Toasting Napoleon

No Lady - No Lamp

2010-03-20T11:56:00.002Z

Gosh and a-golly. These congrats notices are just pouring in at the moment.

Jane Yeadon's wonderful memoir, No Lady - No Lamp, is to be published by an independent Scottish publisher, Black and White, this September. B&W is a well-established house with strong local connections and an excellent list. I think (and hope) they'll do a terrific job for Jane.

It's also so nice to hear from Jane that we were able to help. She wrote (to her principal editor, Diana Stainforth): I couldn't have done it without you, Diana. I held onto your words of encouragement and advice like talismen and of course Harry's input was fantastic too. Made me feel so supported. Of course, I don't need to tell you about the solitariness of writing but you both made great companions along the way.

It's really rewarding to hear things like this. Very often, with our more talented clients, we feel that all we're doing is giving them a little nudge in a direction that they'd probably have been heading anyway. And perhaps that's true. But writing is a solitary old game, and those little nudges - at the right time, and delivered in the right manner - can be live-savers. I know that well enough from my own experience.

So big fat congrats to Jane. And take a bow, Diana, for your help along the way. Best of luck with the publication process!

Future perfect

2010-03-19T13:02:00.002Z

Congrats to Tony Bayliss, whose Past Continuous - a sci-fi romance for young adults, if you can get your head round that - has just been taken on by a new publisher, Sparkling Books.

A couple of interesting points. The first is that Tony's book was certainly helped on its way by its success on HarperCollins' site, Authonomy. The book rose to the top of the all time rankings for Romance, and #2 in the all-time rankings for Sci-Fi. HarperCollins itself didn't want the book, but that record was obviously a persuasive factor in Sparkling Books' acquisition decision.

Secondly - and this is something we're coming across more and more - SB isn't offering a load of money upfront and is requiring Tony to work hard on marketing his work. Some authors are concerned that a bigger publisher might have a different working method.

The answer to that puzzle is both yes and no. Of course, the big guys have more money and more resources. But the truth is that authors were badly paid five years ago and are much worse paid now. Zero advance deals from commercial publishers (that is: not vanity publishers in any shape or form) have become more common. Equally, authors jolly well should be working hard to market their work. The bigger houses certainly expect the same.

So well done Tony. Hope SB does a terrific job for you. A genuinely original premise with some very thought provoking development. It deserves to get read.

Congratulations - Roy Carter, Lata Pattni & Leigh Ferrani

2010-03-12T15:32:00.003Z

It's been a bit of a day today.

First up, monster congratulations to Roy Carter. His MS - a Vatican thriller, yes, but not in any way a Dan Brown knock-off - has been taken on by David Smith at the Annette Green Agency. David loves the MS and is planning to race it straight out to publishers next week. Massive fingers crossing involved in that.

Roy has really done a lot of work on this MS. He had a stunning plot and premise to start with, and the resultant novel has really done justice - more than justice - to that original conception. I think it's got a searingly clever concept and denouement and could do really well. I hope so.

Secondly, massive congrats to the double act of Lata Pattni and Leigh Ferrani. Leigh has ghosted a book proposal for Lata based on Lata's own remarkable story of adversity and triumph. That book proposal has been taken on by a top London agency and will be going out to publishers before too much longer.

Lata is both a very nice person and a very courageous one, so thoroughly deserves success. Leigh has done a wonderful job with the story, so she'll have jolly well earned whatever comes her way as a result of this. Also, it's a good illustration of how a really positive collaboration between subject and ghost is essential to producing a good work. Wherever that collaboration falters or is uncommitted or has the wrong chemistry, the resultant MS is always flawed.

Fingers crossed for all concerned.

Tears of a Stranger

2010-03-01T16:29:00.003Z

And more congrats are in order. Alan Chance's Tears of a Stranger - a very tight, efficient thriller with a strong premise and plenty of good incidental invention - has been taken on by agent Jonny Pegg.

I've read published books - including some that have sold for loads of £££ - that aren't as proficient as this manuscript, and I think it has a topical, market-friendly feel into the bargain. I certainly hope so. best of luck from here on, Alan - and congrats not just to you, but to Debi Alper, who did her normal excellent editorial job with this. I hope for a big announcement on this front before too long. Fingers crossed, as ever.

Making a Splash

2010-02-24T11:54:00.003Z

MS sufferer - and cross-Channel swimmer - Mike Taylor has got an agent for his memoir / self-help book. Sam jordison helped with that one, so big congrats all round.

on the whole, we tell clients that the manuscript is everything and not even to think about drafting a cover design. That's strong advice, of course, and it's right 99.99% of the time ... but when the draft cover design in this instance showed a man in speedos, on the shore of the English channel, and using crutches to stand, you know you've got something pretty special.

We wish him well with the next phase of things - whatever happens, it'll be a breeze compared to that Channel crossing.

Hooray!

2010-02-22T15:16:00.003Z

Just heard that Kathy Bagley - who worked with the great & wonderful Susan Davis - has just signed up with Juri Gabriel, who's a terrific agent with demanding taste & high standards, so well done you Kathy. Fingers crossed that publishers line up to buy your MS!

Kathy says: Catch Me is set in Cornwall and tells of how a family strives to cope with fifteen year-old Jaz, their brilliant but impossibly difficult youngest child.

Promising material that, but today's market is (to use a technical term) a real bugger, so we'll be keeping fingers crossed ...

An angel is published

2010-01-21T12:42:00.002Z

The bell of congratulations needs to toll again, for Patty Tashiro's An Angel Whispered. The publisher is a smaller, specialist one (O-books), but the smaller guys often do better with niche books like this. I hope they do a tremendous job in selling it.

Oh, and a word too from Beverley Roberts, who's now got book deals in Germany & Holland. Way to go, Beverley!

Pomegranate Sky

2009-12-02T18:09:00.003Z

Why can't I come up with titles as strong as Pomegranate Sky? No idea, but I certainly never come close.

In any case, the point of this post is to let you know that Louise Black's novel has won the Virginia Prize and will be published next year. You can read a booktrade item about her success here.

The novel is a love story set in the troubled world of contemporary Iran. It's got a terrific feel and thoroughly deserves its success. Tricia Wastvedt was the guru who originally helped with this. I advised too, but I'm not sure that I added anything at all to the mix.

Huge congrats to Louise for this. We've had plenty of books published before, plenty of books agented, but is this our first prize winner? I think it could just be. Hope the book does really well.

Only joking

2009-11-20T15:42:00.002Z

Congrats too to Michelle MacNamara who's got an agent, following help from Rebecca Horsfall. So huge congrats to Michelle & only slightly smaller ones to Rebecca.

Michelle is now represented by Isabel Atherton at Creative Authors ltd. Michelle tells me "I'm still waiting for someone to jump out and say 'Nah, only joking'!" - I know that feeling but, Michelle, I reckon you're in good hands there. Best of luck!

Caribbean Chemistry

2009-11-20T15:36:00.003Z

Chris Vanier's lovely collection of Caribbean tales is being published by the Kingston University Press this December. Congrats to him & to Helena Drysdale who helped out with an earlier draft.

We don't always get to see book covers and when we do, I'm not always impressed. But just a look at this beauty. Ain't it lovely? Gorgeous design and lovely colours. Makes you want to pick it up, no? Well done to Chris & to everyone connected with the project.

BlueMoose

2009-11-11T11:29:00.002Z

And another well done to Mark Radcliffe, whose Gabriel's Angel has been taken on by BlueMoose, an indie with a decent list of new authors. Well done Mark. These days, any deal is brilliant so that's fab news. The book has a brilliant premise - heaven as an ternity of therapy / self-help groups - so it deserves to do well, and could just have that edge which catches the market's attention. best of luck with it.

And more hoorays ...

2009-11-09T17:09:00.002Z

To Gerard Macdonald, whose absolutely stunning political thriller, The prisoner's Wife, has been taken on by Pete Buckman at Ampersand. I read this one mesmerised myself. It's a cracker, and I hope it sells & sells well. It jolly well deserves to. Dexter Petley was this book's first editor, so well done to him

GM also has a great YA novel ready to go, and I hope that sells very well to. GM is a darn good writer.

An Angel Whispered ...

2009-11-09T17:05:00.002Z

... or rather shouted, CONGRATULATIONS - to Patty Tashiro, whose book An Angel Whispered has been accepted by O-Books, a specialist devotional / MBS publisher.

That's a terrific outcome for Patty, so well done her. And well done to Jane Struthers who helped her out with comments. Take a bow both of you.

Showing off

2009-10-02T11:09:00.002Z

Well, then. Ian Thornton's only gone and got an agent. And not any booooring book agent either. He's gone straight to Hollywood, got himself an agent out there, and she's hawking both the book (to New York) and the concept (to all her rich buddies, like Spielberg and Cruise and probably Obama and people too).

Congratulations to Ian - he had a splendid concept (which I won't reveal here) and lashings of talent. That talent had been occluded by a rather overwrought treatment, but just 70,000 words of pruning later, he's obviously hit the jackpot. Monster congratulations all round. Paul Toth and my good self were the original commentators.

Cross Fox Shock

2009-10-02T11:05:00.002Z

Hooray! Those nice pair at Fox & Howard literary agents pass two lovely editors our way (Claire Gillman & Jane Struthers since you ask). Claire works on a diet book by Maria Cross. It's a good book. Maria sends it out to agents. Fox & Howard take it on.

So congratulations - as ever - to Maria for being talented and to Claire for being her usual fabulously helpful self. But on this occasion to F&H as well for being the agency who provided the editor who made the whole thing happen.

Ain't it nice when things like that happen? Champagne all round.

Consider the Lilies

2009-07-14T10:15:00.002Z

A spray of orchids and a shower of rose petals to congratulate Faith Anstey whose 'Flowers in the Field' has just been taken on by Whittet Books. That's great news for her - well done, congrats, and bonne voyage!

The Art of Standing Still

2009-06-20T16:13:00.003Z

Just a note to say Yahoo, Hooray and Yippee-de-do for Ian Critchley whose Art of Standing Still was taken on by agent Sarah Such some time back. (I've only just learned about it; and take a bow, Ed Fenton, for helping out on this one).

SS hasn't yet sold the book, but then again today's market is so awful, so absolutely dire, that failing to sell something means hardly anything about quality. The fact that Ian C secured the services of a really capable agent means that his work passed muster. He's at work on another novel now and - fingers crossed - by the time he's finished it, publishers may have woken up to the fact that if they don't buy books they won't have any to sell.

Not counting on it, though. These things have only ratcheted downwards for years now. There are abrupt downturns (as now), but then where's the bleeding upturn?

Pop, fizz, hooray!

2009-06-04T11:23:00.003Z

Well done to Martyn Murray whose excellent travel MS about Africa (The Storm Leopard) has been taken up by Whittles, a mid-sized Socttish publisher. Whittles is just the right outfit for this job - with a strong focus on wildlife, which is the theme at the heart of Martyn's book.

Huge congrats to MM, and slightly smaller but still robust congrats to Linda Proud, who helped martyn with this one.

More congrats ...

2009-03-25T11:48:00.003Z

Yay! for Beverley Jones, who is just inches away from tying up a deal with Peter Buckman of Ampersand. Bev has a terrific young female voice and a good sense of crimey darkness (without the gore or dissected body parts). She's gonna do great. I can also mention that we've secured a finder's fee from Ampersand: a glass of ginger beer and a warm chorizo salad. Thanks, Peter!

I can also reveal that Poppy W's deal (see below) is with Susan Smith at MBA, who is quietly gathering in some of our best clients.

And last but not even a wee bitty least, the brilliant Silvia Rossi has found a home with Kate Allan, who's acting as her agent. Silvia's got a huge talent, a literary voice with a nice line in gritty crime, and I'm delighted that she's found a home. Hope a huge deal follows before too long.

Congratulations x 3

2009-03-04T12:11:00.002Z

HB: This blog is, you'll have noticed, more or less dying off for lack of love. The reason is that I've got a new love in my e-life - the Word Cloud. Pop over if you want to have a look.

But in the meantime, dear old TN is still the place where we pop our congrats notices - and we've got a whole load of those.

Louise Sharif's Pomegranate Nights has just been taken on by Sonia Land @ Sheil Land - very posh agent that. Big congrats to Louise.

Poppy Wellby is meeting a very good London agent, and I'm hopeful that they'll be striking a deal very soon. The book in question is Incense & Blood - a terrific travel book about the living goddesses of Nepal. More info when I have it.

And Leela Attfield has been offered a serial rights deal in a magazine. Big salaams and congrats to her too. Champers all round.

The Deep Freeze

2009-01-07T09:54:00.002Z

HB: Just thought you should look at these pictures. (Or images, as them metropolitan types say nowadays. Can't see the difference, meself.)

Pretty, aren't they?

Dragons Come to Gloucestershire

2009-01-06T12:31:00.002Z

HB: Just to let y'all know, our own Geraldine Harris will be giving a workshop on how to write Fantasy Fiction at the New Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester on 18th April. More info here: http://www.newbreweryarts.org.uk/

If you've got something to say, and need to say it with dragons, then G's workshop will set you straight.

In the meantime, we're working to set up workshops in London as well as Oxford this year, and I'd hope Glasgow and maybe Belfast and B'ham too. If bookings look OK, we'll start running some genre-specific workshops as well. Fantasy, for those who need to say it with dragons. Crime, for those who need to say it with corpses. Historical, for those who need to say it with togas ...

Publisher in Ugly Neologism Shock

2008-12-19T14:55:00.002Z

HB: An agent who represents a client of ours is hawking something round at the moment - an intriguing memoir, but not easily classifiable. One publisher commented candidly:

"whilst I thought that ____ was a compelling character with a very unique tale, I felt that as a book, it fell somehwat between the gaps, and with the market requiring such specific genrification, it would just be too hard. Wish you all the best with it, but I'm afraid it's not one for me."

