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CommentSome sharp comment from people in the book world in 2009 Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
'This huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée' ‘To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers. We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room. … If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors’ contracts are being summarily cancelled.’ Henry Porter in an article in The Guardian'Not a threatened species' ‘Books are not a threatened species. They are ordinary features of the ordinary world. Kids read them, just as many (how many?) adults read them. They aren’t "good" for us in the way that medicine is. They don’t "help" in any specific way. Feeding books to the bad lads won’t immediately civilise them and make them good. But they draw us together. They entertain us. They show us as we are – imperfect, partial, elusive, unfinished, beyond straightforward comprehension. They show us as we could be – more angelic, more satanic. They show us how our world could be – more like Heaven or more like Hell. Paradoxically, it’s in fiction’s weird mingling of facts and lies that we can approach the deepest and most complex "truths" about ourselves. Should we, who read books and believe that books and the stories within them contain such power, be surprised that kids read, that books survive? Of course not. We should be celebrating these facts.’ David Almond, author of Skellig, in The Times
'Typing that sentence' ‘I think John Irving said in an interview something which nobody says about writing, which is that writing is sitting down and typing that sentence, and that sentence creates the next sentence and the character grows and the story grows from the physical act of typing what is going on in your head, so in a way my father gave me the example that you sit down in the morning, you keep office hours and you work… The ending informs the novel throughout. So I have to know it because it seems to me that writing novels, which is very different from writing screenplays, is a continual fight against anarchy. You have to keep your mind very focused all the time on what it’s about and you have to know your characters very well otherwise they do anything, and if they really can do anything, they can do anything! That’s very alarming and that’s what induces paralysis, whereas if you are clear about them and you know them very well, they will tell you what they are going to do and you will know what they should do. That’s something I’ve learned over the years and it’s jolly important.’ Deborah Moggach in Scriptwriter Creative writing and the canon Teaching ‘helps in thinking about your own writing in a more formal theoretical way. Writers might think about point of view or structure or character, and often you have an instinctive understanding, but what it has helped me do is get a more theoretically well-founded idea… It’s very frightening for the students, they just don’t know what they are going into at all. When I was starting in 1989 the potential routes one could take were reasonably clear. Now it’s so much more complicated… The idea of what constitutes literary value has changed or become less consensual. It’s harder to establish what is good and what is not, and that is one of the things that forms the canon. Barnes, Amis, McEwan were the last people through the door, and then the door closed, and then the building fell down.’ Giles Foden, author of Turbulence, in the Bookseller Finding writers for the agency through the web ‘Every agent has their own style. Ed Victor goes to a party and signs up someone. Luigi Bonomi goes and talks to a film company or football agent. But I like doing it this way (through his website) because it brings in interesting books, often ordinary people doing extraordinary things. I love the range and serendipity… Publishers are taking longer to make decisions and are being more careful and more selective. But I’m amazed that they are buying as much as they are. It would be very easy for them to sit on their hands, spread the lists out a bit and see how everything looks in 2010.’ Andrew Lownie, whose website is www.andrewlownie.co.uk/, in the Bookseller Back to Top"Real reading" and the e-book ‘According to Amazon Kindle's vice-president, Ian Freed, the success of the Kindle signals the end of physical books: 'The only question is does it take three years, five years or 20 years?' I remain to be persuaded that e-readers are capable of matching the varied activities we engage in when reading. More is required to satisfy the dedicated reader than replicating the content and appearance of a printed book, or emulating the action of "turning pages" using a tap on a touch-sensitive screen. My own reading habits, like those of the historical readers I study, involve changing patterns of physical contact with the book, moving through it in unpredictable and non-linear ways, alone and with others. I usually work with several books simultaneously, using their position on my desk to explain their part in the argument I am trying to follow. So far I see little evidence that e-readers begin to engage with "real reading", the kind those surviving marginal annotations in much-studied books are testimony to. Reading, those annotations show, is an active and social activity. It interacts with reading matter in creatively constructive and useful ways. The output from a reading of this intense and systematic kind is larger than the book itself. It extends to other, related books, and conversations with other, similarly goal-orientated readers. The electronic book offers me a convenient extra way to read while on the move. Given a good enough screen I am sure that I will use it, and I certainly like the idea of being able to buy and download difficult-to-locate texts at any time of the day or night. This may also be the device that will allow newspapers and magazines to survive as revenue-earning businesses. But I do not expect to stop using physical books. ‘ Lisa Jardine in A Point of View on BBC Radio Four Back to Top'Can she hack it as a novelist?' ‘So, Cheryl Cole is to write a series of ‘chick-lit’ novels . . . Ms Cole is gorgeous and talented . . . as a singer and celebrity. But can she hack it as a novelist? Does she actually know what it entails? Where’s her track record of being able to write 100,000+ words of original fiction?... I take this very seriously. It’s not about ‘slagging off’ Cheryl Cole’ (she’s seems lovely) - it’s about protesting at the decisions made by our leading publishers. My concern is that talented, promising, as-yet-unpublished authors may be ignored because publishers are investing their funds elsewhere, where literary quality does not figure. Tell me that Ms Cole’s fine UK publisher won’t now reject and forfeit fine unknown novelists on account of having spent a vulgar amount on her advance? We all know the adage of 'everyone has a book in them' - but how many truly have the commitment, courage, tenacity - and skills - to write a series of novels? Writing a novel is not about ‘burning ambition’ - where ambition is solely about publication or money or fame. For a novel to be a good novel - and worthy of the generous readers who part with their cash to buy it - it can only arise from the author’s absolute desire to write that story out of their system - and being blessed with the necessary talent to do so... Above all else, we object to the assumption that it's 'easy' to write commercial fiction - that 'chick-lit' (an umbrella term I've always loathed...if anyone called me a chick I'd belt them...) is but a dumbed-down genre that 'anyone' can turn their hand to. It’s great commercial fiction, it’s perennially popular and there should be quality controls!!!' Freya North, in a Bookseller blog http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/76271-girl-not-allowed.html Back to Top'A huge leap forward' ‘Self-publishing has taken a huge leap forward in recent years. It’s always existed, but with all the technological changes from desk-top publishing systems to POD to blogging and so forth it’s now more acceptable than ever before. It may not be so appropriate for fiction, though there have been some notable successes, such as Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels, but for specialist non-fiction titles it is proving popular. The trend is hardly surprising: mainstream publishers have cut back and cut back, so that even authors who had niche titles published and might have been in print for some years now find it harder and harder to keep their books available… In difficult times, when people need inspiration more than ever, providing it in portable book format is still important, regardless of all the possibilities available through the internet. One of the attractions of self-publishing is how quickly books can be made available, plus the amount of control an author has over every aspect of production and design. I believe it’s the perfect answer for authors who have had worthwhile books published, but who have been unable to remain in print with a major publishing house due to the continual trimming of lists. If authors are already established in the marketplace and are familiar with marketing and promotion and have experience on the lecture/workshop circuit, they stand even more chance of being successful, providing expectations about sales are realistic. Eileen Campbell, Mind, Body and Spirit expert and author of 6 books, in Bookbrunch 'My life changed' 'My life changed when I took control of my time. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, I sit down to write for three hours every day. It's much more effective - it's about giving yourself the space for creativity to come. Esther Freud, author of Love Falls in the Sunday Times' Style magazine From screenwriting to books 'The beauty of screenwriting is that nobody can do anything without a script, so whether you are going to make the film or not at the end of the day, the writer gets paid, and has to be paid at every stage and for every rewrite... For years my mother had been saying to me, "Write books because then it's yours", so I thought "I'm going to take all the ideas I've had for films over the years and start writing books... As a screenwriter you have to be succinct and cut out any extraneous words or descriptions so when I started writing prose for the first time it was really difficult to make it last. I'd write Chapter One (and it would take up) three-quarters of the page!' Belinda Bauer, author of Blacklands, in the Bookseller 'A compulsion, a pleasure, a necessity' 'It is a peculiar conundrum to write in the knowledge that you are creating a product, but not concerned with production, and knowing the only way to do it is to put that knowledge completely aside. I think for most writers it's a form of mental acrobatics verging on contortion: to hope to reach others by creating something uniquely personal. Or perhaps I'm making a generalisation based only on my own, rather roundabout journey. From childhood, writing has always been a compulsion, a pleasure, a necessity, and not concerned with compromise or approval. But when I was 21 I wrote my first screenplay and an agency took me on. I moved back to London from Paris, where I had been teaching English as a foreign language with some fabricated qualifications, rented a flat and waited for my career to happen. No one feels older than the very young, and it seemed to me that I had travelled a long time to reach that point. I remember a sense of joy and rightness. There was nothing else for me to be doing. I was meant for this. So armed, or unarmed, with my naivety I faced the market place, and everything changed... For me, in the end, unemployment was my apprenticeship and I had my first novel published when I was 40. I am concerned about those very young people being trained up in creative writing courses and universities around the country; being taught how to present, how to sell as if they were heading for careers in advertising, being snapped up by agents and scraping it all in the first - only? - book. Success may be recognition, it may be admiration, or money, but it is an impossibility without the purity and the clarity of the thing itself. Fifteen years ago I would sit down to write and think: "What will people like?" and now I begin every day with the virtual mantra: "Do what you need to do; nobody need ever see it." Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast in the Sunday Telegraph 'The essential component of fiction is plot' ‘I know that what I do is not literature. For me, the essential component of fiction is plot. My objective is to get the reader to feel impelled to turn the pages as quickly as possible. If I want to achieve that, I can’t allow myself the luxury of distracting him. I have to keep him hanging on and the only way to do it is by using the weapon of suspense. If I try to understand the complexities of the human soul, people’s character defects and those types of things, the reader gets distracted. Of course, I’ve read literature in the classic sense. We’ve all got those type of books on the shelves. They made me read them at school and I admit that I didn’t like them much. I couldn’t understand why they were said to be so good.’ John Grisham in the Sunday Telegraph Changing the way people consume content ‘In the digital world, there is more volume out there, a lot of competing forms of media, a lot more noise. So is very hard to get noticed unless you can market your content. Like some record labels are now doing, that is what book publishers can do – use their brands to focus people’s attention on their product… The main thing the music business didn’t realise at first is that digitalisation isn’t about distributing the same content in another way. It changes the way people consume content and what is consumed.’ Danny Ryan, intellectual property specialist at LEGC, in the Bookseller 'Rules for writing' 'In his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell set out a series of rules for writing that are worth repeating in full:
I would add three more tips:
Damian Whitworth in The Times 'A love relationship' ‘The way I see it, ageing and writing is of course an enormous subject all by itself, and my general feeling about it is that as you get older, you lose a certain musicality... you realise that writing is more of a bodily activity than you thought. All writers go off. There is no question about this in several cases: John Updike, for example, RIP, a great presence who is now an even greater absence. With him you see a deterioration in the ear, suddenly in his last two or three books, prose full of rhymes and repetitions and inadvertencies, those bits in prose called false quantities where the reader gets a jolt - "hasn't he already used that word, just in the last sentence", or "that rhymes with that word...' It's my belief that the relationship between writer and reader is a love relationship. How do you make someone love you? You present yourself at your best, your most alive, your fullest, your most considerate. An author must be love-flushed: you must give them you most comfortable chair; you want to give the reader the seat nearest the fire, the best wine and food. It's a sort of hospitality gesture.' Martin Amis in the Sunday Times Books that are written by women for women about women ‘I’ve always felt that I have tried to give women of a particular generation a voice. I do think chick list has potentially been very powerful as it has looked at things like our awful relationship with our bodies, our relationship with food, with the beauty industry, our relationship with work – the fact that we’re still not equal… So I don’t think chick lit is always as fluffy as the title implies. Nevertheless, I sort of feel that I’ve transcended it, I’ve evolved and so have my readers. I still think there’s a place for the fluffy. I do think it’s another form of misogyny to denigrate books that are written for women by women about women. (Publishing)’s become a lot more brutal. I see it with first-time authors, there’s far less opportunity to build an author any more. You’re straight out of the tracks and if you’re not a big success on the first book there isn’t the same kind of loving care. | hope I don’t sound disloyal saying that, but that is the reality.’ Marian Keyes, author of The Brightest Star in the Sky, in the Bookseller The Sony Reader ‘I’ve never been much of a gadget girl. I do have a mobile phone (Orange, obviously…) but, about to embark on a three-week book tour in August, I agreed to test drive one. I was a far from obvious choice. I don’t have a BlackBerry, don’t travel with a laptop and have an old-fashioned pen-and-ink diary. I saw the sense of taking one device rather than lugging quantities of books in and out of customs, but I was lukewarm. Four countries and three weeks later, I’m another convert. The Reader is wonderful when travelling and, once you get the hang of it, easy to use. But, actually, I think the most significant thing about the Reader is not the issue of convenience, but its potential for transforming non-regular readers’ relationship with books. We’re all hard-wired for story telling, both as listeners and as tellers. We know there is a problem with literacy rates in the UK. If we are to solve it, we need to be more imaginative. We need to accept that the tools are not what matters – voice, print, audio – but the narrative itself. And acknowledge that, for some, a resistance to the physical book itself is a problem.’ Kate Mosse in the Bookseller On Her Fearful Symmetry ‘The difficulty always, for any book, is the reveal. How much does the reader know at any given moment? Are you being fair if you hold that behind your back and don’t tell them until later? So what I’m hoping is that as people get into this they are surprised but then they think: ‘Oh, my gosh, yes, of course’, but that’s really hard to do. That’s what mystery writers do and I’ve always had a lot of respect for them because it’s such an amazing craft. But essentially this is a mystery or suspense novel.’ Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, in the Bookseller Opening doors for children ‘In the Fifties, when a strong child was dealing with difficult circumstances, there was always a rescue at the end of the book and it was always a middle-class rescue. The child would win a scholarship to Roedean or something, and go on to do very well. That was felt to be unrealistic and so there was a move away from that. Books for children became much more concerned with realism, or what we see as realism. But where is the hope? How do we offer them hope within that? It may be that realism has gone too far in literature for children. I am not sure that we are opening doors for children who read these books, or helping them to develop their aspirations. ‘I can’t see how we roll back from this without returning to the sort of fiction that is no longer credible — books with a Blyton-ish view of things.’ Anne Fine in The Times Booker's 'literary snootiness' ‘I wish popular novelists wouldn't get so het up about the Booker. They
seem to believe that their exclusion from the most prestigious literary award is
a symptom of the snootiness of the literary establishment. No doubt some
people are literary snobs; but most writers and readers accept that there are
different genres, that the Booker is for literary fiction, and that's that...
