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| CommentSome sharp comment from people in the book world in 2011 and 2012 Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
'Higher royalties on ebooks' 'To the Society of Authors, the arguments in favour of higher royalties on e-books seem as unanswerable as they have ever been. We feel that the starting rate for an unenhanced book, including academic texts, should be at least 30% - and that where enhanced e-books are being published, the royalty rate should be negotiated to reflect the degree of additional costs and work involved. Where the deal is exclusively for an e-book, and no advance is being paid, the royalties should start at a minimum of 50% and be valid either for a period of some three years, or else permit the author to terminate the agreement. At a time when companies seem to be building their e-book lists with a view, in the long run, to selling them to the highest bidder, authors need to stand firm against what otherwise risks becoming a very blatant rights grab. Indeed, such is the speed with which things are changing that all authors - and a fortiori agents - need to insist on having finite licences. An author who was locked two years ago into a 15% royalty will surely be regretting it now; and if indeed, down the line, royalties do climb to a more reasonable rate, those who accept 25% now will doubtless want the opportunity to renegotiate.' Tom Holland, retiring chair of the UK Society of Authors in the Bookseller The iron grip of large publishers 'I believe that the iron grip that large publishers and their marketing partners have had on readers’ attention since the 1990s has slipped quite a bit with the arrival of online retailers and opinion-makers. Obviously patrons of online booksellers can see the breadth of reading options – "Others who bought this item also bought…." Patrons of independent bookstores know of those options, too, and depend on the recommendations of their booksellers. The few "designated" titles from the big houses are still dominant, of course, even in independent stores. But if you are an author in one of those corporations whose book has not been "designated" your reality can become pretty stark. Independent presses can offer a real chance to a talented writer who might not fit the formulas of the big house. Yes, I know that each conglomerate has a few imprints and a good many editors dedicated to the best of books — to maintaining the course of American letters. Those are the prestigious imprints that aren’t always required to pretend the sales of a prior book predict the performance of the next book. (I’m often astounded at how willing the industry is to act as though it believes that. We all know it isn’t true.) But independent presses are all dedicated to finding and presenting the best of books, dedicated to the books in and of themselves and to the promise of the authors. Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books in Psychology Today 'Less of an effort' 'We've arrived at this place where we just thoughtlessly plunge towards whatever the thing is that will allow us to make less of an effort. We know we're diminishing experience. We know that it was richer to walk to the store, talk to the bookseller, maybe meet your neighbour than it is to click online. But we can't stop ourselves. We're programmed to do the 'easier' thing. that's why people have Kindles. It's easier not to have to turn the page. All that's left of turning is this bizarre little sound to remind us of it. People no longer have the concentration to finish things; we skim along the surface, and it's miserable.' Nicole Krauss, author of Great House, in the Observer 'Tidy endings' ‘The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them. Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That’s how you focus the world. It’s the only way reason you should ever try this writing job’ Dennis Lehane, author of Moonlight Mile in The Independent on Sunday 'The paper book will never die' 'Books have always been defined by their physical presence. Those under 50,000 words do not give customers value for money, books much over 200,000 words are cumbersome to read and prohibitively expensive to produce. Ebooks make those rules redundant. Short stories, poetry and essays have moved almost entirely into the lists of small, subsidised, under-funded presses. They have largely died as far as the big publishers are concerned. Ebooks throw them a lifeline: as it is no longer necessary to publish in single-volume form, the book's new found elasticity can allow for the subscription model (the basis for much 19th century publishing) to be reborn. Publishing need no longer be tied into its protracted publishing schedules, there is now the opportunity to think far more nimbly. Ebooks may have cannibalised hardback sales, but everyone recognises that the paper book will never die, because handy and convenient though an ebook is, it lacks the "bragability" and attractiveness of a well-stocked book-case.' Piers Blofeld, agent at Sheil Land, in the Bookseller 'Too much stress on authors' 'There's just too much stress on authors. The business model seems to be that publishers want a book a year. I wanted to spend time on my novels, but that isn't economically viable... Publishers seem to want to compete with faster forms of media, but the fast turnover leads to poorer books, and publishers shoot themselves in the foot. And it's as if authors have to be celebrities these days. It's expected that authors do loads of self-publicity - Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forum discussions - but it's an author's job to write a book, not to do the marketing. Just like celebrities don't make good authors, authors don't really make good celebrities.' Steph Swainston, fantasy author, who is abandoning writing to become a chemistry teacher, in the Independent on Sunday. Money for writing 'Peter (Kravitz - her editor) said to me, I'll give you money for this. It had never occurred to me that anyone would give you money for writing: I thought writers were wealthy people who just wrote things out of the goodness of their heart and gave them as gifts. It takes an outsider to shift things, especially in Scottish culture. We go elsewhere and make monumental changes in other countries and rely on other people to come here and make enormous changes back. Peter was like the telly - he put ideas into your head. He couldn't see why I shouldn't be a writer and I nearly said 'because I'm Scottish'. It was the nearest he came to losing patience with me.' Janice Galloway, author of All Made Up, in the Guardian 'Instinct, not planning' 'I didn't know how many Dickens biographies there had been, how many books on London, it doesn't bother me. I just want to tell a story... I was never an expert on Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde or Blake or Moore or Dickens or Turner before I started work on them. And then they're gone. None of my books has ever been in my head; after they're finished they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then just release it when it's time to go. There's a lot of instinct, not planning.' Peter Ackroyd, writer extraordinaire, in the Observer 'A traditional publishing contract' 'Here’s the flat truth of it, my friends: If you are a midlist writer and you sign a traditional publishing contract with most modern terms, and you do so with an agent—and not an IP attorney—negotiating for you, you will not make any more than your advance on that book. And the advance is not enough to live on. You will not be able to reserve e-book rights to you. Those rights will be a percentage of net, which in most contracts is undefined. And you will have to sell world rights so that the publishing industry can adequately exercise those e-book rights, making any money you would receive on foreign rights vanish. If you have what I’m now beginning to believe is the standard agency rider in your contract, you will also lose a percentage of any auxiliary rights sale to that agent even if you fired that agent in the meantime and someone else negotiated the deal. Plus that agent will be entitled to a percentage of any work you write using that series, those characters, that world, or anything resembling that.' Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of many novels, http://kriswrites.com/2011/05/11/the-business-rusch-writing-like-its-1999/Advice to publishers ‘The next time you parachute a non-editor into a
commissioning role, take your best real editor and promote them to - let’s call
it - Structural Editor and pay them most of what you are going to pay the
commissioning editor in lieu of the kudos (and the rest of the salary); let them
work hand in hand with the commissioning editor and take care of the editorial
work that the commissioning editor isn’t really qualified to do. That is, open
up a new way forward for editors who aren’t going to be able to commission and
don’t want to manage. If you’re going to reward someone for not
bringing editorial skills to the commissioning role, at least try to find some
way of recognising those who do have these skills. God knows, many commissioning
editors, whatever their provenance, will be grateful for a more legitimate way
of sharing the heavy editorial work that they barely have the time to do between
