Robert McCrum on the future of the book

Robert McCrum, in yesterday's Observer, provided a thoughtful article on the future of the book. (Link from booktrade.info.)

I hope it will not seem immodest if I say that the article does not really tell you anything that you won't have read here: in fact as recently as last Monday (see the last two paragraphs of my piece on the Sunday Times). But McCrum is on first-name terms with all the big hitters in publishing, and comes up with direct quotes which neatly encapsulate their thoughts.

For me, the most interesting points are made by Dick Brass and Richard Charkin. Brass is a retired Microsoft Vice-President, with wide experience of e-readers, and he believes that it may take as much as ten to fifteen years to produce an electronic device which provides a reading experience close to that of the book. And Charkin, chief executive of Macmillan and President of the UK Publishers Association, says that he spends four-fifths of his time worrying about technology. He adds that 'none of the big general UK book publishers [Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin] has really embraced the new technology.' Which is another point that has been made here from time to time.

Charkin, by the way, has his own blog, about a month old, and already attracting a large readership. I am flattered to discover that the GOB is one of only two blogs listed in his blogroll. But I'm sure that won't last long.

Fred Vargas: Have Mercy On Us All

Before we go any further, let us be clear that Fred Vargas is a woman. A Frenchwoman, to be precise, and a historian and archaeologist by profession -- or at least she was until she started writing novels, at which she has been very successful.

All in all, I gather that Vargas is the author of twelve titles in French. Three of them have so far been published in the UK, and Have Mercy On Us All has just been brought out by Simon and Schuster in the US; other books are to follow from the same source.

Have Mercy On Us All was a considerable hit in France: it was chosen by the booksellers of France and by the readers of Elle magazine as their Book of the Year. It's a crime novel: a mystery; a thriller, if you will. On the cover we are told that 'Commissaire Adamsberg investigates', and indeed that is her principal character and his job is to investigate murder.

The plot is amiably eccentric, and just about remains credible if examined in bright daylight; in the context of fiction, it works just fine. In the 14th arrondissement of Paris, a former merchant-navy captain has adopted the role of town crier. He will read out anything if you leave a note in his box, together with a modest fee, and one day someone starts asking him to read out obscure mediaeval texts. It emerges, in due course, that all these quotations relate to the plague. And before long people start dying of the plague. Or so it seems until Adamsberg gets going.

The great strength of the book is in its delineation of a dozen or so Parisians -- not always born and bred there, but assembled there. And a motley crew they are too. Always engaging, often amusing, and usually recognisable as bearing a resemblance to folk we have known.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is in the way that the author would have us believe that Adamsberg conducts himself. In real life, no senior police officer could possible investigate multiple murders in the same way as Adamsberg does. But never mind: this is a fictional entertainment, not a manual of police procedure.

Another weakness, if you're determined to find fault, is in the character who was allegedly a brilliant scientist in his twenties, but who now believes some wholly unscientific ideas about bubonic plague and how one can become immune to it. But again, most readers are just going to be grateful for a book which is entertaining, occasionally amusing and touching, and doesn't either insult our intelligence, cover us in gore, or try to explain the Meaning of Life.

This book is well planned, thoughtfully written, well observed, human, absorbing. It is not surprising to find that the author has won prizes and is published in 22 countries. The translation is by David Bellos, and has its own little eccentricities.

Comments we could do without

If you ever go back to previous posts on this blog, and read the comments, you may have noted that some of the comments aren't really comments at all: they're adverts for porn of various varieties.

Now whatever one's feelings about porn, pro or anti, we really don't need links to such sites in the comments section of this blog. Well I don't anyway. And back in the good old days, say a year ago, I was able to delete these non-comments as and when they appeared, because there weren't many of them.

Then we got a whole flood of the things, generated by a machine somewhere, and I had to resort to using a Blogger filter. This involves asking would-be commenters to take one further step before being able to post a comment, which was a nuisance but it did succeed in blocking fake comments for a while.

