Show me the money

Two items in the book trade news today, both of which mystify me. Firstly, Waterstone's will be selling the final Harry Potter (What? You didn't know it was coming out?) at half price because they're driven to be 'price competitive'. Customers will also get a free copy of Wizardology: A Guide to Wizards of the World. Whoopee - get in the queue right now! Simon Fox, their chief executive, says they won't lose money but that 'At half price it's pretty difficult to make money.' Well, duh.

I'm sure you're all aware of the madness going on in the book world which over the past few years has seen the rise of discounting and of the clout of supermarkets, along with a corresponding decline in the independent bookshop sector. What has happened is that customers (and I include myself) have been trained to view books as products on which we want a good deal just like the 3 for 2 or Bogof deal at the chemist or supermarket. The question always is, can we treat a book like a can of beans or a tube of toothpaste? Do we now view books sold at full price as a bad deal? There is a debate going on yet again in the book trade about removing RRPs from books entirely and letting prices find their own level. The whole question of perceived value is an interesting one. We don't want to shell out £7.99 for a paperback but don't mind the same price for a main course on a lunch menu? Remember, as Milton said: 'A good book is the lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.' Isn't that of more worth than a lasagne and side salad?

With the Harry Potter scenario, one wonders if any copies will be sold at all at the RRP. With the gigantic economies of scale involved, neither Bloomsbury nor J.K. herself will suffer. But what about struggling authors who are already facing the prospect of declining royalties which may well be based in the future not on the price printed on the book but on the actual selling price. God knows, a paperback that generates a royalty of 5% or 7 1/2% of a selling price of £7.99 isn't much - but if the book is discounted and a royalty paid on that price, it's far less.

I know we writers are crazy idealists (Got to be, why else spend months and years of self-doubt and effort to produce our books) but where is it written that we have to pretend we don't really want to earn money for our work? I don't mean J.K.'s millions - just a nice living income so we can concentrate on the thing that matters most to us? Anything wrong with that?

Which brings me to the second news item: that Headline is going to publish the debut novel by comic writer Simon Spurrier online for free, in 6 weekly instalments from 24th May. Editor Piers Blofeld says '"Contract" was one of those very rare submissions that had me literally jumping out of my chair with excitement ... While there are obvious issues for publishers, the main point for me is that what writers need above all else is readers.' Well, duh, for the second time - but what about an income? Can someone please explain the logic of all this to me?

The book's website, ironically, is www.itsallaboutthemoney.co.uk - and after free online publication, it's out in hardback on June 4th at £19.99. Once again, can someone please explain?

Letting it Go

I'vebeen quiet for the past few days because I was printing up (with yes, final tiny edits) my typescript, and repaginating the whole thing because I keep each chapter as a separate file. Fun.

Yesterday I sent it off. There's the frisson of gently pushing a pristine MS into a Jiffy bag (remember when submitting, no staples, slippery plastic wallets and the like - keep it as simple as possible) and another kind of frisson as you seal it up, because you have to resist the urge to haul it out again and tamper some more.

Then you hand it over the counter at the post office. It's gone. You try to have faith in the postal service. You tell yourself you won't hassle your agent to check whether it arrived. You really won't, even though the Royal Mail is in a parlous state these days and anything could have happened to it. You won't drop a carefully light email to him/her, now, will you? You wouldn't dream of it. He/she is busy and you'll merely antagonise them. You'll possess yourself in patience. At least until after the Bank Holiday ...

In Sunday's Observer, Sebastian Faulks, who's publishing a new book, 'Engleby', described the writing life, saying that 'For three years, you're alone with your thoughts, then for three weeks you're thrown to the microphones in the name of 'publicity'. The modern writer's life is like a cross between that of the Venerable Bede and Naomi Campbell.' He talks of the difficulty readers seem to have when it comes to differentiating between art and life. Of 'Birdsong', he says 'One man asked me how I knew what it was like to fight at the Somme. I told him I'd read a lot of documents, visited the site, then made it up. 'You made it up?' he spat at me.' This reminds me of how in my youth I used to doodle faces a lot (still do) and some well-meaning friend/relative would peer (yes that word again! - for those of you who've read an earlier post on editing) over my shoulder and say 'That's nice - who's it meant to be?' (And when you come to think of it this is patronising because if it had been meant to be representaional it implied I hadn't exactly captured the reality.) This used to drive me up the wall. I'd explain it wasn't meant to be anyone: I'd made it up. 'What, out of your head?' they'd say, bemused.

There are crossing guards at the border between fiction and reality and they give writers a hard time. Witness the trouble Ian McEwan had recently because he'd used material from a memoir by Lucilla Andrews as source material for part of 'Atonement'. Shock! Horror! Writer uses source! Writer acknowledges source! Therefore writer did not commit plagiarism, the ultimate modern literary crime. Chaucer and Shakespeare, well-known literary recyclers, would not have understood the furore. The art lies in the reshaping, the transmuting of the source, of the familiar, into something new, personal, original, rich and strange.

