Monday morning

Bullshit jobs

Galleycat reports on a launch party for Stanley Bing's book 101 Bullshit Jobs... and How to Get Them. And there's an excerpt from the book, dealing with agents and book editors, which might amuse you. Of book editors, Bing says, 'the more [money] you make, the more access you have to the highest, rocket-grade bullshit imaginable.' He also adds: 'The great book editor is at once a gifted salesperson, an arbiter of taste, a babysitter of lost souls, and a closet boulevardier. God bless them, both of them.'

Sounds to me as if he's been there and done it.

Boris on why women read

In the Telegraph, Boris Johnson has an article about why women read fiction. Actually it's not only about that: it's a wide-ranging article dealing with social changes in the UK. But when we get to the reading fiction bit, here is Boris's conclusion:

The reason women devour so much fiction is that it is the only place where they can find a certain idea of masculinity. It is a spirit that has been regulated out of the workplace and banished from the classroom.

Women turn to fiction, I would guess, because it is the last reservation for men who are neither violent thugs nor politically correct weeds, where a girl can still get her bodice ripped without the bodice ripper being locked up.

Now that seems about right to me, although Michael Schaub, of Bookslut, who led me to the article, didn't seem to think much of it.

Most UK readers of this blog will know who Boris is, but in case you don't you can find out on Wikipedia. Personally I wish he was Prime Minister.

Calling Joanna Trollope fans

OK, here's the deal. On 26 June the BBC World Service will be interviewing Joanna Trollope on the World Book Club programme. You can find details on the BBC's appropriate web page. The discussion will centre on one book in particular, The Rector's Wife.

If you have read this book, and would like to ask the author a question about it, then here's your chance. Send an email to worldbookclub@bbc.co.uk. You can use this address right up until the day of the broadcast, but the sooner the better.

If you visit the BBC site, you will see that the same page has links to numerous previous interviews which you can still listen to: about 30 or 40 of them, including all the usual literary suspects but also Martin Cruz Smith, Ken Follett, Ruth Rendell, Terry Pratchett, and other big commercial names.

More on the Book Depository

New online retailer the Book Depository, mentioned here some ten days ago, is a bigger and more elaborate outfit than I had realised, though I still don't think that the home page makes it immediately obvious what the site actually does. And as I'm a simple sort of chap I like to be told these things. Anyway, just how big and elaborate a business it is is explained in Publishing News.

Book sales in Europe

British and American publishers have for some time been fighting a small, quiet war over the right to sell books in English on the continent of Europe. Now the bosses of some European book businesses have made it plain that they want an open market. Details in booktrade.info.

Jordan on horseback

We have already noted, you and I (15 March to be precise), that Katie Price, aka the stupendously well endowed (if with assistance) model Jordan, is to publish a novel in July. Entitled Angel, the cover looks quite remarkably dull to me.

However, there is good news. Publishing News reports that Katie is to plug the book by riding a horse down Oxford Street, dressed as an angel. Now angels aren't usually dressed like Lady Godiva, dammit, but Jordan is a lively lass and I dare say she would do it if there were enough requests. Go on, write in. Her publisher (Arrow/Random House) don't have a web site for her listed on their list of author sites, so you'll just have to write to them. Not that they want you to, of course. Publishers don't want to be bothered by mere members of the public: see their contact page, which definitely warns you off.

By the way, Angel has so far subbed 150,000 copies. 'Subbed' in the UK book trade, means ordered by the retail trade in advance of publication.

Irvine Welsh interview

The Book Standard has an interview with Irvine Welsh, of Trainspotting fame.

Treat to look forward to

Hey, you know what I found out? Susanna Clarke has a new book coming out. In October, subject to change. Entitled The Ladies of Grace Adieu, it's being issued by Bloomsbury. Looks like a collection of short stories. Well, she published a few of those while she was writing Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and I thought they were pretty good.

How not to advertise

Saturday's Times has a Books section, and then another section entitled The Knowledge: this latter deals with 'the cultural week', and has info on films, theatre, music, galleries, et cetera, plus the week's TV and radio listings.

In last Saturday's The Knowledge there was an advert for a book entitled The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole by Stephanie Doyon. The ad occupied most of a page, and advertising space in the Times is not cheap.

Apart from a picture of the book, the ad ran as follows (all in capital letters): Stand by me meets a confederacy of dunces in this enchanting story spanning three generations in small town America.

Now... What the fuck, as I believe the young people say. I tried this on Mrs GOB, and it meant absolutely nothing to her. It does mean something to me, but not a lot. Stand by me is presumably a reference to the 1986 film of that name, which I never saw but which is, I suppose, tolerably well known if you happen to have been around in 1986 and were paying any attention to films at the time. All I remember about it is that it was about a bunch of boys.

