John Harding's Guest Post: 'The Apprentice', W.H. Auden and Me

Last week I posted my review of John Harding's novel Florence and Giles - and with Hallowe'en fast approaching, nothing more suitable for reading at dark o' night!

Here, as promised, is John's guest-post for Literascribe, a cogent, thoughtful and spirited exploration of the strictures and challenges of author 'branding': enjoy!

The Apprentice, W.H. Auden and Me

At first glance there doesn't seem to be anything to link the poet W.H. Auden and the reality TV show The Apprentice but there is and it's me. Leaving aside Auden for the moment, let's talk about The Apprentice which, as anyone who's ever seen it will know, isn't anything to do with learning a trade or making something, but all about selling. And the key to success there, as Lord Sugar hammers home every series, is not the product itself, but its branding. Branding means creating an individual identity for a product that the consumer will instantly recognise, be attracted to, and buy. It's the thing that makes it stand out from the rest of the crowd on the supermarket shelf.

These days of course books are sold in the same way as baked beans (although Waterstone's has just - somewhat belatedly - realised that selling three very different books by different authors isn't quite the same as selling three perfectly identical packs of washing powder). And in confirmation of this, read any of the growing number of books about how to market your novel and they all talk about the brand. As the author, the brand is you.

Play the branding name association game. Say Heinz and you think of baked beans; say P.D. James and it's crime; Stephen King and horror: Joanna Trollope and Aga saga; John Harding and ...? This is my problem. Even if you've heard of me, even if you've read all of my published books, you won't be able to fill in the blanks. I don't have a brand.

The reason is that I've written four very different books that are difficult to find a common slot for. I've had two publishers and both have been frustrated by this and I sympathise. It makes me difficult to market in an age when everything is pigeonholed, where there's so much out there that you get lost if you don't have a niche.

Increasingly publishers rely on the brand to sell the book. They're reluctant to spend money on advertising, with some justification. It's rarely cost effective. The only one of my books to have any advertising recorded my lowest sales. Marketing strategy seems to be left with two prongs. In my experience in-store promotion is the most vital. It's the main way the reading public is going to be made aware of your book. Publishers will always tell the author, 'We think this is a book we think will sell by word of mouth', but for the elusive word of mouth to happen some people have to see it and read it first, so they can talk about it and spread the word. If the book isn't prominently in the shops, this doesn't happen.

My current publisher didn't manage to get Florence and Giles into the shops in any great numbers. Smiths took 300 between their 600 shops, and it was only in 100 of the 300 or so Waterstone's stores, and then not very prominently. Even if this isn't the case and the book gets into shops, it's extremely difficult to establish a title in the public's mind, as publishers now believe books have such a short shelf life, typically three weeks to three months. After that all but the bestsellers disappear from view. By the time your first readers have actually got round to reading the book and telling their friends about it, it's no longer in the stores. Word of mouth is silenced before it begins.

One publisher I was speaking to recently questioned the wisdom of this, especially in the digital age, reckoning that these days new books have a much longer shelf life - he reckoned it at 18 months rather than three - even if they're not actually on bookstore shelves. And you can see the wisdom of this point of view. Some of the bestselling books on Amazon Kindle recently have been books that came out not last month or even last year but several years ago. There's a new equalising process happening on Amazon, where age matters much less than quality.

Talk to any author who's not a major seller these days and they will tell you the same. Publishers do virtually nothing in the way of promotion - the only thing I can think of mine doing with Florence and Giles was sending out copies wrapped in black paper with a wax seal (it's literary Gothic thriller) to a few celebrities and bookshops, with predictable results - and increasingly the task of selling the book is left to the author, who may be a good writer, but is not necessarily a good salesman.

If an author is clued up about Internet book sites - by which I guess I really mean Amazon - and has a Kindle (every author should these days) and is a consumer rather than just a salesman, he or she may know more about how things work than the publisher, who is often too busy to engage at this level. So it was that I suggested to my publisher than they lower the ebook price of Florence and Giles to 99p. On Amazon it's the publisher who fixes the selling price of ebooks. The point was that at nearly the same price as the paperback it was selling virtually nothing on Kindle. As a Kindle reader myself I understood that it goes against the grain for readers to pay the same price for a virtual book as for one that has paper, printing and shipping costs factored in. At 99p a throw the publisher makes very little and the author virtually nothing on each copy sold, but that's not what matters. Cheap ebooks attract casual browsers who will often take a punt on a 99p book that sounds good. If they like it they tell their friends - and that can be a lot of friends if they use social networks - and you start to get word of mouth. A 99p ebook isn't a profit maker, but it's a terrific marketing too. As word of mouth has started to spread about Florence and Giles, I've seen not only an increase in ebook sales, but in paperback sales too, as some of the people who've heard about it from their Kindle-reading friends have gone for the print copy. Fortunately I'm able to engage in a dialogue with my publisher, who readily accepted the suggestion, and it's working well.

At the same time, they had a digital idea of their own that I wasn't impressed by, which was to launch an ebook edition of Florence and Giles, combined with the Henry James novella The Turn of the Screw which inspired it, priced at £2.99. I can see this might have seemed a great idea to anyone who doesn't spend time researching their book on Amazon, but I predicted it wouldn't succeed as a simple search reveals you can download Turn of the Screw for free on Kindle. they were charging an extra £2 for a book readers could buy for nothing. Predictably the rankings for this edition show it's sold virtually no copies. But the good thing is, other than that, my publisher is supportive of my online campaign, retweeting reviews, and responding to my suggestions about Amazon categories - it's better to put your book in a category where it can make the top 100 rather than one where it won't.

In the dozen years since I was first published, the Internet has opened up and it's much easier for writers to publicise their books via social media. In the last two or three months Florence and Giles has really started to build a buzz on Twitter after some great reader reaction and wonderfully positive reviews which have added to the good reviews it had in the national press.

For the author, engaging with social media is both a joy and a burden. A joy because I've met some terrific people on the Twittersphere, many of them other authors or aspiring writers, and have even gone on to turn a couple of those virtual friendships into actual meetings. It's also proved to be a great way to engage with readers who otherwise would never have the opportunity to have an exchange with a published author, except at the rare public appearance, and the feedback has been wonderfully supportive for someone like me, who, like many authors, finds self-doubt and insecurity a constant problem when writing a book. Every compliment on Twitter helps shore up self-belief for the book I'm currently working on.

I said online social media was both a joy and a burden. The burdensome part is that it's incredibly time-consuming. It can take up several hours a day, just responding to all my new friends, writing blogs like this one, doing podcast interviews and the like. And all of this time has to be factored in over and above my normal life, mornings spend writing a novel, afternoons reviewing and writing reviews, and of course, family life. Since I started promoting the book online a few months ago, I've hardly managed to get out to the cinema (a great passion) or to see old actual friends as opposed to tweeting to new virtual ones.

What I haven't managed to do is create that elusive brand although I have at least identified for myself what I would like that brand to be, which brings me back to Auden. Writing on the death of the Russian composer Stravinsky, Auden made the distinction between craft and Art: 'the draftsman starts work knowing exactly what the finished result will be; the artist doesn't know what he is making until it is made.' When you set out to make a table, you need to have a precise plan from the outset. Get your measurements wrong and the top won't be level and your freshly heated bowl of Heinz tomato soup will slide off the edge and hit the floor. When you release a sculpture from a block of stone, the excitement comes from not knowing quite what will emerge. It's the not knowing that's the whole point.

Auden goes on to say that an artist is always refining himself; once he has done something to his satisfaction, he forgets it and attempts next to do something new that he has never done before. This strikes at the heart of why I've never wanted to write the same book, or even the same type of book, twice, commercially sensible though that might be. Now I'm not making any claims for my books as works of art, nor am I presumptuous or pretentious enough to describe myself as an artist, far from it. But it's what I aspire to and for me that ambition is critical to writing a good book.

