on the Fulham Road.

From our point of view, the thing to note is that Donaldson was the writer who produced the Root letters. Posing as 'Henry Root', wet-fish merchant and eccentric right-wing bigot, Donaldson 'wrote to prominent public figures offering comment, advice and support -- often in the form of a one pound note. His outrageous yet deadpan missives succeeded in provoking a range of often embarrassingly positive responses from the likes of Esther Rantzen, Larry Lamb, Lord Grade, Sir David McNee (the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police), and Root’s personal and political heroine, Margaret Thatcher. The resulting book, The Henry Root Letters (1980), was a bestseller for months.'

I didn't read the Root output when it first appeared, and I suspect it may have dated horribly. It is certainly unlikely to be of interest to US readers. However, Donaldson wrote other stuff too, including a novel: Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, 1975. And an autobiography, of which he remarked that the lawyer's libel report was longer than the book.

Donaldson's obituary makes one thing absolutely clear. He followed the first rule for writers, and one which, as I remarked the other day, is often broken by the young. First, get a life.

Dragon Tamers revisited

Many thanks to those who read my Roundup post from last Friday and did some detective work thereafter (see the comments on the post). If and when I can find the time and energy this week, I will Make Further Enquiries about Dragon Tamers and its publisher, Aultbea, and report back.

Roundup

Here are a few bits and pieces that have accumulated during the week.

For those who are interested in reading more about what the Archbishop of Canterbury had to say, Dylan Kinnett has a longish comment on his No Categories blog. Yes, I probably was a bit quick to criticise, as Dylan says, but I do think the Archbishop has enough to deal with without antagonising the media as well.

Cathy Wald, author of The Resilient Writer, was interviewed on the Leonard Lopate (radio) Show on 17 June. You can, if you wish, download an MP3 recording of this conversation, which included the novelist Edmund White.

The recording runs for about 16 minutes. If you have broadband this should be no problem, but at 6.3 MB it will take a while to download on steam radio so to speak. The conversation will tell you nothing startlingly new, but it is, I believe, what is known as a podcast, so you will be able to boast to your friends about being at the absolute cutting edge of technology. Or some such.

For those who care, and I hope I am not being too ungracious when I say that I am not one of them, there was a further instalment this week of the Aultbea publishing saga, about which I have already written twice, on 7 February and 18 February. When I say another instalment, what I mean is that the firm have issued another press release, which has been reprinted without any serious questioning by another newspaper, this time the Independent.

I repeat -- if Aultbea and their young authors can make any serious money or build a reputation out of all this, then good luck to them. But the newspaper stories about Aultbea and their various young authors are quite remarkable for a complete absence of verifiable facts. This latest one refers (again) to 'overseas print runs' (whatever they are) and translation deals (which languages, and which firms? No one says.). Dragon Tamers is referred to, on the basis of no information whatever, as an 'international bestseller'. What does that mean? Amazon sold three copies in the Isle of Man?

'Talks on a Hollywood film are in the pipeline,' we are told. But have they even sold an option? To whom? Or are these 'talks' just the publisher chatting to his wife about it over breakfast?

This is the second time that the Independent's Scottish correspondent, Paul Kelbie, has dealt with this matter, and he hasn't added any more facts than he had the first time.

Oh, I beg Kelbie's pardon. First time around, 18 February, Kelbie quoted the publisher as being confident that 'more than one million copies of the book will be sold worldwide before the end of the year.' Now, 21 June, the publisher is predicting that 'by the end of the year the number of copies sold will be well into six figures.'

I remain sceptical. And I am not the only one. See what the Alien Online has to say about it (both on 21 June, and in his February post, which he links to).

Now if you want to read an article which actually contains some useful information, nip over to the (US) Book Standard and read what the publisher Doug Seibold has to say about trade paperbacks. If you were exceptionally fussy you might say that the article is just a tad short on hard numbers. But hey -- let us not complain about finding, at last, a piece of writing which, if printed out, you could do more with than just wipe your bum.

Advances -- part 3

If you have been paying really close attention to our discussion of advances (parts 1 and 2, not unnaturally, preceded this one), then you will know that the analysis is largely based on UK data which were published in 1995 and 1999. And, you may reasonably be asking yourself, is the situation in UK publishing still the same today as it was then? In other words, are publishers still paying advances at the same kind of level as they were in the 1990s?

The answer is that we don't know. Well I don't, anyway. And I take leave to doubt that anyone else does.

Within a given firm I would expect there to be a handful of people who know how the average advance, in their company, compares with the figure that would be due if the advance were calculated on the basis of 100% of the royalty income from a sellout of the first print run. I would expect this group of people to include the chief executive/managing director and the finance director. But how much lower the knowledge goes I have no idea.

As for what the picture is in the industry overall -- well, to find that out you would have to do an up-to-date analysis based on data assembled for that purpose. And no one, to my knowledge, has done that research. There is gossip, and rumour, but facts, as usual in the publishing industry, are in short supply.

If you have been keeping your eyes open, you will know that the Bookseller is shortly to publish a report entitled The Consumer Book Report UK -- UK publisher trends, growth and analysis. This is due out in October this year, and it will cost you £249. So far the advance publicity for the book makes absolutely no mention of authors or writers, so an analysis of payments by way of royalties and/or advances may or may not figure very highly in it.

For what it is worth, one well-connected consultant who spoke to me five years ago suggested that 1995 was perhaps the peak date for payments to authors. Since then, he said, advances had fallen somewhat. This was due to a number of factors.

Chief among these was a reduction in the amount of competition for good stuff. As the years go by, more and more publishing companies seem to merge into the big ones. The result is that, depending on how you count them, there are really no more than half a dozen or so really big players in UK publishing.

In the past it was not unknown, I understand, for imprints within the same big company to compete against each other in the market place, but it's hard to believe that they are still allowed to do so.

So that's one factor. Another big influence is the fact that the actual sales levels of books of any consequence is now tracked very closely by Bookscan. This is a service which actually counts the number of books for which money is received, from the customer, in the bookseller's (electronic) till. It does not depend on a publisher telling us that they have sold 50,000 copies when all that means is that there are 50,000 copies on booksellers' shelves, and that half or more of them may bounce back in due course.

Those who subscribe to Bookscan, which includes everyone of any note in publishing, can see at a glance how the latest book by Miss Smith or Miss Jones has done. As a result it is no longer possible for an agent to exaggerate, or be vague, about how wonderfully well her client has done for Clapham & Irons, and thus obtain a massive advance for Miss Jones's move to a new firm. A new firm may well be interested in Miss Jones, but they will know fairly accurately what she is worth to them.

My informant was of the view that unearned advances are now found chiefly in relation to new names who have been thought to be worth a major punt (as we say in the UK; it means a gamble or bet). And, as we all know, these hot new names who are going to set the world on fire sometimes turn out to be damp squibs. So it may be the case that a writer gets one big advance, which is not earned out, and then -- turn out the light.

Having said that, it is certainly true that really big names can pull down enormous sums by way of advances. If you have been following publishing for even six months, you will already have come across stories about X or Y being offered contracts worth millions (of dollars, usually). Even if you divide these hyperbolic figures by 2, 3, or even 10, they amount to a lot of money.

At the top end, in other words, the standard industry royalty levels are almost irrelevant. When you know, in advance, that the mass-market paperback of a particular writer is going to sell a million copies plus, the cost savings in ordering huge numbers of books from the printer are so enormous that all normal calculations cease to apply.

Which brings me back to the 'special deals' done on behalf of writers who are not household names.

It is standard practice for a contract with a publisher to include provision for the publisher to make 'special deals'. These often involve printing a substantial number of copies, say 20,000, for an entrepreneur who will then sell them in various cut-price arenas. The author's share of such deals is often 10% of the sum received by the publisher.

The 'sum received', by the way, is usually described as 'net receipts'. This is a wonderfully vague term, seldom defined, and capable of providing infinite hours of harmless amusement. In an ideal contract the term 'net receipts' would be very tightly defined. I gather that it is so defined in film contracts.

Amanda Mann, whom we have mentioned before, describes on her blog how her publisher sold a special print run of 20,000 copies, which yielded, for Amanda, the magnificent sum of £440. This works out at roughly 2p a copy, as opposed to the 45p or so that a writer would be entitled to as a royalty on a full-price copy sold in the home market.

It is interesting to speculate as to how such a deal might work out. I emphasise speculate because I have never personally commissioned a print run of 20,000 from a printer, so I am groping in the dark a bit.

If the writer is entitled to 10% of the publisher's income, then the publisher would have been paid £4,400 by the entrepreneur. So the entrepreneur is getting the books at, say, 22p each. He will sell them for, say, £1 each; and the market stalls and 'remainder dealers' will sell them for, say £2. Everyone gets a bargain. Except, of course, the writer. But hey -- she only does it for fun, right? The other guys have to earn a living.

The publisher will have had to pay the printer's bill. You can make your own guess as to what that is, but my guess is that the publisher took the printer's estimate and doubled it when he was asked for a price by the entrepreneur. Thus the publisher makes close to £2,000 for doing nothing very much.

Ah, but, you see, he took the risk on doing the book in the first place. And the £2,000 is his reward.

Bear in mind also that writers whose books are sold in supermarkets are never in a thousand years going to see a normal royalty for those sales. Supermarket sales are all going to be dealt with under some clause or other which provides the writer with a much reduced sum of money per book. (For my further thoughts on the joys of supermarkets see my post of 21 September last.)

My final conclusions from this consideration of royalties and authors' advances are as follows:

In many areas of publishing, the old-fashioned royalty scales, based on a percentage of the nominal retail price of the book, are looking increasingly under threat.

It is argued in some quarters that the price-royalty system only really made sense in the days of the Net Book Agreement, when all books had to be sold at the price determined by the publisher. Today, agents and authors are increasingly under pressure to do deals based on the author receiving stated percentages of the sums of money actually received by the publisher (net receipts).

If you seek an example, visit the Blackwell site, where you will find a statement that 'A royalty rate of 10% [of] net receipts (money received by the publisher) is standard.' Not, you will note, a royalty of 10% of the nominal retail price. There is a considerable difference, because the latter might be double the former.

Oxford University Press, which is a massive publisher of non-fiction, takes the same position. The OUP glossary defines net receipts as follows: 'The revenue that the publisher receives from the sale of the book, less any deductions for discounts offered to customers.' Which is a bloody awful definition in my opinion. The OUP goes on to say that 'Net receipts form the most common basis of royalty payments to authors.'

My own guess is that, as the years go by, the remuneration levels of authors will fall. There are more and more ways for the consumer to spend their money. The bookselling chains and the supermarkets are determined to buy product cheaply, and they have the muscle to bully and harass the publishers.

As a result, publishers will try to cut costs in order to maintain profit levels. They will try to find cheaper typesetters and cheaper printers -- in India and Thailand, if necessary. Just recently, for instance, Penguin laid off seven salespeople and HarperCollins are shedding the same number. Why? Because they figure that in today's market they can maintain profits without them, and they want to save money.

Of all the potential areas for cost-cutting, it seems to me that writers are the most attractive target. Even with an agent. Most writers are, after all, romantic fools who are desperate to get into print. Not only would many of them do it for nothing, but they would gladly pay. Furthermore, if they don't have an agent, they are blissfully ignorant of publishing economics and can easily be blinded with science.

Publishers will attack the remuneration levels of writers not because they are villains, but because they are businessmen. They are seldom good businessmen, and that's the problem. Consider the choice: either you can tell a writer, over lunch, that times are hard and she is going to have to take a little less; or you can go to war with that hard-nosed son of a bitch who buys paperbacks for Tescos. Which would you prefer?

So, if and when you finally hold a publisher's contract in your trembling little mitt, take a good look at what it says. You probably won't be able to change anything -- let's face it, most of us don't have four or five firms competing for our book -- but it would as well to understand what you are signing.

Advances -- part 2

If you haven't yet read Advances -- part 1, which appeared yesterday, perhaps I might suggest that you do so as a preliminary to today's discussion.

OK, now that you're back, let's see what else we can profitably learn from the available facts.

I referred last week to Amanda Mann, who a while back posted some interesting figures from her royalty statements on her blog. Today I want to use those figures as the starting point for some calculations.

Of course, I dare say that Amanda would tell us a good deal more about her advances if we asked her, but those things are really none of our business, and she has already been frank above and beyond the call of duty. So let us depersonalise the issue.