meetings.’ 'An amazingly golden time' 'One child in Edinburgh asked me who my main competitors were. If Julia Donaldson didn't exist and her books didn't exist, then I wouldn't have the readers. If I didn't exist then Anthony Horowitz and Jo Rowling wouldn't have their readers. Children need lots of different books. Adult writers are a lot more competitive, but with children you need this vast amount... It is such an amazingly golden time because there are so many good people writing. Now lots of adult writers are trying to write for children. People used to ask me. 'Don't you mind that Jo Rowling is taking all the attention?' And I'd say, 'What attention?' No one had the slightest interest in children's authors. There was no attention. She's created this whole renewed interest in children's books. Children's authors should be very indebted to her.' Francesca Simon, author of the Horrid Henry books, in the Independent on Sunday 'Creative organisations' 'The big debate for anyone at the moment is where does publishing provide value? What is our role? In my view what we do is we select, we nurture, we position, we promote, we leverage - but author care, editorial expertise, design excellence - those things are absolutely critical. We are creative organisations, and we must never lose sight of that. Amazon has never made a bestseller - you first have to have a great book, and then you need marketing and publicity teams to create the consumer demand.' Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin UK in the Bookseller 'The biggest thrill of my life' 'The biggest thrill of my life was selling my first novelette. It was a Western for Argosy magazine in 1951, called "Trail of the Apaches". I'd done a lot of research about the Apache Indians in the 1880s and they seemed like ruthless individuals out to raise hell, which fascinated me. I got paid $1,000 for it and thought, wow, I'm going to quit my job in advertising, which I did... If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. I don't want my books to sound like I'm the one who's talking or somehow there behind the scenes, so I always reread what I wrote the day before; it has to sound like these people are feeling and thinking these things, so I'll take words out if it looks like the character is talking too much; after 60 years I've gotten pretty adept at it.' Elmore Leonard in the Independent on Sunday 'Something for nothing' 'By encouraging and effectively subsidising the creation and distribution of so many free apps by providing free distribution, Apple has given rise to a situation where anything that's not free has to work incredibly hard to prove its value, and in which consumers feel a tremendous sense of entitlement to be amused and pandered to for basically next to nothing... In a commercial environment where the default expectation is to receive something for nothing, it seems that we are discovering just how difficult that is. In the case of apps, unless the consumer mindset shifts significantly, it may be that the publishers who consider creating apps without rock-solid evidence of consumer demand or revenue streams that don't depend on the spoiled consumers will be the ones who need their heads read,' Simon Appleby, Digital Projects Manager for Octopus Publishing in the Bookseller's Futurebook. 'Characters they care about' 'I write full-time, it's my job, I have nothing else to do. I've got no excuse for not writing a book a year... I have no truck at all with this supposed link between quality and quantity, tell that to Mozart... I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea, but because I come from a performance background, I'm not shy when in comes to standing up at festivals or in bookshops. I do enjoy that interaction with readers, if anything it's far more enjoyable than the actual process of writing... It's terribly easy to shock and disgust a reader. It's much harder to make a reader care about characters; what I think I've learned is that there are all these tricks that crime writers talk about, reveals and cliff-hangers and blood and gore, but if you really genuinely want to create suspense what you have to do is give readers characters they care about.' Mark Billingham, author of Good as Dead, interviewed by Alice O'Keeffe in the Bookseller 'The audacity of hope' ‘It could be that subjective factors may favour the survival of a culture of the written word, whatever happens on the ever-stormy seas of technological innovation and consumer economics. So far as we can see, e-books will mean smaller rewards for many authors. The "winner takes all" and "long tail" forces of the hi-tech cultural industries generally mean feast for the few, and famine for the many – but also new markets, and new audiences, for "niche" literature old and new. Yet writing, and reading, have in this literary climate strong social foundations that it will take more than the odd upheaval in gadgetry and finance to shake. Even in an era of austerity – especially in such an era – authorship implies authority, and authenticity. Leathery rock idol, tanned former PM, fresh-faced family-friendly comic: the famous of all species must cement every new step in their career in place with a book, ghosted or otherwise. Whatever you think of the standard of these tomes, they all pay homage to the magic of print… As long as taste-makers in education, the press, broadcasting and other public institutions keep their faith in new books and their begetters, those precious assets of voice and visibility will not be squandered. Whether the sums will add up for much professional literature remains another matter. The age of multi-platform publishing promises no easy fix for the plight W B Yeats called "that old perplexity, an empty purse" - nor to its corollary for authors with silver tongues and shallow pockets: "the day's vanity, the night's remorse". Still, for as long as a highly cerebral memoir by a foreign politician can grow into a barnstorming bestseller for an indie publisher, the book world should be allowed the audacity of hope.’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent 'An adequate narrative vehicle' 'That social function of conveying news has been totally obviated by television and the internet. If I had a list of my tasks as a novelist, even category number 35 would not be "bringing interesting unknown information to my readers"... (Asked about category number one:) To find an adequate narrative vehicle for the most difficult stuff at the core of me, in the hope that that might resonate with the reader who otherwise has been feeling alone with those deep, difficult feelings. I don't really have a list, but that's the project.' Jonathan Franzen in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven 'A bonanza of print' 'Actually, there's hardly a mainstream genre (fiction, history, children's books, poetry) that's not undergoing significant change, attributable to the liberation of the new technology, from ebook to Kindle: poets developing apps, J K Rowling linking Harry Potter to cyberspace, would-be novelists launching their work as ebooks.As omnivores, contemporary readers have become adept at switching from high to low culture at the click of a mouse, moving from codex to ebook to audio. This is the shape of the future: a bonanza of print on many platforms. All that remains to be settled – the $64,000 question – is: what should be the economic terms of trade? How do we reconcile the gospel of "free" with an obligation to reward the artist? It's too soon to evaluate the significance of all this. Sailors on the high seas are the last people to give a reliable forecast, even when they have the most intimate experience of the weather. The book world has been through a perfect storm of economic, technological and cultural change. It will be the creative community that enjoys the benefits. How that happens is probably the most fascinating question facing writers, booksellers and publishers today.' Robert McCrum in the Observer Writing picture books 'When I'm writing a picture book, I automatically think "I don't need to say that" because the pictures will say it. Or better still, "I'll say this and the pictures will say that, which contradicts it"... Usually you can't build a house without an architect doing drawings - there is an intention prior to the existence for the building. But books are made up like sandcastles, you add stuff and knock it down and change it - and, in fact, you didn't even know you were building a castle at first, you thought you were building a garage. Or you were going to have a cave and instead it turned into a garden full of shells... I'm like a dripping tap. As I get older I drip more slowly, but I still come down here. I'm less impatient to spend hour after hour writing, though I like it as much as ever. I don't mind now if it takes me two years to write a few little poems.' Allan Ahlberg in the Guardian "Please edit me." 'I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens it that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way... I always say "Please edit me", because I don't want to write those big, flabby books where the writer's making loads of money and nobody wants to tell them that it's crap. You know who I'm talking about. You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be obsequious to me or do I want to write good books? If it's the latter, you have to take criticism. It's annoying, but that's how to do good stuff, listen to other people.' Denise Mina, author of The End of the Wasp Season, in the Independent on Sunday The concept of the book... is dead 'Although it is hard for many of us to emotionally detach ourselves from the book as an incredible medium, what with all its historical contributions to humanity, we must admit that the concept of the book as the best delivery system for knowledge and information is, in fact, dead. We are moving toward an ever growing differentiation between the book as object versus content delivery system. As this occurs, we cannot ignore the fact that our lives have been shifting dramatically toward a digitalized experience. This shift is happening not just for the sake of technology; it is happening because we - as in, society - are changing, as is our behavior. We continually push our creativity to invent an ever changing dynamic of how we deal with the things that surround around us. We are still taking pictures, writing letters, calling friends, watching TV and films, reading