Advice for the lovelorn

Human nature doesn't seem to change much, does it?

I am prompted to think that thought by the events of this week. It would be invidious to name names, but it has come to my attention that there are at least two individuals who have recently conducted love affairs of a slightly unfortunate nature. Both these individuals have first names beginning with the letter D. Out of consideration for their finer feelings, I will identify them no further than that, except to say that one of them is a princess, or was, and the other is the UK Home Secretary; or he is as I write these words, though the situation may soon change.

How different the lives of these two Ds would have been if only they had heeded the words of Mario Equicola (c. 1470-1525). Michelle Lovric, in her splendid anthology Venice, Tales of the City, tells us that Mario Equicola was the author of a book published in 1530 and entitled The New Courtier, on Prudent and Moral Living. Here, by way of a taster, is what Mario has to say on the subject of Love. And let his words be a lesson to you all.

I would suggest that you should flee extreme Love.... The souls of the Lovers have the time-honoured privileges of raging, arguing, frequent battles and declarations of peace, of rare pleasures and frequent miseries, and hardly ever a brief moment of stability.... According to many unvarying testimonies from those who, with irreparable damage to themselves, have essayed excessive Love, there comes a rapid turbulence and an inevitable (even to the wiser minds) blinding passion, which, as well as transforming a man from humble to insufferable, from shy to insolent, also obscures intelligence, confounds the Memory, dissolves conscience, and cancels out mercy, dissipates all earthly faculties, corrupts the strength of the body, exterminates freedom and brings old age before its time.

Now don't say you haven't been warned.

The McCall Smith production line

From time to time, as you may have noticed, I have expressed a general preference for commercial fiction as against the literary stuff. And on 18 May I made the point that Alexander McCall Smith looked like being ‘one of the most ruthlessly commercial writers to have appeared on the scene for some time. Giving the readers what they want, with knobs on.’ (See my post of 6 August for a discussion of the origin of the phrase ‘with knobs on’.)

The Ottakar’s Christmas catalogue tends to confirm my view of Professor McCall Smith as a highly commercial author: he has a whole page to himself, containing five separate offers, as follows:

In the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the first five volumes are available in paperback, and Ottakar’s are offering three for the price of two.

The sixth volume in the No 1 series can be had in hardback at £10.99.

The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom contains the whole of the Von Igelfeld trilogy, i.e. three books effectively for the price of one (paperback).

Then there’s The Sunday Philosophy Club, which introduces McCall Smith’s new female detective, Isabel Dalhousie of Edinburgh (hardback).

And, finally, you can buy the paperback edition of last year’s The Girl Who Married a Lion.

Please note that nearly all these books of McCall Smith’s are notable for being quite short. For example, each book in the Von Igelfeld trilogy was originally published separately, and they ran to 144 pages apiece. Several of the No 1 series come in at 224 pages. The Girl Who Married a Lion is 208. And so on.

Why is this significant?

Well, I have long held the view, and have doubtless expressed it here, that the smart writer is the one who writes little and often. In the first place, if you haven’t hit the reader with some powerful emotions in 60,000 words, you sure as hell aren’t going to do it by ploughing on to 120,000. And in the second place, by writing two shorter books instead of one bloody great long one you obviously stand a better chance of increasing your royalty income. Especially if you’re any good. Because the delighted reader, having found one satisfactory book, immediately goes looking for the rest of your oeuvre.

Compare McCall Smith’s prolific output with that of Louis de Bernieres: ten years between Captain Corelli and the next one; and Tom Wolfe, who had an eleven-year year gap after Bonfire of the Vanities. Simple arithmetic surely tells us that, other things being equal, the writer who gives the fans a couple of books a year is going to generate greater revenue. Think Josephine Cox.

Of course, there are those who feel themselves to be well above such sordid considerations as earning money. Because they write Literature. Their work is Art. And it’s Art because they Express Themselves. They write only when the Muse strikes, and they are uninfluenced by the thought of cash. Until, of course, it comes time to seek a subsidy from the Arts Council. Then they’re the first in line.

The Da Vinci Code -- again

Yesterday’s Times law supplement had an article about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Brown’s alleged plagiarism of an earlier book by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (plus Henry Lincoln), The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Unfortunately you have to register to read it.

The article, which was written by Margaret Tofalides and Alasdair Bleakley, of Addleshaw Goddard’s media group, echoed my own earlier forecast (post of 17 September) that Baigent and Leigh will have a hard time proving that Brown copied enough of their work to get them any compensation.