Let us suppose, for the purpose of this discussion, that we found ourselves in a restaurant, seated right behind an author and her friend. The author we will call Miss Smith. From shamelessly earwigging the author's conversation with her friend we learnt the following facts:

Miss Smith has had a novel published as a paperback original. The print run was 7,500 copies. So far, Miss Smith's royalty statement shows that 5,380 copies have been sold. And the royalty statement shows an unearned balance, when set against the advance, of £1069. Miss Smith, we gather, is a little worried that she has not earned out her advance. Her editor has not contacted her recently. Does Miss Smith have any genuine reason to worry?

Let us start by trying to establish what sort of sums of money are involved here, both for the publisher and the writer.

We will assume that Miss Smith's book was priced, officially, at £5.99, which we will call £6; this was a fairly typical price at about the time when Miss Smith's book was published. We will further assume, using Charles Clark's book of precedents, that Miss Smith's contract called for her to be paid a royalty of 7.5% of the retail price on each copy sold.

This means that, for each copy sold, Miss Smith was nominally entitled to a payment of 45 pence per copy (£6 x 7.5%). If the whole print run of 7,500 was sold, in the home market, without any special deals, Miss Smith would contractually be entitled to a total of £3375 (45p x 7,500).

You see how easy it is to get rich quick in this game. Publish ten novels a year at that rate and you might make a decent living.

Selling the whole print run, by the way, is an unusual circumstance; there are frequently a few hundred, or thousand, left hanging around in the warehouse.

For the publisher, using the same assumptions, the figures look like this. If we assume, very generously in today's market, that the publisher gets 50% of the official retail price for each copy sold, then the total income to the publisher is £22,500 (50% of £6 x 7,500).

Out of that sum, the publisher has to pay various costs, such as production, sales and distribution, overheads, and, not least, the author. The net profit will vary from publisher to publisher, and will depend on the efficiency of the firm. However, if the publisher was regularly generating a net profit which equated to 5% of retail price, or 10% of income, he would be happy. So in this case a net profit of £2250 (10% of £22,500) would be acceptable.

You begin to see why publishers have to publish a lot of books.

Now let's go back to Miss Smith. How big do you think her advance was?

Using the data which we scribbled down on a paper napkin, all the time pretending to discuss the weather with our own friend, we can make some informed guesses.

We noted yesterday that a publisher will use the projected royalty income from the first print run as the basis for calculating the advance.

We know that Miss Smith has sold 5,380 copies. And 5380 copies, at the royalty rate of 7.5%, yield £2,421. And Miss Smith's royalty statement shows an 'unearned balance' of £1069. If we add £2421 to £1069 we get £3,490. Which is, near as dammit, £3,500.

Furthermore, we have already calculated that, if all 7,500 copies of the book were sold in the home market, Miss smith's contract would require her to be paid £3,375. We can therefore reasonably assume that, in this case, Miss Smith's publisher gave her an advance of 100% of anticipated royalty income on the first print run. (The £3,375 would, I suggest, be rounded up to £3,500.)

How generous, you say.

Well, it is generous if we consider Charles Clark's statement, quoted yesterday, that most Minimum Terms Agreements call for an advance of perhaps two thirds of anticipated royalty income. (A Minimum Terms Agreement, by the way, is a contractual agreement negotiated between the Society of Authors and a number of publishers, laying down the minimum acceptable terms for individual book contracts. In practice, any halfway decent agent would expect to better these terms.)

But Miss Smith's advance is not remotely generous if we look at the facts as set out in yesterday's article. There we had it quite clearly demonstrated that, at least in the 1990s, publishers were regularly paying authors advances of substantially more than 100% of the anticipated royalty income. Not because they were feeling generous, but because, day in and day out, that is what it cost in the market place to obtain the material that they need in order to stay in business. That is how literary agents earn their keep and justify their existence.

A typical advance, at about the time when Miss Smith signed her contract, would have been a figure which was about 50% higher than anticipated royalty income on the first edition. In other words, the publisher could in this case have given Miss Smith an advance of £3,500 plus 50% = £5250. Which would probably have been rounded to £5,000.

Such an advance, I repeat, would not have been at all unusual, and would therefore not have placed the publisher in any difficulties. In Miss Smith's case, because the publisher had given her a less than typical advance, the publisher's net profit on the book would have risen to £3750 (£2250 plus the difference between £5,000 and £3,500).

In other words, by achieving an economy at the expense of the author (not, I have to say, a rare occurrence in publishing), the publisher has effected a 66% increase in his net profit on the book. Not bad, eh? And even if Miss Smith's agent was really on the ball, and asked what the print run would be, the publisher could always be less than honest and say 5,000 when he meant to do 7,500 all along.

No no. I withdraw that. That is less than kind. Let us say that the publisher first assessed the likely market for this book at 5,000 copies and later, in view of enthusiasm in the office, decided to increase the print run.

Miss Smith, of course, is young, beautiful, ambitious, and wildly talented. And so, when her editor doesn't ring her weekly, and buy her lunch at the Ivy, she worries.

Is she right to worry?

I suggest not.

First of all, Miss Smith's paperback original, brilliantly written though it is, is but a small fish in a very large pond. To Miss Smith, an advance of £3,500 (less agent's commission, less expenses, less tax) is a significant sum of money. But to a big-time publisher it is neither here nor there.

Miss Smith's editor is not going to worry about an unearned balance of just over a thousand quid. It is the unearned balance of £450,000 on a £500,000 advance which will ruin her career. So Miss Smith can rest easy.

But what of that other lady novelist, whom we mentioned yesterday. You remember? The distinguished lady novelist who boasted proudly that her books always earned out their advances. What of her?

Well, it has always been the practice on this blog to avoid ad hominem and ad feminam criticism, and I don't intend to start today. So let us summon up another imaginary lady called Miss Jones.

Miss Jones, we will say, once won the Booker. At least one of her many books has been a New York Times bestseller, and at least one has been filmed by Hollywood. How do you think Miss Jones's publisher feels when she announces how proud she is that she earns out her advance?

My guess is that the finance director of that firm would have had a hard time keeping a straight face. Because the truth is, Miss Jones is working for way below her market value. And is proud of it!

Of course, if Miss Jones's contract does not embody standard industry royalty rates, then Miss Jones's point is nonsense and she is just babbling.

Miss Jones's editor may, for all I know, be one of those intense literary types who thinks that a spreadsheet is something that you put on a table for a banquet. She may remain in blissful ignorance of the economics of publishing, and may believe, in all honesty, that the contract that she offers Miss Jones is a fair one.

But what of the lady's agent? Is it possible, even in today's world, that she doesn't have one?

You know what? I haven't finished. I think there will have to be a (shortish) Advances -- part 3 tomorrow.

Uplifting Kevin

In response to my post about Bookmark Now, yesterday, Kevin Smokler says that he has a more cheerful c.v. in another place. He is right.

Advances -- part 1

Today and tomorrow I intend to write about advances. And, without insulting anyone’s intelligence, I shall try to make what I have to say as easy to understand as possible. However, I have to say from the outset that this is a fairly complicated issue and if you are to gain any benefit from the discussion you will have to concentrate.

In other words this isn’t your average blog post that you can digest in one quick glance. It needs a bit of thought. It may even require you to do some sums with a pencil and paper.

First, some basic information.

If and when you ever sign a contract with a publisher, you can usually expect to be paid a sum of money known as an advance. In fact, of course, this isn’t an advance payment at all; it’s a retrospective payment.

Very few publishers in this world will give you a contract for a novel unless you have written it in full; so you’ve already done 95% of the work before you see a penny.

The size of this advance is a matter of much interest to the average writer. And hence the basis on which it is calculated is also of some interest (or should be).

The basis on which advances are calculated was a topic that I discussed in an article that I wrote for a journal called The Author in the Spring of 2001. (The Author is the journal of the UK Society of Authors.) And I begin my discussion of advances on the GOB by reproducing that article in full. It is set out immediately below.

Please be aware that the article is written in a much more formal style than is usually the case with posts on this blog. That is because I was trying to treat the subject with as much academic rigour as the data would allow. In other words, I was trying to establish facts – as opposed to the rumour, gossip and hearsay which are so beloved of the publishing community – and, having established the facts, I was trying to draw some meaningful conclusions.

Immediately before publication, I showed the draft of the article to the consultant who had drafted the reports which I refer to in it. He was kind enough to confirm that I had not misrepresented the facts and that my conclusions were reasonable.

Whether or not the facts and conclusions in this article are of interest and value to you, only you can decide. But be aware, please, that part two of the present discussion, current thoughts based on the 2001 article, follows tomorrow.

Here is the full text of the 2001 article:

ADVANCES -- is your advance big enough?

Introduction

Some writers want nothing more from their publisher than to be able to hold in their hands a printed copy of their very own book. Others care mostly about the size of their bank balance; it is to them that this article is addressed.

As most authors soon discover, the majority of books earn precious little. But how much can we reasonably expect to be paid? In particular, what is a fair advance?

This question is of special interest to those who negotiate their own contracts, and the latest Society of Authors earnings survey (published in the summer 2000 issue of The Author) shows that there are a surprisingly large number of unagented writers.

The traditional calculation for an advance

In the past, it was not uncommon to be told that a fair basis for the calculation of an author’s advance was for the publisher to work out the expected royalty income from sales of the first edition, and then to offer half, or two thirds, of that figure.

Take, for instance, Charles Clark’s classic guide to publishing agreements. In his 1993 edition he tells us that, for general books, ‘most Minimum Terms Agreements include a formula for calculating the minimum advance sum to be paid.... Where the publisher is to publish in hardcover only, 65 per cent is commonly specified; whereas for vertical contracts 55 per cent is the norm.’

Recent evidence suggests, however, that publishers regularly pay much larger advances than would be made on the basis of this calculation.

The BPIB reports

The evidence relating to advances is provided in two reports published by The Bookseller, one in 1995 and the other in 1999. Both were entitled Book Publishing in Britain (henceforth abbreviated to BPIB 1995 and BPIB 1999 respectively).

If you have not heard of these reports, or come across them on the shelves of your local library, it is probably because they are not cheap. The 1995 version was offered, I believe, at £395, while the 1999 version is currently available from Amazon at £545. (I understand that, even at these prices, the reports are not profit-making enterprises for either the author or publisher.)

These two Bookseller reports are the latest in a long line of surveys of the book trade which have been carried out by consultants of one kind or another. In 1976, for example, Euromonitor published a book-readership survey at £400. This was followed by other similarly high-priced publications. Among those which have passed across my desk are Jordan and Son’s report on Britain’s book-publishing industry (1991, £165) and the Key Note report (1993, £350). In 1996 Euromonitor produced a new survey, this time priced at £3,500. You can, apparently pay more for information if you wish: a subscription to Book Marketing Ltd’s survey of book purchases was priced in 1996 at £9,500.

In my experience, the content of these reports varies from the extremely valuable to the obvious. It is not particularly enlightening to be told, for instance, that female readers prefer romantic and historical novels, while male readers favour thrillers and war stories.

The two Bookseller reports are much the most valuable that I have come across. BPIB 1995 was based mainly on information derived from published accounts, supplemented by interviews and discussions with representatives of major firms. BPIB 1999 is similarly broadly based, and includes detailed financial profiles of over 70 firms; it runs to 484 pages. Both reports contain a great deal of information which is interesting and relevant to writers of all kinds, but this article will concentrate on the sections which deal with payments to the creators of books.

BPIB 1995 contains a series of pie charts showing how publishers’ revenues are spent. The expenditure headings shown are production, sales and distribution, other indirect costs, net profit, and payments to authors.

In the case of popular trade books, including mass-market paperbacks, BPIB 1995 reports that payments to authors took up 35% of publishers’ total revenues. For ‘minority interest trade books’ (a term not defined), payments to authors constituted 25%. (The sums going to authors in other fields, such as academic publishing, were much smaller.)

What do these figures mean for the average author? Well, to begin with, the payments are much higher than would be the case if no advances were paid and all authors were remunerated strictly according to the scale of royalties set out in each contract.

BPIB 1995 tells us that ‘there are no industry-wide rules on advances’, though they are usually related to ‘potential earnings from the first print run – in some cases 100% of this figure, in others a proportion varying between firms of from 50% to 75%.’

So far so orthodox, then (when compared with what Clark tells us about the usual practice). But BPIB 1995 goes on to say that ‘one comparatively small publisher reported that only one in five advances was “earned” in the sense that it was exceeded by accrued royalties. Large publishers reported that unearned advances represented between 8% and 10% of turnover.’