[Genrification? Very unique? Publishers today! Honestly! Splutter. Cough. Scents of tweed and pipe tobacco, sounds as of choking on whisky.]

But the point made hammers home one of the themes of this blog: namely, original is not good. If only ____ had not been a compelling character or (better still) had not had a uniquely unique story, all would have been well. So the rules again please:

All commercial fiction needs to be like Dan Brown

All children's fiction needs to be like JK Rowling

All women's fiction needs to be like Katie Price

All literary fiction can be no more experimental than ... ooh, I don't know, Antony Trollope

And thrillers, please (see posts below), must always always feature SAS guys.

How to self-publish and live to tell the tale

2008-12-18T10:32:00.002Z

HB: On the whole, our advice to those wanting to self-publish is (i) by all means do it, if you want to print up some books for friends and family, otherwise (ii) just burn your money - it's more fun and you can warm your toes.

I don't think that advice is about to change, but this article offers a coolly rational view of the whole process, albeit omitting the punchline - whether the author's book actually sold. We're going to be offering a self-publishing workshop next year, with Jeremy Thompson of Matador offering his take on the process. It'll be extremely interesting to see what comes of that.

Meantime, in case I don't post again before Xmas, then a happy Christmas to one and all. This article of mine (printed last year) explains how the British invented Christmas. A bit of a stretch, maybe, but what the hell. Let's credit Charles Dickens, raise our glasses, and Toast Napoleon. Cheers! Prost! and sto lat!

Stop all the clocks

2008-12-02T12:39:00.003Z

HB: Big news. Some sad news and some happy news all in one.

The BAD NEWS is that Zanna - who's been the heart & soul of the WW since she started a couple of years ago now - is leaving us. She and husband Jonny and their delightful three year old Willow are all off down to Dorset. Truth is, much as I hate the fact that Zanna's going, she'll be much happier with Dorset's laidback, more rustic way of life than Oxfordshire's rather phoney version of the same thing.

I'll miss her. So will Tommy. So will all our editors, with whom Zanna's worked so well over the years. And so will everyone who's ever called this office and been darn lucky to have someone as sympathetic and committed as Zanna on the other end of the phone or email.

So much for the sadness. The GOOD NEWS is that Zanna is pregnant and has just learned - wait for it - that's she been blessed with twins. As you can imagine that's happy news, if just a tad on the 'Gordon Bennett!' end of the happiness spectrum. Fingers crossed that all continues to go well from here on. I'm sure it will - and I'll keep y'all posted.

Kindling excitement

2008-11-27T10:36:00.002Z

HB: Want to see the new updated Kindle, the bookslayer? Here it is.

I'm not a gadget monster to put it mildly, but I still can't see the attraction of this - except for students wanting to carry reference libraries in a handbag, and similar. I mean, it's ugly, isn't it? And clunky. And how would you furnish a room with one?

Doom, doom, we're all doomed

2008-11-25T11:46:00.002Z

HB: Ah yes, you can rely on Toasting Napoleon for seasonal cheer. Although the market for books is hardly the crunchiest of credit-crunched crunchees, the market gloom is making life harder than ever for debut authors. According to the Bookseller:

A publishing MD was quoted as saying agents were finding it "much harder" to sell work, since "nobody wants to buy anything"
In the US, one publisher has stopped acquiring any books at all. (!!!)
Simon Trewin of United Agents said, "I think every year we sell fewer books, but every time we do sell a book now it's for more money ... this year it takes longer for publishers to make a decision than it used to, and there is a little less room for flexibility than there was."

Bad news for debut authors. Not good news for existing ones. And calamitous for British literature - but who cares about that? We lead the world in video games, don't we?

Why the Irish are best

2008-11-25T11:23:00.002Z

HB: A survey in the Bookseller last week threw up some interesting data. The survey looked at 6 countries: Britain, America, Ireland, Finland, Netherlands, Sweden. (NB - has anyone else noticed how come Finland always seems to feature in things like this? I think it's going for the Most Surveyed Small Country Award 2008. A deserving winner.) The results can be quickly summarised:

The more bookshops discount prices, the lower the growth in the overall market. Hang your heads in shame, America and Britain (the lowest growth, highest discounting markets).
The more bookshops discount their wares, the lower the profit margins on the average bookstore. Britain's bookstores are least profitable; Ireland's the most. For every £10 spent in a British store, the lucky storekeeper gets to jingle about 20p in his pocket after all costs but before the taxman's bite. That's not a lot of jingling.

Trouble is, I do see that it's hard for any one bookshop to stem the tide. If Borders does away with promos, then everyone will flock to Waterstones. There needs to be an anti-discounting culture, and it's tough for any one shop to inaugurate that solo. But still. Irish bookstores make two and a half times more profit and grow faster, so you'd have thought that the rewards were there, if only the trade made an effort to try ...

Congratulations x2

2008-11-20T10:19:00.004Z

HB: congratulations to Huw Morgan whose fantasy MS Dark Age has been taken on by Tina Betts @ Andrew Mann, a very good agency. I'm always pleased when one of our babes gets taken on, but I'm extra pleased in this case. Dark Age was a fantasy MS that had everything, including intelligence, wit and good writing.

Now if I'm honest, I do understand why so many agents just close their doors to fantasy material. Too much of it is just too bad. That's not to diss the good stuff, just to acknowledge that people who are more interested in Massively Multiplayer Online gaming (have I got that right?) than books aren't likely to make great writers.

But when an MS comes along which is good by any standard, not merely by the standards of its genre, then shouldn't the agenting community be falling over themselves to represent it? For a long time Huw had problems being taken on, but he stuck at it and got there in the end. For him, no doubt, delight. For me, relief. I've always believed that (as long as you don't breach the iron walls of genre & market) good books will always sell. Huw's experience with Dark Age made me doubt that for a while, but I'm a believer again. Good books sell! Hooray!

Oh, and Louise Berridge has had her novel taken on by Penguin. That's great for her; great for Michelle Lovric (her WW editor); great for Victoria Hobbs @ AM Heath .... and in due course great for readers too, especially those as likes a little swash with their buckle.

The Sentence

2008-11-17T12:32:00.003Z

HB: Feeling good about life. I've been wrestling for some weeks with my book on money. I felt perfectly sure (i) that there was a good book to be written here, (ii) that I had the tools needed to write it, and (iii) that I'd enjoy doing so. But it wasn't gelling. The book and I hadn't yet found each other. I was scratching away, reading stuff, writing bits & pieces, but not feeling in the flow.

Then I got it. I went to sleep one night and the last thought as I drifted off was 'It needs to start with character'. The next morning, I woke up with my opening sentence - or pair of sentences, rather. They are:

It starts with character. Character and a moment of risk.

Now that may not mean much to you or strike you as a particularly wonderful bit of anything. But for me it's The Sentence. The tuning fork which gives me the note for everything that follows. The little fragment which tells me that the book & I have finally found each other. There'll be plenty of work from here on, and times of occasional frustration too. But I know now that this book will work; that I'll enjoy writing it; that it'll do something new and valuable; that it wants me to write it.

I'm happy now, and will be happy all the way to the final full stop. Happy days.

Strait is the jacket

2008-11-11T17:37:00.004Z

HB: My post below (Strait is the Gate) seems to have touched a nerve, so here's a little more on the same line.

The book that didn't sell was a crime novel in the Agatha Christie mould, where all the clues needed to solve the puzzle were fairly laid out in the book. A traditional enterprise, but one very open to modern reworkings, a la Rankin for example. But it was also a thriller - with a fine shootout scene at the end. Most strikingly, it was also an exercise in character and voice: the lead character being a highly associative / intuitive dyslexic with a head stuffed full of weird and wonderful facts. It was that last element that made the book so unusual and so worthwhile.

The feedback from editors at publishers was great. They wanted to buy the book. So why didn't they? Because sales & marketing types rule the roost. They said, "This is a tough guy crime thriller and the lead character is not ex-SAS, so it doesn't work for the market we have in mind." [SAS = british special forces, for our American chums].

Feedback from agent to client: "Write me another book like that, with the same character, only make him into an ex-SAS guy please."

Expostulation from client to me (expletives deleted): "For xxxx's sake, this character couldn't possibly be a xxxxxxx SAS guy. It's not that kind of xxxxxx book and he's not that kind of xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx person."

Now I agree with y'all, that readers WANT a crime novel with good splashes of gore, in which the lead character is interesting but not an SAS-man or anything like one. But sales & marketing folk want to pigeonhole readers and of course the more they do that, the more they end up proving their point. Go to the crime-thriller shelves now and you'll find that most bestselling novels do have ex special force types as their protagonists ... which proves the S&M guys right ... but only because no other book is allowed to reach those damn shelves in the first place.

Humph. Nothing a few firebombs couldn't fix, methinks.

One final word. A few people have suggested that our client could just go to a smaller, less strait-jacketing press. Well, yes, he could, and they'd take him, and he'd get into print. But the ugly reality of the trade is that his book would almost certainly die without a big publisher behind him. Yes, there are exceptions, but no there aren't many. And once an author has a poor sales record, it'll haunt him/her for the rest of their days, no matter what the quality of the material.

So come on. Send me your unused Guy Fawkes night fireworks and I'll see if I can't figure out how to make something flammable and fun ...

Strait is the gate

2008-10-31T12:36:00.002Z

HB: Just got news today from one of our clients, whom we placed recently with a top class agent at a top class agency. The MS - a crime thriller - went out to all the usual suspects and was taken up by no one. The agent is now saying that he thinks that book won't get published at all.

I ought to be inured to this kind of news, but I'm not. The book was a cracker. Original. Tautly written. Novel setting. Good violent climax. There was nothing wrong with it, and plenty right.

If debut novels like this are being rejected, then God help us all. I suspect that if the book had only been a tad less original, a tad more formulaic then it would have been taken on. But why the hell should writers write to some narrow template of what's required? I tell you this book was good. I've read loads of crime novels recently and this MS was better than at least 80% of them. Better written, more tightly plotted, and a stunning central character.

The market has now narrowed to the point where it's asphixiating diversity and talent. The best of the material that does get published is still excellent, of course. But that's not the test. The test which matters is whether excellent books are being rejected - and they are, they are. Not just sometimes now, but routinely. It's awful. We should march on parliament, or raise barricades outside Waterstones, or kidnap Richard & Judy. Or something. But I don't like it. When I grow up, I want to be an accountant.

Congratulations x2 & covers

2008-10-30T12:34:00.006Z

HB: The weekly congratulations notice: to Julie Hough, who's secured an Italian agent for her novel Caribbean Sunset. Big congrats to her. Oh, and a last minute congrats to Lucy Beresford, who (having got a book deal for her novel some time ago) has now followed up with a short story published in the London Magazine. We helped with both, but Lucy had star potential from the off.

But now a word on titles. 4th Estate is bringing out the paperback of Little Britain on St George's Day next year. No decisions have yet been taken on rejacketing it. Option 1 is just to stick with the existing (lovely, beautiful, comical) cover - that's the chap drinking tea on the right hand side of this page. Option 2 is to go with something a bit more commercial, a bit more obvious, a bit more flag-waving, in short. Allen Lane (a hardback imprint of Penguin's) has done a very nice cover for a new book on sport (see above), so it can be done in an un-crass way.

4th Estate are a pretty innovative bunch - which is a solidly good thing - but they are times when the right way to innovate is to go solidly traditional. Me, I'm not sure. None of my books have ever sold in huge volumes, so it's not as though I know the formula ...

Yes sir, no sir

2008-10-27T13:00:00.003Z

HB: The Booker Prize winner, Aravind Ardaga, has just sacked his agent, who works for William Morris, which is both a huge film talent agency and also an important literary agency (albeit more in NY than London). The good Mr AA has given no reason for his decision.

Now what is one to make of this? The tone of the commentary so far tends to be that an aggressive author is arrogantly rejecting the agent who brought him success - but my own feeling is rather different. Agents are like plumbers. You pay them to do a job. No one would get upset with an author who changed their plumber, so why should there be a state of shock when an author changes their agent?

It's a question of double standards. We hear all the time from authors who have been dumped by their agents, and more often than not in a bad way: not a swift, businesslike, helpful letter, but rather long silences, emotional outbursts, enormous delays. These partings, crappy and destructive as they are, are never reported on at all. But if an author, from petulance, vanity or any other reason, chooses to move on, then it's all but front page news.

Me, I go on thinking that all agents should address all their clients by 'sir' or 'madam', unless specifically asked not to do so. That's bloody well remind everyone who pays the bills, and that customer service is compulsory, not some optional extra.

Having said all that, of course, my own agent is a star and I wouldn't be without him for the world. But then, he knows all about customer service - even without calling me 'sir'.

Crunching away

2008-10-21T10:04:00.004Z

HB: A couple of people have asked if the credit crunch is affecting us. Er, no, not yet, it would seem. Even though expenditure can't get much more discretionary than spending a fairly large chunk of change on MS assessment, new assignments seem to keep on rolling in. Fingers crossed for that to continue. We're also hosting our first ever workshop at the end of this week (a place or two left in case you're interested), and another one to follow in Nov. Bookings have been very decent so far, so this is an experiment that we'll repeat on a bigger scale next year.

Some of the most interesting things we're doing at the moment are, alas, not something that we can talk about publicly in any detail - we're starting to talk to big publishers about things we can work on together: workshops, editorial work and the like. I think this'll be a sloooooow process, as this is the publishing industry after all, but I'd be disappointed if we got through 2009 without some quite significant changes.

Meanwhile, a joke. Y'all look like you need a joke, so here you are, credit-crunch themed an' all.

Q: What's the capital of Iceland?

A: £4.50

This is just getting silly now

2008-10-03T15:14:00.002Z

HB: More congratulations in order. Louise Berridge - who writes terrific swashbuckling historical dramas, but with some real depth and writerly pizzazz thrown into the mix - has just been taken on with maximum enthusiasm by AM Heath.