Then there's a confederacy of dunces. This is, equally presumably, a reference to the novel of that name which won the Pulitzer prize in 1981. I tried to read it and found it the most excruciatingly dull book that I'd read in a very long time. It is chiefly famous because the author committed suicide; it is said that he became depressed following numerous rejections of his novel, which was only published through the efforts of his mother after his death. As for what it's about -- I remember nothing.

So -- what we now have is an expensive advert for a paperback (no price given), published by Bloomsbury, and the only thing this ad tells us is that the book might, just conceivably, if you are extraordinarily well read and well movied, remind you of a couple of things which appeared more than twenty years ago.

Does this strike you as a good way to spend a marketing budget?

Hope for the great unwashed

There's an ever-growing band of hopefuls (it seems to me) who believe that if you put stuff out in one form or another, even give it away free, and if it's really really good, then sooner or later it will attract the attention of a big-time publisher, and fame and fortune will be yours for ever more.

Should you happen to believe that particiular article of faith, then your faith will be reinforced by a Joel Rickett report in the Guardian (link from booktrade.info). 'The cannier conglomerate publishers,' says Joel, 'are scouring blogs and specialist websites to find promising material. HarperCollins's paperback team, Harper Perennial, has turned up three books from small publishers that have created a stir; each will be reworked, redesigned and marketed to a wider audience.'

These three are Michael Norton's 'subversive ethical guide', 365 Ways to Change the World; a set of fantasy short stories, Magic for Beginners, by 'the cult American author' Kelly Link; and Belinda Rathbone's The Guynd, which traces the true story of how an American art historian fell in love with an eccentric Scottish laird.

Susan Hill on the Orange Prize

Last Saturday's (17 June) Times quoted Susan Hill's blog reference to the Orange Prize, which she helped to judge in 1996. 'The management team is feminist PC new Labour personified. It is the only prize I have judged where I was really, really unhappy with the whole tone of the way it was run.'

That blog entry was on 24 May. On 17 June Susan notes that what she writes is being noticed, as well she might, because what she has to say is always relevant and timely, and comes with a welath of experience behind it. Her blog is rapidly becoming essential reading.

On 17 June, for instance, she says this: 'The fact is that a lot - a lot, a lot, a lot - of people who read and buy books, now take absolutely no notice of the literary pages of the papers - indeed, they probably never glance at them.'

Damn right, sweetheart. Me included. Well, I do glance, but only to see what silly ideas they've come up with now. Like that book advert, mentioned above.

PDF made simple

Someone wrote to me a while back and asked about how to make PDF files. I gave such advice as I could, though I am really the last person to ask about technical matters.

Basically, if you want to make really professional PDFs, you need the Adobe Acrobat programme, which is very expensive. I have an early version, which I used on Windows 95, but it doesn't work on Windows XP. I wonder why? Can Adobe be encouraging me to buy an upgrade?

There are various medium-priced programs, such as Serif Page Plus, which will allow you to convert a page layout to PDF. Serif is quite a good programme, but it takes a many hours to learn how to use it.

And there are also some free conversion programs. The trouble with the free ones, at any rate those of them that I've tried in the past, is that they sometimes alter the layout of the page when doing the conversion. This is something that I find totally unacceptable. In fact it drives me nuts.

However... Over the weekend I read an article which mentioned pdf995. This is free, if you can put up with a few adverts, and only costs $9.95 if you want to get rid of the ads. More to the point, it seems to work. I have only tried it on three files so far, but I deliberately chose as test pieces three files which I thought might give trouble, and the PDFs emerged just fine.

Much more testing is needed before I decide if I'm completely happy. And, as you would expect, this program lacks any kind of control over the extent to which images, for example, are compressed or not compressed.

For a lot of people, however, that kind of refinement is unnecessary anyway. Take a look. It's easy to download and absolutely straightforward to use (even for a non-techie like me).

Ragbag

I must be getting old. Thought I had posted some of this stuff on Monday, but, unless I am even older than I thought, I didn't. So here it is now, plus some later stuff accumulated during the week.

Post Secrets

Seth Godin's post about blog traffic led me to PostSecret, a bizarre and sometimes disturbing place where people write their secrets on a postcard. For those who care about novelty, this is a wholly new 'art form' (for want of a better word), enabled by the internet. Either that or it's a clever wheeze to make money out of other people's work. There's a book involved.

Read the small print before you contribute. And it's hard on the eyes, because it's one of those white text on black background things that drive me crazy.

Was, were, and the subjunctive

A commenter on the ghostwriting post takes me to task for writing 'If I was...' instead of 'If I were...' In other words, I am told that I should have used the subjunctive mood.

Well, yes. And then again, no.

When I was writing the sentence complained of, I did actually pause before tapping further on the keyboard. I contemplated writing 'If I were...' and decided against it.

Why? Well, because of a general sense that the language is changing. And because a blog is not the most formal of contexts. And besides, I said to myself, will anyone not understand me if I write 'If I was...'? I decided not.

But, for the record, I have now consulted Authority on the question of the subjunctive.

Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd edition, as revised by Burchfield (and not, I understand, in itself universally admired) says that the standard reference work on historical English syntax has 156 pages on the subjunctive. Which is too many for me. But in the conclusion of his own (rather complicated) article on the subject, Fowler/Burchfield says that the subjunctive 'is seldom obligatory.'

If we go back 58 years to Sir Ernest Gowers's Plain Words, for a mercifully simpler explanation, we find that he does accept that it was common (in 1948) to find the subjunctive used after 'if'. However, after, quoting various instances of the subjunctive, he concludes: 'It is probably true of all of them that the indicative would have been equally correct, and certainly true that the subjunctive has a formal, even pedantic air.'

Well, as you may have noticed, the style of this blog varies wildly between the twenty-first-century informal and the eighteenth-century formal, so you may find all sorts of usages occurring. And I do not guarantee consistency in the use of the subjunctive or anything else. But I don't think I would accept the argument that 'If I was...' is, in and of itself, necessarily wrong.

As to the anonymous commenter's question -- does the ability to spot things like this qualify him as a good ghostwriter -- I suppose my answer to that is that this ability is certainly useful, and, insofar as it is indicative of close attention to detail, it is a Good Thing. But don't count on it to get you a contract.

Rosemary de Courcy

In a quiet way, Rosemary de Courcy is one of the most famous names in UK publishing. She started out (as I recall) as an editor at Futura, a mass-market paperback firm. It was about thirty years ago, when the paperback firms, particularly the American ones, were cutting each other's throats to buy the rights to books. And Rosie sold the US rights to some really rather ordinary bodice-ripper for about $300,000 -- which was quite a lot of money in those days. Hence she became hot.

She and I had a discussion at that time, about the possibility of writing a paperback original, but we never came to any agreement, and the proposed book (Counter-Coup) was later published by Muller.

Since then Rosie has gone onward and upward, but always making use of her very substantial editing skills. Never (so far as I know) tempted to write her own novels, Rosie has always had a keen nose for what is commercial and what can be sold. Really smart, in other words. Never dumb enough to fall for all the lit'ry glamour.

Now it seems, she is planning a move which will give her 'a more flexible career to take beyond pensionable age.' She has joined up with a literary agency (Mulcahy and Viney) and will also continue to provide editorial services to the likes of Maeve Binchy, Penny Vincenzi, and others. Joel Rickett has the story in the Guardian (link from booktrade.info).

Indie bestsellers

Joel Rickett also reports that the Bookseller has started to publish a special bestseller list derived from the sales at 20 leading independent bookshops. This, it is believed, will give a different picture of the trade from the usual lists, which are heavily influenced by supermarket sales. For better or worse, this new list does not seem to be available online.

April Ashley tells all

You have to be quite old, and British, to remember April Ashley. But she was a big name in the tabloids some forty or perhaps fifty years ago. Why? Because April was probably the first bloke in Britain to 'have the operation' and become -- superficially speaking at any rate -- a woman. Now she's written a book.

The book, The First Lady, is written, interestingly enough, 'with' Douglas Thompson. Our Doug, a name not previously known to me, turns out to be one of the heroes of our time, i.e. a ghostwriter (mainly). As a ghost he has helped along the likes of Christine Keeler, Michael Flatley, and Paul Nicholas. What is more he writes showbiz biographies on his own. Just the sort of career, in fact, that sensible writers would aim for.

You can get a broad outline of the April Ashley story from an interview in the Sunday Times. An old show-business friend of mine performed with April in a nightclub in the 1960s. He ended up flat on his back while April, skirts a-twirling, danced above him. 'It's true, it's true!' he yelled.

Yes, I know. Terribly vulgar. But it was that sort of era. (See Boothby, below.)

Jeanette Winterson bereted

Jeanette Winterson reports that she has been 'bereted by two readers, indeed made into something of an escaped goat, for being sufficiently unfamiliar with the English language to imagine there was such a thing as a damp squid.' And she has whole lot more of the same in her entertaining column in last Saturday's Times.

Pot and kettle

Galleycat reports that John Freeman (whoever he), writing on the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors, has been criticising book bloggers who review books and then offer links to an online retailer from which, if a reader buys the book, they get a commission. Freeman claims that this is immoral and removes any shred of credibility that a litblogger might have.

Well, cheeky bugger, is all I can say. As it happens I don't (usually) link to Amazon or anyone else (although I have in the Doug Thompson bit just above), and I can't be arsed to go through the rigmarole of setting up affiliate status anyway. But what about those newspapers which happily accept advertising from publishers and then, by a curious coincidence, review books from said publishers? What are we to make of that, eh Freeman? Whassa matter --cat got your tongue?

The Boothby affair

Unless you're very old, and English, you won't remember, but once upon a time there was a politician called Bob Boothby, who later became Lord Boothby. He had a number of distinctions, not the least of which was that he was bisexual; in that capacity he not only fancied boys, but also fathered a child by the wife of Harold Macmillan, a man who later became Prime Minister (and remained married to the same wife).

