The Chocolate Keyboard

Busy

2011-06-19T04:27:00.001-07:00

This blog is having a gentle snooze at the moment, while I devote all my energies to the editorial day job and to writing. Occasionally I remember the existence of my boyfriend, too.

I'm half-way through my Orchard contract next week though, so I wonder what the future holds.

An editor's take on issue novels and #yasaves

2011-06-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

It seems Wall Street Journal columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon has joined Martin Amis in the children’s book world stupid corner with an article about how current YA lit is too dark, and will turn your teenage daughter into a bloodthirsty anorexic who uses naughty words to grandma.

The internet is currently exploding with some fantastic heartfelt repudiations of her position, often tagged #yasaves. I have similar feelings, for similar reasons, to many of the people posting. YA didn’t save me as a teenager, but only because I was born just a little too early. Other books did the job.

Feelings aside, I also have a professional position here, which is: wtf duh?

Gurdon appears to believe that YA is one big undifferentiated field, but it most certainly is not. The publishing category occupied by a lot of the books she pans is ‘issue novels’, i.e. realistic contemporary depictions of traumas such as bullying or rape. And from the WSJ article you’d think that authors were pouring an unmitigated and accelerating stream of nastiness direct into the ears of the vulnerable young. If publishers are involved, then it’s probably just to think ‘kerching!’ and email the author asking for another overdose scene.

Hardly. In the UK at any rate, issue novels are a hard sell. They are regarded by publishers as liable to be either undigestedly autobiographical, or preachy and pat, both of which are a killer for teen readers who (unlike a lot of journalists) can smell crap. Slushpiles, in as far as publishers see slushpiles any more, bear this out. There is a lot of material out there that is either exploitative, or reads like therapy.

Some of it gets into print too, but not via any department I’ve worked in. Everyone has come across tales of ‘triumphant survivors’ which focus on someone’s terrible childhood and adolescence and purport to be inspiring but actually leave a nasty taste in the mouth… and these are published into the nastier end of the ‘misery memoir’ genre, not into YA. They’re by adults, for adults.

Books for teens have to clear a much higher bar. For one thing, they have to have the ring of emotional truth. Interestingly, there is one point at which I sort-of agree with the WSJ article, which is when Gurdon quotes from a novel about self-harm: ‘She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe.’ I’ve never read the novel in question so absolutely don’t mean to judge the rest of it, but in isolation at least I find that line lacking. Why? Not because it’s graphic, but because it’s physically very graphic without being emotionally graphic as well, so it falls a bit dead and gets an ick factor without accompanying understanding.

What this tells me is not that issue novels are bad, but something I already know, namely is that they are hard to do, on a personal level as well as on the level of trying to get them past the acquisitions meeting. Authors defending their work can’t really push this angle, but an editor can. Writing about traumas, particularly ones you have survived yourself, can be cathartic but it can also be painful and dangerous, and entails responsibility.

For example, to take another point at which the WSJ article just about brushes reality, some eating-disordered girls really will use any tale on the subject, no matter how cautionary, as ‘thinspiration’. These days anyone writing a novel about anorexia does so in the knowledge that this is the case. But it comes back to the familiar censorship dilemma of whether one should say nothing just because a few people will twist your words. May talented authors never take that path. ‘Wintergirls’ is one of my favourite YA novels and today there are a thousand tweets and posts out there showing just how much the risk of mistaken emulation is outweighed by the benefits of honesty.

All that from me, and I’ve never edited an issue novel. Currently I do series for pre-teens, innocent stories which develop reading skills. I really hope that when the readers of the books I’m currently working on reach adolescence, there will still be a steady stream of honest, intelligent books that keep them reading, and keep them sane.

Letters from child readers

2011-05-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

If you’re lucky enough to have a wide readership among young children, or if you’re a publisher fielding such authors’ post, you will be the recipient of a lot of letters.

The ideal is to read and treasure them all, but unfortunately this is seldom feasible. Quite often a publisher will have a form response that is mailed back to all those earnestly printed outpourings.

The publisher I am currently working for gets hundreds of letters, and I see some of them. After a while, you start to notice an interesting split in their contents.

Category A (90-95%): Form questions – ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’, ‘Will you write back to me?’, ‘Will you come to my house?’, often accompanied by very generic drawings. Quite a lot of these come in batches from primary classes who have been told to write to an author.

Category B (5-10%): Real letters from people who just happen to be five/seven/eleven years old, often accompanied by things they have made – cards, stories (or even full books), games, thoughtful drawings etc.

If you sit and sift through a large pile of post, the difference between the two types can be surprisingly marked. It’s like looking into a nest and seeing nine gaping gullets… then you realise the chick at the back is quietly plucking straws out of the nest and weaving them into a parachute while regarding you thoughtfully with one beady eye. It really makes you want to help that chick fly away to somewhere better, even while you know that she’s just going to have to wait for her feathers to grow in.

Sometimes a child's original mind and forming personality shines through the creases and crayoning of a fan letter.

So when possible, in those special cases, you eke out a bit of time for a personal response, not knowing if you’re inspiring a future genius or getting the kid into trouble with their mum, who doesn’t know they’ve been nicking stamps.

Or both!

Plot outlines

2011-05-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

I am fighting with a plot outline, again. I definitely feel it should be Perfect. It should Contain Everything. It should, essentially, be the book in microcosm so I don’t have to do all that tedious wrestling with bits that turn out not to work when you get half-way through them, because I have a precise guide to keep me on track. This will save time!

My editorial self wants to know in advance that this wheeze is gonna work out.

Unfortunately I’ve never stuck to a self-made plot outline in my life. Writing for packagers or adapting TV material to fit a book format are rather different affairs. As is dishing out plot outlines to other people.

Material originating in my own head goes its own way and generally ends up only tenuously related to the original seed. I have always accepted this previously. It’s not like I have no clue about how books are structured or am unwilling to rewrite as much as necessary.

But now I am applying the hard eye of logic. If one cannot get the plot outline perfect the book is doomed! Because it certainly won’t work in 70,000 words if it doesn’t in 700!! I think.

Is starting a book that isn’t perfected in outline folly because you are ignoring the problems, or is writing the book itself a means of allowing the problems to sort themselves out? The answer as usual is, depends on the book, but how to know…

Big Things and Game Changers

2011-04-17T04:21:00.000-07:00

After much debate, there does now appear to be a critical mass of industry opinion that Dystopia is the next big thing. You can tell that it’s achieved a genuine level of consensus, because some people are starting to declare that the trend is over – that’s usually a good sign that said trend is established.

Why do publishers need a next big thing? The most common theory online appears to be that it’s laziness – we want somebody else to do our thinking for us. The reality is a little more complicated though.

Often your Next Big Thing does derive in large part from a single book, e.g. Twilight leading to Paranormal Romance and Hunger Games leading to Dystopia. So let’s say that later this year someone publishes a breakout novel that generates the fantastic new genre of Meercat Crime. A year later, it’s established as the next big thing. Here’s the thought process for publishers:

1) If we haven’t got any Meerkat Crime on our list, we look out of touch;

2) We can only publish what gets submitted. Agents are focusing on Meerkat Crime so about 25% of what we’re looking at is in that genre. Statistically that means a quarter of the good stuff we get is Meerkat Crime;

3) Bricks and mortar retailers have created a ‘Meerkat Crime’ bay in their shops. Without books in that genre, that’s part of the shop we can’t sell into. We decided to go for Elephant Romance on our list, not Meerkat Crime, but there’s no Elephant Romance section in the shop and no comparable books to put in a three-for-two promotion, so our sales are low;

4) These days, so many books are sold online. No picking up and flicking through the pages; people glance at the cover and one tagline; if they don’t see something they understand, they move on. Everyone knows what Meerkat Crime is, so if we publish into that category we’re not going to lose sales because our product isn’t strongly branded enough.

With all these factors to take into consideration, failing to get any Next Big Thing books on the list is bad news for a publisher of any size.

The good news for people who don’t want to write what’s currently trendy is that while there are strong commercial reasons for jumping on the bandwagon, that will always be second best to driving the bandwagon. Publishers don’t really want to cash in on Twilight, or Hunger Games, or Wimpy Kid, or Mr Gum, they want to find a book that does what they did. A book that invents a market niche will almost without fail sell far, far more copies than the books which subsequently fill it.

So while at the moment a good dystopian submission may stand a slightly better chance of publication than a good teen romance submission, the book that stands the best chance, and attracts the most editorial enthusiasm and marketing spend, will always be the outstanding one, the one that is original and exciting enough to be the next game changer. That’s what publishers want most, because although the strategy is high risk, and most of these novels will not succeed in becoming break-outs, when they do the rewards for success are stellar for everyone involved.

Publishing is changing incredibly fast, and nobody really knows what direction it’s going in, but we have yet to do away with the need for really good books.

Connected again

2011-04-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

Hello, blog world. I have an internet connection! This is pretty exciting news when you have had to wait SIX WEEKS for it. Insert swearing about BT here…

Then take a deep breath and move on. Boyfriend and I are ensconced in our new flat, it is decorated and tidy, and we are connected to the outside world. That is what matters.

I have also been at Orchard working on Rainbow Magic for 10 weeks now, but my colleagues have assured me I am not yet turning into a fairy. If the process did take place, it would have to be quite a lengthy one, as the difference between me and a fairy is quite marked. Diversity is strength, anyway.

My intention is to keep this blog running in a low-key way while I’m at Orchard. Being on staff at an imprint of the nation's biggest publisher makes me privy to various interesting things… plenty of which I can’t share. But perhaps some will turn up that I can.

Moving life

2011-01-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

This blog has been sadly neglected of late, which is no great surprise given that I am currently moving life. I started as Managing Editor at Orchard a week ago, and providing the exchange of contracts goes through (insert swearing here) I will be moving house in two weeks’ time. So life at the moment consists of trying to get the important things done and get enough rest in between.