So, BPIB 1995 demonstrated that, on average, across all major British trade publishers, payments to authors of popular books were typically amounting to 35% of publishers’ revenues. Since the publishers were receiving, on average, 50% of the retail price, this meant that payments to authors were equivalent to a flat-rate royalty of some 17% or 18%.

No doubt a proportion of the so-called unearned advances were accounted for by the high sums paid to super-sellers. BPIB 1995 confirms this by stating that the normal formula for calculating the advance is ‘often waived in the case of expected bestsellers.’ Projected royalty rates are largely irrelevant for writers who can deliver the big sellers which publishers need, and advances in those cases are calculated on an acceptable division of the projected profits.

However, it is important to note that BPIB 1995 gives no indication that high payments to super-sellers are the sole reason (or even the main reason) for expenditure in excess of what the standard royalty rate would generate. Nor is there any suggestion that publishers are hopelessly inaccurate when estimating future sales. The impression conveyed is that making payments to authors of the order of 35% of revenues is a perfectly acceptable practice, year in and year out.

The phrase ‘perfectly acceptable’ needs some qualification. Of course publishers would much rather that payments to authors were zero. If every company could make satisfactory profits by reprinting out-of-copyright classics, and nothing else, then that is what they would do. But they can’t, and therefore they don’t. What they have to do is buy the best product, and in a competitive market at that. This forces them to pay a rate for the job which is higher than the normal scale of royalties would suggest. And, judging by the figures provided, they do it more often than not. Bear in mind the small publisher who reported that four out of five of his books did not earn out their advance. There is no suggestion in BPIB 1995 that such a case is untypical.

BPIB 1999

It is instructive to compare the data in BPIB 1995 with those in BPIB 1999. Such a comparison may enable us to see whether the trend is towards spending more or less on authors.

BPIB 1999 has comparatively little to say on the question of authors’ payments. Is it possible, perhaps, that some of those working at a high level in the finance offices of leading publishers felt that in 1995 they had been a little too generous with the truth? Did they decide, in 1999, that this time around they would be a bit more discreet?

In any event, in the 1999 report the section on ‘payments to authors’ has vanished and has been replaced by a mere two paragraphs on ‘royalty provisions’ in the section on adult consumer publishing. Here there is a discussion of advances paid in author-led areas of the market (which are defined as ‘fiction and certain areas of non-fiction where books are author-branded and author initiated’).

In theory, says the 1999 report, advances ‘should be in line with expected royalties. In practice advances are usually greater than the eventual royalty stream.’ (Note that word usually. Not sometimes, or occasionally. Usually.)

Advances exceed the sums due under royalty calculations ‘by 8% to 10% of total sales.... If the average author royalty is between 8% and 10% of the cover price of a book or between 16% and 20% of publisher income, then it is fair to say that most author-led publishers pay advances that are on average 50% greater than expected royalties.’

Again, there is no suggestion here that paying more than would be justified on a strict royalty calculation is an unusual or exceptional practice. The report states that if publishers are paying anything less than this sort of level of advance, they are likely to be under-investing in new authors.

Unfortunately, the 1999 report does not break down any data on payments to authors to show how the mass-market field varies from the minority-interest field, or any other. However, the 1999 figure for payments to authors, expressed as a percentage of publishers’ income, is 16% to 20%, plus 50% of that figure, which gives us a total figure in the 24% to 30% range.

Thus BPIB 1999 tells us that the average publisher in an author-led field is paying out to authors anything up to 30% of revenues.

The comparable figure provided in BPIB 1995 was 35% for popular trade books (including mass-market paperbacks). The latest BPIB report therefore suggests that there has been a slight drop in the level of so-called unearned advances since 1995.

This is probably the result of reduced competition; as more and more publishers merge, the number of competing firms inevitably diminishes, so publishers don’t have to pay as much as they once did. Another factor is the wider availability of accurate sales information, which makes it easier for publishers to find out how well a particular author has sold.

Nevertheless, the key point to note is that payments to authors in the more popular fields remained in 1999 at a substantially higher level than would be accounted for by a straightforward calculation on a royalty scale.

Conclusions

What conclusions can we draw from these data? Here are a few.

The BPIB data may or may not give a totally reliable picture of what is happening in British publishing, but they are the best information we have. The introductory essay to BPIB 1999 says that it is ‘the most comprehensive study yet undertaken.... The objective has been to create the most detailed overview of the industry possible by synthesising all the available sources.’

The figures show that, over a four-year period, British trade publishers were systematically paying advances to authors which exceeded, by a substantial amount, the sums which would have been due under a royalty calculation. These payments were not exceptional aberrations caused by hopeless optimism in isolated cases – they were the result of the state of the market.

This level of remuneration did not result in the collapse of the book trade as we know it. On the contrary, BPIB 1999 says that, ‘The big trade houses are making more money than they have made at any time in the last 20 years.’ (I understand that they have done less well in the past 12 months.)

The consequence of this situation is that any writer who has ever felt guilty because a book did not earn out its advance should cease and desist. ‘So what?’ is the more appropriate response. Happens all the time. Maybe, just for once, you got paid a fair rate for the job.

In 1995, a distinguished lady novelist made a statement to the press in which she objected to the high sums being paid to some writers, and declared with evident pride that her own books always earned out their advances. Some might consider that this attitude does her credit; but, in light of the BPIB figures, others might wonder whether her agent is getting her the right deal.

The data should be borne in mind when next you yourself next negotiate a contract. Of course, you will not necessarily be able to insist that you are paid, as an advance, a sum of money equal to, say, 150% of what would be due under a royalty calculation. But you might be able to squeeze out a bit more than was originally offered. In the Society’s recent survey of authors’ earnings, 14% of unagented respondents (and 30% of agented respondents) said that over half their books did not earn as much as the advance; so it can be done.

Finally, if you are the author of a mass-market book and you are faced with an editor who insists that the firm never, ever, pays an advance of more than 50% of expected royalties, then you will know that you are dealing with an editor who is young, inexperienced, and fiscally illiterate. The only other possibility (which is so remote as to be scarcely worth mentioning) is that you are dealing with someone who is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. And the people who work in British publishing are far too nice ever to do any such thing.

As you well know.

Charles McCarry: Old Boys

Charles McCarry's Old Boys is a very classy thriller indeed. And perhaps that is not altogether surprising, because McCarry has written several other good ones.

Chief among the others was perhaps The Tears of Autumn, which first appeared (in the UK) in 1975. I read it at about that time, and I remember it rather better than I do The Da Vinci Code. It offered, among other things, one of the more convincing explanations for the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers.

Neither am I the only one to rate Tears of Autumn highly: one recent reviewer suggests that it might be the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American.

McCarry is now a bit of an old boy himself: 75, to be precise. As a young man, 1957 to 1967, he served as a CIA agent, under 'deep cover'. This is not, apparently, quite as exciting or dangerous as it sounds. However, it certainly provided the man with some inside information, which he evidently puts to good use.

Prior to his CIA experience, by the way, McCarry was in Berlin in 1948, where he noted the contrast between the promises of wartime propaganda and the war's actual consequences. Funny how history repeats itself, isn't it? When asked now what he believes in, McCarry says that he believes in consequences. Which I do too; I just wish they were easier to predict.

The lead character in Old Boys is Paul Christopher, a character who has starred in McCarry's books before. Christopher, like his author, is now getting on in years, but fortunately he is able to call on the assistance of several other elderly gentlemen with past service in 'The Outfit'. These old men form the team who fight the baddies.

The plot, as usual in these things, involves a mad foreigner who has a dozen or so cobalt-tipped atomic bombs which he intends to use to blow up American cities. Unless stopped. There is also a two-thousand-year-old scroll floating around. And an elderly woman who was forced to be Heydrich's mistress. And lots of other good stuff.

Our hero spends a lot of time in parts of the world which end in -stan (Kyrgyzstan and so forth), and which are, even today, almost empty. The reader is expected to know all about these places. On page 401 the author says: 'If I tell you that this spot was approximately 250 miles northwest of Tashkent, not far from Uckuduk and fifty miles from the nearest unpaved road, you'll know precisely where we were.'

Oh, right, there. Right. My Auntie Jean had a holiday there once. Caught a nasty case of the trots.

And so on.

There are many, many virtues in this book, and a wannabe writer in this genre should study it closely. For instance, the book is divided into ten parts, and the chapters within each part are short. Which is as useful a page-turning device as I can recommend to you. What is more, the chapters are not numbered consecutively throughout the book, but start at 1 each time you begin a new part. Which is clever. Because instead of finding yourself at chapter 93, and saying to yourself God, when is this bugger going to end, you find, instead, that you are only on chapter 8. I may be old-fashioned but I like that kind of thing.

The ancient scroll, by the way, turns out to provide a subtle, amusing, and all too credible explanation of how Christianity came to be the force in the world that it is today. If the Pope and his merry men got all worked up about the Da Vinci thing, they were chasing the wrong animal. This one is much more subversive.

The book also contains some valuable tips for those of you who are in training for the SAS or some other elite force. When working close to the enemy, at night, it is not a good idea to take a pee standing up. If there is a sniper downwind of you, he will sniff the air, smell your urine, and loose off a whole clip at you, even though he can't see you. So it's best to pass your water in a lying-down position.

No, I don't know what to suggest to Mata Hari either.

As you would expect from such a literate, well travelled and much experienced man, the brief author's note at the end is full of good stuff.

McCarry reminds us that, thirty-five years ago, when he first wrote about his villain, Ibn Awad, the idea that Awad was sponsoring a wave of suicide bombers was thought to be absurdly far-fetched.

The author refers to a handful of books that he read for background information, but everything else, he says, came from thin air. In other words, he made it up.

Now I happen to think that that is a perfectly sensible and proper way for a novelist to proceed. But there are those whose enjoyment of a novel is spoilt if the author mentions anything which doesn't exactly chime with real life.

The English novelist P.D. James, for example, once described a character putting his motorcycle into reverse. And so far she has had approximately 3,472 letters telling her that motorbikes don't have a reverse.

To which my response would have been, Look, this guy had one specially made, OK? So fuck off.

Bookmark now

Kevin Smokler is a writer with an interesting, if slightly depressing, c.v. He is, it seems, the power behind Central Booking; but more to the point he is a blogger and the editor of a new collection of essays entitled Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times. (Watch out for the dreaded Flash on Smokler's sites, by the way. Unless you have the latest version it may gum up your works.)

I haven't read Bookmark Now yet, but it looks as if I probably ought to. In the meantime you can read a useful review of it.

Like many a web-savvy author these days, Kevin undertook a Virtual Book Tour in the week before his book came out. This is a phenomenon which would repay study.

For my own part I took a look at some of the appearances that Kevin made on other blogs and found a particularly useful essay of his on M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype.

This essay includes the first description of RSS which has ever made any sense to me, and also led me to PubSub, which looks as if it might be worth using. You can, apparently, use PuSub to obtain notification of any time anyone in the entire universe uses a phrase online. So if, for instance, you have a book out called "Bookmark Now" you can make sure that whenever anyone mentions the book (as in this post, for instance), you get to know about it. Neat. If it works.

Leftovers

Here are a couple of things that I should have included in my end-of-week roundup last Friday, but didn't.

First, the novelist Jacqui Lofthouse has her own web site, which I should have linked to but forgot. Here you can find not only details of her books but also information about courses and other events that she is involved in. Jacqui works as a life coach for individuals and small businesses.

Next, Julie Hill wrote and asked me to link to her, and why not. Julie is a literary agent (Hill Media) in California, and she heads a team of eight, so she is not just a one-woman band. Her web site provides further information about the fields in which she specialises.

Julie also runs a blog, called Astrology for Writers, Editors and Filmakers. Well, I suppose astrology provides as good an explanation of how publishing operates as anything else does. My own current reading tells me that I am looking out for number one, but that money and publishing do not always go together. Which explains a great deal.

End of the week

The end of the week approacheth, and, as usual, I have failed to do those things which I ought to have done; and, yes, I have done those things which I ought not to have done. So, here's a quick roundup of stuff which is well worth looking at but which I have been unable to do full justice to -- in no particular order.

Debra Hamel writes to say that Gideon Defoe's book The Pirates! Et Cetera is very funny. She has written a review, and while there you will find that the rest of her site is worth reading too.

Archer points out that the Archie of Whatsit can rest easy: Archer's blog is a model of good taste and rectitude. And so it is: see for yourself.

