It's that time of year again. Everybody and his brother is coming up with lists of the year's best books, or the year's most notable, or some such. Year's most heavily hyped and most suitable for writing long, tedious, and pseudo-learned articles about, in many cases.
Should you care, a commenter kindly sent us the URL for the Canadian Globe and Mail's hot 100; the UK Sunday Times has a list; and so does the New York Times, if you can be bothered to register. I did once, but it seems to have forgotten me, so the hell with it.
Jessa Crispin worries that she's only read four of the NYT's list. She began to read some of the others but got distracted by an episode of Lost. Well yes. Entirely understandable.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Robert Nagle on The Networked Novel
Robert Nagle has been blogging since 2002 -- a long time in the blogosphere -- and he currently offers a lengthy and very interesting essay on The Networked Novel. Part 1 is up and Part 2 will follow.
Robert begins by quoting the GOB, but he soon widens the discussion (you will be pleased to hear), and offers us ideas from a variety of thinkers about the novel, including, of course, himself.
He suggests, among other things, that novel-reading is beginning to look like an increasingly eccentric way to spend your time, and that 'we may be returning to shorter forms or (more likely) serialized forms' of fiction.
Modern fiction writers, Robert suggests, need to recognise what is still unique about novels (and text-based artistic works) in the digital age: he offers six such factors to think about. And in Part 2 of his essay he will be asking 'how can the "networked novel" exploit the advantages of the web's opennness without diluting the magnificence of an individual's artistic vision?'
Robert begins by quoting the GOB, but he soon widens the discussion (you will be pleased to hear), and offers us ideas from a variety of thinkers about the novel, including, of course, himself.
He suggests, among other things, that novel-reading is beginning to look like an increasingly eccentric way to spend your time, and that 'we may be returning to shorter forms or (more likely) serialized forms' of fiction.
Modern fiction writers, Robert suggests, need to recognise what is still unique about novels (and text-based artistic works) in the digital age: he offers six such factors to think about. And in Part 2 of his essay he will be asking 'how can the "networked novel" exploit the advantages of the web's opennness without diluting the magnificence of an individual's artistic vision?'
Licensing your work for fun and profit
Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about the licensing of rights to publishers (and other parties). My essay was prompted by an article in the quarterly newsletter issued by the Fisher Organisation, the firm of accountants which does my tax return for me.
What the accountants in question had to say in 2004, essentially, was that, when you license rights to a company, you can confidently expect that the company will not pay you every penny that is due under the terms of the agreement. The accountants made this statement on the basis of numerous audits which they had carried out on behalf of licensors.
This year, the Forensic division of the Fisher Organisation has another article in the newsletter, and they have approached the question of licensing rights from a slightly different angle. They have presented readers with a list of the desirable features which any contract for the licensing of rights (as between, say, a writer and a publisher) ought to contain; desirable, that is, when viewed from the point of view of the writer, or licensor.
Here is a shortened version of the features which the perfect contract will contain:
1. The right to audit the licensee's books, such right to be exercised within two weeks of giving notice (otherwise the slippery bastards will keep putting you off. 'It's Christmas. Mr Jones is off sick. The files are in Belgium...').
2. Any unpaid sums found to be due should be subject to interest charges. It is 'not at all unusual' to find that a pattern of under-reporting goes back several years.
3. Royalties to be paid should be defined in terms of clearly defined gross/net selling prices, and not as a percentage of invoiced prices or money received.
4. There should also be anti-dumping provision. Selling goods dirt cheap tends to damage the perceived value of the brand, so the contract should stipulate a minimum selling price.
5. The contract should set out remedies if these measures are ignored. In particular, most contracts give a licensee rights to a certain geographic area, so any ex-territory sales should be regarded as counterfeit, meaning that the licensor is entitled not merely to royalties but to the net selling price.
And, finally, the Forensic division of this large and highly experienced firm says this: 'It cannot be said too often that any weakness or ambiguity in a contract will almost certainly be exploited by a licensee.'
Now, a few thoughts.
First of all, the firm of accountants referred to here does not deal solely, or even mainly, I suspect, with contracts in the publishing industry. And even when it does, those contracts are often between publishers in two different parts of the world, rather than between author and publisher. Nevertheless, there are some significant pointers here, I believe, when it comes to the kind of contract which the average writer is likely to be offered.
You don't have to be around the book world very long to discover that individual writers are in a very weak position when it comes to negotiating terms. Traditionally, two remedies have been propounded for this state of affairs. In fiction, most writers have to have an agent -- they are hardly likely to be offered a contract by a major firm if they don't work through an agent. And secondly, at least in the UK, there are two writers' unions, or trade associations, which have sought to negotiate minimum-terms contracts: the Society of Authors and the Writers Guild. (The WG web site is down at the moment but the link will lead you to the Guild's blog.)
As for minimum terms, it's a while since I had sight of one of those contracts, and in any case I seem to remember that they differed slightly from one publisher to another. But one thing I think can be said fairly safely. And that is that it is most unlikely that even the best of the minimum-terms agreements will come even close to meeting the template provided by the Fisher Organisation.
As for the agents -- well, no doubt they will do their best. But selling a new author is hard enough at the best of times. So you can expect that the terms available in your early contracts will be less than ideal; and not unless you acquire Dean Koontz/Nora Roberts status will you or your agent be able to tell the publisher what you will agree to and what you won't.
Many publishers are these days moving more and more towards remunerating authors on the basis of sums received rather than royalties on fixed prices. See, for instance, the lengthy discussion of this topic on the Akme web site. Here Andrew Malcolm describes how Oxford University Press, one of the largest and most powerful UK publishers, deals with royalties: a situation which he describes as 'the net-receipts swindle'.
The official story, says Andrew Malcolm, has always been that the switchover from 'published-price' to 'net-receipts' royalty agreements has been of no financial disadvantage to authors, and that the proper equivalences have always been maintained between the percentage rates in the two systems. However, Malcolm has tracked down a statement from the Warden of New College which, he maintains, 'constitutes a formal admission on behalf of a publisher that this is not in fact the case, and he carefully explains how the swindle works.'
As for digital rights... Well, C.E. Petit, of the Scrivener's Error blog, tells me that, since the mid-1990s, one major US publisher has adopted an 'electronic rights are a deal-breaker' approach to contract negotiations. That is to say, every agent/author's attempt to negotiate better terms than the standard electronic-rights grab gets rejected as a deal-breaker. Few agents or authors have been brave enough walk away from a deal on that basis.
Any writer who is offered any kind of a contract seems to regard it as a cause for celebration. The fact is, however, that if you examine the small print you are likely to find that it falls a long, long way short of being ideal.
Some years ago, a leading UK agent once said to me, 'You must always remember, Michael, that publishing is a very friendly business.' Later, when I knew her better, I came to understand that what she meant was this: Don't try to be too brisk and businesslike, because it won't go down very well in the book world. And don't think that you and I can dictate terms to these people, because if we do that we shall end up with nothing.
What the accountants in question had to say in 2004, essentially, was that, when you license rights to a company, you can confidently expect that the company will not pay you every penny that is due under the terms of the agreement. The accountants made this statement on the basis of numerous audits which they had carried out on behalf of licensors.
This year, the Forensic division of the Fisher Organisation has another article in the newsletter, and they have approached the question of licensing rights from a slightly different angle. They have presented readers with a list of the desirable features which any contract for the licensing of rights (as between, say, a writer and a publisher) ought to contain; desirable, that is, when viewed from the point of view of the writer, or licensor.
Here is a shortened version of the features which the perfect contract will contain:
1. The right to audit the licensee's books, such right to be exercised within two weeks of giving notice (otherwise the slippery bastards will keep putting you off. 'It's Christmas. Mr Jones is off sick. The files are in Belgium...').
2. Any unpaid sums found to be due should be subject to interest charges. It is 'not at all unusual' to find that a pattern of under-reporting goes back several years.
3. Royalties to be paid should be defined in terms of clearly defined gross/net selling prices, and not as a percentage of invoiced prices or money received.
4. There should also be anti-dumping provision. Selling goods dirt cheap tends to damage the perceived value of the brand, so the contract should stipulate a minimum selling price.
5. The contract should set out remedies if these measures are ignored. In particular, most contracts give a licensee rights to a certain geographic area, so any ex-territory sales should be regarded as counterfeit, meaning that the licensor is entitled not merely to royalties but to the net selling price.
And, finally, the Forensic division of this large and highly experienced firm says this: 'It cannot be said too often that any weakness or ambiguity in a contract will almost certainly be exploited by a licensee.'
Now, a few thoughts.
First of all, the firm of accountants referred to here does not deal solely, or even mainly, I suspect, with contracts in the publishing industry. And even when it does, those contracts are often between publishers in two different parts of the world, rather than between author and publisher. Nevertheless, there are some significant pointers here, I believe, when it comes to the kind of contract which the average writer is likely to be offered.
You don't have to be around the book world very long to discover that individual writers are in a very weak position when it comes to negotiating terms. Traditionally, two remedies have been propounded for this state of affairs. In fiction, most writers have to have an agent -- they are hardly likely to be offered a contract by a major firm if they don't work through an agent. And secondly, at least in the UK, there are two writers' unions, or trade associations, which have sought to negotiate minimum-terms contracts: the Society of Authors and the Writers Guild. (The WG web site is down at the moment but the link will lead you to the Guild's blog.)
As for minimum terms, it's a while since I had sight of one of those contracts, and in any case I seem to remember that they differed slightly from one publisher to another. But one thing I think can be said fairly safely. And that is that it is most unlikely that even the best of the minimum-terms agreements will come even close to meeting the template provided by the Fisher Organisation.
As for the agents -- well, no doubt they will do their best. But selling a new author is hard enough at the best of times. So you can expect that the terms available in your early contracts will be less than ideal; and not unless you acquire Dean Koontz/Nora Roberts status will you or your agent be able to tell the publisher what you will agree to and what you won't.
Many publishers are these days moving more and more towards remunerating authors on the basis of sums received rather than royalties on fixed prices. See, for instance, the lengthy discussion of this topic on the Akme web site. Here Andrew Malcolm describes how Oxford University Press, one of the largest and most powerful UK publishers, deals with royalties: a situation which he describes as 'the net-receipts swindle'.
The official story, says Andrew Malcolm, has always been that the switchover from 'published-price' to 'net-receipts' royalty agreements has been of no financial disadvantage to authors, and that the proper equivalences have always been maintained between the percentage rates in the two systems. However, Malcolm has tracked down a statement from the Warden of New College which, he maintains, 'constitutes a formal admission on behalf of a publisher that this is not in fact the case, and he carefully explains how the swindle works.'
As for digital rights... Well, C.E. Petit, of the Scrivener's Error blog, tells me that, since the mid-1990s, one major US publisher has adopted an 'electronic rights are a deal-breaker' approach to contract negotiations. That is to say, every agent/author's attempt to negotiate better terms than the standard electronic-rights grab gets rejected as a deal-breaker. Few agents or authors have been brave enough walk away from a deal on that basis.
Any writer who is offered any kind of a contract seems to regard it as a cause for celebration. The fact is, however, that if you examine the small print you are likely to find that it falls a long, long way short of being ideal.
Some years ago, a leading UK agent once said to me, 'You must always remember, Michael, that publishing is a very friendly business.' Later, when I knew her better, I came to understand that what she meant was this: Don't try to be too brisk and businesslike, because it won't go down very well in the book world. And don't think that you and I can dictate terms to these people, because if we do that we shall end up with nothing.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Tim Worstall (editor): 2005 Blogged
A few months ago, I was asked by Tim Worstall if I would allow one of my blog essays to be included in a kind of 'best of British blogging' anthology. Of course I agreed -- especially in view of the amazingly generous remuneration on offer (1 free copy of the book). And now here it is: I have the best-of-British blogging 2005 here in my hot little hand.
Fortunately, the book turns out to be a great deal more interesting and impressive than it looks on the outside. My first reaction was: Oh dear. The book designer seems to have thought to himself: Hmm. Blog = newfangled thingy. Cutting-edge sort of doodah. So we'd better have a cutting-edge sort of design. Except that the 'cutting-edge design' features a title which looks as if it was printed on one of those dot-matrix printers which disappeared about fifteen years ago; and the editor's comments, introducing each blog extract, are printed in the kind of capitals-only font which was used by teleprinters until about twenty years ago. And the text of the book, when you get to it, is printed in a sans-serif font which works well on screen, but actually we're not on screen, are we? We're on paper.
So the initial impression was not good. But happily the contents overcome the initial impression.
Tim Worstall seems to have read an unholy number of blogs in search of material, and to my (not wholly unbiased) mind he seems to have done an excellent job. The contents are arranged in the order in which they appeared on the originating blog, from November 2004 up to the end of October 2005, so the production team have done a good job in getting this into the shops for an 18 November publication date. The publisher, by the way, is The Friday Project Ltd., a new outfit set up to 'turn the Internet's best-known brands into the world's finest books.'
Every reader will have his or her own favourites from this varied collection, but I particularly liked the pieces supplied by those who are actually doing a job. For instance, we have some really good stuff from The Policeman's Blog (self-explanatory); a magistrate who is not too thrilled with the system (The Law West of Ealing Broadway); a teacher in an inner-city school (The Blackboard Jungle); and a paramedic who works in London (Random Acts of Reality). The latter's letter of apology to the dead woman whose life he was not able to save is, for me, the most moving piece in the whole book.
What is really encouraging, impressive, and unexpected, about these blogs from the coal-face is that every one of the bloggers can write really well. OK, if they couldn't I don't suppose Tim Worstall would have bothered to include them, but I bet you he wasn't short of material. And this unexpected literacy and fluency is a definite surprise to me, given that British schools abandoned all pretence of teaching kids how to use the English language about forty years ago.
2005: Blogged features a considerable amount of political comment, as you would expect. And, also as you would expect, most of it is brutally critical of the Government. Not a living British blogger, it seems, has a good word to say about the proposed system of identity cards; and while this is again not remotely surprising, it does warm the old cockles to find the whole fatuous case for the ID system being demolished brick by loose brick.
Another notable and very welcome feature of this book is the evidence it provides that a number of people are now monitoring what their daily newspapers say, and, when necessary, are blogging about the more ridiculous and unreliable reports that they read. (We've done a bit of that here, of course.) Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution, for instance, noticed something interesting about the background of the writer of a Guardian comment piece. And Scott's blogging about this matter led, in due course, to the sacking of that reporter and to the resignation of the newspaper's executive editor.
In another instance, the book's editor himself, Tim Worstall, considers whether Polly Toynbee actually knows what she's talking about, and discovers (who would have guessed) that she doesn't.
Another really vital function of the modern blog is highlighted in Twenty Major's piece about the IRA's agreement to 'end the armed struggle'. I cannot imagine that any newspaper would ever have printed it, but by God it needed saying, and I feel better for having read it.
In short, this book is a great relief to me. I thought, when I first opened the package, that I was going to have to write a carefully worded piece saying only that, if you're looking for a Christmas present for a bookish friend, this might do. As it is, I can unreservedly and warmly recommend 2005: Blogged -- at least to any British reader. Overseas readers would probably not find it so interesting or relevant -- unless, of course, you happen to want to know what the average Brit thinks about things in this year of our Lord.
All links, by the way, are to the blog as of now, and not to the piece included in the book.
Fortunately, the book turns out to be a great deal more interesting and impressive than it looks on the outside. My first reaction was: Oh dear. The book designer seems to have thought to himself: Hmm. Blog = newfangled thingy. Cutting-edge sort of doodah. So we'd better have a cutting-edge sort of design. Except that the 'cutting-edge design' features a title which looks as if it was printed on one of those dot-matrix printers which disappeared about fifteen years ago; and the editor's comments, introducing each blog extract, are printed in the kind of capitals-only font which was used by teleprinters until about twenty years ago. And the text of the book, when you get to it, is printed in a sans-serif font which works well on screen, but actually we're not on screen, are we? We're on paper.
So the initial impression was not good. But happily the contents overcome the initial impression.
Tim Worstall seems to have read an unholy number of blogs in search of material, and to my (not wholly unbiased) mind he seems to have done an excellent job. The contents are arranged in the order in which they appeared on the originating blog, from November 2004 up to the end of October 2005, so the production team have done a good job in getting this into the shops for an 18 November publication date. The publisher, by the way, is The Friday Project Ltd., a new outfit set up to 'turn the Internet's best-known brands into the world's finest books.'
Every reader will have his or her own favourites from this varied collection, but I particularly liked the pieces supplied by those who are actually doing a job. For instance, we have some really good stuff from The Policeman's Blog (self-explanatory); a magistrate who is not too thrilled with the system (The Law West of Ealing Broadway); a teacher in an inner-city school (The Blackboard Jungle); and a paramedic who works in London (Random Acts of Reality). The latter's letter of apology to the dead woman whose life he was not able to save is, for me, the most moving piece in the whole book.
What is really encouraging, impressive, and unexpected, about these blogs from the coal-face is that every one of the bloggers can write really well. OK, if they couldn't I don't suppose Tim Worstall would have bothered to include them, but I bet you he wasn't short of material. And this unexpected literacy and fluency is a definite surprise to me, given that British schools abandoned all pretence of teaching kids how to use the English language about forty years ago.
2005: Blogged features a considerable amount of political comment, as you would expect. And, also as you would expect, most of it is brutally critical of the Government. Not a living British blogger, it seems, has a good word to say about the proposed system of identity cards; and while this is again not remotely surprising, it does warm the old cockles to find the whole fatuous case for the ID system being demolished brick by loose brick.
Another notable and very welcome feature of this book is the evidence it provides that a number of people are now monitoring what their daily newspapers say, and, when necessary, are blogging about the more ridiculous and unreliable reports that they read. (We've done a bit of that here, of course.) Scott Burgess at The Daily Ablution, for instance, noticed something interesting about the background of the writer of a Guardian comment piece. And Scott's blogging about this matter led, in due course, to the sacking of that reporter and to the resignation of the newspaper's executive editor.
In another instance, the book's editor himself, Tim Worstall, considers whether Polly Toynbee actually knows what she's talking about, and discovers (who would have guessed) that she doesn't.
Another really vital function of the modern blog is highlighted in Twenty Major's piece about the IRA's agreement to 'end the armed struggle'. I cannot imagine that any newspaper would ever have printed it, but by God it needed saying, and I feel better for having read it.
In short, this book is a great relief to me. I thought, when I first opened the package, that I was going to have to write a carefully worded piece saying only that, if you're looking for a Christmas present for a bookish friend, this might do. As it is, I can unreservedly and warmly recommend 2005: Blogged -- at least to any British reader. Overseas readers would probably not find it so interesting or relevant -- unless, of course, you happen to want to know what the average Brit thinks about things in this year of our Lord.
All links, by the way, are to the blog as of now, and not to the piece included in the book.
Typewriters writing a new chapter
Well, here's a bit of a turnup. My son Jon points out to me that the latest edition of the official magazine of the UK Museum of Computing contains an article about a revival of interest in the good old typewriter.
It seems that there are a number of 20- and 30-somethings who feel stifled by modern technology. And so when it comes time to locate their inner novelist, or just write letters, they like to hear the sound of hammering keys and the ding of a bell when they reach the end of a line.
One Mariah Pospisil, 22, of Los Altos, California, is quoted to the effect that 'It just seems like the computer and printer are too much of an intermediary between me and my writings.'
Hey, I favour a quill pen myself.
Anyway, more than two thirds of the customers at the California Typewriter Co. in Berkeley are in their 20s and 30s. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and 'popular culture expert', says that the young people who choose typewriters are very careful about what they write. 'It doesn't seem as disposable and casual.'
And when things aren't going well, Heather Folsom, 28, says that she can rip the paper from the machine and crumple it up. 'I find that really satisfying,' she says.
Well, that's a positive way of thinking about it.
Actually this article looks suspiciously like a load of old cobblers put together in a press release to plug a typewriter shop. But never mind.
It seems that there are a number of 20- and 30-somethings who feel stifled by modern technology. And so when it comes time to locate their inner novelist, or just write letters, they like to hear the sound of hammering keys and the ding of a bell when they reach the end of a line.
One Mariah Pospisil, 22, of Los Altos, California, is quoted to the effect that 'It just seems like the computer and printer are too much of an intermediary between me and my writings.'
Hey, I favour a quill pen myself.
Anyway, more than two thirds of the customers at the California Typewriter Co. in Berkeley are in their 20s and 30s. Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse University and 'popular culture expert', says that the young people who choose typewriters are very careful about what they write. 'It doesn't seem as disposable and casual.'
And when things aren't going well, Heather Folsom, 28, says that she can rip the paper from the machine and crumple it up. 'I find that really satisfying,' she says.
Well, that's a positive way of thinking about it.
Actually this article looks suspiciously like a load of old cobblers put together in a press release to plug a typewriter shop. But never mind.
StreetSweeper
Kriti is a recently widowed Englishwoman who lives in Crete and writes. On her blog, StreetSweeper, you can read about how she copes with bereavement, and also read some of her short stories. Try, for instance, The Hunnish Princess, which appeared on 26 October. This is an interesting story, well told, but very tragic.
Kriti is also one of those who are taking part in the novel-writing marathon, NaNoWriMo, and she maintains a separate blog about that.
On StreetSweeper, there appears to be a slight software problem when the site is viewed in Internet Explorer, but it looks OK in Mozilla.
Kriti is also one of those who are taking part in the novel-writing marathon, NaNoWriMo, and she maintains a separate blog about that.
On StreetSweeper, there appears to be a slight software problem when the site is viewed in Internet Explorer, but it looks OK in Mozilla.
Monday, November 28, 2005
The Highfield Mole
An anonymous commenter on K.D. Lathar's The Changeling has alerted me to the existence of an originally self-published book with two authors: The Highfield Mole, by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams. The book comes, as per usual these days, with its own web site.
The authors are two middle-agedish men with established careers, of sorts, though Mr Williams seems to have been at a loose end since he was 'let go' by an investment bank in 2001. These two men have known each other for a good few years, which is just as well, I suspect, for all writing partnerships must surely be subject to considerable stresses.
Anyway, if I have understood things aright, these two gentlemen seem to have noticed (as have we all) that books for kids seem to do pretty well these days. And, unlike most of us, they have decided to do something to take advantage of this marketing opportunity. Hence their book, The Highfield Mole, which is to be the first in a series.
Their first step was to set up a publishing company, Mathew and Son, and they proceeded to drum up publicity in various ways. The News page of the web site gives a short history of how it was done. Now their book has been taken up by Peter Straus of the agents Rogers, Coleridge and White, and he has sold The Highfield Mole to one Barry Cunningham, currently of Chicken House, which is an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Now, if you are really awake this morning, you will remember that Barry Cunningham was the one man in the entire universe who wanted to buy the first Harry Potter, when Harry was no more than a pile of paper and a gleam in the eye of some woman no one had ever heard of. So Barry has form.
Back in October last year, Barry was much mentioned as the man who had bought the next big thing, in the form of a book by Stuart Hill. Who? Well, exactly. The Cry of the Icemark got some good reviews (Guardian and USA Today, for example) but I wonder how well it sold. I don't have access to Bookscan figures, but Amazon says that its current rank is 26,913, having been published last January.
So, as usual we wish good speed to The Highfield Mole and all who sail in her. But we will see what happens.
The authors are two middle-agedish men with established careers, of sorts, though Mr Williams seems to have been at a loose end since he was 'let go' by an investment bank in 2001. These two men have known each other for a good few years, which is just as well, I suspect, for all writing partnerships must surely be subject to considerable stresses.
Anyway, if I have understood things aright, these two gentlemen seem to have noticed (as have we all) that books for kids seem to do pretty well these days. And, unlike most of us, they have decided to do something to take advantage of this marketing opportunity. Hence their book, The Highfield Mole, which is to be the first in a series.
Their first step was to set up a publishing company, Mathew and Son, and they proceeded to drum up publicity in various ways. The News page of the web site gives a short history of how it was done. Now their book has been taken up by Peter Straus of the agents Rogers, Coleridge and White, and he has sold The Highfield Mole to one Barry Cunningham, currently of Chicken House, which is an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Now, if you are really awake this morning, you will remember that Barry Cunningham was the one man in the entire universe who wanted to buy the first Harry Potter, when Harry was no more than a pile of paper and a gleam in the eye of some woman no one had ever heard of. So Barry has form.
Back in October last year, Barry was much mentioned as the man who had bought the next big thing, in the form of a book by Stuart Hill. Who? Well, exactly. The Cry of the Icemark got some good reviews (Guardian and USA Today, for example) but I wonder how well it sold. I don't have access to Bookscan figures, but Amazon says that its current rank is 26,913, having been published last January.
So, as usual we wish good speed to The Highfield Mole and all who sail in her. But we will see what happens.
Sand Storm
SMC is the author of an as yet unpublished novel called Sand Storm and he (?) has set up the inevitable blog to plug it. Sunday's post provided a link to the (Canadian) Globe and Mail's top 100 books of the year, which proves to be a bit of a tease; unless I am missing something, you get the covering article but no more detail.
Peter Nicholson on Poetry and Culture
There are (and it's conceivable that long-term readers might even have noticed) some strange paradoxes in my life. On the one hand I spent a working lifetime in the intellectual powerhouse which is the university sector of English education, and I acquired, along the way, three university degrees; but on the other hand my tastes in the arts are almost invariably of the lowbrow variety; and high-level intellectual discussion of almost any variety leaves me cold to the point of hypothermia.
That said, I recognise that there are perfectly sensible people who prefer Beethoven to the Beatles, and who choose to discuss things at a more rarefied level than I care to myself. And it is in that spirit that I point you towards a two-part essay by the Australian poet Peter Nicholson. Part one can be found here, and part two here.
Peter is clearly a thoughtful individual with an alarmingly wide frame of artistic reference to draw upon, and his subject in the two-part essay is 'poetry and limitations of the ironic mode in the new millennium'. If you want to know more about Peter's background and work, you can find it on his own web site.
That said, I recognise that there are perfectly sensible people who prefer Beethoven to the Beatles, and who choose to discuss things at a more rarefied level than I care to myself. And it is in that spirit that I point you towards a two-part essay by the Australian poet Peter Nicholson. Part one can be found here, and part two here.
Peter is clearly a thoughtful individual with an alarmingly wide frame of artistic reference to draw upon, and his subject in the two-part essay is 'poetry and limitations of the ironic mode in the new millennium'. If you want to know more about Peter's background and work, you can find it on his own web site.