So there we have it, the pigeonhole I would like to create for myself, the brand I would like to establish: someone who will always do different from before, who will always attempt to do better next time, and, above all, will always try his level best to write you a good book. Is there a section for that in Waterstone's?

Thank you so much for this, John. Now some readers may have found some of the things John has to say as chillingly unsettling as his character Florence (author shelf-life, anyone?). However, I think most of us who are writing these days know that publishers have been known not to deliver quite as strongly as promised on the marketing front, that publishers often do want writers to keep churning out essentially the same or same type of story as first garnered them success, and that for any one unknown writer to make their voice heard is the biggest challenge of all.  Last week, Mike French, editor of The View from Here magazine, memorably said this is 'like standing out in a storm trying to make yourself heard to someone standing ten miles away or asking someone to hit you in the face with a large stick all day' (He's drawing attention for his novel The Ascent of Isaac Steward, by the way.)

So it's all the more heartening when the efforts of writers and publishers pay off and the readers do hear the murmur, the whisper in the grass. A few months ago I interviewed Mark Edwards and Louise Voss, who published straight to Kindle and went on to win a publishing deal with HarperCollins. John Harding has shown the acumen to advise his publishers to take a hit on the profits on Florence and Giles in order to raise public awareness of his book - and by Jove it's working!

Looking forward to your next one, John, in the sureness that it will be joyfully unpredictable. Oh, and by the way, I'm one of those readers who came across Florence and Giles on Kindle and have since bought the print copy, to have and to hold.

The link to my review of Florence and Giles is here. John's website is here. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnRHarding.

Meanwhile, my new Fictionfire Focus Workshops are coming up in November and December - go to the Focus Workshops page on my website for details of dates and topics. Booking is also open for my spring day courses: Write It!, Edit It!, Publish It!, Market It! - details here.

Well, the weather's been so grey and grim over the past few days, we could stand with cheering up, so here are the titles vying for your vote in this year's Diagram Prize, which is awarded by The Bookseller to the oddest title of the year. These are all genuine published books and you can vote for your favourite at www.thebookseller.com. Results are due on 25th March.

Here they are:
8th International Friction Stir Welding Symposium Proceedings
The Generosity of the Dead
The Italian's One-Night Love-Child
Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way
Myth of the Social Volcano
What Color is your Dog?

Current favourite is Managing a Dental Practice the Genghis Khan Way, which I have to say I'm drawn to, especially after suffering years of dentist-phobia (result of cack-handed treatment when I was a child and when I lived in Aberdeen. I remember the lady upstairs from my flat recommending I just have all my teeth pulled - 'Ye'll nae be bothered again. Jist get it a' ower and deen wi'.' There were moments when I was tempted ... )

If you want to have a chuckle at the shortlists of previous years, here are the links to my earlier posts about the competition:
2010 and this - where by weird coincidence I was suffering dental woes -
2009
2008
2007

Let me know what you think and whether, in your opinion, this year's list matches up to those of previous years.

Get your metaphors in a twist!

Metaphors are incredibly powerful tools, when you get them right - but writers can give too free a rein to their imagination, letting the horse of figurative language have its head (see what I'm doing here?) and they can fall at the Becher's Brook of comprehensibility.

Only Shakespeare can get away with this sort of frantic coinage of the mind: famously, Hamlet talks of taking arms against a sea of troubles, for instance, and Bill makes it work precisely because of the Canute-like absurdity of military action against the ocean.

My favourite mixed metaphors are 'I smell a rat! Shall I nip it in the bud?' and one which one of my students heard in a meeting: 'The road-map is on track to take off.'

And here today is another corporate-speak nonsense: one of Bloomsbury's sales and marketing people, when interviewed about their new deal with Google e-books, describes the advantages (apparently. Hmnn...) to authors and indie booksellers: 'Anyone that has any platform with any legs moving forward is on cloud.'

I leave that vision with you.

A Catty Comment on the Biography Market

On the rights pages of The Bookseller this week, the announcement of another major celebrity autobiography acquisition. 'Who could it be?' you ask. 'Who's left, given that we're now on the second volume of autobiographies by such stellar scribblers (dictators?) as Peter Kay, Russell Brand and Chris Evans?'

Well, Ebury Press has acquired the story of Aleksandr Orlov, that's who.

Who?

The answer is, quite simply, 'Simples!' Aleksandr Orlov is the meerkat in the TV adverts for Compare the Market.

I'll give you a moment to absorb that.

Apparently Orlov has 750,000 followers on Facebook (do people have nothing better to do with their time?). Senior editor Andrew Goodfellow says 'Aleksandr's moment is now and he's a dark horse for the autumn.' (But wait, I though he was a meerkat!) Curiouser and curiouser. 'The team here just love him and believe we can make A Simples Life a second Christmas number one in a row for Ebury Publishing. ... the British public have been clamouring to hear his story.'

OK, Andrew, if you say so.

All of which is hugely encouraging to those of us who are flesh and blood examples of homo sapiens, trying to write stories and memoirs and sell them, via publishers who are clearly sensible, feet-on-the-ground, rational channels existing to facilitate communication between author and public.

It'll be the twiddly-moustached opera-singer from Go Compare next. You mark my words.

The Lights Are On, But ...

For those who are interested, the dental saga goes on. In spite of my excellent dentist's best efforts, the tooth won't settle down and I can't put any pressure on it, so its days may be numbered. At this rate I'll be mumbling sops of bread in milk - but should end up a champion gurner, so all is not lost.

A couple of weeks ago the entry pack for this year's Bookseller Industry Awards was included in The Bookseller. It's always salutary, as a cree-aytive person, to keep in mind the hard-nosed business we're trying to supply with 'product'. On the page devoted to Children's Bookseller of the Year, previous winners are listed: 2005 Ottakar's, 2006 Ottakar's, 2007 Borders, 2008 Borders, 2009 Borders.

Aye, and where are they now?

I'm really missing Borders. What makes it worse is passing the store in Oxford with its massive floorspace and all the lights on at full blast, it seems, since Christmas. Somebody said to me that this was probably about security but honestly, every single light is on - have they not heard of global warming?

Well done to Kathryn Bigelow for winning those Oscars and with a film that cost $7 million to make, as opposed to Avatar's $185. I was checking out the awards (and the frocks!) this morning and heard an interview with some chap who'd worked with her on Hurt Locker and seemed to be claiming she was so great it wasn't like working with a woman at all! How patronising is that? No wonder it's taken 80 years for a woman to win best director. Strikes me that the film industry is just one big 'who can pee the highest' competition anyway.

What about the writing?

First of all, thanks to all those who attended my second fictionfire course a couple of weeks ago - I really enjoyed it and am now planning new courses. It looks like I'll be running them in May next year, so if there are any creative writing subjects that interest you, do get in touch at info@fictionfire.co.uk. Also, do keep popping over to the fictionfire site because I'm having fun with the Quote of the Week section, where I write a little riff on a writing-related quotation that's caught my attention.

What caught my attention today on the Bookseller website was an article describing how Waterstone's Piccadilly held a seminar for agents late last month, at which agents were introduced to the chain's buying team and informed about the firm's buying 'hub'. One of the useful pieces of information they were given was that there are, apparently, four key considerations when it comes to ordering in books for the stores. Here they are, with my understanding of what each means in brackets: track record (i.e. has the author written before, what sort of sales did they achieve?), support from the publisher (is there going to be any sort of marketing spend, the sort of thing where publishers pay for books to go in the window displays, join the 3 for 2s, etc),  market context (is the subject of the book 'hot' just now, is it in a clearly defined genre, does it have a clearly defined readership, is it like anything else that's popular at present?) and pricing/cover (no need to explain).

