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Comment from the book world in July 2010

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Translations

26 July 2010

'Any bookseller who might be considering whether to order more copies of Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel, which last week (in May) took the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, should look at this week's charts. Astonishingly, translations currently account for 40 per cent of Britain's top-ten bestsellers. OK: Stieg Larsson's 'Millennium' trilogy occupies three slots, with the fourth taken by Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game. Mass-audience crowd-pleasers all - yet, not so long ago, conventional wisdom held that foreign authors stood an even slimmer chance of cracking the popular-fiction market here than they did with the literary niches. Whatever the books involved, this tally represents a singular event - and, who knows, even a precedent for a country with a half-Dutch, quarter-Russian, quarter-English Deputy PM? Against gloom-mongers at home and abroad who always cite the "3 per cent" figure for translations in the UK, we can now claim "40 per cent of the Top Ten" - even if it's only for one freak week in May.'

Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent

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Writing thrillers II

19 July 2010

'I think there was what people sometimes call 'a gap in the market' because I wanted to get away from the fantasy and sensationalism of James Bond and the Ludlum-esque stuff... after a while too much fantasy has a bludgeoning effect: you accept that the guy can fly, or defuse a bomb with bare hands, or whatever. A story has to have certain mechanisms which are tried and tested. So there's a good-looking girl, hand-to-hand (combat) stuff, (the protagonist) gets to blow stuff up... tried and tested mechanisms of the genre, without which we wouldn't call it a thriller. They have to be in there, but it's the way they're in there that's important. At every step I found myself trying to underplay stuff, so for example, our protagonist makes mistakes all the time, getting things wrong and getting hurt.'

Jason Elliot, author of The Network in the Bookseller.

'Shake up the world'

12 July 2010

Only now that the book is out have I fully realized what the most frightening part of the process is. The questions: How will the reading public respond? Do ads work? Do people even read much anymore, beyond vampire books? Is the sophomore slump real? Is the sales rank on Amazon.com a true indicator?

Here's what I've come to know about such questions. They are, in essence, useless. In the face of what Loyal Ledford and his people went through, such questions are unimportant. In the face of the injustices about which I wrote, injustices that still go on today, such questions are materialistic. In the face of what the young veterans in my classes have seen, such questions are wildly unimportant.

I want people to buy and read my book, but the reasons for this want lie not in sales rank or blog hits. The reasons lie where they always have for the artist. If we do our job right, writers can, in the words of Muhammad Ali, shake up the world.

Glenn Taylor, author of The Marrowbone Marble Company on Publishing Perspectives

Big media agencies v literary agents

5 July 2010

'Does this sort of convergence achieve that much-hyped "synergy" between platforms? Or do the greedy celebs hog the trough, leaving starveling literati with the scraps? A multi-media strategy pays richer dividends to busy, versatile authors for whom film adaptations, TV slots, press columns and the like come easily. For focused literary types who simply want the best deal for their words, other agents still keep faith with books alone. Besides, in a digital domain of self-managed online careers, growing numbers of writers could do without agents - and even publishers - at all. Save for superstars, e-books will mean that 10 (or 15) per cent of not very much - the usual agent's bargain - becomes a fraction of next-to-nothing. But don't blame glitzy talent-managers for our reluctance to pay properly for culture in the age of "free".'

Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor, in the Independent