Jacqui Lofthouse is a lady who has the good taste to read the GOB and she writes too. Her book The Temple of Hymen sounds to be like triple X certificate or something. Highly unsuitable for young ladies, apparently. So how come I never heard of the damn thing? I must put in an order immediately.

Visit also Jacqui's friend Amanda Mann, who writes Confessions of an Author. Amanda shocked the publishing world to the very soles of its clay feet a while back when she published some real live genuine figures from her royalty statements.

Now believe me, folks, real figures are pretty damn rare in this business. You just don't ask your friends to show you their actual royalty statements. You allow them, out of a desire to retain their friendship, to lie to you, just as you, glibly and without a trace of guilt, lie to them. So be deeply grateful when the likes of Amanda give you the truth.

Paul Vitols is an experienced writer who blogs about what he is up to, and once again there are experiences described that you can learn from.

Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, who were mentioned a while back (8 June) tell me that they actually write under their joint names, but a lot of places have a habit of dropping the second author in listings. This upsets Eric's Mum, as well it might. Eric runs a Byzantine Blog, where you can find links to their various books.

Eric and Mary were also intrigued by my mention of the book by Kevin Brownlow. This is about his film, It Happened Here. They tell me that Kevin can be found describing how the film came to be made at the following link: http://ukapress.com/Happened.pdf.

And there are also some reminiscences about the making of the film at Rob Hansen's site, including a story about how one actor managed to shoot himself (by playing two parts, you will be relieved to hear).

Finally, don't forget Cantara Christopher, over at Published in New York. Cantara read my piece about life in England in the 1950s and asked how people managed to rebel in those days.

Well, my initial reaction was to say that they didn't rebel. Because it was too dangerous. After all, we must remember that the fifties were only twenty years after the thirties. And in the thirties we had the Depression, when people damn near starved in both the US and the UK. Those memories died hard, and in England people tended to 'know their place'. In other words, however rebellious they felt, they often kept their mouths shut.

However, that is an oversimplification. Rebellion is as old as time. Young people have always found a way to irritate and worry the life out of their parents. You may remember, in that great and good nineteenth-century book The Diary of a Nobody (written by George and Weedon Grossmith), Mr Pooter's son Lupin found no end of ways to cause his father concern. Well, that's young men for you. And young women too.

The fifties, however, did see more than a hint of rebellion. This was expressed chiefly in that dreadful rock and roll business (really, what is the world coming to); and, on a slightly more elevated level, by John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger. And lots more, in cinema, literature, and all the arts.

Enough. Have a good weekend.

Gerard wins -- and speaks!

Gerard Jones, about whom we have written lo these many times -- most recently on 6 June -- continues with his marketing campaign for his book of memoirs, Ginny Good. And so he should because it's a very fine piece of work.

Thanks to Gerard's ceaseless efforts, Ginny Good is beginning to get the recognition it deserves. Here are the links to some recent honours:

Ginny Good was placed first in the autobiography/memoir class in the 2005 IPPY awards. The Ippies -- full title Independent Publishers Book Awards -- were launched in 1996 and are designed to recognise excellence as published by the smaller firms. Entries for the Ippies this year came from more than 1,500 publishers from all over the world: from all 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and 18 foreign countries.

Next, Linda L. Richards, editor of January magazine, listed Ginny Good as her choice for the best non-fiction book of 2004. Linda had earlier written an excellent review of the book.

Should you wish to buy the book, which is well worth the money, you can find more details of where and how to buy it on Gerard's own web site. As a short cut, let me tell you that the book is available through Amazon both in the UK and the USA. Doubtless any other decent bookseller can get it for you too.

Meanwhile, the indefatigable author is proceeding to produce his own audio version of his memoir. Details are once again supplied on Gerard's own web site, but if you can't wait to hear the great man's voice here is a quick link to a sample: http://everyonewhosanyone.com/audio/gg6.mp3.

Only one caveat: unless you have broadband, some of the audio files may prove to be too much for your machine. Mine complained a bit, but it was really very interesting to hear the author read his own stuff. With a little help, of course from Yma Sumac. Remember her? If you do, you're even older than me and Gerard.

Opinions will differ, but my own view is that Gerard's book will have a long life. Historians will be rambling on about the hippie movement and the summer of love and flower power, and all that stuff, for decades to come. And the smarter of them will very soon catch on to the fact that Gerard was there. And he put it all on paper.

In due course (and remember you read it here first) Gerard's book will become a set text on college courses. Thus disproving, just for once, my frequently repeated assertion that the people who teach those courses can't tell Stork from butter; or shit from shinola; or whatever they say in your part of the world.

Paranoid fantasy on the web

The Archbishop of Canterbury (a sort of Pope of the Church of England) yesterday made a speech attacking various aspects of the media. He seems to have had a pretty comprehensive go at more or less everybody: newspapers, television, even blogs.

The Guardian gives a summary of what Archie had to say, plus a link to the full text if you want to read it.

The Guardian's summary seems to me to give a fair indication of what was said. Their headline is: 'Archbishop attacks lethal media'. But the Times, probably feeling a bit touchy about the criticism of the press, chose to give us 'Archbishop hits out at web-based media nonsense.'

(I can't give you a link to the Times piece, by the way, because their site is down, yet again. Is it just me, or have they been offline for weeks?)

Anyway, the piece of the Archbishop's speech which caught my eye was the bit that the Times quoted in the first paragraph of their report. The new web-based media, and blogs in particular, were criticised for 'paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense, and dangerous bigotry.'

It seems to me that there is a possibility here of the pot calling the kettle black, and it would be unwise for the Archbishop to push the point too hard. He might get told a few home truths about the negative effects of religion.

But it gets worse. The speech claimed that the atmosphere on the world-wide web was a free-for-all that was 'close to that of an unpoliced conversation.'

Well, you're damn right there, Archie. An unpoliced conversation is exactly what it is. And long may it remain so. If and when those of us who blog want any controls imposed on us by the Archbishop of Canterbury, his holiness the Pope, or any one of a thousand Ayatollahs, we will ask for them. In the meantime, holding your breath would be injurious to your health.

You've never had it so good

In my recent post about changes in the culture, I made the point (endorsed by some commenters, whose views are well worth reading) that the last fifty years have seen massive changes in all sorts of aspects of life.

And, since this is a blog about books and publishing, it strikes me that there is one area in which there have been particularly dramatic and useful changes: that is in the availability of background information for those who wish to become writers.

There is no shortage of ambitious young writers. Come to that, you get some old and ambitious writers too. Mary Wesley didn't publish a thing until she was about 70, and Vince Vawter recently pointed out to me a 72-year-old Englishman whose first novel is currently making a bit of a stir in the US. The author is Charles Chadwick and his novel is It's All Right Now.

(Haven't read it yet, Vince, but I will get there one day. Charlie boy, by the way, is represented by PFD, big-time agents, which is a neat trick if you can manage it. Wonder how he ended up with them? Bet it wasn't through the slush pile.)

For all of these writers, beginning or established, young or old, there is vastly more information available now than there was when I was a lad.

Back in the 1950s, any sort of background on publishing was hard to come by. True, the Bookseller magazine existed (I think), but I had never seen a copy. The broadsheet newspapers occasionally printed an article which gave some grudging insight into the book world. And there were the inevitable how-to books for writers, many of which then, as now, were written by people who didn't really know what they were talking about; and, in order to sell their book, were wildly over-optimistic about authors' chances.

Contrast that with today, and the difference is huge.

Suppose you want to select a publisher in order to submit your ms. In the 1950s there was one reference book (in the UK): the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. This gave a list of publishers, with their addresses and telephone numbers. As for what those firms published, the list usually went: fiction, non-fiction, reference books. And that was it. No indication, for example, that some firms published only the highest-brow literary fiction and some only romantic fiction. No distinction between massively powerful firms, with 60 salesmen, and those run by two men and a dog.

Thus sending off a ms in those far-off days was an adventure. In more ways than one, because there were no photocopiers, and even if you had made a carbon copy when you typed out your book, that copy was likely to be somewhat untidy. So, if the post or the publisher lost the top copy of your ms (and it was not unknown), you were back to square one.

All is changed. Today, if you are looking for a publisher, there must be a thousand sources of detailed information. This info is sometimes official, as when posted by the company itself, and sometimes very unofficial, as when writers on some forum or other relate the horror stories of how they were mistreated, cheated, and lied to by some thieving son of a bitch.

Here on the GOB I do my best, as and when I come across such useful information, to draw it to your attention. Which is the point (at last! you sigh) of today's little homily.

The Guardian last Friday carried an article called 'How to make a book'. This is a step-by-step account of the writing and publishing of one book: a 135-page comic novella entitled The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.

I'm not going to summarise the book, or the rest of the article, here. What I am going to say is that the author of The Pirates!, Gideon Defoe, somehow or other got taken on by the agents Janklow and Nesbit.

Well, I say somehow or other. The precise mechanism was this. The Times journalist Caitlin Moran apparently saw a discussion of the book (in ms form) on an internet forum and sent it to Claire Paterson, one of the two agents in the London office of Janklow. And Paterson, incidentally, got only one of her 40-odd clients through the slush pile.

Paterson, not surprisingly, given her firm's power in the land, got our young author a substantial advance.

As I say, no further summary of the article here. But what I am going to do is issue A Dreadful Warning.

This article about Gideon Defoe's book is a success story. It is a story of someone who wrote a book (pretty lightheartedly), found an agent, and got published.

But my Dreadful Warning is this. (And no matter how often I repeat it, no one seems to listen.) Do not assume that this will happen to you. Success (if that's what it is) of this kind is rare.

When you get into the car to go to the supermarket, you do not assume that you will be one of the infinitesimally small number of people who are that day killed in a road accident. But for some reason, when would-be writers sit down to write their book, they do assume that they will be one of the infinitesimally small number of writers who complete their ms, find a powerful agent, are paid a decent advance, and achieve some degree of recognition.

It must be something in the genes. But that's the way human nature is.

Meanwhile you can, if you wish, read about Mr Defoe's adventures. The article contains, all in one place, a vast amount of highly relevant information about the UK book trade.

Next, another instructive story. This one appeared in the Independent over a week ago. Sorry, sorry, I do try to keep up but we've had a new kitchen put in, and Mrs GOB keeps talking about putting shelves up.

This is the story of Robert Chalmers, who has had a couple of books published. Chalmers's novels got some good reviews but didn't sell. (Now where have I heard that before?) So the aggrieved author, ambitious as all get-out apparently, has devised a new marketing technique. His aim is to generate some word-of-mouth buzz, so he has travelled to a north-country town and has given away 1,000 copies of his latest. Yes, that's right. Given them away.

The article doesn't tell us (or if it does I missed it) who paid for these 1,000 copies. But I doubt that Chalmers's publisher was willing to do so. So the author is putting his money where his mouth is. Plus a good deal of time and effort.

It's a pretty desperate move, in my opinion. But who knows. It generated an article in the Indie. And a mention on this blog. So maybe the groundswell of opinion is, as of this very moment, lifting the book ever upwards, towards the top of the chart.

Or maybe not. Either way, you can read and learn. And that sort of thing, to repeat, was not available when I was a lad. Which is how I came to go so far astray.

Grumpy, cynical, snide -- and it ain't me

It may cross your mind, just occasionally, that the GOB is a little less than 100 per cent patient, tolerant, understanding, and easy-going. Particularly about publishing. But there are people out there who are even meaner and more bad-tempered than me. (Or is it I? Do you care?)

Booktrade.info pointed me towards an article in the Guardian by Paul Carr, in which he criticises the UK and European publishing community for their response to the Google Print initiative.

The Google Print initiative, by the way, involves the scanning and digitisation of vast numbers of books -- perhaps, in due course, every book ever printed in the entire history of the world -- so that they can be accessed by users of Google. The plan is that human wisdom and knowledge should thereby be made available, to all seekers after the truth, on a far greater scale, and with much greater ease, than is available at present. A worthy plan, you might think. But it has been greeted by prophecies of doom and gloom.

Now as it happens I have already suggested, on this very blog, that the response of UK publishers to this initiative has been a trifle Luddite and short sighted. See my posts of 25 April and 10 May. And now Paul Carr comes along, echoing my words, which he doubtless read (heh heh heh), and adding a few more of his own for good measure.

Paul not only abuses the UK publishing fraternity, but those in most of Europe as well. He accuses them of behaving ridiculously, spending vast amounts of money when small amounts spent in a different way would be better, and generally screwing things up.