I hope to come back here properly after the house move, though it will take a few weeks as we are going to be doing a fair bit of decorating and it’s not clear how long it will take to get the internet connection set up.

There is, of course, the question of what sort of blogger I can be, as obviously I now have a company affiliation within publishing and am not going to post anything that could compromise this. But I will continue to have a brain.

As for Orchard itself, I’m up to my eyes, and it’s great! The disadvantage of freelancing is that you often get given, at first, two simple things to do; then when a client realises you’re competent you get another half-dozen simple things to do. Juggling multiple commitments is a challenge in itself, but you can also end up longing for just one or two really challenging projects to focus on get your teeth into. I certainly have one of those in Rainbow Magic!

Daring to read widely

2011-01-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

I was intrigued and a little amused to read a comment by Keren David, buried in her post about books that inspired her: ‘I had hardly read a contemporary YA book before I started to write one.’

Well! At this point I feel we should BURN THE WITCH! You are not supposed to say things like that, except in the course of admitting how terribly you went wrong, and explaining why you have not yet been published and never will be, or at least won’t be pending your repentant completion of the Ten Tick Boxes of How to Do It.

On the other hand, given the well-deserved success of Keren’s Joe/Ty novels, that reaction doesn’t seem to be called for. In fact, those of us who haven’t managed to read every book published in our field for the last 10 years might breathe a sigh of relief. Being an evil editor I probably feel even more pressured to know the market than an author does, and not just in one field of children’s books but everything from bath books to paranormal romance. Can’t do it, though.

I might be able to access sales figures more easily and get a better inside track on what’s coming, and as I’m about to take on responsibility for Rainbow Magic I’m taking a crash course on one very particular market niche, but my average haul after a visit to the library tends to look like this: one YA novel, one MG novel, one popular science book, one literary novel, one sci fi/fantasy novel, one popular history book, one book in Russian that I will end up having to return before I’ve slogged through more than two chapters. Every few months or so, I get a batch of 12 picture books.

This is not going to make me a leading expert in anything. But it keeps my brain fed more than an exclusive diet of what you might call professionally useful input would, and it fits with my gut feeling that reading quality writing from diverse fields is more likely to hone my expertise than reading everything of every standard in one field. I suppose it’s much the same as someone who works in architecture looking through the trade journals at work then going home and reading novels for pleasure. It’s just that, in publishing, you can never read all the trade texts.

So while it’s probably not ideal for most authors to have no experience in the field they want to write in (Keren has a history as a journalist, so she was at least highly-trained in a related field), and an editor certainly couldn’t work on that basis, Keren’s story is a useful reminder that even in these days of BookScan obsession, sometimes mere talent can do the job – at least in the field of author-led fiction, and that is where most authors want to be.

Going back in-house

2010-12-20T06:54:00.000-08:00

Confession time: I have been unfaithful to the freelance way recently. I have dabbled with job applications. When you do that, it’s always flattering to get invited for interview. And then, sometimes, people go and employ you.

Yes, as of late January I will be Managing Editor at Orchard Books, working a 10-month maternity contract. To quote the original ad, the position is ‘focused on managing and developing large series, including the bestselling Rainbow Magic and Beast Quest series’.

Worth getting out of bed five days a week for, I feel! Orchard are the leading publisher of series fiction, and as well as the famous names above they have some exciting new projects in the pipeline, including one in which I’ve already been involved as a writer. Now I get to guide it on its way too (though most of the editorial work on the first batch is complete). Great fun.

I hope to still have time to keep this blog updated. First though, like most people at this time of year, I have to spend a fortnight overeating.

Merry Christmas!

The perils of professional focus

2010-12-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

Do you know what genre and format your book is going to be? Is it a picture book? A YA thriller? When writing for kids it’s a good idea to have a strong grasp of who your intended audience is, and to focus on one form so that you can build both skill and, when published, brand… etc.

zzzz

You’ll have read this advice before, if you’ve read any online writing resources. And it’s basically sound. Take it from me, I’m an editor with a waggly finger.

On the other hand, I’m a writer, and my writerly self has a thingy in her head. It’s an idea so formless that it’s more of a feeling than a plan. And it’s got company in there, too – some picture books, a young reader, an MG novel, a YA novel and an adult novel. My ideas file is crowded, and quite a few of the denizens didn’t turn up in response to a casting call from the marketing department.

This is not what the successful modern writer is meant to do. You are meant to find one thing you are good at and do it repeatedly until you wear such a groove in the public consciousness that a significant amount of money slides down onto your head.

That’s how it works now, and my professional self, who spends all day writing to order or shaping other people’s writing into the required niche, knows that well enough. But my creative self doesn’t seem to be so keen, even though if I’d started writing one type of thing 15 years ago and done nothing but that ever since I would probably have stood a better chance breaking through as A Writer, with a following of people who buy stuff because it’s got my name on the spine.

I’d probably be less good though. And less interesting. And know a narrower range of stuff. And earn less money. And I’d fear the thingy, instead of feeding it finest brain and waiting to see what happens.

Gatekeeping

2010-11-26T05:55:00.001-08:00

I just read a fascinating post by the always-interesting Phoenix Sullivan about people’s reactions to unpublished writing, and why you so often get a situation where someone posts a first chapter online, general readers are admiring of it, and then an industry type turns up and shreds it.

This reminded me of an experience I’d had a couple of days before. Working in children’s licensed publishing, I sometimes get to see embryonic new characters whose creators hope to turn them into a whole package of books/TV series/merchandise etc. Earlier this week I came across one such: I looked at the characters and intro material for about 20 seconds, noted the half-dozen obvious (to me) things wrong with it, shrugged and almost moved on, but because the design and production side of the material was in some ways strong I did take the time to click through to the promo video.

I watched the video and had my impression reaffirmed: someone with an embryonic idea and big dreams has teamed up with a competent animator to produce a package that is all style and little appropriate content. However, at the bottom of the page, there are quite a few comments from apparently random viewers, and they’re all positive. ‘My kids would love this’ being the general theme.

So there I am, all clever with my instant bullet-pointed list of ways this package fails to hit the spot, and there’s its potential audience going ‘ooh, shiny!’

Huh?

From a professional’s point of view, this sort of thing is unsettling. It’s like the first-chapter review situation described by Phoenix, plus an extra layer of confusion, resulting from the fact that nobody involved in the judgement process is actually the intended audience for a preschool character.

On the other hand, I was still pretty certain that this particular idea is going nowhere unless the originator gets some experienced creatives on board to overhaul it from the ground up.

Why am I confident that I’m right and the YouTube parents are wrong? In this particular case, I suppose I’m taking a leap of faith and assuming that those preschoolers are actually more discerning than their parents are. Children don’t like something, or at any rate they don’t keep coming back to it, just because it has bright colours. They are also interested in gripping, coherent stories and relatable characters. Sure, they’re not gripped by the same issues their parents are, or by the same issues that appeal to a different age bracket of children, but it’s still something they want and need. Yes, Bob the Builder has several machines which are distinguished by their bright colours, but they’re also distinguished by their child-like personalities – Dizzy the giggler, Scrambler the impulsive, Lofty the bag of nerves.

On top of this, I suspect that if they were viewing a new series on the BBC, these parents would apply a much higher standard than they use for a promo posted online with an appeal for comments.

So I shrugged off the enthusiastic comments and moved on. Professional ignores public – again. And remains pretty confident about doing so.

Of course, this raises the question, what is the basic checklist for viability in a children’s character? Sounds like a good idea for the next post.

Hesters Way library and why it matters

2010-11-16T06:01:00.000-08:00

Library closures are a hot topic at the moment; on the whole I think they are a Bad Thing, and I don’t want my current local library, which I adore with a passion, to be hit. However, if it vanished, I could still afford books, if not so many and such a wide range. Cuts have to be made somewhere and I could, albeit very reluctantly, understand the argument if the library in my affluent part of London was scaled back.

Not so with the library in Hesters Way, Cheltenham, which I have just read is threatened with closure unless volunteers step in to run it. And frankly, that translates as ‘it will be closed’, because who seriously imagines that a concern as large as a local library can be effectively be run by volunteers, particularly in an area that is locally associated with crime and antisocial behaviour? Yes, there may well be some at first, but when they burn out because of the thankless exploitation …?

Cheltenham has a largely-deserved reputation for gentility, but any town has its sink estates. One of the folk etymologies for ‘chav’ is that the it comes from the term ‘Cheltenham average’, coined by the Cheltenham Ladies College girls to describe the inhabitants of Hesters Way. I grew up there; in an ex-council house on the fringe rather than in one of the grim central blocks, but life still centered on ‘The Top’, Coronation Square, where the shops and library are. Our house had one shelf of books in the living room, plus a few titles that my parents were able to buy for me – and the endless supply I brought home from Hesters Way. My parents wanted me to be educated but weren’t readers themselves; in the library I was able to range at will.

Without it, I would probably have got books somehow. There was and is Cheltenham Central Library, but I couldn’t have visited there every day if I wanted, as I did with Hesters Way. Would it be different if I was growing up now? Possibly, if I had access to the internet, as I probably would if I had those same parents who pushed me to learn. If I lived in a workless family in a council flat looking out over the barbed-wire car-park and the half-empty row of discount shops, though, I’m not so sure. The grimmest blocks I remember from the 80s have now been flattened and rebuilt as more appealing houses, but if you go out of your door around there, the only thing worth seeing is the library. It’s not pretty – while I was still living there an attempt was made to give it floor to ceiling windows, which just resulted, with depressing predictability, in repeated smashings and the eventual application of semi-permanent boards – but the option is always there to go inside, and find something better.

With this cut, Gloucestershire County Council are going straight for the poorest, very likely because they think it won’t lose them support among real, i.e. wealthy, people.

And now, time to go back to work, as I’m on my lunchbreak at Penguin and it's 2.05. And also time to calm down: the Designer sitting next to me has complained about me banging the desk with my elbows and making it shake!

