Young Writer of the Year Award

Writing, and promotion of my new book, may have been keeping me away from this blog lately but yesterday I attended an event for bloggers which has brought me right back. The Sunday Times and literary agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop kindly invited us to meet the writers shortlisted for The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and it was a very enjoyable and interesting afternoon which raised some key questions about the promotion and nurturing of young writers at the starts of their careers.

Begun in 1991 but temporarily discontinued since 2009, the newly-rejuvenated award, administered by the Society of Authors, is for a full-length book by a UK or Irish writer between the ages of 18 and 35. It boasts among its previous winners such luminaries as Helen Simpson (the first winner), Caryl Phillips, Paul Farley and Zadie Smith, a record justifiably prompting the prize's reinstatement, prime movers of which were Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times and PFD's Caroline Michel. Judges this year were Andrew Holgate, Chief Fiction Reviewer Peter Kemp, and previous winner Sarah Waters.

The prize is for a book of either fiction or non-fiction, extended this year to include Irish, self-published and digital books. Andrew Holgate explained that it is avowedly literary in intent, and the shortlist bears this out, consisting of three literary novels and a book of poetry - no non-fiction makes the cut this year as sufficiently literary in character.

The Year of the Runaways (Picador) by Sunjeev Sahota (above), which was also shortlisted for this year's Man Booker, is a huge sweeping novel following the individual progress of each of four young characters who have had to leave India for Britain (I think he said four: I'm only a third of the way through the novel and so far three have been dealt with in detail). It is Sunjeev's second novel, but the other three books on the shortlist are debuts: Ben Fergusson's Betty-Trask- and HWA-Debut-Award-winning The Spring of Kasper Meier (Little, Brown) set in Berlin immediately after WWII, Sara Taylor's The Shore (Heinemann), a multi-viewpoint fiction charting a community on the rural coast of Virginia, which is being shortlisted just about everywhere (Bailey's Prize, Guardian First Book Award), and Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe's collection of poems exploring her dual British-Chinese heritage, which has garnered shortlistings in the T S Eliot and Forward First Collection prizes.

I would say that all of these books have a kind of literary ease that amply qualifies them for this shortlisting - each of the authors is wonderfully at home in the language, each has a sharp and original eye and accurate feel for our physical world and a psychological acuity, and each is powered by a deep moral sense. (You could tell that last anyway; they were such nice people!) (I've begun all of the books - for this event I broke my general rule of reading only one book at a time in order to give it its due attention, and it's a testament to these books that they're all nevertheless very individual and vivid in my mind.) Pick up any one of these four books and you know you're in the hands of a born writer - proved, perhaps, by the fact that Sunjeev confirmed the rumour that he hadn't read a novel until he picked up Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children at the age of, I think, eighteen.

But what happens to a born literary writer in a culture hellbent on the commercial and on fetishising the Next New Thing, in which authors are routinely dropped after non-mega-selling debuts? It's a question, I think, at the heart of this prize. No doubt there will be accusations that, as a prize for young writers, it's contributing to the cult of youth, but I think its serious literary purpose runs counter to that, designed as it is to give status, exposure and encouragement to young writers writing into our culture through its squeezed literary end. Not, though, that one of these books fails to be exciting and engrossing.

In connection with this, after excellent readings by the authors, Andrew Holgate, chairing the Q & A, asked all four writers about the question of risk involved in the writing of their novels. It has to be said that all four books were published by mainstream publishers, and that none - with the exception perhaps of Sarah Howe's poetry collection - begins with the kind of unfamiliarity of language or tone that would frighten the horses. However, as he pointed out, Sunjeev goes on to create fundamental temporal shifts - we constantly move back in time to the earlier histories of the characters, slowly discovering how they are in the situation at the start of the novel - and in particular with the refusal to explain the Indian words his characters use all the time, expecting the reader to elucidate from the context, or, as Sunjeev put it, to just accept it as part of the music of the novel. Sara Taylor, Andrew Holgate suggested, takes similar risks with time, and with her multi-viewpoint narrative (although she replied that she was surprised it was seen as 'risk': to her the writing of it was simply fun). Sarah Howe's book is striking for its wide range of forms, unusual in a poetry collection, raging from pieces that are more or less prose poems (she called them 'prose') to entirely lyrical verse. Ben Fergusson takes the striking decision to eschew the usual youthful tenor of gay literature and portray a middle-aged man blackmailed for his homosexuality (and very gripping it is).

My writing and blogging colleague Dan Holloway asked if any of the four had however felt any brake on them as beginners. Did they have any sense that it would be only later, once they were established, that they would truly be able to write what they wanted in the way that they wanted? Ben said he simply didn't think about expectations, and Sarah Howe said that she had never even thought of an audience when she sat down to write her poems, it had been an entirely private enterprise, and - interestingly - she now finds it weird to think that that there are things in her poems that she wouldn't even discuss with her family but which other people, strangers, are now reading. Sunjeev, the only one shortlisted with a second book, said that when he wrote it he did have to think about marketing, simply because he'd been through the process with his first book. However, he felt that, although he was indeed reacting to his first book in writing his second, it was more a question of reacting against himself and developing.* Perhaps inevitably for someone whose PhD is in censorship in the production of American first novels, Sara Taylor made clear that in writing her time-shifting multi-viewpoint book she was strongly reacting against cultural expectations, and the only limitation she felt was that of not wanting to reveal family secrets, a sentiment that Sarah Howe echoed, if I remember rightly. It was clear, however, that some of the four had, since writing their books, experienced the negative pressures of marketing: earlier, as we mingled, Sara Taylor had talked about the fact that she likes to call her book a 'fractured narrative', but had been made aware that in marketing terms the phrase had negative connotations, and there was a potential pigeon-holing problem in retailing terms for a book which has been referred to as both a novel and a collection of linked stories. For Sara herself that liminal quality is a strength, and Dan and I heartily agreed with her - and it's excellent that prize judges are rewarding her for it.

