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Comment Archive 2004Some sharp comment from people in the book world in 2004. Comment 07 Comment 06 Comment 05 Comment 04 Comment 03 Comment 02 Comment 01
'Shoppers will pile into bookshops' 'Yet the high streets and shopping centres of Great Britain are filled with bookshops of a quality that would have been unimaginable only twenty years ago. We are spoiled for bookshops, there is no doubt about it. The chains have more branches in more locations. They are open all year round, often seven days a week, sometimes late into the evening. Independents are better than they have ever been. But they are only there to reap the retail whirlwind in the twelve weeks before Christmas, when even people who never buy books buy books, when most of the shopping population make their annual pilgrimage to a bookshop. Hence getting it wrong looms large in the sweat-soaked nightmares of the retail executive. But nobody should worry too much. Shoppers will pile into the bookshops regardless of any qualms some booksellers might have about this year's range of seasonal bestsellers. They will come in droves. They always do. Wait and see.' David Blow in Publishing News
How Oprah can change your life 'She chose it because of its cover. It wasn't the current cover. It was a dark-blue background with a plane going into the air... It was very exciting, a little frightening to me... 'To me, writing is a very selfish activity. I write to please myself. I write in a daydream, which I am sure has saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars in therapy. Everything comes from somewhere, but it doesn't always come from my life. And that is one of the hardest things for readers to accept.' Anita Shreve, author of Light on Snow, in the Times magazine
'Don't get it right, get it written' 'Take the time, before you start, to decide exactly what you want to write. Remember that your publisher will want more of the same, so you must choose a genre with which you are happy... Don't try to copy other writers. Originality, within your field, is essential. As an agent, the typescript I would take home for the weekend would always be the one with the freshest voice. Stick with it, don't give up. My mantra has always been: don't get it right, get it written. Most of all, believe in yourself.' Carol Smith, agent-turned-writer, in Writers' Forum magazine
'Children's writing is the Zeitgeist' 'Eleven is when you need to catch the reading bug. I thought that if I could give my son a 'road to Damascus' experience he might become a reader, so when I sat down and wrote this story that was what was at the back of my mind…. I had a great time writing this, it was like being a child again. I have never read a Harry Potter all the way through, so I don't know what a 'typical' children's books is like today - I grew up on Ransome, Kipling and Buckeridge, as well as comics…. Children's writing is the Zeitgeist. People here can be quite cynical and accuse adult writers of 'jumping on the bandwagon' but so what if they are? When I was a child, the choice of titles was really limited. It's important that children like reading and the more choice there is for them, the better.' Philip Kerr, author of The Children of the Lamp and several adult novels, in the Bookseller
The supermarkets' effect on books 'We really must get wise to what the supermarkets are doing. They offer none of the added value that is fundamental to nurturing serious book-buying and through which sales of publishers' profitable backlists are enhanced. The supermarkets simply take the easily available cream and, in so doing, undermine the strength of the traditional book trade. What is more, because they have no long-term interest in the book industry, they can negotiate with suppliers that much more aggressively. If they can't get the prices they want, they'll simply drop books and sell something else. If, in getting the prices they want, they undermine the established infrastructure of our industry, then so be it. Why should they care?' Richard Barker in the Bookseller
‘Poetry is a craft’ 'But perfectly sane people seriously expect their doggerel to be published in a national newspaper or by the publishing house that fostered T S Eliot and Philip Larkin. They enter poetry competitions in the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time they will shoot to fame and what passes in the poetry world for fortune. It is indeed like the lottery and the odds are probably about the same. Perhaps it's because of the mystique surrounding poetry that people think they can knock off a few words and watch them transform, like magic, into something they call a poem. Sadly, it's not like that. Poetry is a craft and it starts with reading. "I think," said the poet Michael Longley, "that technique is important. If most people who called themselves poets," he added, "were tightrope-walkers, they'd be dead."' Christina Patterson in the Independent
Authors' promotional tours ‘It’s a Catch 22 situation. The more successful you are, the less time you have to write. But your publishers and your readers still expect a book a year, particularly if you are a genre fiction writer like I am… If you take a week off, you can completely lose the plot. Alan Sillitoe once said to me, "They put authors on tour to stop them writing too much."’ Ian Rankin in the Bookseller on the requirement for successful authors to tour.