The world's best sex writing (allegedly)
Some years ago -- about forty, I suppose -- I saw a television interview with George Abbott, the famous Broadway writer and director. He was in London to direct the UK production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. 'Let me tell you something,' said George to the interviewer. 'Sex is not about to go out of fashion.'
George was dead right. Yesterday the Sunday Times announced that it intends to launch its own Good Sex Awards (for books, that is); and the subject was introduced with a lengthy article by Belle de Jour about her favourite bits of allegedly hot books.
And, as if that was not enough for an elderly gentleman on a quiet Sunday, an email arrived announcing the publication of The World's Best Sex Writing 2005, edited by the renowned Mitzi Szereto.
'Sex writers', the press release says, 'were busy in 2005. The World's Best Sex Writing features the funniest, most articulate -- the best -- nonfiction writing on sex, culled from publications around the globe. Publications featured include Wired, Salon.com, Nerve.com, LA Weekly, the Guardian (London), the Independent (London), and the Sunday Herald (Glasgow).'
The Sunday Herald, Glasgow? Shome mistake, shurely.
'Here' -- it says -- 'is Dave Barry (Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald) on sex, men and fruit flies; Nigel Planer (novelist and actor best known for playing Neil in 80s Brit sitcom The Young Ones) on the sexual allure of Tahitian women; the Nation's Katha Pollitt on Andrea Dworkin; Ron Nyswaner (screenwriter for Philadelphia) on his sexual and emotional domination by a male hustler; Toni Bentley (former ballerina) on her obsession with anal sex....' And so on.
No, I don't believe that bit about the ballerina either. But you could check it out. Mind you, I once knew a ballerina who took her baby out shopping in a pram, parked him outside Harrods while she nipped in for something, and then went home without him. Easily done, as I'm sure you'll agree.
George was dead right. Yesterday the Sunday Times announced that it intends to launch its own Good Sex Awards (for books, that is); and the subject was introduced with a lengthy article by Belle de Jour about her favourite bits of allegedly hot books.
And, as if that was not enough for an elderly gentleman on a quiet Sunday, an email arrived announcing the publication of The World's Best Sex Writing 2005, edited by the renowned Mitzi Szereto.
'Sex writers', the press release says, 'were busy in 2005. The World's Best Sex Writing features the funniest, most articulate -- the best -- nonfiction writing on sex, culled from publications around the globe. Publications featured include Wired, Salon.com, Nerve.com, LA Weekly, the Guardian (London), the Independent (London), and the Sunday Herald (Glasgow).'
The Sunday Herald, Glasgow? Shome mistake, shurely.
'Here' -- it says -- 'is Dave Barry (Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald) on sex, men and fruit flies; Nigel Planer (novelist and actor best known for playing Neil in 80s Brit sitcom The Young Ones) on the sexual allure of Tahitian women; the Nation's Katha Pollitt on Andrea Dworkin; Ron Nyswaner (screenwriter for Philadelphia) on his sexual and emotional domination by a male hustler; Toni Bentley (former ballerina) on her obsession with anal sex....' And so on.
No, I don't believe that bit about the ballerina either. But you could check it out. Mind you, I once knew a ballerina who took her baby out shopping in a pram, parked him outside Harrods while she nipped in for something, and then went home without him. Easily done, as I'm sure you'll agree.
Friday, November 25, 2005
New ways in publishing
An examination of the organisational procedures which are employed by the average publishing company is an exercise which can easily generate enough tedium to cause lifelong paralysis, accompanied by the destruction of the will to live. Hence it is something of a pleasure, and a surprise, to read an article about how one particular publishing company operates which is not only interesting but even, in parts, encouraging. Go here to find it. (Link via booktrade.info.)
More on Macmillan New Writing
Back in May I welcomed the arrival of the Macmillan New Writing imprint, though others in the book world, you may recall, were much less enthusiastic; some indeed referred to it as a scam, a trap for the unwary and as yet unpublished young writer.
In the course of those discussions I also mentioned that one of the writers whose first book would appear under the imprint (Roger Morris) had started a blog, known as Roger's Plog (a cross between a blog and a plug for the new book). Well, for a while the blog was there, and then it wasn't, and now it is again. (Little communication problem between author and publisher; you know how it is.)
So you might like to take a look at that. And if you go to Amazon.co.uk, find the advanced search facility for books, and enter Macmillan New Writing in the publisher slot, you will end up with a page which shows the covers of the first eight books to appear under the imprint. This link to that page may or may not work. If it doesn't, you'll have to do the search yourself. None of the books, by the way, is officially published until April 2006.
The eight books so far scheduled cover a wide variety of genres, from historical to science fiction, with a sprinkling of other stuff in between. I have to say that the publisher's blurbs do not make some of the books sound all that exciting -- but then, when did they ever?
In the course of those discussions I also mentioned that one of the writers whose first book would appear under the imprint (Roger Morris) had started a blog, known as Roger's Plog (a cross between a blog and a plug for the new book). Well, for a while the blog was there, and then it wasn't, and now it is again. (Little communication problem between author and publisher; you know how it is.)
So you might like to take a look at that. And if you go to Amazon.co.uk, find the advanced search facility for books, and enter Macmillan New Writing in the publisher slot, you will end up with a page which shows the covers of the first eight books to appear under the imprint. This link to that page may or may not work. If it doesn't, you'll have to do the search yourself. None of the books, by the way, is officially published until April 2006.
The eight books so far scheduled cover a wide variety of genres, from historical to science fiction, with a sprinkling of other stuff in between. I have to say that the publisher's blurbs do not make some of the books sound all that exciting -- but then, when did they ever?
Henry Porter: Brandenburg
I must confess that I began to read Henry Porter's Brandenburg with high hopes, but I ended up feeling very disappointed. And before stating the reasons for that disappointment, here is a bit of background.
Henry Porter is British. He is a former journalist for top newspapers and magazines, and still seems to work as the British editor of Vanity Fair. He has written three previous espionage thrillers which have enjoyed considerable success: Remembrance Day (1999), A Spy's Life (2001), and Empire State (2003). I have read them all, and have written about them here, mostly with approval.
Porter is clearly one of the good guys: read his interview (admittedly with a very friendly interviewer, Max Hastings) in a recent edition of the Guardian, and you will see that he has all the right instincts. He also has personal experience of the subject of Brandenburg, which is the unpleasantness (to put it politely) of the old East German regime, before the wall fell down.
Brandenburg tells the story, chiefly, of one East German citizen, formerly a member of the Stasi (think Gestapo), who becomes heavily involved in spying for the west. And if it's about anything, I would say that this book is about courage; with a Cold War background.
The Guardian interview reveals some interesting facts. On the basis of his track record so far, Porter expects to sell 25,000 hardbacks of Brandenburg, plus 100,000 paperbacks, and to be published in 13 countries. Empire State, we learn, was not published in the US because the publisher couldn't take the idea of the CIA torturing people. I find that, frankly, a very unconvincing reason for rejecting a book, given the highly uncomplimentary picture of the CIA which has been presented by countless US writers; and maybe it was just a polite excuse because they didn't think the book was all that impressive.
So far so good then. We have here an author with all the right background, lots of critical approval, plenty of readers, and a wonderful subject which he has well researched. You can understand why I licked my lips. And the book turns out to be intelligent, literate, and thoughtful.
So where, you may be wondering, does it all go wrong?
And the answer lies in the length. This thing, exactly like his other ones, is just TOO DAMN LONG. By way of comparison, I went to the book shelf and picked out three Ian Fleming books at random. The first one was just under 250 pages, and the other two were less than 200.
Now hear this. If Ian Fleming could create one of the half-dozen most famous and durable thriller/espionage characters of the twentieth century, in books of about 200 pages a time, then there is no need for the Henry Porters of this world to bang on and on for 426 pages. It is not productive. It doesn't help. It dilutes, rather than enhances, the effect.
Somebody -- agent, publisher, or pal like Max Hastings -- should seize Porter by the throat and give him a bloody good shaking. These books are too long, Henry! TOO DAMN LONG! Got it? Good.
That's the chief problem. There are others. I found the principal love story to be quite unconvincing. Sorry, but I did. I also found the way in which the characters bounce back from being tortured and abused to be a bit unrealistic. Sorry again.
I really wanted to like it Brandenburg. I really did. Few readers are more enthusiastic about the modern thriller than I am. But Henry Porter's whole approach to the genre seems to me to need a thorough rethink.
Henry Porter is British. He is a former journalist for top newspapers and magazines, and still seems to work as the British editor of Vanity Fair. He has written three previous espionage thrillers which have enjoyed considerable success: Remembrance Day (1999), A Spy's Life (2001), and Empire State (2003). I have read them all, and have written about them here, mostly with approval.
Porter is clearly one of the good guys: read his interview (admittedly with a very friendly interviewer, Max Hastings) in a recent edition of the Guardian, and you will see that he has all the right instincts. He also has personal experience of the subject of Brandenburg, which is the unpleasantness (to put it politely) of the old East German regime, before the wall fell down.
Brandenburg tells the story, chiefly, of one East German citizen, formerly a member of the Stasi (think Gestapo), who becomes heavily involved in spying for the west. And if it's about anything, I would say that this book is about courage; with a Cold War background.
The Guardian interview reveals some interesting facts. On the basis of his track record so far, Porter expects to sell 25,000 hardbacks of Brandenburg, plus 100,000 paperbacks, and to be published in 13 countries. Empire State, we learn, was not published in the US because the publisher couldn't take the idea of the CIA torturing people. I find that, frankly, a very unconvincing reason for rejecting a book, given the highly uncomplimentary picture of the CIA which has been presented by countless US writers; and maybe it was just a polite excuse because they didn't think the book was all that impressive.
So far so good then. We have here an author with all the right background, lots of critical approval, plenty of readers, and a wonderful subject which he has well researched. You can understand why I licked my lips. And the book turns out to be intelligent, literate, and thoughtful.
So where, you may be wondering, does it all go wrong?
And the answer lies in the length. This thing, exactly like his other ones, is just TOO DAMN LONG. By way of comparison, I went to the book shelf and picked out three Ian Fleming books at random. The first one was just under 250 pages, and the other two were less than 200.
Now hear this. If Ian Fleming could create one of the half-dozen most famous and durable thriller/espionage characters of the twentieth century, in books of about 200 pages a time, then there is no need for the Henry Porters of this world to bang on and on for 426 pages. It is not productive. It doesn't help. It dilutes, rather than enhances, the effect.
Somebody -- agent, publisher, or pal like Max Hastings -- should seize Porter by the throat and give him a bloody good shaking. These books are too long, Henry! TOO DAMN LONG! Got it? Good.
That's the chief problem. There are others. I found the principal love story to be quite unconvincing. Sorry, but I did. I also found the way in which the characters bounce back from being tortured and abused to be a bit unrealistic. Sorry again.
I really wanted to like it Brandenburg. I really did. Few readers are more enthusiastic about the modern thriller than I am. But Henry Porter's whole approach to the genre seems to me to need a thorough rethink.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Get published or die tryin
Noah Cicero has started a blog. Three friends will also contribute and 'there will also be sporadic dumb shit.' I like it. Especially the chapter from the Nicole Richie novel.
Kembrew McLeod: Freedom of Expression
I am indebted to Robert Nagle, a commenter on the Gerard Jones affair, for pointing me to Kembrew McLeod's important book, Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. Should you wish to read it, you can download a free pdf version from the author's web site. And, if you care about personal liberty, freedom of speech, and all like that, I strongly recommend that you do.
It seems to me that European culture -- and for this purpose I take Europe to include North America -- has given the world almost everything of any value: certainly as far as material wealth and social organisation are concerned. But it is noticeable that, even within the overall envelope of European culture, it is all too easy for despotism, of one sort or another, to become the ruling paradigm. (You see? That word paradigm gets in everywhere sooner or later. But you also see what I mean, I hope. And if you don't, what I mean is that it is all too easy for the forces of darkness to prevail.)
And now, as if we didn't have enough to worry about, Kembrew McLeod comes along and tells us of the growing danger to our ability to say what we think, be inspired by a book or a piece of music to write a new book or piece of music, and even, it seems, to use certain gestures and groups of words. Just for starters, and just to prove how silly and dangerous a world we live in, Kembrew tells us that, while an undergrad, he trademarked the term 'freedom of expression'. So he 'owns' the term freedom of expression, in the same way that Fox News (bless them) 'own' the term 'fair and balanced'. (Fair and balanced! Ha! Pause while author tries to stop sniggering and regain a straight face.)
Thus Kembrew McLeod has the legal power, should he wish to use it, to prevent you or me from publishing (at least in the US) a book with the title Freedom of Expression. Which he would not do, he tells us. What he has done, just to emphasise the absurdity of a law which allows someone to trademark a few words like that, is to sue the giant phone company AT&T when they used the phrase freedom of expression in an ad.
Do you begin to get the idea? We live in a lunatic, lunatic world, in which legislation allows big companies to exercise iron control over what you say, write, and, if they have their way, think. For further example: Donald Trump has trademarked the words 'You're fired'; and not only that but he has also trademarked the hand gesture that accompanied the phrase when he used it on the TV programme The Apprentice. And, turning to copyright law, did you know that the song Happy Birthday to You is in copyright? It belongs to TimeWarner until 2030, and don't think they won't charge you a fee for using it at your kid's next party -- if they find out. No incidence of copyright infringement is too small for some of these greedy bastards.
I could go on. I could point out that, if you want to quote Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream' speech, in print, King's heirs and successors will expect you to pay $50 a sentence for the privilege. I could point out that the Church of Scientology has used the copyright laws to prevent Google from leading any internet searchers to sites which criticise said Church. And I could remind you, if you need reminding, that intellectual-property owners who take a dislike to your web site can easily make you disappear from sight by threatening your ISP. And I could warn you that, if you visit a privately owned shopping mall wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that the owners don't like, they can get you arrested. But there are limits to my endurance. I can read and quote only so much of this nonsense and downright wickedness before I throw up my hands and say The hell with it.
What you need to know is this. Recent US legislation, particularly the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, have given additional powers to those whose greed, stupidity, and commercial shortsightedness know no limits. And the result is a potentially disastrous chilling effect upon artistic creativity and the interchange of scientific knowledge.
Here, to illustrate the practical problems which can arise from all this, are a few examples of relevant events in just the last week or so. I make no comment, please note, about the rights and wrongs of any of these cases; I simply note that these are instances where people have got their hand caught in the legal mangle, or where a big corporation is trying to do something to extend its powers.
Andrew Knight is trying to patent a storyline. Judith Kelly is accused of plagiarism. And Cambridge University has angered dons with proposed changes to rules allowing them to patent inventions; critics fear that the proposal to reform the system of intellectual property rights at the university will crush academic freedom, when the rights to ideas are no longer controlled by the creators. The University of Georgia Press has withdrawn Brad Vice's The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. And Amazon.com (which has already patented the one-click ordering system) has just been granted three further patents, including one on consumer reviews.
Fortunately, for the likes of you and me, there are a number of defenders of the faith. First, there are university professors such as Kembrew McLeod and Lawrence Lessig, who are intelligent, well informed, and courageous, and are telling it like it is. They are in the vanguard of the war, and it is a war, against those who wish to impose total monopoly control in copyright situations. They argue instead for the tradition of openness, maintaining that copyright law is intended to promote the dissemination of creative expression, not suppress it.
The second encouraging factor -- and it is a measure of how deep a hole we have dug for ourselves that I, who have never had so much as a parking ticket, should say this -- the second encouraging factor is the existence of a large number of young people who can only be described as anarchists. They are people who are simply not going to stand there and take this shit. Why should they? They have fifty years of active life ahead of them -- why should they allow what they see, read, listen to, and say, and create by way of art, be dominated by some corporate asshole?
In 2000, the Metallica guitarist Lars Ullrich made a very serious mistake. He volunteered to be the front man for an attempt to close down Napster, an attempt which included a personal visit to Napster HQ with lawyer and press accompanying him. A crowd formed outside, and a teenager screamed at him, 'Fuck you, Lars! It's our music too!'
And you know what? The kid was right.
No one is suggesting here that talent and hard work should not be rewarded. Far from it. Any and all digital availability of professionally published music, or prose, or images, should, in my view, be directed towards generating the maximum possible income for the creators. And so when Cory Doctorow makes free digital copies of his books available for download, he does so not out of any charitable instinct but because he thinks that that's his best marketing strategy. And I agree.
The point being made here is not that music should be free for everyone, all the time. The point is that it is not a smart move to alienate, and make criminals of, the people who are most passionate about your product. Music, in particular, is meaningless without an audience. And Metallica's fame and fortune had been built upon a fan base which, when the band was all but unknown, repeatedly violated the copyright laws by taping concerts and exchanging cassettes. Signs are that Lars Ullrich found out the hard way that he'd got it all wrong when he talked about piracy. So have thousands of others, including the big-time business executives who don't have a clue about what inspires the creative drive which results in their precious product; and who really don't understand how to get the best out of it in terms of revenue generation.
The publishing industry, bless its little cotton socks, seems intent on repeating all the mistakes that were made by Hollywood with the video-cassette recorder, and by the music industry twice -- with cassettes and then with downloads.
So -- what, if anything, is to be done?
Well, my advice, for what's it's worth, is that, to begin with, you should read Kembrew McLeod's book. Freedom of Expression is scholarly, learned, and yet informally written and readily readable; so maybe there's hope for America yet. I could have done with more sub-headings in the chapters, because I am a simple sort of fellow, easily intimidated by unbroken slabs of print.
Next, instead of playing Ain't It Awful, you should do something positive. You must have some expertise in something. Write it up, and post it on the internet for free. Instead of making a fool, and a nuisance, of yourself, by trademarking a phrase or trying to insist on payment for your work, give it away for free. Stick a Creative Commons licence on it (as on this blog). Encourage people to use it, transform it, make money out of it if they're smart enough.
Finally, don't -- please don't -- fall into that dreadful writer's trap of imagining that you are the next J.K. Rowling, and slap a big fat copyright sign on everything you write, complete with dire warnings about suing the arse off people who even quote it to a friend. Acquire a little dignity, and a little common sense. You and I should count ourselves lucky if we find half a dozen readers -- apart from Mum -- who will even bother to read our work through to the end.
It seems to me that European culture -- and for this purpose I take Europe to include North America -- has given the world almost everything of any value: certainly as far as material wealth and social organisation are concerned. But it is noticeable that, even within the overall envelope of European culture, it is all too easy for despotism, of one sort or another, to become the ruling paradigm. (You see? That word paradigm gets in everywhere sooner or later. But you also see what I mean, I hope. And if you don't, what I mean is that it is all too easy for the forces of darkness to prevail.)
And now, as if we didn't have enough to worry about, Kembrew McLeod comes along and tells us of the growing danger to our ability to say what we think, be inspired by a book or a piece of music to write a new book or piece of music, and even, it seems, to use certain gestures and groups of words. Just for starters, and just to prove how silly and dangerous a world we live in, Kembrew tells us that, while an undergrad, he trademarked the term 'freedom of expression'. So he 'owns' the term freedom of expression, in the same way that Fox News (bless them) 'own' the term 'fair and balanced'. (Fair and balanced! Ha! Pause while author tries to stop sniggering and regain a straight face.)
Thus Kembrew McLeod has the legal power, should he wish to use it, to prevent you or me from publishing (at least in the US) a book with the title Freedom of Expression. Which he would not do, he tells us. What he has done, just to emphasise the absurdity of a law which allows someone to trademark a few words like that, is to sue the giant phone company AT&T when they used the phrase freedom of expression in an ad.
Do you begin to get the idea? We live in a lunatic, lunatic world, in which legislation allows big companies to exercise iron control over what you say, write, and, if they have their way, think. For further example: Donald Trump has trademarked the words 'You're fired'; and not only that but he has also trademarked the hand gesture that accompanied the phrase when he used it on the TV programme The Apprentice. And, turning to copyright law, did you know that the song Happy Birthday to You is in copyright? It belongs to TimeWarner until 2030, and don't think they won't charge you a fee for using it at your kid's next party -- if they find out. No incidence of copyright infringement is too small for some of these greedy bastards.
I could go on. I could point out that, if you want to quote Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream' speech, in print, King's heirs and successors will expect you to pay $50 a sentence for the privilege. I could point out that the Church of Scientology has used the copyright laws to prevent Google from leading any internet searchers to sites which criticise said Church. And I could remind you, if you need reminding, that intellectual-property owners who take a dislike to your web site can easily make you disappear from sight by threatening your ISP. And I could warn you that, if you visit a privately owned shopping mall wearing a T-shirt with a slogan that the owners don't like, they can get you arrested. But there are limits to my endurance. I can read and quote only so much of this nonsense and downright wickedness before I throw up my hands and say The hell with it.
What you need to know is this. Recent US legislation, particularly the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, have given additional powers to those whose greed, stupidity, and commercial shortsightedness know no limits. And the result is a potentially disastrous chilling effect upon artistic creativity and the interchange of scientific knowledge.
Here, to illustrate the practical problems which can arise from all this, are a few examples of relevant events in just the last week or so. I make no comment, please note, about the rights and wrongs of any of these cases; I simply note that these are instances where people have got their hand caught in the legal mangle, or where a big corporation is trying to do something to extend its powers.
Andrew Knight is trying to patent a storyline. Judith Kelly is accused of plagiarism. And Cambridge University has angered dons with proposed changes to rules allowing them to patent inventions; critics fear that the proposal to reform the system of intellectual property rights at the university will crush academic freedom, when the rights to ideas are no longer controlled by the creators. The University of Georgia Press has withdrawn Brad Vice's The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. And Amazon.com (which has already patented the one-click ordering system) has just been granted three further patents, including one on consumer reviews.
Fortunately, for the likes of you and me, there are a number of defenders of the faith. First, there are university professors such as Kembrew McLeod and Lawrence Lessig, who are intelligent, well informed, and courageous, and are telling it like it is. They are in the vanguard of the war, and it is a war, against those who wish to impose total monopoly control in copyright situations. They argue instead for the tradition of openness, maintaining that copyright law is intended to promote the dissemination of creative expression, not suppress it.
The second encouraging factor -- and it is a measure of how deep a hole we have dug for ourselves that I, who have never had so much as a parking ticket, should say this -- the second encouraging factor is the existence of a large number of young people who can only be described as anarchists. They are people who are simply not going to stand there and take this shit. Why should they? They have fifty years of active life ahead of them -- why should they allow what they see, read, listen to, and say, and create by way of art, be dominated by some corporate asshole?
In 2000, the Metallica guitarist Lars Ullrich made a very serious mistake. He volunteered to be the front man for an attempt to close down Napster, an attempt which included a personal visit to Napster HQ with lawyer and press accompanying him. A crowd formed outside, and a teenager screamed at him, 'Fuck you, Lars! It's our music too!'
And you know what? The kid was right.
No one is suggesting here that talent and hard work should not be rewarded. Far from it. Any and all digital availability of professionally published music, or prose, or images, should, in my view, be directed towards generating the maximum possible income for the creators. And so when Cory Doctorow makes free digital copies of his books available for download, he does so not out of any charitable instinct but because he thinks that that's his best marketing strategy. And I agree.
The point being made here is not that music should be free for everyone, all the time. The point is that it is not a smart move to alienate, and make criminals of, the people who are most passionate about your product. Music, in particular, is meaningless without an audience. And Metallica's fame and fortune had been built upon a fan base which, when the band was all but unknown, repeatedly violated the copyright laws by taping concerts and exchanging cassettes. Signs are that Lars Ullrich found out the hard way that he'd got it all wrong when he talked about piracy. So have thousands of others, including the big-time business executives who don't have a clue about what inspires the creative drive which results in their precious product; and who really don't understand how to get the best out of it in terms of revenue generation.
The publishing industry, bless its little cotton socks, seems intent on repeating all the mistakes that were made by Hollywood with the video-cassette recorder, and by the music industry twice -- with cassettes and then with downloads.
So -- what, if anything, is to be done?
Well, my advice, for what's it's worth, is that, to begin with, you should read Kembrew McLeod's book. Freedom of Expression is scholarly, learned, and yet informally written and readily readable; so maybe there's hope for America yet. I could have done with more sub-headings in the chapters, because I am a simple sort of fellow, easily intimidated by unbroken slabs of print.
Next, instead of playing Ain't It Awful, you should do something positive. You must have some expertise in something. Write it up, and post it on the internet for free. Instead of making a fool, and a nuisance, of yourself, by trademarking a phrase or trying to insist on payment for your work, give it away for free. Stick a Creative Commons licence on it (as on this blog). Encourage people to use it, transform it, make money out of it if they're smart enough.
Finally, don't -- please don't -- fall into that dreadful writer's trap of imagining that you are the next J.K. Rowling, and slap a big fat copyright sign on everything you write, complete with dire warnings about suing the arse off people who even quote it to a friend. Acquire a little dignity, and a little common sense. You and I should count ourselves lucky if we find half a dozen readers -- apart from Mum -- who will even bother to read our work through to the end.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Dead Boy at Your Window
I should have mentioned this when I was writing about Bruce Holland Rogers on Monday, but I hadn't found it at that point. It's a prize-winning story of his, called The Dead Boy at Your Window, and you can read it online. I think it's rather fine myself, and so do some other judges. It won the Pushcart Prize in 1999 and was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2000.
Paul di Filippo: The Emperor of Gondwanaland
This time, before writing a review of a book, I went in search of the author's web site (if any) first. And Paul di Filippo has one. Boy, is it ever weird. But then, if you've read his short stories, you would kind of expect that.
Mind you, once you get over the surprise of finding that the home page of Paul di Filippo's web site has some strange collage-encrusted envelopes on the front of it (a different one very time you visit), you find that the inner pages contain a great deal of fascinating information.
Paul is best known, I think, as the author of short stories, and I have been reading his latest collection The Emperor of Gondwanaland. Essentially, Paul is a writer of science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction (though he tells us that he has no training in science). But that categorisation is not a lot of help, really, apart from indicating that you should not expect the orthodox.
The Emperor contains 18 stories and it is, he says in a short introduction, his first non-themed volume. In other words, there is a bit of everything with no obvious connection between the stories. Well, there's no harm in that. Some charm in it, actually, and I read them all without difficulty.