The other day, when looking for something quite different, I came across a fascinating short memoir by John Pearson. It seems to have been printed, if I'm reading it right, in the Independent on Sunday on 15 June 1997.

It's too long a story to go into here, but Pearson tells how politicians, journalists, senior police officers, and various others, all saw fit to save Lord Boothby's skin, purely and simply because it suited their own interests to do so. Also involved are various murders and murderers, gay orgies, blackmail, extortion, gangs... Oh and a whole lot more.

None of this is news, really, We've had it all rehearsed in the press and in books, many a time. But John Pearson's article is an interesting read none the less. And, of course, these events have been dealt with in fiction, most notably I suppose by Jake Arnott -- a writer who does not, I'm afraid, impress me, but who has impressed other people. Unless I mistake me, Arnott's character Lord Teddy Thursby has strong echoes of Boothby.

The Pearson article appears on the web site of Bernard O'Mahoney, a writer who specialises in books on crime.

Jesus Christ never was

Never was what? Well, never was at all. Never existed. So, at least, argues Luigi Cascioli, and he has a web site in four languages to prove it.

There's a book involved. Well of course -- there would have to be, wouldn't there? And there's a law suit. And it all links up with the Da Vinci code. But how did you guess? And the web site has masses and masses of other stuff.

If you're looking for the racy bits, try the essay on Nudism and Satanism: complete with pictures. As you would expect, this has lots of stuff about clerical orgies, witchcraft, and black masses.

The most entertaining aspect of all this is that Luigi Cascioli is being represented, at the European Court of Human Rights, by that well known 'important international lawyer' Mr Giovanni di Stefano. If you want to know why that's entertaining, go here, here, and here.

99 Burning

99 Burning's issue 9 is out. It's just as rude, bad-tempered and pushy as ever, urging you to read something or be labelled a dipshit. The article by Jim Cherry, said to be about the publishing industry, seems to me to be about music. Or are we expected to draw parallels?

Litro

Then there's Litro, described as original fiction for the underground -- in more senses than one. What happens is, Mike Fell prints up stories and hands them out free to people going into one of London's underground stations. And you're invited to submit stories of your own.

Well, there's more ways than one to find readers, and some of the stories are also posted online at the Litro site. I recommend Mumbo Jumbo by Lynsey Calderwood. This is, at first sight, tough going because it's written in a kind of Trainspottingese, or Scots. But stick with it -- it's worth it. All in all, the Litro site is more professional and impressive than I thought it was going to be.

Litro also tells me that Foyles Bookshop hold short story readings on the last Friday of every month (in London, that is). Go to Decongested for details. It seems they've contracted Arts Council funding, which can be a fatal disease, so we must hope that they all feel better soon.

Tami Brady on the real You

Tami Brady has a new book out from the Loving Healing Press. Entitled The Complete Being: Finding and Loving the Real You, it is a bit too touchy-feely for me, but it may be exactly what you're looking for.

Tami is an archaeological contractor. (Look, I keep telling you I don't make these things up, OK?) And she is founder, editor, and reviewer for TCM Reviews, which seems to offer an essentially free review service, plus a number of for-pay promotional packages.

Loving Healing Press is what I would describe as a new-age publisher, but it certainly has an interesting range of books which are fully described on the web site. They have also taken advantage of Amazon's facilities to launch a publiblog -- something that I had heard about but not seen before.

The blog offers an intriguing account of how one of the firm's books came to be written: David Powell's autobiographical story of how a tour of duty in Vietnam nearly destroyed him mentally, and how he finally managed to recover.

Bill Liversidge on Octavia Randolph

Bill Liversidge is one of those with some faith in the digital revolution and the internet-viral marketing model -- at any rate as a device for interesting mainstream publishers who might recognise a powerful online performance, in terms of generating readers, and buy a book on the strength of it. But his faith is severely tested by the communication he has had from Octavia Randolph.

Nip over to the Pundy House and read it for yourself. But basically Octavia has concluded that even a large online readership counts for naught in the book worlds of London and New York.

My site receives over 50,000 readers a month, from more than 60 nations. On it I have three complete historical novels, a novella, and scores of essays - over 500,000 words of text. Everything is free....

I'd like to speak to the fact that conventional publishers live in a parallel universe to those of us who publish on the WWW. It wouldn't matter to them how many readers download or access free novels on the internet, because that is just not how they decide their lists.

Hmm. Maybe a rethink is in order.

Octavia's web site has lots of good stuff on it, including an essay on Wyrd: the Role of Fate. I haven't quite figured out yet what impact wyrd has on writers, but I'm working on it. Preliminary interpretation: performing with courage and drive may help you to succeed; but if you're doomed, you're doomed.

And last...

One could go on for ever, it seems. But we must stop somewhere.