Now, however, it seems that the spammers have found a way round that, and the porn links and adverts for fake Rolex watches and so forth are turning up again. Until and unless Blogger figures out how to stop them we shall just have to put up with them.

Of course some people used to think that such ads were the best part of the show, but that's another story.

However, the real point of this post is to say that, if you want to know more about all the various wicked things that can be done -- by spammers and the like -- to poor harmless bloggers who never hurt nobody nohow, then there is a handy summary recently issued by Semantec. The answer, if you are worried about the effect of these things on your computer, is to probably to buy a piece of Semantec software. What a surprise.

The right title for a bestseller

Finding the right title for your literary masterpiece has long been considered a black art. For example, some thirty or forty years ago I came across a theory that the best title for a stage play consisted of a dactyl and a spondee. In other words, two words which, when pronounced, come out in the rhythm dah-di-di dum-dum. Long, short short; long long.

And now I suppose I have to think of an example, and the old brain is decidedly slow this morning. But, er... pause for thought...

How about Lesbia Brandon. Not a stage play, of course, but the unfinished novel by the nineteenth-century poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, a novel which so terrified his lawyer (with its incestuous theme, cross-dressing and so forth) that he pretended to lose several chapters, to discourage Algernon from ever finishing it and from trying to get it published.

Other examples, roughly speaking, would include Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and William Gibson's Two for the See-Saw. Also my own stage play Artists and Models.

When we come to novels I know of no specific theory of titles as such. But now, thanks to Vince Vawter, who gave me the link, I can point you to some research into the titles of bestsellers which may, conceivably, lead you to fame and fortune. Or then again, perhaps not.

The research was evidently commissioned by Lulu.com, an outfit which will print your book for you in any one of a variety of formats. And, since they are in the business of encouraging writers to publish their books through the Lulu facilities, Lulu decided that it would be appropriate to offer some advice on titles which would maximise sales. Here's what Lulu says:

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years' worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead [sic] by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this "Lulu Titlescorer" a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

Now, no wish to be unnecessarily rude about something which is little better than a bit of fun, but the last sentence is clearly nonsense; it will seriously embarrass Dr Winkler if he ever sees it. The Lulu web site itself says that using the Titlescorer software will deliver a result somewhere between 9% and 83%, which would suggest that almost one book in ten gets to the top of the NYT bestseller lists; at a minimum.

Furthermore, Lulu seems to have leapt to the absurd conclusion that it is titles alone which determine bestseller status. So, it's all nonsense, as I say. However, the Titlescorer might conceivably give you a few leads as to whether you're on the right track or not.

Just for fun, I ran a few of my own titles through the machine. This year's novel, which you will hear much more about soon, is entitled How and why Lisa's Dad got to be famous. This, Lulu reckons, has a 10.2% chance of success. My earlier novel, Passionate Affairs, written under the name Anne Moore, had a 41.4% chance in theory, but in practice didn't make it.

And, of course, you can amuse yourself by passing some famous books through the machine and seeing what it produces. The Historian shares my 10.2%, and Fleshmarket Close ditto at 41.4%.

From which you learn that these apparently precise figures of 10.2% and 41.4% are not precise at all.

Oh well. It's quite amusing for ten minutes.

Before I forget: There was a time, some thirty years or so ago, when Robert Ludlum was having a run of successes such as The Matlock Paper, The Prometheus Deception, and so forth. This led to a whole rash of books with similar titles. But it got to the point where my then agent said to me, 'For God's sake don't give me a book with a title that goes The Adjective Noun. The market's sick of them.' Even though the Lulu Titlescorer rates them at 35.9%.

Michael Chabon: The Final Solution

Michael Chabon, as you are probably aware, wrote a novel called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and it won him the Pulitzer prize. The underlying idea of that novel was a clever one -- something to do with comic-book heroes and the men who created them -- and I remember reading it, but it made little impression on me. The only thing I do remember is that, as with most literary successes, it was a big thick long book which seemed to grind on for ever.

So, although I am not going to argue with those who consider Michael Chabon to be talented, I wouldn't normally have rushed out to read anything else by him. But for two things: The Final Solution includes Sherlock Holmes in its cast of characters; and it's short.