newspapers, magazines, and books, going to parties, walking on the beach, playing games, and so on. What has fundamentally changed, however, is how we do all these things. And what we are doing, precisely, is redesigning the experience of all the above, or at least how we go about doing them. This has been evident for some time, so there should no longer be reason for panic.' Julius Wiedemann, Executive Editor for Design and Director for Digital Publications at Taschen, in the Huffington Post TV script-writing 'Writing for television is such a strange world, you have to write up to 25 episodes of a programme each year and you need to create a lot of drama. You end up thinking: "Have we done this before and if we have, will anyone notice?" What script writing teaches you is to write good dialogue that is character-specific and that pushes the plot forward, and you learn about beginnings and endings - how to structure your scenes and storyline. On the other hand, you also learn to create drama that isn't there; every seven and a half minutes you get a TV ad, so you have to write to that.' John Stephens, author of The Emerald Atlas in the Bookseller 'Big love' ‘A few weeks ago, I was talking to a group of writers online. The subject was what an author can do for herself if her book isn’t chosen to get the "big love" from her publisher. We all knew what she meant: each season, it seems like some books are selected for star treatment — often, but not always, debut novels — and all the rest are left to take off, or more likely, fade into obscurity, without much support. My advice was to make friends with your local booksellers. Booksellers rock. If they like you, they will work so hard to sell your books. But the point is larger than that. It’s about how you keep going, despite the twists and turns of the market, which you can’t control. The sad truth is that even if you are the big debut author, the rest of your career may not be so charmed. My first novel sold very well. My third novel sold very well. And now, my sixth novel, The Winters in Bloom, is being called my breakout. I hope it’s true (please dear God), but in any case, I’ve learned that keeping a career going as a writer requires flexibility and a willingness to keep trying whatever I can to get my book in the hands of readers. And so my advice to any new writer is simply this: get in the game. Make friends with your co-workers at the publishers’ office and out in the field. Go to your local bookstores and offer to come for a reading, or even offer to run a writing group. Buy a book or two from the stores you want to sell your books. Read as much as you write, if not more. Recognizing that you’re part of a business doesn’t mean you’re a sell-out or anti-art. I always think of the Wordsworth quote: "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." I have to believe that if I write from my heart, as well as I can, someone will see what I was trying to do. So while I won’t chase trends, I will rely on my friends to help me. And the best part? My book biz friends are all readers. They love books, and sometimes, if I’m very lucky, they fall in love with mine.’ Lisa Tucker, author of The Promised World in Publishing Perspectives Writing biographies ‘If you get to hate them you should give up the book! But it is a bit like being married. You have days when you feel fed up and days when you feel passionately in love. Dickens did terrible things in his life. But a good thing about being old is that you’ve seen it, you’ve done it. You know we all do terrible things… There are a lot of authors, like John Updike, for example, who hated the idea of a biography of themselves. I can understand that, because here comes some blundering fool who thinks they can explain away the life and work. So (the key) is tone: have affection and respect, but also a sharp eye, and put people in the context in which they lived.’ Claire Tomalin, author of nine biographies, with Charles Dickens : A Life coming later this year. A dismal future for bookshops? ‘The inevitable disappearance of the vast majority
of bookshops will remove a main marketing channel and will seriously undermine
the power of publishers. It will also increase the scary dominance of
Amazon. Book printers will, sadly, mostly go out of business, and physical books
will become more expensive as a consequence of reduced economies of scale.
Public libraries, as repositories of physical volumes, will disappear… Is writing 'work'? 'I've always had uneasy loyalties about the relevance of the term 'work' to the activities I perform every day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact "working". I write novels and stories and essays for a living. And while I fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as "work"... it's hard for me to think that work is what I really do. Work, after all - to me anyway - signifies something hard. And while writing a novel can be (I love this word) challenging, (it can also be tedious in the extreme; take forever to finish; demoralise me into granite and make me want to quit and find another line of work), it's not ever what I'd call hard. A hard job, okay, would have to be strenuous and pressurised (writing's almost never that way)... Indeed, a smug, self-aggrandising part of me doesn't really understand how anybody who's not a writer gets along in life. Not only is writing easier than almost any occupation I know, but you also run your own operation; you have at least a chance to admire what you do and feel a kinship with the greats; you get to make excellent use (by sticking it in your work) of the constant flood of life's jetsam - the daily freshet that drives most people crazy; and you have a chance to please total strangers with your efforts, and at least potentially, marginally make the world a better place... True, you usually don't make a lot of money, which is a drag, but I associate making a lot of money with jobs that are so tedious (and hard) that only big money would make you do it. My little job I'd do for free - and often have.' Richard Ford in the Guardian Choosing your subject matter 'How do you choose your subject matter? Indeed, do you choose it or does it choose you? Should you follow the adage "write what you know", or should a writer engage with the world beyond their back-yard? How important is research? Are you "allowed" to write a story that doesn't "belong" to you, for reasons of race, class, gender and so on? Is it possible to "own" any story, even the story of your life, given that others who intersect with it (your parents, your lover) will have a different "truth" to tell?... By the time I got down to the writing, I was following the advice I gave my students: write the book that you are compelled to write, stay true to that and only that, draw the curtains, close the door.' Monica Ali on writing Untold Story, her novel about Princess Diana, in the Bookseller On murder 'It's a unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. There is an invisible line that the murderer steps over, and which divides him from or her forever from the rest of us. Murder is an extraordinary act. It is quite different from anything else a person is capable of. I think the majority of us could commit quite atrocious sins, but I do believe that very, very few of us are capable of deliberately planning the death of another human being.' P D James in the Sunday Telegraph 'Viva e-books' 'I love the entire concept of e-books. As a child growing up in rural Ireland in the 1980s, I had very limited access to books. It was hard to know what was happening in the world of children's literature, and harder still to get access to new, exciting novels. The internet has changed all that. Now it's possible for readers anywhere in the world to have instant access to any book that grabs their interest… From a writer's point of view, we all start out as readers. If we have access to more books when we're growing and maturing, we will be able to draw ideas from a broader palette, hopefully resulting in a fresh raft of genre-blending stories. From a publisher's point of view, as e-books take over, they will be able to release books more swiftly — no more long waits while they typeset! Also, they can take more chances and publish less obviously mainstream novels. Since there won't be all the print costs involved, they can push out more books and promote novels that aren't just standard crowdpleasers. We're at the start of a revolution, and over the coming years e-readers will evolve and technical wizardry will take e-books into every home in the world. It's going to make reading more popular than ever, placing books more firmly in the camp of mass entertainment, along with movies, music and video games, which is where they have always deserved to be. A lot of so-called reluctant readers approach books with caution, because they mistakenly see them as primarily an educational tool. Now that books are available digitally, to be downloaded along with their favourite games, songs, comics and movie clips, people will realise that writers like me are, more than anything else, trying to excite, entertain and enthuse them. And I think that will bring droves of new readers flocking to our work… We're in the early stages of a whole new era. The last time something this important happened was when Gutenberg introduced modern book printing to the world. That revolution helped books spread to more corners of the planet than ever before. This revolution will take them even further, faster, and I'm absolutely thrilled to climb on board and be a part of it. Viva e-books! Viva The Word!!' Darren Shan, in Futurebook Darren Shan's blog'Pay a fair price, e-whingers' ‘In tough times for everyone, it rather sticks in the craw to have to defend higher prices. But with e-books, the principle is plain. At long last, Amazon seems to have halted the race to the bottom on titles for its Kindle reader. After months during which charges for e-book bestsellers often plunged to sub-magazine levels, the digital giant has agreed on the "agency model" with Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin. The publishers will set the price, and the retailer will keep to it. Similar deals will no doubt follow. Cue a blizzard of complaints on Amazon forums about the injustice of having to pay more than few pennies for a work that enshrines the skills of authors, researchers, editors and (even digitally) designers. Talent and experience should cost a just amount of money in a commercial marketplace. Professionals deserve a fair reward. This whingeing, petty, adolescent sense of entitlement to culture and entertainment for free has almost proved the death of recorded music. It must not happen with books.’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent 'Our relationship with books' '"Consider the nature of what happens when we read