However, I do have one little problem with Tofalides’s and Bleakley’s analysis. They say that, ‘according to Baigent and Leigh, Brown has borrowed heavily from their novel.’

Well, m’Lud -- if I may have permission to speak – it is, admittedly, some years since I read the Baigent and Leigh opus on the holy grail, and I did, admittedly, consider it a work of quite remarkable imagination at the time, but it was not, unless my faculties have deteriorated to an extent greater than hitherto suspected, a novel. No, m’Lud. By no means.

By way of evidence, m’Lud, I submit the fact that Amazon has the book classified as religion and spirituality, history. The publisher (Random House/Arrow) has it under religion and beliefs. The British Library catalogue has both the 1982 and the 1996 editions of the book classified as Dewey decimal number 001, which is the knowledge section. (My own novels, by contrast, turn up in class 823.) The book also has an index and a bibliography, which should give readers a clue as to its nature. It is said to be based on ten years of research. It may, for all I know, be a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end, but the authors appear to believe that they are dealing in fact.

So, whatever else Baigent et al may be alleging in their case against Dan Brown, it is unlikely to be that he copied the plot of their novel.

The Best of Friends

The Best of Friends 11 is a collection of monochrome photographs, edited by Roger Maile. If you are looking for a Christmas present for someone with a serious interest in photography, this would do very well. It's not that all the images in the book are perfect -- far from it -- but they will at least provide a photographer with ample food for thought.

About twelve years ago, Roger Maile set up a group known as the Friends of Creative Monochrome -- Creative Monochrome being the name of the company he was then running (now replaced by Arem Publishing). His intention was to increase participation in monochrome photography, and, no doubt, to increase the profits of his company. Each year since then he has edited and published an annual volume of photographs, the final selection being made from a much larger number of prints submitted for his consideration by members of the Friends group.

To the layman, monochrome might mean black and white, but almost from the beginning of photography the practitioners of the art have used various chemicals to add 'tone' or colour to their images. That practice continues today. Indeed in the digital age it is easier to achieve consistency in this area than it ever was before. For the most part, however, the photographs in this collection have the look and feel of black and white prints.

This year, the actual printing of the collection has for the first time been done in the four-colour process, thus allowing much improved reproduction, even of those images which have no visible toning at all. It is hard to imagine how the printing of monochrome photographs could be done any better than in this volume, and both the editor and his printers, DAP (Sussex) Ltd, deserve congratulation.

The Best of Friends 11 is essentially the work of amateur photographers. However, they would, I think, claim to be trying to work to the highest standards of photography, and therefore it is not unreasonable, I feel, to judge them by the highest standards. So now let us consider the images themselves.

There are 172 of them in all, selected from a total submission of some 2500 prints. As you would expect, with such a large field to choose from, the technical standard is impeccable. Unfortunately, that does not mean that all the prints are interesting, even to someone (like me) with a fifty-year record of involvement in, and appreciation of, this form of photography.

The choice of images, and their arrangement in the book, undoubtedly reflects the editor's taste; it could hardly be otherwise, and there is no point in complaining about that. But it does seem to be a fact that many of the photographers represented here seem to be quite happy to produce prints which could have been made at any time in the last 50 years; or even in the last 150 years.

This thought having struck me, I went to the bookshelf and took down a copy of a similar book which was published fifty years ago: Photograms of the Year 1954 (PY54). This book was the fifty-ninth in an annual series. The title, by the way, is not a misprint: 'photogram' is simply an archaic word for a photograph.

A review of the images in Best of Friends 11 (BF11) soon reveals that they are very little different from those in PY54. In both volumes we have, for instance, pictures of cute kids; kittens; portraits of noble working men; trees covered in snow; castles; classical nudes; quaint-looking foreigners; flowers in vases; moody landscapes; and so on.

The quality of the image as printed on the paper is, of course, far superior in BF11, but then one would hope so. Apart from that, nothing much has changed. It would be invidious to single out any particular print, perhaps, but one print in BF11 has contrived, through a combination of filter, lith printing and grain, to emulate almost exactly the feeling and tone of an image reproduced in PY54, the latter exhibiting all the limitations of the printing process as it then existed.