If you were wondering where you could buy a set of nipple clamps which can send and receive SMS text messages, and which can simultaneously download knitting patterns off the internet, then I have the answer. They can be found in Little-Frigging-in-the-Wold, where they are manufactured by Norbert Trouser-Quandary.

What a wonderful thing the internet is. Have a nice weekend.

Sue Townsend: Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction

Adrian Mole is not quite up there with Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Harry Potter; but in the UK his recognition quotient can't be far off that of those three other literary giants. Outside the UK I don't think Adrian is anything like so well known; I have a suspicion that he doesn't travel well. No matter, he is much appreciated in England, and this latest book about him is wonderful.

First a few words about Adrian's history; then something about his creator, Sue Townsend. And finally a brief account of the book.

Sue Townsend's The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 was published in 1982. It was, as the title tells us, the diary of an angst-ridden teenager; it was very funny, and a huge seller. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction is, by my count, the sixth in the series, and once again the title tells us where we are: the book is set at the time of the Iraq war (it covers September 2002 to July 2004, to be precise), and at the start of it Adrian is 34.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Adrian has his own web site, where there is lots more information about him.

The onlie begetter of young Adrian is Sue Townsend, a woman who deserves your warmest admiration (though she wouldn't thank me for saying so). Born in 1946, she left school at the age of 15 and had a number of modest jobs in factories and shops. She began writing immediately, but had little success for twenty years. Then she won a prize for a television play, which got her started. Since then she has written quite a number of books and several successful plays. Not the least of these is The Queen and I, which has the royal family deposed from the monarchy and forced to live a normal life on a housing estate in a provincial city; it's also available as a novel.

Sue is a very private person and avoids the celebrity circuit. But I can tell you that she is the mother of five children, is a lifelong Socialist, and since 2001 has been registered blind. Diabetes is what did the damage to her eyes, and you can read all about it in an interview that she gave to Balance, which is a magazine for diabetics.

She still has some small amount of vision, and manages to write by using inch-high letters in thick black marker pen. She only gets about 30 words to a page and reads it back with the aid of a magnifying machine attached to a computer. This is, naturally, a laborious way of working, and I take my hat off to anyone who can write a 460-page novel under those circumstances.

Anyone not yet acquainted with Adrian will soon get the hang of him from the first page of the new novel. He is writing a letting to our glorious leader, Mr Blair. 'Dear Mr Blair,' he begins, in a letter dated 29 September 2002. 'You may remember me -- we met at a Norwegian Leather Industry reception at the House of Commons in 1999.'

In other words, Adrian is one of those people who are really quite bright, but who somehow or other manage to live in a different universe from the rest of us. He is a direct descendant of that other notable diarist, Mr Pooter.

Adrian is currently working in a secondhand-book shop (run by an amiable old gent called Carlton-Hayes); in his spare time he is acting as chairman of a creative-writing group, and he is also worrying about his 17-year-old son, Glenn, who is in the army and may be sent to Iraq.

Adrian has a long history of involvement with women. His great abiding passion is for Pandora Braithwaite, once a teenage girlfriend and now a junior minister in the Blair government. Then there's Sharon, mother of Glenn; there's a Nigerian princess, mother of Adrian's son William, who has been taken to live in Nigeria but misses his Dad. And in the present book Adrian gets himself engaged to the ghastly Marigold, though he can't stand the dreadful neurotic woman, and much prefers her sister Daisy, with whom he has a passionate affair.

On top of that, Adrian succumbs to the contemporary disease of over-spending. People keep sending him these credit cards, you see, and as he's feeling rather depressed about Glenn and the WMD he keeps buying things. By page 267 his minimum monthly repayments already exceed his monthly pay cheque, and the situation deteriorates further after that.

Shining through this portrait of the clueless but well meaning Adrian Mole are a number of political points. Adrian is portrayed as a man whose friends regard him as a kind and likeable person, but as something of a simpleton. He is a man capable of writing things like this: 'How anybody could doubt Mr Blair's word is a mystery to me. The man radiates honesty and sincerity.' So you really don't need to be particularly perspicacious to realise that Sue Townsend has total contempt for Blair and New Labour and their wretched war. At least Adrian's old flame Pandora has the good sense to resign from the government in protest.

In the shape of Adrian's friend Nigel, who is going blind, we also have someone who speaks for the author. Nigel does not take kindly to losing his sight. And he is not grateful when people ask him things like whether his hearing has improved now that he can no longer see. In his spare time Adrian reads Private Eye aloud to Nigel -- an experience which might teach him something about how the world really works -- but Nigel is driven to comment thoughtfully, 'You don't understand half of what you're reading, do you, Moley?'

All in all, this latest episode in the difficult life of Adrian Mole is a delightful read. It is not without its darker passages: you can't run a war without someone getting badly hurt or even killed. But it is a book written by a very warm-hearted, decent woman, and it shows. She equips the hapless Adrian with enough good friends to help him out of all the dreadful messes that he gets himself into, and the ending is a happy one. So much so that it made me cry. But then I always was a sentimental old fool.