Writer's Forum lifts up the rock

2010-11-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

The process of creating tie-ins isn’t normally in the public eye, but this month in Writer’s Forum Magazine Anita Loughrey lifts up the rock and finds me underneath.

Anita interviews a different writer each month about research methods and subjects. I guess you can only feature a limited number of novelists before the frequency of hearing ‘I go to the library’ gets wearing, so she talked to me about watching TV episodes and liaising with production companies about the geography of fictional countries instead!

Do you want your publisher to be a brand?

2010-11-06T11:02:00.000-07:00

A new week, a new desk. As of last Thursday I’m spending a month or so at Penguin, covering for an editor who’s off sick. It’s very nice when publishing colleagues are so glad to see me, even when it’s not so much personal as down to the work they are about to get off their desk!

And I’m always interested to see the inside of another publisher. Of course, being a freelancer you have to be very careful not to go around spreading sensitive information, but the basic structuring of lists isn’t a secret. This year I’ve been in-house at Harper and Penguin, and within children’s fiction Harper has three unbranded departments – author fiction, picture books and licensing – while Penguin has lists with their own famous names – e.g. Warne, Puffin, Ladybird, BBC Children’s Books.

This is partly down to history and practicalities, of course: for example, Ladybird was once an independent company that Penguin then acquired, while the BBC are always going to want their tie-ins marked as BBC. But list profiles are also a kind of branding. One that Penguin is using and Harper isn’t. HarperCollins itself is too big to be a brand – it’s a kind of stamp, saying, ‘this book was approved by professionals’ but it’s not a brand like Puffin.

Does this mean HarperCollins Children’s is missing a trick in appealing to readers and authors who are beyond the ‘glad just to be published by anyone’ stage? Or does nobody care apart from us editors?

Freelancing vs in-house

2010-10-27T08:34:00.000-07:00

I’m back from my holidays! They were in Malta, and rather mixed. Snorkelling and archaeology = good. Torrential downpours, floating cars, shattered pavements and the army being called out to rescue people (not us) = bad, as is food poisoning. I’ve brought some of the latter home with me and during the second half of an interview I had today it tried to reassert itself, so please imagine your distinguished correspondent trying to glitter with employable genius while half her brain is concentrating on not breaking wind a la Boys 5-8.

In the Med, I didn’t do any work for the entire nine days, even on my own writing, which is a personal first since I went freelance.

Nine days!

Cue appearance above my head of flashing sign saying ‘BAD ANNA’ and deep personal conviction that the universe will punish me by never giving me any work opportunities again. The boyfriend said I needed a rest and I’m sure he’s right. But if there had been paid work to do I would have done it. I never get tired of part two of the equation whereby I do work and money results, and you can’t get to part two without invoking part one.

The ideal of freelancing, particularly the writing side, is that you work when you feel like it and potter around with a cup of tea. There’s a bit of truth in that when you’re doing a writing job at home, but on the whole the idea doesn’t map to my life. My life is more about being so excited by the opportunity to work all day and all night that I do just that on occasion, spurred by the fact that my non-publishing client is a government agency with 24/7 coverage.

So the freedom of freelancing, or full-time writing if you can get the sales figures, is really down to personality type: you are free to idle and just scrape by, or to exploit yourself until you fall over. If I go back to a full-time job, which I would like to do if the particular company I was talking to today wants me, I won’t miss feeling that I have to take everything that’s offered in case it all dries up. Nor will I miss going to bed at 3am or sending out letters to publishers I’ve never met telling them how great I am.

But I will miss that theoretical feeling of ‘hey, today I could just ignore everything and drink tea!’

Even though I know I can’t.

Up at 5am tomorrow…

The Campaign for Real Books

2010-10-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

It was sure to happen sooner or later – there is a Campaign for Real Books (www.campaignforrealbooks.org). I won’t recap everything the website says, as you can read it yourself. But the general gist of the statement from the anonymous founder(s?) seems to be that while Cambo doesn’t want to put a stop to ebooks, it wants to ensure the persistence of paper books.

The organisation hasn’t set the world alight yet, or apparently sparked any comment that I can find (wot? it’s not a hoax is it? it doesn’t seem to be), but they’re aiming for big things – the salvation of independent bookshops and libraries, along with the printed page.

So, would you join?

Being a jobbing editor I will go wherever the buying public leads. But without rehearsing the endless contemporary arguments for and against ebooks, on balance I like paper books and hope they continue to exist. I also like 10% discounts, and I certainly like independent bookshops, which obviously can’t survive without physical books. When I move house in a few weeks we’re going to have a local indie, and I intend to frequent it.

On the other hand, naming an organisation after the Campaign for Real Ale does, even to me in my early thirties, make it seem like it’s something for old people in sandals. If Cambo turns out to have a fusty image – so far it’s got a total of one webpage, so I can’t really judge – it could shoot itself in the foot by itself generating the notion that paper books are an anachronism being defended by an old guard, when I don’t know of anyone who actually thinks that (yet).

IMO the people who determine whether paper books can survive into the future won’t be the ones who can remember a time before ebooks, because one way or another we’re all biased. It will be down to the generations who grew up with both, and can compare them on an even footing.

Lately I’ve seen reports on research that suggests contemporary kids still rate printed books, but would they rate them enough to actually protest if they started dying out as Cambo predicts, now or in decades’ time? The ultimate decision on format survival will be theirs.

Not-quite banned books: I was a tweenage Golliwog Exterminator

2010-10-05T04:59:00.001-07:00

It’s not Banned Books Week any more. But while it was, it made me think of my own job as a censor. For among my many roles in life has been that of Chief Golliwog Exterminator on some classics lists.

The task involved looking through material and deciding which parts of it were morally fit to be (re)published. Just one golliwog hiding up a tree in an illustration, and the whole cartoon strip was out.

The idea was to avoid reprinting anything unsuitable for modern children and also, of course, to avoid getting the publisher’s arse sued off (for example, there was a stir around the republication of Tintin in the Congo). One provocative but literally true way of looking at things would be to say I was eliminating all the black characters, because there certainly weren’t any in there apart from the gollies.

The distinctions between Tintin and the material I was looking at runs along two lines: age and culture. Tintin is recognised as being a canonical cultural artefact, while the stuff I was sorting through would have been classed as general nostalgia. As for the age issue, Tintin has a large adult readership and the Congo book was published with a belly band (a strip of paper around the book, warning that it’s not suitable for children) and booksellers were advised to shelve it in the adult section.

Those wanting Tintin in the Congo out of print altogether seem wrongheaded to me. For people like me who are white and comfortably off in a white majority society, it’s easy enough these days to understand that racism is bad, but it also seems rather remote; something done by bad/stupid people that I can comfortably look down on. Reading a relatively recent text that comes from my own culture and contains racist assumptions brings home how easy the casual acceptance of an unjust status quo actually is. As an adult I’m not going to suck those assumptions unquestioningly off the page and interiorise them, but learn from them.

So it does seem reasonable to me that it’s OK to republish Tintin in the Congo in an adult edition but not OK to republish material that contains casual racism and package it as being for children.

As usual there is a continuum of censorship, with calls to suppress a ‘pornographic’ book about a rape survivor (the Speak debacle) at the extreme end, and concerns about not inculcating racism in children at the end of the spectrum where most people mentally hang out.

It does boil down to accepting a degree of censorship though – the process just happens at the ‘decision to (re)publish’ stage, rather than out in society. Which seems fine, as long as right-thinking people are in charge of said decision

That’s the liberal dilemma: I think I am a right-thinking person…

Speech tags: a defence

2010-09-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

‘Oh no,’ she moaned sadly. ‘I overdid the speech tags again!’

Well, I may have done. The editor can take them out if absolutely necessarily. Thing is, contrary to the advice of those who would obliterate them on principle, I quite like speech tags in moderation. Characters of mine have frequently growled, and in extreme cases the large blokey ones have been moved to grate, though I’m not really keen on that one. And none of my characters have ever vocalised, quoth or ejaculated (as far as I can remember). I have some standards.

Smiling I think is a borderline case. It often gets used as an example of bad speech tagging, along with frowning and grimacing. I agree the latter are no good, because they’re physically impossible. But if you smile while articulating a word, it does slightly affect the sound. Not very much though, so I try to keep smiles on the lips and out of the vocal chords.

But my characters groan and mutter and yell and scold, all right. Sometimes, speech tags really do contribute to the story. Consider the following:

‘I’m sorry!’ he whispered.
‘I’m sorry!’ he snapped.
‘I’m sorry!’ he cried.

If you ditch the tag and use ‘said’ in any of the above cases, you lose something. I suppose the contrary argument is that you should be able to imply the character’s feelings by some other, subtler means. I don’t always see why, if a – well-chosen – speech tag does it in one.

When waving the stick of editorial office I take out speech tags when they are piling up too thickly, but I don't make a point of it unless necessary.

‘I won’t condemn all speech tags sight unseen!’ she concluded defiantly.

Ah, behold my deliberately overcooked adverbs. I use those things on occasion too. Just not (except here) with descriptive speech tags.

Almost True book launch

2010-09-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

So I left my flat and, I tell you, there are PEOPLE out there. They are REAL, or at any rate author Keren David and Karen Ball of Working Partners are. Also Maurice Lyons of Franklin Watt, who looks gratifyingly like what part of my inner soul feels a publisher should look. Like.

The one thing lacking was a sufficiency of glasses, and so there was no alcohol for me and I was obliged to mingle with humanity unadulterated, which makes me look at people funny and hide in the corner. But the reason for the lack of glasses was a good one – I was at kerensd’s book launch and she is highly popular. Speak not of one author, a publicist and a dog, this was a packed-out Waterstones. And, cleverly, FW had found a real-life teenage boy to read from Keren’s Almost True. He did not sniff any drugs, mug anyone or even listen to repetitive music for at least the couple of hours he was there. So it’s true; like Keren’s very engaging central character Ty, teenage boys are human!