Paul goes on to suggest a solution to the 'problem' which would satisfy everyone's needs. It is, he says, 'the ideal solution - and one that's guaranteed to move the relationship between print and web forwards, not backwards. No wonder the publishing industry hasn't thought of it yet.'

Dear me, this is very distressing. All those good folk in publishing are getting beaten up yet again. And they're really awfully nice when you get to know them.

Paul Carr, by the way, is editor in chief of The Friday Project. This I had not heard of before, but it describes itself as follows:

The Friday Thing is a fiercely independent weekly email comment sheet. Casting a cynical eye over the week's events, it is rarely fair and never balanced. Despite our best efforts to alienate readers by making light of human tragedy and charging an annual subscription fee, we have been unable to shake off critical acclaim. The Observer described us as "Hilariously cynical", Channel 4 think we're "wicked" and to Time Out we're just "Ace".

You can, if you wish, read a sample of the weekly output here. Warning: if you're American, it might upset you. Come to think of it, if you're English it might upset you too. Oh, the hell with it. It's supposed to be offensive, OK?

George Galloway: I'm Not the Only One

Until recently George Galloway was a name known only to a few UK citizens who took the trouble to follow UK politics fairly closely. However, since his recent televised appearance in front of a US Senate Committee, George has become much more well known. He is having at least fifteen minutes of fame, and he may have more to come.

For those who don't know, George is a 50-year-old Scotsman who since 1987 has been a Member of Parliament. Originally he was a member of the Labour Party, but he was expelled from the Party in 2003 and since then has helped to form a new political party, known as Respect. It was while standing as a candidate for Respect that he was elected to Parliament in the 2005 election.

There is lots of info on the web about Gorgeous George, as he is known in some quarters (he likes to dress well), and if you want to know masses of detail you could start here. But before discussing his 2004 book, I'm Not the Only One, I want to sketch in just a little of the background.

First, George was an MP for Glasgow for many years, and Glasgow is a tough city. There are lots of people in Glasgow whom you would not wish to offend at ten o'clock on a Saturday night, after everyone has had an opportunity to sink a wee dram or two. In fact you would be ill advised to offend some of them at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. And that is the arena in which George flourished. So be warned. You mess with George at your peril, as the Senate Committee found out.

Second, George is an extreme left winger (particularly by American standards). He is not a man who has ever toed the Party line in every particular, but I don't think he would complain if you described him as an old-fashioned socialist. He might complain if you called him a Marxist, because Marxists tend to be somewhat fixed in their thinking, and George can sometimes surprise you with his views. But in general his political preferences lie several miles to the left of today's UK Labour Party, and about three hundred miles to the left of the US Democrats.

For years George has had something of a knack of falling out with authority, in whatever form, but he is more than capable of defending himself. In an age when politicians are increasingly remote (by their own choice) from the voters, George has no aversion to audiences and does not fear the criticism and heckling which such audiences are likely to offer to the speaker. On the contrary, he is described as one of the few great orators in contemporary life, and he appears to enjoy the cut and thrust of live debate more than most.

From the very beginning, George was opposed to the war in Iraq, a country in which he has spent much time and knows well. And this has not made him a popular person, at least in government circles. Thus when documents surfaced in Baghdad which appeared to implicate him in various forms of dishonesty and corruption, a number of UK newspapers, and a US Senate Committee, were pleased to draw them to public attention.

George denied all these allegations, and he took steps to defend himself, either through the law courts or through speaking to people direct (e.g. the US Senate). So far the score is about George Galloway 10, enemies of George 0; with bruises.

If you want to read the full text of George's statement to the US Senate, you can find it here. And it is well worth reading. But now I want to turn to George's book.

From the very beginning of I'm Not the Only One it is clear that George is not an admirer of Tony Blair, the present leader of the party that George grew up in. In fact, he despises Blair, describing him in the Foreword as 'drowning under a sea of incompetence and deceit.'

The first chapter is entitled 'The Boys in the Bubble' and it describes the way in which modern politicians have isolated themselves from unpleasant contact with unwashed voters by taking refuge in the Westminster bubble. In the US, the equivalent term, I believe, is the Beltway.

Those at the top of UK politics, says George, are liars. You know that Blair is lying 'because his lips are moving.' (You begin to see why George got kicked out, don't you?) Later in the book Blair is described as a 'blood-soaked criminal'.

Most of this first chapter is devoted to enumerating the worst of Blair's lies, and George ends by saying that it is 'a national duty to bring about the political end of this war-mongering, principle-shredding, mendacious malodorous rancid crew. Blair must go.'

Which is, I am sure you will agree, plain speaking.

Before long, George begins to give us a short history of his political life, and perhaps one of the keys to understanding him is this statement, which he made, I think, in 1980: 'Whatever the consequences for my own political future, I intend to devote the rest of my life to the Palestinian and Arab cause.' Which, he says, he has more or less done. He has come, he says, to love Iraq as a man loves a woman.

Well, you can see immediately how a man with those intentions and attitudes would not be popular. After all, in both the UK and in the USA, the general preference is to favour Israel over the Arabs and the Palestinians; and those who speak for the other side are likely to come under considerable pressure.

For page after page, George Galloway exposes the fatuity and ignorance of both UK and US politicians, particularly in respect of the not-yet-found weapons of mass destruction. But from a UK viewpoint it is perhaps George's pen portraits of the Labour Party leadership which are the most fascinating.

For a start, many of the current leaders have a history of membership of the communist party, or at any rate a record of working for it. It would be fascinating to know what the FBI and CIA make of these people.

Dr John Reid, for example, currently the Secretary of State for Defence, is a 'former communist, former nationalist, former Irish republican, guitar-playing, chain-smoking alcoholic.' Reid's PhD was on the history of the Marxist-Leninist African republic of Benin. He himself claims to have been, at one time, the leading theoretician of the UK Communist Party.

Gordon Brown apparently also has a PhD, which is news to me, and rather raises the man in my estimation. But he rarely uses the title.

Peter Mandelson is also a former communist, sufficiently active to have generated his own MI5 file. David Blunkett (currently Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) is another man from the ultra left; he was leader of South Yorkshire's 'People's Republic'. Alan Millburn was a supporter of the International Marxist Group. And so on.

The penultimate chapter outlines the political standpoint of the new party, Respect, and the final chapter calls for a bursting of the Bubble.

All in all I learnt a great deal from George's book. And although my own views are somewhat to the right of centre, on most issues, I find myself in agreement with many of the points he makes.

In particular, he is absolutely correct when he says that politicians constantly claim to be listening to the public, but in fact deliberately keep themselves remote. In the recent election, some candidates were reportedly hardly seen in their constituency at all, because they knew that if they appeared in front of an audience they would have to answer some difficult questions.

It is this remoteness, coupled with the hypocrisy and incessant lying, which has generated in many British people a deep-seated contempt for politicians. More power, then, to the George Galloways of this world, who are at least trying to restore a little sanity.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is worth noting that the energetic George has recently involved himself in the establishment of a new publishing company, known as Friction. The list will be mainly political but it will also offer some fiction. But don't deluge him with mss, please. George has more than enough on his plate already.

Selling Michael Jackson

A few months ago, every major publishing company in the world will have considered the same question:

Win, lose, or draw, can we sell a book about Michael Jackson?

The question is by no means a simple one. True, the big publishers have some data to guide them. They will know, in detail, of the success or failure of books about similar high-profile cases; and they will have some idea of how well books about Michael Jackson, in particular, have sold in the past. But the present situation is much harder to assess.

Consider the various factors. As Matt Drudge pointed out on a recent visit to the UK, the Jackson trial was a much bigger story than the O.J. Simpson trial. No one outside America had heard of O.J., but everyone in the Ukraine and Papua New Guinea knows who Michael Jackson is. That's a plus. The subject is, in a sense, pre-sold.

But there are lots of minuses. First, there is the just plain sordid nature of the allegations.

Perhaps I am prejudiced, but it seems to me that the Brits in the US have been the most astute observers of the Jackson phenomenon. Tina Brown, in the Washington Post, pointed out that the question that the jury had to decide was this: was Jackson a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and didn't fondle them, or was he a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and did. Neither picture is very pleasant to contemplate.

Then there's Andrew Sullivan, who in the latest Sunday Times argued that the Jackson trial has highlighted aspects of America that most Americans would prefer to forget or ignore. On the one side we see the celebrity culture in which the rich can apparently get away with almost anything; and on the other hand we have the subculture of greed and litigation in which the feckless and idle grab as much as they can from, at best, questionable law suits.

And then there's timing of publishing a book. Even if you do the ground work while the trial is on, much depends on the verdict. And however fast you move it's going to take weeks to produce a book after that. Meanwhile, the media circus will have chewed it all up and spat it all out, a million times over. Is there really anything left for the book market?

I suspect not. I would have passed on doing a book myself. The world has, after all, changed dramatically since the O.J. Simpson affair. Then, the internet had hardly been heard of. Today, everyone likely to be interested, potentially, in reading a book about the Jackson trial will also be plenty smart enough to have explored every conceivable nuance of the affair over the web.

My guess is that, over the next few days, we shall see an absolute firestorm of comment in the blogosphere. Very little of it, I suspect, will have anything kind or supportive to say about Michael Jackson; but, whether the public verdict is pro or con, I don't think there's going to be much left for the book world to turn into a profit.

But we shall see.

More about changes in the culture

In my discussion of Terry Teachout’s essay on culture (10 June), I mentioned that it was hard for young people to believe how much the world has changed in the last fifty years. As a matter of fact, it’s quite hard to appreciate the change even if you’ve lived through that time.

It occurred to me, after I wrote the Terry Teachout piece, that I had already written something which gives the flavour of those cultural changes, at least as far as England is concerned. It is a passage from chapter 2 of my novel Passionate Affairs, which I published under the pen-name Anne Moore.

The novel is related by an Englishman in his sixties, looking back over his life. The following passage is drawn from fiction, please remember, but it represents pretty accurately what I actually think. This is what the character says:

To enable you to understand this story, I have to start by telling you something about the mores and morals of the English in the year of Our Lord 1960.

When I say ‘the year of Our Lord’ I do so not in any flippant way, but because you need to be aware that England was at that time still a self-consciously Christian country. In particular, people had remarkably stuffy ideas about sexual behaviour.

The self-appointed moral guardians of the 1950s -- bishops, judges, schoolmasters -- tried hard to put the clock back to the nineteenth century. They tried to draw a veil over the horrors of the recent past -- to pretend, as far as possible, that Auschwitz and Dachau had never happened, and that all we needed to worry about was the length of ladies’ skirts when worn at Henley Regatta.

This was a world in which publishers could be prosecuted for issuing a book in which sexual intercourse was described, even without the use of four-letter words. It was impossible to print the word ‘fuck’ without ending up in prison. A similar fate awaited anyone who published a photograph showing female pubic hair. There weren’t many nipples on view either. Topless sunbathing? Ha! Forget it.

Magistrates competed to prove how stupid they were by ordering the destruction of vaguely racy books such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, first published in the fourteenth century. All stage plays were censored, the censors being retired military men in their fifties; their decisions were ludicrous.

The so-called leaders of society frowned upon divorce. Illegitimate births were never discussed in polite company.

Sex education was a farce, if provided at all, and it usually wasn’t. There were instances of well-bred middle-class gels entering into marriage with only the haziest idea of how babies were conceived and born.

Homosexuality was illegal: if you took part in gay activities with another consenting adult, in private, you could be sent to jail for it, and many men were.

Whether you regard these attempts to ‘maintain standards’ as admirable or ridiculous, you have to accept that they were made, and that they were highly influential in creating the ethos of the time.

In short, the England of the late 1950s was a society which was tight-arsed and morally restrictive to a degree which young people today would find hard to believe. It seems as if, having fought so hard to preserve what we had, in two world wars, we had lost all awareness that change might sometimes be for the better.

The Prime Minister of the day told us that we had never had it so good, and in a strictly economic sense that was true. But it was still a miserable bloody time. Believe me.

Fame and fortune await you

I don't read the UK book-trade magazine the Bookseller any more. I used to; I read it faithfully, every week, for about 33 years. But then I decided that 99% of it was stuff that I'd read before. Usually many times.

However, someone at the Literary Saloon does read the Bookseller, it seems, and has quoted from a letter to the journal from a UK literary agent. The nature of the dispute which the agent is contributing to need not detain us. The point is that he describes the fate of the recent second novel of a client of his.

This author's first novel had been respectably reviewed, and his second novel got reviews in the Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement, and the Guardian. In other words, just about everywhere that counts -- at least in terms of literary reputation.