Strikes me this blog has been a bit of a ramble. Anyway, wish me luck with my MS - and feel free to slap me on the wrist if you see me reaching for the phone anytime soon.

I've just read ...

Last week I read Jed Rubenfeld's 'The Interpretation of Murder' - and I'm galled to find that as April draws to a close that's the only book I've read this month, because of the obsessional revising I've been doing on my own book. I keep a total every month of the books I've bought and the books I've read, and the former always outnumber the latter - hands up all those who buy books addictively, regardless of how many books sit reproachfully on their shelves, waiting to be read - or re-read. How many of you have bluffed your way through a conversation with guests who admire the wealth of intelligent reading in your bookcase and who, you hope, have no idea that the book you're wittering on about is one of the many you haven't got round to reading yet? Oh yes, you know you do it ...

Anyway, Rubenfeld's book is a good read, if not quite as cracking as I'd expected (hype always has that counterproductive effect). It is very clever and has one of the best first pages I've read in a long time - once again demonstrating how important it is to get your opening right when you're writing. I didn't really believe in any of it - the characters, the murder plot: it was an intelligent game and somewhat chilly. What I did enjoy enormously and did believe in, was the portrayal of early twentieth century New York, with skyscrapers and bridges in frantic, vulgar, competitive construction. It's worth reading the book for that alone.

Baby? Bathwater?

Well, dear readers, after holding off from it for the best part of a week, I went back to the children's novel to read it straight through and do some potentially final nibbling at the text. The good news is that it definitely reads with more pace and I'm pleased about that - it isn't just the subtraction of nearly twelve thousand words - it is that I've rejigged the run-up to the denouement and it doesn't feel anymore is if the story has been diverted and left in a waiting room, tapping its fingers, waiting to be called.

That said, it's actually been a difficult few days. I want to send it off, free my mind from it, go on with Book Two, impress my agent with my efficiency and smiling professionalism (Cut my novel drastically? No problem! Consider it done.)

On the other hand, I can't let it go. Not yet. Surely more can be done to polish and refine it, make it shine more dazzlingly. Surely?

The question is - when is enough revision enough? Is it ever enough? I often feel reluctant to look at my published novel, 'The Chase', because every time I do I see things I'd cut or change. Nothing is perfect - but the impulse to try to achieve it is there, and should be there, if you've any self-respect as a writer.

What have I learnt/relearnt? I've learnt that I spell things out too much, that I am adverb and adjective-heavy. I exhibit Roget's Thesaurus tendencies and have to stop this. Use one adjective. Decide if even one is necessary. Use good verbs rather than an adverb-plus-verbs - but keep things simple too: don't use overly melodramatic verbs.

Repeated reading of your text makes you realise how often you repeat yourself, how you have favourite items of vocabulary which you return to over and over again. Partly it's laziness or habit, partly it's because you were in the white heat of composition and didn't want to slow the flow by casting around for the mot juste, partly because the damn book took months/years to write so you'd forgotten you'd used the very same expression five chapters back. This is what editing is for. You have to become the Reader with the Critical Eye, not the Writer. When I wrote The Chase I used 'grey' and 'juddered' so frequently that I'm almost phobic about using them now. The prize for Most Over-used Word in the new book is 'peered'. People peer up, along, into, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Stop it, already! They now gaze, glance, stare, and simply look.

So, back to the question - have I done enough? Enough to please agent/editor? Enough to get the deal, to get the book, a year or so down the line, on the bookshop shelves? And the other question - have I done too much? Have I killed the essence in the search for commerciality? Have I thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

Should I go through it just one more time ....?

If you build it, they will come

I don't know if you've heard about the creation of the funpark Dickens' World as yet - and yes, it's as ghastly as you imagine - but the Guardian blog today has had fun with the idea: check out http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/04/all_the_fun_of_the_literary_th.html I particularly like the idea of Kafka's castle and the Alan Bennett World of Adventure. As a parlour game, see how many you can come up with ...

I also read today that Kazuo Ishiguro bought a study guide to one of his own books (see, we authors don't know what we're writing after all) - and ever since, Amazon has been recommending his own books to him!

Finally, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Jenny Colgan has landed a £1m deal to write 2 novels, because she now ranks as a "recognised brand" in the romantic comedy genre. (You may have noticed that authors are increasingly becoming brands.) All credit to her for breaking free from the day job - she was originally an NHS administrator. However, the article on her in Scotland on Sunday goes on to say that 'According to experts, only a small number of authors earn a fortune from their novels' - this is news to us? - and 'there a large number of well-reviewed, high-profile writers living on around £30,000 a year.' Don't know about you, but from my perspective at present £30,000 looks damn fine ... Then again, having watched a programme last night about city traders and their bonuses and the Maseratis and £5m crash pads in London they buy with them, and knowing how many hours of hard graft go into writing a book, £30,000 is actually sod all.