Rumour has it that this is to be the last in the Adrian Mole series. That would be sad but, in the circumstances, entirely understandable.

More on the James Joyce copyright

Soon after posting yesterday's piece about the saintly Stephen Joyce and his good work on behalf of humanity, I found a reference in Publishers Lunch to a recent legal challenge to Stephen Joyce's behaviour.

You can read all about it in a press release from Stanford Law School. Basically, the Fair Use Project and Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford is assisting the well known Joyce scholar Carol Shloss in her struggle to establish the right to quote from published and unpublished material relating to James Joyce on a scholarly web site about him.

According to the lawsuit, the Estate and its agent, Stephen Joyce, have a history of threatening and pursuing litigation against persons using Joyce's works. As examples, the lawsuit states that the Estate sued sponsors of a global Internet webcast reading of Ulysses that took place on Bloomsday 1998; that event was supported by the Prime Minister, the President, and other politicians in the Republic of Ireland. In addition, the lawsuit contends that although the Estate does not hold copyright over medical records of Lucia Joyce and many letters relating to her, it has consistently leveraged the threat of denying permission to use James Joyce's works if material relating to Lucia Joyce -- of which the Estate does not approve -- is published.

Thank the Lord for Lawrence Lessig, is all I can say.

Does Sandi Thom show writers how to do it?

About ten days ago we took note of the case of Sandi Thom. Sandi is a young Scottish girl who writes songs, and she took to webcasting concerts of them from her basement flat. As is the way of things in the pop music world, kids started to notice, they emailed and texted other kids, and... all like that.

There were those who questioned some of the statistics about Sandi's claimed viewing numbers and downloads. But hey -- why spoil a good story? And why begrudge a kid a few minutes of fame? And besides, it turns out that Sandi's record company has been sending very heavy-handed legal letters to various newspapers, warning that allegations of an 'internet scam' were not only false but will 'most likely have a significant and long-lasting detrimental effect on a promising new British artiste, at a very critical point in her nascent musical career.' In other words, watch your step, boys.

Well, within the last week Sandi's fame has really taken off, as fame will do from time to time. Last Saturday, for instance, Sandi was on the front cover of the Daily Telegraph magazine, and yesterday she was on the cover of the Times 2 section.

The Times article (very long, by the way) is definitely worth reading for what it says about marketing in the digital age. It emerges that Sandi is not quite as young as you might think, has been around for some time, knows a lot of influential people, and the online audience was boosted by Sandi's management sending off 1 million emails.

But enough about the pop business -- you can read all that for yourself if you want to. What, you will be asking, has this to do with books?

Well, as noted here before, there are those (notably Val Landi) who believe that what the internet has done for the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom it can also do for writers. This new model of achieving success in popular music publishing, some observers say, can also become the new model for book publishing. It is 'a new model that allows emerging artists to bypass the dysfunctional roadblocks of a broken industry.' Book publishing, like music, is said to be 'a broken dysfunctional industry, primed for disruption.'

Hmm. Are we really to believe that this kind of viral, internet-drive, overnight fame can be achieved by writers, in the same way that it can demonstrably be achieved by singer/songwriters?

The problem, as I remarked here on 26 May and also 22 May, is that music is well known for making people (mostly teenagers) go Wow! The kids hear something, which may or may not sound attractive to you and me, and they go Wow! This I've got to have, they say. And they download it for a dollar, or whatever, pirate it, spread the word, text it, phone friends, start fan clubs and so forth.

The great big overwhelming problem for writers, a problem to which I have not yet even seen a suggested solution, is that it is hideously difficult to imagine how a writer might create that kind of Wow! effect.

Yes, we've all read books that we love, and we recommend them to friends. But books are not like songs. History shows that hit songs are often written in twenty minutes on the back of an envelope, by people with very limited musical training. Once a song becomes famous, it is subsequently recorded by ten, twenty, a hundred other artists. It last for fifty years or more. It is instant emotion: three chords of a familiar song and you're hooked again. The emotion is repeated. How many hundred times have you heard 'Hotel California' (or whatever turns you on)? Does it ever pall?

Fiction just simply doesn't work that way. Not even the short story. A short story can't hit you with a powerful emotion in ten seconds, as a song can. What is more, once a short story is read, it's read. You don't really want to read it again. Certainly not as many times as you can listen to a much loved record.

So that's the first and most powerful reason why I doubt that the internet is going to transform the fiction market for writers quite as dramatically as some would argue. Yes, writers can relatively easily find routes to publication, and readers, that weren't there even ten years ago. But instant, (almost) overnight success on the Arctic Monkeys/Sandi Thom model? No.

But... if you're keen to try, here's my prescription.

Viral marketing on the internet works best with young people. So if you want to achieve internet-driven fame, aim for the young. Anything above ten years of age and below twenty.