Meanwhile, another client, Philip Goldkayn, has been taken on by AM Heath and his MS is in front of publishers right now. If I were a publisher (God forbid!), I'd definitely offer on that book. It's a thriller that's also a perfect whodunnit type mystery and also has a really intriguing and non-standard central character. The best of genre fiction.

And congrats too to Leigh Ferrani & Ron Shephard. Ron is Britain's most married man (he's on wife #8 at the moment, and tabloid photographers are there to snap the happy couple at each new wedding anniversary). Leigh - one of our wonderful ghosts - drafted up the first few chapters of a memoir for Ron, and she's just secured an offer of representation from the agent Lorella Belli, who'll be looking to start selling the proposal as soon as editors are back from Frankfurt.

We've got other MSS heading off to agents as well, and I've high expectations for some of them. All of a sudden, this getting published lark is almost starting to feel easy. But it isn't of course. The usual monster congratulations to all our successful clients.

Newsflash --- poetry better than money --- newsflash

2008-10-02T11:20:00.003Z

HB: Ever been pissed off that you're flat broke and writing books which never seem to sell any copies while all your City mates - and former work colleagues - are moaning because their bonuses are going to be so pisspoor this year that they'll have to defer upgrading their yacht?

Fear not! Poetry is better than money, even £100s of millions of it. How do I know? Cos Felix Dennis says so, and he's known both. What's more his live poetry tour is a sellout ... and the fact that he supplies free booze copiously and of excellent quality is neither here nor there. Shame on you, for dreaming to think otherwise.

I'm interested in all this, because I'm just gearing up to start researching my next book - a kind of travel book, where the land I'm journeying into is the Land of Money. I'm going to be talking to millionaires & billionaires - but also talking to those involved in Aid & Development - and to $4 a day manufacturing workers in China - and Wall St hedge fund managers - and so on. It'll be a bloomin' fun book to research methinks ... and if any of you happen to be reclusive trillionaires with a yen to be interviewed, then please just drop me a line ...

Congratulations!

2008-09-23T10:24:00.002Z

HB: Seems a bit routine now, but yet another client has been taken on by an agent - Paul Waters has scored with MBA. (He's wound up with Sam Jordison's agent, in fact, so she's obviously a sucker for punishment.) Anyway. Well done to one & all. Champagne all round.

Congratulations!

2008-09-22T10:52:00.004Z

HB: Double congrats this morning.

Congratulations the first to the immense, the wonderful, the kingly John Fenton - a client of ours who hasn't merely got an agent, hasn't merely got a (huge) book deal, but has now got himself on the bestseller lists too. He's at #6 in the non-fiction charts with PLease don't make me go. Massive achievement. What a star man!

Congratulations too to Mick Connaire, who's got himself an agent for the magnificently entitled Fred's Dad's Dead Dad's Shed. A terrific book that well deserved agenting. I don't yet know the lucky agent, but will tell you once I know.

The things this modern author chappies get up to

2008-09-22T10:45:00.002Z

HB: Since we've been muttering (see below) about web 2.0ish ideas from publishers, check out this YOuTube offering from our own Sam Jordison, itself a piss-take of someone else's (very tedious) YouTube offering. And everyone seems to be at it. Andrew Crofts - ghostwriter extraordinaire - has used this promo to boost his recently published standalone novel.

Do these things actually increase sales? I don't know. I suppose mostly not, but every now and then one of them will really go viral. (Ha, don't I just know the lingo, innit?)

Do, BTW, go on commenting on those Ryanair/Facebook posts below. So far: a cautious welcome to Macmillan. Some scepticism about Authonomy, though to be fair the latter is much too new to be fairly assessed just yet.

Facebook does publishing

2008-09-17T11:40:00.005Z

HB: This is really a PS to the post below.

HarperCollins has just set up something called Authonomy. Previously, HC more or less disregarded its slush pile. Authonomy is an effort to outsource the sorting of its slushpile to writers themselves. Basically, you can:

upload your own manuscript
comment on other people's manuscripts
vote Pop-Idol style on the ones you rate the best

The top 5 MSS to emerge from this process each month will be reviewed seriously by the appropriate HC editor. There's no guarantee of being taken on. There's no prize, or guaranteed advance or royalty structure. I assume contracts would be individually negotiated book by book.

But again: whaddaya reckon? A bold, imaginative & enterprising move that helps publishers reach beyond the normal suspects (agents, celebrities, journos)? Or a retrograde, web 2.0 ish, YouTubeish corrosion of all those values that we hold dear?

At all events, what does strike me is that publishers are recognising that being entirely dependent on agents for sourcing their raw material is both expensive, and one that limits the kinds of authors that might come their way. These new ventures, whether or not they ultimately succeed or not, certainly indicate that publishers are itching to find new directions. That in itself has to be a Good Thing.

Ryanair does publishing

2008-09-17T11:14:00.005Z

HB: Now folks, what do we all think about this?

Macmillan - Britain's 5th biggest publisher and an old & prestigious industry name - set up an outfit a couple of years back called Macmillan New Writing. (See its FAQs page here.) MNW:

offers no advance, but ...
offers reasonably generous royalties
takes work in any adult fiction genre - literary fiction to space-opera, and I expect operatically spacey literature too.
gets the full support of Pan Macmillan in terms of design, production, PR, sales & marketing, etc

There are two schools of thought on this. One (voiced by a disgruntled agent who sees this as the thin end of an anti-agent wedge) derides MNW as the Ryanair of publishing. You could even argue that MNW is exploitative. Advances are there, after all, to offer authors some kind of insurance against the vagaries of a very vagariferous market.

The other school of thought says hooray. The market is too narrow and the compulsive rush towards unaffordable advances is one of the mostly corrosively narrowing forces at work. MNW broadens the kind of work that can be taken on. It gives authors a chance to build a reputation. It's a return to the most old-fashioned virtues of publishing. Long may it flourish.

So what d'ya think? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Would you personally care to have your novel published by MNW - or do you think this is exploitation by a different name? Let's all have a heated debate ...

Colours to a Blind Man

2008-09-05T11:20:00.003Z

HB: I promised a plug for Dave & Sue Hooper's book Colours to a Blind Man. Helena Drysdale helped Dave & Sue with this, and the book is available now from Chipmunk Publishing, a specialist mental health publisher. It's a great book, and Chipmunk is a brave & worthy outfit. ... though you would have thought that £20 was a bit toppish for something like this. Amazon info on the book can be found here.

Diversity awareness

2008-09-05T10:39:00.004Z

HB: I was in Borders a few weeks back and saw across the aisles a stand entitled "Books you might not have heard of before" or something snappy like that. Hooray, thinks I, some attempt to bring non-standard material to a broad audience. Not so. I gets closer and I finds that the neglected novelist in question is Pulitzer prizewinning bestseller Michael Chabon. (The Yiddish Policeman fella, remember?) I threw one of my writerly tizzes & had to be calmed down with a soya decaf frapuccino with plenty of sugar substitute.

But now - wa-hay! - Waterstones has had the guts to really go for it. The idea is that big name authors - Philip Pullman to start with - get to choose the 40 books that have meant most to them, and those 40 books are out on a table with all the 3-for-2s. PP being the Big Man that he is, he's chosen such tough books as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and Musil's Man With No Qualities (a tome which I have to admit to never having finished. But I suspect I'm hardly alone there. I've read as much as I need to.)

let's enjoy this while we can. I'll bet you a pound to a penny that Waterstones discovers that Musil's MWNQ doesn't shift books at the rate of Patty Cornwell's latest, so that sooner or later we'll be looking not at PP's top 40, but Katie Price's top 20. When that day comes, it'll take more than the soya decaf to calm me down.

(NB: if you liked this, you might like ... Boyd Tonkin's article on the same topic in the Indie.)

Hunting Writers

2008-09-04T09:50:00.002Z

HB: Slightly unfortunate title for the post, maybe. But 'Hunting writers' isn't about guns & mantraps, so much as one of the biggest dilemmas for publishers.

The issue is this. Publishers have 2 ways to find authors.

1) The slush pile. Extremely labour intensive & very poor at truffling up quality.
2) Agents. Excellent at producing quality MSS, but the sales process is designed to ramp prices up to the max.

What is a poor publisher to do? Well, publishers have responded inventively, albeit (as yet) not very decisively. So f'rinstance:

Hamish Hamilton has set up a literary magazine (Five Dials) as a bait to lure new writers
Penguin in the US setup an online competition for new talent in conjunction with Amazon
HarperCollins has set up a peer-review site for writers, Authonomy
Macmillan has set up a New Writing venture, aimed specifically at non-agented writers

Of these, Macmillan has had the most success so far, and wants to expand its range further. Given that we're proven trufflers up of talent and a big publisher could do loads for us in terms of increasing our profile, then there's huge potential synergy in some sort of linkage. I suspect we won't get to the end of 2009 without something happening on that front.

But meantime, there's always the old fashioned way of doing things. Aida Edemariam who discussed some of this in a Guardian article talks about Tindal Street Press:

"Because we're small and we've been building a reputation, we haven't been an obvious choice for agents," says [Tindal Street] editor Luke Brown, "so the slush pile has been vital for us." This year Tindal Street is publishing three novels that began life this way. Brown admits, however, that this kind of publishing is extremely labour-intensive: not only do you have to find the book - you then have to make it publishable.

"We work a lot with the authors," says Brown. "Generally there are four or five drafts. It's a question of seeing its potential." The process can take up to three years, and there are few big publishers, mindful of corporate owners and bottom lines, willing to give this kind of time to an off-chance.

Personally, it seems to me that the old ways are still the best. They're the ones we cleave to, anyway.

Worth Every Penny

2008-09-03T09:33:00.004Z

HB: Here is an article by Andrew Crofts (Britain's top ghostwriter) defending the proposition that Katie Price (Britain's top owner-of-enormous-breasts) deserves every penny she's earned from writing.

I agree more than not, I think. In the end, anyone who manages to shift lots of books has done well and deserves what rewards come their way. The problem is never with those authors. The problem is a retail market that achieves huge sales for a handful, leaving many fine authors with minimal sales and a literary climate that's overly hostile to the experimental.

I might add that I had cause to speak to Andrew Crofts about something recently. He's an absolutely top bloke - very helpful. He also, as it happens, has a book coming out this week. Not ghosted. A novel, about celebrity and fame, titled The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride. Just click that link to go straight through to the Amazon page. Or click this one to go the website, complete with YouTubed video & all. Very 21st century.

Publishing Upside Down

2008-08-28T09:37:00.003Z

HB: Came across this article by a marketing type who knows the publishing industry well. He raises the following questions. I've edited what follows for length, but otherwise left it. Because the list is long for a blog, I've restricted myself to one word comments in red after each comment: TRUE! if I agree, FALSE! if I don't, and Hmmm if I think it's all more complex. I should also add that my own publisher is better than 90% of the competition, so my comments apply to the industry in general, not them in particular.

1. Who's in charge here? How can a 22-year-old editor bid on a book? What does a post-graduate $32,000-a-year fresh-out know what will hit with the public? Why does this frequently appear to be a case of the nuthouse leaving the inmates to decide! Hmmm

2. How do you expect people to pay 25 dollars for a book!? It's ridiculous. Economics of publishing need to be studied. And no, "Do paperbacks" is not the answer because Amazon doesn't feature them as lovingly as the hard options. Hmmm

3. The editing is done exactly how far in advance? If I write a book that is to come out in say December of 08- they have to have it in February. Why? 'Cause they have a "schedule to follow," but it would seem with digital technology you should be able to write right up to the deadline (like we do online). TRUE!

4. Marketing is something that happens when? You probably know this but publishers basically print and cross their fingers-unless your name is Grisham, King, or Winfrey. But to market them is the REAL waste of money... their fans will find their books like a stampede. It's obvious that publishers publish way too many books, and have no faith in anything. They just hope something will stick. It's all Teflon! TRUE!

5. You give nothing away? Every now and then a maker of books announces "Here's a chapter" gratis, or introduces a limited time free download for online consumption ... The limited part is what makes people go "how old-fashioned." GIVE IT AWAY NOW. TRUE!

6. Bookstore chains are difficult corporations? Let's be real. Borders, Amazon, Barnes & Noble are just as scared about the economy as publishers are. So I say work with the little stores just as hard as you used to with the biggies. Every little venue needs handholding and we authors will help get the word out, but everyone in pub is so afraid to say anything that might be construed as "insulting." TRUE!

7. Why is everyone so afraid to make waves? Isn't that the only way to rise above the noise! Retail seems to be dying--and yet the stores scare publishers in ways that shake my head involuntarily. I've done books with most of the big publishers, and no one ever said to Barnes & Noble: "We want placement, what's it going to take to get it? This book is important!" I know that BN is LOOKING for ballishness. Honestly, those big corporate publishing behemoths have power, but don't use it. Gosh. Hmmm

8. You won't publish me even if I'm the next Tolstoy unless I have a platform of my own? Yeah I get it ... In 2002 I got myself booked with the then-adorable Katie Couric on Today Show for "trendSpotting" and I told the people at Penguin-Putnam who thought I was kidding ("Well, let's see") --and when I was scheduled they didn't bother to alert sales force, stores, or anyone. So 20 million watched me cavorting with that perky thing, and a dozen books were in stores. Publishers don't know how to sell, that's the fact. They wait. Very Darwinian. If something takes off THEN they start pumping out the marketing. TRUE!

9. What about the number of books? Publishers will have to "break" artists like the music biz does and don't just publish whatever sounds good ... Save your money and invest in a few key artists. FALSE!