a book... in private, unsupervised, unspied-on, alone. It isn’t like a lecture;
it’s like a conversation. There’s a back-and-forthness about it. The book
proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We
bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities,
and our own limitations too, our own experience of reading, our own temperament,
our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter. Anthony Horowitz quoting Philip Pullman http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/nov/06/usa.politicsLine editing ‘Very often I'm brought to a halt by some ridiculous mistake that hasn't been picked up by an editor, which makes me think there can't be much line-by-line editing going on in publishing houses these days. I don't know that it matters all that much. It makes a lot of people absolutely furious so they can hardly enjoy reading. But for me if what is being said comes clearly across that's what matters. It is a bit pedantic to fuss too much about the editing of detail. On the other hand, it does offend my personal instincts, having been trained in the old-fashioned ways, which meant our texts should be perfect. The answer I found for myself is that I take much more trouble than I used to in the line-by-line editing of my own manuscript, and I think authors should now take that responsibility on themselves if they don't want to be annoyed by minor details. In nearly 50 years as an editor for André Deutsch, I never came across a writer who objected to editing if it made sense, not just in terms of mistakes, which all writers want to be corrected, but the actual way something was written. A lot of writers, for instance Jean Rhys, are perfectionists, so all the editor has to do is spot typing mistakes. I would never have dreamed of suggesting alterations. If we took a book on it meant we liked it; it might in certain respects or details be improved, but if the author didn't want to change it we didn't mess around with their texts. Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End and former editor at André Deutsch, in an article by Alex Clark entitled ‘The Lost Art of Editing’ in the GuardianWriting and editing 'Sometimes writing is easy and sometimes not. You have to be sitting at your desk; if you wait to want to do it you might wait for ever. But you generally find that once you're doing it, you want to. Early morning is best. I write in my dressing gown, because when you're writing fiction the nearer you are to your subconscious, your sleeping state, the better. My theory is that once you dress, that's the end of work for the day. The real world surges in and takes over. In the afternoon I edit what I wrote in the morning. Morning writing, if you're me, comes out of the creative, woolly, right-hand side of the brain, often just as an effusive ramble. In the afternoon I let the left side - the one that wields his red editorial pen - take over and let him have his way. It's a him. I'm a her.' Fay Weldon in The Times magazine 'The balance of power has permanently, irreversibly shifted from the media companies to the tech firms. Let's imagine some bolder moves from the publishing industry. Perhaps multiple publishers could band together in opposition, starving the App Store of content until better terms can be negotiated. Or maybe they could seek to challenge Apple on antitrust grounds. Either might prove effective in leading to slightly better terms for publishers. But unless a media company is able to build a better tablet or a better phone or convince customers to return to paper magazines and newspapers, nothing changes the fact that the publishing industry has lost control of its most valuable asset: distribution. It was always the printing presses and the delivery trucks, not the words themselves, that were the seat of the publishing industry's power. The audience has moved elsewhere, and this emigration has birthed a new gatekeeper.' Pete Cashmore founder and CEO of Mashable, in his weekly column about social networking and tech for CNN.com.Writing a biographical novel 'With a biographical novel you've got the basic structure of the life, you've got a mass of facts. The problem is to find a novel-shaped story to tell, there's no point telling the biographical story, it's been done… what the novel can do is to give a seamless sense of the experience of the writer and how his personal life was interwoven with his public life, how they impinged on each other and to imagine how he would react to success, failure, disappointment, frustration in a more inward way, than a biographer can do. The truthfulness of the novel is not a truthfulness to fact in the way that a biography is, it's a truthfulness to your own intuition of what this man amounted to, what motivated him, how did he reconcile or not reconcile the conflicting impulses in his character.' David Lodge, author of A Man of Parts on H G Wells, in the Bookseller 'Seeing the film as a film' 'When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book. It's important to see the film as a film. Of course, it's easier with an old book. If it's Wuthering Heights or something, it's like going to the theatre and seeing another version; it might as well be Chekhov. This book (Never Let Me Go) came out in 2006, so it's harder to do that. But it's a movie. Every discussion shouldn't be dominated by comparison with the novel... There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.' Kazuo Ishiguro, the film of whose book Never Let Me Go has just been released, in the Evening Standard 'Author events will take over your life' 'The fact of the matter is that author events will take over your life if you let them. Being invited to Edinburgh these days is like entering the royal enclosure at Ascot. If you haven't sat sipping whisky in that yurt, you haven't arrived - and it's not just other pen-pushers that you'll meet. Politicians, sportsmen, celebrities... they don't need to have written or even ghost-written a book. Talking about books seems to be a bigger business than reading them... But I do have some concerns. What happens if you don't like performing? What do you do if you're born plug ugly or with a lisp? Is there a danger that the publishing world is aspiring just a little too much to the pages of Hello! magazine? Worse than that. In the great welter of speeches, Q & A sessions, panel debates and so on, do any of us really have anything strikingly original to say? Is it possible that we are all, the whole lot of us, frauds? The terrible truth is that I do not know how I create characters. I'm not even sure how long it takes me to write a book. I have no answers to at least half of the questions that are thrown my way but, of course, I'm a writer. I make things up.' Anthony Horowitz in the Bookseller 'Publishers are relevant' ‘Publishers are relevant. We have practical expertise and, of course, money. We give our authors advances which enable them to concentrate on their work in hand… My idea of hell is a website with 80,000 self-published works on it – some of which might be jewels, but, frankly, who's got the time? What people want is selection and frankly that's what we do. Our industry is going through the most profound revolution since Gutenberg. It affects everything we do. There is a fight for survival for long-form reading which I'm really up for but there are certain categories of books that will change. Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House UK, in the Guardian 'An explosion in ways you can read' ‘ The second decade of the century is already likely to be characterised by an explosion in ways you can read, and therefore perhaps in approaches to writing. It will also see new dynamics in how readers find what they want to read and how writers engage with their readership. The real story is that writing and reading are rich parts of our culture getting richer, and that is genuinely exciting. One aspect of this may be the light that we can shine on niche interests and tastes as e-books and the conversation online cut the costs of distributing through the mass market and allows a wider range of writing to find readers. This could benefit areas, among others, such as literary fiction, poetry and translated work.I'm also highly optimistic about the role smaller, independent publishers can play in finding readers for writers, and for creating value in their work. The real value publishers offer is in a specialised ability to help authors to create the best work they can, to know and discover audiences for that work – and that no longer only means placing it front of store in a bookshop. And they know how to create fair value for the work in many different ways – including physical and digital books, but also all manner of other formats and channels. Small companies and imprints can do this with great focus. All this began in earnest in 2010, and will accelerate in 2011 and beyond. ‘ Stephen Page, Chief Executive, Faber & Faber, in the Independent 