Now, dear readers, you may be feeling there's one other important consideration missing from this list - and the agents, bless them, were alive to this. 'What about the writing?' they asked. One attendee said, 'They reassured us but for Waterstone's not to mention content as a key consideration was a shock. They are not Tesco.'

No, but getting there.

Here, it seems, is how the book industry works: judgement is from the outside in. EPOS sales records, celebrities famous for something else, genre bandwagons etc. As writers who produce, mad obsessional fools that we are, the 'product' for the market, we in our innocence tend to make judgement calls from the inside out: is the writing any good? Have I seduced the reader with gorgeous language, compelling characters, a gripping yarn? Have I expressed my deepest emotions, interests and concerns? Have I actually managed to generate 80,000 words of logical, coherent prose? Yay me! Have I revised and polished that prose so it gleams? It's hard for us to be as hard-nosed as the chain buyers. So, keep on writing what you want to write, keep on caring about its quality - but when you come to send it out, try to define your 'market context' and pray for a publisher prepared to support it so that you get the chance to establish that track record.

Borders bowing out?

First the good news: I checked out the website of the Bridport Prize yesterday and yes, my name is indeed on the shortlist; it wasn't all a dream. Very uplifting - I just wish they'd managed to spell my name correctly ...

Today all sorts of rumours have abounded but it does seem to be true: Borders has gone into administration. The signs have been there for quite a while: I was amazed to see more and more floorspace open up in the Oxford store. I kept thinking - if you pay a fortune to rent space by the square metre why wouldn't you want to fill it with goods to sell? The children's department suffered horribly. In the world of books they have a ghastly term: destocking. It strikes a chill into the heart of every reader, every writer.

Then the destocking changed to the stocking of well, what Sir Alan Sugar might call 'a load of old tut'. Shelf after shelf of feather-edged, sequin-bedecked jewellery boxes and stands. Stuff like that. In a bookshop? I have no problem with coffee concessions and stationery and cards being sold in a bookshop - but fluffy boudoir gifties? NO!

The writing was on the wall - increasingly desperate offers, limited range and staff who looked like they'd lost the will to live. Now administration. Echoes of Zavvi and Woolies last year.

Locally, I liked the Borders store. I liked its long opening hours, the author events they put on, the Paperchase franchise, and, when it opened a few years back, the range they had. I also like Waterstone's and Blackwells, both of which are very close to Borders in the heart of Oxford. I like bookshops, full stop, and have been upset at the loss of the range of browsable, eccentric second-hand stores in the city. Chain bookshops have had their faults and still do: the endless 3 for 2s, the lack of daring with range, the frustration with central buying, the treating of books like ...

but wait! Who really treats books like baked beans? Enter the supermarkets, who have squeezed the chains as the chains once squeezed the independents. Supermarkets who with their enormous spending power have made publishers turn craven, granting terms that benefit nobody - not the publisher, not the chains and independents (who often source their books from supermarkets as they can get them cheaper than from the publisher), not the poor bleedin' author - and in the long run, not the reader, who is patronised and swindled, denied choice and range.

So, if Borders cannot be salvaged, this is a sad day, just as it was a sad day when Ottakars went, when Waterfields and Thornton's in Oxford went.

As writers, my dears, not only will we have to write the books, we'll need to self-publish them, market them, and find premises from which to sell them!

OK, now finally - there's still just time for you to sign up for my course on plot on Saturday! You'd be very welcome. See my post below for details or mosey on over to fictionfire!

Publisher wants it all quiet on the western front

This is just a quick post because I'm pretty busy trying to construct a website for my new enterprise. Steep learning curve, I assure you. Plus the boys are imminently returning to school (cue weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth) and my teaching will get underway next week. Summer, suddenly, is over and as so often as September arrives, there's a sense of having been cheated. Certainly, we were cheated weather-wise, and all meteorologists should be spit-roasted over the barbecues they predicted we would have. But also, you remember late June, early July, the academic year coming to an end, the season stretching ahead, the plans for all the things you'd do, the trips you'd take ...

I always plan cultural/educational Places to Visit and Things to Do with my sons - and then fail to carry through. Plus the big change this year is that said sons wouldn't be seen dead with me downtown, in case they run into their mates. It is Not Cool to have Mum around. So Mum ends up feeling distinctly redundant.

Sebastian Faulks was on Breakfast this morning, promoting his new book from the comfortable position of established, well-regarded, media-friendly author. He told an anecdote, which as literary anecdotes are prone to be, was part-funny, part-horrifying. When he wrote Birdsong his American publisher was reluctant to take it on. She asked him whether he could cut the war sections (!) or, indeed, relocate it to a more recent conflict! She wasn't entirely getting the point of it, was she? This follows on the heels of a friend telling me yesterday that someone she knows, of high academic standing, cannot sell her father's memoirs (and this was a man who had lived a perilous and exciting life) because, as one publishing minion put it, 'Your father's dead and therefore we couldn't arrange a promotional tour.'

Permission to open and close your mouth like a goldfish.

Would you credit it?

If you scroll down this blog to the 10th and 15th April, you'll find a couple of posts I wrote about 'Carrion Jane' - that is, the successful 'mash-up' novel called 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies'. Yes, really. It does exist. It is a success, though daunting when you come across it in a bookshop, with a lovely Regency miss in an Empire-line muslin dress but with the whole of her lower jawbone, teeth, sinews and gunk on full display. Quite puts one off one's afternoon tea.

I talked about how this success seems to be breeding more horror-lit mash-ups, and put forward a few spoof versions of my own, including 'Prince Albert, Royal Werewolf', tee hee. Well, hush my mouth, somebody must have been listening. In this week's 'Bookseller' Hodder and Stoughton announce that they've acquired 'Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter'! This worthy tome has been 'proactively' sought out because this is a 'growing area' (I better get back to my own list and get writing, then!) It was bought for a 'good five figure sum' through agent Antony Topping, who, by the way, is the agent who represents C.J. Sansom, a writer I much admire. Hmn. In the novel Queen Vic is a demon hunter who protects the empire from werewolves and demons. So now you know why she was none-too-amused. Maybe it was the empire on which the sun never set because if it did, all these nasty beasties would come creeping out of the woodwork. And maybe that's why Prince Albert (see above) had to die ...

If you're in any need of further ghoulish humour, how's this: Father's Day is nearly upon us and Tesco and W.H. Smith have both been taken to task for displaying 'The Crimes of Josef Frizl' as a book you might like to give to your dear old pa. Granted, it was only in a couple of stores, but really. The Lewisham branch of W.H. Smith had in it their 'Top 50 Books for Dad' display.

Stick to the slippers, the Simpsons tankard, the table snooker or the Old Spice gift set, I'd say.

The Best Things Come to Those Who ...

A few weeks back I blogged about 'Queryfail' - where agents were sharing on Twitter the worst approaches made to them by writers. This has caused rage and frustration in the writing community: go to http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/04/agentfail-right-here.html to listen in to writers getting their own back by grousing about the dreadful behaviour of agents. I took a look at this last week and it was already a very lengthy thread and although I felt sympathy - and recognition - I also felt that it was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory to sneer at agents and complain about them. Sadly, many of the complaints were badly spelled and expressed - and this does the would-be clients of agents no favours. We need to stay calm, professional, icily articulate. Do go across and take a look: some of the experiences recounted are truly shocking. After a while, though, I bet you'll start feeling weary or uncomfortable - where does it get us all? I enjoy a good bleat as much as the next hard-done-by writer (oh, you noticed that, did you?) but there comes a time when you have to detach yourself and think of ways of taking practical, independent action. You have to have your pride, even if you don't have the cherished book-deal.