And the bit that caught my eye is this. Prior to publication, booksellers had ordered a grand total of 200 copies of this second novel.

So that's what you can hope for. You write a first novel which is respectably reviewed, and this creates such a windstorm of interest among booksellers that they order 200 copies of the next one. What is more, it seems that, even with a set of good reviews for said second novel, booksellers are disinclined to order any more. Yes, they will order a copy specially if someone wanders in and asks for it. But buy a pile on the strength of a few reviews? No.

However, now that we have disposed of today's bad news, I also have some good news.

Are you having trouble with your novel? Are you stuck on chapter three? Can you not decide what to call the hero's mother-in-law? If so, help is at hand.

I am a user of several software programmes produced by Serif, and because I have bought from them in the past they regularly write to me with new offers. Today's offer is for a programme called Write Your Own Novel. Yes folks, now your computer will do most of the work for you.

Here's a handy summary of just some of the things that this wonderful new piece of software can do for you:

Organise and store your complete novel - this great feature will let you get on with the important business of writing your novel whilst it does the work of putting it into the correct order. Simple, yet incredibly effective!

Plan and research your story - Stuck for ideas? Write Your Own Novel will help you get your ideas down onto paper with its powerful research function.

Generate characters, names, and ideas - Struggling to come up with names for your key characters? Then Write Your Own Novel can do it all for you! Some days we all get writer’s block, so let this great CD-ROM do the hard work for you.

Develop characters, events and locations - Maybe you’re having trouble coming up for [with?] the perfect setting for your novel. Well, that’s not a problem with this great feature. Write Your Own Novel will enhance your story with the single click of a mouse.

Submissions tracker helps you track who you’ve sent your story to [all 4,563 of them] and can help you keep track of who hasn’t got back to you, and, more importantly, who has!

Oh, and there's a spell-checker too. 100,000 words, no less.

Wow. Serif offered this to me for £9.95 plus shipping. But that's because I'm a proven sucker and get a bargain price. You can get your own copy from Amazon. And there are two versions: the standard and the professional. Only the latter will do, obviously.

Jo, from Devon, says on Amazon that this is a great piece of software. 'Writing a book is something i;ve always wanted to do but just never quite got round to it as i didn't really know whare to start,' she says. Start with the spell-checker, darling.

Terry Teachout: Culture in the Age of Blogging

Terry Teachout has been blogging for a couple of years now: he writes About Last Night.

Terry is based in New York, where he is drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, but he writes about the other arts, too -- books, ballet, painting and sculpture, film and TV, whatever happens to catch his eye or ear. He is disgustingly productive, turning out more published words in a week than many writers do in a year.

One of Terry's recent essays in Commentary is entitled 'Culture in the Age of Blogging', and it's well worth a look. (I do try to keep up with Terry's output, but there are limits to what one can read, so thanks to Maud Newton for the link.)

Terry begins by pointing out that the blog phenomenon illustrates a circumstance which has been apparent for some time now, namely that there is no longer a common culture. He is speaking of the United States, but the same is true in the UK.

I was pretty sure that I had written something about this change in society myself, somewhere along the line, but I can't find any trace of it, so maybe it's just one of those pieces that I composed in my head and never actually wrote.

Anyway, Terry's point, which I agree with, is that once upon a time, say in the 1960s, there were mass-circulation magazines such as Life and Saturday Evening Post which were read all over America. These both reflected what was then a common set of assumptions and life-styles, and also created and reinforced those common assumptions and life-styles.

Before long, however, these mass-circulation mags were replaced by a thousand and one smaller magazines which dealt with tiny aspects of life: Budgerigar Breeders Gazette, Boob-Fancier Monthly, and so forth. In other words, things began to fragment. What was true of magazines was true of the other media too. Instead of just CBS, NBC, and ABC, we got cable. Instead of just one hit parade, we got top-twenty lists for every sort and kind of music. And so on.

This process, it seems to me, is even more pronounced and dramatic in the UK than in the USA. For example, when I was growing up there was only one TV channel -- the BBC. Then we got one commercial channel (late 1950s); then we got BBC2 (about 1963?). And today, even on my modest satellite setup, I have several hundred channels. (And you know what? I sometimes find it hard to find anything I want to watch. And I miss those German channels that I used to get before I went digital.)

So there it is. In my youth, everyone watched the same TV shows. Audiences of 20 million in a nation of 50 million people were not unknown. Everybody talked about the same programme on the bus and in the office or the classroom. There was, in the sense that we all shared a common expeience, a common culture. And that common culture extended, of course, to our concept of what was right, what was wrong, our view of religion, and our views of how political discussion and business should be conducted.

All that has been swept away. Not by the blogs, of course, because they are brand new, but by the steady and almost exponential increase in the number of media, by the vast influxes of immigrants with their different ways of doing things, and by the growth of the travel industry, which has opened people's eyes to the fact that not everywhere in the world is the same.

Today's world, at least in the developed countries, is dramatically different from that of 50 years ago. That may be a statement of the blindingly obvious to some of you, but unless you've lived through it you can't possibly understand just how different things are.

Terry Teachout's article traces the stages in the development of this change, in the American context.

In doing so, he is obliged to refer to a matter that I touched upon yesterday, in the Blue Rondo review, namely whether there is or there is not such a thing as high art, which is appreciated only by the intellectuals and aesthetes of this world, and which is innately superior to the vulgar forms of entertainment which please the masses.

If I understand his argument correctly, Terry believes that, whichever side of this debate you feel inclined to support, the battle seems to have been abandoned. Instead of slugging out a Kulturkampf, Americans have instead chosen to gather around them, both literally and metaphorically, those who share their tastes and opinions and politics and religion, and have got on with their lives while ignoring, pretty much, those who have different opinions. And -- they've started blogging.

Not that Terry is an unqualified admirer of the blogs. They have, he says...

...their own built-in limitations. Chief among these is a tendency toward superficiality. While a blogger can write at any length, few seem inclined to post the kind of full-length essay that is the stock in trade of an intellectual magazine like Commentary. Most favor brief, suggestive postings that imply more than they state, and they no less typically prefer hit-and-run assertion to detailed argument, verbal slugfests to coolly reasoned refutations. Moreover, for all the contempt in which they affect to hold the mainstream media, too many bloggers remain in their thrall, complaining about what the media do wrong instead of figuring out how to do other things right.

Terry Teachout's piece is a consistently absorbing essay, and if you're interested in how blogging fits into the greater scheme of things it would repay your time.

One final thought on the common culture thing, more relevant perhaps to the UK than elsewhere.

In 1961 the British Prime Minister appointed a Committee under Lord Robbins to consider the provision of university education in the UK. This Committee decided (among many other things) that there were four principal aims of a good university system. The fourth of these was 'a function that is more difficult to describe concisely but that is none the less fundamental: the transmission of a common culture and common standards of citizenship.'

In subsequent years, whenever new universities were founded (and there were quite a few of them) it was frequently the case that the Robbins Committee's four aims were incorporated into the university's charter, as the official description of what the university was supposed to be doing. (Why think for yourself when someone else has done it for you?) And it is worth remembering that UK universities are almost entirely funded by the state.

So we have a situation today in which many, perhaps most, UK universities have it as one of their official aims that they should be bringing about the transmission of a common culture. But at this point I will bet you a substantial sum of money. Go into any one of any of these universities and ask the man or woman in charge what they are doing to bring about the Robbins Committee's fourth aim. And I bet you that the lengthy, reasoned and detailed reponse that you receive will be along the following lines:

Er, well....

(Apology: first posting of this piece referred to the gentleman as Terry Teacher. Now corrected. The eyes are not what they were. Ditto the powers of concentration.)

John Lawton: Blue Rondo

This blog has been going for rather more than a year now, and I suspect that a number of themes are beginning to emerge. Perhaps theme isn't quite the right word, but what I mean is that there are a number of things that I find myself saying fairly often.

I repeat these points (a) because I think that they are important and true, and (b) because I think they will be useful to those of you who are planning a career (pause for sardonic laughter) as a writer.

One of the points that I make from time to time is this: a novel really isn't any sort of a big deal. Reading a novel is a bit like going out for a meal, watching a football match, seeing a movie, taking a walk in the park. You do these things because you hope that they will give you pleasure. A novel is, therefore, just one of the many (and rapidly multiplying) sources of entertainment and emotional satisfaction which are available to the super-privileged people of the western world.

You will readily observe, however, that there are those who would have you believe that the novel is something more than just another source of entertainment. The literary establishment, so called, maintains that the novel -- when it takes the form of 'serious literature' -- is a species of 'high art'; and high art (according to these self-appointed experts) is something far, far more precious and important than a football match or a TV show or a CD by Britney.

At this point, unless firmly disciplined, I tend to splutter a bit and undergo a kind of apoplectic fit of indignation at the bone-headed stupidity of the human mind. Particularly the kind of human mind which was had about twenty years of formal education but persists in believing that the moon is made of green cheese.

Let me therefore content myself with saying that the high-art merchants are fuzzy thinkers, at best. At worst they are conmen, frauds and hucksters, devious sons of bitches who have found themselves a very cushy berth teaching Eng. Lit. or media studies or some such, and are determined to hang on to that comfortable way of life no matter how far they have to bend the facts.

The simple truth is that the novel is not anything important, like a cure for cancer or an engine which will work with water as its fuel. A novel is simply something that may, if you are lucky, provide you with a few hours of harmless enjoyment.

All of which is a preamble to a brief discussion of John Lawton's new novel Blue Rondo. Lawton is man whose output I have discussed before, so you can read about him there if you wish. For present purposes, it will suffice to say that he is an English author who works in what I suppose we must call the thriller genre. And, since he writes thrillers, Lawton is a man who is systematically ignored, if not actually despised, by the literary establishment, i.e. those who profess to police our culture for us. (And as far as I am concerned they needn't bother.)

Most of Lawton's books are set in England, sometime between 1944 and 1963, and they feature the same man, Frederick Troy, who is a police officer by profession. He is also the son of a wealthy immigrant of Russian origins; and Troy's brother is a leading member of the Labour party.

In Blue Rondo we are in 1959. Troy is now a Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard, but much of the early part of the book deals with his friends, family, and lovers. It is absolutely none the worse for that.

When the criminal aspect of the novel gets under way, Troy finds himself up against a couple of villains who are clearly based on the real-life Kray twins. Many of the other characters are either real-life people from the 1950s -- Hugh Gaitskell and Tom Driberg for instance -- or they are based on real people, here being given new names. Lady Docker and Lord Boothby were, I would guess, a couple of Lawton's models.

Lawton also uses real locales. Troy, for instance, lives in Godwin Court, which is more of an alley than a street. I haven't been there for years, but I used to hang out there once upon a time. There was a small coffee shop, where a friend of a friend used to work: Peter Farmer, last heard of designing sets for ballet companies. And the literary agent Margaret (aka Peggy) Ramsay used to have her office there.

Unless my memory deceives me, Godwin Court was also, incidentally, the place where the actor Michael Redgrave had a hideway in which he conducted his sexual adventures. Lawton, I think, makes reference to it in one of his other books. It's a long time ago, but I seem to remember that Redgrave had a thing for guardsmen (i.e. soldiers) and that some S&M was involved. Though whether the guardsmen beat him, or he them, I neither know nor care. No doubt Alan Strachan's 2004 biography would reveal details.

But I digress.

My main point it to say that, bearing in mind my views on the nature of the novel, John Lawton's Blue Rondo is about as good a book as you could sensibly hope to find. It is intelligent, literate, gripping, and sheds some interesting light on past events. Among its other virtues, it is a bloody good detective story.

This book will be particularly enjoyed, I suspect, by English people of a certain age. Americans aged 23 are unlikely to find it so enthralling. Although, having said that, there is no reason why not. It is certainly professional enough.

The novel also has a slightly unexpected humorous side to it. There is a funeral scene which is as funny as I have ever read (though funerals, admittedly, are not often amusing). However, when Lawton tells us that the officiating priest was a certain Canon Chasuble, I fear he may be going a step too far. And is there really a wine called Couve de Murville? I rather doubt it.

I only wish there were more in the John Lawton oeuvre that I had not already read. But there aren't. As my mother used to say, they don't write 'em quick enough for me.

Quickies

OK, here are a few short pieces inspired by my mailbag, just to start the day.