Anyway, back to the article - Jenny Colgan's agent says the deal is a reflection of Colgan's 'potential to make huge sales at a time when readers were staying loyal to well-known writers. ... It reflects what's happening in publishing now. Books are achieving either massive or miniman sales. Supermarkets are fuelling the huge sales. The top 50 titles in the UK are selling 40% more than they did five years ago. And titles at positions 51 to 200 are selling 40% less than five years ago.'

Laugh. Cry. You choose.

Public showman, private shaman? Be true to the kind of writer you are.

A few weeks back I attended several talks at the Oxford Literary Festival, which has grown over the past decade from a very small weekend event at the Oxford Union, to the Sunday Times-sponsored sprawling behemoth it now is. Though it is impressively wide-ranging and well organised I do miss the spontaneity of the original festivals - but then again, this was before festival-fever well and truly hit our land and every town and hamlet worth its salt felt it must put on some sort of Event with Words, Fashionable Topics and Glamorous In-Authors. I have to confess a kind of weariness when I contemplate the bulging programme, with all the Right People being wheeled out to promote their latest books, sometimes collected under PC or trendy themes. Have we not all heard it all before? Writers, once elusive, mysterious creatures who retreated from the world to think deep thoughts and emerge with sybilline wisdom every now and again - writers are now unashamed showmen, practising all sorts of huckster-techniques, giving us the well-honed schmooze, the well-turned anecdote (and I've been to enough of these things to have heard the same worn anecdote or witticism trotted out just that once too often). And yes, I know there were always writers-as-performers (Dickens springs to mind immediately) - but the point is that nowadays, published writers are automatically expected to be performing seals too, whether it's congenial to their nature or not; it's part of the pact with the publishing devil, it's part of what a publishing house considers before they take you on: are you marketable?

All this cynicism serves as a prologue to talking about a writer who was anything but a huckster, and for whom the idea of appearing at a festival like this would have been utter anathema. A writer who, when shortlisted for the Booker, absolutely refused to come south and have anything to do with the shenanigans of rivalry and prize-winning. I went to a talk by Maggie Fergusson about the life of George Mackay Brown, the Orcadian novelist and poet who was renowned for scarcely venturing to the Scottish mainland, far less anywhere else - although he did visit Oxford in 1989 for the centenary of Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom he greatly admired and to whose poetry he is clearly indebted. GMB said 'Nothing much happens to me but words' and those words are a blend of the starkness of Norse legend and the ceremonies of celebration, woven with rich alliteration and assonance and the images of nature, tradition, religious awe and time. Maggie Fergusson played a tape of him reading his poem 'Hamnavoe', about his father who was the local postman, his sense of the sanctity of a simple life and the rites of passage of a community both nurtured and threatened by the sea. I found myself enormously moved, partly by the beauty of the poem, partly because it evoked for me memories of my own childhood in a fishing community in northern Scotland.

Here are excerpts - if you like them, go in search of him. And yes, this is one of the things I will do with this blog - if I will inflict my recommendations on you. There's bound to be something you'll like.

...
On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
...

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring.
...
And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

Letting it Lie

You'll remember I talked about the three stages of editing in an earlier post - well, I've come to the end (or perhaps the interim end) of stage three, the one that's toughest. I had to stand back from my novel and take a long hard look at where the story was slowest. No point thinking that I know what's coming and that the investment of the reader's attention will be well rewarded by the imminent dramatic moment or the climactic final chapters. You can't think like that, because your reader, not knowing what you know, will just wander off.

So, it was time to grab the slow chapter-sequences and start dropping, moving and conflating the events to tighten the story and rev up the pace. When I say pace I don't mean to say that every story you write has to have the speed of a Formula One racer - just that there should be enough forward momentum to carry the reader along and not give them the opportunity to think 'we're in the doldrums here - why am I spending valuable time reading this stuff when I could be on You Tube instead?' Back in Victorian times when letter-writing, beadwork and decoupage were the only competitors, writers could shamelessly explore location, mood and genealogy at enormous and frequently tedious length, but now, in the age of the nanosecond attention-span, the restlessly devouring spirit which says 'shock me, grab me, be new, be fast, do it all for me because I am an avid Consumer', nobody's going to hang about if there's the slightest danger of being bored.

There were times when, having dismantled my story-sequence, I thought I'd never manage to put it together again. There were precious passages I wanted to shoe-horn in somewhere, rather than lose them. Some, sadly, just wouldn't fit - my only comfort is the thought that I can use them in a later book.

The result is that I have a book more than eleven thousand words shorter than it was. Isn't it ironic - to triumph when you take away all those laboriously-composed words, to tot up totals of reduction rather than addition?

Now I have to follow another sort of discipline: I have to stand back from the book for a few days (don't want to leave it any longer - want to impress my agent with my industry). I need those few days for a small degree of unfamiliarity to creep in. This is a crucial aspect of revision - you need to come to your book with the eyes of a stranger, if possible. After three incredibly close-focus sweeps through the thing, I'm too close to it to see any of it clearly. When I return to it I will have yet another read through - and perhaps something else will leap out at me. Perhaps not. Perhaps I have done as much as I can do and it will be time to send it to my agent again.

We'll see.