Publishing illustrated books 'The investment in an illustrated book, the picture acquisition cost, the production, the design, is much, much greater than, let's say, a novel, where if you don't sell a single copy, and it's a first novel, where you might not have paid a huge advance, the actual cost of the paper and production is very slim. Whereas, if you get it wrong with a big art book, you will feel it financially. That's one of the reasons why so few illustrated art books work with just the domestic market in mind. With some few exceptions, it just isn't big enough. So the way that we endeavour to make it work is to have a team of people whose job is to set up international editions, translations, co-editions, which we will then print in French, German, American, Hungarian, Korean - it's about getting up to a large enough print run, defraying some of the risk because of the co-publishers in other countries.' Jamie Camplin of Thames & Hudson, in Publishing News
Can an advance be too big? 'Everyone was throwing money at me. It was absurd. I was in a bar when I took the phone call saying it had been sold in America. But instead of doing a extravagant champagne-for-everyone, I thought: Oh...my... God. I'd seen a friend get a large advance. He thought that was it. It was going to be bitches by the pool in LA. But the fact was that his book didn't sell. At that point, nobody wants to touch you. I was going: is there any way we can tone this down? I didn't want them to pay a lot. I wanted them to pay enough. A rather worrying number of people assumed I would go off the rails. There was a period of six months where I'd walk into a room and there'd be this appraising quality. They'd be waiting for me to rip off the mask and reveal that I was Puff Daddy.' Hari Kunzru on getting a big advance for his first book
'The dark forces of sales and marketing' 'Editors nowadays move jobs much more frequently than before, and have little experience actually working with text. This leads to authors feeling unloved and badly treated. Young editors are being taught to be risk-averse, and although desperate to buy books, they are finding the barriers for entry get higher. They are going for the obvious choices or, tellingly, the novels which are in need of very little editorial work. Novels that merely show promise do not get sold - novels that are brilliant and in need of almost no attention do. All too often, it isn't the editor who calls the shots, but the dark forces of sales and marketing - the engine room of the business. An editor is going to have much more clout in arguing for marketing spend for a book they have paid £100,000 for than one which has cost a mere £20,000. It is less about the prose and more about the maths at this stage.' Simon Trewin, literary agent at PFD, in the Independent on Sunday
'Those messy little notebooks' ‘Learning how to type does not make you a writer. It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life when I found that I couldn’t compose at a typewriter. You see so many movies in which pages fly out of a writer’s machine and novels pile up next to them. I’m in my late 30s now and I’m still working in those messy little notebooks I had when I was six.’ Donna Tartt in the Observer
Online reviewing - a dialogue amongst readers? 'There are some who argue that by opening the gates to millions of reviewers, who may be incompetent, unedited and sometimes illiterate, the web has undermined the very idea of cultural authority. But this seems to misunderstand the nature of the new beast. At its best, internet reviewing provides a refreshing directness, a place where people say what they like and dislike without any of the baggage of literary criticism or knowledge of previous form, or grammar... The best online reviewers tell the story that they have read, add their own twist and take, and pass it on, creating a dialogue among readers that directly descends from the oral storytelling tradition.' Ben Macintyre, The Times
Sting like a bee 'Falling for a subject is more gradual than falling in love, though it soon gains something of the same irrational and fascinated compulsion. I did not imagine summers of pondering the sex lives of flowers, and I certainly didn't expect to be on the roof of an Upper West Side brownstone in Manhattan investigating illegal apiary. But that's what happens with a book. You think you're in charge, then suddenly the subject gallops off where it will.' Hattie Ellison on writing her book Sweetness and Light: the Mysterious History of the Honey Bee
Publishing for teenagers 'You have to keep up with the times. There are always 14-year-old girls, but every three or four years, they are going to be completely different. When I look back on some of our output in the early Nineties, it seems naive. There's much more sophistication now. We've got to move with the times. People often say to me that you'll run out of topics and ideas for that age group, but it isn't the case, just as it isn't the case for adult novels. The great themes of life are always there - love, death, illness, loneliness - but the world changes with increasing rapidity and what we publish reflects these changes.' Brenda Gardner, founder of Piccadilly Press in Publishing News.