Overall I was impressed. This man has terrific range and versatility. Take, for example, his story Observable Things. This features the young Cotton Mather as narrator. And if the name is vaguely familiar but you aren't quite sure who he was, the answer is that Cotton Mather was a seventeenth-century minister of Boston's Old North church, and was heavily involved in the Salem witchcraft trials. Paul di Filippo also introduces into this story 'a fictional hero from the canon of Robert E. Howard'. And the whole thing is related in convincing first-person seventeenth-century prose. See what I mean about range and versatility? Plus a thoroughly uninhibited imagination.
The prose style of the other stories is often equally startling and proficient, but there are, I think, two weaknesses. First, some of the plots are rather mundane and uninspired; and second, for my taste the author gives us too much information from his own position as story-teller. Yes, I know that no less an authority than R.P. Burnham tells that this is perfectly acceptable as a narrative technique, and I dare say it is, in principle. But in practice I prefer stories in which the necessary backstory is provided painlessly and neutrally, so to speak, in the course of dramatic scenes. This preference comes of having a sensibility which is corrupted by too much television as a child.
Paul di Filippo frequently makes use of real-life characters. There is, for instance, an excellent story about Albert Camus. Who? Gosh, you are young. He was famous once. Another famous literary personage to appear in these pages is Robert Frost. Of his choice of Frost as a protagonist, Paul says this: 'Grab a poet as your leading man or woman, and you've instantly got a wealth of human feeling, and likely also some dizzy, unconventional lifestyles to play with.' I agree: Mr Swinburne has served me well more than once, in three short stories, a play, and a novel.
In addition to his hundreds of short stories (of which there are about eight collections), Paul di Filippo has also written some novels which, judging by the covers, look to be seriously interesting. I know, I know, but the cover is at least something to go on, right? I might be tempted by those.
In one of the interviews available on his web site, Paul tells us that he is a self-taught writer; he has never been on any creative-writing courses. Isn't it interesting how interviewers automatically ask this question now? And the next one usually is, Where do you teach? And by the way, just as an aside, I have had an email from Bruce Holland Rogers in which he mentions that, when he took a university course on The Poetics of Fiction, the class was required to read some 'recent masters of literary obfuscation', and also had to produce some paintings. Yup. Paintings. Two of the three 'term papers' were required to be paintings. Go figure.
Finally, before I forget, Paul di Filippo is also the author of Lost Pages, a volume of stories about some twentieth-century literary icons. Of this, Harlan Ellison said 'I swear on the grave of my sainted mother that Lost Pages by Paul di Filippo is nothing less than an imperial read.' I have a copy, which I bought and read two or three years ago. But I think I might just read it again.
Mind you, once you get over the surprise of finding that the home page of Paul di Filippo's web site has some strange collage-encrusted envelopes on the front of it (a different one very time you visit), you find that the inner pages contain a great deal of fascinating information.
Paul is best known, I think, as the author of short stories, and I have been reading his latest collection The Emperor of Gondwanaland. Essentially, Paul is a writer of science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction (though he tells us that he has no training in science). But that categorisation is not a lot of help, really, apart from indicating that you should not expect the orthodox.
The Emperor contains 18 stories and it is, he says in a short introduction, his first non-themed volume. In other words, there is a bit of everything with no obvious connection between the stories. Well, there's no harm in that. Some charm in it, actually, and I read them all without difficulty.
Overall I was impressed. This man has terrific range and versatility. Take, for example, his story Observable Things. This features the young Cotton Mather as narrator. And if the name is vaguely familiar but you aren't quite sure who he was, the answer is that Cotton Mather was a seventeenth-century minister of Boston's Old North church, and was heavily involved in the Salem witchcraft trials. Paul di Filippo also introduces into this story 'a fictional hero from the canon of Robert E. Howard'. And the whole thing is related in convincing first-person seventeenth-century prose. See what I mean about range and versatility? Plus a thoroughly uninhibited imagination.
The prose style of the other stories is often equally startling and proficient, but there are, I think, two weaknesses. First, some of the plots are rather mundane and uninspired; and second, for my taste the author gives us too much information from his own position as story-teller. Yes, I know that no less an authority than R.P. Burnham tells that this is perfectly acceptable as a narrative technique, and I dare say it is, in principle. But in practice I prefer stories in which the necessary backstory is provided painlessly and neutrally, so to speak, in the course of dramatic scenes. This preference comes of having a sensibility which is corrupted by too much television as a child.
Paul di Filippo frequently makes use of real-life characters. There is, for instance, an excellent story about Albert Camus. Who? Gosh, you are young. He was famous once. Another famous literary personage to appear in these pages is Robert Frost. Of his choice of Frost as a protagonist, Paul says this: 'Grab a poet as your leading man or woman, and you've instantly got a wealth of human feeling, and likely also some dizzy, unconventional lifestyles to play with.' I agree: Mr Swinburne has served me well more than once, in three short stories, a play, and a novel.
In addition to his hundreds of short stories (of which there are about eight collections), Paul di Filippo has also written some novels which, judging by the covers, look to be seriously interesting. I know, I know, but the cover is at least something to go on, right? I might be tempted by those.
In one of the interviews available on his web site, Paul tells us that he is a self-taught writer; he has never been on any creative-writing courses. Isn't it interesting how interviewers automatically ask this question now? And the next one usually is, Where do you teach? And by the way, just as an aside, I have had an email from Bruce Holland Rogers in which he mentions that, when he took a university course on The Poetics of Fiction, the class was required to read some 'recent masters of literary obfuscation', and also had to produce some paintings. Yup. Paintings. Two of the three 'term papers' were required to be paintings. Go figure.
Finally, before I forget, Paul di Filippo is also the author of Lost Pages, a volume of stories about some twentieth-century literary icons. Of this, Harlan Ellison said 'I swear on the grave of my sainted mother that Lost Pages by Paul di Filippo is nothing less than an imperial read.' I have a copy, which I bought and read two or three years ago. But I think I might just read it again.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
New thinking at Random House
In the recent past I have been heavily critical of big-time publishers for (a) failing to be aware of the digital revolution, and/or (b), if they were aware of it, proceeding to reproduce all the mistakes made by the music industry in their response to it. Well, there are just a few hints that things may be changing. Sort of.
Try reading (link via booktrade.info) the BusinessWeek article about Random House's plans for moving into the twenty-first century. RH, it seems, is to set up an online facility which will allow readers to read pages of RH books at about 4 cents a time. And the process is being speeded up by the competition offered by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
Among other things, Richard Sarnoff, president of RH's Corporate Development Unit, reckons that rapid breakthroughs in digital readers are about to occur. Sarnoff believes that, within 18 months, reading devices could be as easy to use for books as the Apple iPod is for music.
Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, welcomes the RH initiative. 'Everybody now wants to digitize all intellectual property,' she says. "That's good for publishers because we control [it].'
Er, just a minute. Who's the 'we' here, darling? I thought authors had something to do with it.
Anyway, Friedman goes on to say 'Everything keeps changing, but this ultimately will be a healthy time for books. We just have to make sure [digital sales] get done right.' RH is, however, to discourage copying of the texts by delivering pages in low-resolution files. Ho hum. The usual paranoia. Any publisher who has something that people actually want to to copy for a friend should go down on his knees and thank the Lord. Discouraging the 'Wow, have you seen this?!' response is a Stone Age knee-jerk braindead piece of thinking.
And what do the punters make of all this? The BusinessWeek page allows comments to be made, and some of them are most revealing. A guy called Joe Blow, for instance, says this: 'When I buy a book it is my property. Just as when I buy a tv, car, cd, house, land, shirt, etc. it my property. Random House, Microsoft and the rest of then can KMA!'
Now what can that possibly mean?
Try reading (link via booktrade.info) the BusinessWeek article about Random House's plans for moving into the twenty-first century. RH, it seems, is to set up an online facility which will allow readers to read pages of RH books at about 4 cents a time. And the process is being speeded up by the competition offered by the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
Among other things, Richard Sarnoff, president of RH's Corporate Development Unit, reckons that rapid breakthroughs in digital readers are about to occur. Sarnoff believes that, within 18 months, reading devices could be as easy to use for books as the Apple iPod is for music.
Jane Friedman, CEO of HarperCollins, welcomes the RH initiative. 'Everybody now wants to digitize all intellectual property,' she says. "That's good for publishers because we control [it].'
Er, just a minute. Who's the 'we' here, darling? I thought authors had something to do with it.
Anyway, Friedman goes on to say 'Everything keeps changing, but this ultimately will be a healthy time for books. We just have to make sure [digital sales] get done right.' RH is, however, to discourage copying of the texts by delivering pages in low-resolution files. Ho hum. The usual paranoia. Any publisher who has something that people actually want to to copy for a friend should go down on his knees and thank the Lord. Discouraging the 'Wow, have you seen this?!' response is a Stone Age knee-jerk braindead piece of thinking.
And what do the punters make of all this? The BusinessWeek page allows comments to be made, and some of them are most revealing. A guy called Joe Blow, for instance, says this: 'When I buy a book it is my property. Just as when I buy a tv, car, cd, house, land, shirt, etc. it my property. Random House, Microsoft and the rest of then can KMA!'
Now what can that possibly mean?
John Farrow: Ice Lake
The dust jacket of Ice Lake tells us that John Farrow is the pseudonym for a distinguished Canadian author of literary fiction.
Well, ever the nit-picker, I have to say that 'pen name' would in my opinion be a better term to use than pseudonym. The latter suggests an intention to hide an identity, perhaps even to deceive; whereas the former suggests (to me, at any rate) a name adopted to indicate a particular style of work. In any case, you don't have to google very hard to discover that John Farrow is actually a guy called Trevor Ferguson.
Trevor's first five literary novels won the highest plaudits from the critics, but, in a 2001 interview with J. Kingston Pierce, he does not disagree with a statement that none of them sold more than 700 copies. (I hope you guys are paying attention out there. Critical praise does not translate into sales.)
Come 1995, therefore, Trevor decided that, if he was going to survive as a writer, something had to change. So he began to write crime fiction under a new name. So far he has written two John Farrow books, but a search on Amazon.com suggests that he has published nothing new under either name since 2001.
John Farrow's first 'mystery thriller', to use the 2001 interviewer's term, was City of Ice. Set in the author's home town of Montreal, it featured a French-descended detective called Emile Cinq-Mars -- 'an old-fashioned cop in a new-fashioned world.' This book was notably well received by a new set of critics; the Vancouver Sun said that it 'might be the best book ever produced in Canada', and Booklist labelled it 'a character-driven mystery of the highest order.'
Ice Lake is the second in the John Farrow/Emile Cinq-Mars series. And personally I would characterise it as crime fiction. There isn't much suspense, apart from one scene; there is little mystery; and it certainly isn't a whodunit -- or at least, not for very long. What it is, is a long, detailed, and rather old-fashioned novel about people involved in a crime. Some of the people are mostly good, some mostly bad, and at least one is more than a little insane.
The setting is Montreal in winter, and judging by the description I am mighty glad I don't live there. The author makes heavy use of the complicated social structure of the city, involving (just for starters), those of French, English, and Mohawk Indian antecedents; and all of these cultural complications are well understood and well described.
The narrative technique is traditional to the point of being old-fashioned, as mentioned above. And eventually we get to know an enormous amount of detail about the origins, early life, medical history, tastes, ambitions, and general psychological profile, of all the major characters; with a little Freudian analysis thrown in. The only thing we are short of is the results of their Rorschach tests.
Ice Lake is, just like every other thriller these days, a good 50-100 pages too long. And I wish I could say that I found it to be a real zinger. But I didn't. It's diligent, capable, and it held my attention; but it's also pedestrian, over-conscientious, and committedly bourgeois. So what we end up with is a James Ellroy plot as written by a very polite vicar.
Well, ever the nit-picker, I have to say that 'pen name' would in my opinion be a better term to use than pseudonym. The latter suggests an intention to hide an identity, perhaps even to deceive; whereas the former suggests (to me, at any rate) a name adopted to indicate a particular style of work. In any case, you don't have to google very hard to discover that John Farrow is actually a guy called Trevor Ferguson.
Trevor's first five literary novels won the highest plaudits from the critics, but, in a 2001 interview with J. Kingston Pierce, he does not disagree with a statement that none of them sold more than 700 copies. (I hope you guys are paying attention out there. Critical praise does not translate into sales.)
Come 1995, therefore, Trevor decided that, if he was going to survive as a writer, something had to change. So he began to write crime fiction under a new name. So far he has written two John Farrow books, but a search on Amazon.com suggests that he has published nothing new under either name since 2001.
John Farrow's first 'mystery thriller', to use the 2001 interviewer's term, was City of Ice. Set in the author's home town of Montreal, it featured a French-descended detective called Emile Cinq-Mars -- 'an old-fashioned cop in a new-fashioned world.' This book was notably well received by a new set of critics; the Vancouver Sun said that it 'might be the best book ever produced in Canada', and Booklist labelled it 'a character-driven mystery of the highest order.'
Ice Lake is the second in the John Farrow/Emile Cinq-Mars series. And personally I would characterise it as crime fiction. There isn't much suspense, apart from one scene; there is little mystery; and it certainly isn't a whodunit -- or at least, not for very long. What it is, is a long, detailed, and rather old-fashioned novel about people involved in a crime. Some of the people are mostly good, some mostly bad, and at least one is more than a little insane.
The setting is Montreal in winter, and judging by the description I am mighty glad I don't live there. The author makes heavy use of the complicated social structure of the city, involving (just for starters), those of French, English, and Mohawk Indian antecedents; and all of these cultural complications are well understood and well described.
The narrative technique is traditional to the point of being old-fashioned, as mentioned above. And eventually we get to know an enormous amount of detail about the origins, early life, medical history, tastes, ambitions, and general psychological profile, of all the major characters; with a little Freudian analysis thrown in. The only thing we are short of is the results of their Rorschach tests.
Ice Lake is, just like every other thriller these days, a good 50-100 pages too long. And I wish I could say that I found it to be a real zinger. But I didn't. It's diligent, capable, and it held my attention; but it's also pedestrian, over-conscientious, and committedly bourgeois. So what we end up with is a James Ellroy plot as written by a very polite vicar.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Bruce Holland Rogers
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American. He is a full-time writer, and teacher of writing, who has found an interesting way to eke out a modest living. For $5 a year he offers to supply readers with three short-short stories a month. That's 36 stories a year, or fourteen cents a story. So far, 608 people in some 60 countries have signed up, and most of them re-subscribe at the end of the year.
If you want to take a look at what he offers, go see www.shortshortshort.com. It's intriguing, at the least. A French-language version of the service will start in January, and may be followed by a Portuguese version.
What you will find, as you poke around, is that Bruce is no slouch. He has a published bibliography which goes back to 1989, teaches at some respectable colleges, and has won some distinguished prizes: two Nebula awards (1996 and 1998) and a Bram Stoker (1998).
He has also written a book on the problems of surviving as a writer.
If you want to take a look at what he offers, go see www.shortshortshort.com. It's intriguing, at the least. A French-language version of the service will start in January, and may be followed by a Portuguese version.
What you will find, as you poke around, is that Bruce is no slouch. He has a published bibliography which goes back to 1989, teaches at some respectable colleges, and has won some distinguished prizes: two Nebula awards (1996 and 1998) and a Bram Stoker (1998).
He has also written a book on the problems of surviving as a writer.
Literary theory is dead, hurrah! Or is it boo?
The Literary Saloon has a link to an article in Slate, entitled 'The death of literary theory -- is it really a good thing?'
Written by Stephen Metcalf, this is a short history of the life (and death?) of literary theory as taught in the great universities of the western world. It is written, happily, in terms which ordinary people can understand, which is more than can be said for almost everything else ever written about the subject.
Metcalf has an appropriately jaundiced view of the intelligence and ruthless self-interest of professors of Eng. Lit. Such profs, he argues, moved from being suckers to being con men and back to being suckers again; none of these roles being one which attracts respect from anyone capable of rational thought.
Along the way, however, he points out that the great strength of English departments in universities was that, while being 'vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery' (you can say that again), they were also 'the last great repository for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university.' The English departments, were (Metcalf maintains) just about the only places where any serious thinking went on about life and knowledge in general, without that thinking being directed towards turning students into competent lawyers, engineers, and surgeons.
Well, maybe. Metcalf certainly has a point. I have always had a strong preference for vocational education myself, but not to the exclusion of all else. Any vocational education needs, in my view, to be based firmly on a broad liberal-arts foundation. And I would not disagree with the following statement from John Alexander Smith, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, who told his new students in 1914 that
If you really wish to consider the purpose of university education in more detail, find a decent university library and read my 1988 book The Goals of Universities.
Written by Stephen Metcalf, this is a short history of the life (and death?) of literary theory as taught in the great universities of the western world. It is written, happily, in terms which ordinary people can understand, which is more than can be said for almost everything else ever written about the subject.
Metcalf has an appropriately jaundiced view of the intelligence and ruthless self-interest of professors of Eng. Lit. Such profs, he argues, moved from being suckers to being con men and back to being suckers again; none of these roles being one which attracts respect from anyone capable of rational thought.
Along the way, however, he points out that the great strength of English departments in universities was that, while being 'vulnerable to charlatanism and dupery' (you can say that again), they were also 'the last great repository for the nonutilitarian hopes of the university.' The English departments, were (Metcalf maintains) just about the only places where any serious thinking went on about life and knowledge in general, without that thinking being directed towards turning students into competent lawyers, engineers, and surgeons.
Well, maybe. Metcalf certainly has a point. I have always had a strong preference for vocational education myself, but not to the exclusion of all else. Any vocational education needs, in my view, to be based firmly on a broad liberal-arts foundation. And I would not disagree with the following statement from John Alexander Smith, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, who told his new students in 1914 that
Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.The problem with the English departments is that they did (and still do) a great deal of harm and not much good. Their success rate in teaching students how to 'detect when a man is talking rot' is lamentably low. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have any students left after the end of the first term.
If you really wish to consider the purpose of university education in more detail, find a decent university library and read my 1988 book The Goals of Universities.
Friday, November 18, 2005
More interesting than it sounds
The American National Book Awards are not something that I have previously paid much attention to. I dislike awards generally, the only exceptions being where the voting is done by ordinary readers. However, the Awards claim to be 'the nation's preeminent literary prizes, and The National Book Awards Ceremony and Dinner [is] the most important event on our literary calendar.' Especially the dinner, by the sound of it.
Despite these reservations, however, I have to say that the Book Standard's account of this year's National Book Awards ceremony was reasonably entertaining, and introduced me to the surprise winner of the fiction category, William Vollmann. Can't say I'd heard of him before, but then he is a fearful highbrow sort of chap, and I'm not.
Should you be intrigued enough to want to know more, the Kirkus review of Vollmann's prize-winning book, Europe Central, is available online.
The Wiltshire public library system, by the way, has never heard of Vollmann either. Except when spelt with one N. And then it tells you that it doesn't stock him. And if you go to Amazon.co.uk, you discover that Europe Central is published in the UK by Penguin, but there is absolutely no information provided it at all. Not a two-line summary, not a word about the author, not so much as an 'Excellent', Slough Advertiser. Good to know how on the ball our major publishers are, and what detailed care they devote to marketing a big prize-winner.
Despite these reservations, however, I have to say that the Book Standard's account of this year's National Book Awards ceremony was reasonably entertaining, and introduced me to the surprise winner of the fiction category, William Vollmann. Can't say I'd heard of him before, but then he is a fearful highbrow sort of chap, and I'm not.
Should you be intrigued enough to want to know more, the Kirkus review of Vollmann's prize-winning book, Europe Central, is available online.
The Wiltshire public library system, by the way, has never heard of Vollmann either. Except when spelt with one N. And then it tells you that it doesn't stock him. And if you go to Amazon.co.uk, you discover that Europe Central is published in the UK by Penguin, but there is absolutely no information provided it at all. Not a two-line summary, not a word about the author, not so much as an 'Excellent', Slough Advertiser. Good to know how on the ball our major publishers are, and what detailed care they devote to marketing a big prize-winner.
Nicole Richie, novelist
Publishers Lunch reports that Nicole Richie (you know, the one who was in that TV thing with Paris) is busy doing signing sessions for a novel which 'she wrote herself.' Wow! Now there's a novelty. Someone doing a book-signing session who actually wrote the book herself.
The lovely Nicole merits about 20 column inches -- in the New York Times, no less -- for this achievement, most of the space being devoted to teenage fans' enthusiasm for Nicole's hair, figure, dress, wit, wisdom, and all like that.
Publishers Lunch wonders why Nicole rates this space above any other young novelist with a book out. Get real, lad.
The lovely Nicole merits about 20 column inches -- in the New York Times, no less -- for this achievement, most of the space being devoted to teenage fans' enthusiasm for Nicole's hair, figure, dress, wit, wisdom, and all like that.
Publishers Lunch wonders why Nicole rates this space above any other young novelist with a book out. Get real, lad.
Cantara Christopher on publishing
Cantara Christopher, who refers to herself as 'dogsbody and publisher', has some reports from Paris on her blog. Of more specific interest, perhaps, are her three 'foundational essays' for her small press, Cantarabooks. One of these, about a disturbing real-life murder case, I have already mentioned on 30 August, but the one which caught my eye today was entitled Writing in the New Publishing Paradigm. Considerable food for thought here.
Tim Appelo on Jonathan Raban
Tim Appelo has a long, long article on, and interview with, Jonathan Raban in the Seattle Weekly.
Quite how and why the Seattle Weekly should be willing to devote so much space to an English writer, even if he does live in Seattle, is a bit of a mystery. However, it's an interesting discourse on an unusual writing career.
Tim Appelo describes himself as 'the recovering Bestsellers Editor of Amazon.com, now doing honest work in newsprint.'
Quite how and why the Seattle Weekly should be willing to devote so much space to an English writer, even if he does live in Seattle, is a bit of a mystery. However, it's an interesting discourse on an unusual writing career.
Tim Appelo describes himself as 'the recovering Bestsellers Editor of Amazon.com, now doing honest work in newsprint.'
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison is one of the really big names in science fiction/fantasy, though I gather that the man himself prefers to speak of 'speculative fiction'. Here is a brief list, taken from a page on what claims to be his official web site, of the honours and awards that have come his way:
'What Ellison does best', says one web site, 'is irritate people.' Ellison is not a tall person, says the same source, 'but he is very self-possessed and confrontational... When he stood up to give a reading at a convention a voice drifted to his ears: "Isn't he short?" To which Mister Ellison's immediate reply is reputed to have been (through gritted teeth), "I may be short, but I'm very tall when I stand on my ego." The disembodied (and much chastened) voice did not reply.'
If you search Amazon.co.uk for Ellison's works, you will find plenty listed, but they almost all come from American publishers. My local library has almost nothing of his. Hence it took me some time, poking around in dusty old bookshops, to find a collection of short stories first issued in the UK in 1973 and reprinted in 1981.
Titled All the Sounds of Fear, this collection includes some of Ellison's most famous stories, particularly I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman. The latter I regard as one of the most brilliant titles that I have ever come across, though personally I would have omitted the inverted commas.
In a short introduction to All the Sounds of Fear, Ellison says that the theme of alienation dominates the collection. And he is right. But, he adds, the stories 'are by no means stories of hopelessness.' Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the first story, is a strong contender for the title of blackest, darkest, bleakest story that I have ever read, describing, as it does, a future in which computers have taken over the world and preserve just one human life solely in order to inflict pain and suffering upon him.
The Ticktockman story did not, for me, live up to its title. And the last one in the book, Bright Eyes, is yet another vision of an apocalyptic future in which all human life is extinguished.
In short, I suspect that Harlan Ellison is a writer for true connoisseurs, hard-core fans of the genre, rather than the general reader. However, if you're tempted, you might begin by trying The Essential Ellison: a 50 Year Retrospective. It runs to more than 1200 pages, according to Amazon.com, though Amazon.co.uk thinks it only has 152. I think the former authority is more likely to be correct, particularly as it supplies far more information about the book.
In a career spanning more than 40 years, he has won more awards for the 75 books he has written or edited, the more than 1700 stories, essays, articles, and newspaper columns, the two dozen teleplays and a dozen motion pictures he has created, than any other living fantasist. He has won the Hugo award 8½ times, the Nebula award three times, the Bram Stoker award, presented by the Horror Writers Association, six times (including The Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996), the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America twice, the Georges Méliès fantasy film award twice, two Audie Awards (for the best in audio recordings), and was awarded the Silver Pen for Journalism by P.E.N., the international writer’s union (this prestigious accolade was presented for his columns in the L.A. Weekly, titled “An Edge in My Voice,” in defense of the First Amendment).All of that being the case, you may be wondering why you haven't heard of him. And I have no ready explanation for that, though there are a few hints in the wind. First, it is said that 90% of his stuff is out of print. And second, he has a reputation for being, shall we say, difficult. The man clearly believes in free speech (see reference to First Amendment, above) but he does not like having his stuff used without remuneration. He was involved, for instance, in a 1980 landmark lawsuit: he sued ABC-TV and Paramount Pictures for $337,000 when they plagiarized a television series that he had created. This was the famous (in some quarters) Brillo/Future Cop case. And more recently he has taken on AOL.
'What Ellison does best', says one web site, 'is irritate people.' Ellison is not a tall person, says the same source, 'but he is very self-possessed and confrontational... When he stood up to give a reading at a convention a voice drifted to his ears: "Isn't he short?" To which Mister Ellison's immediate reply is reputed to have been (through gritted teeth), "I may be short, but I'm very tall when I stand on my ego." The disembodied (and much chastened) voice did not reply.'
If you search Amazon.co.uk for Ellison's works, you will find plenty listed, but they almost all come from American publishers. My local library has almost nothing of his. Hence it took me some time, poking around in dusty old bookshops, to find a collection of short stories first issued in the UK in 1973 and reprinted in 1981.
Titled All the Sounds of Fear, this collection includes some of Ellison's most famous stories, particularly I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and 'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman. The latter I regard as one of the most brilliant titles that I have ever come across, though personally I would have omitted the inverted commas.
In a short introduction to All the Sounds of Fear, Ellison says that the theme of alienation dominates the collection. And he is right. But, he adds, the stories 'are by no means stories of hopelessness.' Well, I'm not so sure about that.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, the first story, is a strong contender for the title of blackest, darkest, bleakest story that I have ever read, describing, as it does, a future in which computers have taken over the world and preserve just one human life solely in order to inflict pain and suffering upon him.