Nevertheless, I found a corner. I can’t help it; in the children’s department of a bookshop I make a beeline for the licensing section and note what’s selling etc. Tonight I learned that Peppa Pig, Dr Who and Ben 10 are popular. Um, big news. Really didn’t need to spend time working that out. Still, Almost True was tonight's sell-out. Time for a range of lift-the-flap tie-ins? Hm...

Typers and Artists

2010-09-14T08:02:00.000-07:00

Painters paint, musicians play music and writers… type? Type writing? We certainly don’t write, in the physical sense, or at any rate I don’t. I might have to jot things in the margins of manuscripts or write a post-it note, but that’s it.

I was one of the last generations to grow up without word-processing (actually I was an early adopter at university, with my own second-hand computer churning out essays in horrible dot matrix Courier New) so my handwriting got pretty good. Now it’s decayed rather embarrassingly.

The implications for writers of a sea change in the normal way of working, from paper to screen, were discussed in great detail some years ago, when the great switch was happening, but now it’s more or less taken for granted. I’ve been thinking about it again though, since finding out that Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, is now writing via Voice Recognition software, with his assistant then tidying things up. Pratchett, as most people will know, sadly has Alzheimer’s.

His latest YA book I Shall Wear Midnight has been out for a week or so, and like a lot of readers I was anxious not to spot any diminution of the author’s narrative powers. I did though – but I don’t think it’s down to Alzheimer’s so much as voice rec. There is a slightly unfocused feeling to the whole book, with some excellent passages, but an overall sense of everything not hanging together. For example, the characterisation of Nanny Ogg, who is a core character in Discworld stories, is rich and deep, viewed from new angles as well as old, while Eskarina Smith, who has not been seen since she was nine years old some 30 books ago, and whose return was eagerly awaited by fans, is sadly sketchy. The book is like a garden with some beautiful flowers and scattered spots of bare earth.

Yet there’s no real evidence that Pratchett’s powers of invention are failing, because there are some beautifully realised small details. What I think is happening is that Pratchett can dictate large chunks of perfect Oggery, because he knows Nanny very well already, but for a new, or to all intents and purposes new, character the system of dictating to his assistant doesn’t allow him to do the intensive writing and rewriting and making 20 tiny changes and then making them back that typing on a computer allows. That’s how I grow my first drafts into final ones – it’s not a sequence of discrete versions, it’s cumulative. You can do that with hands-on word-processing in a way you couldn’t with handwriting (the MS would have been shredded to a pulp by the time a quarter of my changes were made, in some cases) and you can’t (very much) if you are dictating.

All this reminded me that my whole method of writing depends on having a computer, and also on being able to type 100wpm on the thing, brain to screen with no intermediaries of which I am consciously aware. Without a computer I would lose my ability to intensively redraft, and so my whole method of writing. I’m quite sure that my work would be weaker without constant redrafting, but what I don’t know is whether I could learn to do without it if I had to. I’ve never had to, and I’m rather hoping I never will.

So, A&C Black, get with the programme, be realistic, and produce the 2012 Typers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. No?

Another rich author

2010-08-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

I noticed in the Mirror and the Sun the other night (don’t look at me funny, I get paid to read the tabloids sometimes) reports about a six-year-old boy with a huge book deal. Being under deadline, I skimmed the articles and assumed that the real story behind them was something fairly prosaic: a ghostwritten book with a cute kid to front it, the idea of some canny publisher or other.

You get a lot of articles like that in the feature-y hinterlands of the less hardcore newspapers: sundry variations on "Grandma/preschooler/budgie gets £millions advance for charming tale". By reinforcing the myth of authorial riches to casual readers, they do real writers few favours. However, they’re such printable human interest stories it’s unlikely they will go away.

The Leo Hunter coverage turned out to be of unusual interest though, as I discovered later that this time I actually wasn’t being cynical enough, and the reality is even less inspiring than I thought. Looks like the gap between public perception and reality is getting even wider. Now it’s not even public perception = writer makes £££s, while reality = writer makes 10p a book, it’s public perception = writer makes £££s, while reality = writer (or his mum) PAYS £££s. We've left exaggeration behind and launched into the realms of mirage.

Most of the reasons why this situation is unhealthy are too obvious to need rehearsing. The one I’ve been thinking about though is more indirect, and concerns the effect of the myths on the already shaky perceived value of books, and what this will mean for the definitely/probably/possibly forthcoming ebook revolution. In the music world, it’s long been understood that record labels take a high proportion of an album’s selling price, but many people don’t realise that likewise a book’s publisher gets much more of the price than the author (necessarily so, because of the expenses of printing, marketing etc). So while plenty of illegal downloading goes on there’s also a bit of sympathy for bands fighting The Man, and fans do recognise that if they don’t pay for music in some way there will be less of it to enjoy.

But neither authors nor publishers have that romantic aura. If you believe an author is by definition rich, and probably gets about £5 of the £6.99 you pay for her latest paperback, then you will feel less guilty about illegally downloading that book instead. The author can take the loss because she’s an author, and they’re rich, aren’t they, all these newspaper articles prove it. The reductio ad absurdam is that eventually nobody will earn money from writing content while every other lifestyle page has a “Grandad gets 10-book deal after showing top agent his shopping list” story – pasted from a press release because the publication can’t afford journalists any more.

I have to admit that this situation appeals to my sense of the absurd, only not to my wallet, or my deeper sensibilities. The media puff around new authors does inject a little harmless sunshine into the lives of people who think “I could write a book”, briefly imagine doing so and becoming rich, then turn the page. But it’s not harmless to everyone. When Leo Hunter is old enough to understand about vanity publishing, he’s going to be an early entrant into a large company of very disappointed people.

Learning what a story is

2010-08-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Do you think series fiction is evil? Well, ‘evil’ is possibly an overstatement, but some people definitely consider it inherently unchallenging. I’m thinking particularly of extensive series for the very young – Rainbow Magic et cetera.

I must admit I would probably once have instinctively shared this feeling. Formulaic, repetitive stuff! Who wants that?

The answer is of course, most young children. Repetition to them is not dullness but reassurance and a chance to establish mastery of something that is initially very new. At that age you are learning what a story is, what archetypes are, how to read new words on a micro level and understand on a macro level how ideas weave together to make a story rather than a list.

The argument in favour of repetitive series goes something like this:

Child is suspicious of books. Child acquires series fiction book and finds it accessible and digestible. Child likes the experience and wants another. Repeat ad many-am. Child has bookshelf of many books. Child thinks ‘I like books. I’m familiar with books. Books are for me!’ Happy reading ever after.

This strikes me as pretty convincing. It won’t be like that for every kid; some will seek books on their own and some will just not be interested whatever they are offered. But long series get books on shelves, and for every mum who groans at being expected to buy book number N in an ever-expanding series, there is another who is relieved that junior is finding a way into reading.

So dismissing series fiction as a negative influence is a bit like saying, ‘Bike stabilisers, how wussy! Either you start riding properly at once, or just don’t bother’. Some kids will go ahead and succeed anyway, but you’re removing a potential source of help.

Among the baked beans - need vs want

2010-08-11T06:01:00.000-07:00

My last post provoked a comment that brings up a huge area of discussion, so I’ve brought it forward to a new post.

Catdownunder said that readers need meat and vegetables (i.e. challenging books) and I replied “What readers need is a side issue, it’s about how many units you can get into Tesco.”

Anon then said: But... Tesco are pretty good at selling stuff. The Tesco buyer only wants to stock books that s/he expects to sell lots of, and his/her judgement about that is probably fairly sound, since Tesco are pretty good at selling stuff. So what's the difference between "what readers want" and "what Tesco will stock"?

My original comment was a bit gnomic and designed to avoid going into discursive detail but I guess I’d better do it now. Broadly Anon is right but s/he has changed a key word – ‘need’ into ‘want’. And supermarkets are a particularly idiosyncratic, if increasingly dominant, arena of bookselling.

Most people shopping in supermarkets want a book to keep the kids quiet or to give to granddad for Christmas. Most people who consider themselves lovers of literature feel that they need challenging, exciting writing to make their lives complete. Cat is talking about that latter impulse, while publishers are catering to the former – because it’s perceived to have more money in it (or, never mind ‘more money’ at the moment, it’s perceived to provide enough money to enable publisher survival).

Of course this is a gross simplification and provokes all sorts of spin-off questions and accusations about elitism, etc. But it’s broadly based in the truth – ignore said truth and you won’t sell any books. In my case, many a book I’ve worked on has graced the shelves of a supermarket, and many a book I’ve loved has been considered elitist and difficult. So I personally benefit from both sides. But if the supermarket side of the equation becomes so dominant that it’s the only game in town and meatier books cease to be published altogether because they are so unprofitable (self-pubbing is really not (yet) an answer because you just can’t get the credibility and distribution) then a lot of people have lost something they love, just to provide the supermarkets with the 0.3% or so of their turnover that books constitute. And the other crucial point is that readers can’t want things they never find out about. What if the next big popular genre, the next Paranormal Romance say, never gets started because nobody wanted to take a risk on the initial book? A perfect circle that excludes innovation will help no-one. Even the supermarkets 'need' to avoid that (except they don't need it very much, as if books ceased to be profitable for them they would simply drop the category).

In the past ten years publishing has been heading more and more towards the commercial-only model. Many people in the business will agree it’s gone too far in that direction, but argue there’s nothing else that could have been done in the current climate.

Also, a side note about supermarket buyers. Essentially the publisher has to do most of the buyers’ work for them – the publisher can only offer stock that is sure to sell well, because if it doesn’t then the supermarket will stop dealing with that publisher. Some supermarket buyers choose children’s books mostly on the basis of what their own kids like (though of course some are more diligent). They can do this because any publisher who wants to stay in business is only offering them the cream of their range to start with, and then paying them thousands just for putting the books on their shelves.