‘A damned-up desire to write’
'The crime cull' ‘In the past 10 years an axe has been taken to the crime lists of all the biggest publishers. Shorn of medium to low sellers, star names and future hopes have been repackaged and marketed with greater gusto than ever before… The crime cull cannot be blamed totally on changes in distribution and marketing. Readers’ tastes have changed too. Demand for dusty detectives has been replaced by demand for darker, more psychological stories, with strong characterisation. At the same time crime writing has achieved greater credibility among the lit crit brigade, thanks to a new generation of gifted writers working within the genre…’ Danuta Kean on current trends in British crime writing in the Bookseller
'A messenger from the dead' 'At times it's almost as if there's a telepathic communication going on. You get this extraordinary sense of intimacy with people you're never met. After a while you begin to feel almost like a messenger from the dead, trying to bring people back to life. And that's a very strange feeling, almost a magical one... 'I think that to invite the dead to tell you some truths that it would be unreasonable to ask them when they were alive is to pay them a compliment. You're helping them to be heard again and what they say contributes to the living world. You see, that's what I've tried to do as a biographer: to keep death in its place, and not to let it have the final word.' Michael Holroyd talking to John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph about being a biographer
'Earnest soul-searching scribes' 'The very words "creative writing course" can trigger a prolonged bilious attack in any critic whose skin crawls at the thought of all those earnest, soul-searching scribes munching digestive biscuits as they listen to one another's lyrical outpourings. We don't want writers cosily wrapped up in halls when they should be suffering in the time-honoured manner of Kafka or Camus - or experiencing the same infernal torment as the reader trying to wade through 500 pages of The Last Tuna, a postmodern satire about a flooded dystopia ruled by evil talking dolphins...' 'Not that any of these caveats will stop people enlisting on the courses. Writing is a lonely business and most authors I know will stop at nothing to find some excuse to gaggle together, gossip, drink and sleep with one another...' Rowan Pelling, Independent on Sunday
Updike on meeting authors 'The meat of the matter is to be had sitting down and reading the books - not by meeting the author. When I was a young, aspiring writer I was thrilled to meet a boyhood idol of mine, James Thurber; I loved the way he both drew and wrote. Thurber was quite blind by this time, and understandably self-centred, and he basically recited things I'd already read. He told all the same stories, so I came away less enchanted than if I'd never met him. So there's a risk you run when you meet your readers.' John Updike, interviewed by Anthony Quinn in the Sunday Telegraph
'An unconscious extension of the class system' ‘I think that the perception of genre in this country is an unconscious extension of the class system. People have a dreadful snobbery in their approach to their book-reading. Lots of literary books are marketed almost as accessories that they reflect in the person you are. Lots of people buy literary books because it gives them a poetic image of themselves... ' Looking down on SF and fantasy is 'perpetuated by some of the fiction editors and commentators and professional spitters, like Germaine Greer, who was furious when The Lord of the Rings won Waterstone's Book of the Century poll. They hate the fact that there are people out there unpicking their opinions.' Graham Joyce, author of World Fantasy Award-winning The Facts of Life, in Publishing News
Jane Austen and what people read 'One of the things that strikes me so strongly is that her work has been put to every imaginable agenda: people are arguing that she's an intensely conservative writer and then that she's incredibly radical; she was apparently prescribed for shell-shocked soldiers after the First World War, and Emma was made part of the movement to emancipate women in Bengal. It's really quite astonishing. I help facilitate a reading club at the bookstore where I live, in Davis, near Sacramento. It's taken me about five years to be able to predict what one person will like and what they won't. It's both wonderful and troubling to me to see how we all read the same books, but we all read a completely different book. Some things that seem to me to be very tangential to a book will be the entire focus of someone else's reading.' Karen Joy Fowler in the Bookseller, talking about her US no 1 bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club
Writing for teenagers and 'the power of language' 'The one thing you have to do for this age group is to be direct and get straight to the point. You can have deep, interesting ideas, but the story must be there. When I was trying to write for adults I thought people would just love the sound of the words, and that the story didn't matter at all. But it does. No one reads anything without a story to carry them through... 'Every culture throughout history has had stories, and very often anthropologists find that they're linked in ways that can't be explained by people travelling from one place to another. There seems to be almost a collective consciousness tying us all together, and I wanted to say something about that, about the power of language... and the politics of the power of language and privilege.' Nicola Morgan, author of Sleepwalking, in Publishing News