It gets worse. Worse, that is, if you hope for some sort of originality in photographs, as opposed to a demonstration of mastery of (admittedly difficult) technical skills. PY54 includes, at the back, a series of images from the previous hundred years, pictures produced by the 'early masters of pictorial photography'. Of these, Julia Cameron's 1867 portrait of Henry Longfellow could be set between plates 137 and 138 of BF11, and, if they were otherwise unidentified, I would defy anyone to date any of them accurately. They are all three pictures of bearded men, with little to distinguish them.

As for the nudes... Well, it has been a long-standing tradition in 'serious' amateur photography, continuing even unto this day, that no nude must ever be suspected, in the slightest degree, of generating so much as the memory of an erection in a male viewer. Nudes must be chaste, bloodless, and wholly unerotic. Given this tradition, I have to say that I prefer those which appeared in PY54, particularly as one of them is by the wonderful Joan Craven. It is a notable fact that some of the very best nudes have been taken by women photographers: e.g. Rosalind Maingot, Yvonne Gregory, and the peerless Eva Grant.

What are we to make of all this?

Well, if you want a demonstration of fine-quality traditional darkroom printing, then BF11 will provide it. And that has its own value and interest. But if you want cutting-edge stuff, a demonstration of the possibilities of the digital era (and I'm not talking about Photoshop 'special effects') then, with one or two exceptions, it ain't here.

There is nothing here which is dangerous, disturbing, or even adventurous. You could show the book to your great-aunt Jane and she would think it was lovely. All the images in BF11 are safe, polite, and, frankly, dull. The photographers represented here here have all mastered the technique of their medium; but, having acquired this mastery, they don't seem to know what to do with it.

But perhaps that's just a result of the editor's choice. I get the feeling that, just as the original manuscript of Harry Potter was turned down by every publisher in London save one, a budding Dan Burkholder or Nan Goldin, or even Michael Kenna, would not find a place in the Best of Friends series.

Speaking of Michael Kenna, I am reminded that, on an internet newsgroup about photography, I once read a message from a member of a traditional UK camera club. Someone had recommended that he should take a look at the work of Michael Kenna. He had done so, he said, and on the whole he 'didn't think much of Michael Kenna's print quality.' This counts as the single silliest statement that I have ever read on the internet, an arena in which foolishness is not hard to come by.

As it happens, Michael Kenna has had one-man exhibitions of his work in major galleries and museums all over the world; he has produced books which sold out their 10,000 initial print run without difficulty and were then reprinted; and he currently sells prints for $1000 and upwards. If it is indeed true that Michael Kenna's print quality isn't much good, then the rest of us need to get our print quality amputated at the earliest opportunity.

And that's the problem with BF11. The print quality is superb. But there's something missing.

No nannies needed for them

Once upon a time there were two smart girls, Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, who worked as children's nannies to wealthy New York families. In the course of time Kraus and McLaughlin wrote a novel (The Nanny Diaries) about a girl who worked as a nanny for a wealthy New York family. The book was, no doubt, complete fiction from beginning to end.

The Nanny Diaries was reportedly a substantial success, selling two million copies. Thereafter, however, things did not go altogether smoothly. The girls changed agents, changed publishers, and were, as you might expect, subject to a certain amount of backbiting and jealousy among the writing community. Who were these two upstarts? And where did they get their creative-writing degrees? What? They haven't got degrees? Banish them to outer space! Rumour had it, moreover, that the two girls had lost their heads altogether and were demanding to be treated like movie stars.

Well, on Friday last the Rocky Mountain News published an interview with our brave girls which proved that most of these rumours were, also as you might expect, more or less complete balls. The girls are currently touring the US to plug their number two book, Citizen Girl, which is about a young lady who is pursuing a career rather than bed partners.

'A lot of the reporting on us and our publishing journey is frequently made out to be infinitely more dramatic than it is,' said Kraus, adding that changing agents and publishers is much more common than gets reported.

The publishers of The Nanny Diaries declined book number two because it was too different from the first one. You see? Haven't I told you, over and over again, that if you do have a success your publisher will expect you to rewrite it, year after year, until well beyond retirement age. But these two young ladies had the balls (metaphorically speaking) to say no. I salute that.

Then they signed with Random House, a contract which was reportedly worth $2 million for a two-book deal. Eventually they hit an impasse with Random House, and they had to pay back the advance to be free to go elsewhere. And here is the bit which really caught my eye. Paying back the advance was not all that difficult, the girls say, because the money was to be paid 'in very tiny increments parcelled out.'