The consolations of proofreading

2010-07-29T14:40:00.000-07:00

Proofreading was not very exciting or glamorous when I last posted about it, and it’s still not very exciting and glamorous, unless there was a revolution while I didn’t notice because I was at home proofreading. It does however have to be done, sometimes by me in between all my more glitzy assignments.

What proofreading can do for the jobbing editor is to get you out of your little corner of publishing. As well as kids’ stuff, a book of anecdotes about ageing has recently crossed my desk. In the latest development, with a mighty thump, I just deposited upon its battle-scarred surface the six inches of proofs and related documents for the 560pp ‘Offender Management’.

Now that’s definitely outside the kids’ publishing field. Which means it’s not going to chomp my own creativity the way intensive editing in my own field does. I foresee a fortnight of spending half the day on my original YA novel and half the day in the world of probation theory coming up, and both jobs will probably be enhanced by the mental workout provided by the other.

Like most people, I would like to have so many gigs in the exact field I want that I am in a position to turn down work. But as Nicola Morgan noted on her blog a few weeks ago, even successful novelists with significant back catalogues are starting to feel the pinch enough for them to need to diversify. Looks like I’m ahead of the game, then...

Moonlighting

2010-07-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

At the moment, this blog is only getting updated about once a fortnight.
This is because if I don’t have anything to say, I tend not to say it.
That may not be a very good self-promotion strategy… but I guess if I
prioritised self-promotion I wouldn’t be an editor.

I have been off to one side of the book world and working for the
government a fair bit, as I usually do in summer because, basically,
they pay far more money than publishing does. I live on beans to a
lesser extent than a lot of editors I know, because of this two-strand
approach to my career.

My first publishing salary was 14.5k, and I was so excited to be an
Editorial Assistant(!!!) that the fact that this was a two grand drop
from the glorious sum I had previously been earning as a secretary (my
route into the industry) seemed immaterial. Ten years on, my tolerance
for making do is a lot lower.

This gradual removal of the stardust drives a lot of talented people
out of publishing; they go via brand management into other industries,
or do a law conversion course, or just get pregnant and don’t come
back. Nobody senior pretends this is great, but then nor do they
pretend that there isn’t an eager queue of replacements wanting to be
editors. There’s not a lot of impetus for change.

If you survive, you either become a manager or a freelancer. Or
possibly turn full-time author – in which case you can easily end up
aspiring to beans as the long-lost good life. Editorial work, at least
in recent times, has always been very competitive and modestly paid, and
now there’s the risk of the industry evaporating if, as some
predictions have it, free digital content eats the market.

People will keep working in publishing for as long as the field
recognisably exists, because – I hope – many people will continue to
love reading, so it’s an attractive field. There is also no
requirement for particular qualifications, in contrast to many
other professions so you can do it even if you are like me and somehow have three non-vocational degrees.

But I have to confess to being glad it’s not the only field I have a
toehold in. (Even if all the government jobs are about to vanish as
well…)

Editorial interference

2010-07-07T03:21:00.000-07:00

Behold, the horror that lurks beyond manuscript acceptance! They’ll take your book and rewrite it into mush!

Or so it is feared by authors, and not entirely without reason. I know a writer who is regularly in horrors about what the copy editor does to his elegant sentences. The trouble is that in the genre he’s writing, elegance is not considered as desirable as terseness. He rather wishes he hadn’t written himself into that genre, I suspect. The copy editor presumably feels, with justification, that she knows what the market wants, and is trying to knock corners off the product so it fits in the packaging.

I’ve done some of that sort of thing, but editorial interference duties come in at different levels for different books. At one extreme, I’ve worked on facsimile editions, where you sometimes even leave the typos in, and on the other I’ve taken a hacksaw to stories to make them fit into suddenly halved paginations etc. The worst scenario is where you have to rewrite something dreadful because your boss is committed to publishing it, and the author does not see the situation in the same light, but fortunately that doesn’t happen very often.

Getting your editors to interfere to just the right degree can be an unexpected hassle for publishers too. The style manual for the classic reissue books I’ve been working on contains dire warnings about foolish meddlers of yore, who persisted in sending in query lists full of suggestions like “This would be better rephrased as…” This is emphatically not what is wanted if you are reprinting a classic text. I did however once find a subtle typo in The House at Pooh Corner that had gone unnoticed for about a decade’s worth of editions, and duly corrected it, to my great glory (as these things go).

Editing new novels is of course rather different, but it’s still a balancing act, often between author and market. It’s dispiriting as an editor to change something that you know the author is attached to, but that you also know can’t possibly stand because it’s just not appropriate for the market (children’s publishing has a lot of this kind of pitfall for obvious reasons). Nobody relishes the author coming back in a snit, or worse still complaining about them.

The extent to which we should interfere is something that editors have to learn too, and sometimes we do get it wrong.

Reprints of the future

2010-06-24T11:33:00.001-07:00

There’s nothing like complaining about not being busy to bring on… well, you guessed it. I’m not so much overwhelmed with work as with rushing around putting offers in on flats, admittedly, but my desk also has more proofs on it than at time of last posting.

In addition to the current stuff, I probably have some work for a reprints publisher in the pipeline, which I’m quite looking forward to. Getting paid for rereading my favourite childhood books, what’s not to like? (Well, sometimes at least, there’s the bit where you realise that the books you loved were actually borderline fascist/inane/just plain dreadful – but I’m hoping that won’t happen this time.)

Anyway, behold, reprints from my golden youth, or more accurately from the time when I was miserable and hadn’t built up many internal resources, so books were particularly vital. This set me to wondering what today’s children will be looking back fondly on, and buying in folio editions from reprint publishers, in 30 years’ time. Will the predictions of the death of books mean that there is no new generation of books of this type? Or will there be hordes of Rowlings and Meyers in gold leaf?

Come to think of it though, the reprints I’m likely to be working on are of books that were already old when I was a kid. The contemporary tales which I have the strongest memories of are, as ‘death of the book’ predictors foresaw at the time, TV shows – Dungeons & Dragons and Mysterious Cities of Gold. Book-wise I was on a diet of Blyton and Tintin, then Tolkien and CS Lewis.

On the other hand, I was a child in the 80s, when books for children weren’t the glamour industry they have, surprisingly, become, or come to be seen as. There is a lot more around today that could potentially be regurgitated as golden memories in 30 years’ time. I would like to think some of it will be, and that the 2040s equivalent of me now won’t just be sentimental about Xbox games. After all, I can get sentimental about Beeb games, but books retain my interest for longer.

You read a book once (usually) but the impression it makes can last a lifetime; it will take decades to see if those impressions are being laid down for the current generation.

Packagers, the unexploited market??

2010-06-11T06:48:00.000-07:00

Editors don’t have to take rejections, they dish them out! (insert evil laugh)

Unless you’re a freelance editor, when publishers get to reject you too. D’oh! Talk about inviting the worst of both worlds.

Of course, I am wonderfully experienced, have wonderful contacts and am generally wonderful (stop believing that and I vanish in a puff of dust), but just occasionally it’s possible for the contact book to run dry. “We’ll need people over the summer,” is something I’ve heard quite a lot, but nobody’s actually ditched the future tense yet.

Building contacts is the way to go, but it is also wise to regularly pollinate the market with CVs. Generally this produces good results, if you target them carefully. I don’t seem to have had much luck with my latest batch though.

I did some research into small book packagers who specialise in the kind of novelty formats I have lots of experience in. Packagers are often quoted as an underexploited market for freelancers. There’s some problems with this, though:

1) Visiting the company’s website to find they’ve gone bust. Erk.
2) Getting back a fulsome email that says ‘You’ve got just the kind of expertise we need but the economic situation is so bad we can’t afford to do any new projects at the moment’. Erk.
3) Something one packager told me, which is that increasingly packagers are producing material specifically for the American market, and those clients are specifically requesting American writers and editors.

Hmm. Market knowledge. You can’t beat it. Even when it’s really depressing. Publishing still has the economic jitters in a major way; I rather fear that nobody’s budget is going up.

Still, the smart freelancer has her finger in many pies. Publishing industry? I scorn your fickleness, I shall work for the government and earn more money (sadly true; most things earn more money than publishing).

But it’s much more enjoyable to work on books. Come on, it’s summer, time for the editors to go on holiday and their bosses to call me in a panic!

Copy-editing vs proofreading - what's the difference and who cares?

2010-06-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

You’d think that since I do some of both for a living, I’d be really clear on the distinction between copy-editing and proofreading. I am in theory, but inevitably if you’re officially doing one you will do a bit of the other too. Copy-editors will remove typos and proofreaders will spot tiny plotholes remaining in the text. It’s a bit like having two people clean the same patch of floor, with the expectation that the second one is going to find a lot less muck but there’s bound to be something that the first one missed.

Proofreading, while not obviously exciting, and generally worse-paid than copyediting, can be quite enjoyable, particularly if the author and editor have already taken great care over their labour of love and you are just saving them from bloopers. Messier MSS can be a bit of a problem, as you scrawl everywhere, wondering if you are overstepping the bounds of your job.

I’ve just been proofreading some charming books for a very small publisher, and I think their editor was very glad to get the job off her desk; all too often, when the budget is squeezed, the editor of the book will end up having to do the proofreading herself.

This looks good to the finance department, but it’s not good for the book. By the time you have edited a book, you’ve read it at least half a dozen times and you don’t stand much more chance than the author does of noticing the kind of errors that hide in plain sight. One book I edited while working in-house a while back has an Amazon review complaining about the typos, and this kind of thing is demoralising for an editor – there wasn’t money for a proofreader, which is why the job wasn’t done to the highest standard, but of course the public don’t know that, they just think the author or editor (depending on their level of awareness of the industry) is a bit rubbish.

Even in the best-edited book I would expect to find one error, even if it’s only an extra space or an infelicitous repeated word, every couple of pages. Proofreading is really not a luxury extra. Authors, demand that your publishers provide it!