Slightly to my surprise, The Final Solution proves to be one of the most impressive books that I have read in a long time; and I suspect that I shall remember it. Yes, the author is obviously exceedingly bright, but, unlike many such, he mercifully doesn't wave his cleverness in our faces; on the contrary, he rather disguises it, which is an endearing characteristic if ever I came across one.

The plot, involving a small boy, a pet parrot, and a murderer, is entirely preposterous. But it would be unreasonable to complain about that. Most of Conan Doyle's plots were preposterous too; but he pulled them off by dealing mostly from the bottom of the pack, and by using, of course, Dr WAtson as his viewpoint character. And then again, The Final Solution is set in the second world war, when any number of bizarre ideas were tried out, and some of them actually worked. (Consider the case of the bouncing bombs.)

Sherlock Holmes, by the way, simply appears in Chabon's book as one of the cast. He is not the dominant figure. This is perhaps unsurprising when one realises that he is now 89, and has been doing nothing more cerebral than keeping bees, somewhere between Eastbourne and Brighton, for several years.

The title, of course, will probably give you a hint of Holmes anyway -- or it did me. There was another non-Conan-Doyle addition to the Holmes canon some years ago: The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. But 'the final solution' also gives us a strange hint of what is now widely referred to as the holocaust, and that features in the plot too. And there is a third reference/meaning, which you will discover towards the end of the book. Yes, Mr Chabon is a clever chap all right.

He has also, as all good authors do, undertaken his research; and only the occasional word or phrase reminds one that the author is not English.

At first one imagines that this book is just another piece of Holmesian whimsy, but somewhere around page 50 you realise that it's really rather good. And it's all very elegantly done. A bottle of whisky in Holmes's drinks cabinet is described as being coated in 'a layer of dust that might have repelled a Schliemann.'

The final chapter of this book (narrated, if you please, from the point of view of the parrot) is, I have to say -- and I say it through gritted teeth because you know how much I hate to bestow praise on a literary novelist -- brilliant. No other word for it. More to the point, however, it is moving and memorable. And the last page is ironic. In more ways than one.

The Final Solution is warmly recommended. And, I repeat -- go down on your knees and thank the Lord -- it is short. It is the living proof of a principle which I have expounded here many a time: namely that, if you have the talent, you don't need to bang on for 600 or 700 pages; you can do it comfortably in 127; which includes a few rather nice illustrations.

Michael Chabon's official web site, by the way, is most unusual.

Abandoned novels

During the Christmas break, I began to read two novels and abandoned them both halfway through.

Both these books have been huge sellers, and have undoubtedly found an appreciative audience. So the fact that I didn't care to finish reading either of them is neither here nor there. But there may be, I think, some virtue in comparing and contrasting these two and seeing what can be learnt from their authors' careers so far.

Elizabeth Kostova: The Historian

The first book was Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. The Book Standard fills us in on the background of this one rather nicely:

The whopping $2-million advance first-time author Kostova received from Little, Brown for The Historian, her take on the classic Dracula story, may have raised some eyebrows in the publishing world, but it’s safe to say that Little, Brown can look on it as a good investment. The huge marketing push behind the book—publicists sent out more than 500 galley copies of the title to booksellers—also paid off. The Historian wound up moving 282,000 copies to take the No. 1 position in the Debut Novel category for titles first published during the award’s timeframe.

And that's just the American sales. According to the exceptionally well informed Galleycat, Little, Brown have more than recovered their whopping advance by selling foreign rights to overseas publishers.

So: $2 million for a first-time author, and a thousand and one other publishers fighting for it. Must be a pretty good read, right? Well, er -- sort of.

Elizabeth Kostova is a Yale graduate with an MFA from Michigan. And whatever else they teach them on MFA degree courses they evidently don't teach them to achieve their effects in a minimum of words. The Historian runs to 642 pages. So that's the first problem I had with it. It's long. And it's slow.