'Only 25 years ago' 'It's only 25 years ago, but go back to the British book trade of 1979 and you find London dotted with dozens of small, independent imprints run by strong-minded mavericks. Book shops are gloomy, inhospitable places, smelling of stewed meat. In Hampstead, the manager of W H Smith turns off the lights when there are no customers to save electricity. In 1979 there is no Borders or Waterstone's, no Random House, no Orange Prize - and no Hay Festival. Most telling of all, there is virtually no money, especially for writers. Novels are commonly signed up for £500, short-story collections for £200 or £300, or even less. When the hot-shot young agent Ed Victor sold a now-forgotten yarn, The Four Hundred by Stephen Sheppard, for a quake-worthy 'six-figure advance', the shockwaves reverberated from Bloomsbury to Harmondsworth.' Robert McCrum, literary editor, in the Observer
Capacious essays ‘Literary criticism as a discourse available for, and even attractive to, the common reader has all but disappeared. Literature as criticism - DeLillo's knowing essayism, Rushdie's parables about hybridity, Franzen's postmodern riffs - has burgeoned, while criticism as literature, what R.P. Blackmuir called 'the formal discourse of an amateur', has faded. This ought not to be possible. If all those clever writers studied other writers at university, they should, in addition to producing fiction and poetry, be writing capacious essays for the mythical common reader. We should be awash in V.S. Pritchetts and Edmund Wilsons.’ James Wood, London Review of Books
'No higher pleasure' 'A novel or biography can do two things a stage or screen director cannot. It can offer us descriptive prose of a higher and more reflective sort than can be inserted into realistic dialogue: a kind of poetry-in-prose. And its author can tap the reader on the shoulder, take us aside and share with us his or her own thoughts about the meaning of what is taking place. For the serious reader of English literature, I believe there is no higher pleasure: a pleasure…which only a book can give.' Matthew Parris
Boom time for history 'One of the reasons people have turned to historical novels in much greater numbers is because history is less fully taught in schools. Readers like to learn about historical periods that interest them. I also think that the quality of writers writing historical novels has been consistently high over the past 10 years. It's also true that writers can comment on today's society in a much simpler way using historical fiction... I think all of the TV and film tie-ins add up to a feeling that it's not just perfectly OK but positively chic to watch or read history. I'm pretty certain that we have never had as much in the way of history-related programming on TV as we've had in the past year.' Susan Watt, publishing director at HarperCollins UK
Clinton's own story 'Everybody should sit down and write the story of their life when they reach 50... It's very therapeutic. After an hour, I was there again. I felt what it was like when I was five and my stepfather's shot landed in the wall between my mother and me...’ 'When I thought about what Kenneth Starr did to me, I was so mad I couldn't write for four hours.' 'I was very fortunate to grow up during the last pre-television age.' I …'learned to listen and appreciate the unique character of superficially ordinary people.' Bill Clinton speaking about My Life at Book Expo
'It's not photographic' 'Every time I write a book there's a sort of prime fulfilled, unconsummated. It's about being at the height of your powers. Or more having access to ideas and energy that you need to fulfil... A novel about people who are normal won't come out as reality. A book is like a stage. You've got people a little larger than life always. It's not photographic so you have to exaggerate a bit... I wish people wouldn't write novels if they can't do it. It would be better, if they had an urge to write, if they wrote memoirs, diaries, or just letters to friends, wonderful letters.' Muriel Spark, interviewed in The Times by Nicola Christie on publication of her new novel The Finishing School
'A massive displacement below the waterline' A crucial change over the last year is that both sides are coming to understand that selling fewer books at greater discounts is not the way to go... We need to think more strategically, creatively and practically about offering a richer range, and promoting the product as much as the price of the product. A tighter bottleneck of retailers, whose competition reached new extremes, more sales of fewer titles and margins that, to put it mildly, were not spectacular - resulted in a massive displacement below the waterline.' Anthony Forbes Watson, CEO of Penguin Group UK
On discovering new authors ‘Most publishers seem like wallpaper. Most of them today are either promoted bookkeepers or ambitious men and women who care only for power and couldn't care less what they actually publish. If publishers don't say much, it's probably because they don't have much to say…’ And on the thrill of discovering a new author: ‘That's why you get up in the morning with a bounce in your feet. You've discovered a new author you think is marvelous. It's very sexy. It feels great. It's a triumph.’ The founder and publisher of the distinguished American publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Roger W Straus, who died last week, on publishing and what makes it special.