Then again, there’s always a high-risk alternative strategy of laissez-faire. Recently Penguin Australia made a notorious proofreading cock-up, and ‘ground black pepper’ turned into ‘ground black people’ in a pasta cookbook. I’ve got to wonder if some corners were being cut on the proofreading there. It turned out fine for them though, as after all the publicity sales of the book in question jumped fourfold.

Still, I wouldn’t recommend you try that at home.

"A basement flat in Lewisham"

2010-05-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

I’m even busier than usual at the moment and not finding much time to update this blog – or do other things that will help me build a professional profile for that matter, oh dear – because a flat move may be on the horizon. It’s because of this man who turned up in my life. A strange, hairy man who has a PhD in maths and works for the civil service but who looks more like ‘a writer’ than I do. And I need somewhere to put him.

‘A basement flat in Lewisham’ is my boyfriend’s current catchphrase – this being where we predict, in pessimistic moments, that we will end up living. It arises from this Comment Is Free article from a short while back, which proclaims that comfort is bad for literature and a basement flat in Lewisham is what’s needed. It describes how the Hosking Houses Trust is, or was, having trouble finding an author of sufficient calibre for free accommodation in an idyllic location plus a £750 month bursary.

The article gets pilloried by readers, in the approved Comment is Free fashion, for buying into the old chestnut that Suffering = Art. I think the commenters are largely right in their criticism but aside from the obvious folly of romanticising distress I was struck more by an issue that wasn’t raised: the question of who is going to want or be able to take a year out of their life to put all other commitments on ice and live away from their family on a small stipend. Not that many people, I would hazard a guess, even though the Hosking arrangement does sound very pleasant for as long as it lasts.

I couldn’t have applied for the bursary because it’s specifically for a woman over the age of 40, nor do I think it likely to be aimed at the kind of writing that I currently have published. But I really wouldn’t want to anyway, because I can’t take that chunk out of my life. Having a room of my own is fantastic and vital – the criteria of our current flat-hunting is founded on the need to have a hidey-hole each – but a whole year of isolated contemplation would in fact bring my writing career, such as it is, to a disastrous halt.

Really, neither misery nor overprotected circumstances are conducive to productivity; what’s required is involvement with life (and the publishing industry), even if you are an anti-social type like me.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering, Lewisham is hardly the apogee of urban blight anyway. I’ve lived just up the road from there and my best friend still lives in Lewisham itself. It’s OK, but I’m not about to live there now, because after 10 years of working like mad, saving like madder and making some wise property choices I’m very sanguine and unromantically untormented about the fact that I can afford somewhere nicer.

…Probably. Just don’t ask me about explaining freelance income to mortgage lenders; it’s not pretty.

Manuscript appraisal - it works!

2010-05-12T15:06:00.000-07:00

No, really, it seems to be true. I’ve only done a relatively small amount of work for private clients, as opposed to publishers, since I set up my website in January, but I’m finding I like it, and the clients seem to as well.

Obviously it would be inappropriate to go into details about commissions, but I’ve found that working for individuals differs for working for a publisher in several ways. Working in-house can, unfortunately, particularly in times of stress (i.e. often, given contemporary publishing workloads) lead to viewing authors as a bit of an obstacle. They produce raw text, which is nice, but then you have to try to cook said text … and worst case scenario you end up with a trashed deadline, a lump of charcoal and an author screaming ‘But it was meant to be sushi!’

By contrast, as a freelance editor or other advisor in the author’s employ, your mission is to help the client tune their style so that they won’t end up in the above situation.

Before I started taking individual clients I was a bit worried that I would be taking money for old rope. As any honest professional will tell you, in publishing no opinion is totally reliable, so I certainly can’t lead anyone along the golden path to publication. But once I started, I realised just how much technical knowledge I have, and how helpful that can be to unpublished writers. I’m also good at explaining my reasoning clearly, which not all editors are; sometimes you can say to a colleague ‘this just doesn’t read right’ and waggle your fingers and wrinkle their nose, and they’ll get it, but this is not an approach that can fairly be used on paying customers. They need a clear explanation and suggestions for how to make constructive changes.

I still don’t know exactly where I stand on the question of whether you can teach creative writing. But you can certainly demonstrate the use of critical tools, pass those tools to the writer and send them away with a stronger book.

So I ought to go and get seriously promoting myself and acquiring more clients, I suppose. The trouble is, there is no obvious central channel for this, and so it's never quite a priority above dealing with all the existing work, and if I’ve got half an hour that can be spent fishing for work from MegaPublishing Inc or from Jo Bloggs then it will be spent on MegaPublishing, because they are more likely to provide repeat business.

But I do love these smaller, personal jobs. World, please keep them coming!

Multitasking for writers

2010-04-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

What would you do, if you made, say, £10,000 a year from writing, year after year? Do a day job part-time? Give up on writing? Focus purely on writing and accept living on beans in a hovel?

Back when I Wanted to Be a Writer I imagined myself working on one grand project. Then another project. Then another etc. Maybe take a week’s holiday in between great works. That sort of thing.

Then I was an in-house editor, and I worked on about fifty books at once, which should have been a warning. And now I am a freelancer and the name of the projects is Legion, and I can’t leave them in the office.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very far from complaining. In fact it’s exciting and fulfilling when thing are going well, which they definitely are at the moment. It certainly beats the pit of the recession when I had almost no publishing work (and consequently was in fact earning better money moonlighting for the government; ah publishing, how we love thee). But the balance between doing the current lot of work and seeking the next lot of work is a constant consideration for a freelancer, and indeed for anyone who Wants to Be a Writer but isn’t willing to simply quit the day job and write a novel on the gamble that someone will publish it in the end.

Writing-wise, I’m at the stage of having people sometimes invite me to pitch for stuff rather than me having to sidle up to the glass door and pull faces at them, which is very welcome indeed, but the pitching still takes time. Today I had to spend an hour in the local library hunting up books on an abstruse subject; then I’ll have to read them, then do the pitch, and I might not get the work. In a couple of days’ time I’ve got an interview for a temporary editorial in-house stint. I should start planning a concept for a publisher friend I met at the London Book Fair who said he was specifically looking for books about vampire gerbils (not the actual subject, obviously). I should follow up other LBF contacts. I need to work up a sample edit for a potential private client, and do a blog post (uh, this one) because if you don’t blog people forget you exist and so you don’t get work – etc etc.

All quite promising except – AAGH HANG ON NONE OF THAT MAKES MONEY. It might. I’m sure some of it will, but who knows which bit, and until that happens I really had better finish the current write-for-hire project and edit the current private client’s MS and make sure the government want me for that weekend in May, because I’m not about to lose that income strand. Not to mention finish a project of my own that I’d like to get out there, and, preferably, clean the flat before I contract something fatal (I did do the washing, but moving the washing had the effect of forcing me to look at the state of the surfaces underneath).

I do get holidays, of course, just like I thought I would when I was still aspiring, but they are booked months in advance and the work crowds messily and clashingly around them and quite often invades their turf, to the boyfriend’s exasperation.

So that is me, and I have to say I have more than enough familiarity with the opposite situation to take great delight in being busy and able to strive for a living daily. Some people close to me can’t work due to chronic illness and I know the toll that inactivity takes. But it does all rather depend on me not going down with food poisoning for, or having a return of the stress ailment bequeathed to me by a former employer. If that happens, the wheels fall off.

It’s modern life, I suppose. Would you do it? I know some of you do.

Q&A on picture and novelty books

2010-04-13T01:43:00.001-07:00

Today my Q&A on picture and novelty books is published over at the splended Help! I Need a Publisher! blog. Thanks to Nicola Morgan for hosting it.

Approved!

2010-04-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

Hurrah! A certain series fiction manuscript finally got approved. That's 'series' as in 'written to brief for a packager' so I can't claim creative autonomy, but these books should be getting considerable marketing spend and exposure.

Of course, the project is totally confidential so I can’t actually say anything about it. But hey, relief!

Hopefully the series will be announced in the next few months, and get an official pub date.

Writing for children or parents? Or the Waterstone’s buyer?

2010-04-06T11:57:00.001-07:00

Every time I finish reading a book, I go and see how it’s been reviewed on Amazon. It’s not that I need people to tell me what to think (I hope) but if I find intelligent reviews they quite often clarify my reactions for me.

Of course, finding useful reviews is not always possible. For the last children’s book I read, What I Was by Meg Rosoff, I came across an adult reader complaining that too many of the reviews were by adults, and she would have been more interested in reviews from the target age group of the book.

This is a fundamental problem for children’s authors, of course: are you writing to appeal to children, or to appeal to the gatekeepers who decide what they get to read? The younger the age you are writing for, the greater the need to address both constituencies until you get down to the picture book age group, where an adult carer will probably spend as much time with the book, reading it aloud, as the child does.

Also, there’s a third party involved, one not so visible outside the industry, the professional buyers from the small number of major retailers. The pool is ever shrinking – we just lost Borders – and Amazon and Waterstone’s are now the biggest consideration for most publishers, with companies like WHSmith and The Book People looming large for particular deals. Probably the most significant opinion outside the publishing house will be that of the corporate buyer who, the publisher thinks, is most likely to be interested in books of this type.

Writers want to reach readers and most children’s authors are primarily interested in appealing to children, but in the industry certain authors are known for winning prizes and wowing adults without necessarily selling many books or enthusing many children. It’s a niche that a small number of authors occupy successfully, though they probably earn less royalties than they would like.

Do not actually try this at home, but in theory one of the best ways for a children’s writer to further their career would be to stalk the major buyers, work out what they like and name major characters after their offspring. After all, you’ve only got to get through an agent and a publisher to get to the buyers – to reach actual children you’ve got to get through agent, publisher, buyer, parent and/or teacher.

VAT on novelty books - no more carousels?

2010-03-30T23:22:00.000-07:00

The Bookseller reported recently that novelty books face an unexpected VAT threat from an EU ruling that carousel books are not to be categorised as ‘picture books’ but ‘playsets’. (Carousels are the kind of book that you open out to form a 360 degree shape, tying the covers together with a ribbon.)