It's also a tad confusing. As I have remarked before, modern readers do not concentrate on a novel for two hours at a time while sitting quietly in their panelled library. On the contrary, they snatch five minutes here, ten minutes there, while on the bus, on the loo, waiting for the girl/boyfriend to turn up.

And the difficulty with The Historian is that the first 100 pages are complicated. We have a story being related in 2008 about events in 1972, with another character describing events in 1952. And 1932 comes into it somewhere as well. So chapter 4, for instance, is a first-person account of the narrator's father telling a story which was told to him by a third character. It's not exactly straightforward stuff. There are several competing first-person narratives here, and it's hard to remember who's what.

Another characteristic, which is not a problem for me, but which makes it far from obvious to me as to why an American publisher was so interested in the book, is that The Historian is a very European novel. And it's about old Europe at that. The Europe of deep, dark woods, castles, and wolves, and Hansel and Gretel. Little Red Riding Hood. It's a carefully researched, even scholarly novel, and it's about scholars. But it's not until about page 88 that we really know what the thing is all about.

And it turns out to be about Dracula. Basically what we have here is a plot made familiar by a dozen or two Hammer horror movies from the 1950s and 60s: namely, Dracula lives; and he's going around doing nasty things to people.

So. This is all very well. Promising enough. Quite commercial in its way. But I'm afraid I looked at the pile of other stuff beside my bed and really decided that some of the other stuff might be more rewarding. Which brings me to:

Ian Rankin: Fleshmarket Close

Ian Rankin's career stands in well defined contrast to that of Elizabeth Kostova, though he has a similar academic background. He was at one time working on a PhD, and planned a career as a professor of English literature. But he decided, very sensibly, that he would rather write books which people read than books which simply sat on the shelf of an academic library.

Unlike Kostova, Rankin did not have a smash hit with his first book. Or, for that matter, with any of the first half-dozen. And that alone sets him apart from the average writer of today. In a very wide-ranging and extremely interesting interview with the Bookslut, he describes how his publisher, Orion, had got to the point where they were about to dump him.

They were saying, 'Ian, we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried promoting you as best we can and it’s not working. You’re still selling a few thousand copies. We’re going to see if another publisher can do any better.' Which is a tactful way of saying you're out the door.

However, at that point he won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for 1997. Black and Blue became his breakthrough book. It sold four times as many copies as previous books and it was shortlisted for the Edgar award; it won a few awards overseas. 'Suddenly, I felt like I could make a living doing this. Up to that point, it was very fragile ground I was walking on.'

Yes, indeed. Not only was the ground fragile for Ian Rankin, but it was ground that, ten years later, few writers are going to get the chance to walk on. Not many publishers these days are going to give you half a dozen chances to find an audience. Today you either make a big impression with your first book or you can go fuck yourself. Not, of course, that anyone in publishing would put it that way, because they're all far too well bred; but that is pretty much what it amounts to.

After 1997, Rankin became a huge seller. Fleshmarket Close, paperbacked in August 2005, had sold 243,152 copies in the UK market by the year's end. His books have also been adapted for television. His detective, Rebus, was played initially by John Hannah, and a new series with Ken Stott in the lead role has just started. Stott is a fabulous actor, and I found the first episode extremely watchable.

Why then did I give up on Fleshmarket Close at page 254, with another 230 pages to go? Well, there was nothing really wrong with it. It was all highly professional. But I have read just a few too many novels about burnt-out detectives who drink and smoke too much and have problems with their women. That's all.

Hackoff.com continued

Some three months ago we had a look, you and I, at Tom Evslin's novel and web site and bells and whistles under the name Hackoff.com. I decided then that it was all a bit alarmingly high-tec for me. But Tom Evslin is the former head of a dot.com company, so it's to be expected.

Since October Tom has gone on developing his basic idea. Go to the Dothill Press web site and you will see that he has recruited one Kelly Evans to handle the administration. It seems that he is publishing his novel Hackoff.com first via a blog, then via podcast and finally via hardcover in the first quarter of 2006.