Do you remember -- well, no, you wouldn't, because you're too young, and some of you aren't English. But from 1922 to 1970 a lady called Richmal Crompton published approximately a book a year featuring a small boy called William. These books were collections of short stories: about 350 stories, all told.

You can find a sample here -- a sample which, incidentally, in its account of a visit to a 'Picture Palace', really shows its 1920s origins, though the small boy remains a timeless figure. It is quite a fascinating example of Richmal Crompton's art, in that it reveals that she never remotely wrote down to her audience.

William was a middle-class English boy, aged 11, who had a bunch of friends called the Outlaws. They all lived in a village and enjoyed a very suburban/provincial life indeed. And William was a rather naughty boy, for ever getting into scrapes and difficulties of one sort or another.

These books were highly popular with boys of my generation, and are still read today: Macmillan keeps reissuing them.

Now, what you need to do, if you want to rise to fame via the internet without benefit of agent, Macmillan, or anyone else, is learn how to write stories which are of much interest and excitement as the William books were in the almost fifty-year period during which they first appeared.

Before you start, make sure that you have a good stock in hand, because, if the wheeze works, demand will increase exponentially. And make sure that you know how to keep the series going for several decades and 350 stories if need be.

Of course, if you're really, really smart, you will combine the writing of the stories with finding a person to front the operation. Perhaps someone who is already known and admired by the target audience. A children's TV presenter, perhaps? Work on it. It needs thought. This division of labour, though requiring a division of the loot, will help enormously and be worth every penny. It means that a media-savvy person can handle the chat shows and the newspapers while you get on with churning out the stories. And if you choose the right collaborator, someone who mixes with the target audience on a daily basis, they can be a genuine help in letting you know what the kids are talking about these days.

Begin with one story. (Of course it has to be a story that makes the target audience go Wow!) There's no need to rush. Get it known. Put it about. Release the virus. And then go from there.

That way you have at least some chance, in principle, of making the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom look like amateurs.

The joys of copyright

The issue of copyright has been discussed here from time to time. For example, in February I mentioned that, even in 1841, Macaulay had wisely argued to the House of Commons that extending the term of copyright much beyond an author's lifetime was not an idea which was in the public interest.

The House of Commons then agreed with him, but later legislative bodies, in Europe and the USA, have taken a different view. And if politicians go on taking funds from companies which have a vested interest in making copyright last for ever, then we can expect that the term of copyright will steadily be increased further and further. This will greatly benefit the media companies' shareholders, and those who control writers' estates, but it won't do much for anyone else.

I am reminded of all this by a post by Michael Schaub on Bookslut. James Joyce died in 1941, but, thanks to the politicians of this world, his work is still in copyright. The Joyce estate is now controlled by one Stephen Joyce (the great man's grandson), and Stephen Joyce is, in his small way, also famous. The following story shows why.

An academic who has devoted years of his life to studying the work of James Joyce, and is a recognised expert in the field, recently applied to Stephen Joyce for permission to quote from Ulysses. Stephen demanded a fee of $1.5 million, and told the academic: 'You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again.' The full story is contained in an article in the New Yorker.

What a charming fellow Stephen is. And how clearly this incident demonstrates that the public interest in literature is best served by extending the term of copyright steadily towards infinity.

More on Dylan Evans and the placebo

In September last year we took a look at Dylan Evans's book on the placebo. And now the medical correspondent of the magazine Private Eye has drawn attention to the data on the British Medical Journal's web site devoted to clinical evidence.

According the to Eye, Clinical Evidence have found that only 15% of the thousands of orthodox scientific treatments that they have reviewed have been proven to be beneficial. A further 23% are likely to be beneficial, 7% are a trade-off between benefit and harm, 5% are unlikely to be beneficial, 4% are likely to be ineffective or harmful, and a whopping 46% are of 'unknown effectiveness'.

Meanwhile, it seems that the placebo, or placebo-type treatment, works pretty well. Patients with osteoarthritis who have had air blown into their joints (while under anaesthetic) have as much pain reduction and improved movement as those who've had proper arthroscopy. And one of the reasons why it costs drug companies nearly $1 billion to get a new drug to market is that many of them have a hell of a time demonstrating that the wonder drug performs better than a placebo.

One study, of 15 neurotic patients, proved that a placebo works even when the patients are aware that they're being given a sugar pill. The 15 patients were told: 'A sugar pill is a pill with no medicine in it at all. I think this pill will help you as it has helped so many others. Are you willing to try this pill?'

Of the 15 patients, 14 agreed to try it, and 13 improved over a week, some a great deal, and including one patient who had previously been suicidal.

The Eye's medical man suggests that 'all medicine is in large part placebo... But far from wasting money, complementary therapy does in many cases save it by avoiding the prescription of far more expensive, and potentially harmful, drugs.'

Meanwhile Dylan Evans himself has got a bit bored with run of the mill science, and has embarked upon a utopia experiment. You can volunteer to help if you like. Among other things, he's looking for people who can tell stories.