10. The agents are working for exactly whom? Lit agents I've met, with few exceptions, though none I can think of as I type, are beyond frightened of pissing off the editors, so they won't fight like Hollywood agents will for the clients. TRUE! (not of my own agent, I might add)

11. The world' most successful businesses don't sit around having meetings all day - Google? - and golly, turf wars are so 90's! Publishing geeks seem so afraid to step on one another's toes. "Let's have a meeting to see how X feels about it." Garrrrrh! All that endless chitchats around oak tables. I say let's fan out, make trouble, be disruptive, start our own religion ... anything. Plan less -- do more. Rise up. Be aggressive. As Fred Trump once said, "No one gets any work done in the office." TRUE!

12. Small publishers? Nah, don't think so. I found they were just as cheap-headed as their older brother, and only provided support when the author paid his own way. Seems like the small publisher is a misnomer-like indie film. Neither exists except as marketing gimmick. Sigh but, yes, probably quite TRUE!

13. Finally, and for the good of the readers, shouldn't everything be made available online? We're inundated with material to read online and that takes our attention. Having a book in hand - even on the excellent Kindle, which is really fun--isn't the most efficient way to digest someone's work. Like when I read a book offline and want to share a passage with a friend, I have to type it out, yeah! That's almost as frustrating as not being able to send my DVR moments to pals who absolutely need to see that sucky ad I witnessed. Blimey, FALSE!, if it's my book. TRUE! if it's someone else's.

Shameless Plug

2008-08-20T10:14:00.002Z

HB: Here is a shameless plug for the excellent Richard Blandford's latest ...

"My new novel, Flying Saucer Rock & Roll, is out now. It tells the story of five teenage boys who form a band, get too drunk on imported Russian beer, and somewhere along the way, accidentally grow up. Along the way, they encounter pedantic punks, bad jobs, worse girlfriends, working men's clubs, venture scouts, and art school.

Following my first book Hound Dog, which is considered by many to be the definitive Elvis impersonator/public urination/swearing novel, I knew I had to up my game if I was going to meet the expectations of the literally tens of people who follow my work. I wrote Flying Saucer Rock & Roll (or FSRAR, as it's known in the trade) as a way of exploring philosophical ideas
that interest me, such as the dividing line between competence and genius, and the moral implications of breaking down the barrier between art and life. I also wanted to cash in on the market for early nineties nostalgia before anybody else did.

The writing process for this second book was probably harder than the first, partly because I didn't want to stick to the easy option of doing what I already knew would work, and partly because it's a much subtler story. Writing about things happening is quite easy. Writing about not much happening is a lot harder (which isn't to say that nothing happens at all.
That's my next book).

Finally I would like to point out that the inside cover of the book is unexpectedly shiny, and feels
very nice to the touch. This alone has been considered worth the price of purchase by all who have felt it."

Richard has been a very good editor for us: honest, tactful, tough and subtle. If you want to pick up a copy of Flying Saucer Rock & Roll then you can just click this link.

To the Salt Mines

2008-08-20T09:54:00.002Z

HB: Was taken on a guided tour of the Bodleian Library at the weekend, by the very nice Director of Development there.

A couple of nuggets.

First, the Bod is a copyright library, entitled to receive a copy of every book published in the UK. I asked whether that included all the mass of self-pub material that's pouring out from Authorhouse and other similarly excellent publishing houses. He said yes: if a book has an ISBN no, the Bod retains a copy. They used to be selective about what they accepted, but since coming to regret turning down first editions of Jane Austen's works, they now just take everything.

And where, I asked, do they put all this material? I knew that the Bod's underground vaults are gradually expanding ever wider beneath Oxford, but it seemed a bit rich to turn Oxford into a honeycomb just for the sake of some of this self-pub material. Ah no, ses he, most new titles are sent direct & unread to Cheshire. To a salt mine in fact. I daresay all my fine output is doing its time there, before posterity finally pardons it.

Second nugget.

In the early 1600s, the Stationers Company had a monopoly over printing & kept a register of authors, titles and authorised works. But Thomas Bodley asked, how would they be able prove what exact texts those authorisations referred to if there weren't some central repository? The Stationers had no answer ... so the good TB offered to keep one copy of every book in perpetuity. He got his books free. The Stationers had their problem solved. And the arrangement has continued - through changes in law &c - ever since.

The Death of the Book

2008-08-04T09:38:00.002Z

HB: For how much longer will the book as we know it continue to exist?

All the publishers I've ever spoken to about this seem serenely confident that bound & glued paper wodges will survive long into the 21st century. I personally think that's likely too, but that doesn't mean that e-books won't end up gobbling a big slice of what is now the books market.

The Amazon Kindle doesn't seem to have gone great guns since its launch. I don't know anyone who's got one, or even anyone who wants one. But it's selling all the same. A US tech blog, Tech Crunch, reports:

"240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.

Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far"

You can read the full piece here. And for college students, say, what could be better than a Kindle? It can hold dozens of textbooks, it can make them searchable, it's easily refreshed. I don't like the idea much, but the e-book is a-coming.

Summer time

2008-07-30T13:04:00.003Z

HB: Ah, don't you love summer?

We've been weirdly busy at the WW - more manuscripts this July just gone than we've ever had in a single month before. When it's been hot, we've piled the office outside into the garden. We're all very laptopy, hot-desky, wi-fi-ish at the WW, of course, so it's easily done.

And summer also means stag nights - a once regular feature of summer, which comes my way less often now than of old. I was meant to be away today for a stag day/night on the South Coast, which was to have started with some serious rock-climbing off Portland Bill. Would have been a fantastic day.

Alas, the alternator on my car failed, so I drove down there with an ever-diminishing supply of electric power. By the time I got to Bournemouth, I couldn't use my windscreen wipers or lights, so decided to turn back. By the time I got to Newbury on the way home, pretty much every warning light on the dashboard had lit up. By the time I went past Oxford, the warning lights had failed for lack of power and the speedometer had stopped working altogether. Because I've got a complicated newfangled turbo-diesel, the engine wasn't even working properly.

I did make it home, but - memo to self - do not attempt 150 mile journey in car with knackered alternator. Besides, who wants to go on a stag night, when I could sit at home with a pile of unread WW scripts?

"steaming f***ing anger can make a man verbose"

2008-07-24T10:57:00.005Z

TK: I know I'm very naughty for not having blogged about my novelling escapades yet, but Giles Coren has provided me with a far more compelling excuse to blog. For those of you who don't know him, Mr. Coren is an intelligent and very entertaining writer, as food critics go.

He does, however, have a bit of a temper. He is probably right about his particular gripe, but I think he nevertheless has given us the template for how not to react to an editorial report. Anyone with even a passing interest in the editorial process and its effect on writers will simply have to read this. It is the letter he sent to the sub-editors at The Times, when they removed one (1) ocurrence of the indefinite article from one (1) of his sentences:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/23/mediamonkey

Author Photo

2008-07-21T10:50:00.008Z

HB: A recent emailer happened to call me "young Harry". Hmm. I wonder if that epithet had anything to do with the fact that my standard issue author photo is now ten years out of date ... 10 years in which my hairline has climbed rather.

So here are some possible new author pics to use for jacket photos &c (All photos taken on a recent long weekend in North Yorks). First though, an apology to the Harrogate Crime Writers, who tell me that they don't actually receive dosh from publishers for promoting their authors. You can see their comment here.

Any case, back to the pics. Here's a hairline-hiding one:

Here's a photo of me in more normal pose:

And here's one of me enjoying a quiet read:

personally, I'd say that the middle photo gets closest to the real me ...

Murder Most Puzzlicious

2008-07-19T11:16:00.002Z

HB: My comments on Ian Rankin have sparked some debate. In a post earlier I said:

"Ian Rankin is a classy writer, but he's very pure crime fiction - that is, crossword puzzle, whodunnit territory. Judged (unfairly, admittedly) by the standards of conventional novels - notably as regards the level of interior insight into the protagonist - Rankin would barely get a passing grade. "

Simon Brooke pushes this comment a little further: "Ian Rankin is the novel as film script. It concentrates on the external: what the camera sees. This isn't a bad thing, but there's a whole lot of territory that's missed. And Rebus' drinking and insubordination do not add up to a character study.Nevertheless the yarn rattles along at a good pace: shallow, but bravura."

On the other hand, Jon Jermey, talking about puzzle plots, comments in Rankin's defence: "If I went looking for 'Renaissance-style' portraits, but refused to view any portraits painted before, say, 1750 because they were 'too old', you would be entitled to assume that I was either very ignorant or insincere. Similarly with books ... To complain that modern books don't have puzzle plots is rather like complaining that Mark Rothko isn't Reubens." [full comments to be found here.]

Now there's something very intriguing at the root of all this. The traditional view of the novel would say:

The novel is all about interiority. Even a pulpy commercial novel - a James Bond book, let's say - is trying to have the reader what it feels like to be Bond.
The shape of a plot is basically this: Challenge - Adventure - Resolution
The interior and exterior plot trajectories need to be complementary and meet in a satisfying way come the resolution
Obviously modernist approaches to the novel might go in for non-resolutions and indeterminate or ambiguous endings, but even those are simply offering us the same old model in a form appropriate to our complex & ambiguous age.
In any case, the essence of the novel is about allowing the reader's consciousness to leap from one brain to another. It's about placing ourselves in other people's heads - the ultimate exercise in what psychologists refer to as Theory of Mind.

You're with me so far? And fairly obviously these rules hold broadly true of nearly all literary fiction and large swathes of genre fiction (notably all women's fiction).

But there's one area of the bookshop where these general rules get almost no traction at all - namely the crime shelves, and particularly at the Rankin / La Plante / Colin Dexter end. The rules above - if reformulated for the crime shelves - would read:

the novel has no interest in interiority
there is a technical issue to be solved in each novel, but this is absolutely NOT of acute psychic importance to the protagonist. On the contrary, solving crimes is his/her job. It's what they do. The detective's matter-of-factness about their daily business is characteristic of crime fiction from Conan Doyle to Rankin. Challenge-Adventure-Resolution is not an appropriate model for crime.
The more appropriate model is simply Puzzle-Clues-Solution
there therefore is no internal plot trajectory
these novels are absolutely not about Theory of Mind

Pretty interesting difference, huh? Time for an HB-ish theory ...

Regular novels are indeed about theory of mind - and children's interest in fiction is at its all-time peak at about the time that they are developing a sophisticated model of other minds. But crime fiction can't be about this, because it has such blatantly little interest in internals. Yet something crucial must be going on, because crime fiction is such a huge & perennial seller.

What's going on here, I reckons, is that human sociality is a deeply complex affair. We are very dependent on others; we bound up in hugely complex chains of trust, reciprocity, interdependence, &c - yet people can also be deceivers, betrayers, etc

Humans therefore have a huge (and evolutionarily required) interest in fathoming out these issues of trust and betrayal. These issues are about externals - it's not about feeling what it's like to be a murderer, it's about working out how to unmask the bugger.

Those issues of trust & betrayal are ultimately what crime fiction is about - and why crime (rather than say botany, or romance, or anything else) forms the natural backdrop for such novels. Oh yes, and it also explains why women (a very sociable sort of ape, and also one particularly at risk from male violence & betrayal) are particularly keen on crime books, when everything else we understand about women would suggest that gory crime wouldn't be their kind of thing at all.

Hence my rather shaded comments about Rankin. He's a sophisticated writer for sure, but he's playing a totally different game from the one played by most novelists. It's a game that I'm not personally all that keen on, but I don't knock it.

Oh, and if you're wondering how come my views are so developed on this topic ... well, I did write 1/3 of a book on the human storytelling instinct before my dear publishers decided to spike it. Ah well. Some day, I'll get that book out there.

Murder Most Satisfying

2008-07-17T10:04:00.003Z

HB: Probably time to emphasise the positives.

Here's a fine blog devoted to the best of crime fiction.

Here's the Bitter Lemon Press website - see Jane Jakeman's positive comments below.

Do also check some of the fuller comments to the Murder Wars postings, as there are some suggestions for more interesting reading matter than the crime highway. My tips: Carl Hiassen, Fred Vargas, and (not what I regularly read but I have to say I liked it) Robert Crais. If you've got other faves, let me know.

Publishing Most Foul

2008-07-16T11:47:00.003Z

HB: Got another comment on the Murder Wars, that's just too good not to give a post all of its own. So here it is, from the WW's very own Jane Jakeman (herself a crime novelist so dangerously gifted that she could find half a dozen murder weapons in a totally empty room):-

NB: I've kept this post up so readers can follow the thread in full. In actual fact - though JJ had this info on what appeared to be good authority - she doesn't seem to be right here. See the festival's comment below and a longer post from them, dated 23 July.

"What the general public doesn't know about the Harrogate Crime Festival is that the authors are not invited to appear there solely through merit. Their publishers have to pay a hefty sum per author to the festival organisers.This means that only big publishers can afford it, and then only with authors they want to push. It is rather like the system by which bookshops are paid by the publishers to have certain books in the window. These promotional activities, disguised as literary festivals, etc., play a large part in the present dismal standard of best-selling crime fiction. In my view, one of the finest crime publishers currently operating is the tiny Bitter Lemon Press, which specialises in translations of foreign work, but their sales are tiny compared with the massive 'popular' and heavily promoted stuff. I think the best way to get these practices dropped is to make the reading public aware of them."

Hear, hear to that!

The Murder Wars

2008-07-15T09:52:00.003Z

HB: The stilletos are out in Harrogate, where the annual Crime Fiction Festival is getting into full murderous swing. (I understand that this year, they've hired a couple of forensically aware serial killers to divert the crowds.) The Heated Debate - see comments below - rages away. Just to clarify my own views:

1) I think a lot of the mainstream crime writers are dull & overrated

2) I think there are plenty of non-mainstream crime writers that are of real interest

3) Nevertheless, it's the mainstream that racks up (by far) the largest sales

4) And that's sad, because genre fiction should be exciting and innovative, in its biggest selling forms as well as in its less well known ones.