First, Eric Mayer has kindly let me know that he is running a series of comments on my essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, beginning on 6 June. What he has to say is interesting (to me at least), and may perhaps cause you to read the original essay if you haven't done so already. Various people have also commented on his comments.

Eric, by the way, is co-author, with his wife Mary, of a series of detective novels which are published by Poisoned Pen Press. The two authors use the name Mary Reed.

Next, the much-beloved P.G. Wodehouse has a prize named after him. Full title the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. (We mustn't forget our sponsors.) This year's winner is Marina Lewycka for A short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Further details in the Guardian.

Finally, it seems that an Oops is in order. In my review of Ian Hocking's book (see below), I gave the wrong link to his publisher. The site I linked to is that of UK Authors, whereas the publisher is actually UKA Press. True, the two sites are closely related, not least in that they are run by the same boss lady, Andrea Lowne, but we need to distinguish.

UK Authors is a writing community website, with some 2000 members. It's a place where you can find stuff to read, and, if you are a member, submit material for publication on the site.

UKA Press is a small press which publishes in traditional style. Their latest book is by Kevin Brownlow, and tells the story of how the film It Happened Here was made. Like many small presses, however, UKA Press is deluged with mss and proposals and is currently closed to submissions.

Ian Hocking: Deja Vu

Ian Hocking is an industrious young (well, youngish) writer who runs a blog, a web page, and writes novels. He is also a bit of a dab hand at getting himself publicity -- which, in this day and age is not so much a virtue as a necessity.

Deja Vu is science fiction. And it is science fiction about time travel, so you need to keep your wits about you. In fact, just about my only criticism of Deja Vu is that you have to concentrate like a bastard or you will miss something. I have this bad habit of reading books in bed, last thing at night; and when I wake up the next morning I very often can't remember the last chapter that I read before nodding off. With some books this doesn't matter -- indeed it can be a merciful blessing -- but with Deja Vu it is no help at all, because the reader needs to be fully alert.

Since Ian is English it is no surprise to find that the book is set in England, but we are in the future. Sometimes 2012 and sometimes 2023; and, I dare say, at some other points in time also.

Before long the book develops into a chase. Saskia Brandt, a detective with a European law-enforcement agency, is pursuing David Proctor, a scientist. She wants to question him about a bomb that exploded in 2002.

The plot is fiendish complicated. Few characters are precisely who or what they seem to be; and some of them are not even who they think they are. Or once were. Or hope to be in the future. I told you -- wits needed about you. Reading the book is a bit like watching The Matrix -- consistently interesting, but you do sometimes wonder what the hell is going on.

The writing I thought was excellent. Crisp and professional, with the action being structured in scenes.

All in all, this book bodes well for the future. It is, after all, a first novel -- or at any rate a first published novel -- so it would be unreasonable to expect miracles. Even Kurt Vonnegut's first novel (Piano Player) wasn't all that hot; The Sirens of Titan was his second. And in fact Ian's blog reveals that he has recently completed his second book.

The publisher of this opus is UK Authors, a small and slightly odd outfit (at least to my jaundiced eye). Let's hope that Ian can move a little more into the mainstream with his second book. He deserves to.

Tess Gerritsen: The Sinner

In general, this blog has a marked preference for commercial fiction as compared with the highbrow literary variety. Occasionally, however, as I have had cause to remark before, commercial fiction can be too commercial for its own good. So it is, at least in my opinion, with Tess Gerriten's The Sinner.

Tess Gerritsen is an American, living in Maine. She was once a successful medic (a nice vague term, but that's what the book says), and she gave up her practice to raise children and concentrate on her writing. She has written six previous novels, all of them being New York Times bestsellers.

The Sinner comes with warm endorsements from Mo Hayder ('absolutely riveting') and Stephen King ('you're going to be up all night'). The latter seems to be unusually generous in offering plugs to other writers, but why not.

The Sinner, written by a woman, seems to me to be aimed firmly at women readers. There are two lead characters, both female. Maura Isles is what in England is called a pathologist; she examines dead bodies. Jane Rizzoli is a cop. Both women have complicated love/sex lives which are dealt with at some length.

The plot involves the murder of nuns in a convent, where 'unspeakable carnage' is discovered. And we go on from there.

All the familiar elements of a bestseller are present. Violent death. Religion. Big business up to no good. Strong female characters. And whodunit?

Personally I thought the medical examiner was decidedly slow to diagnose leprosy, but then I don't suppose leprosy is very common in the US. More to the point, perhaps, I found the whole book a little too contrived and mechanical for my taste.

I have no objection to people bolting together the necessary elements for a bestseller, and making some money out of it -- no objection at all. And this book will no doubt serve very well for those who read one book a month; or perhaps even one a year. But I prefer novels which are a little more quirky and individual; even if they do sell less well.

Gav and Leaf

Gav's studio is a blog about (as it says at the top) 'another writer's life'. And it was Gav who first drew my attention to the existence of Leaf Publishing, a company which is hoping to put out small (A6) books containing short stories of about 4,000 to 5,000 words. These will be sold through various outlets, most of which, it seems, will be outside the normal bookshop chains: coffee shops, tea rooms, and hotel bars are given as examples.

To kickstart their operation, Leaf are running a competition to find suitable material. First prize is £200, plus publication, and the entry fee is £5.

It would be interesting to know something about the forecast costings and estimated sales of this operation, but I don't suppose Leaf are going to share that with us. I can't quite bring myself to believe that the idea will be commercially viable, but it's an intriguing concept and I hope the organisers prove me wrong.

Gerard Jones: Ginny Good

I wanted to begin this review -- which threatens to go on a bit -- with a handy summary of my opinion, so that, as with some previous reviews of mine, you were saved the trouble of reading the whole thing if you didn't wish to. You would know what I thought in one or two sentences.

But I find myself with a problem. I want to be complimentary. In fact more than complimentary: I want to demonstrate that this is a book that I admire enormously. But the simple fact is that the language of praise and enthusiasm has been so cheapened and coarsened by years of overuse at the hands of publicists that the words no longer mean anything. Worse than that: they evoke a contemptuous curl of the lip.

Suppose I were to say: brilliant, wonderful, moving. The trouble is, you've heard it all before. And the last time you read a book with that sort of endorsement on the cover, you weren't too impressed.

So, let's skip the shorthand compliments. I will just say that this is a remarkable book. I enjoyed reading it, and I recommend it unreservedly. Those most likely to enjoy it will be, I suspect, those who were around in the 1960s; but younger readers might be surprised to discover that they did not invent sex and drugs and rock and roll.

Let's begin with the physical object: the (paperback) book itself. For as long as I can remember, American book design has seemed to me to be superior to British, and this is a good example. The publisher is Monkfish, of Rhinebeck, New York, and the designer was Georgia Dent. The cover is not, perhaps, the most inspiring you have ever seen, but at least it is related to the text, which is more than some are. And while there are occasional peculiarities in the printing (some curly apostrophes, and some straight ones, for example) they are not enough to be disturbing.

Next, the author. If you have never heard the name Gerard Jones, then it is high time you did. Gerard is one of the true stars of the web -- one of those people who early on recognised that the internet could be used in a wholly new way, to do wholly new things, and he seized the opportunity.

Gerard is the creator of Everyone Who's Anyone, and if you are not familiar with that web site you should take a long look at it soon. And you don't have to read Everyone for very long to discover that Gerard is a writer who worked for years and years to get his book published. In fact he claims the world record for the number of times his book was rejected, and I am not about to dispute that claim. But eventually he made it; the book was published in 2004.

The saga of Gerard's search for a publisher is a long one. When he first appeared on the web, reproducing the rejection letters that he had received from agents and publishers, Gerard could easily have been mistaken for one of those wacko eccentrics, the true obsessives who write to the Queen, the Prime Minister, and the Lord Chancellor, and blame everybody but themselves for their problems. But make no mistake. Gerard Jones is not a crackpot. He is saner than most of us. And he is a really talented writer. He is a great success, in the sense that, in this memoir, he has accomplished exactly what he set out to do. And if you and I could write half as well as Gerard we would have cause to feel pretty pleased with ourselves.

Ginny Good is described on the title page as 'A Mostly True Story', and I don't doubt that. If there are parts of it that Gerard made up, or embroidered a little, then all I can say is that he is an even better writer than I already take him to be.

Gerard was born in 1942, grew up in Michigan, and moved to California in 1960. In particular, he lived and loved in San Francisco (even on Haight Street) at the height of the hippie movement. The book tells the story of his long love affair with Virginia Good, aka Ginny.

Chapter One begins with the following words:

I'm using everyone's real name. They can all sue me. I hope they do. I could use the excitement. It gets kind of boring living up here with my eighty-year-old mother in Ashland, Oregon.

And already, you see, we hear the authentic voice of the Gerard we know and love from his web site. A combative, fairly aggressive, sort of fuck-em-all attitude. Gerard is his own man. He says what he thinks, and he writes in a most remarkably free and yet controlled manner.

Gerard's writing reminds me, in its looseness and lack of inhibition, of the art of moving freely on stage. In the whole of my life I have only ever seen three people who, to my mind, moved with true freedom and grace on stage. One was the great Mickey Rooney; another was an obscure dancer and choreographer called Flick Colby; and the third was a boy in the chorus line of a pantomime that I saw many years ago in Norwich.

And that's the way Gerard writes: he writes the way Mickey Rooney moved. And it is not, in my opinion, a gift. It is something that derives, in part, from an attitude of mind, but it is an acquired skill which requires endless work to develop. The result is all too easy to take for granted: to the reader it looks easy; it looks as if anyone could do it; but then, I guess, that's the way it should be.

The majority of the story that Gerard has to tell relates, naturally, to the girl who provides his title and inspiration. And it has to be said that Ginny Good, though a sensitive, educated, and thoughtful person, was pretty much doomed from the start.

From well before her relationship with Gerard, Ginny suffered from psychiatric problems of one kind or another; Christmas was a particularly difficult period for her, and she usually ended up in hospital. These underlying problems were often exacerbated by drink and drugs. So the story is not always a happy one. In fact, it is a sad story, even upsetting at times. But it is never depressing.

Perhaps this is the place to confess that it took me a long time to get around to buying and reading this book. I have known about it for years, because its existence was hardly a secret. But even when it was published I did not rush to buy a copy.

Why? Well, because I feared that it wouldn't be any good. And you know how painful and embarrassing it can be when a friend gives you something of theirs to read, and you really want to like it, and you know you ought to be polite and positive, but... dear God, the bloody thing is awful.

Such fears can be set aside. Ginny Good is... and once again I grope for a phrase which is not soiled. The book is a genuine work of art, in the sense that it is the product of a thoughtful, sensitive man, who has laboured long to record a passage of his life for our entertainment and instruction, and has succeeded to a greater degree than anyone has any reasonable right to expect. He is a remarkably observant person, deeply interested in life, and not just as an observer but as a participant. (That last part is something that young writers often forget.)

By page 30, we already have a picture of the young (and old) Gerard which is very different from the image which is conjured up by his web site. On Everyone Who's Anyone, Gerard comes across as a cantankerous, difficult, cynical, and perhaps bitter person. But the true Gerard is not like that. He is something altogether more admirable.

Gerard as a young man was also, I have to say, a considerable success with the ladies, many of who are named here, and many of whom, given the free and easy life of California in the 1960s, probably never had names, or, if they did, have long since been forgotten.

One of Gerard's conquests was Donna McKechnie, who later starred in A Chorus Line, and is now a star with her own web site, God help us all. At one point, Donna thought she was pregnant by Gerard, and then it turned out that she wasn't. By such accidents of fate are our lives determined.

Since this blog is about writing and publishing, it is worth noting at this point that Gerard showed some interest in writing from an early age. And at one point he was tutored (for money) by one Gordon Lish. Lish seems to have been one of those nitwits who believe in 'serious literature'; he has, as Gerard observes, made a whole heap of money out of going round preaching that serious literature should not make money. Gerard wasn't any too impressed with Gordon Lish, and neither am I.

As I read this book, I made notes on some of the things that struck me -- because it's all too easy to forget these things afterwards. And Chapter Ten strikes me as remarkable writing by any standards. It's an account of one of Gerard's early encounters with Ginny. Now -- either Gerard has an unusually good memory, or else he made up what we have here; either way, he knows just what to tell us, and just what to leave out.

Chapter Fourteen, by the way, reveals that Ginny Good was the first hippie. Or so Gerard claims. The first time that word was used was in a caption to a photograph of her which appeared in her school paper in 1963. I am not about to argue.