It was a thought-provoking and very enjoyable afternoon, and a privilege to be able to meet and talk to the authors and the prize organisers, and I thank them.

(I'm afraid I didn't get a photo of Sarah Howe reading: I was so engrossed in her mesmerising reading that I forgot, but she's there in the background of the photos of the others reading.)

A week tomorrow - the evening of Monday 23rd - some of the shortlisted authors and previous winners including Helen Simpson will be reading and speaking at Foyle's. Do go if you can - I would if I could! (Beer and pizza too, apparently!) Details here.

* Dan Holloway points out to me that in answer to his question, Sunjeev also said that he would never have felt able to write such a long and complex book the first time around as he wasn't ready. I missed Sunjeev actually saying that, and it's a crucial point. As Dan says: 'Yet he clearly was ready enough as a writer to be published. Which further emphasizes what we talked about afterwards - that it is so important for new writers to be given space, to know that they will be given several books in which to discover their voices before being dropped.' (Thank you, Dan.)

Guest post: Penelope Farmer on ageism in traditional publishing and the e-publishing answer

Penelope Farmer is the author of numerous books for children and adults, including the classic and loved children's novel Charlotte Sometimes, so famous and loved that it was turned into a hit song by the pop group The Cure. One might have assumed that someone with such a track record would never end up without a publisher, yet this is the situation in which Penelope found herself, much to the frustration of her agent who had a new novel by Penelope that she loved and was dying to sell. Here Penelope talks about the present-day forces that led to such a situation, and the solution that her agent found in helping to bring her sweeping new novel, Goodnight Ophelia, to public attention. The thoughts and memories of a woman dying from a disease that could have been prevented had she known her true parentage, it's both a fascinating study of a complex character and an impressive survey of the history of a whole generation brought up with the unacknowledged tragic effects of war. And in spite of its subject matter, it's sprightly and uplifting - in a way that the marketing folk of traditional publishing were apparently unable to see.

Old writers may not die; they may even keep on writing. What they don’t get is published any more unless their names come with big sales figures attached. 

This old writer – me – has published more than thirty books over the years, for adults and children, most of them commissioned. One – Charlotte Sometimes – has been in print since it was published in 1969, helped by being turned into a song by the Cure: an accolade that led around 1996, to my standing in Earls Court Arena waving back at a vast audience of cheering Cure fans. Maybe I should have foreseen that this would be my high spot as writer, before the downhill slide caused by the ditching of the Net Book Agreement. Everyone said its demise would do for mid-list writers like me. And they were right. 

I compounded the problem, of course, by never writing the same book twice. I can’t blame either publishers or readers for liking familiarity; I gulp up successive books about the same detectives myself.  But that’s boring for the writer – me. I compounded problems still further by failing even to produce a novel after 1993. My life having fallen apart, I assembled three autobiographical anthologies instead, all published, but hardly best sellers, and then, as foolishly, turned down a commission to write another children’s book, opting instead to produce a book about several weeks spent as a writer in residence at a hostel for people with mental problems. The ruling on this book by the marketing men - against the wishes of an eager would-be editor  – was ‘who wants to read about the nitty-gritty of mental illness’: this my first encounter with the very different publishing world from the one I’d hitherto enjoyed of being nurtured by fond editors; a world in which sales and marketing rules.

I think I realised that publishing the new novel I did at last get round to would be troublesome. But I’m a writer, I write; when the name ‘Ophelia’ swam into my head, in 2008, I scribbled down endless notes and set to work.  The first line ‘There can’t be many people, especially of my age, who find out who they are via Wikipedia’ came into my head about six months later. And there I was with a book about a woman whose conception out of the chaos caused by Hitler even before his war broke out led to her being brought up by a stepfather without any real idea of the whereabouts of her parents – and in the case of her father even who he was. A kind of genealogical whodunit, you could say. I suppose that in publication terms I did not make it easy for myself by setting the story of her life around her dying – from an illness which she might have survived had she known her parentage: But it did not turn out a gloomy book, surprisingly, and I was pleased with it. And so were my agents: to the extent of employing an editor to help me polish it and to the extent, in due course, of going into self-publishing and producing it themselves, after the normal publishers returned a series of rave rejections - ‘ I love this book’ – ‘a lovely, lovely novel’ – ‘a wonderful read’ etc - followed by almost certainly sales generated doubts. ‘It’s not clear how we could re-establish this author’ (translation: too old: too low sales). Or ‘The book is ‘too reflective’ – ‘too quiet’ – the translation here, I daresay, ‘no dramatic ‘hook’ - the considerable drama in my book evidently too local to count.

A very usual story, alas. Agents are constantly failing to sell books that they love, that publishers would have jumped on a few years back, because of assessments made on non-literary grounds, by young men who are making mere guesses at future trends – often forgetting, seemingly, that a large proportion of novel readers are women over fifty. Who might well enjoy such ‘page-turning’ novels as mine: if they were offered them. 

Hence my agents’ venture into the world of ebooks and self-publication, via a specialist packager who does the business far more professionally than authors ever could, not least in finding professional artists to design a cover: and thence via Amazon’s services to self-publishing writers. The advantage for the agent is that they get their authors out there without it costing them much, their costs probably recovered by a percentage on sales – provided the author works hard on her own account. For this is the author’s disadvantage. Though the agent’s input relieves her of the stigma of vanity publishing the rest is up to her. She has to pay for the design not least, an essential cost for print on demand copies. And thereafter she has to do her own publicity: chasing up editors for reviews – writing round book websites to get them to review it, so on and so forth. Some authors are good at self-promotion. More like me are not.  Drafting the endless emails necessary is like shouting in a soundproofed room. I did manage to get interest from one excellent website, Vulpes Libres, which not only gave me a very good review but also an interview. And that seems subsequently to have persuaded Amazon to do a special promotion – offering the book at a much reduced price; of course. (What that will or won’t bring in terms of sales has yet to be seen – they reserve the right but to do no promotion at all but still reduce the price. That’s Amazon for you.)