The same site outlines detailed plans for organising a 'blook tour' for the book, and presumably, for other books by other authors. And the Links link gives you a means of moving from Dothill to various associated sites. And the Amazon.com page for the book is definitely worth looking at.

It's all pretty dazzling stuff, even if they can't spell advice, and even if the font size is definitely on the small side for elderly eyes. This is evidently the way to go if you're tech-savvy and have enough money to do it. But will it succeed in terms of the bottom line? Let's hope we get to find out, though ventures which don't turn out to be profitable usually have a veil thrown rapidly over them.

We now have a number of authors, Val Landi being another example, who are well familiar with the business and technology worlds, and who are pretty much convinced that publishers are an unnecessary link -- one might almost say an obstacle -- between an author and the public. I suspect that this is much more true of non-fiction than of fiction, but time will tell.

Big Brother's books

Well, I warn you, there may not be many books read here for the next couple of weeks, because Celebrity Big Brother is on Channel 4 again, and it's gripping stuff.

Of course, it's sheer ignorance on my part, but I'm not quite sure how many other countries run their own Big Brother shows, so here's a quick rundown of what happens.

You take 11 celebrities (I use the term loosely) and lock 'em up together in a purpose-built house. They have no contact whatever with the outside world. No phone, no radio, no TV. They just have to sit there and interact. And, this being the digital age, the house is wired. There are cameras and microphones everywhere, so no one can even whisper without the audience picking it up.

The audience can watch all this, pretty much 24 hours a day. It's broadcast live, or nearly so. There's just enough time-lag to cut the sound if someone says something libellous or swears too often while the kids might be watching.

The idea is, and I speak from the producer's point of view here, that someone -- some particularly sensitive flower -- may succumb to the pressure and have a nervous breakdown. Or shag his way through every woman in the show, live. (I believe it's been done.) Or run amok with a kitchen knife. Or otherwise entertain us.

Every so often the audience gets the chance to vote on who should remain in the house and who should be evicted. And at the end of three weeks or so a winner emerges. With lots and lots of lovely media exposure. The newspapers love it and the winner can enhance, or rebuild, his/her career big-time.

And all of this, surprisingly enough, is heavily book-orientated.

To begin with (and I apologise if I'm teaching Grandma something about eggs here), the title of the show derives from a famous novel by George Orwell, entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published in 1949, that novel imagines a nightmarish future for England, in which the government, personified by an all-powerful figure known as Big Brother, has the power to investigate and check up on every aspect of a citizen's life, and to cause pain and suffering to said citizen if he should dare to question the powers that be.

Well, the future hasn't quite turned out as Orwell feared, but it's pretty damn close. The British police have more than enough powers to make life very difficult for you if you choose to disagree with Mr Blair. A woman was arrested in Downing Street recently for reading out the names of the Iraqi war dead; this was justified under the terms of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. And on the other side of the pond, Cousin George is busy phone-tapping everyone who thinks he's a fool; an exercise which should keep him busy for some time.

So, Big Brother has literary antecedents. Not only that, but several of the current participants have books to their name already -- let alone what they will produce if they win.

Dennis Rodman, for instance -- yes, it is that Dennis, black, American, retired basketball player; the one who Madonna wanted to have a child with, and didn't; the one who politely declined to have oral sex with Madonna; that Dennis -- he is the subject of a biography by his ex-wife. They were married for ten days. This biog, Worse Than He Says He Is, relates how Dennis gave his missus sexually transmitted diseases and let her down badly in bed: sex lasted about 14 seconds. And the Celebrity BB hostess, the lovely Davina, has already told us that he requires extra-large condoms. All of which makes me worry about that nice little English girl, Chantelle, who was last seen holding hands with him. How will it all end? You can see how a chap can get distracted.

Then there's George Galloway. Yes, the same George who made mincemeat of a Senate committee, and wrote I'm Not the Only One, which was reviewed here on 14 June 2005.

Jodie Marsh is a former stripper, page 3 girl, and all like that. Jodie is the author, in a manner of speaking, of a 288-page autobiography, Keeping It Real. She's only 27, but a good-looking girl with a generous bust measurement can pack a lot into those years you know.