'A way to write myself in' 'As a novelist, you have a mask. When I started, I wasn't sure how to write non-fiction - especially something so personal. The early process was horrible because the idea of writing something which I wasn't making up was so alien to me. But how much of myself of my father did I want to expose? My natural impulse was to stay out of it, so I started off by writing chronologically about my father's family and his life. It didn't work. The more I tried, the more I realised that I was involved with a book in which I would have to find a way to write myself in.' Sue Miller in an interview with Sue Box in The Times about writing about her father's Alzheimer's
Writing for children 'You can't be self-indulgent, particularly if you are writing for teenagers. I took this book to a class of 14-year old boys, and the comments I got were very interesting. There are kids who are immediately hooked by writing anyway, and they are gone within the first page, so you're fine with them; but there's another group who put a book down relatively easily, so there has to be very strong action, suspense or intrigue to keep them reading... The main lesson was that you couldn't indulge yourself. Everything in the book has to be pulling the story forward, and anything that is just there because it's quite fun to write has to go.' N M Browne, author of Basilisk, quoted in the Bookseller
Is literary fiction better than genre fiction? ‘Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care… ‘I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, though I do prefer curling up with an author such as A.M. Homes rather than Helen Fielding. Nor do I mean that the distinction is a rigid one. On the contrary, some of the best novels - Jane Eyre, The Woman in White - have a foot in both camps. I mean only that novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.’ Mark Haddon, author of the prize-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in the Guardian
'An impossible race with the supermarket sector' ‘For all of us as consumers cheap books are attractive because it means we can afford to buy more of them, but they are less attractive if buying more books eventually becomes difficult because there are fewer bookshops to buy them from. Cheap books are suddenly less attractive if they jeopardise bookshops. So any news coverage that drives home the message that booksellers are underselling themselves with deep discounts, or struggling to win an impossible race with the supermarket sector, is to be welcomed.’ David Blow in Publishing News
'The dream of a common language' 'What I had in mind was poetry itself as connective urge and power... Do I want that? Yes. Do I want it in a literal sense, that each word or line I write has the same meaning for everyone as it does for me? No. Do I think poems are made of words used according to dictionary definitions? Obviously not. But poetry is an art of translation, a connective strand between unlike individuals, times and cultures.' Adrienne Rich in an interview with Ruth Fainlight in the Independent on Sunday`
'A jolly good story' 'As a historian, I think that a biography can tell you so much more than just the life of that particular individual. I think it can tell you about the time they lived in. It gives you access to that particular period. For example, I think in the case of Einstein, a book on his scientific achievements is not something a general reader will pick up. But a biography on Einstein can still carry information, and be good science, but wrapped in a more digestible form and format.... a life is always a jolly good story, and what else do you want from a book but a jolly good story?' Barbara Schwepke of Haus Publishing
'Agents shouldn't hold us to ransom' 'Where publishers have worked successfully to build an author over a number of books, agents shouldn't hold us to ransom every time there is a new contract. We accept that we should reflect past successes, but too often new contracts demand advances that bear no relation to even the most impressive sales increases. This can turn what has been a happy, successful and profitable relationship into one that is fragile and wary. Royalties may seem an outmoded concept, but there is nothing a publisher likes more than paying them to its authors. And could the deal sometimes genuinely be about things other than just the advance money? As long as an advance is fair and not substantially lower than what may be available from the competition in the short term, surely editorial commitment, flair, passion, long-term vision and ambitious marketing plans should count for something. They do in some cases, but increasingly rarely. For the publisher, unearned advances are "dead money" - money that could be spent on marketing campaigns to stimulate not only sales of a particular title but also of backlist and future titles.' Martin Neild, Managing Director of Hodder Headline adult consumer divisions
'Profoundly personal' ‘I don't keep books unless I have to: meaning I keep only those books I know I'll want for the rest of my life. The rest I callously sell on. I am not a writer because I love reading. Writers quite often make poor readers and book keepers... A writer reads in the way that a butcher eats restaurant sausages - with professional understanding, but also with the hope and fear of being outdone.... 'Asked to choose a powerful reading experience, it isn't poetry that readers will generally recall, but that ether moment of immersion in a novel; of looking up to find that hours have passed, that everyone has left and the sun has gone down. This is one of the great strengths of the novel: the profoundly personal, private way it can immunise us to our surroundings.' Tobias Hill, author of The Cryptographer, writing in The Times about the power of reading.