This is not great news for children’s publishing, as in many cases slapping VAT on a book makes it unpublishable. To quote publisher Tony Potter in The Bookseller: "I will stop making this type of book because the VAT makes them uneconomic. You can’t increase the price of a £10 book at retail in the present climate. Our production costs have risen dramatically in the past 18 months and the new VAT charge of 17.5% on this type of book makes them unviable."

The cost rises he’s referring to are an increase in the price of paper and the weakening of Sterling. Even without that, for a publisher developing a new novelty format, the first question is quite often whether or not it’s going to attract VAT. If the answer is yes, the format does not proceed. It doesn't help that VAT applicability decisions are notoriously random, and formats often seem to be approved or disapproved as VAT-free not based on a coherent system but on which inspector happens to be on the job at the time.

Carousels are, mostly, a high-end luxury format – which means they don’t print or sell very many copies. So I don’t foresee many appearing from British publishers in the next few years. Plus if an all-paper format like a carousel is going to be a ‘playset’, then, as Potter warns, just about any format could be under threat.

My boyfriend's opinion as an interested lay observer of the book industry is that in theory it wouldn't do much harm to have VAT on all books, as they’re not an essential in the same category as food. Unfortunately in reality this would instantly wipe out the existing meagre profit margins on many kinds of book.

Perhaps if certain formats have to get more expensive or vanish, then the customer will accept a price rise, but I wouldn’t want to be the publisher banking on that!

Annuals

2010-03-25T00:16:00.001-07:00

A perfect illustration of one of the points in my post on tie-ins just popped up on the Bookseller -

http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/114901-an-annual-complaint.html

Now, each of these bestellers certainly had a writer or writers (not me in this case as I didn't do any annuals last year), but Caroline Sheldon clearly has no truck with the idea of them having authors, or even being real books.

I can definitely see what she means, but if tie-ins are to be kept off the bestseller lists, then I want the proportion of tie-in publishing profits that goes to shoring up unprofitable original fiction departments kept back and paid to me instead, please.

What makes a good tie-in book?

2010-03-23T20:59:00.000-07:00

Editorial Anonymous had a wee swipe at tie-ins in her latest post – and then retracted it in the comments, so no hard feelings there.

It got me to thinking about the tie-in market though, and how it’s perceived from the outside: often pretty negatively, sometimes for reasons with a foundation in justice, but more often not.

Scoff at the tie-in (or brand publishing) market at your peril. It’s something like a quarter of the entire UK children’s market, though this is tailing off slightly as factors such as the reduced funding for children’s TV begin to bite.

Specifically, EA was taking issues with the more eccentric aspects of a post by a US tie-in writer called Dean Wesley Smith. I agree with a lot of her comments, but she seemed to be suggesting that his claims to be ‘bestselling’ are dubious. Without actually looking up any information, I strongly suspect his books are bestsellers; my tie-ins certainly are. Books I’ve written have been in the children’s books top 10, featured in newspaper promotions and racked up total sales of over two million.

The important distinction, and one that I am always careful to acknowledge when talking about my ‘bestselling’ books, is that the level of sales has more to do with the words ‘Ben 10’ and ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ on bookcovers, not with my involvement, particularly as so many tie-ins for children don’t even have the author’s name on.

On the other hand, my input certainly isn’t irrelevant. TV tie-in books demand skills of their own.

NB: There’s an article, What is licensed publishing?, at my website if you’re interested in the industry side, such as the commissioning process; here I’m going to write a bit about where the skill lies in tie-in writing and what distinguishes the good from the bad.

What skills do you need to write a tie-in?

Tie-ins are, obviously, a job of craft rather than art. A writer’s most indispensable attribute, apart from familiarity with the original TV series, is the ability to fit their personal creativity into the strict model presented by someone else’s world. You will be presented with set characters, set wordcount and possibly a set plot. The challenge is to absorb the style of the original and convincingly reproduce it; no matter how good your idea or fine your phrase, it goes out of the window if it doesn’t fit with the source material.

A lot of writers can’t or aren’t willing to do this, feeling it saps the creativity they need for their personal projects. It’s also not uncommon to hear authors of original fiction who either can’t get published or have low sales grousing that tie-in writers are pseudo-authors who can’t sustain stories of their own. I can’t say this is never the case but I can say that the best tie-in writers are ones who have all the skills necessary for writing original fiction plus the discipline needed to put their ego aside.

In addition to the practical skills, tie-in writing is like genre writing in that you need to be very aware of your target market, which is not always the same as that of the original material – for example, novelisations of adult films may have a high number of YA readers, and the books to be accessible to them without alienating adults. Or for a tie-in with a children’s preschool series, the challenge may be how to do justice to the content in a way that the child reader will understand, given that they don’t have the visual and audio cues of a TV show to help them.

It’s also important for tie-in writers to be able to accept heavy editing. As an editor, I’ve occasionally had clashes with writers over this, and it’s made me wary of working with anyone who I don’t know to have a track record of being happily edited. Tie-ins differ from original fiction in that the writer is not the ultimate authority on the created world. There’s a good chance that the editor, who has been working on Moggy the Cat, for five years, understands the character better than the writer does. And that’s even before the TV series people get their chance to demand everything about the book is changed.

What I look for when I’m commissioning tie-ins:
- ability to pick up character and series voice
- ability to write for the target age/market
- ability to meet deadlines
- ability to accept editing
- track record

Adult tie-ins

The most common adult tie-in format is the novel, which can be either an adaptation of a film script or a new story set in the world of a TV show.

My Doctor Who-loving boyfriend complains that too many 1990s and 2000s Dr Who novels appear to have been written by people who just wanted to get their science fiction novel in print, and shoehorned a TARDIS in there in order to get published. This gives some idea of where the ‘tie-ins are written by frustrated novelists’ notion comes from, but these days the publishing industry is simply not in a position to sustain indulgence like that. Tie-ins are as audience-targeted as anything else in publishing, i.e. a lot.

Of course, sometimes a previously trusted writer will turn in a turkey, which the publisher then has to put out as there’s no time to restart from scratch, and said writer might then get another chance because of their track record, but turning in a turkey your first time is a prime way to never get recommissioned.

Tie-in commissions tend not to be given out to novices, precisely because there is so little room in the schedule for foul-ups. As with so much in professional life, the way to get work is to have done it already. I would advise anyone seriously interested in adult tie-in writing to contact the publisher with a CV that highlights any kind of track record they have in writing-to-order, and includes a sample first chapter for the series they want to write for. Try to come across as being knowledgeable without being too much of a fan – ardent fans too often turn out to have their own ideas about the series and twist the brief.

There is also a thriving little industry in ‘behind the scenes’, ‘art of’ etc books. What’s needed to get commissioned for one of these is the proof that you have the required access, and have written something comparable before. A publisher will almost never take a chance on a beginner here as they risk blowing their relationship with a film or TV studio if the beginner messes up.

Children’s tie-ins

While adult tie-ins are mostly either novels or glossy illustrated hardbacks, the children’s tie-in market is different in that it is heavily format-driven. Ordinary storybooks make up only a fraction of publisher’s output in this field. There’s sticker books, activity books, CD Rom packs, annuals, lift-the-flap, carousels, wipe-clean books, pop-up books… and new formats are invented monthly.

Something like 75% of children’s tie-in books are written in-house by staff, because all the available money has gone on paying for the rights to the TV show and the extra print costs of having a pop-up element, or whatever it may be. This produces mixed results, on a case-by-case basis. An unscrupulous publisher may have the work experience girl in the production department throw the text together. This explains why you find so many rubbish tie-ins in your local children’s book shop. But a savvy, or lucky, publisher may have editors who are competent to write, and who then edit each other’s work.

That other 25%, usually more text-intensive titles such as annuals and storybooks, is a relatively accessible market for new authors, as there aren’t generally hoards of people fighting for the commissions. Someone who wrote a competent letter and included an example of a story they wrote for the Moggy the Cat Story Library series might then be added to the list of writers commissioned to work on Moggy books. Just don’t expect to earn more than a couple of hundred pounds per book, unless it’s a special project.

Even more so than for adult books, it’s format, format, format for children’s tie-ins. The editors don’t sit there saying ‘hm, that’s a nice story, what kind of book shall we make from it’, it’s ‘hey, Production have costed this great new format, how do we come up with a Moggy story that fits around it?’ Which is why children’s tie-ins are commissioned, and never accepted on spec.

A good example of a complex children’s novelty is My Journey with Thomas the Tank Engine, which is due out in a couple of months. Assuming it hasn’t been edited out of all recognition – which as I’ve just said is admittedly a dangerous assumption! – this is a high-spec folder-format book, containing lots of extras like tickets, a passport and a map of Sodor. In writing it, I did use the skeleton of a story (Thomas taking children on a day trip around Sodor island) but the important thing was to make everything fit around those novelty extras, and the available photographs of locations Thomas could visit. I had to use my storytelling skills to turn a bunch of technical obligations into engaging narrative comprehensible to preschoolers, my editorial skills to make it all fit into a low wordcount, and my research skills to become a world expert on the geography of Sodor.

Tie-in writing is both harder to come by and harder to do properly than its detractors think. It’s not for everyone – but nor should it be written off.

What do you want in an MS report?

2010-03-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

This week I’ve done a couple of MS reports, which has gone and reminded me that I really like editing.

A lot of editing in-house is about arranging the schedules, calculating the costings etc, but if you’re doing freelance MS reports you don’t have to bother with that. It’s just you and someone’s piece of work, and your mission is to make as many helpful suggestions as possible in two hours, or whatever chunk of time/volume of words you’re being paid for.

‘Helpful suggestions’; they’re the thing. What one author will consider a helpful suggestion will have another one wanting to flush either their own or their editor’s head down the toilet. (Not, I should add, that anyone is currently threatening to do this to me.)