The irony of course is that Amazon, with its brutal discounts, was my nemesis in the first place. Nor do I care for its failure to pay tax and still less for its treatments of its workers. And here I am dismounted from the moral high horse onto a less than dignified – and certain less moral - donkey – gratefully – sort of – accepting its services. But what else can a poor author do? Stay unpublished?

The main problem remains as ever: visibility: something publishers provide. Their salesmen tout the books round booksellers. They send copies for review to the media, they offer authors as speakers at literary festivals; they put them in for literary prizes. Authors have none of these advantages. Self-published books may of course be taken up by orthodox publishers, if they see money in it (I did apologise to my agent for having presented her with Goodnight Ophelia rather than 50 Shades of (bloody) Grey. ‘I would have rejected it if you had,’ she said which was comfort of sorts, I suppose.) But the chances of such ennoblement are vanishingly small. My agent’s suggestion of offering myself to book blogs was one way out of this impasse - some of them do appear to have very large readerships. Though this may not look much like visibility, someone of my generation may well underestimate the power of the Internet compared to more conventional media: and at the very least such exposure may sell a few more copies – the review in Vulpes Libris seems to have had some effect.  Facebook and Twitter are other options – but so far tweeting and updating my Facebook status has not got me very far.  (17 followers anyone? Pathetic.)

I suppose I could review myself on Amazon; some authors do – some even rubbish their competitor meantime. But no I can’t bring myself to do that. Yet.

Goodnight Ophelia by Penelope Farmer is published on CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2015. ISBN-13: 978-1496111968. 264pp. Also available as an ebook, published by C&W.

BBC National Short Story shortlist

I knew in mid-August, when I received an email from Booktrust's publicist, intended to get me excited as a blogger about the announcement of the shortlist for the BBC National Short Story award a month later, that of course once again I had failed to make it. The email clearly meant that the shortlist had been chosen and shortlistees informed - the publicity machine and publication and recordings requiring at least a month's preparation. Actually, I never expect to get anywhere in this competition, and most years I think wearily, 'Is it really worth my bothering to go through the motions?' And the main thing that puts me off is the bit on the form where you have to say whether you are the author or the author's publisher entering the story. I always wonder: why is this distinction made such a fuss of? Why are publishers allowed to enter stories on behalf of authors? The entries aren't anonymous (you have to declare your most recent publications - or your publisher has to); if you're a sifter, or a judge, how likely are you to overcome the temptation (conscious or unconscious) to be influenced by the endorsement of an established publisher? One year, I asked my hard-pressed small publisher to enter me: she generously and readily agreed, but I know it was a huge hassle on top of all her other work, and I didn't feel it was fair to do it again (I suppose the big publishers have publicists etc to deal with all the form-filling bother), and I'm left thinking every year: do I even stand a chance whatever the standard of my story?

Well, I guess one should reserve judgement unless one knows the ins and outs of the process, but this year's shortlist - Zadie Smith, Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain, Tessa Hadley and the one less-well-known author Francesca Rydderch - even had chair of judges Alan Yentob being asked on Front Row last night if the reputations of the authors had influenced the judging. Of course Yentob denied it: these were simply the best stories, he insisted, and said (I think - I was driving as I was listening) that one might well expect such proven masters of fiction to produce brilliant stories, which is undeniably true.

But the press release I received makes me uneasy. We are told in the accompanying email that the shortlist is 'glittery', and the press release refers, in popular-culture terminology, to an 'all-star lineup', as well as stressing as a virtue the fact that some of these authors have been shortlisted previously. It's understandable: I know from my own time as an editor of a literary magazine the temptation - indeed necessity - of drawing readers (to serious literature) with big names and suggestions of glamour, and I'd like to think that that's all that's going on here, and that those in a position to promote the short story as a form aren't ending up sacrificing it on the altar of 'celebrity' or the status quo.

It depends what you know about a book before you read it

Our reading group discussion of Bainbridge's Harriet Said, her first-written novel but not her first published. An interesting case, we found, of the difference that being told the background to a novel makes to one's experience of reading it, which has implications for the power of blurbs and publicity.

Austen modernisations, really?

Is there anything that better illustrates literary fiction's contemporary enthralment to the market than HarperCollins' series of Jane Austen modernisations? As John Mullan points out in the Observer, Austen's novels are specifically about the manners, modes and social constructs of the time in which she was writing, all of which have now gone by the board. He outlines them all and shows how Austen's plots hinge on them entirely: the formality of naming which creates the crucial romantic misunderstanding in Sense and Sensibility, the rigid rules of sexual behaviour which, adhered to or breached, can create commitments and misunderstandings that would never happen now (Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility), the unbreakable trap that marriage was, the fact that a single woman had lost her chance of it by the age of 27, and so on...

I  suppose people will object that it's the characters that can be replicated, that the interest is in seeing those same characters negotiate a different set of social circumstances. But this is to subscribe to a pretty naive concept of 'character' and, more crucially, of what a novel is. Most of us, I guess, have been told that we are like a certain older relative, that we share their character, and many of have us felt that indeed we are and do, and in that sense we can see character as something that is passed down through families, determined by our genes, and therefore given and constant. But we are not in fact those older relatives: we may share certain personality traits but we are also formed by the different things that happen to us and the different society in which we live. Change the circumstances and you change the way a person is going to a behave, and thus in turn their character. And what is a novel - that most social of forms - but a depiction of the way people behave (action) when a certain set of social circumstances is applied to them?

A novel and its characters, as I discussed in a previous post, are also, supremely, constructs of language: to change the language of a novel - an essential part of the project in any modernisation - is to destroy its soul. And as Mullan points out, when the Marianne of Austen's Sense and Sensibility is finally driven to swear it is a most dramatic moment, but Joanna Trollope has her 'using the F-word on page 6, so when things turn really bad what extreme words does she have left?' Swearing means something different nowadays: it doesn't indicate the same thing about situations or characters, and the fact that Trollope's Marianne swears does not make her the same character as Austen's.