Percentages for beginners

I really try not to make a habit of fishing comments out from where they are and sticking them on the front page: it's an invidious practice, especially two days in a row. However, there's a beauty just arrived on the Maddox post of 3 April. The commenter is one zenofeller, though whether this is the zenofeller of zenofeller.com ('the world's leading anal satire site') I know not. Though I doubt there would be two.

After giving other commenters a quick lesson in how to calculate percentages, zenofeller explains about the almost infinite number of emails that can be stored on a hard disc, and then concludes as follows:

if this blog and the people on it are in any way representative of the industry, then here's the explanation why the industry finds itself today in the position of dreaming for a fraction of the video games market.

fucking idiots.

As I always say, a sense of humour is an essential attribute if one is to survive in the book business.

Generating blog traffic

Publishers Lunch recommended Seth Godin’s piece about how to generate traffic for your blog, so naturally I did.

As usual when I read these things, I ended up slightly depressed and confused. Seth, who is never short of ideas, lists 56 ways for a blogger to find readers. Some of the steps that he recommends are things that I already do, and some aren’t. And some (as I'm sure he realises) are entirely contradictory. Here are just a sample, not an exhaustive list.

Things I do, or try to do (it would be immodest to say that I succeed):

Become an expert in your field.
Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
Share your expertise.
Write long, definitive posts (but see below).
Answer your email.

And here are some I don’t do (usually):

Write short, pithy posts (see above).
Encourage readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
Write about your kids.
Be snarky. Write nearly libellous things about fellow bloggers.
Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
Do e-mail interviews with the well known.

And that’s just out of the first 20 tips.

Well, this is a pretty boring subject unless you’re a blogger, so we’ll stop there. But Seth is no slouch when it comes to marketing in general, so here’s another of his tips, from a separate post; it’s relevant to anyone, or any organisation, with anything to sell:

When I type your brand or your name into youtube, what do I find? What about technorati? or flickr? You can fix all three of these things today. It's easy to worry about Google rankings, but hard to change them. Now, though, there are dozens of horizontal search tools that you can populate yourself. They're not hiding. Are you?

By the way, while we're on the subject of blogging: if you're a regular blogger, hie thee to Scooptwords.com and discover how you can possibly -- just possibly, perhaps, maybe -- generate some income from your work.

Scooptwords, as you will see, is associated with Nightcap Syndication, a web site which, if you're a blogger, is also well worth a look.

Lewis Perdue and Dan Brown

Last Friday I was pretty dismissive of Lewis Perdue's complaints against Dan Brown, so I think it is only fair that I should fish out his comment on my post and put it on the front page, otherwise you might miss it. So here it is:

You know, it's really easy to lose in court when the judge refuses to allow the strongest evidence to be presented. This is precisely what happened when the judge in my case disallowed the sworn statements of the expert witnesses.

There was never a trial, never a hearing on the evidence. The Random House "victory" in court is a sham: all about manipulating the system and nothing about justice.

And don't forget, please, that Random House sued me...not the other way around.

The truth is, of course, that I know nothing whatever about the rights and wrongs of this case. (If you want to make your own mind up, start with Perdue's legal resources page.) I don't think I had ever heard of Lewis Perdue's book until the reports of the Vanity Fair article started to appear. So if I was dismissive I was simply saying that I am a little weary of reading about these issues.

Not only weary but leery too. I am not a lawyer, and have no detailed knowledge of the case law relating to copyright in either the UK or the USA. What I do have is several decades of reading about and hearing about cases in which writers feel that they have been ripped off.

For example: the Ladies Night versus Full Monty case. The authors of the stage play Ladies Night felt that the movie The Full Monty was a rip-off of their play. So did I, having seen both. So did a commenter on the IMDb page for The Full Monty. (The comment, by susanxx, now seems to have been removed, but for the moment you can still find it cached on Google.)

The authors of Ladies Night made several attempts to get compensation, in more than one country. And lost each time. Their Hollywood attorney said, 'I've been doing this for 40 years, and this is as solid a copyright case as I've ever seen.' But they still lost.

Even if you win, you can still lose. At any rate in England. There was the case (it's not on the net and I don't remember all the details so I am going to leave out the names I do remember) of the man who opened a newspaper and found an article about a pop star, by a well known British journalist. He considered that this article made excessive, and uncredited, use of his book on the pop star. So he sued. And won. Was paid £8,000 in damages. Legal costs, which he had to meet: £20,000.

And then there's the case of Baigent et al versus Dan Brown. Those guys ended up nearly if not actually bankrupt.

No, no. It's not smart, in my opinion, to go around complaining that somebody stole your ideas. Even if it's true, it looks like sour grapes and it looks as if you're simply chasing the money. And it certainly isn't smart to take the case to court; not in England, anyway.

The best thing to do is to keep your mouth shut, let others comment if they see fit (like that clear-thinking fan on IMDb), and just get on with your next book or whatever.