As a commercial fiction writer myself, I'd never diss the art form itself. Two of the best post-war British writers - John Le Carre and Patrick O'Brian - were technically genre authors. Graham Greene moonlighted as a genre author often enough, and some of his most enduring work fell on that side of the line. I'd far rather read Brighton Rock (excellent), than Stamboul Train (an embarrassment).

Murder Most Boring - the Heated Debate

2008-07-14T15:07:00.003Z

HB: I've had a few interesting comments on the Murder Most Boring post. These comments can be found in full on the comments section of that post, but here are some edited highlights.

First this, from crimeficreader:

I am not going to negatively criticise “the good and the great”, but I will say this: even where the quality remains the same, it is possible to become bored with an author’s works, pure and simple. Where quality appears to be going down the pan, interest can flag and wane, or reach the final straw. I think one of Walters’s main assets is that she does standalones. You never know what’s coming next. Billingham has moved onto a standalone for his next novel, due in August. That’s both a brave and wise move on his part. To date, I’ve read only the first chapter out of curiosity - I like to try and stick to a planned schedule of reading – but it’s pretty damn good. It draws you in emotionally and it’s topical.

Then this, from Simon Brooke:

OK, what is a writer?

Ian Rankin paints a very atmospheric Edinburgh - and as it's the city I grew up in and I know most of the places I really appreciate that. But compare him with Ian Banks or Irvine Welsh, also writing about Edinburgh, or Alasdair Grey writing about Glasgow - and there just isn't any comparison.

Ian Rankin is the novel as film script. It concentrates on the external: what the camera sees. This isn't a bad thing, but there's a whole lot of territory that's missed. And Rebus' drinking and insubordination do not add up to a character study.

Nevertheless the yarn rattles along at a good pace: shallow, but bravura. As story telling, it tells a story. And Rankin uses language well.

The thing with the crime novel is that it is too formulaic. That the formula was established too long ago, that (with a few honourable exceptions) its boundaries have not really been pushed, means that it's increasingly dead (there's an opportunity for a book here: The Death of Crime Fiction).

These books sell, and the reason they sell is the same reason Mills and Boon sell: the consumer knows (pretty much) what he's getting, and he knows that it will be an undemanding read which will occupy a plane or train journey.

They are, if you like, the fictional equivalent of a Macdogburger. Not nutritious, not wonderfully presented, not made with the finest ingredients. But you know what you're getting and sometimes it's what you want.

For legal reasons, this blog would like to issue the following statement: "In reprinting the foregoing comment, Toasting Napoleon does not seek to imply that that the burgers produced by a certain US fast food chain are based on Leg-of-Dog or any other cut of dog meat. On the contrary, we are regular eaters of McDonalds (TM) hamburgers and we have not suffered any major coronary or other cardio-vascular emergency in the past 12 (twelve) months, though our blood pressure ain't quite what it should be. We fully accept that items found in so-called McDogBurgers possibly pointing to a canine origin (dog collars, paw prints, whole chihuahuas, etc) are both nutritious and consistent with a 100% premium beef-style product."

Finally, from John Constable, this:
"If one accepts in the realms of crime fiction that there is unlikely to be a plot idea that someone hasn’t done before, probably several people several times before, then it seems the work has to offer something else that merits the reading of it. Unfortunately, this appears to be a bridge too far for many writing in this genre. The key test for me is whether if you remove the name/s of the protagonists from the printed page and also the location/s of the action, you can recognize the author of the book, or at least narrow it down to perhaps two or three possibilities. In my view, most crime writers fail this test which means that there is insufficient emphasis in their writing on the development of voice. I think this criticism applies in respect of crime fiction on both sides of the Atlantic although I am more tolerant of it in regard to American writers, but accept that may simply be because they are writing about places with which I am not familiar. There are other elements in the mix which do not enhance interest as far as I am concerned. Why write only 75/80,000 words when an indulgent editor will let you get away with 100,000 or more although the extra words add nothing and simply increase the level of irritation as one wades through page after page? Why the emphasis on police procedurals with yet another DCI Somebody-Or-Other and his/her sidekick? Why endless books about serial killers, Satanic rights, and weirdos of one sort or another?"

On the whole, I agree with all these comments. Let's keep the Heated Debate raging furiously.

Underwired support garments, poetically inclined

2008-07-14T12:25:00.003Z

HB: My e-friend, Suck a Sandwich (aka Chainsaw Ducks, aka Caducean Whisks), notes that my name also anagramises as:

H? A rhyming bra.

Make of that what you will.

NB: the Murder Most Boring post below got a heated debate going, just as asked for. I'll publish those comments shortly - and post about it too.

Congratulations!

2008-07-08T14:27:00.003Z

HB: Blooming 'eck! What's happening? It's meant to be holiday season, but manuscripts are pouring into the WW office, and our clients are notching up all kinds of success. This morning, the good Sir Ron (see post below). This afternoon, it's Annemette Fogh whose Venetian novel has just been taken on by the Feldstein Agency. Well done, Annemette. An ambitious novel, now with a very committed agent. Hope they find you a giant deal soon ...

Congratulations!

2008-07-08T11:37:00.002Z

HB: To Sir Ron Norman, whose Odd Man out in the French Alps has just been picked up by a small indie publisher. That's a great outcome for Ron - and proof that the small, quirky travelogue can still find a home in the age of Amazon and the 3-for-2. Congratulations all round.

Murder most boring

2008-07-08T11:05:00.004Z

HB: OK, now I've read a lot of crime fiction recently. I've read books by:

Colin Dexter
Ian Rankin
Lynda La Plante
Michael Billingham
Minette Walters
Henning Mankell
Val McDermid
Patricia Cornwell
Tess Gerritsen
Kathy Reichs
and quite a few others.

Among those others, I found plenty of jewels - for example, Robert Crais, whose Uber-hip, uber-macho novels shouldn't really be my cup of tea, except that their sheer stylistic brio won me happily over in the end.

But the jewels were largely to be found not in the highways of crime fiction, but in the byways. Books that weren't true crime novels, or didn't involve series characters, or made use of non-contemporary or otherwise exotic settings. The novelists I've listed above seem to me to represent the crime-thriller highway: genuinely mass market, genuine genre novels.

And - whisper it softly - but they're not terribly good. Ian Rankin is a classy writer, but he's very pure crime fiction - that is, crossword puzzle, whodunnit territory. Judged (unfairly, admittedly) by the standards of conventional novels - notably as regards the level of interior insight into the protagonist - Rankin would barely get a passing grade. Readers who aren't into the novel-as-crossword-puzzle genre would scarcely find Rankin a compelling read.

And Rankin has class. Most of the others really, truly don't. Of all the others listed, I'd say that only Minette Walters has anything to lift her off the plane of the depressingly competent. (In her case, she has a curiosity about abnormal psychological states which at least takes the reader into interesting territory).

And the rest is average to poor. Patricia Cornwell's most recent book came out in April and has already sold 250,000+ copies. She'll easily sell 400,000 of these before she's done. But the book is all but unreadable. That's partly because it reads like an instalment of a soap opera where I didn't know any of the characters and story lines. But also, the book just ain't that good. If you want to test me out here - and please do, I'd love your comments - then PLEASE don't buy her book, but steal it or borrow it or buy it 2nd hand. (It'd feel too galling to add to her royalties). Then attempt to read it. If you finish it, and enjoy it - well, I'll be darned. I might also wonder whether you share the great Cornwell's pornographic interest in reading about young women being slowly tortured to death. Yuk, yuk, yukkety, yuk.

I hope y'all know that I've nothing against genre fiction. I've always written commercial fiction myself and love a really good pageturner. But the wearily, unexcitingly competent? God save me. I'd sooner reread The Golden Bowl. In Dutch.

If you folks genuinely rate any of the folk on my list above - Ian Rankin excepted, who as I say is classy within his particular niche - then let me know. Disagree with vigour.

Or if you know of proper, regular, down-the-line mainstream crime-thrillers that really give you a buzz, then let me know. But it seems to me this market, unlike most in publishing, is dominated by authors whose work no longer entitles them to be there.

Let's all have a heated debate.

Dearie me

2008-07-03T11:49:00.001Z

HB: Golly gosh. Read this. What is the world coming to? and how long before it comes to the UK as well?

Bad Joke

2008-07-03T11:42:00.002Z

HB: Not mine, it's from a client -

A guy is building a house and he needs more guys to help so he goes to
the Job Center. He gets a Scotsman, an Irishman and a Chinaman.

He says to the Irishman, ‘You shift that sand round the back with a wheel barrow.’

He says to the Scotsman, ‘You get a broom and sweep up.’

He says to the Chinaman, ‘You’re in charge of supplies.’

He returns an hour later and the sand is still there, heaped on the
forecourt.

‘I told you to shift that,’ he said to the Irishman.

‘Bejasus,’ says the Irishman, ‘I don’t have a wheelbarrow and that Chinaman has disappeared so he couldn’t give me one.’

‘And you,’ said the man to the Scotsman, ‘I told you to sweep up.’

‘Well Jimmy,’ says the Scotsman, ‘I don’t have a broom; that Chinaman never gave me one. He’s just disappeared.’

The man looks disconsolately around the site and notices that the sand
appears to be moving.

Suddenly the Chinaman bursts forth, yelling: ‘Supplies!'

Horny

2008-06-27T15:14:00.002Z

HB: Was at lunch with an agent at Raymond Blanc's little Oxford brasserie. (Oh the lives these writers have!). He was complaining that no one seemed to be involved in manufacturing any more.

Eh? According to the National Accounts as compiled by the government statistical office, the printing & publishing trades fall squarely under manufacturing activities. Writers and agents are just the engineers who feed their specs through to the factory floor, by way of determining the final kickable & touchable product.

Horny-handed? C'est moi.

Bang him, Harry

2008-06-25T12:33:00.002Z

HB: One of the nice things about working with writers is that one comes across plenty of people with strange skills & obsessions. Like one potential client who pointed out that my name anagramises as
Aargh rib hymn
arb ha rhyming
high bran army
bang him harry
barmy ran high
hymn grab hair
&
hay bring harm

I suffer a fair bit from hayfever, so "Hay bring harm" is certainly true, although without (I feel) capturing my essence. I'd say that "Barmy ran high" has more of a scent of me, but for sheer verve, I've got to go with "Bang Him, Harry".

Meanwhile, am still trying to find a 2nd book idea with 4th estate. A short history of freedom, maybe? Magna Carta. Medieval Parliaments. French & American revolutions. That kind of thing. Sound good? You like?

Ernest Hemingway Must Die!

2008-06-12T13:42:00.003Z

HB: I told you, did I not, that I'm reading a lot of crime & thrillers at the moment. (Yes, yes, I've still to reveal my reasons. All in good time.) And I've been very struck by the huge difference in the way that Americans and Brits write commercial fiction - perhaps especially in the crime/thriller area. Here for instance is a snippet from Kathy Reichs' Grave Secrets, in which the protagonist, Tempe Brennan, hangs up after having the death of an old lady (whom she's met, but hardly knows) reported to her:

Disconnecting, I felt a warm trickle slide down each cheek.
"Vaya con Dios, Senora."
I backhanded a tear.
"We'll take it from here."

Now that's wrongly punctuated, isn't it? It's Tempe B who speaks both sentences, so they should really be in the same para with the bit about backhanding a tear as an insert into the dialogue.

Picky? Yes, certainly - but the way the snippet is laid out was surely chosen to add punch, imapct, pace, snappiness.

Three paras feel more snappy than two.

Or one.

But it's not just the punctuation which is distorted to fit a certain kind of template on how to write. The characterisation is too. What the hell is that - "I backhanded a tear"? I'm not concerned about the fact that 'to backhand' isn't a recognised verb. Verb away, as far as I'm concerned.

My problem is this. The sentence is deliberately uber-tough. Using a noun as a verb, avoiding any internal language, emphasising the disposal not the production of the tear - all classic tough guy techniques.

And how inappropriate all that is. The point here is that Tempe Brennan feels moved. She's weeping, for crying out loud! The tough guy sentence is wildly at odds with the emotional state that Kathy Reichs is wanting to convey. Here, in this context, it's an awful sentence.

Now for my HBish theory. It's simply that for some weird reason American thriller writers have come under Hemingway's spell to such an extent that they feel compelled to write like him even in the teeth of all reason. Hemingway specialised in tough emotional-retards. Tempe Brennan is tough, but she's no retard. Kathy Reichs is slave to a style (vastly overrated in my view) that hopelessly distorts her characterisation. And not just Kathy Reichs, but countless others like her.

Enough already! The problem's getting out of hand. My HBish solution: we all need to deal with the Ernest Hemingway inside ourselves.

Find him.

Kill him.

Smith & Wesson him from our prose.

So long, Big Ern.

The Storytelling Ape is Dead

2008-06-10T13:51:00.003Z

HB: Grrr. One of those publishing things. Back in Feb, I agreed a new book with Mitzi Angel at 4th Estate. The new book was to be about the human storytelling instinct and both she & I were excited by the project. In fact, the more I read about the subject, the more I was confident there was an incredibly exciting book to be written. I bought a million books on the subject and spent three pretty solid months working at the project.

Alas, Mitzi has just left 4th Estate and with her departure, enthusiasm for that particular project has evaporated. So now it's back to plan A - a follow-up book to last year's This Little Britain. That was a project I'd offered to start working on last summer ... but back then, everyone wanted to see how TLB fared at the tills before making a decision. So a year has passed and now we're back to square one.

All deeply frustrating for me - nobody's fault in particular, just one of those things - but also an illustration of how very dependent writers are on their publishers. (And 4th Estate, let's remember, is a best-of-breed publisher, with some very smart & committed people working for it.)