The Ticktockman story did not, for me, live up to its title. And the last one in the book, Bright Eyes, is yet another vision of an apocalyptic future in which all human life is extinguished.
In short, I suspect that Harlan Ellison is a writer for true connoisseurs, hard-core fans of the genre, rather than the general reader. However, if you're tempted, you might begin by trying The Essential Ellison: a 50 Year Retrospective. It runs to more than 1200 pages, according to Amazon.com, though Amazon.co.uk thinks it only has 152. I think the former authority is more likely to be correct, particularly as it supplies far more information about the book.
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Book binding for beginners
Warning. This post contains material which some will find distasteful. (And if you're thinking that all posts on this blog do that, then this one more so than most.)
Maud Newton commented on an item in the Literary Saloon which was based on an article in The Record, which describes itself as the independent newspaper at the Harvard Law School. The article in question is a learned disquisition upon the art of binding books -- and other objects -- in human skin. Books so bound are said to be examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy.
You can read the article for yourself, if you wish, but the purpose of this post is to record one notable omission: or at any rate a case of enthusiasm for this rare craft which The Record failed to note.
In the nineteenth century there was a well known distributor of pornography called Frederick Hankey (1828?-1882). Hankey was a profoundly unattractive person, both physically and morally. For example, he once attended a public hanging, with a friend, and took along two girls so that he and his friend could have sexual intercourse while witnessing the event. Hankey was probably inspired in this action by the incident recorded in Casanova's memoirs: Casanova noticed two couples doing the same thing at the execution of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV of France.
Hankey was resident in Paris, then the centre of the porno business, and he used couriers to import forbidden material into England. Sometimes the books were carried in the diplomatic bag (Hankey had a friend in the Paris embassy), but the best of his couriers, Hankey maintained, was Mr Harris, the manager of Covent Garden; he was adept at transporting books in the bend of his back.
It was Hankey's oft-expressed ambition to own books which were bound with human skin. To Richard Monkton Milnes he spoke of his desire to see a girl hanged and to have the skin of her backside tanned to bind his Justine with. And when the explorer Sir Richard Burton passed through Paris Hankey asked him to try to obtain the skin of a Negress (preferably torn off a live one). Burton promised to try to get him one, but failed. Burton wrote to Richard Monkton Milnes from Dahomey with the sad news: 'I have been here three days and am grievously disappointed. Not a man killed, nor a fellow tortured. The canoe floating in blood is a myth of myths. Poor Hankey must still wait for his peau de femme.'
A fuller description of Hankey can be found in Ronald Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud. Also see Ian Gibson's immaculately researched book The English Vice. And, if memory serves -- it is forty-odd years since I read the book, and I don't have a copy to hand -- Hankey is mentioned in Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony. Hankey can be found too in various biographies of Swinburne, with whom, naturally, he was acquainted. Swinburne called him 'the Sadique collector of European fame. His erotic collection of books is unequalled upon earth -- unequalled, I should imagine, in heaven.'
As indicated by the public-hanging incident, Hankey's sadistic taste was not confined to books. When in London he patronised a flagellant brothel run by Mrs Jenkins, who provided facilities for flogging girls of 13 or so. Hankey also stuck needles into the girls. But not very far, he said, indicating the tip of his finger.
The brothers Goncourt met Hankey in Paris, describing him in their journal (in translation) as 'a madman, a monster, one of those men who live on the edge of the abyss.' Through him, they wrote, they had a glimpse of 'a terrible side to a wealthy blase aristocracy -- the English aristocracy -- who bring ferocious cruelty to love and whose licentiousness can only be aroused by the woman's sufferings.'
Thus Hankey may, for all I know, single-handedly be responsible for the the coining of the French term 'le vice anglais'.
Finally, Hankey appears as a minor character in my novel The Suppression of Vice (written under the pen-name Patrick Read).
Maud Newton commented on an item in the Literary Saloon which was based on an article in The Record, which describes itself as the independent newspaper at the Harvard Law School. The article in question is a learned disquisition upon the art of binding books -- and other objects -- in human skin. Books so bound are said to be examples of anthropodermic bibliopegy.
You can read the article for yourself, if you wish, but the purpose of this post is to record one notable omission: or at any rate a case of enthusiasm for this rare craft which The Record failed to note.
In the nineteenth century there was a well known distributor of pornography called Frederick Hankey (1828?-1882). Hankey was a profoundly unattractive person, both physically and morally. For example, he once attended a public hanging, with a friend, and took along two girls so that he and his friend could have sexual intercourse while witnessing the event. Hankey was probably inspired in this action by the incident recorded in Casanova's memoirs: Casanova noticed two couples doing the same thing at the execution of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV of France.
Hankey was resident in Paris, then the centre of the porno business, and he used couriers to import forbidden material into England. Sometimes the books were carried in the diplomatic bag (Hankey had a friend in the Paris embassy), but the best of his couriers, Hankey maintained, was Mr Harris, the manager of Covent Garden; he was adept at transporting books in the bend of his back.
It was Hankey's oft-expressed ambition to own books which were bound with human skin. To Richard Monkton Milnes he spoke of his desire to see a girl hanged and to have the skin of her backside tanned to bind his Justine with. And when the explorer Sir Richard Burton passed through Paris Hankey asked him to try to obtain the skin of a Negress (preferably torn off a live one). Burton promised to try to get him one, but failed. Burton wrote to Richard Monkton Milnes from Dahomey with the sad news: 'I have been here three days and am grievously disappointed. Not a man killed, nor a fellow tortured. The canoe floating in blood is a myth of myths. Poor Hankey must still wait for his peau de femme.'
A fuller description of Hankey can be found in Ronald Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud. Also see Ian Gibson's immaculately researched book The English Vice. And, if memory serves -- it is forty-odd years since I read the book, and I don't have a copy to hand -- Hankey is mentioned in Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony. Hankey can be found too in various biographies of Swinburne, with whom, naturally, he was acquainted. Swinburne called him 'the Sadique collector of European fame. His erotic collection of books is unequalled upon earth -- unequalled, I should imagine, in heaven.'
As indicated by the public-hanging incident, Hankey's sadistic taste was not confined to books. When in London he patronised a flagellant brothel run by Mrs Jenkins, who provided facilities for flogging girls of 13 or so. Hankey also stuck needles into the girls. But not very far, he said, indicating the tip of his finger.
The brothers Goncourt met Hankey in Paris, describing him in their journal (in translation) as 'a madman, a monster, one of those men who live on the edge of the abyss.' Through him, they wrote, they had a glimpse of 'a terrible side to a wealthy blase aristocracy -- the English aristocracy -- who bring ferocious cruelty to love and whose licentiousness can only be aroused by the woman's sufferings.'
Thus Hankey may, for all I know, single-handedly be responsible for the the coining of the French term 'le vice anglais'.
Finally, Hankey appears as a minor character in my novel The Suppression of Vice (written under the pen-name Patrick Read).
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
On Monday night to the Theatre Royal, Bath, to see another play based on a famous novel: this time Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier.
Some of these stage adaptations of famous novels work very well. The Young Visiters, seen last Friday, was a delight. Rebecca, sadly, wasn't.
Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca in 1938. It has sometimes been described as the greatest of the imitations of Jane Eyre, but the plot, when baldly stated, would tax the credulity and patience of a ten-year-old.
Our heroine (she has no name in either novel, film, or play) is working as a lady's companion when she meets a rich English widower, Maxim de Winter. Maxim sweeps the young woman off her feet, marries her, and takes her back to Manderley, his large country house near the sea. The Manderley household features the usual array of characters: a faithful butler ('I've served the family man and boy'); a village idiot ('Don't let them put me in the asylum, Miss -- especially as I'm a key witness in Act Two'); and a nasty housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.
Everyone at Manderley is obsessed by the memory of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who drowned in the sea.
None of the key characters, viewed objectively, has any appeal whatever. The heroine (who narrates the novel) is a complete wimp. Maxim is a member of the idle rich -- a class of people whom it is hard to admire at any time, but particularly, one might have thought, in the 1930s. And Mrs Danvers speaks so far out of turn for a 1930s servant that no employer, or employer's wife, would have put up with her for thirty seconds.
In due course, Maxim confesses to his second wife that he actually murdered Rebecca. She was a tart, you see, and provoked him. Anyone would have shot her. At which point the wimpish wife suddenly acquires some backbone; but the backbone has a curious twist to it. She does not report his crime to the police; on the contrary, she becomes determined to protect her husband against any charge of murder.
Such dramatic moments as occurred in the latest stage version of the story (such as the first-act curtain) are presumably lifted from the book, and they arise out of faux pas and ludicrous misunderstandings which could have been avoided by anyone with any common sense.
One member of the cast does come to the conclusion that Max murdered Rebecca, and he says so. This is is Jack Favell, one of the Rebecca's lovers, and he is clearly a bounder because he wears co-respondent shoes.
The allegation of murder is dealt with by having the matter investigated by a friendly local magistrate: a dining pal of Max's. He holds an informal meeting in Max's sitting-room. Evidence, of a sort, is provided by the village idiot and by a lady doctor who was consulted by Rebecca shortly before she died.
The lady doctor gladly reveals Rebecca's medical history ('I know this is unprofessional, but...') and it emerges that Rebecca had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. So she had a motive for suicide. Ergo any suggestion that Max murdered her is clearly nonsense. (Technically this is known a deus ex machina, or desperate ploy invented by an author who has got her hero up a tree and can't think how to get him down again.)
And now you see, I hope, what I mean about the plot taxing one's patience and credulity.
It has to be said, however, that Daphne du Maurier evidently wrote the original novel with enough bravura to turn the thing into a big popular success. That initial success snowballed when the novel was (a) adapted for radio in the US by the great Orson Welles, and (b) filmed by Alfred Hitchock with Laurence Olivier in the lead.
It is a tribute to the skills of Olivier and Hitchcock that they managed to turn this unlikely story into a big fat hit. Rebecca the movie won two Oscars (including best picture) and was nominated for nine more.
So much for the history. And now someone has decided to produce a new version of the book for the English stage; I say new because there was a 1940 version starring Celia Johnson as the heroine and featuring Margaret Rutherford as Mrs Danvers. And I say 'someone' because it is not clear to me who initiated this new venture.
Whoever it was, they have assembled a formidable array of talent and spent a lot of money. As producers we have David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, both of whom have a long string of hits behind them. The director is Patrick Mason, who gave us the original production of Dancing at Lughnasa. The script is by Frank McGuiness, a prize-winning playwright. And Nigel Havers stars. And there were, if I counted correctly, fourteen actors on stage for the final curtain, a huge number by modern standards, because any more than five is usually considered uneconomic.
One way and another then, a large number of talented people have convinced themselves that this weary old warhorse still has life in it, and they have devoted a lot of time and effort to presenting it to the public. And to be fair, I have to say that the play is running for two weeks in Bath, and on the Monday night of the second week the place was packed.
That said, I find it difficult to think of anything nice to say about this production at all. The action takes place against a bank of shingle, representing a Cornish beach, and the design is almost monochrome -- perhaps seeking to evoke the success of the movie. Changes of locale are suggested by the most minimal means: chairs and tables mostly.
But absolutely nothing seemed right to me. Nigel Havers initially wears a suit which doesn't fit, and his evening dress isn't much better. As for the lighting -- well, the lighting director has chosen to light the production entirely from the wings, with the result that the actors are for ever casting shadows on each other's faces. I couldn't see the logic of this at first, but I began to suspect that it was an arrangement specifically requested by the cast. They were probably so embarrassed by what they were asked to do and say that they wanted to make sure that no one would be able to recognise them in the street.
The actors, of course, did their best. Actors always do. But it was a losing battle. One thing, however, was excellent: Mrs GOB and I were both agreed on that. Filmed shots of the sea, breaking on the Cornish coast, are at certain points projected on to a giant screen at the back of the stage. This, we thought, was rather good.
The rest of it was dire.
Some of these stage adaptations of famous novels work very well. The Young Visiters, seen last Friday, was a delight. Rebecca, sadly, wasn't.
Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca in 1938. It has sometimes been described as the greatest of the imitations of Jane Eyre, but the plot, when baldly stated, would tax the credulity and patience of a ten-year-old.
Our heroine (she has no name in either novel, film, or play) is working as a lady's companion when she meets a rich English widower, Maxim de Winter. Maxim sweeps the young woman off her feet, marries her, and takes her back to Manderley, his large country house near the sea. The Manderley household features the usual array of characters: a faithful butler ('I've served the family man and boy'); a village idiot ('Don't let them put me in the asylum, Miss -- especially as I'm a key witness in Act Two'); and a nasty housekeeper, Mrs Danvers.
Everyone at Manderley is obsessed by the memory of Maxim's first wife, Rebecca, who drowned in the sea.
None of the key characters, viewed objectively, has any appeal whatever. The heroine (who narrates the novel) is a complete wimp. Maxim is a member of the idle rich -- a class of people whom it is hard to admire at any time, but particularly, one might have thought, in the 1930s. And Mrs Danvers speaks so far out of turn for a 1930s servant that no employer, or employer's wife, would have put up with her for thirty seconds.
In due course, Maxim confesses to his second wife that he actually murdered Rebecca. She was a tart, you see, and provoked him. Anyone would have shot her. At which point the wimpish wife suddenly acquires some backbone; but the backbone has a curious twist to it. She does not report his crime to the police; on the contrary, she becomes determined to protect her husband against any charge of murder.
Such dramatic moments as occurred in the latest stage version of the story (such as the first-act curtain) are presumably lifted from the book, and they arise out of faux pas and ludicrous misunderstandings which could have been avoided by anyone with any common sense.
One member of the cast does come to the conclusion that Max murdered Rebecca, and he says so. This is is Jack Favell, one of the Rebecca's lovers, and he is clearly a bounder because he wears co-respondent shoes.
The allegation of murder is dealt with by having the matter investigated by a friendly local magistrate: a dining pal of Max's. He holds an informal meeting in Max's sitting-room. Evidence, of a sort, is provided by the village idiot and by a lady doctor who was consulted by Rebecca shortly before she died.
The lady doctor gladly reveals Rebecca's medical history ('I know this is unprofessional, but...') and it emerges that Rebecca had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. So she had a motive for suicide. Ergo any suggestion that Max murdered her is clearly nonsense. (Technically this is known a deus ex machina, or desperate ploy invented by an author who has got her hero up a tree and can't think how to get him down again.)
And now you see, I hope, what I mean about the plot taxing one's patience and credulity.
It has to be said, however, that Daphne du Maurier evidently wrote the original novel with enough bravura to turn the thing into a big popular success. That initial success snowballed when the novel was (a) adapted for radio in the US by the great Orson Welles, and (b) filmed by Alfred Hitchock with Laurence Olivier in the lead.
It is a tribute to the skills of Olivier and Hitchcock that they managed to turn this unlikely story into a big fat hit. Rebecca the movie won two Oscars (including best picture) and was nominated for nine more.
So much for the history. And now someone has decided to produce a new version of the book for the English stage; I say new because there was a 1940 version starring Celia Johnson as the heroine and featuring Margaret Rutherford as Mrs Danvers. And I say 'someone' because it is not clear to me who initiated this new venture.
Whoever it was, they have assembled a formidable array of talent and spent a lot of money. As producers we have David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers, both of whom have a long string of hits behind them. The director is Patrick Mason, who gave us the original production of Dancing at Lughnasa. The script is by Frank McGuiness, a prize-winning playwright. And Nigel Havers stars. And there were, if I counted correctly, fourteen actors on stage for the final curtain, a huge number by modern standards, because any more than five is usually considered uneconomic.
One way and another then, a large number of talented people have convinced themselves that this weary old warhorse still has life in it, and they have devoted a lot of time and effort to presenting it to the public. And to be fair, I have to say that the play is running for two weeks in Bath, and on the Monday night of the second week the place was packed.
That said, I find it difficult to think of anything nice to say about this production at all. The action takes place against a bank of shingle, representing a Cornish beach, and the design is almost monochrome -- perhaps seeking to evoke the success of the movie. Changes of locale are suggested by the most minimal means: chairs and tables mostly.
But absolutely nothing seemed right to me. Nigel Havers initially wears a suit which doesn't fit, and his evening dress isn't much better. As for the lighting -- well, the lighting director has chosen to light the production entirely from the wings, with the result that the actors are for ever casting shadows on each other's faces. I couldn't see the logic of this at first, but I began to suspect that it was an arrangement specifically requested by the cast. They were probably so embarrassed by what they were asked to do and say that they wanted to make sure that no one would be able to recognise them in the street.
The actors, of course, did their best. Actors always do. But it was a losing battle. One thing, however, was excellent: Mrs GOB and I were both agreed on that. Filmed shots of the sea, breaking on the Cornish coast, are at certain points projected on to a giant screen at the back of the stage. This, we thought, was rather good.
The rest of it was dire.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Ian Hocking: Deja Vu
Ian Hocking's science-fiction novel Deja Vu attracted some good reviews: e.g. the GOB and Debra Hamel. Now the author has decided to make it available as a free podcast audiobook. One episode each Saturday, lasting about twenty minutes.
The audiobook is available under a Creative Commons licence (which this blog also uses, by the way). It will be interesting to see what (detectable) effect the audiobook has on sales of the paperback.
Ian Hocking also maintains an interesting blog, This Writing Life.
The audiobook is available under a Creative Commons licence (which this blog also uses, by the way). It will be interesting to see what (detectable) effect the audiobook has on sales of the paperback.
Ian Hocking also maintains an interesting blog, This Writing Life.
Biff Mitchell
Biff Mitchell is an IT-savvy writer who (mostly) does his own thing as regards publishing and marketing. You might care to take a brief look to see how he does it.
The second edition of Biff's book on emarketing tools for writers has just been published at Fictionwise. I might have bought it but I'm afraid the complications of the Fictionwise site wore out my patience.
The second edition of Biff's book on emarketing tools for writers has just been published at Fictionwise. I might have bought it but I'm afraid the complications of the Fictionwise site wore out my patience.
How to shock your reader
These thoughts are prompted by the fact that, as mentioned last week, I have been watching a BBC3 serial called Funland (now finished -- but it will be back, no doubt).
The chief virtue of Funland was the quality of the acting. Everyone in it was superb, but the stand-out performance, for me, was that of Judy Parfitt as Mercy Woolf.
Judy describes the part as follows: "Mercy is totally ruthless; she will do anything to get what she wants and she is so detached from any sort of real emotion. If she does show any emotion then it is only in the hope of manipulating someone to do what she wants them to do! She's totally different to me as I think I'm about as frightening as Minnie Mouse!"
Mercy has a son, who is confusingly named Shirley. And at one point Mercy advises Shirley to face up to the truth about himself. She says this: You fucked your mother, and you loved it.
This 'revelation' in Funland was not really a revelation at all, because the scriptwriters had, as they say in the drama business, foreshadowed it. But when the truth is made known to Shirley's wife, she is deeply shocked by it.
And then the question that I asked myself was this: Was I shocked by Mercy's line or not?
The answer, of course, is No.
For several reasons. First, I had seen it coming. Second, incest is scarcely a rare occurrence these days. It is mostly father/daughter, but the other way round is not unknown. (There was an ancient Greek called Oedipus, I believe, but I don't think he counts because he didn't know what he was doing.)
And all this led me to recollect that, as someone once remarked, the times they are a-changing. There was a time when the British were shocked by almost anything, and the Americans even more so. When I was a youth it was absolutely inconceivable that anyone could mention incest in a play or a novel. In the 1950s you couldn't print the word 'fuck' without the probability of a jail sentence; even if you could find a printer who would risk putting his name to it, which was most unlikely. (For further details, see my post of 29 October 2004.)
This squeamishness was not limited to prose. In the British theatre, censorship of a fairly severe kind was in force until 1968, forbidding even the most passing reference to sexual matters. In terms of images, no male sexual organs (other than in classical art) could be shown before the late 1960s, and even then certainly not with an erection. Female pubic hair was particularly taboo, and at one time there was a section of Customs and Excise (Department PT4, with 30 civil servants aided by ten Acts of Parliament) devoted solely to ensuring that printed photographs never revealed the fact that women have genital organs.
As for television -- well, I can remember an episode of a BBC cop show, Z Cars, in about 1963, where there was a scene set in a mortuary. Dead body on slab, pathologist poised for action. At one point he said, Well, I'd better get on with it, picked up a scalpel and prepared to make an incision. You didn't actually see him do anything. This scene caused such an uproar that the BBC was forced to issue an apology and state that it had gone too far. Today, at three o'clock this afternoon, you could probably tune in to satellite TV and watch a series called Post Mortems for Beginners: part 94, the liver and kidneys. In colour. The BBC in 1963 was black and white.
So. Point made, I think. It is now quite hard to shock people.
But, you may be wondering, why bother?
Well, for one thing, writing a shocking story has been, historically, one way to bring yourself to public attention. For example, in the late 1940s, a young American called Stanley Ellin was struggling to break into the fiction business. He had never sold anything, but he had an idea for a short story which even he expected to be rejected. Nevertheless, he sent it around, and, sure enough, it bounced back. But then it found a home with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The story in question was called The Speciality of the House, and it described a restaurant in New York (naturally) where a particularly tasty dish was served. And the final revelation (as you may have guessed) was that the dish derived its unusual flavour from human flesh.
When it first appeared, this story rapidly became the talk of the town. It won the magazine's best fiction award in 1948, and helped to establish Ellin's career. And subsequently, of course, many other writers have found that it does them little harm to have written something which people find shocking. Think Lolita.
That said, however, it will be fruitful to consider the nature of this 'shocking' process in a little more detail. The object is not (it seems to me) to horrify, appal and disgust. At least you should not do that to your chosen audience. There may be others, outside your target audience, who will be horrified and disgusted, but that's no help to anyone. What you are seeking here is the story that makes the hairs on the back of someone's head rise when they reach the end of it. You want them to put the book (or magazine) down, lift the phone, and call a friend to say Hey, have you read...
I have often argued here that achieving an emotional effect on the reader is, properly understood, almost the whole and sole proper purpose of a piece of fiction. And to do that you need to identify a number of things very clearly.
One, as mentioned above, is the target audience; and the easiest way to understand your target audience is to be a member of it. It's hard to write a number-one chart hit if you're 73 and only like Beethoven.
Next, you need to think very carefully about the nature of the emotion that you are trying to create. In this case what you want, I suggest, is a kind of slow burn. You need the tension to rise higher and higher as you approach the end, and then you want to produce the Oh my God! effect.
An ending which is truly a surprise is not, in my opinion, going to do it. The reader will all too often feel cheated, because you haven't played fair. No, what is required is an ending which, on reflection, readers will realise is inevitable, given what you had told them, but which they really had not wanted to recognise as inevitable because they were reluctant to do so.
Oh, and if they were reluctant to recognise what was about to happen because it involved an unhappy ending -- an ending in which a character whom they have come to like meets a sticky end -- you have failed.
Well, that's all quite straightforward, isn't it? Can't think why people don't do it more often.
The chief virtue of Funland was the quality of the acting. Everyone in it was superb, but the stand-out performance, for me, was that of Judy Parfitt as Mercy Woolf.
Judy describes the part as follows: "Mercy is totally ruthless; she will do anything to get what she wants and she is so detached from any sort of real emotion. If she does show any emotion then it is only in the hope of manipulating someone to do what she wants them to do! She's totally different to me as I think I'm about as frightening as Minnie Mouse!"
Mercy has a son, who is confusingly named Shirley. And at one point Mercy advises Shirley to face up to the truth about himself. She says this: You fucked your mother, and you loved it.
This 'revelation' in Funland was not really a revelation at all, because the scriptwriters had, as they say in the drama business, foreshadowed it. But when the truth is made known to Shirley's wife, she is deeply shocked by it.
And then the question that I asked myself was this: Was I shocked by Mercy's line or not?
The answer, of course, is No.
For several reasons. First, I had seen it coming. Second, incest is scarcely a rare occurrence these days. It is mostly father/daughter, but the other way round is not unknown. (There was an ancient Greek called Oedipus, I believe, but I don't think he counts because he didn't know what he was doing.)
And all this led me to recollect that, as someone once remarked, the times they are a-changing. There was a time when the British were shocked by almost anything, and the Americans even more so. When I was a youth it was absolutely inconceivable that anyone could mention incest in a play or a novel. In the 1950s you couldn't print the word 'fuck' without the probability of a jail sentence; even if you could find a printer who would risk putting his name to it, which was most unlikely. (For further details, see my post of 29 October 2004.)
This squeamishness was not limited to prose. In the British theatre, censorship of a fairly severe kind was in force until 1968, forbidding even the most passing reference to sexual matters. In terms of images, no male sexual organs (other than in classical art) could be shown before the late 1960s, and even then certainly not with an erection. Female pubic hair was particularly taboo, and at one time there was a section of Customs and Excise (Department PT4, with 30 civil servants aided by ten Acts of Parliament) devoted solely to ensuring that printed photographs never revealed the fact that women have genital organs.
As for television -- well, I can remember an episode of a BBC cop show, Z Cars, in about 1963, where there was a scene set in a mortuary. Dead body on slab, pathologist poised for action. At one point he said, Well, I'd better get on with it, picked up a scalpel and prepared to make an incision. You didn't actually see him do anything. This scene caused such an uproar that the BBC was forced to issue an apology and state that it had gone too far. Today, at three o'clock this afternoon, you could probably tune in to satellite TV and watch a series called Post Mortems for Beginners: part 94, the liver and kidneys. In colour. The BBC in 1963 was black and white.
So. Point made, I think. It is now quite hard to shock people.
But, you may be wondering, why bother?
Well, for one thing, writing a shocking story has been, historically, one way to bring yourself to public attention. For example, in the late 1940s, a young American called Stanley Ellin was struggling to break into the fiction business. He had never sold anything, but he had an idea for a short story which even he expected to be rejected. Nevertheless, he sent it around, and, sure enough, it bounced back. But then it found a home with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
The story in question was called The Speciality of the House, and it described a restaurant in New York (naturally) where a particularly tasty dish was served. And the final revelation (as you may have guessed) was that the dish derived its unusual flavour from human flesh.
When it first appeared, this story rapidly became the talk of the town. It won the magazine's best fiction award in 1948, and helped to establish Ellin's career. And subsequently, of course, many other writers have found that it does them little harm to have written something which people find shocking. Think Lolita.
