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Comment from the book world in November 2009

November 2009

Changing the way people consume content

30 November 2009

'In the digital world, there is more volume out there, a lot of competing forms of media, a lot more noise. So is very hard to get noticed unless you can market your content. Like some record labels are now doing, that is what book publishers can do - use their brands to focus people's attention on their product...

The main thing the music business didn't realise at first is that digitalisation isn't about distributing the same content in another way. It changes the way people consume content and what is consumed.'

Danny Ryan, intellectual property specialist at LEGC, in the Bookseller

'Rules for writing'

23 November 2009

'In his essay Politics and the English Language George Orwell set out a series of rules for writing that are worth repeating in full:

  1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
  2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  5. Never use a foreign phrase or jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent.
  6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I would add three more tips:

  1. Read the papers.
  2. Be a sponge...
  3. Write. As much as you can. The more you do the better you'll get at it.

Damian Whitworth in The Times

'A love relationship'

16 November 2009

'The way I see it, ageing and writing is of course an enormous subject all by itself, and my general feeling about it is that as you get older, you lose a certain musicality... you realise that writing is more of a bodily activity than you thought.

All writers go off. There is no question about this in several cases: John Updike, for example, RIP, a great presence who is now an even greater absence. With him you see a deterioration in the ear, suddenly in his last two or three books, prose full of rhymes and repetitions and inadvertencies, those bits in prose called false quantities where the reader gets a jolt - "hasn't he already used that word, just in the last sentence", or "that rhymes with that word...'

It's my belief that the relationship between writer and reader is a love relationship. How do you make someone love you? You present yourself at your best, your most alive, your fullest, your most considerate. An author must be love-flushed: you must give them you most comfortable chair; you want to give the reader the seat nearest the fire, the best wine and food. It's a sort of hospitality gesture.'

Martin Amis in the Sunday Times

Books that are written by women for women about women

9 November 2009

'I've always felt that I have tried to give women of a particular generation a voice. I do think chick list has potentially been very powerful as it has looked at things like our awful relationship with our bodies, our relationship with food, with the beauty industry, our relationship with work - the fact that we're still not equal... So I don't think chick lit is always as fluffy as the title implies. Nevertheless, I sort of feel that I've transcended it, I've evolved and so have my readers. I still think there's a place for the fluffy. I do think it's another form of misogyny to denigrate books that are written for women by women about women.

(Publishing)'s become a lot more brutal. I see it with first-time authors, there's far less opportunity to build an author any more. You're straight out of the tracks and if you're not a big success on the first book there isn't the same kind of loving care. | hope I don't sound disloyal saying that, but that is the reality.'

Marian Keyes, author of The Brightest Star in the Sky, in the Bookseller

The Sony Reader

2 November 2009

'I've never been much of a gadget girl. I do have a mobile phone (Orange, obviously...) but, about to embark on a three-week book tour in August, I agreed to test drive one. I was a far from obvious choice. I don't have a BlackBerry, don't travel with a laptop and have an old-fashioned pen-and-ink diary. I saw the sense of taking one device rather than lugging quantities of books in and out of customs, but I was lukewarm.

Four countries and three weeks later, I'm another convert. The ReaderNew website launched by magazine for readers which provides readers' reviews, mostly of classics, and reading rooms for online discussions. www.thereader.co.uk is wonderful when travelling and, once you get the hang of it, easy to use. But, actually, I think the most significant thing about the Reader is not the issue of convenience, but its potential for transforming non-regular readers' relationship with books. We're all hard-wired for story telling, both as listeners and as tellers. We know there is a problem with literacy rates in the UK. If we are to solve it, we need to be more imaginative. We need to accept that the tools are not what matters - voice, print, audio - but the narrative itself. And acknowledge that, for some, a resistance to the physical book itself is a problem.'

Kate Mosse in the Bookseller