I hope that one day before I die, I can get back to my beloved storytelling monkeys again. Meantime, I need to relocate my enthusiasm for all things British ... and try to reassure myself that the time & money I spent on the Storytelling Ape will bear fruit one of these years

It probably will, though it's hard to tell that to a bank manager.

soothe ... soothe ... soothe ...

2008-06-06T10:34:00.003Z

HB: OK, maybe that post below wasn't that funny. I've had a couple of enquries from worried clients, the gist of which was Does this mean that the WW doesn't take serial-killer lit seriously?

The short answer: of course we take it very seriously. So too do agents. So too do publishers. So too does the Great British Reader, who regularly puts gristle-meisters Patricia Cornwell, Kathy Reichs, et al at the very top of the bestseller charts. The simple fact is that the crime/thriller market is weirdly reliant on serial killers for their raw material - and a perfectly sensible strategy for any first-time writer in this genre is to deploy some of the same tricks of the trade. We'd have far more concern about a thriller without corpses, than a thriller with loads of 'em.

And if of course, the purpose of the book is more psychological drama than mere bodycount, well then we respond to that too. We're not idiotic enough to pigeonhole a book by the number of corpses it racks up.

The editor who made the comment about killing the writers of serial killer books was joking - he reads crime/thriller material for fun as well as professionally for us. More than one WW editor has written serial killer material themselves - we can hardly claim to be innocent in the body count deparment. (Though my own hands are clean, I might add. I've generated a few corpses in the course of war in my books, but extremely few otherwise. A little light fraud is the most I normally manage).

But, hey, in the end there's a funny side to all this too. There are far more books about serial killers than there are serial killers. Between our very own Veronica Stallwood and the late, great Colin Dexter, the WW's home town of Oxford has pretty much been decimated by literary slaughter. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh.

kill ... kill ... kill ... kill ... kill ...

2008-06-05T15:22:00.003Z

HB: Just had another serial killer novel in. Got this email from our lucky editor:

"great. another serial killer. if i were a serial killer i'd go round killing the writers of serial killer novels ..."

Ha! Good thought. Me, though, I'd go around killing the editors who assist the writers of serial killer novels. That'd nip the whole thing in the bud.

£7.57

2008-06-04T10:43:00.002Z

HB: Across Britian in 2007, the average book sold for £7.57. That's actually a slightly higher price than I'd have guessed myself - a typical paperback has a cover price of £6.99 and is very often discounted - but then there are hardbacks, academic books, illustrated books, and the like all of which sell for a good bit more.

In 2001 the average book sold for £7.81 - so prices have actually fallen by 3%. Given that inflation has been running about 3% p.a. over the whole period, then the relative price decline is more like 20%.

Not quite sure what that tells us, except that Amazon & Tesco have done what Amazon & Tesco do. Good for book buyers, I suppose - and I'm a big book buyer and I make plenty of use of Amazon, so I can't really complain. On the other hand, it'd be nice to see prices edge up a bit, and authors pocket the extra. I'd also like pigs to fly, England to discover that they did in fact qualify for Euro 2008 and that Ronaldo, Fabregas & Torres all have British passports & English fathers. Further lists of things I'd like can be found at my new website www.thingsillneverget.com

Vanity of vanities, saith the bookseller

2008-05-29T09:44:00.002Z

This item in Publishing Weekly calls attention to the huge growth in the number of self-published (aka vanity) books being produced - 22,000 short-run or Print-On-Demand titles were published in the US two years ago; the number is now 135,000. I suspect a fair few of the 276,000 regular titles being published are in effect self-pub too. There's a lot of it out there.

No bad thing for those people who understand what they're getting from these self-pub outfits. But a downright fraud on those who think they are being published, in a regular get-your-book-into-bookstore sort of way.

Biting on Lemons

2008-05-29T09:24:00.003Z

Just finished reading Patricia Cornwell's Book of the Dead. Not my usual reading matter, but I had a deeper purpose which I'll tell y'all about some time.

And I hated it. It's not badly written, by any means. Characters are properly characterised. The dialogue is strong. All that crimey investigation type stuff is all just tickety-boo (as the great PC presumably does not say). But it's written in the present tense.

Bingham notes the choice of tense and winces. The whole book? He flips forward through the pages. It appears so. His grimace widens. He decides to plough on, but he's got a bad feeling about this. Shadows lengthen in the morgue. The body count increases. That present tense jars. It grates. It's like drilling into a tooth, and there are a hundred pages still to go.

This is partly a personal thing with me. Other readers, I assume, can read stuff like that without wanting to scream. Me, I hate it. I think the reasons are:

1) The past allows the author to shift focus with ease: near, distant and middling past are all handled the same way. Long periods, short periods, and single moments ditto. The author can zoom in and out without jarring the reader by a sudden shift of tense.

2) I'm a big fan of showing over telling, on the whole, but I'd never suggest that an author does no telling at all. But that's a lot harder in the present - sounds more forced - and the result is that PC's whole damn book is related in a constantly dramatic present. Minimal reflection, minimal discursiveness. Aaarrgh.

Which is worse? Biting on lemons or biting on silver foil? Whichever's worse is more like Book of the Dead.

The Long Silence

2008-05-27T14:15:00.002Z

Some of you may have noticed that this blog has gone mute for the last month or so. The occasional heady champagne buzz of a congrats notice, but not much more. Well, there's no good reason for that beyond issues of time & inclination.

Still, just to show we're still alive & kicking:-

Was at Hay on Wye over the weekend doing a talk on This Little Britain. A slightly weird event - I was on stage with a man who had crossed the English Channel in a bath. He talked about that. I talked about English medieval property rights and the process of enclosure in English agriculture. I sold three books, which means that the prospect of my receiving royalty payments has leaped forwards by 5 days (from 15 June 2156, to approx 10 June 2156).

Hay on Wye was fantastically muddy. When Gene Robinson (the 'gay bishop') gave his talk, he was almost inaudible over the din of heavy machinery sucking water from beneath the tent. My mum says that the local farmers won't sell the relevant fields to the Festival for less than a ridiculous amount of money, so they have to rent and therefore can't afford to invest in facilities that would somewhat lessen the mud. Sounds dubious to me.

The weather inspired the best joke of the Festival:-

Q. Why is the British summer Islamic?
A. Because it's sometimes Sunni, but mostly Shiite.

made me laugh, anyway.

Congratulations!

2008-05-27T14:08:00.002Z

This time to the excellent Katie Roy, whose Tassie & the Black Knight has just sold to Egmont (after interest from Puffin & others). The agent involved was Kate Shaw from Aitken Alexander - a very fine agency.

Fay Sampson was Katie R's WW editor. Fay thought the book was great and passed it to me - and I too thought it was great. As I remember, I suggested only the very lightest of editorial nudges, which is a rare thing for me.

But I have to say I tried & failed to get the book accepted by those agents that I approached directly. I was amazed - I thought the book had loads of obvious talent, energy, & commercial potential. Still, I strongly advised Katie to persist, and think that I gave her one of my famous letters of endorsement to go fishing with. It took time, but Katie won through. Really, really good for her. Round of applause. Hats off. Uncork the bubbly & all that.

Lessons for those not (yet) in katie's position: 1) use the writers' workshop. 2) if we tell you work is good enough, then it really, really is and if agents turn you down then they're wrong & you're right.

Hope Katie's career is long & glorious.

Congratulations!

2008-05-22T09:49:00.003Z

... to Jeremy Lent, whose Requiem for the Human Soul is being published by Libros Libertad, a Canadian indie publisher. You can read all about Jeremy's book here.

The wise reviewer who helped JL was Craig Taylor - and I seem to remember offering a word or two of advice myself.

The Literary Landfill

2008-05-06T12:17:00.002Z

One of the odder quirks of publishing is that bookshops never actually buy books from the publishers - they just stock em on a sale-or-return basis. Since retailers also get publishers to pay for shelf space, you'd think that it was a lot nicer being a retailer than a publisher.

The sale-or-return idea dates back to the depression of the 1930s, where publishers introduced the idea as an emergency way to make new titles viable for retailers. Anyhow, want to guess how many books are printed then pulped? 5%? 10%? Place your bets please ladies & gentlemen. The real answer is:

"In 2005, roughly 1.5 billion books were shipped in the U.S., according to the Association of American Publishers. Of those, 465 million, or 31 percent, were returned to publishers. " - Bloomberg

Crazy, huh? As green issues rise up the agenda - and as publishers note that they're not exactly doing their businesses much good by the practice - then firm sale is likely to come in. Good for the planet, of course, but the average landfill is likely to lose a little of its former class ...

Congratulations!

2008-04-28T10:10:00.002Z

Just to report, that Mark Cundy's book A Man and a Pram is out now with Apex Publishing - a small indie publisher, I've not come across before. Mark is a perfectly ordinary bloke who one day decided to up sticks and walk round the world. Which he did. I'm not quite sure who gets to pick what walking round the world actually involves. (Go to the North Pole, walk three paces south, then trot round in a circle?) In any case, in Mark's case it involved walking 5,500 miles through 3 continents. Good on you Mark and best of luck with the launch.

As ever, bloggees interested in the book should simply hyperlink themselves over here to enquire further.

Congratulations!

2008-04-25T13:11:00.002Z

To Nick Clough for his A Safe Place to Kill, which is about to be published by Robert Hale. RH is a really good, focused independent that knows its trade & plies it well. I hope NC starts to build a stonking reputation. May the blood begin to flow! e-champagne all round.

The book's out in the next few days. You can buy it here.

shill, shim, shin, ship, shit

2008-04-06T11:55:00.004Z

HB: if you want to find out why Simon Brooke has only this - " shill, shim, shin, ship, shit" - to say to me, then you ought to go and read the comments to my BANG! post. It's good chat.

The Future Cometh

2008-04-04T13:25:00.002Z

HB: Great news. HarperCollins in the US has announced a new venture that will deal with some of the 'vexed issues' that have long plagued publishing. Among those issues: authors' advances. The new venture will do away with advances altogether, instead rewarding authors with a 'share of profits'. (The article does not say 'if any' - though most books published do not make money.)

Needless to say, I'm very excited by this development. If only it had been introduced some years ago, I'd have been able to take advantage. Of course, I'd be as thin as a string bean ... and my wife would consist only of air ... but hey, you can't have everything. Sign me up!

Piece of Cake...

2008-03-31T21:25:00.004Z

TK:

BANG!

2008-03-31T14:56:00.003Z

HB: You'll have guessed from my long blog-silence (blilence?) that the answer to the question raised in my last post: was "read and write simultaneously". I've been writing - and reading - like a dervish for the last week or two and enjoying it grotesquely.

Yesterday, Nule was away most of the day in London and only got back close to midnight. Usually I'd miss my wife. Not so yesterday. I churned away at the Storytelling Ape, and was vaguely disappointed when 10.00 pm came round and I needed to start thinking about bath, dinner etc. I'm REALLY loving this book - always a good sign with me. I do always enjoy writing, but this one has something pretty special; I feel it.

But let me ask you this. Words. Do you believe:

Theory 1) Apart from a few special case exceptions (onomatopoeia and word 'clusters' like lump, dump, thump, stump, hump, etc) there is no real connection between the sound of a word and its meaning. Words are, in this sense, just arbitrary signifiers.

or do you believe:-

Theory 2) Balls to all that. Of course sounds flavour words. Especially with short, physical or otherwise basic words, sound importantly flavours meaning. Or rather, whether a word gets adopted into a language (and how it gets adapted once it's there) depends very much on whether it sounds right to the ear.

Linguists tend to favour option (1) . That's the respectable option. Personally, I favour option (2), the disreputable but more poetic option. For anyone vacillating - or anyone interested in probing further - then go to Margaret Magnus' Magnificently Magical Site. I spent a long time there and had a lovely time. I think that, unless you're a dyed-in-the-wool Theory One-er, then you'll be a confirmed Theory Two-er by the time you leave MM's site.

Oh yes, and let me ask you this. Without checking a dictionary, please match up the following words to the definitions below.

Words
Leet
Lod
Lomen

Definitions
Roof truss / roof beam
Spiritual chant or incantation
Regional name for oystercatcher (small, long-beaked waterbird)

If you are a theory 1-er, then you can't say without checking a dictionary. If you're a theory 2-er (or just an ordinary English speaker) then I reckon you'll have quite a strong hunch ...

Let me know your thoughts & we'll all have a heated debate.

As the Iron is Heating

2008-03-17T12:57:00.003Z

HB: I've been reading a million books since agreeing my new book project with 4th Estate - and getting more excited with each one.

But there's one of those tricky writing decisions to make. On the one hand, I can't skimp on the research. There's been masses written on the whole topic of story & language, and loads of it is really interesting stuff.

On the other hand, when my research work starts to slide from genuine enthusiasm to tutorial essay, it's going to be hard (or impossible) to project joy in the writing. I need to start writing when I've read enough not to go astray, but long before the excitement has started to stale. That won't produce a perfect draft by any means, but the details can be worked on in editing. The joy can't be.

So: to start or not to start? The iron is a-heating, but how hot do I need it? Linen hot? Cotton hot? Or just silk ....?

People first, work second

2008-03-11T10:48:00.002Z

SB: I haven't posted a blog for such a long time that you have probably forgotten who I am. It's me, Sophia, the woman who is supposed to be writing the story of Dick Whittington. I say supposed to because

a) I am currently teaching a Creative Writing course to undergrads at Brookes University. This is a regular slot. I do it in the Spring Term of every year and I enjoy it a lot but it does eat into writing time, but not as much as

b) looking after my mother. She got taken into hospital with internal bleeding and liver failure during half term. She had three massive blood transfusions and stayed in hospital for two weeks. Her local hospital is four hours drive from my house so going to see her meant hours on the motorway. Now I am caring for her in my house while she rests and hopefully gets better. At the moment she is dozing in front of a roasting hot fire in our sitting room.