'Four or five books to establish you' 'I entertain. I spend my day putting doors into alleyways. In every single book, you'll find Sharpe trapped in a blind alley with no way out. His sword is broken, his gun is out of ammunition, and he's faced with 20 malevolent Frogs who want to kill him. At that point, when the game seems up, a doorway appears magically beside him and he steps through it to safety. Now, your readers won't accept that, so you have to go back 10 chapters and establish the door in the future alleyway without the reader noticing. This is always a huge amount of work... I was lucky. Susan Watt (his editor) said: "It will take four or five books to establish you." HarperCollins sat out those first books and the fifth Sharpe took off. I really don't know if publishers would have the patience to do that in the current climate.' Bernard Cornwall, author of The Fort and many other novels, in the Observer Ebooks - an author's point of view 'Through all this "wither the industry" debates, I feel I'm looking on from the outside. It's frustrating not to understand the implications and, truthfully, I realise I resent having to think about it all. Like many writers, I just want to concentrate on the book that I'm working on - the content, not the "method of delivery". But, at the same time, it's ostrich-like not to think about how much money I should earn from the sale of a story I wrote that requires neither printing, binding, stocking nor shipping - at least not in the traditional senses. In the end, I don't want to have a view on all this - I'm much more interested in the type of brakes on my heroine's 1940s bicycle - but I realise that I'm going to have to find one.' Kate Mosse, author of Sepulchre, in the Bookseller 'Seismic convulsions... a bonanza in new prose' 'Since 2000, the Anglo-American book business has been rocked by seismic convulsions. Google has digitised some 10 million titles, Barnes and Noble is for sale. Borders, bankrupt in the UK, clings on in the US. Here, Waterstones's parent company, HMV, wants to sell. Amazon's market share continues to soar. Asda, Tesco and the supermarket chains are said to be draining the life out of independent bookselling. In the US, it's claimed that ebooks are now outselling many hardbacks. By the end of 2010, 10.3 million Americans are expected to own e-readers, buying an estimated 100m ebooks (up from 3.7m e-readers and 30m ebook sales in 2009)... The rearrangement of the book trade continues apace. Last week's New York Times Book Review contained no fewer than three separate items about the death of print. But paradoxically, the age of digitisation is both a golden age of ink (virtual and electronic as much as ink-and-paper) and a boom time for narrative, in many media, on countless "platforms", from blogs, audiobooks and trashy paperbacks to television soaps, Facebook crazes, and - yes - hardback memoirs. Not since the late 16th century has there been such a bonanza in new prose. The scale of the global audience and its extraordinary new means of self-expression get forgotten amid the legitimate anxieties over the consequences of "free content". Robert McCrum in the Observer 'A man sitting at a desk typing' 'Male writers write books with themselves as characters in them, because we never cease to feel that there's something less than manly about the way that we earn our living. Literary creation is an isolated business involving nothing in the way of physical aptitude, courage, leadership or business acumen. Writers are cut off from all of the male-bonding rituals that gestate in the world of work: we don't commute, punch the clock or binge-drink on Fridays. (Many of us binge-drink all week.) An honest male writer's biography would be histrionically dull, consisting mainly of lengthy descriptions of a man sitting at a desk typing. While in the 20th century women have made great inroads into the formerly male preserves of work, they still aren't big enough for women writers to feel quite so acutely this sense of disconnected superfluousness. On the contrary I suspect that many women writers face the same dilemma as their non-literary sisters: is it selfish for me to define myself by my work rather than my family role at all, regardless of what that work may be? However, unto the fourth and fifth generation of feminism I confidently predict that opportunities will emerge for female writers who wish to fictionalise themselves - many may regard this as one of the more dubious benefits of sexual equality, but I, for one, am looking forward to it.' Will Self in The Times 'The onrushing digital revolution' ‘The idea that publishers 'now appear frozen in the
headlights of the onrushing digital revolution' is simply untrue. Long before
the digital revolution had become a reality for readers, most major publishing
houses have been planning and investing in their digital divisions in addition
to 'doing the day job', publishing and selling their authors in all formats and
in all markets. Many readers like knowing the book they are going to be spending their valuable time reading has been filtered through a selection process by people whose job is to guide the reader to what they want and ensure that they spend their time – and money – wisely.’ Ursula Mackenzie, CEO of Little Brown UK, on the Guardian website Submitting to children's publishers 'One said: " You can't write a book for children in the first person, they don't understand it." I knew that was rubbish. Another said: "Either have lovely pictures and keep the text minimal, or keep the text and have simple drawings." They all seemed to agree that I shouldn't have the text interrupting the pictures, as I do. But I thought, no: I'd rather it never got published than make radical changes. So I sat on it for a long time. That was very hard: I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done, and I thought: if no-one wants this, I don't know what I can do.' Lauren Child, on looking for a publisher for her bestseller Clarice Bean, in the Guardian Handling rejection 'I always look back to that and tell people if I had given up then, if I had said well I tried it and I'm not good enough, it didn't work out, I would still be practising law right now... I think so much of whatever we do in life is about hard work and it's about luck, but I think hard work creates luck so you have two things that can control right there. It's about having faith in yourself, and keeping that faith, even when you're disappointed.'Emma Giffin, author of Heart of the Matter in the Bookseller Creating more value ‘At heart, publishers exist to create more value for writers than writers can (or wish to) create for themselves. It's clear that the specifics of this role are changing. Some writers have decided that they can create as much value as they need alone, and feel freer by doing it themselves. Elsewhere there is a debate about where the line lies in a fair return for licensing copyrights, particularly when it comes to older books. Fundamentally, though, the need for publishers endures, even if not in their current form. Readers will be best served by publishers who can marry the best of what is sometimes labelled "legacy" publishing to the new means of developing and delivering what readers want and writers need. And if that marriage is achieved, then the persistent reporting of the death of old publishing will continue to be mere exaggeration.’ Stephen Page, MD of Faber and Faber, in the Guardian blog Making lesbian writing mainstream 'Of course, it didn't hurt that we had begun to write fiction that's hugely enjoyable to read. And maybe that's the key part of the answer. Maybe our present success has something to do with escaping from the weight of misery that was at the heart of The Well of Loneliness: the tradition Radclyffe Hall established of writing about crippled and damaged lives. We've left that behind us now. We've walked out into the sun and found a way to communicate our wider experience. We lesbian writers are far less obsessed and defined by our sexuality than the straight world might think. Anyone who's human can enjoy our work. If you're a woman, there are aspects of our novels that may speak more clearly and deeply to you. And it you're a lesbian - well, that's just a bonus. really.' Val McDermid in the Independent on Sunday Poet to crime writer 'Both have a massive preoccupation with structure. In a poem, every word has to be in the right relation to every other word. In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11. (Her new publishing contract) was the biggest deal I had done in my career. I felt that, instead of being this person writing in a little room, business was being done. Things moved up a gear. That was great, but also a little bit scary. I thought, "Who am I to deserve this?"' Sophie Hannah in the Independent on Sunday Is competition ungentlemanly? 