This confirms another of my contentions, which would be hard to prove because it is in everyone's interests to lie -- but I have long maintained that many of these big-money contracts are not worth nearly as much as the announced figures would suggest, because of the small print.

I would be willing to bet quite a lot of my own cash that almost any advance which is newsworthy enough to get reported in the press is in fact hedged around with so many conditions and clauses that the quoted figure has only a tenuous relationship with reality.

So the girls weren't too bothered by the fact that, with two books under their belt, they were already on their second agent and third publisher. And, having read their interview, neither am I. It seems to me that Kraus and Laughlin have (if I may mix my metaphors somewhat) their heads screwed on straight and their feet planted firmly on the ground.

These two are in the business of writing commercial fiction. And, despite some iffy reviews of Citizen Girl, they seem to be making a pretty good fist of it. Naturally, none of this goes down well with the literary brigade, whose heads are well above cloud level, and who live in a dream world.

Big sellers

On 1 December the Scotsman ran an article by Danuta Kean (linked to by booktrade.info) about the current state of the bestseller lists. Unfortunately, you have to register to get access to it today.

Incidentally, and not that it's particularly relevant except for the proofreaders and pedants among you, the classic text on big-selling books refers to them as 'best sellers' -- two words. (80 Years of Best Sellers, by Alice Payne Hackett.) The Oxford Concise uses a hyphen, best-sellers, as does the Scotsman, and I use one word, bestsellers. So does the Daily Telegraph. You can take your pick.)

Danuta Kean is, I believe, a freelance journalist, and will doubtless conjure up an article out of the slimmest materials, and good luck to her. Her piece in the Scotsman includes both useful information and some unrealistic conclusions which I doubt whether even she really believes, because she's much too well informed.

First, she quotes us some actual figures for sales of books, as reported by Nielsen Bookscan. Such figures are not all that often reported in the press, largely, I suspect, because subscribers to Bookscan have to pay a hell of a lot of money for the data, and they naturally don't pass it on for free. Anway, the lovely Danuta tells us that Jon Snow's memoirs have sold about 9,000 copies. Since HarperCollins are reported to have paid an advance of £600,000 for the book, this is what you might call a flop.

There are other flops in recent months too. Greg Dyke's book on the Iraq row (£500,000 paid, again by HarperCollins) has sold 6,000, and Rageh Omaar's book, also on Iraq, has managed 16,000 copies for another £600,000 investment, this time by Penguin.

Actually we knew the broad outlines of these situations before, but it does no harm to be reminded.

By contrast, Danuta points out that some of the smaller publishers have recently had some unexpected hits. She quotes the autobiography of Katie Price, aka Jordan, the many books of Alexander McCall Smith, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and so forth.

All of this, Danuta suggests, constitutes 'a reversal of the natural laws of publishing'. Well yes. And then again, no.

The article has earned Danuta a few guineas, and I don't begrudge her that, but nothing has changed. For at least thirty years, and probably longer, publishers have been paying out large sums of money for books which they thought would be sure-fire bestsellers, only to find that the public made loud raspberry noises when actually confronted with the product.

Equally, there have been countless times in the past when a book, bought for tuppence ha'penny, suddenly took off and started to sell in vast numbers, catching the publisher completely cold. Danuta mentions the famous case of the first Harry Potter book, which can never be mentioned too often for it remains a lesson to us all. (Incidentally, and again this is of interest only to real publishing groupies, Danuta says that the book was rejected by 20 publishers, which is a higher figure than I have seen before, and describes the advance paid as £3000; previous figures which have appeared in reasonably reliable places have been £2000 and £2500.)

I don't know about you, but I have largely lost interest in the bestseller lists. Most bestsellers these days are manufactured by the time-honoured (and often effective) methods of pouring lots of money into advertising, getting the book featured on Richard and Judy, getting it reviewed in high places, planting stories in gossip columns, et cetera. By and large, the only people with the money and other resources to do all this are the big firms. Little firms, generally speaking, don't have a hope. Unless, of course, their author happens to be Jordan; she, for some reason which I am too old to understand, seems to have the knack of getting her picture in the newspapers without the publisher having to pay for the space.

Self-publishers please note. Despite the sudden spate of articles (including another one by Danuta) telling us that self-publishing is a quick way to a small fortune, it ain't gonna happen. Stop dreaming.