That said, however, it will be fruitful to consider the nature of this 'shocking' process in a little more detail. The object is not (it seems to me) to horrify, appal and disgust. At least you should not do that to your chosen audience. There may be others, outside your target audience, who will be horrified and disgusted, but that's no help to anyone. What you are seeking here is the story that makes the hairs on the back of someone's head rise when they reach the end of it. You want them to put the book (or magazine) down, lift the phone, and call a friend to say Hey, have you read...
I have often argued here that achieving an emotional effect on the reader is, properly understood, almost the whole and sole proper purpose of a piece of fiction. And to do that you need to identify a number of things very clearly.
One, as mentioned above, is the target audience; and the easiest way to understand your target audience is to be a member of it. It's hard to write a number-one chart hit if you're 73 and only like Beethoven.
Next, you need to think very carefully about the nature of the emotion that you are trying to create. In this case what you want, I suggest, is a kind of slow burn. You need the tension to rise higher and higher as you approach the end, and then you want to produce the Oh my God! effect.
An ending which is truly a surprise is not, in my opinion, going to do it. The reader will all too often feel cheated, because you haven't played fair. No, what is required is an ending which, on reflection, readers will realise is inevitable, given what you had told them, but which they really had not wanted to recognise as inevitable because they were reluctant to do so.
Oh, and if they were reluctant to recognise what was about to happen because it involved an unhappy ending -- an ending in which a character whom they have come to like meets a sticky end -- you have failed.
Well, that's all quite straightforward, isn't it? Can't think why people don't do it more often.
Monday, November 14, 2005
The Giller Prize
The Giller Prize is allegedly the Canadian equivalent of the Booker, and it has been getting some attention from the blogosphere.
David Bergen won for his novel The Time in Between, which is a story about a brother and sister who travel to Southeast Asia to look for their father, a Vietnam veteran who has disappeared there.
The Bookslut reckons that one advantage of the Giller Prize ceremony over the American National Book Awards is that, at the former, 'you can totally smoke weed there.'
On the other hand, you could just stay at home and smoke weed anyway.
David Bergen won for his novel The Time in Between, which is a story about a brother and sister who travel to Southeast Asia to look for their father, a Vietnam veteran who has disappeared there.
The Bookslut reckons that one advantage of the Giller Prize ceremony over the American National Book Awards is that, at the former, 'you can totally smoke weed there.'
On the other hand, you could just stay at home and smoke weed anyway.
Unhappy ending
Terry McMillan is a middle-aged lady (black, American) who wrote a bestselling novel called How Stella Got Her Groove Back. This described how a 42-year-old woman went to Jamaica, found herself a man who was half her age, shagged him silly, and as a result was... well, you know, kind of rejuvenated.
According to the Times, this novel was inspired by Terry McMillan's own experience. She was 43 when a young man aged 20 caught her eye over breakfast at a hotel in Jamaica. The two of them had a passion-filled five days and as a result Terry was... well, you know, kind of rejuvenated. She subsequently married the fellow.
Now Terry McMillan has found out that her handsome young husband is gay, and throughout their marriage has been seeing other men. So she has dumped him, and the two of them are suing each each for this and that.
No, no. You mustn't laugh. Really.
According to the Times, this novel was inspired by Terry McMillan's own experience. She was 43 when a young man aged 20 caught her eye over breakfast at a hotel in Jamaica. The two of them had a passion-filled five days and as a result Terry was... well, you know, kind of rejuvenated. She subsequently married the fellow.
Now Terry McMillan has found out that her handsome young husband is gay, and throughout their marriage has been seeing other men. So she has dumped him, and the two of them are suing each each for this and that.
No, no. You mustn't laugh. Really.
Daisy Ashford: The Young Visiters
On Friday last, Mrs GOB and I attended a theatrical adaptation of Daisy Ashford's novel The Young Visiters. And no, that isn't a typo. Visiters is the way Daisy spelt it.
Daisy Ashford was born in 1881. She began dictating stories to her parents before she could write, and when she was nine she wrote a short novel called The Young Visiters. Her punctuation wasn't much better than her spelling, but she had a wonderful imagination.
In 1917, at the age of 36, Daisy found her early manuscript in a drawer, and lent it to a friend who was recuperating from flu. Various other people read it, including Frank Swinnerton, who was a novelist and reader for Chatto and Windus.
Because of Swinnerton's enthusiasm, the book was published exactly as the young Daisy had written it. J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, agreed to write a preface, and the book became a huge success. It is still in print today, both in the UK and the USA, but you can in fact read it online.
The chief characters in the story are Mr Salteena ('an elderly man of 42'), Ethel Monticue (a young girl of 17), and Bernard Clark, a rival of Mr Salteena whom Ethel turns out to prefer.
Most modern readers -- and certainly the audience at the theatrical version of the book which I saw on Friday -- have found the book highly amusing. The humour lies, of course, in the fact that Daisy writes about adult love affairs and marriage without ever quite understanding how such affairs are conducted. At the end, Ethel and Bernard return home from a six-week honeymoon 'with a son and hair a nice fat baby called Ignatius Bernard.'
And so on. Not everyone's taste, perhaps, but a little gem of its kind.
Should you reside in the UK, watch out for the touring production of this novel/play, as mounted by Paddock Productions.
At the age of 13, Daisy wrote another novel, The Hangman's Daughter. And then she retired.
Daisy Ashford was born in 1881. She began dictating stories to her parents before she could write, and when she was nine she wrote a short novel called The Young Visiters. Her punctuation wasn't much better than her spelling, but she had a wonderful imagination.
In 1917, at the age of 36, Daisy found her early manuscript in a drawer, and lent it to a friend who was recuperating from flu. Various other people read it, including Frank Swinnerton, who was a novelist and reader for Chatto and Windus.
Because of Swinnerton's enthusiasm, the book was published exactly as the young Daisy had written it. J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, agreed to write a preface, and the book became a huge success. It is still in print today, both in the UK and the USA, but you can in fact read it online.
The chief characters in the story are Mr Salteena ('an elderly man of 42'), Ethel Monticue (a young girl of 17), and Bernard Clark, a rival of Mr Salteena whom Ethel turns out to prefer.
Most modern readers -- and certainly the audience at the theatrical version of the book which I saw on Friday -- have found the book highly amusing. The humour lies, of course, in the fact that Daisy writes about adult love affairs and marriage without ever quite understanding how such affairs are conducted. At the end, Ethel and Bernard return home from a six-week honeymoon 'with a son and hair a nice fat baby called Ignatius Bernard.'
And so on. Not everyone's taste, perhaps, but a little gem of its kind.
Should you reside in the UK, watch out for the touring production of this novel/play, as mounted by Paddock Productions.
At the age of 13, Daisy wrote another novel, The Hangman's Daughter. And then she retired.
Friday, November 11, 2005
R.P. Burnham and The Long Story
On 13 May I mentioned that a commenter had drawn my attention to the work of R.P. Burnham, who is the author of a collection of essays called The Least Shadow of Public Thought: the Small Press and the Art of Fiction; he is also the editor of a journal called The Long Story.
Subsequently, Mr Burnham sent me copies of both his collection of essays and issue 23 of The Long Story, and I have been reading both with great interest. The essays were all written between 1983 and 1992, and the collection was published by the Juniper Press in 1996. It is now (so far as I can discover) out of print, so you will have to search libraries and the net to find a copy.
Let's have a closer look at the essays.
I don't think I have ever read a book about writing which has ended up being so heavily annotated with pencilled comments; and this I regard as a mark of quality. Certainly I learnt a great deal from it; and, more to the point, perhaps, it gave me food for thought in relation to what, if anything, I am trying to do when I write fiction myself.
In his introduction, Burnham tells us that his essays offer a different perspective on the writing of fiction from that which is presented in the 'ubiquitous writing programs of the colleges and universities'; and that is an excellent start. Implicitly or explicitly, he tells us, his essays 'suggest that Modernism and Post-Modernism has been a disastrous mistake.' In other words, if I understand him aright, he believes in the more old-fashioned methods of telling stories. And so do I.
Burnham comments that, out of every 100 submissions to The Long Story, 95 read as if they were written by the same writer. The little literary magazines and the big commercial publishers, it seems, have at least one thing in common: in each case there is a kind of approved style of writing which gains you entry to the club; but in the process you end up writing something which feels to the reader like a manufactured product rather than the work of an individual. So Burnham's essays are, he says, addressed to those few writers who 'want to be true to their own individual voice and vision.'
That said, he does not claim to be 'normative', which I take to mean prescriptive. He hopes not so much to advise writers on how they should write, as to make people think -- especially if they've been fed three years of creative-writing-course propaganda.
The first essay, on Moral Fiction, is not as forbidding as it sounds. It describes (usefully, if you intend to submit to The Long Story) Burnham's preferences in fiction. He is not really interested in stories which observe the 'modern rules' about point of view, neutral narrators, dramatising not telling, and so forth. Unlike many modern theorists, he believes that it is useful for a story to have a plot; perhaps one which concerns the struggle for human dignity. And, above all, he wants vision, which he sees as an invitation to the reader to share the writer's humanity.
The second essay is an attack upon what Burnham calls 'bourgeois aestheticism', which ensures, as he sees it, that the complete truth about the society that we live in is never told. At the heart of bourgeois aestheticism, he says, is the the principle of never getting involved. Hence he argues for committed fiction; fiction which at least reveals which side the author is on, and which shows some commitment to life. Burnham wants fiction with emotion in it: tell the truth about the particular, he says, and the universal will find expression.
The whole thrust of this second essay is to widen the boundaries of acceptable literary practice. Burnham wants to read more fiction which deals with the dispossessed and the poor in the USA. (Try Noah Cicero.) 'I take it as axiomatic', he says, 'that any writer who is lionized by the New York literary establishment is far more likely to be a genial, middle-browed bourgeois booby than a writer of any serious consequence.' Right on, brother. But he will, he says, happily consider publishing a story about a banker's vacation in Acapulco, provided the writer can make it a larger vision of what the banker's journey here on earth means.
The third essay begins with another attempt to describe what Burnham admires, and hence what he is looking for as an editor. 'Though we are not at all interested in science fiction, adventure, detective, adolescent bedroom farce, and other forms of popular fiction, anything of a serious nature will get a close reading.' Furthermore, 'we publish at least two stories each issue that are not exactly up our alley but which we think are exceptionally well done.'
The remainder of the essay (1986, and hence long before the internet) deals with the role of the little magazine and the small press in publishing the work of writers who would otherwise never get a look in.
Burnham is blunt about disliking popular fiction: 'I distrust works that become too popular, and I distrust works that aim to be popular.... In reading submissions I look for the work that burns with sincerity... independence of spirit and courage of conviction'. Such writers, says Burnham, can only find a home in the alternative press; and they may be read by only 300 or 400 people; but at least they will prove that 'the government, the mass corporations, and the mass media have not been able to fool all 240 million of us.'
The next essay is entitled Literary Seeing, and it touches upon a point which has been troubling me recently (as you may have noticed from recent posts): namely, how can fiction compete with other media, such as movies and music?
Burnham's view (which I don't altogether share) is that if movies fill most people's need for a story, then literature's claim for attention must be based on something else. And he therefore welcomes literary experimentation -- but not experimentation in the direction that it has gone in recent years, which he thoroughly dislikes. 'The ludicrous notion that deliberate obscurity signified artistic worth became fashionable,' he writes, 'so that if one could say, "I don't see the point of this piece," that was supposed to be a measure of its greatness.' If this is the price of keeping literature alive, he says, it is better to let it die.
Burnham believes that there are, in principle, other ways to develop fiction which may be better than those found so far; and he suggests that the most suitable subject for fiction is the inner response to the outer world.
I don't recall that Burnham actually mentions the stream of consciousness technique in this context, but perhaps I might mention here that there are, if my memory is not deceiving me, at least two bestsellers -- or at least famous books -- in which the highly literary device of stream of consciousness was used within a more traditional narrative. One such instance occurs in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, and another (a much more commercial context) in Ken Follett's The Key to Rebecca.
Next comes a consideration of The Aesthetic Moment, in which Burnham rightly emphasises the fact that 'while technical devices, form and genre are the flesh and bones of an art, emotions are its soul.... The artist must present an intrinsically moving subject universal in scope, and the appreciator must bring to the work the willing suspension of disbelief and the intelligence and humanity to enter into the artist's world.' I agree.
There follows a valuable discussion of The Neutral Narrator and the Empathetic Narrator, in which Burnham attacks the (apparently well established) concept that the author should stay well out of the action and simply show, not tell. Oddly enough, the great Thomas H. Uzzell also pointed out that some of the great writers of the past were very much inclined to comment on the action. Uzzell recommended that the extent to which this should occur should be left pretty much to decide itself, according to the author's temperament; and I can offer no better advice than that.
This discussion of technical aspects of narrative broadens out in this essay into a criticism of the capitalist system and its effects. Academia and the large media outlets, says Burnham, are already in the pocket of the large corporations; and it very much suits the interests of the large corporations to have the writers and intellectuals 'too busy squabbling over questions of form and expression to notice what the rascals are up to.' What a modest word that 'rascals' is.
That being Burnham's view, you will not be surprised that he goes on to argue, as he has before, for literature in which the author is committed to a particular view, and which leaves the reader in no doubt what that view is.
I could go on a lot longer about this chapter on the role of the narrator. It is, I think, much the best in the book, and my pages are covered in scribble. He sums up by pointing out that no one is surprised to find that an essay writer has something to say; why should there not also be fiction where the writer has something to say?
Some light relief is provided, towards the end of the book, by an imagined interview, conducted by Litbiz magazine, with William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (simultaneously, both men having been nabbed at the Meatloaf Writers' Retreat). This is fun, and has Shakespeare, for instance, saying that 'we can't change the world, but we can write and if successful get a job teaching somewhere.' His poem 'Shall I compare Ya to a Summer's Day' has recently been chosen for inclusion in The Best Loved Poems of the Creative Writing Teachers of America Anthology.
The final essay is devoted to The Reader and the Writer. Here Burnham argues for a mutual respect between reader and writer. And I have an uneasy feeling that such respect is not only lacking in some of the cruder commercial novelists (I will name no names), but also in the literary elite, where the object is not so much to entertain or move the average reader, but to impress the highbrow critics -- rather a different audience.
'Literature is not mathematics,' says Burnham, 'and there is no such thing as an iron rule.' I agree. And he adds, on the final page, 'The small press, even conceding that a large percentage of it is adolescent, or too academic, or in pursuit of private agendas, or merely the front for a group of writers who are pals, is still the only place in America where it is possible to find literature not written from an economic motive.'
Well, not any more it ain't. Now we have the internet.
Burnham is a slightly puzzling man to read. I often found that I both agreed and disagreed with him; sometimes even in the same paragraph, and even in the same sentence. But, as I said before, he makes you think: which is occasionally painful but often advantageous.
And now to issue 23 of Burnham's literary magazine, The Long Story.
Well, the nature of the beast is that it contains stories between 8,000 and 20,000 words in length -- an uneasy sort of length in my opinion. As you would expect from what has gone before, the stories are all rather serious in nature. They are, however, pretty varied in content. One deals with the lives of Welsh miners in the 1930s; one give us insight into the political situation in Poland at about the same time; and a third deals with the moral problems of present-day security guards in America.
I can't say that any of the stories struck me personally as outstanding; but that's because, as regular readers of the GOB will know, my taste is ineffably vulgar and I am a man in search, mostly, of cheap thrills. However, even the dimmest reader could not fail to ackonowledge the intelligence, thought, and hard work which has gone into the construction of these eight stories.
I do feel obliged to comment on one point, which I am increasingly coming to think of as a vital factor in the appreciation of fiction: and that is the layout of the words on the page. The Long Story is roughly A5 sized, with very narrow margins, print which might just be 9 point but looks more like 8, and 48 lines to the page. Now -- I understand full well the economic forces which bring about this state of affairs. But personally I believe that Mr Burnham's writers would have been better served by dropping one or two of the stories and giving the others a much more reader-friendly layout.
More information: The Long Story; R.P. Burnham; The Wessex Collective, publisher of R.P. Burnham's novel Envious Shadows.
Subsequently, Mr Burnham sent me copies of both his collection of essays and issue 23 of The Long Story, and I have been reading both with great interest. The essays were all written between 1983 and 1992, and the collection was published by the Juniper Press in 1996. It is now (so far as I can discover) out of print, so you will have to search libraries and the net to find a copy.
Let's have a closer look at the essays.
I don't think I have ever read a book about writing which has ended up being so heavily annotated with pencilled comments; and this I regard as a mark of quality. Certainly I learnt a great deal from it; and, more to the point, perhaps, it gave me food for thought in relation to what, if anything, I am trying to do when I write fiction myself.
In his introduction, Burnham tells us that his essays offer a different perspective on the writing of fiction from that which is presented in the 'ubiquitous writing programs of the colleges and universities'; and that is an excellent start. Implicitly or explicitly, he tells us, his essays 'suggest that Modernism and Post-Modernism has been a disastrous mistake.' In other words, if I understand him aright, he believes in the more old-fashioned methods of telling stories. And so do I.
Burnham comments that, out of every 100 submissions to The Long Story, 95 read as if they were written by the same writer. The little literary magazines and the big commercial publishers, it seems, have at least one thing in common: in each case there is a kind of approved style of writing which gains you entry to the club; but in the process you end up writing something which feels to the reader like a manufactured product rather than the work of an individual. So Burnham's essays are, he says, addressed to those few writers who 'want to be true to their own individual voice and vision.'
That said, he does not claim to be 'normative', which I take to mean prescriptive. He hopes not so much to advise writers on how they should write, as to make people think -- especially if they've been fed three years of creative-writing-course propaganda.
The first essay, on Moral Fiction, is not as forbidding as it sounds. It describes (usefully, if you intend to submit to The Long Story) Burnham's preferences in fiction. He is not really interested in stories which observe the 'modern rules' about point of view, neutral narrators, dramatising not telling, and so forth. Unlike many modern theorists, he believes that it is useful for a story to have a plot; perhaps one which concerns the struggle for human dignity. And, above all, he wants vision, which he sees as an invitation to the reader to share the writer's humanity.
The second essay is an attack upon what Burnham calls 'bourgeois aestheticism', which ensures, as he sees it, that the complete truth about the society that we live in is never told. At the heart of bourgeois aestheticism, he says, is the the principle of never getting involved. Hence he argues for committed fiction; fiction which at least reveals which side the author is on, and which shows some commitment to life. Burnham wants fiction with emotion in it: tell the truth about the particular, he says, and the universal will find expression.
The whole thrust of this second essay is to widen the boundaries of acceptable literary practice. Burnham wants to read more fiction which deals with the dispossessed and the poor in the USA. (Try Noah Cicero.) 'I take it as axiomatic', he says, 'that any writer who is lionized by the New York literary establishment is far more likely to be a genial, middle-browed bourgeois booby than a writer of any serious consequence.' Right on, brother. But he will, he says, happily consider publishing a story about a banker's vacation in Acapulco, provided the writer can make it a larger vision of what the banker's journey here on earth means.
The third essay begins with another attempt to describe what Burnham admires, and hence what he is looking for as an editor. 'Though we are not at all interested in science fiction, adventure, detective, adolescent bedroom farce, and other forms of popular fiction, anything of a serious nature will get a close reading.' Furthermore, 'we publish at least two stories each issue that are not exactly up our alley but which we think are exceptionally well done.'
The remainder of the essay (1986, and hence long before the internet) deals with the role of the little magazine and the small press in publishing the work of writers who would otherwise never get a look in.
Burnham is blunt about disliking popular fiction: 'I distrust works that become too popular, and I distrust works that aim to be popular.... In reading submissions I look for the work that burns with sincerity... independence of spirit and courage of conviction'. Such writers, says Burnham, can only find a home in the alternative press; and they may be read by only 300 or 400 people; but at least they will prove that 'the government, the mass corporations, and the mass media have not been able to fool all 240 million of us.'
The next essay is entitled Literary Seeing, and it touches upon a point which has been troubling me recently (as you may have noticed from recent posts): namely, how can fiction compete with other media, such as movies and music?
Burnham's view (which I don't altogether share) is that if movies fill most people's need for a story, then literature's claim for attention must be based on something else. And he therefore welcomes literary experimentation -- but not experimentation in the direction that it has gone in recent years, which he thoroughly dislikes. 'The ludicrous notion that deliberate obscurity signified artistic worth became fashionable,' he writes, 'so that if one could say, "I don't see the point of this piece," that was supposed to be a measure of its greatness.' If this is the price of keeping literature alive, he says, it is better to let it die.
Burnham believes that there are, in principle, other ways to develop fiction which may be better than those found so far; and he suggests that the most suitable subject for fiction is the inner response to the outer world.
I don't recall that Burnham actually mentions the stream of consciousness technique in this context, but perhaps I might mention here that there are, if my memory is not deceiving me, at least two bestsellers -- or at least famous books -- in which the highly literary device of stream of consciousness was used within a more traditional narrative. One such instance occurs in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, and another (a much more commercial context) in Ken Follett's The Key to Rebecca.
Next comes a consideration of The Aesthetic Moment, in which Burnham rightly emphasises the fact that 'while technical devices, form and genre are the flesh and bones of an art, emotions are its soul.... The artist must present an intrinsically moving subject universal in scope, and the appreciator must bring to the work the willing suspension of disbelief and the intelligence and humanity to enter into the artist's world.' I agree.
There follows a valuable discussion of The Neutral Narrator and the Empathetic Narrator, in which Burnham attacks the (apparently well established) concept that the author should stay well out of the action and simply show, not tell. Oddly enough, the great Thomas H. Uzzell also pointed out that some of the great writers of the past were very much inclined to comment on the action. Uzzell recommended that the extent to which this should occur should be left pretty much to decide itself, according to the author's temperament; and I can offer no better advice than that.
This discussion of technical aspects of narrative broadens out in this essay into a criticism of the capitalist system and its effects. Academia and the large media outlets, says Burnham, are already in the pocket of the large corporations; and it very much suits the interests of the large corporations to have the writers and intellectuals 'too busy squabbling over questions of form and expression to notice what the rascals are up to.' What a modest word that 'rascals' is.
That being Burnham's view, you will not be surprised that he goes on to argue, as he has before, for literature in which the author is committed to a particular view, and which leaves the reader in no doubt what that view is.
I could go on a lot longer about this chapter on the role of the narrator. It is, I think, much the best in the book, and my pages are covered in scribble. He sums up by pointing out that no one is surprised to find that an essay writer has something to say; why should there not also be fiction where the writer has something to say?
Some light relief is provided, towards the end of the book, by an imagined interview, conducted by Litbiz magazine, with William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (simultaneously, both men having been nabbed at the Meatloaf Writers' Retreat). This is fun, and has Shakespeare, for instance, saying that 'we can't change the world, but we can write and if successful get a job teaching somewhere.' His poem 'Shall I compare Ya to a Summer's Day' has recently been chosen for inclusion in The Best Loved Poems of the Creative Writing Teachers of America Anthology.
The final essay is devoted to The Reader and the Writer. Here Burnham argues for a mutual respect between reader and writer. And I have an uneasy feeling that such respect is not only lacking in some of the cruder commercial novelists (I will name no names), but also in the literary elite, where the object is not so much to entertain or move the average reader, but to impress the highbrow critics -- rather a different audience.
'Literature is not mathematics,' says Burnham, 'and there is no such thing as an iron rule.' I agree. And he adds, on the final page, 'The small press, even conceding that a large percentage of it is adolescent, or too academic, or in pursuit of private agendas, or merely the front for a group of writers who are pals, is still the only place in America where it is possible to find literature not written from an economic motive.'
Well, not any more it ain't. Now we have the internet.
Burnham is a slightly puzzling man to read. I often found that I both agreed and disagreed with him; sometimes even in the same paragraph, and even in the same sentence. But, as I said before, he makes you think: which is occasionally painful but often advantageous.
And now to issue 23 of Burnham's literary magazine, The Long Story.
Well, the nature of the beast is that it contains stories between 8,000 and 20,000 words in length -- an uneasy sort of length in my opinion. As you would expect from what has gone before, the stories are all rather serious in nature. They are, however, pretty varied in content. One deals with the lives of Welsh miners in the 1930s; one give us insight into the political situation in Poland at about the same time; and a third deals with the moral problems of present-day security guards in America.
I can't say that any of the stories struck me personally as outstanding; but that's because, as regular readers of the GOB will know, my taste is ineffably vulgar and I am a man in search, mostly, of cheap thrills. However, even the dimmest reader could not fail to ackonowledge the intelligence, thought, and hard work which has gone into the construction of these eight stories.
I do feel obliged to comment on one point, which I am increasingly coming to think of as a vital factor in the appreciation of fiction: and that is the layout of the words on the page. The Long Story is roughly A5 sized, with very narrow margins, print which might just be 9 point but looks more like 8, and 48 lines to the page. Now -- I understand full well the economic forces which bring about this state of affairs. But personally I believe that Mr Burnham's writers would have been better served by dropping one or two of the stories and giving the others a much more reader-friendly layout.
More information: The Long Story; R.P. Burnham; The Wessex Collective, publisher of R.P. Burnham's novel Envious Shadows.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
The value of a blog
Question: how much do you think the Grumpy Old Bookman blog is worth, in cash terms? Go on, guess.
Nah. Not even close. The answer, as of 7.56 p.m. on 9 November, is $105,568.98. Well, that's what this bloke on the internet reckons, so it must be true.
To work out the value of your blog, go here. And we'll see who's got the bigger one. In this context, anyway.
And if you even begin to understand how the calculation is done, please explain it to me in words of one syllable. Slowly.
Thanks to my son Jon for pointing out this amazing piece of information.
Nah. Not even close. The answer, as of 7.56 p.m. on 9 November, is $105,568.98. Well, that's what this bloke on the internet reckons, so it must be true.
To work out the value of your blog, go here. And we'll see who's got the bigger one. In this context, anyway.
And if you even begin to understand how the calculation is done, please explain it to me in words of one syllable. Slowly.
Thanks to my son Jon for pointing out this amazing piece of information.
Another day, another name
OK, so here's what you wannabes can look forward to. Info courtesy of Publishers Lunch, who pointed to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
You slog away for years, banging on doors, working your fingers to the bone, destroying your relationships, depleting your bank balance -- and then, TERRIFIC! You actually sell a book!! And it gets published!!! And it gets wonderful reviews!!!! And it sells lots of copies!!!!!