I really can't see what's actually being replicated here. Except for one thing: the lovely glow that a best-selling classic lights in the heart and a publisher's bank balance.

Literary labels

The excellent online magazine The View From Here kicks off its autumn season today, and I'm chuffed to be in the fiction slot, The Front View, with a new story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told'.

I suppose you could say that 'Tides' is a bit of a metafiction, but I hesitate to use that word because it sounds as if the story is far more experimental, hermetic - whatever - than I think it is. A short while ago the reading group I'm in had a couple of writing-group sessions, and I brought this story and made the mistake of calling it metafiction, and I think it put people off and they approached it fairly critically. (I think they liked it in the end, though!). See, that's the danger of labels, yet they're what we're stuck with in this marketing literary culture...

Anyway, I'd be really interested to know what other people think. You can read the story here.

Many thanks to Kate Brown, Fiction Editor at The View From Here.

Crossposted with my author blog.

Novel as language

In today's Guardian Review Zadie Smith writes:

What's this novel [her latest, NW] about? My books don't seem to me to be about anything other than the people in them and the sentences used to construct them.

And my reaction is Exactly! That's exactly how I feel about my own work, and I bet loads of other writers feel this too. A novel (or a story) is a construct, a construct of language, and the literary novel is above all about language: it's perhaps the defining characteristic of the kind of fiction we call 'literary'. Characters are supreme constructs, manifest not only in the narration (language) that conjures them, but in their dialogue (language), which is where people most self-consciously, and on a day-to-day level, construct reality about the world and themselves. None of it's real, but, as Smith (a wizz at dialogue) indicates, what we're engaged in is nevertheless a search for reality, the reality of the world that language constructs.

Yet always we are asked the question, 'What is your novel about?' and we are always expected to come up with some more concrete answer than the above, to refer merely to the story, or a political or moral theme, as though these are the be-all and end-all of any piece of fiction, when in fact they are common currency, and could be replicated any number of times. The real, defining and unique aspect of any novel is the voice or voices. And yet we do, don't we, we answer in the way we're expected, like dogs on hind legs? It takes a particular level of fame and status to be able to answer as Smith has done (although I'm daring to agree with her here, and wait wincing for the chop), for most of us are in thrall to the marketing machine that grinds along on those clattery superficial and ever-replicable cogs. Answering in the way we are expected, we feel afterwards that we have sold our work short.

And does it affect how we write? As it happens for me, a couple of days ago someone writing a PhD contacted me about one of my very early stories, and commented that I was doing something unusual and interesting with language. I was flattered, but my blood ran cold. For I consciously stopped writing quite in the way I did then. Mostly I think it's a good thing, that my work became more accessible, but it did make me wonder: have I simply been deflected, possible wrongly, by a sense of what's no longer linguistically acceptable in a dumbed-down literary marketplace?

Branding in publishing

Longman's dictionary:

brand n 1 a charred piece of wood 2a a mark made by burning with a hot iron to designate ownership (eg of cattle) b a mark formerly put on criminals with a hot iron 3a a mark made with a stamp, stencil etc to identify manufacture or quality b a class of goods identified by name as the product of a single firm or manufacturer c a characteristic or distinctive kind; a variety (a lively ~ of humour)

brand vt 1 to mark with a brand 2 to stigmatise 3 to impress indelibly (~ the lesson on his mind)

branded adj labelled with the manufacturer's brand.

Well, it's obvious which of these we mean when we're talking about branding in publishing, isn't it?
Or is it? The more I think about it, the less sure I am, and the more sure that sometimes we aren't at all clear what we mean.

Our Salt panel at the London Book Fair was centred on the notion of branding, though our focus was on the use of social networking in creating a brand, and we took the necessity of creating a brand, and the concept itself of a brand, for granted. But since then I've been thinking...

What precisely do we mean by a brand, and who or what is meant to be the brand? Clearly when the LBF invited Salt to form the panel on the strength of their success via social networking, they were thinking of Salt's output as a brand, in the sense of n 3b, 'a class of goods', in this case books, 'identified by name as the product of a single manufacturer', and also perhaps as n 3c, since Salt is characterised and made distinctive as a quality literary list. It's pretty obvious that a publisher does need to be brand in these senses - both as a business, and in the case of a literary publisher, for artistic reasons.

But then we Salt authors were there to speak for ourselves, precisely for our individual identities as writers, distinct from each other (we hope) and from all other authors, and it is constantly said now that an author - an individual author - needs to be a brand. It was an idea that was utterly taken for granted in the session on The Future of the Literary Agent I attended later that day. When agent Hellie Ogden spoke of what she was going to do for a new author she had taken on, it was the author's brand she spoke of managing and promoting. But what does this mean? In what consists the author's brand?

All too often, I fear, it means that an author is considered, or expected to be, the manufacturer of a series of one particular kind of novel. I have too often heard writers complaining about being pushed by their publishers to write another novel just like their last (and others of being rejected for not doing so), in other words to conform to their supposed brand, in the sense of 'being marked with a stamp'. Well, ouch! After all, creativity is all about innovation, to be repetitive is to be anti-creative. But even more pertinently, from the business point of view too there's a huge fault in this kind of thinking. Of course we like brands: as humans we take comfort in the familiar, the recognisable, but we are also excited by the new: brands can pall, especially in this era of the restless search of the new. This, I guess, is what leads to the deplorable situation of publishers dropping those they may have pushed into repetition, thus wasting their previous investments, and constantly seeking desperately for the The Next New Author.