That said, I did recognise one of the cardinal sins of agents, and publishers, repeated over and over and over, and I have been at the receiving end of this so many times. What is it? Cruelty, a sneering dismissal, a promise unfulfilled, a stolen idea? No. It's SILENCE. It's the hardest thing of all to cope with. You put together the best submission package you can, you write a smooth, brief, ultra-professional letter, you dutifully follow all the guidelines on the agency's website, you act keen but not insanely desperate. You send material off by snail mail or through the ether. Then you wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

You know you should be writing something new but you can't settle to it until ... until you know, once and for all, whether your beloved project has found a home.

You wait some more.

You agonise about when it would be permissible to make a brief, humble enquiry - did my material, perchance, reach you safely? When do you think you could let me know whether you're interested? You draft an email enquiry with more care than you put into the whole novel. You wait.

And you wait

And you wait.

Christmas comes. Another birthday. Your children grow six inches. So does your waistline. The photo you fondly thought might do as a publicity shot bears less and less resemblance to your current haggard state.

You keep waiting. Weeks, months - and sometimes years - down the line, an answer comes. When it does, it's a weasel-phrase, a wriggle-clause, written by an overloaded overworked agent (or minion) who, in spite of the fact that an entire geological epoch has passed since you submitted the thing, hasn't really had the time to read much of it, or read it with care. You suspect that these time-delay judgements are also, paradoxically, snap judgements. Not quite right for our list, bleh bleh. We wish you luck placing it elsewhere, blah blah. The knowing for sure, is cruel - but it certainly beats, believe me, the NOT knowing for sure. Tread on my dreams if you must - just don't skirt them and wander off without any comment at all on their pretty colours, their soft textures.

Several writers on the Bookends blog were particularly upset by failure of agents to reply even when material had been solicited! Another grouse is that agents put up on their websites that they will reply in four or six weeks - and then don't. Or they say that if you don't hear in a certain time, it's a no. Hmn. You'll still be left wondering - did it get to them safely? I must know, I must know! So you'll still chase them. Glitches do happen: when I revised my last book for my agent and waited several weeks for her response, then emailed her, I was told she hadn't received it. In fact it was at the agency, lying on somebody else's desk, for the best part of a month, further delaying the time when it would be sent out to publishers.

Now then, because God forbid we should sound biassed and unfair, let's take a look at an agent's perspective. Go to agent Nathan Bransford's excellent blog (in my blogroll to the right) - he's been conducting a very interesting experiment. He posted, with the writers' permissions, fifty genuine query letters he'd had and invited us to judge whether we would, as agents, have requested material from those writers. If you go to the blog, scroll right down to the beginning of this process: it's a lot of material and takes a while to read. I have to say I just read the queries rather than the hundreds of comments people were making on them, because I do actually have a life and it's really too short to follow up all of this. What is fascinating is that he buried in the midst of this three queries where the writers did go on to get publishing deals. He invites you to spot them. (This is why it's important to scroll right down to the start of the process and read upward, as it were). Well, I didn't. In fact, I can't remember any of the queries making my pulse go faster. Maybe I'd be a really mean agent! Try it for yourself: be an agent for a day. It'll fill up some of that waiting-time.

Tough Cookies of the World Unite

First of all, thank you thank you to the lovely Karen at http://writewritingwritten.blogspot.com/ for giving me my first blogging award, which I've proudly posted on the right! I'm chuffed on two counts: getting the award, which I hope also to pass on to some of my favourite bloggers, and learning how to get the dratted image onto my blog (teenage boy came in handy for that one!)

I'm sorry I didn't blog last week - pressure of work and a bit of a cold are my excuses, plus the startling revelation from my current agent that she's about to retire: all this knocked me for six and I didn't have the heart to write about bookish things. Those of you who are regular readers will have guessed that 2008 has been a bit of a sticky year for me. You may remember back in June 2007 I took up 'Hopeful Writer Stance'. Well, I'm still there, balanced on one leg, head slightly less in the clouds than before, trying not to wobble, trying to keep the fixed grin pinned to my face. Stomach like a washboard, my dear. (Not). Writing is a continual learning curve: you learn the techniques of the actual composition, you learn the discipline of editing, you do your best to take a professional approach and maximise your chances of publication. You write promotional copy, you think of all the angles, you are careful not ever to sound like a 'difficult author' in any communication with people in the publishing world. However, ultimately you are helpless. The worst aspect for me over the past two years is that I have had to wait. And wait. And wait. For cursory responses, for gushing regrets, for news that another series similar to mine was signed by that particular publisher only a week ago, for praise for my writing but condemnation of my genre. I've been told the central features of my book are no longer in fashion, that booksellers are tired of series (N.B. Booksellers - not readers. We know where the true power lies.) Then I've seen new series signed up, or books with fantasy elements like mine win prizes because the kids out there haven't yet been told those elements are passe. Then there are the publishers who can't be bothered to reply. A ghastly literary limbo that has lasted a full eighteen months.

So what now? Maybe I'll look back on this year as The Year of Taking Stock. Do I go on writing? If so, what do I write? Do I keep on believing in my children's book, a book which a couple of years ago gave me such incredible pleasure to write? Can I recapture that joy and enthusiasm or has it been bludgeoned out of me? If I write something else, what? Will I have to go through all this again - and again - and again? Or do I become mistress of my own fate and self-publish: ruin myself financially in all probability but at least not be at the mercy of Those Who Make Us Wait.

My agent's departure is a wake-up call. It's unnerving and scary to no longer be represented by an agency I've been with for years - but it also has potential. It will make me move on: I need to find someone who will nag me and reassure me and guide me in my dithering and energetically fight my corner. Wish me luck in the search.

This is for sure: we writers have to be tough cookies. Terriers. If you're writing too, hang on in there, won't you? Let's show them.

Society of Authors AGM

On Monday I nipped up to the big smoke to attend the Society of Authors' AGM at the accessible but somewhat spartan venue of Conway Hall, Red Lion Square. To be honest, having not attended for a couple of years, I decided to go more to have a chance to meet up with my friend Anna McGrail, who's a brilliant novelist ('Mrs Einstein') but who for the past few years has had to put fiction writing on the back burner to concentrate on the Baby Centre websites she sets up all around the world and the Good Spa Guide which she and her friend Daphne publish. She gave me a copy of their latest edition - browsing through it, with its gorgeous photos, is the next best thing to being able to visit one of the spas ...

At the AGM Tracy Chevalier, the Chair, reviewed what has been a busy year for the Society, covering some of the concerns I've explored in this blog: the reduction in PLR rates, for example, and the campaign against Age Ranging on children's books. There is no doubt that the Society is an active and vocal campaigner on our behalf but it did seem to me that figures from the Government, the Arts Council and the various publishers who wish to print age-ranges on books, manage to wriggle out of any real reply to our concerns with empty weasel-phrases about 'consultation' and so on. With age-ranging, which I haven't mentioned for a while, a very effective campaign has been waged by children's writers - but I do feel that only the names with clout will have the power, when push comes to shove, to veto what publishers want to do.