Alzheimer's and literary style

Most of yesterday's broadsheets, e.g. the Guardian, carried a report of some research carried out by Peter Garrard, of the institute of cognitive neuroscience at University College, London. Garrard and his colleagues compared the early novels of Iris Murdoch with her final work, and concluded that, towards the end of her life, her vocabulary had dwindled and her language had become simpler. This, they suggested, provided evidence of Alzheimer's disease some time before the writer was actually diagnosed as suffering from that condition.

Well, there seems to be no doubt that Iris Murdoch did suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and I am quite prepared to believe that this showed up in the way she wrote. However, there are a couple of points which I would like to make in relation to Garrard's research and in relation to Iris Murdoch's writing generally.

First, it would come as no surprise to me if, over the course of a writing career lasting twenty or thirty years, a writer's style did become simpler, using a larger proportion of short words. From casual, rather than scientific, observation, it seems to me that young writers, particularly in the literary genre, do tend to think it clever to use great long rambling sentences (the Faulkner influence) and to employ words with a multiplicity of syllables. Their style, in short, is consciously and deliberately sesquipidalian. And ten to one you've had to go to the dictionary to find out what that means. Young people think it's clever to do that sort of thing, and it isn't. It is entirely possible, I hope, that in the course of doing a few books, and listening to some wise advisers, a writer might learn to write in a more readily comprehensible manner.

After all, the whole point of fiction is to create emotion, and the whole point of non-fiction is to convey information. Neither objective is achieved by being long-winded and obscure. Faulkner once criticised Hemingway on the grounds that he never used a word which would oblige the reader to consult a dictionary. But Hemingway's response, which I fully endorse, was that he was trying to produce emotion, and you don't do that by using words that the reader can't understand.

In non-fiction, exactly the same applies, of course. Some decades ago there was a famous American journalist called Ed Murrow. Towards the end of his career, Murrow was told by an eminent professor of English that the prof had identified the secret of Murrow's success. It was short sentences. Murrow's comment was that he didn't think short sentences were much of a secret.

So, back to Iris Murdoch. Yes, Peter Garrard and his friends are probably right. Iris's last book probably does reveal early signs of Alzheimer's. But it is at least possible, in theory, that she had decided to write in a way which could be understood by people who don't actually have a PhD and an IQ of 175.

The second point I want to make relates to the actual examples of Iris Murdoch's prose which Garrard quotes. The Guardian gives us two sentences (only), one from an early novel, The Sea, The Sea, and one from her last book, Jackson's Dilemma. Here is the first sentence (and I am assuming that the Guardian quoted it correctly, though with the Grauniad you can never be quite sure):

The chagrin, the ferocious ambition which James I am sure quite unconsciously, prompted in me was something which came about gradually and raged intermittently.

This, I repeat, is just one sentence, presumably chosen at random but intended to be fairly typical of Iris's early style. It would be grossly unfair to read too much into one sentence, but what can we say about it?

Well, if I had read this sentence in isolation, not knowing who had written it, I would say that it seems thoroughly sloppy. It is a sentence written by someone who is writing on automatic pilot, putting down the thoughts pretty much as they popped into her head, and not bothering to arrange them in a sensible order once they were set down on paper. Furthermore, the punctuation stinks. It is the kind of construction that you might expect to find in a letter dictated by a busy estate agent.

What on earth is the woman on about? Chagrin seems to me to have nothing to do with raging ambition, though the connection may be clear if you read the sentence in context. Even so, the whole thing screams out for an editor's pencil, or, better still, a complete rewrite on the part of the author, who suddenly realises (as you do) that what she has written down in the full flood of inspiration doesn't actually make much sense.

Let us now look at the sentence quoted from her last book, Jackson's Dilemma.

Owen had laid out a little table with whisky and red wine and orange juice and ham sandwiches and plums and cherry cake.

Dr Garrard tells us (and I believe him) that the sentence from The Sea, The Sea contains 24 tokens of 22 different word types, and that the second sentence contains 25 tokens of 20 word types; over the course of a large text these differences become highly significant.

Stylistically, however, the second sentence seems to me to be an improvement. Admittedly, all those 'ands' are a bit odd -- almost childlike -- but they don't bother me unduly. And at least the meaning is crystal clear. The difference between the two styles is, however, ascribed in this case to incipient Alzheimer's, rather than a conscious decision to adopt a simpler style.

Unfortunately, Iris Murdoch had little incentive to change anything. Ever. She was told, by a host of sycophantic critics, early in her career, that she was a terrific writer, and was frequently described as 'the most brilliant woman in England'; so why consider change? The fact that there were masses of people, like me, who tried to read one of her early books, found it impenetrable, and never bothered to try again, doesn't seem to have disturbed Iris or anyone on her team.