But in good business practice a brand will maintain a constant while simultaneously refreshing and evolving. And is it not the case that serious authors do this anyway? The brand of a serious author consists after all in voice or style - which as T S Eliot averred is embedded in personality - or maybe something even more subtle, a particular characterising talent or energy, which in turn can give rise to the refreshment of literary variation.

Come back, you abandoned literary mid-listers, all is, or ought to be, forgiven...

London Book Fair

So I went to the London Book Fair. Someone once said - I'm sorry, I don't remember who - that a book fair is no place for a writer, but it's perhaps a sign of the times that this year there was a strong emphasis on self publishing, with seminars on things like how an author needs to be an entrepreneur, and Advanced Marketing for authors, and there was a dedicated Author's Lounge for unpublished authors  - though I'm not quite sure who they were supposed to be networking with: each other? I somehow can't imagine a load of agents and publishers coming down to be networked with, though I did attend a session there entitled The Future of the Literary Agent, in which Hellie Ogden, who has recently joined  Janklow and Nesbit, talked of a new relationship between authors and agents in which authors appointing agents want to know what agents can do for them. The whole tenor of this session, at which Andrew Lownie of Andrew Lownie Associates also spoke, was that it's a whole new world in publishing, with agents taking a much more active and creative role in managing the careers of their authors, and many publishers getting left behind in a quickly-changing digital ethos, overtaken by e-self-publishing and the kind of enterprise Andrew Lownie himself has - apparently very successfully - begun, trialing books as ebooks and via print on demand.

The Authors' Lounge for this event was vastly overcrowded, with people standing and sitting on the floor, and I did take a photo to show you, but I'm afraid when I got back to my very cheap hotel with absolutely no room whatever in the bathroom, the iphone (on which I'd taken the photo) slid off the pile of towels on top of the lavatory cistern into the loo (which made it in the end a very expensive yet inconvenient hotel). I know it's a cliche, dropping your phone in the loo when you're drunk, and I can't deny I'd had a glass or two, but still...

I was at the fair to take part in a Salt panel on How to Build Social and Brand Equity on a Shoestring. Branding was a key word at this fair. The great message of our panel was that we all have to be ourselves, yet we all need to be a brand, indeed we need to brand ourselves, so figure that one out, dear   Readers. In fact, our great chair, Elaine Aldred is going to blog about the event, and I'll link to her post when she does.

The way we change

Sometimes you get such searing insights into how the world of reading, and of selling books, has changed. At Christmas a relative I visited was weeding his bookshelves, and one of the books he offered round was this 1949 Pan paperback edition he bought from a secondhand-bookshop when he was a teenager. I took it for its classic cover design, but when I got it home I could hardly believe the 'blurb' (below) on the back of this populist publication, which in its structure, language and preoccupations reads more like a (stilted) essay, and appeals to assumed biobliographic and philanthropic interests in the readership rather than to a simple desire for spills and thrills. I particularly like the opening academically-inclined salvo:

THE SAINT VERSUS SCOTLAND YARD was originally entitled The Holy Terror, but its present title was used in the American editions and is therefore now adopted to obviate confusion.

and the assurance that the author is

himself [?] deeply interested in problems of psychology and philosophy

as well as the fact that

Enthusiasts for the Saint are reminded of the Saint Club ... which, besides giving members some amusement, supports the Arbor Youth Club in a heavily blitzed East End area of London

although we are told that Charteris has 'invented new ways of selling books,' and that last, with its carefully-placed contact details,  is probably an example.

Promotion and criticism

I hardly dare say this, but the fuss over R J Ellory's 'sockpuppetry' has me feeling distinctly uncomfortable and with alarm bells ringing. Of course his behaviour (in posting glowing Amazon reviews of his own work under a pseudonym and trashing that of his rivals) is highly reprehensible. But the thought immediately occurs to me: how far different is posting glowing reviews of your own work from the business of promoting your own work, as we authors are obliged to do nowadays? Well, yes of course it's different, but really, honestly, when I'm engaged in the business of promoting my own work I feel as though I'm doing something very similar. Because really, who am I to say my work is any good/worthwhile? Surely, that's for others to judge. Obviously you don't actually say that, that your work is good, but just standing up and shouting about it carries that implication. Doesn't it? Well, if it doesn't, if all you're doing is metaphorically standing there sheepishly and saying, Well I'm not sure if it's any good, but please, please take a look - well, frankly, now that I've thought about it, I'd rather boil my head than carry on being so ruddy beseeching. Actually, to be honest, I'll go further and admit that doing any of the tasks of promotion, asking people to review my books, putting word out about my readings etc etc makes me feel like a prostitute. I wish I could have the dignity of doing what I did right at the start of my writing career - hide right away behind my work and simply send it off into the world, where others could sing its praises or not. And as for Ellory, clearly he's responsible for his own actions, but the thought occurs that a culture in which the onus is on authors to get their books sales has surely paved the way for such actions...

And then there's the other side of it: his trashing of his rivals. Oh dear. Big bell ringing here. In the context of his glowing reviews of his own work, his negative reviews of his rivals sure look bad. But there's something worrying at stake here. Ellory may well have been on a campaign to do his rivals down, but he may well also have truly considered his rivals vastly inferior to himself - after all, we authors may be swilling in angst but we need a certain confidence about what we're doing, too, or we couldn't go on, and often have strong and negative opinions about those who are doing it differently. Yet I have read objections to Ellory's statement that he 'wholeheartedly regrets the lapse of judgement that allowed personal opinions to be disseminated in this way', on the grounds that he is still however holding to those opinions. Well, maybe he is being disingenuous here, clever - taking an opportunity to publicly reiterate those opinions - but the reaction to this worries me: are we writers not allowed to hold negative opinions of the work of other writers - or at least, if we do, must we keep them to ourselves, and resist engaging in literary discussion that promotes our own agendas at the expense of that of others? Well, yes, I guess that's increasingly so: as others have pointed out recently, in a situation where authors are expected to market and promote their own work, and reliant on each other for cheerleading, we are ending up with a backscratching culture in which true literary discussion heads for the drain..