As a result of all this Dick Whittington is languishing unloved on my desk but I really wouldn't have it any other way. People first, stuff second. For the moment anyway - when I start ranting about my mother I'll know she's getting better and I'll pack her off home and get back to Dick.

The Storytelling Ape

2008-03-10T17:37:00.003Z

HB: Good news! My book deal with 4th Estate is for two books, and until just recently I didn't know what that second book would be. Well, I've now agreed an idea with Bill & Mitzi (my agent & editor respectively) and the book is provisionally entitled:-

The Storytelling Ape

(I think a new book deserves its own fancy font style, no?). The book will deal with why humans tell stories; what role narrative plays for us; and how these things ought to affect the way we go about reading fiction.

It was an idea I was excited about when I pitched it. Now - about 15 books or so into my research work - I'm very, very excited. There's just so much to write about. Fields like evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary psychology, & neuroscience are just fizzing with ideas on these topics, in a way they just weren't 15 years or so ago. What's more, although there are popular books written for the lay reader on individual topics in these areas, no one has ever joined the dots the way I'm hoping to.

Best of all, I feel like I'm writing again. No actual words on actual pages or anything radical like that, but very much underway nonetheless. And I absolutely love it. It's good to be back.

The Lions of Al Rassan

2008-03-05T13:22:00.003Z

HB: The Lions of Al-Rassan was presented to me as a work of fantasy fiction which could stand alongside any more conventional literary novel and hold its head up high. And so it can. By Guy Gavriel Kay (*), it's a tremendous book. Wonderful. Huge in scope. Touched with strangeness - but strangeness of a wonderful sort. Beautifully written. Poetically written in fact: the author has also published a collection of poetry. Oh yes, and a real page turner. I stayed up till 1.45 am getting to the finish and slightly wasted the experience by pressing ahead too fast. A corking read. Not only do I certainly prefer this book to most of the Booker Prize shortlisted/winning books I've read recently, I think it's a better book besides. If you haven't read it, then do. You can buy it here.

Is it fantasy? The word 'jerkin' did not appear frequently. There were no dragons. No elves. No wizardry. There was one boy who could sense danger coming to his family, but that's a pretty humble definition of fantasy. On the other hand, Kay's interests are largely not those of conventional literary fiction. His characters are non-realist. I don't mean that they sprout horns or don't feel the same range of emotions as us - but Kay is not interested in the fine detail of emotional depictions. It's not that his characters are archetypes, exactly, but they are characters formalised; the book is not the hurly-burly of historical reality, but a dance, beautifully choreographed, wonderfully combining the regular and the fluid.

If this is fantasy fiction, then I'm a fan. And as for you, Simon Brooke, who started this all: many thanks. I've learned a lot.

(* - definitely a man. Or a bearded woman, at the very least.)

The snaffle & the curb

2008-02-28T18:41:00.005Z

HB: The following words should, in my mind, be carved in stone over anywhere that teaches, talks or thinks lit crit:

"You praise the firm restraint with which they write -
I'm with you there of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?" --- Roy Campbell

This thought arises because I've just read two books. One - Al Rassan - I'll blog about very soon indeed. In fact, this posting is the first in a two-part blog on Al-Rassan, it's just that my entry point is slightly digressive. The second, A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne, won the Orange Prize and should therefore be A Very Good Book and maybe even a Very Important Book.

And it's fine, that Suzanne Berne book. It's very nicely written. If you want to know how a suburb feels at evening, with the lawns all nicely mown and the living rooms turning blue as the TVs come on - well, this book will tell you. More than once, actually.

Nice writing. Nice observations. Plot? Well, stuff happens. A bit. The book is no more than a novella stretched out into a shortish novel --- but that's to be a bit unkind to novellas. German literature has plenty of red-blooded novellas that pack drama and vitality into a short space. To call Berne's ACITN a novella is really just to say that the story is far too limp for a novel.

But because it's pretty (and it is), it wins a major prize. No doubt the judges praised the firm restraint with which SB wrote.

So why is this blog really about Guy Gavriel Kay's Al Rassan? Because Al Rassan is a BIG book. It has a huge sweep, huge ambitions, huge events. And I like that. Good grief. In novels, special effects come free. You want to talk about the Reconquista in Spain? Then do it! History doesn't quite give you the space to say what you want to say? OK, so scrap history. Imagine a whole new world. Religion a problem? So make up a new one. Make up three.

As it happens, GG Kay is perfectly adept at using the snaffle and the curb, but that's not what you're likely to notice about his work. What you notice is the bloody horse.

March Madness

2008-02-28T15:29:00.003Z

TK: This March, I'm going to write a novel. I'm going to write a novel in a month. I'm not promising that I'll ever let anyone read it, because I'm quite convinced that anything bashed out that quickly will necessarily be hideously bad (and yes - full of adverds and adjectives).

But - I will post a screenshot of my word count on the blog on the 31st of March. Like the crazy people that do the National Novel Writing Month in November each year, 50,000 words will be my goalpost - it would be on the short side for publication, but just right for this kind of craziness.

There is a very real chance that I will fail. I have written all my life, but that entire time I've been a writer that agonizes over every paragraph, sentence, clause, and word. And this is precisely why I'm doing this exercise - to break free of that mentality.

This is a bad month for me to do it, as I already know I will be spending at least four days of it away from home, and I'm just an all-round busy person. I'll still do it.

I am absolutely terrified.

A public berating

2008-02-26T18:38:00.003Z

HB (aka Loretta): I've been corresponding to the excellent Lois McMaster Bujold - see posts below - and she has berated me for my own late conversion to the fantasy genre. Her berating runs thus:

"Um... yes? And just how long did your friend have to beat you about the head and shoulders to try something in this genre?To quote you back at yourself, "The fantasy market here is smaller than it is in the US, and to say that it's not a prestigious area of fiction is to put it far too mildly. Most agents / publishers speak about it as they might speak of cockroaches."

And you believed them? People who are already satisfied with their conclusions seldom are moved to examine the evidence. (And congrats on breaking out of a box you didn't know you were in, btw.) The people who give literary awards mostly don't read genre books, and so are ignorant of the possibilities. It's that simple. Which is OK; we have plenty of awards of our own -- which include some criteria of judgment orthogonal to traditional literary concerns anyway. The problem only comes when people start trying to use books as counters in status games, an activity which has little to do with reading.

Now, F&SF as a genre comprises a huge range of styles, subjects, and levels of quality; I've often likened it to a house that is bigger on the inside than on the outside, like Dr. Who's Tardis. You've now sampled two data points that both lie in much the same region of the map; it would be like visiting Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon and concluding you now knew all about America.. If you want to explore further, here are a few bracketing books, chosen because they're important in the field and as different from each other as possible. About their "literary quality", whatever that is, I make no assertions, but all have thrived for years or decades, printed and re-printed.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Military-political SF. One captures the mood post WWII, the other post Vietnam, and both need to be read in the context of their eras. The contrast is especially instructive. I've defined a genre as "any group of works in close conversation with one another", and these two are. Be it noted, that conversation can be (and often is) an argument.

Dune by Frank Herbert. The quintessential scorned-young-man-gains-vast-powers book, not to mention lords 'n swords in space, but more complex and sly. I loved it when I was 15, found it nearly unreadable when I was 55, but that was partly my shift in perception of the sexism of the era. The zillion pages of sequels may profitably be skipped, but for an example of the coming-of-age tale taken to the max, this one is hard to beat.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. This book falls in the historical-political shift between the Golden Age books of the 40's and 50's, of which Starship Troopers is a prime example, and the New Wave of the late 60's - 70's, of which it is one of the best examples. It is basically not describable, as it is best discovered as you read. So just go read it. Includes, but is not limited to, Hindu mythology, lost space colonies, practical reincarnation, and Buddhism as revolution.

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Also falls in that transitional period. Beagle is one of those writers whose career is cursed by having one of his very first books also be one of his very best. This one can still make me cry.

Farthing by Jo Walton. Modern fantasy with political concerns of the sort penned at white heat; I believe it won the World Fantasy Award recently. An alternate-history country-house murder mystery set in a post-WWII Britain where a truce was struck in 1940, leave Europe in Nazi hands. Jo is also noted for the Anthony Trollope pastiche where all the characters are Dragons, with peculiar and oddly Victorian social customs arising from their biology, Tooth and Claw.

Sorcery & Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. At the extreme opposite of the emotional spectrum from most of the above books. A Georgette Heyer pastiche with magic, not to mention an epistolary novel, frothy and witty. If you've finished any of the more daunting political books late at night and find yourself reaching for that bottle of pills or the revolver with one cartridge in it, here's the sovereign antidote. Originally published as an Ace paperback in the early 80's with a dire cover; when the tattered used copies started going for $300 a pop on eBay, it was reprinted by Harcourt as a Young Adult title. (I'll keep the rant about Heyer as the most disregarded influential writer of the 20th. C. for another time or place.)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Hugely important book, sui generis, a vast unruly construct that defies every rule of novel writing I've ever heard of, but still works. I loved it when I was 15 and still loved it when I was 55, but for a completely different set of reasons. If ever I have to toddle off for the last two weeks of my life to some terminal-illness hospice, this is the book I'd take with me.

Tolkien's inspirations William Morris and Lord Dunsany and the Kalevalaare also wonderful reads, but I don't include them in this survey as they wrote before the modern genres we are discussing hived off from literature in general, and so can't sensibly be described as "genre writers".

Ursula LeGuin and Gene Wolfe are two other writers much praised by those of the SF crowd with literary tastes, btw. I'm not current enough on either to make recommendations for starter-books.

Terry Pratchett, y'all should know; he performs the very unusual feat of penning books both political *and* that keep one from reaching for the pills/revolver.

F&SF still sustains a short story market, which is a quick way to sample a wide range of writers, but I'm also not up on it at present, so someone else would have to do the native guiding.

Oh, and if you still think SF conventions are all about teenage guys in Klingon costumes, this may enlighten you: http://www.wiscon.info/index.php. Note that WisCon has been running for 32 years.

Something I've come to realize lately, as I tried my hand at a book blending fantasy and romance, is how intensely political both science fiction and fantasy are, as genres. It becomes more apparent when one stands outside the genre/s -- the ambit of modern romance, for example, is the personal, not the political, and the different as-it-were focal planes make it more fiendishly hard to obtain a satisfactory meld than one might think."--- Lois McM Bujold

Hb again: Well, said! As it happens, I'm not as ill-read as you might think. From the above list, I've read Heinlein, Tolkein, le Guin, and Frank Herbert. The Le Guin especially I'd regard as masterpieces of children's writing - absolutely top class. If I've read any of her adult work, then I've forgotten about it: I devoured most of my fantasy / sci-fi when I was a teenager.

Why have I not read more since? The answer I think is pretty simple. (1) I haven't known what to buy. (2) there's plenty of poor writing (or I've been unlucky). (3) I don't like the book covers - or rather, they haven't been designed to appeal to my demographic, so I've never been driven, sheeplike, to investigate further. Baaa! As it happens, I'd never have picked Lois' book from the shelves based on cover alone - so again, humble thanks to Simon Brooke for pointing me in her direction. (Our main fantasy editor at the WW is Egyptologist & fantasy novelist, Geraldine Harris. She tells me that Lois is one of her favourite authors).

As for the literary community's ability to ignore quality ---- well, don't get me started. A hearty hear-hear to that.

Motorcycles, Trains, and Cups of Tea

2008-02-22T14:16:00.002Z

TK: I've recently bought a motorbike, and can now often be observed going nowhere fast, somewhere in Oxfordshire, as I try to make my way from A to B (normally ending up at around Q). This has generally been a very positive development, but I used to take the train to work, and that had its benefits.

The train forces you to have a silent moment to yourself. Not only is there very little that beats some time alone with the scrolling English countryside, but it also presents you with a moment that's perfect for doing a little bit of writing. If you walk, cycle, motorcycle, or drive, you have to concentrate on doing those things instead.

Now, you can always make time in your life for quiet moments in which to write. But that demands that you have discipline. This is, of course, a vital skill in life, and quite probably a prerequisite for any kind of success - but it isn't directly related to one's ability to write well. Now don't get me wrong; I reckon I have my fair share of willpower, but there is something very comfortable about not needing it. If you are forced into moments of silence at a regular rate, giving you time to write, it simulates discipline without effort, and this is comfortable. Just like you don't need a warm study with cups of tea to be a writer, you don't need silent moments on a train. But cups of tea and silent moments are welcome luxuries.

Loretta writes

2008-02-21T13:45:00.003Z

HB: Just come back from the Gender Genie - see below to understand the origin of this gender obsession.

I gave the Gender Genie a chunk of my fiction that was was written from a male point of view (POV). The Genie told me that the author of the chunk was probably male.

I then gave it a chunk still by me but written from a female POV. The Genie told me I was probably female.

OK. One all. Time for a decider.

So then I gave it a long chunk from the same book, written from the male POV, but describing the protagonist's first encounter with the woman who becomes his romantic partner. The male and female characters had roughly equal text space. The Genie thought a moment, then told me that my male score was 1186, while my female score was a whopping 1737 - telling me decisively that the author was female.

So Loretta it is. Do have a play with the genie yourself, and let me know the results ...

PS: there are some good comments on this piece. Don't miss 'em. Just click the thingy below

Lois' Evil Twin

2008-02-21T10:40:00.004Z

HB: If you haven't yet read the preceding post, Fantasy Author in Sex Change Shock, then you probably want to do that now, before reading the following - a response by Lois McMaster Bujold, the erroneously re-gendered fantasy author in question:-

"Hi Harry, Thanks for your response! No, I don't think you are a twit for mistaking my gender, because it has happened often enough before not to still surprise me. There are several things at work here, starting with owning a fairly rare first name and writing in what is often perceived (incorrectly, as it happens) as a male-identified genre. (I don't count mistakes made by folks reading my works in such languages as Russian, Japanese, or Hebrew, as no one would expect the gender-associations of the name to survive translation.) There is also a European man's first
name, very rare in the US, Alois. Most commonly, however, people mentally add a letter to transform me to "Louis", to the point where I've started referring to "my evil twin Louis".