After the AGM there was a panel discussion: various big guns of the industry were lined up to answer our questions. Graham Rand is involved in the book supply business, Jonny Geller is a major agent at Curtis Brown, Alexandra Pringle is editor in chief at Bloomsbury. All three were experienced, articulate and frequently entertaining. All three flattered the audience - the usual bromide that they need us, the authors, to keep providing 'content' for them to survive. You bet your bottom dollar they do - but it still rang hollow to me, when the discussion revolved around the usual concerns: digital rights, authors finding proper marketing for their books, the difficulty of being published at all (answer, as ever, that you must go away and write what you in your heart of hearts want to write, not what you think the market wants, and that quality will out, a good book will always be published - rubbish! This is true to some degree but we all know good writing also needs the stiff breeze of good fortune in its sails, and we all know that lots of rubbish, especially with a celebrity name attached, finds a publisher). Early in the discussion there was focus on the importance of EPOS figures: to the uninitiated, these are the electronic point of sale figures that tell a publisher or bookseller how many copies you shifted of your 'product' to the 'market' if you published before - and if they weren't good, you better start praying - or better still, change your identity. Later, EPOS was dismissed as not crucial at all. Well, which is it?

Alexandra Pringle talked about how she had temporarily been an agent because she could no longer bear the limits placed on her freedom as an editor at a major publisher - she is now with Bloomsbury because it gives her more independence. She told us that 'The Kite Runner' and 'Eat, Pray, Love' were both word-of-mouth successes with no real marketing spend. However, Graham Rand said that when a book is being touted to booksellers by the publisher, they look at EPOS and marketing spend to see whether or not the publisher is really behind the book - and of course, the publisher can't be behind every single book they publish to the same degree. All three panellists agreed that too many books are published each year (approaching 150,000) - yikes!

Jonny Geller said that nowadays the sales force has as much clout as the editor when it comes to making buying decisions (take a look at my post just after the Winchester conference in June for a similar view). Increasingly an author has to become a 'brand' - and the big brand authors are selling more than ever these days, while the 'mid-list' suffers. Of some comfort, there is a feeling that the book industry will survive the credit-crunch better than other areas because a book, as a consumer item, doesn't cost as much as a cooker or a sofa, so people may still throw a little spare cash our way!

Looking to the future, there was discussion of e-readers. Jonny Geller said e-books would be successful to a point but it's not an industry yet. Alexandra Pringle said the younger generation will be more open to it and I agree with that: they're the 'digital natives' after all. She proudly waved her Sony e-reader about and said that as an editor, it had transformed her life as she could load lots of manuscripts onto it. I posted about e-readers recently. Last week in Waterstone's I had a closer look at the Sony: I do find its slimness appealing, along with the idea of being able to travel without my bag weighing me down. But I didn't like the buttons - when you turn the page, the screen goes temporarily dark - and somehow, there was something quite dispiriting about it. When push comes to shove, old dear that I am, I just like pages. I like the feel of paper under my fingers - not some titchy button.

Ms Pringle predicted that there will be an increasing market for luxury hardbacks but that more publishers would print straight to paperback, as is, indeed already happening. She praised the large 'Royal' paperback format, saying a novel could come out in that form instead of hardback (as, again, already happens frequently) before coming out later in a smaller trade paperback. Well, call me stupid, but one of the reasons I infrequently buy hardbacks is size. They're just too bulky - so a book either has to be by a writer much-loved or it has to be a totally exquisite article in itself, to justify the shelf-space. Otherwise I'll wait for the £7.99, manageably-sized pb. I'm not going to shell out £11.99 or so on a huge, hard-to-handle paperback that will take up as much space as the hardback would have.

The question of self-publishing was raised, again not unexpectedly, given that it has become a much more accessible way for writers to reach readers. Of course, the panel were quite edgy about that: Alexandra Pringle said it was 'fine' for writers 'if it makes them happy' - which I thought was pretty condescending. Yes, newsflash, publication of our words, however we manage it, makes us happy! Not rich, though ... Ms Pringle also celebrated the 'family' relationship between an author and a publisher. I thought Jonny Geller was far more honest when he said 'The only person who really really really cares about your work is you' and described how you need the psychological ability, the resilience to cope with criticism and rejection.

All in all, I came away not having learned much more than I already know. And what can you, dear readers, take away with you? If you're regular readers of this blog, you'll know how I feel: this writing game, this quest for publication/recognition/validation, it's a love/hate relationship. You get smacked in the mouth, you vow you'll walk away, and this time it's for good. You suck on the bitter lemon of envy, you get fired up with ambition, you float on the pink cloud of dreams, you put your head in your hands in black despair. But all the time, words are in your brain, what ifs in your imagination; essentially, you just can't help yourself, you poor sap. So do what they advise: write what is in your heart, write for yourself - but keep your ear cocked always to the distant hunting-horns and view-hallooing of the marketplace.

And Anna, one day, throw the baby out with the Bath Spa-water, and write your stories again!

Post Winchester

Yes, I know it's over a week since I was teaching at the Writers' Conference in Winchester, and I'm sorry for not posting sooner, but I had a deadline to meet last week on another project, so many apologies.

The Conference was the usual mix: it's uplifting to be amongst so many people who are fascinated by the writing process and who have followed or want to follow a writing dream. It's also pretty tiring and full-on - and the site, at the University of Winchester, is physically demanding, built as it is on the side of a hill (those of you who were there will know what I mean!) I thoroughly enjoyed meeting old friends there and catching up with them (and thanks again, Sally Spedding and Mike Greenhough, for love and support), and making new contacts (good to have met you, Jane Bidder aka Sophie King!). Then suddenly, it's all over.

One of the most striking things for me as an old trouper who started going there a number of years ago, before I was published and before I myself started teaching creative writing, is the difference between the naive views I held then and the close-to-cynical outlook I now have. Part of me wants to say to the newbies 'It ain't how you think it is! It ain't easy!' If anything, it's even less easy than it was a decade ago: one of the common messages coming out of the conference this year is how risk-averse mainstream publishing now is. Readers up and down the land complain about the same-old same-old on the 3 for 2 tables in the chain bookstores, - but in a prospective recession and in a publishing climate where the chains and the supermarket wield such economic clout, publishers play safe, and you can't really blame them for that.

I went to a couple of talks by industry professionals, on your behalf my dear readers. Here's what I took away: one agent said he'd had 4,000 submissions last year, and took on 2 writers. Another gets 60-70 sumbissions a week and looks for reasons to reject them. Her assistant vets them first - so many never get as far as being looked at by her personally. She never reads synopses: hates them. She used the word 'bollocks' a lot. Hmn.

Bollocks or not, a lot rides on how you present your work. It turns out your covering letter and how you are able to sum up your work in a sentence or two are pretty crucial. If your book goes as far as the 'acquisitions meeting' at a publishing house, the sales and marketing people, the rights director, the finance director, the publicity director and the M.D. will all have their opinion and the hapless editor who just happens to love your book, sweetie, may well be stymied by the sums. Nothing to do with your deathless prose, everything to do with the market.

So what's the good news? The good news is that people still care enough to write. That writers, far from jumping on the latest bandwagon, still, occasionally, like to create their own bandwagon. That writers, faced with the frustrations of mainstream publishing, turn to self-publishing - and no, they're not all crazed self-deceivers, - and somehow they cling to their enthusiasm in the face of terrible knock-backs. There are many festivals and conferences all over the country these days, and in my darker moments I do think this is over-kill, that not everyone who attends a course or lecture will finish writing a book, that not everyone (not by a long shot) will achieve the publication that they want - but at Winchester although there was the usual writerbleat from all of us, there was still also fellowship, mutual support, sharing of advice and information, a sense of community, a desire to win through against all the odds.

And that's got to be worth a lot. For many writers, after all, the bottom line is the actual writing: the joy and satisfaction of having put the words on the page. They're your words, put down in your own particular way, about what particularly interests - or obsesses - you. Never mind the publishers and the booksellers - you, ultimately, are in charge. Hang on in there. Keep writing.