What do we mean by 'literary'?

In the week when this year's Booker judging panel chooses a wideranging longlist, biased towards the off-beat but nevertheless embracing the apparently traditional farce of Michael Frayn's Skios, Daniel Green alerts me on Facebook to an article on The New Inquiry blog in which Rob Horning denounces the term 'literary'. It might seem from this last that Horning is taking a similar liberal approach to that of the Booker judges, but - although I find the real thrust of his argument hard to tease out  - his position seems, on the contrary, partisan.

He doesn't like the term 'literary', he begins by saying. My initial reaction is to agree (although I often find myself using the term). My reasons are these: while 'literary' can refer to a wide range of kinds of writing, from plain if heightened realism and the well-turned familiar to the wildly experimental and dissonantly innovative, it is too often taken as conjuring up the latter, against which there is a general prejudice. Any use of the term can cause people to assume with no other foundation, and often wrongly, that a book will be too difficult, or unenjoyable, or elitist, and put them off. 'Literary', in consequence, is too often used nowadays as a term of denigration. Secondly, this usage of the term is arbitrary, since forms that are unfamiliar when they first appear - non-linear narrative, for instance - can become familiar (and thus lose their 'difficulty') over time.

Initially, Horning appears to be saying exactly this last. He says that although we think the term defines 'particular formal characteristics', it doesn't really, since what is considered literary changes over time. But here his argument takes a different course, and his article turns out to be based on the assumption that, far from being used as a term of denigration, 'the literary' is a term still embraced as a positive accolade.

The reason for changes in notions of what is literary, he says, is that the literary is a matter of fashion. And the fashions are dictated (not by external factors in society, as I'd contend) but by a 'gate-keeping' literary community intent on 'asserting social power'. It's used, he declares, as 'an alibi for the status aspirations of the people who use it, who want to control its meaning'. 'The literary is what literary people say it is, which is what makes them literary people.'

It's the snobbery of the literary he's objecting to. There's something in this, of course: I remember feeling as child that maybe I could never be the writer I wanted to be, as those novels considered literary - ie given acclaim by reviewers - were set in worlds about which I knew nothing (except from books), middle-class drawing rooms peopled by doctors and lawyers or Bohemian artists. And when my novel The Birth Machine was first published it was hard to get it taken seriously as literature/art rather than propaganda because of its subject matter. It's certainly true that there are changing prejudices around what we consider literary. But it's the use of the term we are apparently talking about, and Horning seems at this point to overlook the fact that 'literary' has in recent years become a term of abuse, that publishers and agents are drawing their hands away from novels in any danger of being considered 'literary' as from hot bricks, and authors have been turning to familiar genres as the only way of surviving. I'm not sure that professing a 'literary' identity has recently given authors much power, social or literary.

Not that Horning purports to be talking about authors. 'The literary never really refers to books but to readers', he says. The point is that 'literary works flatter audiences... lets them pat themselves on the back by rejecting pleasure'. Well, there can't be many readers wanting to be flattered and patted on the back this way if publishers' enthrallment to the market is anything to go by, or if there are, the industry is mistaken and neglecting them sadly. And here we come up against a glaring inconsistency in Horning's argument. To Horning, it seems, 'the literary' does after all mean a specific 'formal characteristic' that is apparently unchanging. He began by asserting that the literary is not the same as the good, that 'any overlap may be entirely coincidental', but here he joins the ranks of those who use the term as an insult and equates the literary with the bad: 'The literary,' he says, 'never lets you forget how literary you are by reading it', implying not only that it always has a certain self-consciousness of tone but that this tone is directed towards nothing but flattering the reader's vanity (and so the author is implicated after all). This doggedly overlooks the possibility that prose designed to defamiliarise can have worthier aims: to draw readers' attention to certain truths about language, story-telling or life (see, for instance, my reading group discussion of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat). But then Horning has covered that base: 'Such goals are nonsensical, impossible,' he asserts, but in any case, since the literary is a matter merely of fashion decreed by an elite interested only in their own status, literary fiction is unfit to point to the truth. As a result, he says, literary books are never a force for social change and are only ever transient in significance.

Well, I don't know where George Orwell's novels, for instance, or nineteenth-century literary classics come into this. The example he chooses to prove his point is John Updike's Couples. I thoroughly enjoyed his hatchet-job on Updike's overblown prose, but can't agree that the fact that this is how it now seems is simply the result of 'the need for evolving sumptuary laws of culture to fix people in what seems to be their place' rather than wider changes in our social attitudes and consequent changes in the way we use language.

It turns out, though, that Horning isn't ignoring the current state of the market and its effect on so-called literary fiction, but for him it's another illustration of the way that literary fiction is lost up its own upturned nose: those he sees as claiming the badge of the literary he sees also as using the current marketing situation for 'just another mystification of the capitalist value form that orients production not toward generating more material wealth but generating distinction. It justifies poverty amid plenty on the basis of effort directed at shadows — in this case the alleged superiority of some socially coded type of language use'. For me this comes too close to blaming the victim, and his savage description of what he calls the newest literary moves towards endorsement of popular prejudiced and narrow conceptions of the literary: 'arid avant-gardism, formal difficulty for its own sake, genre experimentation, or really anything that the right readers can tell themselves is powerful and new and thus enjoy their own perceptiveness'.

Towards the end of the article, however, there's a change of tone, and Horning becomes almost wistful:  'I used to think you could salvage the term literary by ignoring its marketing usage and reserving it at least personally for those unique artifacts that appear perfect in themselves.' And he ends with what I take as self-irony: 'The reader who purports to be beyond the literary may be the most literary of all, claiming the perfectly camouflaged cultural capital whose value therefore can’t be questioned.' Which makes it all the more mystifying to me that he has expended so much effort in attacking a straw man.