I suspect that if you had started reading my work with Chalion's sequel, Paladin of Souls, you would not have made the mis-attribution, however, because that book is written from the point of view of a 40-year-old woman. I once beguiled some time on the internet visiting a toy called The Gender Genie (click here to visit) -- a program that purports to take a chunk of prose, run it though a statistical word-counting algorithm of some sort, and return the writer's gender. I found it was no better than a coin toss for identifying my gender as a writer, but it was 100% accurate at telling the gender of my point-of-view character (!) for any given single-viewpoint scene.

Now, I write my fiction in what is called, variously, tight third person, third person personal, or filtered third, where all the prose is subordinated to the personality, language, and vocabulary of the viewpoint character; there is no separate "narrator". So if either the Gender Genie or a real male reader thinks I'm a male writer when I'm writing from a male character's viewpoint, I figure I must be Getting Guys Right, and it more pleases me than not. I'm not sure how the algorithm machine would work if I ran something from an omniscient viewpoint through it, with omniscient's tacit or explicit narrator's voice to confuse the issue, because that's not a style I've yet attempted. (Though a lot of British writers seem to do it very well.)

I find your "physically confident prose" remarks very interesting. I've been a geek girl since before the term was invented, and I've been reading fantasy and science fiction since I was nine. C.P. Snow's purported gap between the Two Cultures fails to exist in the reading world where I routinely hang out. Since I mostly am friends with other geek girls (for a certain value of "girl") I've always felt normal -- for my milieu. (I become less sure of my ground when I am plunked down amongst more mundane female neighbors, especially if they're non-readers.) For the record, I am now a 58-year-old divorced mother of two grown children, born and raised in the Midwest (Ohio) and now living in the Upper Midwest (Minnesota). (Although both are fly-over states, the two have different colonization histories giving rise to somewhat different current cultural tones.)

Re: British versus American genre-gender expectation, I will submit one observation from the late 80's, when my first books were published, not very successfully, over there by Headline. Looking over the tone of the British advertising catalog copy, it seemed to my American eye that the month's books were sorted into just two classes, literary and trashy. To judge from the way the catalog chose to describe its offerings, the "middle class" of books seemed to be entirely missing. Since that's pretty much where I, my books, and my usual audience falls, it seemed as though my proper marketing slot wasn't quite there. Just one data point, not enough to balance a theory upon, but there you go.

The other question, of course, is do you *read* a book differently depending on your belief as to the gender of the writer? It's not usually an experiment one can run, although the late James Tiptree, Jr., is famous for doing so in my genre. Your "mistake" has thrown up an interesting natural experiment for your introspection, here.

I assure you Guy Kay really is a guy, not a woman, by the way -- I've met him on the science fiction convention circuit -- but he is Canadian, which may count for something.

Well, I've likely parasitized your blog long enough, but I'll check back later and see what, if anything, your other writer-readers make of the Gender Genie.

Oh. And more than any sane person would ever want to know about Lois McMaster Bujold may be found at http://www.dendarii.com/ The website is actually owned and run by a British fan named Mike Bernardi, who is thankfully far more computer literate than I am, and to whom I owe much."

HB again: Lots there to muse on. More of that anon. Meantime, I'm off for a visit to the Gender Genie. When I return, I shall ask you to call me Loretta.

Fantasy author in sex change shock

2008-02-19T20:17:00.010Z

HB: OK. Lois is a girl's name. I know that. I've never actually met a Lois, but I was aware, I guess, that any Lois I'd ever heard of was a woman. (I think that WonderWoman was called Lois, or maybe I'm thinking of Superman's bit of skirt. Not strong on popular culture, me.)

On the other hand, Lois seems a complicated sort of name to me; and besides, I once assumed that a potential client of ours called 'Val' was a girl, and he turned out to be an Aussie rather aggrieved that I'd transgendered him - so these things can all be a bit more complex than they seem.

All this comes by way of preamble. The Lois Bujold McMaster (whose book I was praising here and which is available for purchase here) is, as her name suggests, a woman not a man. Obviously I'm a twit for thinking otherwise. Mea culpa, and all that. Now I was made aware of this because one of you eagle-eyed readers let me know pretty sharpish. Fair dinkum, as Val-the-Aussie would no doubt have said.

But I then got this email from the great Lois herself:

"All right, this opportunity is too good to pass up...

...before you look up any information on-line or anywhere else, please describe how you tacitly constructed this author in your mind on the basis of the book you read. What is the fellow like? Age, education, family or cultural background, anything? What would you or did you construe about him?

It's vital for the pristine nature of the data point to capture your internal image before it is jostled by other information of any kind. (Although I shall be interested in your take on Al-Rassan, as well.) curious, L. (And endlessly fascinated by reader-response theory. Or better still, data.)"

Well, if I change somebody's sex without asking them first, the very least I can do is to answer a fair question put in a fair way. So all right. How had I pictured Lois in my head?

The first answer - the main one - is I hadn't really pictured him at all. I don't think I do usually construct complex author-portraits in my head.

But the second, and more subtle answer, is that I must have had some mental construct of the excellent Lois B McM, for me to have ignored the obvious signal of her name. So what was that construct and where did it come from?

I reckon I'd pictured LBM as a guy, probably in his thirties, maybe early forties. Reasonably confident in the world - at the very least not timid, the way some authors are. And technically confident. That is: if you had asked my LBM to put up a set of shelves or a stud wall, let's say, he'd have done the job capably and without stress.

Now that's a fairly subtle impression of someone I claim not to have pictured much. Part of it is simply that I've imagined (wrongly?) that the fantasy market is largely written by men for men. So, if I was unsure about an author's gender, I'd probably plump that way.

But there's something deeper going on here. And I think it's this. There's no author's bio in the book, just these acknowledgements: "The Author would like to thank Prof William Phillips for History 3714, the most useful four hundred dollars and ten weeks I ever spent in school; Pat 'Oh, c'mon, it'll be fun' Wrede for the letter game that first drew [the book's protagonist] blinking and stumbling from my back-brain into the light of day; and, I suppose, the utility companies of Minneapolis for that hot shower one cold February, where the first two items collided unexpectedly in my head ..."

Now, to my (British-entrained) ear, this prose has a masculine quality to it. There are plenty of ways to express the synthesis of two disparate ideas. Using the word 'collided' - and identifying the shower as the place where that collision took place - and indeed tracing the incident of the shower back to certain utility companies - is a way of phrasing the event that would, in Britain, be more likely to come from a man's pen than a woman's.

There are other little things that point the same way. 'Blinking and stumbling from my back-brain ...' - That use of an Anglo-Saxon style compound noun suggests to me the kind of writing that is here most typically associated with boys-ey thrillers.

In short, I think had those acknowledgements come from a British pen, I'd probably have been right as to whether the pen-wielding hand in question was likely to have had hairy knuckles or not. But this incident reminds me that there are differences between British & American writing - and one of those differences is how physically confident the prose of American writers tends to be. How comfortable it seems with technical things, especially manual-technical things. How often it strives for a kind of physical dynamism.

In maladept hands, this can just be plain naff, of course. There's a class of detective who never rides an elevator to the tenth floor, but always shoots it up there, probably by jabbing or stabbing the button on the way. Equally, there are plenty of good ways to write that aren't physically dynamic at all. (Jane Austen, I believe, has her admirers, yet the level of physical detail in her work is almost nil).

LBM's prose isn't naff at all - quite the reverse - but she has that same physical dynamism and confidence in her writing, and I think it was that which fooled me as to her sex.

Long post, but that's it from me. As for you Lois: beg pardon, ma'am - and now I'm off to Google to find out all about you. Meet you in cyber-space soon ...

Titbits

2008-02-19T13:20:00.003Z

HB: Some interesting nuggets from an article in the Times yesterday.

Nugget one: Last month The Times published statistics from Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks book sales nationwide, showing that, of 200,000 books on sale last year, 190,000 titles sold fewer than 3,500 copies.

Nugget two: More devastating still, of 85,933 new books, as many as 58,325 sold an average of just 18 copies.

Nugget three: Of the 1.2 million titles sold in the United States in 2004, only 2 per cent sold more than 5,000 copies.

Hmm. I think that those books that are selling just 18 copies are probably vanity published - in other words, they're not actually published at all. But still, the bottom line is pretty clear: books mostly don't sell. Who can blame publishers for chasing those elusive bestsellers ...?

Obsession

2008-02-18T16:53:00.002Z

HB: A comment posted on this blog recently accused me of (praised me for?) being obsessed with money.

Hmm. yes and no.

Yes: I do get a bit preoccupied with it and certainly let that preoccupation show through in the blog.

No: I'm only concerned about money because my last book sold badly. Unless the paperback or my next hardback offering sell well, it's going to be quite tough to put any kind of writing career together again. I am the main source of income for my wife and me, and I can't responsibly write books for nothing, or close to nothing. In short, I get concerned about money, because my ability to sustain myself as a writer ain't guaranteed by any means whatsoever.

Does that all make me an obsessive? Reader, you decide. Just one last piece of evidence for you to consider. Once upon a time I worked as an investment banker and made loads of dough. Back then, I hardly concerned myself about moolah at all ...

Father, Son & Bastard

2008-02-18T15:44:00.003Z

HB: A little while back (here, in fact) I accepted Simon Brooke's challenge to read a couple of fantasy novels and decide whether they constituted literature or not.

I'll talk about The Lions of Al Rassan shortly (I'm 500 pages through a 580 page novel), but for now now, here's my verdict on the Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold.

The book is set in a land vaguely reminiscent of medieval Spain. The fantasy element itself is not that huge. No dragons, rings, elves, warlocks, time travel, or any of that stuff. The one major twist on reality is simply that the religion of the land acknowledges God the Father, God the Mother, God the Son, God the Daughter - and God the Bastard. (At least Quintarians worship the last of these; some heretic Quatarians don't.)

Now this, it seems to me, is a splendidly imaginative and rich conceit; one which thoroughly deserves novelistic exploration. And I think that Bujold does a pretty fine job of that exploration. His God the Bastard is the god of unseason, unpredictable but essential as the moving part needed to balance the whole. Indeed, Bujold's imagined religion strikes me as a rather better structured one than any religions that humanity has ever actually come up with.

There are some fine sequelae to all this too. When a person dies, animals representing the different parts of God are invited to come and claim the soul - which animal comes forward to accept the corpse indicates which god has taken the soul. Again: splendid. If Philip Pulman had come up with something similar, we'd all be throwing more prizes his way.

What's more, Bujold can turn a nice sentence when he wants to. 'The shrinking geometry of death', for instance, is a prase that lingers. There are other nice touches throughout.

But literature? No. I don't think Bujold would claim it is. It's damn good commercial fiction. The prose is always deft, always competent, but seldom sparkling. The characterisation is absolutely fine for a commercial market but doesn't have the subtlety that is usually needed for literature.

However, though I don't think that Bujold makes the grade as a 'literary' writer, I do think that he writes jolly good commercial fiction. I never finish books if I don't like them, and often throw books away only half-read. Bujold, on the other hand, kept me pretty much fixed to the page and his ending in no way disappointed. There are plenty of much more widely acknowledged authors whose work has far less to offer.

Before you all write in to tell me how I've missed the point, do just pause awhile and wait for my comments on Al-Rassan, another book that I'm very pleased to have been introduced to. I'll also have some slightly more elaborated thoughts on fantasy-lit ...

A Youthful Soldier

2008-02-06T11:44:00.000Z

HB: Just came across this interesting article in the Observer that calls attention to some factual discrepancies in Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone. Extra interesting to me because (i) IB's UK editor is Mitzi Angel, my own editor (*), and (ii) I've got the memoir beside me waiting to be read.

The truth is that IB seems to have revised his age downwards for the purposes of his tale, but otherwise told a pretty accurate story. Who cares, really? The truth is that publishers and the PR industry are mostly to blame, given their slavering enthusiasm for ever more deeply coloured stories. Surely being a youthful soldier, if not quite a child, and telling a remarkable story very well should be enough. Sigh. World gone mad. Good on you, Ishmael mate. Take the money & enjoy your success. You deserve it.

(*) Guess who's added more solid lustre to Mitzi's career - me or IB?
Eh?
What's that? Come now. Money, fame & critical success aren't everything you know.

Dinsors for childern

2008-02-06T11:19:00.000Z

HB: We do get some daft emails, but some of them do make one ask what British kids do in school all day. Here's one, not unrepresentative:

"i am 19 and i wont to publish my book dinsors for childern i love wrting so this will be my first try of a publisher"

I won't be harsh enough to give a name - but suffice to say that the author misspelled her name not once but twice. We've had similar emails from people who are (or purport to be) undergraduates in Eng Lit. Heaven help us! Tommy, who is half-Norwegian and knows what proper schooling is like, is appalled.

Split personalities II

2008-02-05T15:17:00.001Z

HB: Just to say, I agree entirely with Sophia's gripes (below) about multiple viewpoints in fiction.

Story matters! It's not as though story is just some easy formula to be churned out by cruddy commercial writers, while real literary types can safely ignore such trivial concerns in favour of more hi-falutin' concerns. IN fact, writing a compelling story, whether literary or commercial, is bloody difficult and there are plenty of well-regarded literary authors who just aren't that good at it.

And second, every time a writer deploys multiple POVs in fiction, they are always either (1) sacrificing precious narrative momentum by doing so, or (2) they are geniuses who are not bound by the same limitations of we lesser mortals. I'm not being sarcastic about the second option. There are great writers who can pull off tricks that few can manage. But such writers are blooming rare. Most literary types who write a multiple viewpoint novel write a novel that is also dull. That's not clever, just boring.