Next, Rula Lenska: distinguished actress. Rula has not, so far as I know, written a book, but she has been involved as the narrator on numerous audiobooks, especially for children: Roald Dahl's Matilda, for example. Also, her ex, Dennis Waterman, has written an autobiography entitled Reminder, so she presumably makes an appearance in that.

Michael Barrymore has the inevitable autobiography. And the others, so far as I know, are, so to speak, book virgins. Although the transvestite pop singer Pet Burns clearly has more than one book in him. (I quite fancy Pete, Doctor. Is this a cause for concern?) When last seen he was wearing a dress with a train, to which were attached about a dozen multi-coloured balloons. You think I made that bit up. But I didn't. See below.

Chantelle, as you will doubtless know, is not a real celebrity but was required to persuade the others that she was; and succeeded. I thought the girl done good. And since it seems that, never having sung a note in her life, she is about to release a pop record by the mythical band which she claimed to be a member of (yes it does get a bit confusing, doesn't it? Keep notes, is my advice), there is no reason on earth why she should not also turn up on next year's Booker long list.

Oh yes, it's gripping stuff, as I said at the beginning. And in case you're wondering why I should be taking such an interest in a weird reality-TV show, the answer is that, during the past year, I have been working on a novel about a man who goes on just such a show in order to win a million pounds for his daughter.

Now I thought, when I was writing this novel, that I had put forward a few outrageous and far-out ideas about the kind of people who might go on such shows, and the kinds of things that they might be required to do. But of course, now that I've watched the real thing, I have discovered that the reality of reality TV is far, far more outre and bizarre than anything that I could ever have invented.

You couldn't make it up. Really. I know. I've tried.

More on the Sunday Times fiasco

Last Sunday the UK Sunday Times set out to prove that publishers are no longer able to identify literary talent. The ST's feeble experiment was described here last Monday.

During the week the ST article attracted a certain amount of comment in the blogosphere. If you want to get a taste of it, go to Technorati, type "sunday times" and "booker prize" into the search box (both terms in inverted commas) and you will be given a list of most of the bloggers' comments.

In general, nobody had anything good to say about the ST, which is scarcely surprising. Miss Snark (4 January, Why the Sunday Times is nitwit of the new year) was far ruder than I was. And m'learned friend C.E. Petit Esq., at Scrivener's Error, took the trouble to make it absolutely clear why, in terms of research design, the ST attempt to test its hypothesis was so pathetically incompetent.

All of that being so, it was with some interest that I waited to see what the paper itself would publish by way of letters. In the event, only two letters on this issue appeared in yesterday's edition. One said that if publishers had started rejecting the kind of book which wins the Booker, then at least they are doing something right.

The other letter came from Sylvie Nickels, the smart girl. She explained that she too had been rejected by major publishers and had gone the self-publishing route instead. So she used the ST's fatuous article to earn herself a couple of free column inches by way of advertising. Lots of people will have googled her, or gone to amazon, to have a look at her book.

The only other thing to add is that one of the commenters on last week's GOB piece seemed to think that, in writing it, I was contradicting what I said about a year ago in my extended essay entitled On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile. Explain yourself, sir, was the general tenor of his comment.

Well, actually I don't think there's much to explain. But let me say that, if I had had a change of mind/change of heart in the last twelve months, I certainly wouldn't feel defensive about it. On the contrary: I would be rather pleased with myself. It is one of our less useful human characteristics that we hang on to our long-held opinions even when mounting evidence shows them to be well out of date; so changing one's mind -- in the light of new evidence -- is something of a virtue in my book.

As it happens, however, I haven't changed my mind in any dramatic way. The difference between the emphasis in Rats and that of my Sunday Times piece arises (it seems to me) because we are looking at the same facts from different angles.

For what they're worth, my views can be summarised as follows:

1. I take it as an established fact that even expert judges, i.e. experienced agents and publishers, cannot read a year's supply of slush-pile submissions and identify, with infallible accuracy, which of them will achieve commercial or literary success. This has been proved, and admitted, so often that it is really beyond dispute.