So now you're made for life, right?
Er, no. Not quite.
What happens, all too typically, is that first book does OK; then your second book is so-so. And your third book is, frankly, a definite disappointment. And then your publisher writes you a Dear Jane email. And then you wonder what to do next.
Fortunately the WSJ rides to the rescue with a solution. You just re-invent yourself, that's what. Get yourself a new name and a new career. The WSJ has several case histories which are really encouraging. There is light at the end of that awfully dark tunnel after all.
There's only one snag. You may end up writing books which are quite different from what you intended to write when you started out. And this does not appeal to everyone. 'If I was a sensitive person I'd be suicidal,' says one male writer who, under a female name, is now the Queen of some bizarre niche genre or other. And gets to be interviewed wearing a female wig.
I ask the question here that I have asked many times before, principally in my extended essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile: is this a business that sensible people should ever get in involved in?
You slog away for years, banging on doors, working your fingers to the bone, destroying your relationships, depleting your bank balance -- and then, TERRIFIC! You actually sell a book!! And it gets published!!! And it gets wonderful reviews!!!! And it sells lots of copies!!!!!
So now you're made for life, right?
Er, no. Not quite.
What happens, all too typically, is that first book does OK; then your second book is so-so. And your third book is, frankly, a definite disappointment. And then your publisher writes you a Dear Jane email. And then you wonder what to do next.
Fortunately the WSJ rides to the rescue with a solution. You just re-invent yourself, that's what. Get yourself a new name and a new career. The WSJ has several case histories which are really encouraging. There is light at the end of that awfully dark tunnel after all.
There's only one snag. You may end up writing books which are quite different from what you intended to write when you started out. And this does not appeal to everyone. 'If I was a sensitive person I'd be suicidal,' says one male writer who, under a female name, is now the Queen of some bizarre niche genre or other. And gets to be interviewed wearing a female wig.
I ask the question here that I have asked many times before, principally in my extended essay On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile: is this a business that sensible people should ever get in involved in?
Marketing for authors
If you haven't yet realised that an author has to undertake much of the marketing of a book herself, then either you haven't been involved in the book world very long, or else you haven't been paying attention.
The main blog for those interested in marketing -- and everyone needs to be -- is M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls and Hype. But recently a new one has opened up which may be more directly relevant to UK readers. Its name is to the point: Marketing for Authors; and it's run by Kate Allan, who is a writer herself.
At first I was a little cautious about this. After all, as Kate points out, many such blogs and web pages are simply a kind of advert, inviting you to spend money on some sort of consultancy or agency arrangement. But I don't think Kate's is like that. This is what she says in her very first post:
The main blog for those interested in marketing -- and everyone needs to be -- is M.J. Rose's Buzz, Balls and Hype. But recently a new one has opened up which may be more directly relevant to UK readers. Its name is to the point: Marketing for Authors; and it's run by Kate Allan, who is a writer herself.
At first I was a little cautious about this. After all, as Kate points out, many such blogs and web pages are simply a kind of advert, inviting you to spend money on some sort of consultancy or agency arrangement. But I don't think Kate's is like that. This is what she says in her very first post:
Here's the first rule of marketing for authors. It can very cheap indeed. If you're in any doubt how a marketing service might benefit you and your book(s), don't do it if it costs money. If you are willing to invest time, you don't need to invest (much) money. And I'd suggest you spend the money where it counts. Perhaps this might be on printing, or website hosting, or wine for your book launch party.I shall be keeping an eye on this one. Even the first few entries gave me some ideas.
Chances of success
Bill Liversidge has done some calculations (8 November) on your chances of achieving a 'bestseller' novel in the form of a giveaway pdf on the net.
Your chances are not high, it seems. But it's an amusing calculation. One thing missing though, which might affect the results, is the WOW! factor -- which I mentioned on Monday.
Your chances are not high, it seems. But it's an amusing calculation. One thing missing though, which might affect the results, is the WOW! factor -- which I mentioned on Monday.
Scott Lynch: new star
On 5 April I reported that an editor at Gollancz/Orion, Simon Spanton, had read part of a novel on a writer's blog, and had promptly signed the author to a multi-book contract. The author/blogger concerned was 26-year-old Scott Lynch and his first book was entitled The Lies of Locke Lamora. There is to be a seven-volume series.
The editor was quoted as saying, as editors do, that The Lies of Locke Lamora 'is going to be a big book for us.' For my part I was, shall we say, cautious.
Well, it seems that Simon Spanton's judgement was sound. Rights to Lamora have so far been sold in America, France, Germany, Russia and Holland. Which ain't at all bad. No Hollywood deal yet, but these epic fantasy things are thought to be hot right now: witness the forthcoming Narnia and Eragon.
Lamora is described as a more sophisticated Harry Potter type book, with adult themes and language. It's the story of a thief who operates in a Rivendell-like city, only darker. And it's not out till next July by the way. Control yourself.
The original blog which aroused all this excitement seems to have disappeared.
The editor was quoted as saying, as editors do, that The Lies of Locke Lamora 'is going to be a big book for us.' For my part I was, shall we say, cautious.
Well, it seems that Simon Spanton's judgement was sound. Rights to Lamora have so far been sold in America, France, Germany, Russia and Holland. Which ain't at all bad. No Hollywood deal yet, but these epic fantasy things are thought to be hot right now: witness the forthcoming Narnia and Eragon.
Lamora is described as a more sophisticated Harry Potter type book, with adult themes and language. It's the story of a thief who operates in a Rivendell-like city, only darker. And it's not out till next July by the way. Control yourself.
The original blog which aroused all this excitement seems to have disappeared.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Jane Shilling: The Fox in the Cupboard
Jane Shilling's The Fox in the Cupboard is a memoir. It tells the story of how Jane, a single mother living in London, decided to use a spare couple of weeks to learn to ride a horse. And how, having learnt to ride, she began to go fox hunting.
The book is published in the UK by Penguin, and in the US by Touchstone; I have been reading the American edition.
As it happens, Jane Shilling's decision to go hunting was made at almost exactly the time when our Glorious Leader and his cronies began to talk about making fox hunting illegal in England. This is a circumstance which inevitably colours what she has to say. But I would be doing the author a great disservice if I gave any impression that this is a political tract.
Absolutely the opposite: what this book is, is a wonderfully well observed account of the life of one young woman amidst a host of English 'characters' and eccentrics. Jane Shilling is a columnist for the London Times, so she knows how to write; and by page 15 she had already begun to evoke for me a convincing sense of the atmosphere, sound, smell, and social context of an average English hunt.
The portraits of some of the characters of the hunt are exceptionally well drawn. Mrs Rogers, who taught Jane to ride, and who shortly thereafter became a Master of Fox Hounds, is one of those terrifying Englishwomen who are totally competent, don't suffer fools gladly, but have an underlying sense of sympathy and care.
There are marvellous descriptions of some of the social functions, both grand and down to earth, in which hunt members tend to get involved. There is a particularly funny account of a hunt ball. (And yes, all the stories that you have heard about hunt balls seem to be true.)
Afterwards, Mrs Rogers comments that it was great fun. 'But,' she adds, 'at the Tally Ho club dances [the Tally Ho club being the hunt's foot followers, of modest means] they never feel the evening's complete until there's been a knife fight.'
Yes, I thought, when I read that. This is the book for me, all right.
Of course, no book about hunting can possibly convey the physical effort involved in going hunting. In Jane's case, she has to get up at 5 a.m., spend an hour driving into the country, and then two or three hours preparing her horse. Then she goes out and hunts for perhaps six hours. Then she spends another two or three hours washing down the horse and cleaning the equipment. And finally she has another hour's drive home.
Hunting, it should never be forgotten, is a highly dangerous activity. People get killed. It demands courage, and Jane tells us that she was regularly sick before the hunt began. She clearly had to struggle to force herself on at times; and that, in my opinion, is admirable.
It has to be said that this book is a trifle over-written in places, and some judicious skipping may be needed. Overall, however, it a very fine book indeed, and I'm glad that I read it.
And now, for those who care, here is an appendix with some details of the social and political background to fox hunting in the UK, over the last few years; plus some remarks about my own attitude.
Fox hunting is an activity which had its rules and guiding principles set out in writing by King Edward II's huntsman, William Twiti, in 1327. Over the centuries it has been heavily supported by landowners, noblemen, the rich, and the leisured; but it is also a pursuit popular with country people generally, even those who can afford to do no more than follow the hunt on foot or by bicycle.
In recent years a case against hunting has been developed on the basis that it is cruel to animals. However, this argument was never very convincing; and we have a statement from a former Chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to the effect that a ban on hunting will not, in fact, reduce the overall level of cruelty to animals, because of its knock-on effects.
The truth is the most support for a ban on hunting is based not on concerns for animal welfare but on dislike/hatred of the English upper classes. Anti-hunting sentiment is chiefly fuelled by some very unattractive human characteristics such as envy, jealousy, and spite.
'The countryside,' one Labour MP told the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, 'represents everything that we despise -- wealth, exclusiveness, feudalism and cruelty.' In accordance with that view, the Hunting Act turned out to be a thoroughly mean-spirited piece of legislation.
The anti-hunt brigade regularly turn out whenever a hunt meets. And they are equally unattractive in their mores. 'Whore!' they say, in low intent voices as Jane passes. 'Cunt! Murderer!' Charming people.
Now for my own attitude.
So far as I remember, I have only even caught sight of a hunt on three occasions. In short, I am wholly uninterested in hunting. But I am interested in personal liberty. And the decision to ban hunting seems to me to be an entirely unnecessary interference with personal liberty.
When the Countryside Alliance invited those who were against the proposed legislation to take part in a march in London, to demonstrate the strength of the opposition, I went along. So did Mrs GOB and 400,000 others. This march, though impressive at the time, was not sufficient to impress Kim Il Blair, and a ban on hunting took effect on 19 February 2005.
So far, the ban has proved to be largely unworkable. By making a few minor alterations to the ways in which they conduct themselves, hunts have been able to continue their activities; and there has not, so far, been one prosecution for illicit hunting with dogs.
The Independent, in a leader column on 7 November, declared that 'The debate over hunting with hounds will go down as one of the greatest wastes of time in political history....The Hunting Act has become a tragic symbol of the follies of the Blair era.'
It is said, incidentally, that the debate on hunting took up more Parliamentary time than did the debate on whether to go to war with Iraq.
The book is published in the UK by Penguin, and in the US by Touchstone; I have been reading the American edition.
As it happens, Jane Shilling's decision to go hunting was made at almost exactly the time when our Glorious Leader and his cronies began to talk about making fox hunting illegal in England. This is a circumstance which inevitably colours what she has to say. But I would be doing the author a great disservice if I gave any impression that this is a political tract.
Absolutely the opposite: what this book is, is a wonderfully well observed account of the life of one young woman amidst a host of English 'characters' and eccentrics. Jane Shilling is a columnist for the London Times, so she knows how to write; and by page 15 she had already begun to evoke for me a convincing sense of the atmosphere, sound, smell, and social context of an average English hunt.
The portraits of some of the characters of the hunt are exceptionally well drawn. Mrs Rogers, who taught Jane to ride, and who shortly thereafter became a Master of Fox Hounds, is one of those terrifying Englishwomen who are totally competent, don't suffer fools gladly, but have an underlying sense of sympathy and care.
There are marvellous descriptions of some of the social functions, both grand and down to earth, in which hunt members tend to get involved. There is a particularly funny account of a hunt ball. (And yes, all the stories that you have heard about hunt balls seem to be true.)
Afterwards, Mrs Rogers comments that it was great fun. 'But,' she adds, 'at the Tally Ho club dances [the Tally Ho club being the hunt's foot followers, of modest means] they never feel the evening's complete until there's been a knife fight.'
Yes, I thought, when I read that. This is the book for me, all right.
Of course, no book about hunting can possibly convey the physical effort involved in going hunting. In Jane's case, she has to get up at 5 a.m., spend an hour driving into the country, and then two or three hours preparing her horse. Then she goes out and hunts for perhaps six hours. Then she spends another two or three hours washing down the horse and cleaning the equipment. And finally she has another hour's drive home.
Hunting, it should never be forgotten, is a highly dangerous activity. People get killed. It demands courage, and Jane tells us that she was regularly sick before the hunt began. She clearly had to struggle to force herself on at times; and that, in my opinion, is admirable.
It has to be said that this book is a trifle over-written in places, and some judicious skipping may be needed. Overall, however, it a very fine book indeed, and I'm glad that I read it.
And now, for those who care, here is an appendix with some details of the social and political background to fox hunting in the UK, over the last few years; plus some remarks about my own attitude.
Fox hunting is an activity which had its rules and guiding principles set out in writing by King Edward II's huntsman, William Twiti, in 1327. Over the centuries it has been heavily supported by landowners, noblemen, the rich, and the leisured; but it is also a pursuit popular with country people generally, even those who can afford to do no more than follow the hunt on foot or by bicycle.
In recent years a case against hunting has been developed on the basis that it is cruel to animals. However, this argument was never very convincing; and we have a statement from a former Chairman of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to the effect that a ban on hunting will not, in fact, reduce the overall level of cruelty to animals, because of its knock-on effects.
The truth is the most support for a ban on hunting is based not on concerns for animal welfare but on dislike/hatred of the English upper classes. Anti-hunting sentiment is chiefly fuelled by some very unattractive human characteristics such as envy, jealousy, and spite.
'The countryside,' one Labour MP told the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, 'represents everything that we despise -- wealth, exclusiveness, feudalism and cruelty.' In accordance with that view, the Hunting Act turned out to be a thoroughly mean-spirited piece of legislation.
The anti-hunt brigade regularly turn out whenever a hunt meets. And they are equally unattractive in their mores. 'Whore!' they say, in low intent voices as Jane passes. 'Cunt! Murderer!' Charming people.
Now for my own attitude.
So far as I remember, I have only even caught sight of a hunt on three occasions. In short, I am wholly uninterested in hunting. But I am interested in personal liberty. And the decision to ban hunting seems to me to be an entirely unnecessary interference with personal liberty.
When the Countryside Alliance invited those who were against the proposed legislation to take part in a march in London, to demonstrate the strength of the opposition, I went along. So did Mrs GOB and 400,000 others. This march, though impressive at the time, was not sufficient to impress Kim Il Blair, and a ban on hunting took effect on 19 February 2005.
So far, the ban has proved to be largely unworkable. By making a few minor alterations to the ways in which they conduct themselves, hunts have been able to continue their activities; and there has not, so far, been one prosecution for illicit hunting with dogs.
The Independent, in a leader column on 7 November, declared that 'The debate over hunting with hounds will go down as one of the greatest wastes of time in political history....The Hunting Act has become a tragic symbol of the follies of the Blair era.'
It is said, incidentally, that the debate on hunting took up more Parliamentary time than did the debate on whether to go to war with Iraq.
Cynicism writ large
It is one of the ironies of my life that I have often been regarded as a deeply cynical individual; and yet the truth is that I am, was, and ever will be, hopelessly naive.
As proof, here is a statement which I found on the Galleycat blog. It is made by one Joni Evans, of whom I had not heard, but who is apparently a former big-time publishing executive and, until recently, a top agent at William Morris. Here is what she says about a lesson learnt early in life while working for a magazine:
As proof, here is a statement which I found on the Galleycat blog. It is made by one Joni Evans, of whom I had not heard, but who is apparently a former big-time publishing executive and, until recently, a top agent at William Morris. Here is what she says about a lesson learnt early in life while working for a magazine:
The magazine did a poetry issue once, and the editors needed important people to write for it. I had a famous uncle who was the poetry editor of the New Yorker, so at the general editorial meeting, I raised my hand and said, "I can get Howard Moss." There was silence in the room. Then everyone turned to little Joni as if to say, How do you know Howard Moss? Within a week, I was promoted. I got a raise and a better desk. And that's how I learned that everything is about who you know, not what you know.It is a measure of how truly naive I am that, when I read this statement I did not gravely nod my head and mutter Yes, this is the way it is. On the contrary, I gasped, clutched my heart, and reached for those little blue pills that the doctor gave me and which I had never thought I would need.
NaNoWriMo
A correspondent writes to ask whether I am aware that it is NaNoWriMo. And the answer is yes, I was aware of it before he wrote, but the very idea, I'm sorry to say, filled me with overwhelming apathy. However, prompted by my enthusiastic correspondent, I went and had a look at NaNoWriMo in more detail. And you know what? I feel quite a lot better about it now than I did before.
For those who are wondering what the hell I'm talking about, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. National as in United States, where the idea originated. But hey, the organisers aren't fussy. They regard the thing as international, and you can participate even if you live in Peru. It's just that InaNoWriMo (they claim) doesn't trip off the tongue so easily.
The idea is, basically, that as many people as possible should start writing a novel at 12.01 a.m. on 1 November, and stop at the end of the month, aiming to complete 50,000 words in the meantime. For more information, go take a look at the main Nanowrimo web site.
This slightly weird enterprise has apparently been going since 1999, when there were 21 participants and 6 of them actually managed to bash out 50,000 words. Last year there were 42,000 participants and just short of 6,000 winners.
The organisers seem determined to regard their project as just good clean fun, and I guess that's the right way to approach it (if you do). But some writers have, it seems, succeeded in selling the result.
Closer to home, I once wrote a 75,000 word novel in a total of 125 hours, but my working average for time/words is about 3 hours per 1,000 words. Roughly 1 hour per 1,000 words in planning, 1 hour to write, and 1 hour to revise. So a 100,000 novel can be expected to take 300 hours, or 6 hours a week (3 evenings at 2 hours a time) for a year. You have to be keen.
For those who are wondering what the hell I'm talking about, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. National as in United States, where the idea originated. But hey, the organisers aren't fussy. They regard the thing as international, and you can participate even if you live in Peru. It's just that InaNoWriMo (they claim) doesn't trip off the tongue so easily.
The idea is, basically, that as many people as possible should start writing a novel at 12.01 a.m. on 1 November, and stop at the end of the month, aiming to complete 50,000 words in the meantime. For more information, go take a look at the main Nanowrimo web site.
This slightly weird enterprise has apparently been going since 1999, when there were 21 participants and 6 of them actually managed to bash out 50,000 words. Last year there were 42,000 participants and just short of 6,000 winners.
The organisers seem determined to regard their project as just good clean fun, and I guess that's the right way to approach it (if you do). But some writers have, it seems, succeeded in selling the result.
Sarah Gruen's soon-to-be released Flying Changes began as a NaNoWriMo novel. Rebecca Agiewich sold her 2003 NaNoWriMo book to Ballantine in 2004; it'll be hitting stores in May of 2006. Dave Wilson sold his 2004 NaNoWriMo manuscript, The Mote in Andrea's Eye, to Five Star/Gale; it'll come out in June 2006. In fall of 2005, Gayle Brandeis sold her 2004 NaNoWriMo manuscript, Self Storage, to Ballantine in a two-book deal. Around the same time, Kimberly Llewellyn found a home for her 2004 NaNoWriMo manuscript, Cashmere Boulevard, at Berkley Books. It's due out in summer 2007.Well, so long as no one takes any of this too seriously, I guess it's OK. And it's certainly possible to write 50,000 words in a month. Thomas Wolfe, it is said, used to stand outside the homes of other writers and chant 'I wrote ten thousand words today!' At least he did until they took to emptying buckets over him. And Gore Vidal claims to have written his Edgar Box detective novels (60,000 words) in a week: 10,000 a day for six days, and then one day to 'tidy it up.' But then he is a frightfully clever chap.
Closer to home, I once wrote a 75,000 word novel in a total of 125 hours, but my working average for time/words is about 3 hours per 1,000 words. Roughly 1 hour per 1,000 words in planning, 1 hour to write, and 1 hour to revise. So a 100,000 novel can be expected to take 300 hours, or 6 hours a week (3 evenings at 2 hours a time) for a year. You have to be keen.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Services for independent publishers
Quite a few of the people reading this blog are writing a book; or they have written one; or they've written a dozen. And most of those people, pretty much by definition, are not going to be able to interest a front-rank, commercial publisher. As a result, many of those authors are going to begin to think about publishing the book themselves.
I can't claim to have explored this field all that thoroughly in recent years. I did explore it thoroughly about seven yers ago, and decided on an arrangement for publishing my own books which suits me very well. But that was then. Things have changed.
However, if you live in the UK, there are certainly a few firms which seem to me to be sensible, down to earth, do not indulge in hard-selling methods, and which seem likely, on the face of it, to be able to provide you with services at a reasonable cost.
One such is RPM print and design of Chichester. Click on 'short run books' on their menu and you will find a good deal of useful information. There is a practical guide to self-publishing, plus a pdf of the first issue of an occasional magazine which they have been handing out for free.
You won't come to any harm if you read either of these. There are some interesting snippets from bigwigs at Waterstone's, Ottakar's, and Gardners; plus case studies; and at least one dreadful warning.
Admittedly the tone of all this is a tad more optimistic about the likely outcome of self-publishing than I think is justified by the facts. But then this is a firm which is selling its services, after all.
And besides, maybe it isn't overoptimistic. A friend of mine has a book which was published commercially in Malaya and which isn't even listed on Amazon, but he has been able to sell a goodly number in his local bookshops, despite that. However, you do need to be a bit of a born salesman to tackle the locals. And I'm not.
Another UK firm which looks promising is one which I have mentioned before -- see my post of 29 November 2004. Its name is Matador.
I can't claim to have explored this field all that thoroughly in recent years. I did explore it thoroughly about seven yers ago, and decided on an arrangement for publishing my own books which suits me very well. But that was then. Things have changed.
However, if you live in the UK, there are certainly a few firms which seem to me to be sensible, down to earth, do not indulge in hard-selling methods, and which seem likely, on the face of it, to be able to provide you with services at a reasonable cost.
One such is RPM print and design of Chichester. Click on 'short run books' on their menu and you will find a good deal of useful information. There is a practical guide to self-publishing, plus a pdf of the first issue of an occasional magazine which they have been handing out for free.
You won't come to any harm if you read either of these. There are some interesting snippets from bigwigs at Waterstone's, Ottakar's, and Gardners; plus case studies; and at least one dreadful warning.
Admittedly the tone of all this is a tad more optimistic about the likely outcome of self-publishing than I think is justified by the facts. But then this is a firm which is selling its services, after all.
And besides, maybe it isn't overoptimistic. A friend of mine has a book which was published commercially in Malaya and which isn't even listed on Amazon, but he has been able to sell a goodly number in his local bookshops, despite that. However, you do need to be a bit of a born salesman to tackle the locals. And I'm not.
Another UK firm which looks promising is one which I have mentioned before -- see my post of 29 November 2004. Its name is Matador.
W.F. Zimmerman
W.F. Zimmerman seems to be a man of remarkable energy. He appears to be a writer, publisher, and blogger. Well, so am I, come to think of it, so perhaps that's not so astounding after all; but he does produce a huge amount of stuff.
You might try, to begin with, his blog What's New for Book-Lovers. This has a lot of good stuff in it. I discovered, for instance, that 93% of all ISBNs sell less than 1,000 units. (Not sure if that's worldwide or just the US, but anyway it makes you think a bit.) The source article for that statement -- Zimmerman describes it as 'the smartest company in publishing' (O'Reilly, for the record) -- also refers to 'the broken fiction publishing model: flood the market with different products, publicise poorly, and let the market find the 5% it wants to elevate to bestseller status.' So right there you've got two statements which could involve you in serious thought for the rest of the day.
But there's more. Look in the top right-hand column of What's New for Book-Lovers and you find links to other blogs and books wot Zimmerman has wrote. These include a blog on military history and international politics, another blog about Ann Arbor from the point of view of a lifelong resident, and another one with links to articles about science for science lovers.
He appears to have, if I've got this right, sixteen current blogs.
Frankly I got tired just pressing the buttons to look at them, never mind writing all that stuff. And I haven't even mentioned the books that he's written.
I think I might just go and lie down for a bit.
You might try, to begin with, his blog What's New for Book-Lovers. This has a lot of good stuff in it. I discovered, for instance, that 93% of all ISBNs sell less than 1,000 units. (Not sure if that's worldwide or just the US, but anyway it makes you think a bit.) The source article for that statement -- Zimmerman describes it as 'the smartest company in publishing' (O'Reilly, for the record) -- also refers to 'the broken fiction publishing model: flood the market with different products, publicise poorly, and let the market find the 5% it wants to elevate to bestseller status.' So right there you've got two statements which could involve you in serious thought for the rest of the day.
But there's more. Look in the top right-hand column of What's New for Book-Lovers and you find links to other blogs and books wot Zimmerman has wrote. These include a blog on military history and international politics, another blog about Ann Arbor from the point of view of a lifelong resident, and another one with links to articles about science for science lovers.
He appears to have, if I've got this right, sixteen current blogs.
Frankly I got tired just pressing the buttons to look at them, never mind writing all that stuff. And I haven't even mentioned the books that he's written.
I think I might just go and lie down for a bit.
Book publicity in the UK
Here's a tip which may be useful if you are (a) trying to publicise a book in the UK, and (b) are a very small and inexperienced publisher.
There exists in London a group of professional people which is known as the Publishers Publicity Circle. This is a gathering of book publicists from big the publishing houses or p.r. agencies, and it meets more or less monthly. Each meeting features (it seems) a presentation from one or more guests who work in the mainstream media: magazines, newspapers, TV companies, and so forth. And a short summary of what the guests have to say is, praise be, subsequently posted on the Publishers Publicity Circle web site. Click on the 'Last meeting' box to find an archive of such posts.
All of this information is, in my opinion, potentially valuable to authors and small publishers generally. But of course it does need to be interpreted with common sense. When the editor of Vogue (or whatever) says that she welcomes phone calls to tell her that a press release is on the way, and that she likes to chat about projects over coffee, she doesn't mean that she is happy to hear from you and me. Well, me, anyway. What she means is that she would love to hear from you if you're handling a new erotic novel by Madonna.
In the nature of things, the contact details for some of these speakers may go out of date fairly rapidly; people do move onwards and upwards. But there is a lot more on this site than just the records of previous meetings. If you're looking for a p.r. firm to plug your latest, there is a list of consultancies. There is also a list of events which might offer opportunities for writers and small publishers: e.g. the Derbyshire literary festival in June 2006.