Age-ranging rage

One of the current topics of debate in the world of children's books is whether publishers should print intended age-groups on the covers. There was a fairly heated spat on this morning's BBC Breakfast programme between authors Meg Rosoff (in favour) and Graham Marks (against). In my copy of The Bookseller this week there is a full page statement by famous children's authors putting the case against and asking us to support them.

So what are the arguments? Publishers (and not all have signed up for this, by the way: Walker and Bloomsbury, I believe, are reluctant) argue that people who are buying books for the children in their lives need guidance, otherwise they just don't know what would be appropriate for little Melanie or Johnny.

I have a suggestion here - how about they look at the jacket design or try opening the covers and reading a few pages? If they are in the habit of having any contact with the children they're purchasing for, they must have some idea of their interests and vocabulary level.

Meg Rosoff argued that people are genuinely bewildered. Graham Marks, showing signs of being seriously exercised by this, pointed out that in bookshops there is already age-ranging going on: 8-12, 12+ and so on. Meg countered that in supermarkets this is not the case, and that it's really hard, apparently, to find a bookseller who can give you that kind of information and guidance.

Oh please.

You may have twigged by now which side I take on this debate. I think the idea is hideous. Once of the strongest arguments against it is that kids will judge other kids and sneer at them if they see them reading something marked beneath their chronological age. God knows, it's hard enough to get kids to read in the first place, let's not age-ghettoise them.

When I was a child, my criterion for reading a book was this: 'Is it a good story?' Never mind age-appropriateness. I hated those books that had been bowdlerised and watered down to suit a nominal age group: 'Kidnapped' with a simpler vocabulary, and so on. I liked to be tested. I often didn't understand words and concepts (I used to wonder why so many 'divers' appeared in old books, for instance) - but that didn't matter. Reading those words in the context of a story that gripped me led me towards an understanding of them, simply because of that context, that setting - and helped me to develop my own powers of expression.

Neither publishers nor bookshops seem to have a clear sense of age-banding anyway: younger reading can stop at 7. Or 8. The middle ground goes from 8-11. Or 9-12, depending on the bookstore. Older readers are 12+. Or they have to be teens. At some point they segue into young adults. When are you a young adult? 14? 15? 16?

To fix these ages on the backs of books, as opposed to shelf-edges or display stands is the worst of options as this is a signal not left behind after purchase. Every time the child opens the book they're making a declaration to the world, to their peers: 'This book is, like Goldilocks' porridge, just right for me. At least, so the publisher is telling me - even though I'm bored stupid'. Or 'This book shows the world I'm punching above my weight. I'm a clever-clogs. Actually, though, I don't understand the half of it.' Or 'This book confirms what you all thought: I'm a thicko and I can only cope with something written for littlies - I'm so embarrassed. But I really like the story.'

Stop patronising kids - start stretching them. Let them find their own level. Encourage them to read everything, from the old picture books that bring back the feeling of being cherished and safe, to the bewildering complexity of a story that gives them challenge and satisfaction.

If you feel as I do, take yourself off to www.notoagebanding.org and sign the petition.

Advances in Retreat

'Writing, the No-money Game' - now there's a title you can't resist: this is the area debated in Jean Hannah Edelstein's Guardian blog - http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/04/_those_inclined_to-suspect.html
What has given rise to it is a proposal by an imprint of HarperCollins to dispense with writers' advances and instead give them a bigger cut of the royalties. On the face of it, I'm in favour of that. The reading public often has no idea at all how small the writer's cut is. When I signed copies of the £17 hardback of The Chase when it came out, many were the signees who seemed to think I was earning all or most of that £17. Hah! At most, £1.70, my dear - and don't even mention paperbacks to me - pennies, my love, mere pennies. Then again, my advance - like most advances - was pretty small. So I would welcome more than 5% or 7.5% of the price of my book as reward for my labours - but is it a good idea to get rid of advances? There are two major problems with this: the first is how long it takes to write a book. The Chase took me six years. At least with an advance, you at last get some sort of reward, divided into instalments at the signing of the contract, at the delivery of the final manuscript, and on publication. With no advance you would have to wait another year for the book to actually hit the bookstalls, then for the income from it to filter through the Byzantine and slothful accounting systems of your publisher. Secondly, most writers are aware that the amount of marketing effort your publisher puts into your book is commensurate with the amount of the advance paid. If it's a large advance, the publisher will make more of an effort to recoup that investment. So, all in all, I do think advances should stay and royalties should increase!

The Guardian blog has, as ever, given rise to debate by the old faithfuls who love to comment on it - the debate is interesting, often eccentric and self-indulgent, and at times acrimonious. It veers off the point of advances etc to return to that hoary old chestnut: that somehow writers, being such noble souls, should write for the love of it - not for dosh, not to satisfy ego etc. Do take a look and see what you think. When I'm teaching creative writing I always ask my students to examine their motivation as honestly as possible. And yes, we writers do have ideals, and many of us could not conceive of giving up writing even though we never gain any reward or recognition for it, and many of us look askance or with a snobbish superiority at those who turn into cash cows for their publishers. My own feeling (and my feelings are complex at present, as I am engaged in a personal struggle with my own writing and motivation) - is that it's perfectly OK to want to earn money from your talent. And why not a lot of money? The problem just now is more to do with the limitations of the celebrity-driven commercial world of publishing, which seems to be in a state of feverish pursuit of ... what? The sure-fire, the done-before, the lowest-common-denominator insult to the reading public which assumes they have no spirit of adventure and must not have their horizons broadened, by a process that demands books be written on the ever-more-speedy production line, by an artistic environment -as in films and music - where the artist, the actual creator of content and 'product' is devalued and exploited.

Whew! I leave you with a quote from Jane Holland in the debate after the blog - she has several comments there, including a scary resume of just how much money she (did't) make from one genre novel - '...there seems to be an absurd assumption hereabouts that writers should write for sheer pleasure and artistic integrity, and that if they're lucky enough to be published, to accept that as the pinnacle of their achievement. Any unholy desire for filthy lucre - i.e. a few quid for a poem, and if you're really lucky, a couple of grand for a first novel that probably took you several years to write - is to be rejected as a soiling of the artistic dream.'

Artistic integrity? Filthy lucre? As Harry Hill would say: 'There's only one way to find out! Fight!'

Happy New Year

Now, I know this post is three days late, but what with visits, clearing up, supervising children's thank you letters and cajoling elder son to do GCSE coursework (after the major challenge of getting him to rise from his bed before midday each day), be grateful that I've made it at all. I hope you all had a wonderful Hogmanay and New Year's Day and I wish you all a happy and successful 2008.

So, January. My least favourite month. The desire to hibernate my way through it strong. I long for light to return and energy levels to rise, and I get very Scrooge-like when I go downtown, read the newspapers, watch the review-of-the-past-year programmes on the TV. All these exhortations to make fresh starts. God. Humbug! Paul Mckenna promises to make us thin, tobacco free, confident and wealthy. Humbug. Boots the chemist offers a choice of healthy challenges that they will caringly help us with. Humbug. Horoscopes aver that with Pluto departing after a ten year dominance of the heavens (had you noticed?), this year will be the year for Capricorns, Pisceans, .... all 12 signs, apparently. Goody.

