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CommentSome sharp comment from people in the book world in 2010 Comment archive 2009 archive 2008 archive 2007 archive 2006 archive 2005 archive 2004 archive 2003 archive 2002 archive 2001
'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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