2. It is also commonly reported that slush-pile submissions are in any case seldom read by expert judges. Normally they are read by young people who are by definition inexperienced. Furthermore, these same young people are often also handicapped, in the sense that they have recently spent three or four years having their heads filled with piffle by professors of English literature.

3. Modern publishing is concerned first and foremost with making a profit. And the problem with 'literary quality', as generally defined, is that it is not profitable. As Miss Snark says, 'respectable sales over the course of YEARS is the height of achievement [for a literary novel]. Most of them sink like rocks.'

4. For reasons which escape my understanding, most of the leading newspapers concentrate their reviews on literary fiction; this gives a misleading impression to ambitious young writers.

5. Courses which purport to teach 'creative writing' also tend to concentrate on 'literary quality'. This is a circumstance which seems to me to be unhelpful to everyone -- except, of course, to those who make a comfortable living from teaching such courses.

6. The bestseller lists provide a valuable guide to what is selling fast at any given moment. But they do not tell us what is selling steadily. There are plenty of capable and successful writers around who are never reviewed in the national press, never make the bestseller lists, but produce work, year after year, which is widely enjoyed. To find these people you need to go burrowing in obscure corners, such as the Times Warner stocklist. PLR data -- i.e. records of loans from UK public libraries, are also useful; as are sites such as Fantastic Fiction.

In writing Rats, I was mainly looking at things from the writer's point of view, and offering some suggestions to slush-pile readers along the way. In my comment on the Sunday Times article, I was, for once, looking at things from the publisher's point of view.

Having said that, I will also say that, during the last twelve months, I have become somewhat more sympathetic to the general plight of those who work in publishing than I have been in the past. It is a commonplace that publishing is changing, but I suspect that just how fast it is changing is still being underestimated by those who work in the industry.

Of course there will always be printed books -- at any rate during the lifetime of anyone likely to be reading this. And I think we shall increasingly see an emphasis on the book as object -- as a beautiful piece of design -- in addition to the continuing and inevitable emphasis on content. However, I expect that, within ten years, and probably a whole lot sooner, we shall have a hand-held electronic device which is easier to read than the average mass-market paperback, some of which are exceedingly cheap and nasty.

When that happens, some areas of publishing are, I think, going to find themselves in much the same position as manufacturers of buggy whips were one hundred years ago. That's not a comfortable position to be in; and they're all such nice people, too.

If inspiration fails...

Yes, folks, if inspiration fails, in your quest for fictional stardom/movie script sale/Nobel Prize next year type thing, then you can always turn to the web for help.

My son kindly points out that there is a helpful blog, The Generator Blog, which provides all kinds of software that may prove useful. Just recently, for instance, someone has kindly posted a piece about a late-night movie plot generator (4 January). This turns out to have its own web site, and is an invaluable tool for the film-world ambitious if ever I saw one. A guaranteed route to success.

Back to the Generator Blog, and on the right-hand list of previously posted generators you will find, just by way of example, a story generator. The plots offered here are a little minimal, I feel. But hey -- why not generate two or three, and bolt them together? Can't be difficult. And if you choose two or three plots of different genres, then you could have yourself a highly original cross-genre masterpiece. Break new ground. And all like that.

Should the story generator not meet with your entire approval, click on the word 'writing' in the box at the top left, and you get links to enough generators to keep the average writer in business for several years.

And, best of all, if you are one of those people who think that what comes free can't possibly be any good, the story-generator site features lots of Google ads for software that you can pay for. Try, for instance, the Writer's Cafe -- a UK-based site, and therefore, by definition, a quality product.

And, finally, don't overlook the easily missed log-line generator. A log-line is (I understand) one of those plot summaries that you see pasted across a poster for a movie. You know the kind of thing. Two men, one woman -- and she loved them both. Or some such. And now you don't even need to think up your own. Just press a button.

Never let it be said that the GOB does not provide entrees to cutting-edge stuff. Software will change the world. Not necessarily for the better, though. No promises about that.