However, January was named after Janus the double-headed Roman god of doorways and it is a time for looking forward and back, so here goes. I feel I should contribute to the plethora of 'books of the year' judgements which the newspapers have been boring us with - always the same old, same old. As I review what I bought last year and what I read (and figure A is always larger than figure B), certain books delighted me, and some were disappointments. Much of my reading was teaching-related, or was research for what I'm writing, so I won't go into that. Exciting and brain-tiring, is what I'll say. Here's a selection from the rest:

Good novels:

Jane Smiley: A Thousand Acres (reworking of the King Lear story)
Julie Hearn; Follow Me Down, Eva Ibbotson: Journey to the River Sea, Marcus Sedgwick: My Swordhand is Singing, Michelle Paver: Outcast, Geraldine McCoughrean: The White Darkness - all excellent children's books. Some of the children's fiction I read was less inspiring, but I'll protect the guilty in case they were published by some of the publishers I'm approaching at present!
C.J. Sansom: Dark Fire, Dissolution. (Tudor mysteries - I'm saving Sovereign for the summer holidays)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black
Kate Atkinson: One Good Turn
Stef Penney: The Tenderness of Wolves

Not so ...:

Mo Hayder: Pig Island ( I love her Tokyo, but this one seemed to suffer from the pressure publishers put on successful authors to roll out a book a year - or less. Don't they know that stories need time to mature? This one had its moments but became too grand guignol absurd plus it was all too easy to guess who was responsible for the Bad Stuff)
Jason Goodwin: The Janissary Tree (this was like Boris Akunin's work. I tried to like it but couldn't - lots of wit and historical detail but nothing convincing about it. Nice, though, that the hero was a eunuch but could still romp like James Bond with Russian countesses!)
Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics (This one was a trial. Embedded in it was an interesting murder mystery, but the layers of reference, sidetrack, anecdote and diversion buried that at somewhere around the depth of the Cretaceous era. There's no doubt she's a clever and witty writer but every phrase had to be wisecrackey, every image developed at extraordinary length, nothing could be left to be common or garden. It was extremely wearing: I kept throwing my hands up and crying 'Enough already!')

Now no doubt some of you are spluttering indignantly 'She liked that?' 'She was bored by that?' It's all a matter of personal taste. What I do appreciate - and any of you out there who are writers or would-be writers will also appreciate - is that each and every one of those authors put one word behind another on the page, page after page, chapter after chapter, on and on to the bitter or sweet or slightly flat end - and then, even more miraculously, they got themselves published. So more than three cheers for that.

Looking ahead, I know that Book Trade Madness will go on (by the way, would you like to know who was the most pictured author in The Bookseller in 2007? J.K. Rowling? Ian McEwan? Nope and nope. Jordan aka Katie Price, that's who. I don't need to say more).

We will grind our teeth at celebrity madness, at the blindness of agents and editors, at a culture which devalues literacy and literature (take a look at Susan Hill's brilliant blogpost of Jan 2 - see link to her blog at right - where she lambasts Ed Balls and the Labour government for what is being done to libraries). We will, nevertheless, go on loving and hating books, searching for and pouncing on stories that cast a spell, and some of us will go on dreaming of writing our own stories and maybe, just maybe, selling them.

As for me - well, last year I was full of fine-sounding resolutions. All I can say at present is that I'm continuing to maintain Hopeful Author Stance (see my post back in June. Yes, June.) Keep tightening those abdominals.

Oh, for goodness sake!

I'm in nark mode, so brace yourselves. It must be something to do with the imminence of Christmas ...

First, in an interview Jacqueline Wilson reveals that her mother, who's in her eighties, has never read any of her books. 'Why would I want to read children's books?' she says. Well, there's so much wrong with this: first of all, why not read children's books, especially at this vibrant time for children's fiction? Several of the best books I've read in the past few years have been far more impressive than hyped 'literary' fiction, because children's fiction is a tough arena and anyone entering it has to remember that their readership will switch off quicker than any other if their interest hasn't been stimulated. And what turns them off quicker than anything - a lack of a story, a narrative that seizes them and carries them along to a fulfilling ending. (Congratulations, by the way, to S.F. Said for winning the Blue Peter prize for the Book I Couldn't Put Down for 'The Outlaw Varjak Paw'). Secondly, what about family loyalty? Can't JW's mother find it in her to read at least one of her highly-successful much-loved-by-the-public daughter's stories, if only to say 'Very nice, dear.'? Is this something you recognise? What is the attitude of your nearest and dearest to your writing? If you are unpublished, it might very well be that they have no interest in or respect for your 'scribbling' - and sadly, this adds to the loneliness of being a writer and reinforces the self-doubt which can all too easily stop you in your tracks. If you are published and have gained. to whatever degree, a public recognition of what you do, it's strange how important still it is to gain validation from those close to you. I speak from experience: I have a husband who is incredibly supportive in every way.

What else is pissing me off? Ah yes: apparently, health and safety, the Stalinist padded cell we are consigned to as a nation, has obliged certain publishers to take material out of children's books as being dangerous to the kiddies. This includes, in Lindsey Gardiner's book 'Who Wants a Dragon?' an illustration of a dragon toasting marshmallows while fire comes out of his nostrils! This ranks with the chap in Swindon who was forbidden to sell his book to his office colleagues for fear they might get paper cuts from handling it and then sue! What have we come to? My son went on a day visit to Southampton University on Wednesday, to fill him with the desire to attend university, which was a worthy aim. As his parent I had to fill in a health and safety form which included not only mentioning his allergies and when he last had a tetanus shot but also saying how far he could swim: were they afraid the bus would overshoot the campus and end up in the English Channel? So, go to your children's bookshelves and remove all those dangerous volumes involving adventures risky to life and limb and all those illustrations of ogres and dragons and towers and battles and spaceflights and boat trips and pet rats. That would mean .. oh, let me think. Yes: every book on the shelf.

Finally, an article in last weeks Times by Melissa Katsoulis, tells us that young writers are the best, and old writers are dried up has-beens with nothing to say about 'Revolution, revelation, challenge and unrest'. The whole thing is written in a bolshie attention-grabbing manner, and it certainly got my attention. 'The trajectory for most literary geniuses is down,' she announces. Well, in certain cases she's not wrong - and with the death of Norman Mailer there's been discussion of the dinosaurs of the literary scene, especially the male American ones, who seem to be going on well past their sell-by. Fine. I was extremely disappointed by the selection of books of the year in last week's Sunday Times - all the usual suspects were there: Ian McEwan for 'On Chesil Beach'. Oh please. Robert Harris for 'The Ghost' - it could be he's there because it's a satisfying twisty expose of our ex-prime-minister and his wife. Or is it because he's one of those writers who is in a crony relationship with the reviewers of reviewer-land? So, I'm not saying there aren't problems with our current literary scene. But to argue - and to reinforce your argument with examples drawn from the Romantic period, which is hardly news to us: that Keats did the right thing by dying and Wordsworth didn't - that youth is better because it's youth, because young people are, well, like, not jaundiced yet, and have lots to say about 'the hottest pies' and that fiction is written for young people and old people's 'furies and passions no longer spit and fizzle', that old writers write about sex because they can't get it anymore and this is 'so far from being fresh as to be yukky' - all of this is so simplistic. I remember bemoaning to my husband that I wasted my twenties, when I had far more time in which to write than I've ever had since and his reply was that I hadn't written anything because I hadn't anything to say. Some people need to live a little or a lot. Most of us need a long training in our craft. Of course, some writers become tired and predictable and set in their ways, some endlessly recycle the same old themes in the same old style. Some would have been better doing a Keats. But the thing about Keats, when you read through the brief but dazzling trajectory of his work, is that when he died he still had so much potential and had he lived to Wordsworth's age I fully believe he would still have been pushing the boundaries of what was poetically possible and he would still have been writing letters full of exploration of beauty, truth and time. Many modern youthful writers burn out after their first fine well-hyped rapture. To every thing its time and season. So, let's not have sweeping generalisations about writing not being a country for old men. Let the middle-aged and ageing continue to be nostalgic for their pasts, and explore experience, memory, time and death, along with the subjects Melissa claims are topics for the young: race, sex, politics, music. Let them go on raging against the dying of the light.