'A mere arm of the movie industry' ’My experience has demonstrated that it is wrong to think that bigness is better. Carried aloft by robust Christmas sales in 2003, many American publishing houses seem, as of this writing, to have had respectable years, but the wild success of a few mega bestsellers does not obscure the dire condition of literary fiction, not to mention poetry. While scribblers like Dan Brown or James Patterson can, with one novel, rack up sales in the millions, it is not uncommon for noted literary novelists to sell between 3,000 and 6,000 copies of their latest work. Selling 10,000 books in this climate would be a resplendent success. These kinds of alarming sales figures are prompting more publishers to weigh whether they should concentrate on 'airport books' alone… The equation is simple: A large advance, at least six figures, is required for a book to be taken seriously. As a result, the book proposal becomes the almighty determinant of a book's success -- especially for the works of nonfiction, which I primarily edit. Indeed, a trend has emerged in which proposals are 'gussied up'-- repolished and rewritten -- often by people other than the actual author. This often means that months or years later, hapless editors may be confronted with a manuscript that bears little relation to the proposal. If publishing is to save itself from being a mere arm of the movie industry, executives must realize that they cannot divine a book's success through money tendered at contract time.' Robert Weil, Norton editor, in Washington Post Book World
'A wildly unfair anachronism' 'There are three essential components in making a book available to the public: the author, the publisher and the bookseller. There are, increasingly, endless hired hands in the interstices, including agents, paper makers, binders, printers, wholesalers, internet booksellers, book clubs and so on. But fundamentally there is the author and those who exploit (sell) his or her work and, as more and more of the latter thrust their oars in, the less the author seems to receive. It might reasonably be construed that everyone makes or stands to make money out of "the book" - other than the author. Is this fair? … Instead of agents arguing with publishers about percentages received subject to discounts given to book retailers (over which agents and authors have no control) authors should henceforth be paid an actual sum of money per book sold... The time-honoured device of royalties to an author being expressed as a percentage of different discounts worked well in a different era. It has become a wildly unfair anachronism in our new century.' The late Giles Gordon, whose memorial service was held last week, in the Bookseller
'What is fiction for?' 'A story of two airliners, commandeered by flying-school novices armed only with box cutters, smashing into the World Trade Centre in the war against the great Satan is too far-fetched. A swaggering President telling a fearful nation "We're going to get these folks," is the stuff of schlock. Literary fiction is simply not equipped for the story of the hanging chads and the helpful brother in Florida. Halliburton and the gnomic sayings of Mr Rumsfeld are beyond make-believe... Maybe the final question is: what is fiction for? Kafka came closest when he said it should be an axe to smash the frozen sea within us. There may be a good case that there is something too absurd and frightening and paradoxical and banal about modern politics for it to translate into fiction.' Tania Kindersley, author of Nothing to Lose, in The Times
'Digging down into the past' ‘I had the idea right from the beginning about digging down into the past and that, unless you have come to terms with the past, confronted it honestly, you can’t move forward.’ Her books are about ‘people edging towards salvation, wisdom – understanding the meaning of their lives. I want to talk about what it’s like to be alive for all of us, and all the great questions. I’m interested in what it’s like to be a woman, a mother, a friend, a lover, to fear, to hope, to love.’ Rose Tremain in an interview with Dominic Bradbury in The Times about her new novel The Colour.