PS. The Publishers Publicity Circle provides more food for the apostrophe debate; and note the difference, when you get to the web site, between Publishers in the heading and Publisher's in the text. Consistency is perhaps a virtue?
There exists in London a group of professional people which is known as the Publishers Publicity Circle. This is a gathering of book publicists from big the publishing houses or p.r. agencies, and it meets more or less monthly. Each meeting features (it seems) a presentation from one or more guests who work in the mainstream media: magazines, newspapers, TV companies, and so forth. And a short summary of what the guests have to say is, praise be, subsequently posted on the Publishers Publicity Circle web site. Click on the 'Last meeting' box to find an archive of such posts.
All of this information is, in my opinion, potentially valuable to authors and small publishers generally. But of course it does need to be interpreted with common sense. When the editor of Vogue (or whatever) says that she welcomes phone calls to tell her that a press release is on the way, and that she likes to chat about projects over coffee, she doesn't mean that she is happy to hear from you and me. Well, me, anyway. What she means is that she would love to hear from you if you're handling a new erotic novel by Madonna.
In the nature of things, the contact details for some of these speakers may go out of date fairly rapidly; people do move onwards and upwards. But there is a lot more on this site than just the records of previous meetings. If you're looking for a p.r. firm to plug your latest, there is a list of consultancies. There is also a list of events which might offer opportunities for writers and small publishers: e.g. the Derbyshire literary festival in June 2006.
PS. The Publishers Publicity Circle provides more food for the apostrophe debate; and note the difference, when you get to the web site, between Publishers in the heading and Publisher's in the text. Consistency is perhaps a virtue?
Monday, November 07, 2005
Blogger's thought for the day
'Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.'
Edward R. Murrow, newsman (1908-1965)
Found on the blog run by journalist Antonia Zerbisias, who has a lot to say about US and Canadian politics.
Edward R. Murrow, newsman (1908-1965)
Found on the blog run by journalist Antonia Zerbisias, who has a lot to say about US and Canadian politics.
K.D. Lathar: The Changeling
A tiny reference in Publishing News reports that 'the David Higham Literary Agency has signed up K. D. Lathar, author of self published The Changeling, which was itself picked up on by Ottakar's as part of its three-for-two offer. The book has already attracted interest from one large publishing house.'
So I went a-googling and found the self-publisher's -- sorry, independent publisher's -- web site, Tarragon Publishing.
It turns out that K.D. Lathar has written a children's book about a boy who is half-badger. The author's sister, who is a lawyer, helped him to set up his own publishing company. Printing has been done in India, with an initial run of 500 hardback and 1000 paperback, local publicity has been obtained in his home town of Birmingham, proof copy sold for high price on ebay, and more like that.
Somehow or other, Lathar seems to have persuaded Ottakar's to sell the book, which is quite a trick in itself.
I hope it won't sound rude if I say that Mr Lathar seems to have learnt a few things from the Dragon Tamers case study. He may also have studied the career of the Rev. Graham Taylor, author of Shadowmancer. And, of course, he has invested a not inconsiderable amount of time and money.
We shall see what develops.
So I went a-googling and found the self-publisher's -- sorry, independent publisher's -- web site, Tarragon Publishing.
It turns out that K.D. Lathar has written a children's book about a boy who is half-badger. The author's sister, who is a lawyer, helped him to set up his own publishing company. Printing has been done in India, with an initial run of 500 hardback and 1000 paperback, local publicity has been obtained in his home town of Birmingham, proof copy sold for high price on ebay, and more like that.
Somehow or other, Lathar seems to have persuaded Ottakar's to sell the book, which is quite a trick in itself.
I hope it won't sound rude if I say that Mr Lathar seems to have learnt a few things from the Dragon Tamers case study. He may also have studied the career of the Rev. Graham Taylor, author of Shadowmancer. And, of course, he has invested a not inconsiderable amount of time and money.
We shall see what develops.
Knock-off product
In my post of 4 November, I made the point that it's hard to write a book that will really generate massive enthusiasm in potential buyers. And this point was driven home to me with emphasis when I read an extract from a new book by Tim Phillips: Knock Off.
Knock Off deals with the manufacture and marketing of counterfeit goods within the UK, and you can read a good slice of it courtesy of a Times extract.
Out here in darkest Wiltshire we don't see a lot of counterfeit DVDs or clothes, but it seems that, if you were to go to a street market in one of the bigger cities, you would find that the stall-holders are selling little else.
The customers, of course, are queuing up for it. The latest Hollywood or Bollywood epic on DVD, two days after it opened in LA or Delhi? No problem, sir. That'll be £5. And if you want a piece of software which retails for £10,000, that will be no problem either. Just speak to the 11-year-old kid over there and place your order. Have a cup of coffee while he skips round the corner, finds the man with the CD copier (about the size of a kitchen pedal bin), burns off a copy, runs back with it, and asks you for £10.
The UK authorities who are supposed to deal with all this lack real power and lack the budget even to pay for weekend overtime; and weekends are when the trade flourishes.
But it is not our place -- not quite -- to worry about the film industry. Our business is books. And, apart from Harry Potter, who do we know, in the book world, whose books are so exciting that you could shift a couple of hundred knock-off copies in a Manchester street market on a Saturday afternoon? Even at half the price in Tesco?
And that's the real problem which faces the writer of today. Not what the TLS thinks.
Knock Off deals with the manufacture and marketing of counterfeit goods within the UK, and you can read a good slice of it courtesy of a Times extract.
Out here in darkest Wiltshire we don't see a lot of counterfeit DVDs or clothes, but it seems that, if you were to go to a street market in one of the bigger cities, you would find that the stall-holders are selling little else.
The customers, of course, are queuing up for it. The latest Hollywood or Bollywood epic on DVD, two days after it opened in LA or Delhi? No problem, sir. That'll be £5. And if you want a piece of software which retails for £10,000, that will be no problem either. Just speak to the 11-year-old kid over there and place your order. Have a cup of coffee while he skips round the corner, finds the man with the CD copier (about the size of a kitchen pedal bin), burns off a copy, runs back with it, and asks you for £10.
The UK authorities who are supposed to deal with all this lack real power and lack the budget even to pay for weekend overtime; and weekends are when the trade flourishes.
But it is not our place -- not quite -- to worry about the film industry. Our business is books. And, apart from Harry Potter, who do we know, in the book world, whose books are so exciting that you could shift a couple of hundred knock-off copies in a Manchester street market on a Saturday afternoon? Even at half the price in Tesco?
And that's the real problem which faces the writer of today. Not what the TLS thinks.
Publishing's biggest challenge
It is a sign, I think, of the changing times when the best beginners-start-here summary of new developments in publishing is provided by a source in India. But that's the way it is.
Booktrade.info provided a link to an article in Business Standard, which is India's leading business daily, a newspaper published in seven centres. The article is headed Publishing's Biggest Challenge, and it provides as neat and thorough an exposition of the impact of digital technology on the book-publishing world as I have come across.
Of course, an article which runs to just a couple of thousand words or so is bound to be superficial in certain respects. But Devangshu Datta, who wrote it, has put his finger firmly on many of the key issues.
And here's a surprise. He's not too impressed with the quality of publishers' thinking. 'Publishing', he says, 'is globally amongst the most hide-bound industries in terms of leveraging technology in marketing.' Go on. Who would have guessed?
Datta takes us through all the recent developments, including of course the Amazon, Google, and Yahoo projects, and concludes that, one way or another, these will force a long-overdue review of definitions of copyright, fair use and libraries.
'An idea this big', he says, 'cannot really be suppressed -- and it will also force publishers to refine their e-book models, whether these specific initiatives succeed or fail.'
Exactly. In other words, whether they want to join the twenty-first century or not -- and there's plenty of evidence that they don't -- publishers will be pushed into it by economic forces. Either that or they will quietly fade away.
Some publishers, fortunately, are beginning to wrestle with these problems: Random House for one.
The Datta article is valuable reading if you want to make even a cursory effort to find out what's going on.
Booktrade.info provided a link to an article in Business Standard, which is India's leading business daily, a newspaper published in seven centres. The article is headed Publishing's Biggest Challenge, and it provides as neat and thorough an exposition of the impact of digital technology on the book-publishing world as I have come across.
Of course, an article which runs to just a couple of thousand words or so is bound to be superficial in certain respects. But Devangshu Datta, who wrote it, has put his finger firmly on many of the key issues.
And here's a surprise. He's not too impressed with the quality of publishers' thinking. 'Publishing', he says, 'is globally amongst the most hide-bound industries in terms of leveraging technology in marketing.' Go on. Who would have guessed?
Datta takes us through all the recent developments, including of course the Amazon, Google, and Yahoo projects, and concludes that, one way or another, these will force a long-overdue review of definitions of copyright, fair use and libraries.
'An idea this big', he says, 'cannot really be suppressed -- and it will also force publishers to refine their e-book models, whether these specific initiatives succeed or fail.'
Exactly. In other words, whether they want to join the twenty-first century or not -- and there's plenty of evidence that they don't -- publishers will be pushed into it by economic forces. Either that or they will quietly fade away.
Some publishers, fortunately, are beginning to wrestle with these problems: Random House for one.
The Datta article is valuable reading if you want to make even a cursory effort to find out what's going on.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Funland and novelisations
I can't help feeling that British publishers are missing a trick here. Surely there is a bit more scope for the novelisation of successful TV series than is being practised at present?
These thoughts are prompted by the fact that I am watching a BBC3 serial called Funland. This is described in some quarters as an experimental drama, and by the BBC itself as a 'disturbingly funny new thriller'. Well, I haven't laughed much, but I have been interested. More to the point, is there a book? The Beeb doesn't mention it and Amazon doesn't think so. But there could be -- and when Funland transfers to BBC1 or 2, which it presumably will, the thing would surely sell a few copies in Tescos.
There's some bloody good acting in Funland by the way. It is always a pleasure to see old stagers like Roy Barraclough, and of the new ones Kris Marshall will go far I think. And Sarah Smart is very beautiful.
As of today we're 7 Funland episodes into 11, but parts 6 and 7 are being repeated tonight. So, if you read up the story so far you might be able to make sense of the thing. But don't bet on it because I've been watching from the beginning and I'm still not sure what's going on.
There are lots of other UK TV shows which could also be turned into novels if anyone had the wit. Shameless, for instance. Two series already shown, and I think I read somewhere that there's a third one coming.
Even Vincent, a private-eye series of four which has just finished, and which starred the wonderful Ray Winstone, could have been turned into a book. Although admittedly some of the plots were definitely a bit dodgy in that one, and the series was saved, as is so often the case, by the actors.
I can't see what the problem is. All a publisher needs is early copies of the scripts, and the character outlines. You hand them over to a writer -- someone who can work cheap and fast. Someone like... well, someone like me, actually. Just a thought. And a few bob would be made all round with no harm done to anyone.
By the way, there is one British TV series running at present which is based on a book that was published some time ago. No, dear, not Bleak House. I'm talking about Bodies. This is based on a novel by Jed Mercurio, who is writing and producing the second series, now showing.
Bodies is an everyday story of medical incompetence, backbiting, and gruesome deaths in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a big hospital. It is not for the faint-hearted. I know one lady doctor who can only watch it with her hands over her eyes, muttering Oh my God, oh my God... But then she has had three children. So far.
I haven't read the book version of Bodies yet, but it's on my bedside table.
These thoughts are prompted by the fact that I am watching a BBC3 serial called Funland. This is described in some quarters as an experimental drama, and by the BBC itself as a 'disturbingly funny new thriller'. Well, I haven't laughed much, but I have been interested. More to the point, is there a book? The Beeb doesn't mention it and Amazon doesn't think so. But there could be -- and when Funland transfers to BBC1 or 2, which it presumably will, the thing would surely sell a few copies in Tescos.
There's some bloody good acting in Funland by the way. It is always a pleasure to see old stagers like Roy Barraclough, and of the new ones Kris Marshall will go far I think. And Sarah Smart is very beautiful.
As of today we're 7 Funland episodes into 11, but parts 6 and 7 are being repeated tonight. So, if you read up the story so far you might be able to make sense of the thing. But don't bet on it because I've been watching from the beginning and I'm still not sure what's going on.
There are lots of other UK TV shows which could also be turned into novels if anyone had the wit. Shameless, for instance. Two series already shown, and I think I read somewhere that there's a third one coming.
Even Vincent, a private-eye series of four which has just finished, and which starred the wonderful Ray Winstone, could have been turned into a book. Although admittedly some of the plots were definitely a bit dodgy in that one, and the series was saved, as is so often the case, by the actors.
I can't see what the problem is. All a publisher needs is early copies of the scripts, and the character outlines. You hand them over to a writer -- someone who can work cheap and fast. Someone like... well, someone like me, actually. Just a thought. And a few bob would be made all round with no harm done to anyone.
By the way, there is one British TV series running at present which is based on a book that was published some time ago. No, dear, not Bleak House. I'm talking about Bodies. This is based on a novel by Jed Mercurio, who is writing and producing the second series, now showing.
Bodies is an everyday story of medical incompetence, backbiting, and gruesome deaths in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a big hospital. It is not for the faint-hearted. I know one lady doctor who can only watch it with her hands over her eyes, muttering Oh my God, oh my God... But then she has had three children. So far.
I haven't read the book version of Bodies yet, but it's on my bedside table.
Richard Booth's £1 million item
The mystery is revealed.
Back in September, I mentioned overhearing the eminent bookseller Richard Booth telling some young lady about an item he was asking £1 million for. But I didn't know what it was. Now, thanks to Anna Cooper, of Richard Booth's bookshop, I do.
Mr Booth has recently acquired an enormous collection of books, photographs, video and audio tapes, drawings, dance libraries, fine 19th century bindings, costumes, head-dresses, masks, manuscripts etc of one of India's greatest classical dancers, Ram Gopal. He is hoping to display it in Hay Castle for six months (from December) before putting the collection up for sale.
Well, it sometimes takes a while, but we get there in the end.
Back in September, I mentioned overhearing the eminent bookseller Richard Booth telling some young lady about an item he was asking £1 million for. But I didn't know what it was. Now, thanks to Anna Cooper, of Richard Booth's bookshop, I do.
Mr Booth has recently acquired an enormous collection of books, photographs, video and audio tapes, drawings, dance libraries, fine 19th century bindings, costumes, head-dresses, masks, manuscripts etc of one of India's greatest classical dancers, Ram Gopal. He is hoping to display it in Hay Castle for six months (from December) before putting the collection up for sale.
Well, it sometimes takes a while, but we get there in the end.
The Diary Junction and other marketing ploys
Only yesterday I remarked that perhaps the best way to publicise a book via a blog or web site is to provide some material of value or interest to a particular group, and then to plug your book in passing, so to speak.
This is a technique being used to good effect by Paul K. Lyons. Paul has developed an impressive web site called The Diary Junction. It's pretty self-explanatory. It provides a vast amount of information about historical and literary diaries and diarists.
Picking a name more or less at random from a list of 450 diarists (so far), I chose Dora Carrington. There isn't a vast amount of info provided, and it is not cheerful, because it seems that the lady's diary records how she decided to kill herself. Nevertheless, the Diary Junction would be a useful starting point for a researcher.
As for Paul Lyons's other work, he does give us links to his novel Kip Fenn -- Reflections, and to some of his other fiction and non-fiction projects. See what I mean? All you have to do to get readers for your blog/book is be able and willing to put in hundreds of hours of work on (a) your book, and (b) a web site which provides useful information. Quite simple really. Then you get to be rich and famous. Maybe.
Meanwhile Bill Liversidge points out that his View from the Pundy House, which I mentioned on Tuesday, contains a piece called Bird Flew Virus, in which he outlines his viral marketing campaign. This lists a number of bloggers, and one of them, Gaping Void, offers a link to an article by Kathy Sierra. This discusses the old way of doing marketing compared with the new way.
Several of these new ways seem to me to concentrate on an aspect which is easily overlooked by independent publishers -- as I shall now call them -- and it's this. It's the product, stupid. Product, product, product.
It is possible for an entirely unknown pop group to record something which they make available on the net, and when people hear it they say -- within five seconds -- WOW! What is THAT?!! I've got to hear that again!
So the secret of becoming a big-time writer and making lots of dosh as an independent is to write something that has the same effect. And that's hard. As we have all discovered.
This is a technique being used to good effect by Paul K. Lyons. Paul has developed an impressive web site called The Diary Junction. It's pretty self-explanatory. It provides a vast amount of information about historical and literary diaries and diarists.
Picking a name more or less at random from a list of 450 diarists (so far), I chose Dora Carrington. There isn't a vast amount of info provided, and it is not cheerful, because it seems that the lady's diary records how she decided to kill herself. Nevertheless, the Diary Junction would be a useful starting point for a researcher.
As for Paul Lyons's other work, he does give us links to his novel Kip Fenn -- Reflections, and to some of his other fiction and non-fiction projects. See what I mean? All you have to do to get readers for your blog/book is be able and willing to put in hundreds of hours of work on (a) your book, and (b) a web site which provides useful information. Quite simple really. Then you get to be rich and famous. Maybe.
Meanwhile Bill Liversidge points out that his View from the Pundy House, which I mentioned on Tuesday, contains a piece called Bird Flew Virus, in which he outlines his viral marketing campaign. This lists a number of bloggers, and one of them, Gaping Void, offers a link to an article by Kathy Sierra. This discusses the old way of doing marketing compared with the new way.
Several of these new ways seem to me to concentrate on an aspect which is easily overlooked by independent publishers -- as I shall now call them -- and it's this. It's the product, stupid. Product, product, product.
It is possible for an entirely unknown pop group to record something which they make available on the net, and when people hear it they say -- within five seconds -- WOW! What is THAT?!! I've got to hear that again!
So the secret of becoming a big-time writer and making lots of dosh as an independent is to write something that has the same effect. And that's hard. As we have all discovered.
The Editors Weblog
Many and many a time I have commented here on the changes wrought by the internet. Well, here’s another one.
Yahoo, it seems, are offering enhanced competition to the newspapers of this world. They have hired ‘veteran television war reporter Kevin Sites’ to visit every war zone in the world and to report back.
Full story in the Editors Weblog, and thanks to Anne Weale for spotting it. (Note, by the way, the absence of any apostrophe in the site’s title, a nicety which was debated here on 17 October, in a quickie item headed Dark Fire wins.
Yahoo, it seems, are offering enhanced competition to the newspapers of this world. They have hired ‘veteran television war reporter Kevin Sites’ to visit every war zone in the world and to report back.
Full story in the Editors Weblog, and thanks to Anne Weale for spotting it. (Note, by the way, the absence of any apostrophe in the site’s title, a nicety which was debated here on 17 October, in a quickie item headed Dark Fire wins.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Josephine Tey
Josephine Tey, the English crime writer, died in 1952; but if you go to Amazon.co.uk and type in her name, you get 172 results; and on Amazon.com you get 109. In other words, the lady is still in print, is still published in a wide variety of formats, still selling, and still being read. That being the case, it is worth having a look at her life and methods in order to see what might be learnt.
This author's real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and she was born in 1896 or '97. Not much seems to be known about her private life, but in addition to the crime writing she also had a separate career as a playwright under the name Gordon Daviot. She seems to have regarded the playwrighting as far more important than the crime fiction.
I have recently read Josephine Tey's novels The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar, in the American editions published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster; these have a new introduction by Robert Barnard. Warning: in what follows, I may 'reveal the ending' of these two books; but actually that is no great sin, because in neither of them is there any dramatic revelation at the end; these are not whodunits, in which the murderer is unmasked on the last page, with all the suspects assembled in the library.
The Franchise Affair was first published in 1948, and it was a famous book in the 1950s, when I was growing up. It was filmed in 1950, as a vehicle for Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and I seem to remember it being serialised by the BBC in the '50s too. In any event it was filmed again in 1988; it was broadcast as a TV movie in the US and as a serial in the UK. And, on 8 October of this year, the book was dramatised as a radio play on BBC Radio 4. So it has legs, as they say.
The plot of the book is quite simple. The scene is a small, slightly sleepy English town in the Midlands, late 1940s. Two respectable but not very well off ladies, mother and daughter, live in The Franchise, a big house on the outskirts.
One day a fifteen-year-old girl, who has been missing from home for some time, finally turns up in a slightly dishevelled state. She claims that she has been held prisoner by the two ladies; not only held prisoner but tied up and beaten with a dog whip, starved of food, and otherwise mistreated. She describes the two women in detail; describes the house; describes the room where she was kept prisoner. And the two women are eventually accused of abduction.
The central character is the solicitor who agrees, reluctantly, to defend the two women. And the women, naturally enough, deny that they have ever clapped eyes on the girl before.
There is no murder here then, let alone a series of murders; neither is there any great mystery, because the reader is not left in any doubt that the young girl is lying through her teeth. The only question is, what was she doing while she was missing from home? Can the defence solicitor find any evidence of that?
In the end, of course, he can; and in the end, being a single man, he naturally falls for the younger of the two women whom he is defending.
Now wherein -- whether in 1948 or today -- lies the appeal of all this?
The answer -- I suppose, and I confess I am groping somewhat here -- lies in the fundamental decency of the central characters. Robert, the solicitor, is dull and not very energetic, but he is honest, reliable, and keeps his word; that kind of thing. Marion, the younger of the two women, is down to earth and sensible; she has never been married because she prefers not to be. These likeable if not very heroic central figures are contrasted -- but not over-dramatically so -- with the less sympathetic characters.
Betty Kane, the young girl, is clearly no better than she ought to be, and a lying psychopath to boot, but she is not presented to us as some sort of monster; rather she appears to be a bit like that girl down the road: much too fond of the boys, and prone to tell tales to get herself out of trouble.
There are also portraits of some of the more unattractive features of England in 1948, features which have become all too familiar with the passing years. We have crowds of hooligans breaking the windows of The Franchise, for instance, when the two women are formally accused; also tabloid newspapers which print the purest fiction about them.
Although the setting is very definitely post-war England, the time and place are not over-emphasised. The war, so far as I can remember, is never mentioned; food rationing, which was still in force, is not mentioned either.
And so we come to the inevitable ending -- inevitable in the sense that this is commercial fiction.
Over the course of the book, Josephine Tey has built up in the reader a sense of gross outrage at this clearly false accusation made against two harmless and respectable women, and we are never in much doubt that they will get off -- somehow. Very bravely, in my opinion, the author chooses to have the rescue of the afflicted come about through pure chance. And, what is more, she points out to the reader that it is pure chance. Or Providence, as she chooses to call it.
A key witness is found who establishes beyond doubt that Betty Kane, the allegedly imprisoned victim, had in fact picked up a businessman in a bar, had gone with him to Copenhagen for a couple of weeks, while he pursued his business there; and, when the affair came to an end, had made up a story, complete with convincing detail, to cover her absence.
At the end, Robert asks Marion to marry him, but she refuses. She and her mother plan to make a fresh start in Canada. Robert at first appears to accept this, but then changes his mind; the book ends with him boarding the same plane and taking a seat at Marion's side.
So. We have a clear, well defined, well written narrative, the central element being an unjust accusation against two innocent and likeable women. The person who defends them is a man of good standing, not dynamic but dependable. The 'villain' is an immoral and precocious schoolgirl. And we have a love story with a satisfactory and upbeat conclusion.
Just remember that, in 1948, there were a whole lot of people who had good reason for taking satisfaction in seeing evil defeated; and there were just as many who had a dream of making a new life for themselves -- somewhere far away, where there was no rationing, where houses were properly heated in winter, and where the powers that be were not living in the past.
The second of Josephine Tey's books that I have read recently is Brat Farrar, from 1949. This was also adapted for television, in 1986.
Here the central character is Brat Farrar himself. Brat was abandoned as a baby and was brought up in an orphanage; for a few years he has been working in the States, with horses, and now, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, he is back home in England. Brat meets a man who mistakes him for someone else. They talk, and eventually Brat is persuaded to impersonate Patrick Ashby. Patrick is believed to have committed suicide at the age of thirteen, though the body was never found. By returning from the dead, so to speak, the imposter Patrick can claim ownership, at age twenty-one, of a substantial estate.
Through clever briefing from his criminal mentor, Brat succeeds in persuading the lawyers and the family that he is indeed Patrick Ashby, who was thought to be dead. Thus we have, as our central character, a man who is a criminal, at least in intent; and therefore, one might think, he is a character whom it is difficult to make sympathetic. The fact that Josephine Tey does manage to make him sympathetic is, I think, testimony to her skills; the reader may have strong reservations about Brat's character, but most readers, over the years, have gone on reading.
The book contains, by the way, a considerable amount of information about breeding horses: either Josephine Tey knew a lot about horses before she started the book, or else she was a very fine researcher.
Of course you don't have to be very bright to work out that Brat looks exactly like a member of the Ashby family because he is a member of the family: the son of a black sheep whose mother was not able to look after him and put him in good hands. Neither do you require Einstein's IQ to work out that the original Patrick was in fact murdered, at age thirteen, by his twin brother -- the man whom Brat is about to cheat of his inheritance.
What we have here, in short, is a complicated plot in which even the average reader could have picked multiple holes. But we find that Tey has anticipated every one of the reader's possible objections, and has contrived ways in which to overcome our very natural scepticism. The book is something of a tour de force in creating sympathy for a character who, properly speaking, ought to arouse feelings of contempt.
This is another book which ends with the principal characters deciding to leave England, though in this instance they head for Northern Ireland. In those days it was still possible to imagine that moving to Northern Ireland was a smart move. Just about.
Perhaps now we can suggest a few conclusions about how the books which Josephine Tey cobbled together in the 1940s, and which she herself seems not to have regarded all that highly, have continued to find and to satisfy readers.
First, I suppose we must mention her carefully wrought plots. As we have seen, the two books discussed here are not just run of the mill whodunits; there is scarcely a mystery in either of them. But they do involve crime, and therefore both these books represent something that has often been thought of as the holy grail of crime writing: i.e. a novel in which crime is an element but which has all the finest components of 'higher' and more literary forms. (Margery Allingham is perhaps the most famous example of a writer who is thought of in those terms.)
Secondly, we must acknowledge Tey's extreme skill in creating sympathetic, credible characters. It is no accident, in my view, that she had had an earlier career as a playwright. A playwright must learn to portray character through action, and to do so quickly; and a playwright has to write in scenes, rather than having someone just tell the story.
