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Comment from the book world in December 2003

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December 2003

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'A revolting act of patronage'

22 December 2003

'The one defence that can be made of The Big Read is that it has boosted reading. Never mind that the programmes have been nothing less than "car-crash TV", as one book-trade commentator put it. Anything at all that gets more people reading is good, isn't it?

No, it is not. It is possible to make programmes promoting books that are so demeaning they do more harm than good. Far from easy, but possible - and The Big Read has pulled off this amazing feat of debasement.

In any case, it turns out that it is not reading that The Big Read has primarily promoted but watching: yet more watching. According to the online booksellers Amazon, sales of DVDs and videos of the featured titles have increased far more than sales of the books...

And as for the result ... It was clear as soon as The Big Read was announced earlier this year that Tolkien would win, just as he won a similar Waterstone's poll, even before the movies were made...

The Big Read - was a revolting act of patronage from our most powerful medium. Here, literature has been refashioned entirely in television's terms: turned into film; reintroduced to us by television's own transient little celebrities; then fatuously voted on by viewers, some of whom may be readers, some not.

There's no harm done to books. We can all pick up any book we like, the next minute, without thinking of The Big Read. But harm has been done - to the standing of the BBC.'

David Sexton in the Evening Standard

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Literature versus commerce

15 December 2003

'I don't regard literature, which he spoke of in a perjorative way, as a competition - it is so vast. We have this marvellous language, and we are so lucky it gives us a huge audience. If we were writing in high Norwegian we'd have mostly reindeer for readers.

'I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are the most read is satisfactory. I don't see that we should read this or that. We should bring our own individuality, our own intuitions, towards what we want to read. In America, we're drowning in explanations. What we need are more questions. Explanations - the official ones - are not leading us to good places.'

Shirley Hazzard, winner of the National Book Award in the US, responding to Stephen King's speech at the awards

Writing a novel

8 December 2003

'I found that I could write poems and short stories at the same time because they required the same sort of effort. But once you're writing a novel it's a larger undertaking and it does take up quite a lot of 'head space' and I've found that poems and novels don't go very well together for me. Writing a novel is a different process and part of what's different is the day-today lifestyle. You can compose poetry and short stories while you're walking, on a train, or a plane, although walking is better, sometimes even when you're asleep. but with a novel you need to get down to it and have a place where you can do it, with piles of books around you for research.'

Tobias Hill, author of The Cryptographer, interviewed by Jane Ellis in Publishing News

'Book buyers who see books as very cheap'

1 December 2003

'We are creating a whole new generation of book buyers who see books as very cheap. We do the reverse of so many industries: when we have a valuable brand, we tend to discount it more; elsewhere, they put up the price. What we're facing is retailers fighting for market share and using discounting as a way to do that, and we publishers have to protect our authors' position and our own position. The US board, on which I sit, is staggered at our level of discounts - in the States the average is well below 50% and the 60%-plus discounts that have recently been demanded here by some supermarkets are unheard of.'

Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK in an interview with Liz Thomson in Publishing News