'It's the story, stupid' 'I think I'm a storyteller rather than a writer. The difference is that with me the story comes first, rather than the literature. When people go on about literacy and why children are put off books, and they can't quite grasp why children don't love spelling and punctuation, you have to point out that what they're missing is that it's the story, stupid. The story has to come first, it's the heart of the thing. And then, of course, there's the telling of it, which is the literature.' Michael Morpurgo, the new Children's Laureate in Publishing News
'Good books sell and make money' ‘People have realized good books sell and make money. And the pressure on the corporations is to make money. They understand that there are audiences for books other than the John Grishams and the Dr. Phils and the Atkins Diet. I think it's easier now to sell good literary fiction in greater numbers than it ever has been. At one moment, Arthur Golden's first novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and Frazier's Cold Mountain, all were on the New York Times bestseller list. In my 25 years of being in the business, I cannot recall a moment when three literary first novels were all on the bestseller list at the same time.’ Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove-Atlantic, New York in the Christian Science Monitor
'A pomposity and a preciousness' 'Very occasionally I become aware of a pomposity and a preciousness associated with poetry, and that some people in the poetry world are trying to protect something they see as very, very pure. And occasionally that makes me want to do something very, very dirty, like get up and read something that sounds like a song, or do something that might appeal to a wide number of people. It's probably something too about my background, about growing up in a culture of people telling stories, telling jokes, singing songs and sharing the talent they've got with as wide an audience as possible. It's just a natural consequence of who I am and where I've been brought up. It's not a career choice. I don't think I could do it any other way.' Simon Armitage talking to Tom Payne in the Daily Telegraph
'To feel a bit better about life' ‘People read these books for the same reason as they'd go to see a film like Notting Hill or Sliding Doors. They watch a Reese Witherspoon film to see her get the guy. People pick up a chick-lit book for exactly the same reason: to feel a bit better about life when they close the last page. And what's wrong with that?’ Chris Manby, author of Seven Sunny Days
'An extraordinarily energetic industry' ‘We operate in a relatively mature market, but book publishing is a surprisingly dynamic enterprise because you have to reinvent your product year after year… You cannot rely on past successes. If half your sales are from your back catalogue, the other half has to be published afresh. We have to be extremely alert to new trends and fashions and be able to read the market perhaps two or three years in advance because of the lead time… Book publishing always feels to me an extraordinarily energetic industry. People who join the publishing industry rarely leave." John Makinson, Penguin CEO
Penzler on crime Style — that is to say, literary style — matters. How well an author writes, the use of metaphor, simile, and other literary devices matters. Plot matters. Tell a good and fair story, have an arc that establishes the characters and the ensuing action, maintain intriguing subplots, and reach an inevitable and satisfying conclusion, and I’m yours. Create three-dimensional characters, people I want to know more about, or forget the whole thing. If there are no fully developed heroes, villains, victims, suspects, red herrings, or detectives (official or not), I might just as well be putting letters in little squares in a crossword puzzle. I bring the same set of requirements to a mystery novel as I would to any work of general fiction.
'A diabolical shame' Writers should ‘get out there and do it themselves. There are 150,000 books published each year but there are so many unsolicited scripts sent to publishers that they are missing good, talented writers. It's a diabolical shame. Writers should look at new ways of publishing, like the internet and self-publishing... You have to be careful because there are companies out there that will rip you off. There are vanity presses who charge an absolute fortune and give little in return.' Reverend Graham Taylor, author of Shadowmancer, quoted in Writers' Forum
'The middle man to culture' ‘When I first entered publishing, the bookseller was the middle man to culture. In today's philosophy of the chains and the bottom line, a new form of censorship has begun, where your publishing imprint has to be on the 'accepted' list before a sales rep or a book will be welcomed or considered. This is a form of cultural censorship which bodes ill for society’ British publisher Frank Cass, who sold his company to Taylor & Francis last year
'I needed to be somebody' ‘I started writing in earnest at 22. I thought: I am a wreck and have no money and am in poor health – and so how am I going to impose myself on the world? I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that. I needed to be somebody. The only way I could think of was by writing. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. But it was never an escape, nor was it the place I was running to – because it wasn’t a refuge – but it was what enabled me, it was my source of power…’ Hilary Mantel, in an interview with Kate Kellaway in the Observer on publication of her much-acclaimed memoir, Giving up the Ghost.
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