So, at the end of her life Iris has become another of those well known literary figures (such as Sylvia Plath) who are talked and written about a great deal but are hardly ever read. Such is the fate of writers who believe their own publicity.

In 2001 a film was made about Iris Murdoch's life. The young Iris was played by Kate Winslet, and the older, sick woman was played by Judi Dench. In interviews both actresses revealed that, although they admired Iris Murdoch enormously, neither of them had actually got around to reading any of her books. Kate claimed that she didn't have time. Well you don't do you, being an actress and that.

Kala Trobe: The Magick Bookshop

Through some process of serendipity, fate, or karma (I am not sufficiently familiar with the vocabulary of magick, or esotericism, to know the right term) I came across a copy of Kala Trobe’s The Magick Bookshop in my local public library.

The Magick Bookshop is a novel, with the subtitle Stories of the Occult. It is published by Llewellyn, a firm I have not come across before. Based in St Paul, Minnesota, they specialise in books on wicca, paganism, shamanism, magick, and the like. Founded in 1901, they are obviously well established and successful.

Kala Trobe’s book is a most unusual read. I might have referred to it as ‘original’ but that is a term which I try to avoid. Books labelled as ‘original’ usually aren’t, being based very firmly on someone else’s work. And, if they are truly original, they normally aren’t much good. So I won’t say that The Magick Bookshop is original; but it is certainly unusual and different. I recommend it to you, but I do offer a warning: you have to be prepared to be open to some new ideas. If you are one of those feet-on-the-ground people who can’t bear to read any form of fantasy, science fiction, or imaginative/speculative work, then this probably isn’t for you.

The novel takes the form of six linked stories; they all centre around people who work in, or patronise, Mr Malynowsky’s antiquarian bookshop in Oxford.

The book is clearly based on the author’s personal experience. The blurb tells us that she has been ‘rigorously trained in magick and occult symbology’, and that at one time she ran a bookshop such as the one described in her novel.

I don’t think I need tell you much more than this. The writing is fluent, practised, and eminently readable. According to the author’s web site, another series of stories may appear soon.

I can’t say that I am overly familiar with occult fiction, but Llewellyn seems to publish a fair bit of it. What I do remember is that fifty years ago the English writer Dennis Wheatley had a whole series of bestsellers based on the occult. The books remain in print (312 listed on UK Amazon) and a few fans remain loyal. So there is an audience, and perhaps Kala is the one who will hit the big time; she seems to have the talent.

Odds and ends

I have to go to a funeral later this morning so time is short.

Booktrade.info carries an announcement that Lady Colin Campbell has a new book out soon: The Real Diana, to be published by Arcadia Books, 6 December. And yes, it is about that Diana -- the one whose voice can currently be heard on American television, waffling about her infrequent and unsatisfactory sex with Charles, if today's Times is to be believed.

If the new book is anything like that author's The Royal Marriages it should be hot stuff. The Royal Marriages made Kitty Kelley's opus look a bit tame, in my view. Campbell maintained, through various not so subtle hints and nudges, that at least two of the Queen's children were fathered by someone other than her husband. And there was lots more in the same vein.

In The Real Diana Campbell will reveal (or allege, according to your taste) that Diana had an abortion while married to Charles, and had flings with King Juan Carlos of Spain and the Earl of Pembroke. What with that and falling in love with her bodyguard (today's Times again), the girl certainly seems to have got around.

And if you're wondering how Lady Colin Campbell comes to have such an odd name, I can tell you that it's because she married a British aristocrat, Lord Colin Campbell, and takes the name from him. They are now divorced. I can also tell you, though you may not wish to know, that the lady was born in Jamaica with some serious genital malformations (fused labia and deformed clitoris), and was brought up as a boy. Later surgery enabled her to have normal sexual relations as a female, though she cannot have children. Lady Colin has herself told this story in some detail.

The only other thing I have time for today is to point you to an article in the Guardian about the annual English nonsense about 'Books of the Year'. Pretty much every major newspaper and literary magazine invites a team of well-known names to give the titles of their three favourite books of the year. Not surprisingly, this leads to an enormous amount of mutual back-scratching and 'you plug mine and I'll plug yours' type of thing. No one in their right mind takes the slightest notice of it. But the Guardian reveals that the annual pantomime continues because it provides pages of almost free copy! The contributors either get a very modest fee or a bottle of wine. No wonder they use the opportunity to mention their own and their friends' books.