'I can think of no end of talented authors who are today poorly or even negligently represented. Is it fair to deny them the possibility of better representation simply because the more atherosclerotic parts of our industry consider competition to be ungentlemanly? The lifeblood of business is competition. Other industries thrive on it: we can too. I'm calling for a major rethink of our attitude to this subject - and an appreciation that fair competition can only benefit authors. Until that happens, we're not really in business at all- we're just dilettantes.' Peter Cox of Redhammer Management and Litopia, in the Bookseller Transforming Birdsong into a play 'I believed right from the start it would work powerfully on stage because it's the story of one man, with a very strong central narrative drive, questioning what it means to be human, I don't know a more dramatic question than that. Also, for me, it says that no matter what happens, there is always the possibility of redemption. I hope the play will make you cry, but make you come out wanting to live... As long as I'm working on something I believe matters I'm very happy to scrape by. I think that bringing a story like this back to the public consciousness, when there's no one left alive who remembers it, is very important.' Unknown playwright Rachel Wagstaff on dramatising Sebastian Faulks' First World War novel Birdsong 'I want to do this until I die' ‘If you write truthfully about human life, by which I mean the human heart and how it interacts with the world, you don't have to strive for contemporary relevance. If a book like Wolf Hall meant nothing today, we would not have got past page two. The essence of 'we' is universal and no different to two hundred years from now, if it's truthful to the human experience. How that 'we' is pummelled and moulded is locally determined. The corruption of the Dutch East India Company is the same as the corruption at Enron. The ideas I will tend to choose for novels are ones that least resemble books I have already written. My curiosity leads me to choose different types of books to write. I rather encourage this trait because it's the best way I can see of avoiding the condition of writing endless versions of the same novel, which can lead to premature artistic death.’ On the Man Booker nomination, third-time around? ‘What? Do I want to win? I felt honoured and pleased (by the nomination), but it's the guy who approached me to tell me his wife reads Cloud Atlas once a year that I think is just so great. If I had to choose one out of the two, I'd choose the man. I want to do this until I die. He enables me to continue to do what I love. Prizes won't do that for you.’ David Mitchell, author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet in the Independent We all need a publisher ‘Recently, Newsweek ran an article about the brave new world of self-publishing. Its title asked the question "Who Needs a Publisher?" Well, the short answer is, I do. The bigger answer is: we all do. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that self-publishing has evolved from stigma to respectability. I love that worthy authors who might be overlooked by the major houses can now be read. It's great that writers with a special niche, an established following or an entrepreneurial bent can make more money self-publishing than they would in royalties. But I'm also concerned about the future of books and the larger issue of assuring the flow of reliable information. Here are just two reasons for that concern, based on my own recent experience: 1. Advances. I just finished a nonfiction book that will be released this fall. It consumed the better part of three years -- far more than I anticipated -- and the research entailed countless hours of reading, about three hundred interviews and some travel. My advance did not come close to covering the cost of all that information-gathering, but it helped. More importantly, the fact that a major publishing house was committed enough to write even a modest check was psychologically essential. Given my personal circumstances, I simply could not have sustained the effort to complete the project without that commitment…2. Quality control. After authoring and co-authoring more than twenty books, I was just reminded once again of the immense value of working with professionals. At each step of the way, from inception to restructuring to rewrites to finalizing the index, editors, copy editors and proofreaders made my book a better book.My bottom line is this: when it comes to serious nonfiction especially, readers, libraries, reporters and everyone else concerned about accuracy and readability should rely only on books that have been competently edited. And long live advances: may they grow and may authors and their readers prosper.’ Philip Goldberg in the Huffington Post 'Literacy is essential' 'When I was a child, we lived in a two-up, two down. We had no bath - it was a tin tub in the back yard. The toilet was at the end of the yard. The first six years of my life, we used to go over the road twice a day and fetch water from the well. We were too poor to own books. However, every night we were read a story, and those stories came from books, and those books came from the library. It was being read to that made the difference to me and I would say that the reason that I eventually became a teacher, a head teacher, an inspector and a writer, I can track back to our weekly visit to the library. Without that library, the world of literacy would not have opened up for me. Literacy is essential for a healthy, thriving society that gives everyone a chance. All children deserve the right to an imaginative and literate childhood.' Pie Corbett, in an interview on the National Literacy Trust website 'A writer's passion' 'A writer's passion, his belief in his work, is what keeps him going through those long, dark stretches when it seems as if no one is ever going to get it. But if a writer has got himself out there - just a toe in the water - then readers' passions come into play too, and in the age of Amazon and e-readers independent booksellers still have a huge role to play. A bookseller you trust is like a friend; you may not believe the reviews you read online, but if someone looks you in the eye and presses a book into your hands, that's different.' Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of The Times 'Moral tales' ‘Some people think they know what my books are about when they haven’t read them. They feel I’m in favour of bad behaviour or swearing. Some even think I write about drugs. There’s nothing of that kind. Mostly, my books are about outsiders, kids who don’t fit in. I feel they’re quite moral tales, although they do show that there are things even loving parents can’t always protect children from. Children recognize the truth of that… I think you have to treasure the moment and go for what you want. Mostly, I’m quite happy. In my twenties and thirties I regretted not having had further education. I was silly enough to marry at 19, but those choices make you the person that you are. I’m very happy and secure.’ Jacqueline Wilson 'Passionate about history' ‘A lot of people love to get their history through historical fiction, so it’s very important that what they read is as close to the truth as possible. Where the novelist uses her imagination is to fill in the gaps. But even then you can’t let rip. What you write has to be credible within the context of what is known about that person. You can’t indulge flights of fancy because that sells short both those who know a lot and those who know a little about the subject… I use the same sources as academics, but I write my histories as narratives. History is full of great stories, great characters and wonderful detail. If you marry those together, you get something that you can infuse with passion. I’m passionate about history and I want other people to share that passion.’ Alison Weir in the Toronto Star 'A new evolution' 'What's different about digital publishing? The answer should be: nothing. It's a fact that we talk about digital and traditional publishing and we need to stop that now. One of my frustrations is that many publishers seem to keep editors away from digital discussions, leaving contracts and "digital" departments to take things on. I met a writer at the book fair who had talked to a corporate digital supremo. The hint had come that "digital" publishing would be better without editors. Many of the editors I've worked with in the past 20 years roll their eyes at the digital bollocks they now have to consider. From an agent's perspective, I want a publisher to have a view as to how to publish a book, and the editor should be intritnsic to those discussions. From where I sit, digital provides the publishing industry with a new platform, creates new formats. Just as Allen Lane created the paperback in 1936, we now have digital editions, on e-readers, phones, Kindles, iPads, you name it. It's here, and more is coming. But it's not the future of the book, it's another future. Anyone who thinks the book is going to die is cuckoo. Publishing is being driven to a new evolution through a technological revolution in which the consumer of other products will demand new things from our industry, will seek to read writers and their words (and let's not call that 'content'). David Miller, agent at Rogers, Coleridge & White in the Bookseller and in its Future Book blog 'A deep-sea dive' 'Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year. I only read on paper. I don't have an e-reader or an i-Phone. I have the best time reading newspapers. I don't believe books are dead. I've seen the figures. Sales of adult fiction are up in the worst economy since the Depression.' Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Zeitoun, in the Observer 'One of the largest and most profitable industries in history' 'Books are not going anywhere. Neither is publishing. Since Gutenberg made his epic contribution to the human race, publishing has secured a place as one of the largest and most profitable industries in history. In that time, publishing has adapted to major technological changes, survived economic meltdowns, persisted through political censorship, and made it to the other side of catastrophic price wars. The likes of Simon & Schuster and Random House are not going to lay down simply because more than 25% of their potential customers bought electronic version of books instead of much more expensive, hard to warehouse, and returnable physical books. If the mainstream publishing world's enthusiastic embrace of eReaders is not evidence enough that they are doing fine, than their stable sales through the largest economic disaster in our nation since the Great Depression should be. Small publishers need not worry either. They are vanguards in this new trend, innovating and competing in ways the big boys can't catch up with. Like the music and movie industries have experienced, independent book publishers are on the cusp of transitioning into the very lucrative mainstream market. If anyone should be concerned, it is the bookstore. Amazon's healthy five-year trend indicates that the flight from brick and mortar is not subsiding anytime soon. Couple that with the middleman-eliminating eReaders, then bookstores have a great deal to worry about. And their 15 point drop last year is only the beginning. It is the bookstores that need to break into the market with a bullhorn explaining the value of the printed book, not the publishers.' Jennifer Havenner, independent publisher, in the Huffington Post 'The copyright business' 'The fundamental relationship between authors and publishers is changing. My first 40 years in the business have been very much working as a collaboration with booksellers, having bought the author's work via the agent. Now authors have an alternative, they can sell their book themselves, in many different ways. We now have to say we are actually in the copyright business, not the book business. It is a whole new dimension of understanding various media, in the larger context of being the author's business partner. It's better to get things wrong than not to try at all. You can't just pretend the world is the same as it always was.' Anthony Cheetham, Director and Associate Publisher of Atlantic UK, in the Bookseller Translations ‘Any bookseller who might be considering whether to order more copies of Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, which last week (in May) took the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, should look at this week's charts. Astonishingly, translations currently account for 40 per cent of Britain's top-ten bestsellers. OK: Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' trilogy occupies three slots, with the fourth taken by Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game. Mass-audience crowd-pleasers all - yet, not so long ago, conventional wisdom held that foreign authors stood an even slimmer chance of cracking the popular-fiction market here than they did with the literary niches. Whatever the books involved, this tally represents a singular event - and, who knows, even a precedent for a country with a half-Dutch, quarter-Russian, quarter-English Deputy PM? Against gloom-mongers at home and abroad who always cite the "3 per cent" figure for translations in the UK, we can now claim "40 per cent of the Top Ten" - even if it's only for one freak week in May.’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent Writing thrillers 'I think there was what people sometimes call 'a gap in the market' because I wanted to get away from the fantasy and sensationalism of James Bond and the Ludlum-esque stuff... after a while too much fantasy has a bludgeoning effect: you accept that the guy can fly, or defuse a bomb with bare hands, or whatever. A story has to have certain mechanisms which are tried and tested. So there's a good-looking girl, hand-to-hand (combat) stuff, (the protagonist) gets to blow stuff up... tried and tested mechanisms of the genre, without which we wouldn't call it a thriller. They have to be in there, but it's the way they're in there that's important. At every step I found myself trying to underplay stuff, so for example, our protagonist makes mistakes all the time, getting things wrong and getting hurt.' Jason Elliot, author of The Network in the Bookseller. 'Shake up the world' Only now that the book is out have I fully realized what the most frightening part of the process is. The questions: How will the reading public respond? Do ads work? Do people even read much anymore, beyond vampire books? Is the sophomore slump real? Is the sales rank on Amazon.com a true indicator? Here’s what I’ve come to know about such questions. They are, in essence, useless. In the face of what Loyal Ledford and his people went through, such questions are unimportant. In the face of the injustices about which I wrote, injustices that still go on today, such questions are materialistic. In the face of what the young veterans in my classes have seen, such questions are wildly unimportant. I want people to buy and read my book, but the reasons for this want lie not in sales rank or blog hits. The reasons lie where they always have for the artist. If we do our job right, writers can, in the words of Muhammad Ali, shake up the world. Glenn Taylor, author of The Marrowbone Marble Company on Publishing Perspectives Big media agencies v literary agents ‘Does this sort of convergence achieve that much-hyped "synergy" between platforms? Or do the greedy celebs hog the trough, leaving starveling literati with the scraps? A multi-media strategy pays richer dividends to busy, versatile authors for whom film adaptations, TV slots, press columns and the like come easily. For focused literary types who simply want the best deal for their words, other agents still keep faith with books alone. Besides, in a digital domain of self-managed online careers, growing numbers of writers could do without agents – and even publishers – at all. Save for superstars, e-books will mean that 10 (or 15) per cent of not very much – the usual agent's bargain – becomes a fraction of next-to-nothing. But don't blame glitzy talent-managers for our reluctance to pay properly for culture in the age of "free".’ Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent 'The intensity of a short story' 'I've always loved short stories. The process is probably less anxious than writing a novel. There's something about the intensity of a short story that I love... You can reinvent them all the time (whereas) with the novel there's the huge weight of tradition. There's something about modern life that suits the short story. It's a bit snipped up and jagged and raw and I think stories are like that... There is a perception that short stories don't sell. But they love them in the US and Canada, and it's changing with the web and webzines. Young people love them. It's time we got rid of that cliche.' Michele Roberts, author of Mud, in the Bookseller 'Books are not dead' 'Books are not dead. They may appear besieged, ever more so as fragile retailers hunker down to re-examine their own business models. There may be fewer new titles published over the next several years, which would be no bad thing, and perhaps the opportunity will be open for new writers to self-publish their work in digital form. This may well deprive book publishing of a little of its vitality, but I am confident that the book business will evolve, as it has done for hundreds of years, and will occupy a considerable position as a ongoing and valued medium.' Laurence Orbach, CEO of Quarto, in the Bookseller Having mass appeal 'It's nice! But there is something disillusioning about anything you achieve. It is always a bit of a disappointment when you get something you thought you wanted. I get nervous about characterising myself as successful, because it seems vain and I don't want to frighten the success away. But it doesn't get me out of running when I don't feel like it. Doesn't solve any marital problems I might have. Doesn't bring my older brother back to life... Literary success only pertains to a slice of your life. It's not really going to make you happy. Happier perhaps. I do try and remember what it was like writing books in the void, back when I had to worry about whether they were even going to see print. That was not a good place. I am very grateful not to be there. I feel I not only narrowly escaped obscurity but also having to give up writing novels altogether, which would have broken my heart. It is easy to be blase about having a bigger audience. I don't take it for granted.' Lionel Shriver, whose new book is So Much For That, in the Sunday Telegraph's Seven. An agent's view 'I think that the best thing I can do for myself, my business, and my clients is to continue to be extremely selective about taking on new projects, and then working hard to get those books in the best possible shape editorially before sending them out. The smaller my list, the better able I am to help my clients work with their publicity and marketing departments to ensure that their books are published as successfully as possible. To me, the recent changes in the market mean we all have to focus more, and publish more carefully and thoughtfully. I know it's somewhat of an unpopular opinion, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that you can support yourself solely as a writer in this economy. Most of the writers I know teach, or have other day jobs to support themselves, so the best way to avoid eating ramen noodles is to not rely completely on your book advance to pay your bills. In the end, the better you make the book, the better the chances that you'll get a healthy advance, and the harder you work with your publisher to promote the book by publishing stories or nonfiction essays to raise your profile, by blogging and keeping your website active, by thinking outside of the box in terms of marketing and publicity, the better your book will do. But at the end of the day it's the quality of the work that matters the most. US agent Julie Barer on mediabistro Red herring? 