The latest is Jenny Colgan, in the Independent: "But the Booker's
enduring legacy to me is this: this is Grown-up Serious Reading and would all
you little sentimental people who like being entertained please scuttle back to
your tawdry little comics, your Katie Prices, threefers and celebrity
autobiographies." Nick Clee in BookBrunch Writing short stories ‘The short story is a moment of enlightenment. A moment of vision. The story is going to fall on my head like an apple. But the novel… there is a school of thought, and I agree with it, that we do not have to invent novels; we discover them. The novel exists in my heart and in my mind and I must concentrate to get it out. This is not the case with the story. I could get an idea for a story now, while I am looking at your face... Society is a living organism and you must keep up. That’s why I still practise (as a dentist), though only for two days a week. I will never close the clinic. The clinic is my window, I open it to see what is happening in the street. You can’t get disconnected from the street, as a writer; that’s a common mistake. You can be too easily welcomed every night by the richest people and the most influential. It is very dangerous because it is that relationship with the street that made you successful in the first place. I’m against presenting literature on an ethnic basis. I am pushed, little by little, to be an Arab writer, but I prefer to think of myself as part of the republic of literature... A good subject does not make a good novel, but a good novel makes any subject seem interesting.’ Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany in the Observer Pity the poor editors ‘Publishing is often an extremely negative culture… The sheer book-length nature of books combined with the seemingly inexorable reductions in editorial staffs and the number of submissions most editors receive, to say nothing of the welter of non-editorial tasks that most editors have to perform, including holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers, fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on - all these conditions taken together make the job of a trade-book acquisitions editor these days fundamentally impossible. The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter, another very old and evergreen publishing story but truer now than ever before.’ Daniel Menaker, former Random House US executive editor-in-chief, in the Barnes & Noble Review 'Just a guy who tells a story' ‘I was already writing The Lost Symbol when I started to realize The Da Vinci Code would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke--you're temporarily crippled. Then the furore died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story.’ Dan Brown in Parade 'Rude about commercial fiction' ‘I find it bewildering how often people are rude about commercial fiction and how many really mediocre pretentious literary books are published every year. A lot of attention is paid to books that I quite often think are really shoddy. What I want my books to be is some kind of escapism. I want you to get lost in them, I want you to feel like you are going on holiday with them and that you know them, that it could be you and that it’s some representation of recognisable life, but with a bit more magic thrown into it.’ I hope my publishing background gives me a knowledge of what (publishers) do. Half is how good the book is and half is how well it’s published.’ Harriet Evans, editor turned author of I Remember You in the Bookseller 'Encouraging younger consumers to pay' ‘Although I don’t wish to be a harbinger of doom, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to predict that that the global book market will reduce by 30% to 50% in the next 10 years. This will come not only from piracy, but also from reductions in list prices to encourage people to buy rather than pirate and also through a decrease in active readers. It is perhaps worth thinking of alternative ways that publishers, authors and booksellers can survive. Even the big-name authors can’t escape, and they can’t go on sell-out stadium tours like their counterparts in the music industry. So, how do we encourage younger consumers to pay for products when they are used to getting entertainment and information for free? Andrew Crawford, CEO of The Book Depository, in the Bookseller Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001 |
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