Another one for the optimists

There is a monthly magazine (in the UK) called Book and Magazine Collector; it doesn't seem to have a web presence. For the most part it is aimed at the serious collector, as the title suggests, but I buy a copy occasionally to see who is advertising what. The magazine also includes general articles about the various editions of writers' work, how much they are worth, and the circumstances in which they were produced and published.

Issue no. 250 (Christmas 2004) has an article on a writer called Deborah Lawrenson. Deborah, it seems, published three novels through Heinemann in the 1990s, and then hit a snag with her fourth. The publisher 'found much to praise' but thought that 'the book would be difficult to market'. In other words, as usual in today's hard-nosed commercial world, her first three hadn't sold well enough for the publisher to want to go with the fourth. And rather than trust the author to go on developing and learning her trade, they dumped her. Which is so common an occurrence as to be worth hardly a mention.

However, in this case Deborah decided to publish her book herself. And she seems to have made a success of it. So much so that a couple of other publishers (Bloomsbury and Random House) were prompted to show an interest, and the latter firm will now publish a paperback version of the new book, The Art of Falling, next year.

Well, congratulations to the author, Deborah Lawrenson. She has invested a good deal of time, money, and effort, and won herself a renewed lease of life as a result. So hers is another success story which will be added to the list of self-published authors who have made good.

Should you be remotely thinking of publishing your own book yourself, you may now feel the urge to google the words "self publishing" and see what comes up. When you do that, you will find that there are a multiplicity of firms ready and willing to take your money to provide the relevant services. And, I dare say, most of them will do a reasonable job. Deborah Lawrenson used a company called Matador; judging by its web site, this is a great deal more respectable and responsible than most.

But you won't have to go far in exploring the web sites of these service providers to find an article which assures you that almost every famous writer in the entire history of literature started out by publishing his or her own work. Trafford, for instance, gives us a list including Alexander Dumas, Edgar Allan Poe, and Margaret Atwood. Advocate House reminds us of Mark Twain, James Redfield, and John Grisham. And even so straitlaced a body as the UK Publishers Association mentions Jill Paton, Timothy Mo, and Susan Hill. The longest list is to be found in the self-publishing hall of fame.

Yes, dear friends, no doubt it is true that a substantial number of famous writers have at one time or another gone in for publishing their work themselves (usually, I suspect, at the start of the careers). But so, if I may make so bold, what?

Does it follow, as night follows day, that J. Bloggs, or Freda Farnsbarns, the unknowns from Clapham and Blackpool respectively, will, after arranging for the private publication of their own dazzling novels, also become as rich and famous as John Grisham? I venture to suggest not, and for a variety of reasons.

For the chief of these reasons I am indebted to Nicholas Nassim Taleb, who refers to it several times in his work. It is a circumstance known, I believe, as survivorship bias, and attention was first drawn to it in 1620 by Francis Bacon.

Bacon, it seems, was aware of a number of shipwrecked mariners who had escaped drowning and had ascribed their survival to the fact that they had previously offered up suitable prayers and had generally 'paid their vows' -- which I suspect means that they had given some money to the church in order to get special treatment from God. And lo and behold, when in due course their ship had been wrecked on a rocky coast, they had been cast ashore with little more than a wet suit of clothes to trouble them -- thus proving the efficacy of prayer.

Except, of course, as Bacon pointed out, their survival illustrated absolutely nothing at all other than the capriciousness of fate. The survivors, we are told, had their portraits painted and became famous men (the church naturally wanting to publicise the good fortune which follows from the payment of large fees). But where, Bacon asked, were the pictures and other details of the countless mariners who had also offered up earnest prayers, and paid out large sums of money, but had drowned nevertheless?

Exactly the same question could be asked about those who publish their own books. Yes, over the last couple of centuries, we can find examples of writers who, at one point or another, have paid for the publication of some of their work, and have then gone on to become rich and famous. But how many of them are there, when compared with the countless thousands who have also shelled out large sums of hard-earned money, only to sell three copies and remain entirely anonymous?

As ever, a little logic and clear thinking would not go amiss in the mad worlds of writing and publishing.

And just in case you've forgotten, let me add that I publish my own work through my own small press, Kingsfield Publications, and amazing stuff it is too. Buy something today. Please.