'My job is to entertain. There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash and I have to entertain them. It's my role to come up with the goods. I work in an entertainment industry. I tell stories, people read them and enjoy the stories, so I get paid, and get to write more stories... The wonderful thing about having a regular readership is that people know how I write... so I can lead them up a garden path. In my next book I am introducing a character called Red Herring. Because this is a Jasper Fforde book, readers won't know if it is a red herring, or if it's the fact he's called Red Herring that is, in fact, the red herring. It's this double-bluff feedback loop, reader-writer relationship that I enjoy immensely. You can play on it and the magic works that little bit extra.' Jasper Fforde, author of Shades of Gray, in the Independent on Sunday 'The book industry is not the music industry' 'This analogy between music and books is something that keeps popping up. Many people are saying that digital file sharing "killed" the music industry and that if the book industry isn’t careful, the same thing will happen to publishing. But the book industry is not the music industry. One very interesting contrarian commentary I came across was an article entitled "iPad iWash" in which a bookseller talks about the difference between music and books. He states that, unless it’s a live show, enjoying music has always involved another device or gadget. Books, on the other hand, are already their own device with no need for any sort of player. He has a good point. Printed books are certainly superior in so many ways to the current entity we know as ebooks. They have dominated for over half a century, unlike the music industry which has gone through significant format changes in a short time-period: from sheet music to vinyl recordings to eight tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3s. As exciting and attractive as digital books are, the physical book is still the simplest and most efficient way to reach the broadest possible audience. That being said, this die-hard book nerd still anxiously awaits being able to buy an iPad and experience reading a book on it, all the while recognizing that while ebook reading devices come and go, books abide.Mark Leslie in The Mark 'Stories are enough for me' 'The sudden rush of Kindles, tablets and readers strikes me as strangely illogical. Reading is supposed to be in danger, in decline. And yet somehow these devices are going to make it more attractive. Isn't that a bit like putting sat nav into a horse and carriage? And although thousands of e-books have been sold, do you know anyone - anyone - who actually uses the bloody things? I've tried, but they're not fun. I can understand the success of Jamie Oliver and his 20-minute recipes which became the number one application on the iPhone. And with 40 million of these devices in circulation, I can see the attraction for publishers. But storytelling, fiction, demands a deeper, more tactile interaction. And I don't necessarily believe that enhanced e-books will reach a larger audience. Quite the ocntrary. If you can zoom in on Alex Rider, manipulate him and dance with him to the music of Nick Cave (who pioneered the e-field with The Death of Bunny Munro), then why bother just reading him in the first place? ... Call me old-fashioned or just call me old. But you can keep your e-book ancillaries. Stories are enough for me.' Anthony Horowitz, author of The Power of the Necropolis in the Bookseller 'So much control' ‘ A screenplay is really just a set of instructions, it doesn’t actually have any value of itself. You can read a screenplay and be entertained by it but unless it’s made, it’s worthless. You’re always thinking: ‘How can we get this made? Is it as funny or dramatic or engaging as it can be? Will people pay to see it? Is someone else going to pay the money to make it? A screenplay is written entirely for other people; consequently, decisions you make with a screenplay are for technical, practical or financial reasons…Writing fiction is inevitably much more personal. Not necessarily autobiographical, but much closer to your way of seeing the world, and much more demanding. I find it much harder. But that’s also its great pleasure, that you have so much control. It’s a personal form of expression as opposed to a screenplay where I think you’re second-guessing the director or the producer or the audience.’ David Nicholls, author of One Day and many TV scripts, in the Bookseller 'A book about becoming who you are' 'Oranges would not be in print across the world, much less read and taught, 25 years later, if it were just about me. I never wanted me to be just about me, and maybe that's the point. I wanted, through language and through storytelling, to reach something wider and more important than my own circumstances. And that is why gay or not gay is not the point or the purpose of the book. Yes, the book has been vital for a lot of gay people struggling with social prejudice and self-hatred, but Oranges is a book about becoming who you are by means of a story. The opening words, "Like most people..." are the clue. Most people have not grown up the way I did, but the struggle to become who you are is for everyone.That struggle seems to me to be narrative based: we're back to who can tell the best story. Will it be you, about your own life? Or will you let others tell your story for you? Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.' Jeanette Winterson on her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in The Times 'A convenient extra way to read' 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 'They are the story' 'You could argue that all novels stand or fall on how convincing and engaging their plot and characters are, but with crime fiction and thrillers these ingredients don't just underpin the story: they are the story. Choosing your detective character is crucial; a quick glance at the successful crime series of recent years suggests that he (or she, but not so often) should be a loner, a maverick, fiercely intelligent but compromised by some character flaw, a little melancholy, attractive but a bit down at heel, bruised by love but grudgingly open to the possibility... My one anxiety when I first started writing crime fiction was whether people - including myself - would think I had sold out. But as I began writing and researching the Bruno books, any such worries evaporated. Apart from enjoying the writing process more than I had with any of my previous books - killing people in inventive and grisly ways really is an entertaining way to spend the working day - I began to rediscover my former love of murder mysteries, but with a renewed sense of admiration for just how difficult they are to do well. The best crime and thriller novels, though they may work within certain parameters, can offer just as much scope for psychological depth, tenderness and a critical perspective on society as "serious" novels.' Stephanie Merritt, aka S J Parris, the author of Heresy, in the Observer 'Still going uphill' I have a vivid memory of when Curious Incident took off, which was very early on, before it was published here, and it was quite scary. It's like having one of those dreams in which your car starts to fly. They're great, but if your car starts to fly in real life, it scares the living daylights out of you. And you know fairly quickly whether it will wreck your life, or whether you're going to ignore it. These days I ignore it completely. What keeps you writing is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying to get to. I was writing something recently and I was chuckling at something I'd written, and my wife looked across and said, "Do you think that real writers do that?" And I didn't even notice it was funny at first, because I still think, "Oh, one day I'll be a real writer." Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in the Daily Telegraph Writing fiction 'It either works on an imaginative level or it doesn't... that's my whole raison d'etre, going into spaces that I don't normally inhabit, exploring them and trying to bring something out which enables people to feel a greater empathy. I think that's one of the justifications for writing fiction - you can make real to somebody something which they feel very difficult to understand... (Historical novels) are just novels that have a past location and are therefore not swept away by the tide of present day life so fast. This is the great agony of trying to capture the present in a novel - it's a very slow thing to write and present life moves on in a hideously unexpected and overtaking kind of way.' Rose Tremain, whose new novel is Trespass, in the Bookseller
'This huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée' ‘ The old triumvirate of writer-agent-publisher that once shaped the shopfronts of British booksellers has disappeared under remorseless sales pressure. When the recession exposed the faulty logic of the marketplace equation in a creative industry, the collapse of the retail side became the top story in the lives of most writers today. Scarcity of resources in a shrinking market has touched every aspect of the business. But this perfect storm may have a silver lining: the IT revolution. Just as one generation of writers faces the prospect of the garret, another kind of challenge confronts the new kids on the block: how to navigate the myriad, conflicting opportunities and temptations of online publishing. For the garret, read Starbucks.The prospects for the laptop generation are considerably brighter than for the typewriter veterans, but still opaque. Ask anyone in the business about the future of traditional publishing and you get variations on the theme of "Nobody knows anything"… Whatever the future, a new generation of agents and publishers sees the old publishing model as broken. There must, they say, be a marriage between virtual and old text worlds. This generation speaks the jargon of "disintermediation" (roughly, commercial streamlining). The boom days are over. Writers will have to adapt. From copyright down, every aspect of the business is being redefined. In the short term, the quickest route out of the garret will be to find comfort in concepts like "clouds", DRM (digital rights management) and "interoperability", the cutting edge of innovation.’ Robert McCrum in the Guardian '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 Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001 |
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