Literature as comfort blanket

An interesting post by Danuta Kean, which relates to the issues discussed in my last post, below. She asks why some books become bestsellers, however badly written, often without much of a marketing campaign (Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, she tells us, received only £5,000 advance, 'guarantee of little or no marketing', and I understand that the first Harry Potter had a similar kind of introduction to the world). Kean's conclusion, which seems to me correct, is that they 'tap into contemporary anxieties about our lives' and yet are 'overwhelmingly reactionary', providing a literary comfort blanket (rather than any political challenge).

Hidden treasure

Mslexia dropped through my letterbox this morning. Always good for the latest industry trends and issues of interest to writers, this morning it held a special treat for me: the news that my friend Rosie Garland (who once thrilled audiences as Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen poet) has won the Mslexia competition for an undiscovered novel, with her novel The Beast in all her Loveliness. Not only that - another of her novels is on the 9-strong shortlist! The Beast... garners huge praise from judges Jenni Murray, who compares her to Angela Carter, and Sarah Waters, women who know their stuff when it comes to good writing, and fellow judge agent Clare Alexander says it has 'so much energy and exuberance, it glued me to the page.'

There's no way, at this rate, that Rosie is not now proved to be the fine and exciting writer I have always known her to be, yet in the 'How I Did It' section she describes the struggles she has encountered in a commercialised publishing industry. Such struggles are all too common now for literary writers who are however hardly free to air them before achieving this kind of success, and so the difficulties lie hidden. Mslexia, however, hearing 'rumours from agents that the market for fiction was in freefall, publishing deals were harder to come by, advances were decimated, and established authors were being tossed on the scrap heap' and noting that 'it's a sad fact that many agencies employ junior staff to sift submissions' and that in such a situation success depends on contacts, launched their competition to test how much good debut literary fiction has been left lying by the wayside. Their results appear to be spectacular: they say they were 'seriously impressed by the standard of the writing on show'. To find out why so much good writing was lying hidden they contacted the hundred (!) longlisted authors. It wasn't that the writers weren't sending their stuff out; far from it, but only 15% had managed to get an agent. Amongst the rest Mslexia encountered a tale of 'near misses', agents recognising the merit of manuscripts, even working for long periods with the authors on manuscripts, but ultimately feeling unable to sell them. Rosie herself writes of an agent who sent her winning book out only once, leaving it languishing after a single rejection before finally confessing to her that 'the market was so dire at the moment, he had been told by the agency to concentrate on non-fiction.'

God help us, is all I can say, and I'm not just talking about us writers but our so-called civilisation.

Ebooks and the slog of publishing

Well, I got my Kindle for Christmas. I've read so much about Kindles, but it was still a shock to be able to press the One-Click button on Amazon and be told that the book I wanted would appear in a moment on my Kindle, and in the next instant look down and find it there, and with another flick of a button begin reading - and all for less than two quid! Maybe I'll get used to it, but at present this does seem to make books kind of magical. Although I am getting used to it: there's another book I want, King Crow by Michael Stewart, and actually, I sent off for it in early December and it never arrived, so rather than bother chasing it up I'll just download it on Kindle, shall I? Oh hey, no, it's not on Kindle.* I've got to bother chasing it up after all, or pay the print price all over again plus postage and packing and wait a day or two, when really I want to look at it NOW! And there are other books on Kindle: I can imagine a scenario where I just don't bother and get one of those instead (though I didn't do that). And since my own books aren't yet on Kindle (they will be eventually, I'm told) I'm jealous of all those authors whose books already are - readers being able to get hold of them so quickly, so easily. People interested in my books have asked me if they're on Kindle and I have answered with equanimity (and, for a considerable time, little interest) that they aren't, imagining those readers happily ordering the print copies instead. Now, though, I'm imagining them instantly losing interest... Surely being on Kindle must make a difference to sales... Surely, as a small-publisher at a book fair said to me recently, even though the price of ebooks has been forced so low by Amazon, you can still turn a profit, as ebook sales can be phenomenal?

But apparently it's not so simple. Which books do I download? Why, those I know about beforehand, of course: you can't exactly browse for books on Amazon. So those books that will sell well via Amazon, either in print or electronic form, are those which have had good marketing. And since Kindle books are priced so low, you need to sell a lot to make any substantial profit - which must mean that ebooks need particularly aggressive marketing.

And marketing a book is really hard and time-consuming work. I've heard so many non-writers advising authors having difficulty getting published to do it themselves with ebooks. Of course, they're thinking of Amanda Hocking, who has become a millionaire through her self-published young adult vampire ebooks, but it's interesting to learn in a recent Guardian article that she 'became so burned out by the stress of solo publishing' that she has now turned to a traditional publisher, and to hear what she herself has to say on the matter. I read elsewhere that she wants to be a writer again, the implication being that being a sole publisher left her no time to write, and The Guardian reports:

She also resents how her abrupt success has been interpreted as a sign that digital self-publishing is a new way to get rich quick. Sure, Hocking has got rich, quickly. But what about the nine years before she began posting her books when she wrote 17 novels and had every one rejected? And what about the hours and hours that she's spent since April 2010 dealing with technical glitches on Kindle, creating her own book covers, editing her own copy, writing a blog, going on Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, responding to emails and tweets from her army of readers? Just the editing process alone has been a source of deep frustration, because although she has employed own freelance editors and invited her readers to alert her to spelling and grammatical errors, she thinks her ebooks are riddled with mistakes. "It drove me nuts, because I tried really hard to get things right and I just couldn't. It's exhausting, and hard to do. And it starts to wear on you emotionally. I know that sounds weird and whiny, but it's true."

* Edited in: In the few days since I wrote this post, Michael Stewart's Not-the-Booker-winning King Crow has become available on Kindle. I've also read it since, and recommend it - vivid and moving (and very cleverly written).