Drip-Feeds versus Wallows

Now here's a thing: The Book Standard has an article extolling the virtues of Daily Lit (http://www.dailylit.com if you can bear to check it out), because 'even the busiest person can tackle a literary classic - in five minutes a day via email.'

This is yet another symptom of our time-poor nanosecond-attention-span society. Listen, if you're pushed for time, read a haiku. Some poor novelist has sweated blood creating the rhythm of clause, sentence, paragraph, chapter, overall plot. The language may have a lilt to it, a swing and flow that is individual to that writer and is the result of long practice. The pace of the story should have its own systole and diastole, lifting you, holding you, releasing you only to seize you again as you read. And you don't get that in a five minute soundbite.

You can tell I'm narked, can't you? I'm also puzzled. Whenever I and my friends talk about the joy of reading or reminisce about books we loved long ago, the books we've never forgotten, the books we revisit, we don't talk about that zippy little phrase on page 67 which grabbed us and made the whole thing worthwhile. Certainly, we may have favourite lines or memorable phrases we can recite - but when we talk of the love of a good book we use phrases like 'I was lost in it', 'I couldn't put it down', 'I was totally drawn into it' - and we sigh at the memory of the reluctant renunciation we felt when the book came to its end and we had to return to the 'real' world. Some books take a long time to cast their spell: it isn't an instant fix, a shallow 'affirmation' to be stuck on the fridge - it's a long wooing, a seduction of the reader through character and language and storyline.

One of the things I most regret about adult life is how difficult it is to have a damn good wallow in a book. On the rare occasions where I can read a book in a couple of bursts - or in one sitting - I sink into the book with joy and am fit to commit murder if disturbed. One of the irritations of trying to read in bed nowadays is how tired I am, how incapable of still being awake all the way to the last page at five a.m. when the birds are stirring and the light filters in. Nowadays, a page or two and I'm dozing - and the next night and the night after that find myself rereading the same two pages because I've forgotten what happened.

It's claimed that Daily Lit works because 'people really respond to the fact that it's according to their schedule.' Couldn't they fit their schedule to reading the book, according it the attention and respect it deserves? Is this what we've come to? I worry that my children bring home photocopied sheets from school all the time: they're being conditioned to see life in terms of 'best of', in terms of extracts and bleeding chunks, and thus never learn any staying power, never see what might be worthwhile in the 'slow bits', the less obviously grabby bits.

In the article, one reader says it's the method 'easiest for me to consume'. Consume? Consume?

One of the founders says 'It's a new format that hasn't yet been exploited and they're looking at this incremental revenue, similar to the book club format. It doesn't take away from or cannibalize the existing marketing. It's reading that wouldn't otherwise take place.' This is just sad. What have we come to, if we have to rely on Daily Lit, emails, and reading potted texts off the itty bitty screens of mobile phones to be the last bastions of reading custom.

Wake up, pick up a big fat read - and wallow!

Noggins, Ne'er Do Wells, Performers and Plowterers

First of all, thanks to Scott Pack of The Friday Project for taking a look at this blog and complimenting it. I'd emailed him to try to get a freebie CD of Oliver Postgate material (I never had time for the Clangers but I was a huge Noggin the Nog fan when I was young. Ah, the Land of the Northmen, the Nogs, Queen Nooka, Graculus the Great Green Bird, even Nogbad the Bad bwa-hah-hah-hah ...) - but I was too late, they'd all been snaffled up.

Secondly, my boys have returned to school - the elder one facing GCSEs this year, so God help us all. And I'm back teaching too ...

Take a look at the link to muvva's blog on the right - it's newly started up and looks promising. I especially like the cartoon she's posted on it - we can all relate to it, I think!

Items in the current world of book news - apparently a Polish author has been jailed for 25 years for murdering a man he suspected his wife was having an affair with. Later he published a novel with all the details of the murder, which led the police to arrest him. Not the brightest of bunnies, then. See http://news.bbc.co.uk

Richard Charkin on his blog http://charkinblog.macmillan.com talks about routes to market. Analysing the sales of a recent mass market fiction paperback he found 50% of sales were through the chains, 35% of the supermarkets, 9% internet, 5% independent bookshops, 1% libraries. You may find this scary. The 1% library figure was rounded up - even scarier.

A blog by Lee Rourke in The Guardian blames the influence of the Beat writers for the self-indulgence of young male writers who talk the talk but don't walk the walk and who worship at the altar of experimentation having never learned the basics of composition. It's the familiar point that you have to know the rules to break them.

An earlier Guardian blog discussed how badly writers tend to read aloud their own work. We've talked earlier on this blog about how writers are expected to be performing seals these days - and some are better than others at balancing that ball on their nose while slapping their flippers together. I've attended some brilliant readings - Philip Pullman and Carol Ann Duffy spring to mind - but also some truly dire ones (names withheld to protect the guilty). I do think that if the publicity people want to send the writer out to perform they ought to give him or her coaching in how to do it - and if the writer genuinely cannot do it, if they read in a flat monotone, looking at the floor as they do so, or mumble inaudibly, or drain the work of any colour and animation, then just don't send them out there: it'll do the work no favours at all. Get an actor to do it instead.

Here's a good quote from Leopardi on The Guardian blog: 'we are well aware of the unspeakable annoyance we feel when listening to someone else's work.'
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books

I'm having real trouble today just typing - positively dyspraxic. Also the words are not flowing - which is a pity, because I need to put together a synopsis for the new book. All summer the damn thing has been giving me trouble in terms of making the elements of the plot hang together - but now at last it's seems to be settling into place and I want to formalise this so that it acts as my basic route-map. (Not that there won't be diversions and alterations of itinerary ahead - it's just nice to feel I have a general sense of where I'm going and what my destination will ultimately be. I don't like going into a book totally blind.)

As I say, the words aren't gelling well for me today - I do believe that we are subject to biorhythms or whatever you want to call them: sometimes there's fluency of brain and internal Roget's Thesaurus, sometimes there just ain't, and every last phrase is a heavy-booted clump through claggy mud. Do you ever feel that too?

In the dialect of the bit of northern Scotland I come from, to struggle through mud is to 'plowter through the dubs.' Thought you might like that.

Shooting Fish

Picking up on yesterday's blog, there's an article in The Independent (http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2785433.ece) by Andrew Franklin, director of Profile Books, about why publishers miss good books. It's witty, informative and blood-curdling so if you're a wannabee only read it if you can stare truth in the face. He stresses how many submissions are made. Many are made, few are chosen. You knew that, didn't you? He tells us that 'not every manuscript get the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.'

You knew that too, didn't you? Course you did.

He stresses that publishers have to read submissions from the mad, bad and dangerous to know (not you, obviously. You'd never dream of sending in an MS in green ink). That publishers hide behind weasel messages like 'not quite right for our list' because they cannot afford to enter into a dialogue with a needy and hopeless author - they'd never get rid of them (again, not you).

Most importantly, because you knew all the above stuff already, he stresses the importance of having an agent: 'Publishers now rely on specialists - agents, in fact (think of them as the consultants of the publishing profession) - to supply them with novels, though we all still buy some non-fiction directly from authors. To plagiarise, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the most celebrated fiction houses now only buy fiction from agents. All serious aspiring authors know this and seek out an agent as an essential stage in the process of finding the right publisher, and of course the best contract too.'

So why am I telling you all this when you knew it already? Maybe some things can't be stated too often. Write the book you want to write, polish it until it gleams, get yourself an agent (and no, I'm not on commission from any agency touting for trade), chant the William Goldman mantra 'Nobody knows anything', submit your work with professional clarity, accept rejection with grace and never give up. That's all there is to it. Like shooting fish in a barrel, eh?