I have the feeling that somewhere -- and I can't put my finger on it -- Gerard tells us that Ginny Good was rewritten and reworked a number of times. Well, maybe so. But if it was, it retains a a high degree of spontaneity; it reads as if he was just in the room, chatting to us. And that, I think, is probably a measure of the book's quality. It feels fresh and brand new, but it has actually been polished, considered, rearranged, and planned. That is something which requires lots of talent.

This is a book which is occasionally funny, and usually fairly easy to read. But it is, ultimately, a story about various ruined lives; and if not ruined, damaged. And since it is an autobiography, it reveals things about the author's life which are not easy to be frank about; and, even if you're prepared to be frank, they are painful. Thus in Chapter Eighteen we find that Ginny, pregnant with Gerard's child, has an abortion.

Now I don't want to get into popular psychology. But it did seem to me, as I read this passage, that it is little wonder that Gerard sometimes comes across as an angry man. There is no doubt that he loved Ginny Good. Little doubt in my mind, either, that he wanted a family. He seems to have known that Ginny was not remotely suitable for motherhood; but even so, the abortion episode hurt him.

On the question of how he feels about the abortion, Gerard is unusually silent; a circumstance which in itself tells us much. Ginny Good was destroying herself -- or, more accurately, being destroyed, by factors which were outside her control; and outside Gerard's too.

Because we are dealing with California in the 1960s, drugs were freely available, and were freely taken. To no one's great advantage, as far as I can see. But if you want a graphic account of what it is like to have sex under the influence of LSD, Gerard provides one.

It was, I think, pages 223 to 225 which convinced me that Gerard is a master of prose writing. In barely two complete pages, he tells us the following story. Exceptionally foul-mouthed man (and I am tolerant in this regard) gets his girlfriend pregnant; wants her to have an abortion; she refuses; he leaves her; gets himself on the cover of Rolling Stone; then gets killed in a drug deal; his girl friend keeps the baby and ends up working as a dental hygienist in Tallahassee, Florida.

By any conceivable standards, those two pages constitute a master class in writing. They reveal character, and they create emotion. You see, if you have the talent and the skill, you don't need 500 pages; you can do it in 2.

One of the noteworthy aspects of this book is the way in which Gerard deals with Ginny's inevitable death. He does it by telling us that, in a sense, he doesn't care.

I don't like dead people. I've never liked dead people. Dead people piss me off. Dead people can go fuck themselves.

But of course in telling us this he merely reveals how painful it was to lose someone he loved -- and it still is painful, even after all these years.

Almost immediately, Gerard moves away from Ginny's death and tells us about the death of his father; and in so doing he succeeded in making me laugh.

After Ginny, Gerard found himself another girl. Melanie. Who is one of nature's most fragile creations. A simple girl, it seems to me (and that is far from an insult), easily damaged and not easily repaired. Melanie is still around, Gerard tells us. They don't live together any more, but through Melanie Gerard has acquired a family, of sorts.

The process of writing Ginny Good appears to have had a beneficial effect on Gerard. He describes it as follows:

It's the feeling you get when you've done things you thought you'd never do and have had your heart desiccated and ground down to around the consistency of talcum powder and suddenly it somehow gets itself, like, reconstituted or some damn thing. You like people again.

The final page reminds me somewhat of the ending of John Rechy's City of Night. Not perhaps the most suitable coda to choose, one feels. But hey -- who are we to argue with the author?

Gerard Jones's Ginny Good is one of the most impressive books that I have read for a long time. I'm glad I finally made the effort to get hold of a copy, and even more glad that it didn't disappoint me. This is a book that I shall read again. And I don't say that often.

Congratulations, Gerard.

Longer and longer

Bowker, the US bibliographic specialists, recently put out a press release with some book production figures for 2004.

It seems that there were some 195,000 books published in the USA last year. Of these, about 25,000 were adult fiction. And then you wondered why it was so hard to find anyone to publish your own book. Go figure.

Anyway, the small point that I want to draw attention to here is the increase in the length of the average work of fiction. Novels published by the large trade houses averaged 359 pages in 2004, which was an increase of 24 pages since 1995, and 43 pages since 1990.

Now, question. At this rate, how long will it be before the average hits 500 pages? What do you mean, you need a calculator.

Actually, by my calculation, if the increase continues at the same rate, we shall have an average of 500 pages in approximately forty years' time.

However long it takes, this increase is, in my view, completely unnecessary and also counter-productive. For details of why I hold that view, see the archives for my posts on The Problem of Length, beginning on 13 December last.

Abandoned attempt

Every once in a while I have one of my funny turns.

What happens is, I wake up one morning and decide that perhaps I really ought to make another attempt to find out what modern literary theory is all about. After all, I spent most of my working life in the university sector; and although I have been profoundly rude, in the past, about those who work in the English Literature departments of universities, I do occasionally wonder whether I have been entirely fair to them.

So, every once in a while, I make another attempt to figure out what in blue blazes such people are talking about.

My latest attempt was prompted by a reference to Christopher Hitchens's article in the New York Times. I had to register to read it, but this link may work. Hitchens, you may recall, was described by George Galloway recently as a 'drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay', and a man who has earned such an accolade cannot be all bad. (I am about to read George's book, by the way; of which more later.)

Hitchens's article takes the form of a review of The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism; in its second edition, mark you, so the thing must be a really hot seller.

The main problem with Hitchens's review is that he seems determined to prove that he is the intellectual equal of those who contribute to the book. And this seems to require that he write in prose which is as impenetrable as theirs. For example:

Adorno once remarked (this was also in ''Minima Moralia'') that a film of true aesthetic value could be made, and be in full conformity and compliance with all the rules of the Hays Office, as long as there was no Hays Office. That was, if you like, an ironic and paradoxical appreciation of the transgressive.

Huh? Whatsay?

However, despite my difficulty, as an intellectually challenged person with only three degrees to my name, in following Hitchens's argument in every detail, I find myself agreeing fully with his conclusion. He says that one of the contributors to the Guide refers approvingly to an essay entitled 'On the Abolition of the English Department'. This man, says Hitchens, should be more careful what he endorses, because 'the prospect of such an abolition, at least in the United States, becomes more appetizing by the minute.'

Well, right on there, brother. No argument from me.

The Hitchens piece attracted a certain amount of attention in various blogs -- sorry, but I do not have all the details to hand -- and Maud Newton (Another look at the popinjay, 2 June) has a useful little discussion with some good links.

Well, I think they're good links. I tried one, and that was enough for me. My funny turn was beginning to subside by then, and sanity was making a comeback.

The link that I tried was to James Wood's article 'The Slightest Sardine' in the London Review of Books. This is very hard going indeed. It really is. But there is, I think, the germ of a sensible point buried there somewhere.

Of course I may have got the wrong end of the stick entirely, but what Woods appears to be saying is that we have endless academic discussion of Eng. Lit. and literary theory and what-have-you, but discussion of books in terms which can be understood by the man in the street/woman on the Clapham omnibus has virtually disappeared.

I repeat. I think that is one of the points that Woods is making. And if so, then I think he is missing something. Namely -- clears throat modestly -- the existence of blogs such as this one. Where books are discussed, I hope, in terms which can be understood by anyone smart enough to navigate here over the web.

And if, as I believe he does, Woods wonders why the academic discourse on literature is conducted in a language called gobbledygook, then the answer is surely perfectly clear. If professors of English Literature were to discuss books in everyday language, in terms which could be understood by the average reader of the Daily Mirror, then it would be blindingly obvious that we don't need professors of English Literature at all. And they would be out of a job. And we can't have that, can we? Hence obscurity.

There are other links in Maud Newton's piece but I'm afraid that by this time my resolve failed me. The trouble is, you see, whenever I read anything serious I get this sharp pain, right between the eyes. I think I will go back to ignoring literary theory and all those who dwell in it; it's much more relaxing if you do.

Catherine Wald: The Resilient Writer

Catherine Wald has this week been undertaking what is known as a virtual book tour. This means appearing in one form or another on a number of blogs, and, for all I know, other places as well. See, for instance, Galleycat (31 May) and Buzz, Balls and Hype (1 June).

As far as the GOB is concerned, Catherine's new book, The Resilient Writer, was discussed, in outline, on 9 May. Subsequently I was sent a review copy and so I am now in a position to discuss it in more detail.

The Resilient Writer is a well designed and well produced paperback; the publisher is Persea Books of New York. The subtitle of the book is 'Tales of rejection and triumph from 23 top authors', and what we have here is a series of interviews in which said authors are asked about their early (and later!) problems with rejection, and how they dealt with them.

Let me say at the outset, perhaps to save you the trouble of reading to the end of this review, that if you are interested in being any sort of a writer, whether fiction or non-fiction, and you hope to achieve some sort of success in the business, there is much in this book which will be valuable to you.

Catherine Wald has been around long enough to know what questions to ask, and she seems to have the knack of getting people to speak freely about what can be very personal and painful circumstances. The result is a great deal of useful information, and, yes, some inspiration as well.

Any reservations which follow are more related to the nature of the opinions expressed than to the professionalism with which this book is written.

The Introduction strikes a note which will be sounded many times in this book. Catherine begins by telling us that one of her interviewees, Chris Bohjalian, was once advised, early in his writing career, that he should seek employment as a banker, rather than try to write. He chose not to listen to that advice, persevered, and ultimately wrote nine novels including a New York Times number-one bestseller.

How inspiring, I hear you cry. And that indeed is Catherine Wald's view. But I am by no means sure that it is mine.

The problem I have is one of logic. Most writers are going to be told, when they begin to offer stuff in the marketplace, that they really aren't any damn good at the job. They're going to be told that because most of the time it's true. But does it follow that if they stick at it, they will all, ultimately, have themselves a number-one bestseller? Sadly, no.

Catherine tells us that authors, editors, and agents all swear that the cream still rises to the top in the publishing world. She is right, in a sense. They all do swear that. But are they correct in holding that view? I have suggested elsewhere (see my essay On The Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile) that the evidence leads to a quite different conclusion.

Having assured us that the cream rises to the top, Catherine tell us that we must believe this. Why must we? Wouldn't it be a lot more reassuring, for most of us, to believe that second-raters can make it, at least once in a while?

The 23 interviewees provide a pretty good cross-section of the writing community: some men, some women, mostly novelists but a few poets, journalists and non-fiction writers.

Quite a lot of them, by the way, do not make a living from writing alone, though they usually seem to find work in book-related activities. I'm not sure that that is a good idea either; contact with people who never read a book from one year's end to the next wouldn't do any harm.

At least a couple of the authors, by the way, were blessed by the touch of Oprah Winfrey's magic wand, which is the equivalent of winning the lottery. But fortunately there are also a number of cautionary tales, illustrating what can go horribly wrong, in addition to the inspirational success stories. Arthur Golden, for instance, was one day led to believe that a hot-shot editor was about to publish his book, only to discover the next day that a book on which he had already spent six years was going to require a complete rewrite.

Several other writers -- Bill Henderson and Betsy Lerner, for example -- speak frankly about the deep (and dangerous) depression which can result from having a novel rejected. Edmund White tells us that he found rejection so painful that he even contemplated suicide -- several times. I can only say what I've said many times before: writing can seriously damage your health. (See The Truth about Writing.)

It is not wise to allow yourself to become so obsessed with 'success' that rejection does you major damage. Bob Shacochis, when asked, 'Do writers have to be obsessed?' replies, 'You absolutely do.'

Well, in my opinion, you absolutely don't. And the smart writer is one who is not obsessed. Esmeralda Santiago seems to have the right idea. She says 'Writing is one of the things I do. My sense of who I am is not built up around my writing.' Very sensible.

All in all, this is a thoughtful and interesting book. Whether you agree with the opinions expressed or not -- and since the opinions cover a wide spectrum you are hardly likely to agree with all of them -- you will find much material to think about.

As I read this book I did what I usually do with a review copy, i.e. write pencil notes in the margin as I go along. And what I find now, as I leaf through the pages for this review, is that over and over again I have found references to how important it is to persevere. And over and over again I have felt it necessary to note that the opposite is not true. Perseverance does not guarantee success as a writer, no matter how modest your aims.

Read the book, by all means. But just don't give up the day job too soon, OK?

By the way, while I was reading this book I had a rejection of my own. A lady at the BBC returned to me a play that I sent her in 1999. Apparently it was in the back of a cupboard. 'You certainly gave up all hope of hearing from me years ago,' says my correspondent. And that's true. But at least she returned the script, which is more than some do.