National short Story Day and Words for Christmas

The shortest day today and what better way to fill it with light than to celebrate National Short Story Day, and what better way to wish my readers Happy Christmas than to direct you to the website, where there's a feast of stories, and many short story recommendations. My own favourites (here) are Grace Paley's 'A Conversation With My Father' and 'The Universal Story' by Ali Smith: click the recommendations link on the home page to see choices of a host of others.

Speaking of recommendations, I was going to recommend to you Mark Forsyth's Etymologicon, the book from his erudite and witty blog on etymology - I'm a sucker for such things and I'm putting it in stockings - but it's clear I don't need to: it's book of the Week on Radio 4 and currently Amazon's best-selling book - pretty amazing for a book from a small publisher. Meerkats one year, the origins of words the next - there's no accounting for the British!

Merry Christmas, everyone!


Crossposted with my author blog, Elizabeth Baines

The pseudo-scholar and the pigeon hole

I'm re-reading E M Forster's Aspects of the Novel and thought I'd share some words from the Introductory lecture which seem apposite to our times. The 'pseudo-scholar', he says

...classes books before he has understood or read them; that is his first crime. Classification by chronology. Books written before 1847, books written after it, books written before or after 1848. The novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the pre-novel, the ur-novel, the novel of the future. Classification by subject matter - sillier still. The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women's Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues - dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex ... improper books ... novels relating to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the weather...

It strikes me that this is the chief way that books are viewed and received now in our culture: it's how they are marketed, it's how they are frequently written about on the web or, in particular, in newspapers. It's how stories are often published in anthologies, and filtered in competitions, ie thematically. A novel or a story is seen through the walls of some pigeon hole or other, and no one looks at it - really reads it - for what it is in itself or on its own terms. As Forster goes on to say, this is

moving round books instead of through them... Books have to be read; it is the only way of discovering what they contain. ...reading is the only method of assimilation... The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer, and this the pseudo-scholar will not do. He would rather relate a book to the history of its time, to events in the life of the author, to the events it describes, above all to some tendency.

Too simple for words?

Interesting juxtaposition in today's Guardian.

First, there's a very interesting four-page interview with Umberto Eco by Stephen Moss. The great semiotician opines that ' "you [ie the author] are not responsible for perverse readings of your book" ' which might seem like poststructuralist orthodoxy - a text is what the reader/cultural context makes of it, etc - but it's obvious that he thinks his books are misunderstood by what he calls "weak readers". He feels that books are best judged 10 years after publication after reading and re-reading [my italics], an interesting comment in the light of our current quick-fix literary culture, and the way that books drop right out of the public consciousness if they don't have an instant hit. He isn't precious about the film of The Name of the Rose; he is tickled by the fact that a girl went into a bookshop and saw it and said "Oh, they have already made a book out of it [ie the film]." He has a iPad for travelling, but he doesn't think that printed books will die, and puts it nicely: "Not just Peter Pan but my Peter Pan". Above all, he explains the huge success of the erudite The Name of the Rose, which just goes on and on selling, by the fact that "It's only publishers and journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged."

Then there's a piece by Laura Barnett on the fact that this year the Christmas literary market is awash with 'women's fiction' about Christmas. As Barnett points out, Dickens wrote Christmas books, but one has to doubt that these books will still be being read, like A Christmas Carol, 170 years after publication (leave alone in Eco's 10-year time frame), since the quote from Hodder and Stoughton editor Isobel Akenhead makes pretty clear that the thematic push is intended as ephemeral, and the books are being sold as ephemeral commodities: "It makes sense to publish for Christmas – that's the one time of year that doesn't seem to have been affected by the general drop-off in sales of women's fiction. In supermarkets, these books cost little more than a Paperchase Christmas card; people often seem to buy two of them, one for themselves and one for their mother, sister or friend. That doesn't happen at any other time of year." So they're bought like Christmas cards, for the rituals of Christmas (which we all know can be a chore, but hey, we've got to do it), and like Christmas cards, they are a cause of brief delight before being thrown away.

Of course, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with reading purely for entertainment. But it's interesting that Isobel Akenhead says that sales of 'women's fiction' have dropped off generally. Are we simply talking comparative numbers in a market that is nevertheless a major source of income for publishers, or can Eco be right about people wanting other kinds of literature, too?

A couple of links

My latest piece for the online literary journal, The View From Here, on marketing books.

And the latest discussion of my reading group, on E L Doctorow's Homer and Langley.

The critic, the artist and the ego

I love the Guardian extract, concerning critics and prizes, from Stephen Sondheim's forthcoming book, Look I Made a Hat. He's pretty much on about the artists's ego, which might seem self-centred,  but it's a serious point that artists and writers need buoyant egos to go on working. Here are the bits I really like:

On critics:

A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been.

On prizes:

What sours my grapes is the principle of reducing artists to contestants. Competitive awards boost the egos of the winners (until they lose) and damage the egos of the losers (until they win), while feeding the egos of the voters (all the time). Just as there are people who claim to be immune to public criticism, so there are those who claim to be unaffected by being passed over for an award from their supposed peers. But, as in the case of the critic-immune, I've not met any who have convinced me. It isn't so much that you want to be deemed the best; it's more that you don't want to be deemed second best. No matter who the voters are, and whether you accept them as worthy of judging you, winning means they like you more than your competitors.

In conclusion:

...the only meaningful recognition is recognition by your peers or, more accurately, people you consider your peers, and peer recognition is a very personal matter. An artist's peers are other artists, not necessarily in the same field – ie, musicians for musicians, painters for painters – but people who understand what you're trying to do simply because they're trying to do a similar thing.

On the first point, I'd add that a favourable review that nevertheless entirely misses the point of your work can be almost as bad as an unfavourable review - or, well, pretty dismaying. On the second, I'd add that the pernicious thing about prizes is that the also-rans become second-best in the eyes of the public as well as the judges.
On the last, I'd heartily agree, as far as an artist's ego goes, but then we have the matter, don't we, of sales...?