Another point which it is easy to overlook at this distance in time is that Tey's stories and characters were quite bold and daring by the standards of the 1940s. The Franchise Affair features, as we have already noted, a fifteen-year-old girl who can effortlessly pick up a salesman in a hotel bar, and has no qualms about spending a randy two weeks with him in foreign parts. (The average reader in those days had probably been no further than Brighton.)
Not only is the girl a pretty startling character for the period, but the salesman is too. Despite being married, he is quite ready to testify in court as to what he got up to. Furthermore, his wife testifies that they have an 'open' marriage; she knew all about the girl! And then there is the faint hint of S&M in the alleged whipping of the girl. Very faint indeed by our standards, but enough to shock and titillate some in its day.
One way and another, Josephine Tey was a formidable talent: one worth investigating if you're in the crime-fiction business.
Her most famous book is probably The Daughter of Time, in which she seeks to rehabilitate the good name of Richard III: that king of England who is portrayed by Shakespeare as the blackest of villains. Should you wish to know more about this book (and about Tey), a learned essay by the book critic of the Washington Post is available online.
This author's real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, and she was born in 1896 or '97. Not much seems to be known about her private life, but in addition to the crime writing she also had a separate career as a playwright under the name Gordon Daviot. She seems to have regarded the playwrighting as far more important than the crime fiction.
I have recently read Josephine Tey's novels The Franchise Affair and Brat Farrar, in the American editions published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster; these have a new introduction by Robert Barnard. Warning: in what follows, I may 'reveal the ending' of these two books; but actually that is no great sin, because in neither of them is there any dramatic revelation at the end; these are not whodunits, in which the murderer is unmasked on the last page, with all the suspects assembled in the library.
The Franchise Affair was first published in 1948, and it was a famous book in the 1950s, when I was growing up. It was filmed in 1950, as a vehicle for Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and I seem to remember it being serialised by the BBC in the '50s too. In any event it was filmed again in 1988; it was broadcast as a TV movie in the US and as a serial in the UK. And, on 8 October of this year, the book was dramatised as a radio play on BBC Radio 4. So it has legs, as they say.
The plot of the book is quite simple. The scene is a small, slightly sleepy English town in the Midlands, late 1940s. Two respectable but not very well off ladies, mother and daughter, live in The Franchise, a big house on the outskirts.
One day a fifteen-year-old girl, who has been missing from home for some time, finally turns up in a slightly dishevelled state. She claims that she has been held prisoner by the two ladies; not only held prisoner but tied up and beaten with a dog whip, starved of food, and otherwise mistreated. She describes the two women in detail; describes the house; describes the room where she was kept prisoner. And the two women are eventually accused of abduction.
The central character is the solicitor who agrees, reluctantly, to defend the two women. And the women, naturally enough, deny that they have ever clapped eyes on the girl before.
There is no murder here then, let alone a series of murders; neither is there any great mystery, because the reader is not left in any doubt that the young girl is lying through her teeth. The only question is, what was she doing while she was missing from home? Can the defence solicitor find any evidence of that?
In the end, of course, he can; and in the end, being a single man, he naturally falls for the younger of the two women whom he is defending.
Now wherein -- whether in 1948 or today -- lies the appeal of all this?
The answer -- I suppose, and I confess I am groping somewhat here -- lies in the fundamental decency of the central characters. Robert, the solicitor, is dull and not very energetic, but he is honest, reliable, and keeps his word; that kind of thing. Marion, the younger of the two women, is down to earth and sensible; she has never been married because she prefers not to be. These likeable if not very heroic central figures are contrasted -- but not over-dramatically so -- with the less sympathetic characters.
Betty Kane, the young girl, is clearly no better than she ought to be, and a lying psychopath to boot, but she is not presented to us as some sort of monster; rather she appears to be a bit like that girl down the road: much too fond of the boys, and prone to tell tales to get herself out of trouble.
There are also portraits of some of the more unattractive features of England in 1948, features which have become all too familiar with the passing years. We have crowds of hooligans breaking the windows of The Franchise, for instance, when the two women are formally accused; also tabloid newspapers which print the purest fiction about them.
Although the setting is very definitely post-war England, the time and place are not over-emphasised. The war, so far as I can remember, is never mentioned; food rationing, which was still in force, is not mentioned either.
And so we come to the inevitable ending -- inevitable in the sense that this is commercial fiction.
Over the course of the book, Josephine Tey has built up in the reader a sense of gross outrage at this clearly false accusation made against two harmless and respectable women, and we are never in much doubt that they will get off -- somehow. Very bravely, in my opinion, the author chooses to have the rescue of the afflicted come about through pure chance. And, what is more, she points out to the reader that it is pure chance. Or Providence, as she chooses to call it.
A key witness is found who establishes beyond doubt that Betty Kane, the allegedly imprisoned victim, had in fact picked up a businessman in a bar, had gone with him to Copenhagen for a couple of weeks, while he pursued his business there; and, when the affair came to an end, had made up a story, complete with convincing detail, to cover her absence.
At the end, Robert asks Marion to marry him, but she refuses. She and her mother plan to make a fresh start in Canada. Robert at first appears to accept this, but then changes his mind; the book ends with him boarding the same plane and taking a seat at Marion's side.
So. We have a clear, well defined, well written narrative, the central element being an unjust accusation against two innocent and likeable women. The person who defends them is a man of good standing, not dynamic but dependable. The 'villain' is an immoral and precocious schoolgirl. And we have a love story with a satisfactory and upbeat conclusion.
Just remember that, in 1948, there were a whole lot of people who had good reason for taking satisfaction in seeing evil defeated; and there were just as many who had a dream of making a new life for themselves -- somewhere far away, where there was no rationing, where houses were properly heated in winter, and where the powers that be were not living in the past.
The second of Josephine Tey's books that I have read recently is Brat Farrar, from 1949. This was also adapted for television, in 1986.
Here the central character is Brat Farrar himself. Brat was abandoned as a baby and was brought up in an orphanage; for a few years he has been working in the States, with horses, and now, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, he is back home in England. Brat meets a man who mistakes him for someone else. They talk, and eventually Brat is persuaded to impersonate Patrick Ashby. Patrick is believed to have committed suicide at the age of thirteen, though the body was never found. By returning from the dead, so to speak, the imposter Patrick can claim ownership, at age twenty-one, of a substantial estate.
Through clever briefing from his criminal mentor, Brat succeeds in persuading the lawyers and the family that he is indeed Patrick Ashby, who was thought to be dead. Thus we have, as our central character, a man who is a criminal, at least in intent; and therefore, one might think, he is a character whom it is difficult to make sympathetic. The fact that Josephine Tey does manage to make him sympathetic is, I think, testimony to her skills; the reader may have strong reservations about Brat's character, but most readers, over the years, have gone on reading.
The book contains, by the way, a considerable amount of information about breeding horses: either Josephine Tey knew a lot about horses before she started the book, or else she was a very fine researcher.
Of course you don't have to be very bright to work out that Brat looks exactly like a member of the Ashby family because he is a member of the family: the son of a black sheep whose mother was not able to look after him and put him in good hands. Neither do you require Einstein's IQ to work out that the original Patrick was in fact murdered, at age thirteen, by his twin brother -- the man whom Brat is about to cheat of his inheritance.
What we have here, in short, is a complicated plot in which even the average reader could have picked multiple holes. But we find that Tey has anticipated every one of the reader's possible objections, and has contrived ways in which to overcome our very natural scepticism. The book is something of a tour de force in creating sympathy for a character who, properly speaking, ought to arouse feelings of contempt.
This is another book which ends with the principal characters deciding to leave England, though in this instance they head for Northern Ireland. In those days it was still possible to imagine that moving to Northern Ireland was a smart move. Just about.
Perhaps now we can suggest a few conclusions about how the books which Josephine Tey cobbled together in the 1940s, and which she herself seems not to have regarded all that highly, have continued to find and to satisfy readers.
First, I suppose we must mention her carefully wrought plots. As we have seen, the two books discussed here are not just run of the mill whodunits; there is scarcely a mystery in either of them. But they do involve crime, and therefore both these books represent something that has often been thought of as the holy grail of crime writing: i.e. a novel in which crime is an element but which has all the finest components of 'higher' and more literary forms. (Margery Allingham is perhaps the most famous example of a writer who is thought of in those terms.)
Secondly, we must acknowledge Tey's extreme skill in creating sympathetic, credible characters. It is no accident, in my view, that she had had an earlier career as a playwright. A playwright must learn to portray character through action, and to do so quickly; and a playwright has to write in scenes, rather than having someone just tell the story.
Another point which it is easy to overlook at this distance in time is that Tey's stories and characters were quite bold and daring by the standards of the 1940s. The Franchise Affair features, as we have already noted, a fifteen-year-old girl who can effortlessly pick up a salesman in a hotel bar, and has no qualms about spending a randy two weeks with him in foreign parts. (The average reader in those days had probably been no further than Brighton.)
Not only is the girl a pretty startling character for the period, but the salesman is too. Despite being married, he is quite ready to testify in court as to what he got up to. Furthermore, his wife testifies that they have an 'open' marriage; she knew all about the girl! And then there is the faint hint of S&M in the alleged whipping of the girl. Very faint indeed by our standards, but enough to shock and titillate some in its day.
One way and another, Josephine Tey was a formidable talent: one worth investigating if you're in the crime-fiction business.
Her most famous book is probably The Daughter of Time, in which she seeks to rehabilitate the good name of Richard III: that king of England who is portrayed by Shakespeare as the blackest of villains. Should you wish to know more about this book (and about Tey), a learned essay by the book critic of the Washington Post is available online.
Blog statistics
Writers who start a blog in the hope of generating interest in their latest, or yet-to-be-written, book, sometimes find that attracting visitors to that blog proves to be a problem. One or two commenters on pieces on this blog have recently remarked on it.
Well, here are some data sent to me by Gav of Gav's studio. Gav has enough knowhow to be able to analyse the traffic to his blog and then to present it in the form of a graph. What the figures show is that when he started his blog, in January this year, he had precisely zero visitors. Numbers rose reasonably steadily in the next few months, levelling out in the low hundreds.
There was, however, a dramatic peak in July: 2192 unique visitors, sampling over 6,000 pages. The reason for this, Gav says, is that he was writing about Live8, and that was what people were typing into Google at around that time.
These figures confirm what I have heard and read from other sources: namely that the choice of title for a post can greatly influence the amount of traffic coming your way from casual enquiries made in the various search engines.
Perhaps the moral is, if you want bulk traffic, you should write posts with titles that people are likely to be searching for. On the other hand, such 'false pretences' traffic really isn't going to sell many books, is it?
The best advice I can offer, to those in the blogging for marketing purposes category, is to build a blog which offers something of value, interest, or concern to people in a particular field of activity, over a period of months or years. And then, if and when you have a book to sell, your existing audience might, perhaps, be willing to give it a try.
Well, here are some data sent to me by Gav of Gav's studio. Gav has enough knowhow to be able to analyse the traffic to his blog and then to present it in the form of a graph. What the figures show is that when he started his blog, in January this year, he had precisely zero visitors. Numbers rose reasonably steadily in the next few months, levelling out in the low hundreds.
There was, however, a dramatic peak in July: 2192 unique visitors, sampling over 6,000 pages. The reason for this, Gav says, is that he was writing about Live8, and that was what people were typing into Google at around that time.
These figures confirm what I have heard and read from other sources: namely that the choice of title for a post can greatly influence the amount of traffic coming your way from casual enquiries made in the various search engines.
Perhaps the moral is, if you want bulk traffic, you should write posts with titles that people are likely to be searching for. On the other hand, such 'false pretences' traffic really isn't going to sell many books, is it?
The best advice I can offer, to those in the blogging for marketing purposes category, is to build a blog which offers something of value, interest, or concern to people in a particular field of activity, over a period of months or years. And then, if and when you have a book to sell, your existing audience might, perhaps, be willing to give it a try.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The book world of 1935
During a recent visit to Hay-on-Wye, I bought a book first published in 1935 and entitled The Book World -- a New Survey. This is a collection of essays upon various aspects of the book trade, as it then was, by a fair cross-section of the good and the great of the day.
First things first. This book has lasted remarkably well, and it still looks good today. A hardback, measuring 6" x 4.5", it sits comfortably in the hand. There are wide margins, only 29 lines to the page, and the print is, at a guess, 12 point. The paper has hardly deteriorated at all. How many of today's books will look as good in 2075 I wonder?
Many things, it turns out, have changed since 1935; but some remain the same. As early as page 3, for example, we learn that libel is a worry, and is thought to be something of a racket. Nothing new there, then. 'Obscenity' was also a problem; no one had any clear idea of how far you could go, but some people went as far as Dartmoor, without so much as a 'fuck' to show for it.
Another concern was over-production. Would you believe it, there were as many as 13,000 or 15,000 books a year being published! Far too many for anyone to keep up with. Where would it all end?
Retail bookselling was thought to be hazardous. 'The idea that the selling of new books is a lucrative undertaking is a fallacy'; and the idea of bookselling chains was not welcomed: 'a chain-system might end in a book trade in chains'.
Some figures about bookshops are provided. These are based on the accounts of 19 bookshops over a 3-year period; the average turnover was £17,706 a year, yielding an average net profit of only £71 per year. But most of those bookshops, it appears, sold secondhand books as well as new ones. Bookshops which sold only new books actually incurred an average 4% loss on a turnover of £10,733.
The chapter on authorship suggests that the importance of authors to the book world 'is often underrated'. Ha! It's taken a while to get that sorted then. And the chapter wisely points out that an early triumph for an author can be curiously demoralising.
Another chapter deals with the literary agent. The literary agents of this world came into being largely because, in the late nineteenth century, copyright law was a mess, leaving authors grossly exposed to unscrupulous publishers (yes, there were some; hard to believe, isn't it?). The agents very soon rose to 'an impregnable position'. Publishers, apparently, found it a nasty shock to be 'up against someone whose skill in driving a bargain equalled if not excelled their own'.
This situation has, however, led to literary agency becoming the 'happy hunting-ground of the unscrupulous adventurer, who saw in it an easy and safe way of picking the pockets of authors with more money than sense'. The authors of 1935 were not, it seems, more gullible than most people, but they were 'more susceptible to flattery, however crude or obvious'. (Dear me. That surely isn't true, Deirdre, is it? When that agent chappy Blenkinson-Smythe tells me that my work displays genius in abundance, he is simply telling the honest truth -- isn't he?)
The publishers were also having a hard time. Even in 1935 they were being sent an 'astonishing amount of illiterate and unintelligent writing', but practised readers spent little time on it.
One major change since 1935 has been the disappearance of the so-called circulating library. These were commercial operations, one of the largest being run by Boots the Chemist; they enabled readers to borrow the very newest books, usually well before they were available in the local public (i.e. free) library, on payment of a fee per book or per year.
In this sector of the trade there is also complaint about over-production. The average reader, it seems, consumes only two books a week, and there are nearly 15,000 a year being published. Oh, calamity. It makes life awfully difficult. Or they thought it did at the time.
First things first. This book has lasted remarkably well, and it still looks good today. A hardback, measuring 6" x 4.5", it sits comfortably in the hand. There are wide margins, only 29 lines to the page, and the print is, at a guess, 12 point. The paper has hardly deteriorated at all. How many of today's books will look as good in 2075 I wonder?
Many things, it turns out, have changed since 1935; but some remain the same. As early as page 3, for example, we learn that libel is a worry, and is thought to be something of a racket. Nothing new there, then. 'Obscenity' was also a problem; no one had any clear idea of how far you could go, but some people went as far as Dartmoor, without so much as a 'fuck' to show for it.
Another concern was over-production. Would you believe it, there were as many as 13,000 or 15,000 books a year being published! Far too many for anyone to keep up with. Where would it all end?
Retail bookselling was thought to be hazardous. 'The idea that the selling of new books is a lucrative undertaking is a fallacy'; and the idea of bookselling chains was not welcomed: 'a chain-system might end in a book trade in chains'.
Some figures about bookshops are provided. These are based on the accounts of 19 bookshops over a 3-year period; the average turnover was £17,706 a year, yielding an average net profit of only £71 per year. But most of those bookshops, it appears, sold secondhand books as well as new ones. Bookshops which sold only new books actually incurred an average 4% loss on a turnover of £10,733.
The chapter on authorship suggests that the importance of authors to the book world 'is often underrated'. Ha! It's taken a while to get that sorted then. And the chapter wisely points out that an early triumph for an author can be curiously demoralising.
Another chapter deals with the literary agent. The literary agents of this world came into being largely because, in the late nineteenth century, copyright law was a mess, leaving authors grossly exposed to unscrupulous publishers (yes, there were some; hard to believe, isn't it?). The agents very soon rose to 'an impregnable position'. Publishers, apparently, found it a nasty shock to be 'up against someone whose skill in driving a bargain equalled if not excelled their own'.
This situation has, however, led to literary agency becoming the 'happy hunting-ground of the unscrupulous adventurer, who saw in it an easy and safe way of picking the pockets of authors with more money than sense'. The authors of 1935 were not, it seems, more gullible than most people, but they were 'more susceptible to flattery, however crude or obvious'. (Dear me. That surely isn't true, Deirdre, is it? When that agent chappy Blenkinson-Smythe tells me that my work displays genius in abundance, he is simply telling the honest truth -- isn't he?)
The publishers were also having a hard time. Even in 1935 they were being sent an 'astonishing amount of illiterate and unintelligent writing', but practised readers spent little time on it.
One major change since 1935 has been the disappearance of the so-called circulating library. These were commercial operations, one of the largest being run by Boots the Chemist; they enabled readers to borrow the very newest books, usually well before they were available in the local public (i.e. free) library, on payment of a fee per book or per year.
In this sector of the trade there is also complaint about over-production. The average reader, it seems, consumes only two books a week, and there are nearly 15,000 a year being published. Oh, calamity. It makes life awfully difficult. Or they thought it did at the time.
Terry Pratchett: Thud
Thud is the latest novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. If you haven't yet read any of them, I think the only advice I can give you is to start with The Colour of Magic and proceed from there. Of course, as with any other writer, it took Pratchett a few books to get really into his stride, but the early ones are still OK. And altogether there are, apparently, thirty of them, so you've got a few treats in store.
A gentle form of humour, based largely upon the eccentricities and peculiarities of English life, is one of Pratchett's strong points, and Thud is one of the funniest of his books so far. The plot concerns a schism between the trolls and the dwarfs -- a row which seems likely to develop into a full-scale war, unless Commander Sam Vimes, head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, can resolve the matter. And of course he does, though not without considerable difficulty.
Within the first fifty pages alone, Pratchett takes the mickey (as we say in England, if trying to be polite) out of any number of targets: such as the warring factions in Northern Ireland, 'artists' who exhibit untidy piles of clothes, the Da Vinci Code, and a lot more.
I wonder how Mr Pratchett feels about fillums. Because it strikes me that this would make a better fillum than most. I'm sure he must have had enquiries.
This is not the strongest of Pratchett's books in the last five years -- Monstrous Regiment takes that prize, in my opinion -- but it's well up to scratch.
By and large, Pratchett seems to me to be simply the best living UK novelist. Not that you often hear him recognised as such, though he does have one literarily-eminent admirer in A.S. Byatt. You can read her review of Thud in the Times, and in the course of it she rightly maintains that Moving Pictures is one of his rare failures -- well, actually one of his rare less-than-brilliants. Soul Music wasn't all that hot either; but two less than wonderful in thirty isn't bad.
By the way, Thud is not only a pleasure to read in terms of content, it is also very easy on the eye. Happily, the verso of the title page tells us why: it's printed in 11.75 point on 15.5 point Minion, with 33 lines to the page in Royal Octavo size. If that isn't more or less ideal, I don't know what is.
You probably won't find Minion on your word processor. It's new; but it does seem to be possible to buy it, and I just might. It's that good.
A gentle form of humour, based largely upon the eccentricities and peculiarities of English life, is one of Pratchett's strong points, and Thud is one of the funniest of his books so far. The plot concerns a schism between the trolls and the dwarfs -- a row which seems likely to develop into a full-scale war, unless Commander Sam Vimes, head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, can resolve the matter. And of course he does, though not without considerable difficulty.
Within the first fifty pages alone, Pratchett takes the mickey (as we say in England, if trying to be polite) out of any number of targets: such as the warring factions in Northern Ireland, 'artists' who exhibit untidy piles of clothes, the Da Vinci Code, and a lot more.
I wonder how Mr Pratchett feels about fillums. Because it strikes me that this would make a better fillum than most. I'm sure he must have had enquiries.
This is not the strongest of Pratchett's books in the last five years -- Monstrous Regiment takes that prize, in my opinion -- but it's well up to scratch.
By and large, Pratchett seems to me to be simply the best living UK novelist. Not that you often hear him recognised as such, though he does have one literarily-eminent admirer in A.S. Byatt. You can read her review of Thud in the Times, and in the course of it she rightly maintains that Moving Pictures is one of his rare failures -- well, actually one of his rare less-than-brilliants. Soul Music wasn't all that hot either; but two less than wonderful in thirty isn't bad.
By the way, Thud is not only a pleasure to read in terms of content, it is also very easy on the eye. Happily, the verso of the title page tells us why: it's printed in 11.75 point on 15.5 point Minion, with 33 lines to the page in Royal Octavo size. If that isn't more or less ideal, I don't know what is.
You probably won't find Minion on your word processor. It's new; but it does seem to be possible to buy it, and I just might. It's that good.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Publishers and profits
Publishing News carries a brief paragraph about a good year at the small UK publisher Allison and Busby. For the year ending 31 December 2004, turnover was up from £819,382 to £1,103,180. Operating profit increased from £93,517 to £169,856. So who says publishers can't make money?
Oh but just a minute. What's this last sentence at the end? A deficit of £1,142,883 was carried forward.
Oh dear. That rather spoils it.
Oh but just a minute. What's this last sentence at the end? A deficit of £1,142,883 was carried forward.
Oh dear. That rather spoils it.
More on the wild, unlimited and stunning success of the digital revolution
Yesterday brought an email from a brave man called Bill Liversidge. Brave because he gives me some hard data on visits to his blog and viewings of his online novel. And er... well, let's put it this way: business could be brisker.
If you click over to Bill's blog, View from the Pundy House, you can view these statistics for yourself (his post of 29 October).
There are all sorts of comments one could make here -- chiefly about ways and means to improve the situation -- but perhaps the most obvious is that marketing your book on the web isn't just a matter of making it available and then sitting back while the world finds its way to the door. Bill's own conclusion is that a viral marketing campaign is needed, and I agree. And in fact, of course, he's already started it, hasn't he?
If you click over to Bill's blog, View from the Pundy House, you can view these statistics for yourself (his post of 29 October).
There are all sorts of comments one could make here -- chiefly about ways and means to improve the situation -- but perhaps the most obvious is that marketing your book on the web isn't just a matter of making it available and then sitting back while the world finds its way to the door. Bill's own conclusion is that a viral marketing campaign is needed, and I agree. And in fact, of course, he's already started it, hasn't he?
A comment on recent comments
Unless you are a particularly keen and careful reader of this blog, you will probably not go back, a few days after a post appears, and see what comments (if any) have been made on it. But if you are at all interested in the question of how a writer can get a book recognised by the public without being pushed hard by a big-time publisher, then I suggest you take a look at the debate which has been going on in relation to my post of last Thursday about the Screenbiz interview with Francis Ellen.
Personally I largely agree with what Francis Ellen has to say. Which is just as well, because if we ever got into the ring I suspect that his left jab would loosen some of my teeth in about a round and a half.
Personally I largely agree with what Francis Ellen has to say. Which is just as well, because if we ever got into the ring I suspect that his left jab would loosen some of my teeth in about a round and a half.
Miss Snark revisited
Vince Vawter asked me if I'd read Miss Snark recently. And the answer was no, so I went and had a look.
Miss Snark, if you're wondering, is a practising US agent, and she mainly writes responses to writers who have asked her questions -- quite often, I would have to say, some pretty dumb questions. But then I suppose there was a time when even I was ignorant and stupid. All right, all right, so I'm still ignorant and stupid; but now it's about other things.
Anyway, Miss Snark seems to me to inject a very healthy degree of realism into her replies, and if you're hoping to break into any serious market, particularly in the US, you could learn a lot from her.
Miss Snark, if you're wondering, is a practising US agent, and she mainly writes responses to writers who have asked her questions -- quite often, I would have to say, some pretty dumb questions. But then I suppose there was a time when even I was ignorant and stupid. All right, all right, so I'm still ignorant and stupid; but now it's about other things.
Anyway, Miss Snark seems to me to inject a very healthy degree of realism into her replies, and if you're hoping to break into any serious market, particularly in the US, you could learn a lot from her.
Noah Cicero interview
Never let it be said that there is not some interesting stuff out there. Of course, what interests me may not interest you, and vice versa, but try this one.
A short while ago I reviewed Noah Cicero's short novel, Burning Babies. And now you can read, if you have the stamina, a 20,000 word interview with him. This is provided by Tao Lin on the blog called Reader of Depressing Books. There are also masses of links to other Noah Cicero stuff.
The blog opened in my browser with a very small font, but you can make it bigger (in Internet Explorer) by clicking View>text size>larger.
This material is worth taking a look at, even if you wouldn't read Noah Cicero in a thousand years, because it illustrates what is possible in this modern world of ours. Writers who only fifteen years or so ago would have had absolutely nowhere to go can now set out their views in a 20,000 interview.
Now what is that? Is it democracy? Freedom? Opportunity? Whatever it is I welcome it.
Tao Lin also has a novel, by the way. It is being posted one bit at a time.
A short while ago I reviewed Noah Cicero's short novel, Burning Babies. And now you can read, if you have the stamina, a 20,000 word interview with him. This is provided by Tao Lin on the blog called Reader of Depressing Books. There are also masses of links to other Noah Cicero stuff.
The blog opened in my browser with a very small font, but you can make it bigger (in Internet Explorer) by clicking View>text size>larger.
This material is worth taking a look at, even if you wouldn't read Noah Cicero in a thousand years, because it illustrates what is possible in this modern world of ours. Writers who only fifteen years or so ago would have had absolutely nowhere to go can now set out their views in a 20,000 interview.
Now what is that? Is it democracy? Freedom? Opportunity? Whatever it is I welcome it.
Tao Lin also has a novel, by the way. It is being posted one bit at a time.
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