In doing an MS report for an individual, I must admit I consider it pretty much a professional duty to uncover as many problems as I can. If I mention that something’s good, it tends to be in a wider, more critical context, e.g. “Such-and-such a plot incident is really interesting so it’s a shame you deal with it so briefly”.

Reading for a publisher is of course a bit different. The publisher needs to know what’s good about the book just as much as what’s bad, because they’re judging it as a whole work. Plus, I should add in following comments, if you're in-house working with authors whose MSS have always been acquired, then you need to give a lot of positive feedback to keep up morale. But an individual writer’s attention is, or I think needs to be, focused on the negative stuff so they can improve it.

When providing this sort of service, it’s always good to see what other people are doing in the field so I was very interested to come across the sample appraisals at http://www.fictionfeedback.co.uk/sample.html

It's pretty different to the sort of document I produce. Of course they have chosen positive reports to put on the website in order to attract customers, but still it makes a contrast to my approach. If I thought a book was absolutely wonderful I would write something to the effect that “Overall I think this book is wonderful; now I’m going to pick out all the tiny errors I can find.” That, to my mind, is what I’m being paid for. But I wouldn't be surprised if some author-customers turn out to have other ideas.

Wish-fulfilment in children's books

2010-03-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

I try to read at least one MG/YA book a week, and this time it’s been Bad Company by the consistently prolific and successful Catherine MacPhail The book is about 10 years old but keeps being reissued. It’s a fine, taut plot with a lot of character interest. However, I thought (part of) the ending of the book was rather silly, until I twigged that this was an excellent example of how canny children’s authors write for their child audience rather than for me.

The emotional thrust of the story is that the main character, Lissa, who seems to be about 13, takes up with a bad influence and starts behaving worse and worse. Finally she supports her friend’s lie that English teacher Murdo slammed her hands in a desk. This makes her feel terrible, and eventually she admits she was lying. Then she has to go and face her class, pretty much all of whom she has managed to alienate. First they look stony – then they all start clapping, and smiling happily, and shouting praise.

This immediately struck me as drivel, and disingenuous drivel at that. Young teenagers en masse are no more likely to spontaneously burst into heartwarming applause (the book made clear that the teacher hadn’t put them up to it) than they are to run around shouting “I like homework”. A class of 13-year-olds in that situation would variously be snickering, eye-rolling, ignoring everything around them and obsessively copying what their neighbour was doing. A bit like adults, really, plus an added extra layer of paralysing obsession with not being seen to do or say something uncool.

The scene seemed not only ridiculous but disingenuous, because it was encouraging the child reader to form an unduly flattering view of their own likely behaviour in that situation.

Then it occurred to me that this is what a lot of adult fiction does. Most happy endings in fact. You might not have something quite as unsubtle as a class bursting into applause, but similar techniques are used to make the reader feel both that justice has triumphed, and that they are on its side.

It’s what they call the feel-good factor, and it’s often not a strict representation of reality. Wish-fulfilment. Children want it as much as adults do, and to get them on-side a book has to deliver it to some degree. After all, if books don’t show them that good gets rewarded in the end, they’ll all grow up smashing stereos and snorting socks, right?

I don’t know… but I do suspect that if we don’t give them that, they might not like reading books so much. They can remember how horrible it was being a kid when they’re safely adult. For the time being, a merciful author will provide her readers with a few aspirational illusions.

On the need to be valued and appreciated

2010-02-26T11:20:00.001-08:00

It’s identity flip time again. As of yesterday I finished my stint being a Senior Editor at HarperCollins, and now it’s time for a month of writing. Sort of writing, that is: as things stand, one of my commissions for March has evaporated and another is wreathed in difficulties.

There are some obvious differences between the two sides of the publishing desk. Working as an editor in-house, you can, if you are in the right job, draw some self-esteem from the organisation: your manager likes you, people ask your advice, that sort of thing. If you’re a writer, all you get is the occasional communication from said editor. The editor gets a regular pay cheque, until she’s made redundant. The writer, or at least most writers, just have to hope.

Sometimes I’ve heard colleagues wonder why so many writers react so obsessively to any editorial communications, or appear to play petty mind games. I feel that I have some idea. If you’ve been writing this thing in isolation for x long, and your ability to pay the mortgage depends on it, and the editor is doing anything other than swooning with joy, then the mind games don’t seem petty, but a necessary war against implacable forces.

Like the novelisation I was set to do that got cancelled. Now, I was in the office when the rights team were trying to sort the contract out and know perfectly well that the cancellation is nothing to do with me. But if I wasn’t in the office, doubtless a part of me would be going “OMG! They dumped me because they think I’m crap!!111” Worse still if it’s some original project of your own that gets shelved.

Financially, it’ll be OK – I’m a very lucky freelancer in that my most consistent client for editorial work is a government department that operates 24/7, and just a few graveyard shifts there pad out a lean month nicely. But psychologically, things like project cancellations, not to mention the industry pay rate, get to you.

If I’d never been an editor and didn’t know from first-hand experience what was going on at the other end of the intermittent emails, I wonder if I could cope with being a writer?

Oh well, it's important to remember that working in-house at the wrong place and getting stiffed is even worse. "They told me I'm valued and appreciated", as a former colleague would say in tones of utmost embitterment, before going off to get drunk.

Creative discussions - the reality

2010-02-22T10:57:00.001-08:00

A high-level creative discussion from the hallowed halls of one of the nation’s top children’s publishing departments, rendered verbatim (as far as I can remember)…

Editor: “Oy, designer – Vroom Vroom!?”
Designer: “Nah, Zoom Zoom! now.”
Editor: “No – Beep Beep!”
Designer: “Oh f… Beep Beep!”
Editor: “This isn’t really Vroom Vroom! – I mean Zoom Zoom! then.”
Designer: “No, Beep Beep!”
Editor: “Change it to Beep! Beep! then.”

And then the editor’s brain climbed out of her ear and ran down the corridor to the literary fiction department, where someone looked at it funny and trod it into the carpet.

Back from holiday

2010-02-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

We went to Cornwall for a cheap holiday courtesy of the boyfriend's parents and the cottage wi-fi did not work!!!

I am not made for such trials, and would have chewed through the walls if they had not been a foot thick.

Nevertheless I am now back.

Has this really happened to you?

2010-02-08T05:32:00.000-08:00

There are lots of popular complaints among paid writers (a put-upon species), but one of the most frequent is that when you tell people you are a writer, they immediately assume you are raking in the money. In recent years, this problem has particularly exasperated children's authors, who tend to earn peanuts and frequently encounter members of the public who believe they are Rowling in it.

However, I have to admit this has never happened to me once. It may in part be because I am not the most accomplished socialiser, and in part because the expanded phrase 'freelance writer and editor', my usual self-description, rather strips away the oak-panelling that the uninitiated might like to apply to the word 'writer'.

Perhaps this failure of my surroundings to deliver the due insult is the deathly clue that proves I really am not a proper writer. I look forward to my initiation with suitably mixed feelings.

Dinosaur publishers? Love ’em!

2010-02-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

My stint in-house at HarperCollins is up at the end of February, so I am again at that special time in a freelancer’s life that is either known as ‘flapping around looking for employment’ or ‘selecting one’s next assignment’, depending on whether panic or PR are in the verbal driving seat.

The CVs and nudge emails have been going out in the usual fashion. I have quite a number of leads and even if three quarters of them evaporate – a pretty standard proportion, unfortunately – something should firm up into work for March.

One CV produced an informal interview with a well-known figure in publishing who reported that he’d clicked through to my website and blog and been very impressed. I was suitably struck by our meeting as well – I thought maverick publishers of that vintage had all been taken out and shot with propelling pencils long ago, but I’m glad they apparently haven’t. Now running an imprint at a large house, he gave the impression of a grand old brontosaurus plagued by velociraptors with clipboards but well able, when necessary, to stomp good and hard.

The admirable dino publisher, who has a track record of digging up bestsellers, opined that he can’t find anything much to publish at the moment. He’s looking for stuff he likes – not necessarily loves passionately, because then you get too close to the material – pretty much regardless of genre. I really hope he finds it, whether it generates any work for me or not.

One of the downsides of being involved in today’s commercial publishing industry is that it can leave you feeling like individuality and a love of books are shameful onanism, good for PR puff but rather unprofessional in practice. I came away from the admirable dino feeling a bit better about myself on that score.

I am an editor and I like books!!!!!

How to be a half-published author and do quite nicely

2010-02-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

It sounds like a stupid question, but what exactly is a published author? And is becoming one always like flipping a switch from failure to success, or are there other ways?

It can be like flipping a switch, if you take the traditional approach of submitting and submitting and submitting some more, and finally getting plucked out of the slush pile and offered that dreamt-of deal. But lots of people take other routes; and the other routes are often more sustainable.

My books, for example, have sold over two million copies. So the chances are good that I am more published than thou. On the other hand, new writers dreaming of success don’t usually imagine a lift-the-flap book that doesn’t have their name in it, or even a hardback gift book that credits them in the indicia (small print). In the public imagination, a published author is very definitely someone with their name on the front of a book – with the large exception of self-published books, which won’t get you into the Society of Authors, and which the literary person in the street instinctively feels constitute cheating.

So as a tie-in writer I’m definitely not as ‘published’ as Aardvark A. Author, who has sold two million books under his own name. My writing has to be good (as in fit for purpose, obviously, not as in elegantly refined), but readers are buying the books for the Rupert Bear and Ben 10 content, not for me. On the other hand, if Ben 10 stops selling, I can onto the next thing. If Aardvark’s fans lose interest in his work, he’s in trouble.

When I decided to Be a Writer a depressingly long time ago I definitely thought in terms of names on covers. But dreams modify themselves, and I’m not the type to accept living in a hovel while waiting to be discovered. I was aiming to get an original novel into print by the age of 30; in reality I got Gordon and the Tree, a Japanese-issue only board book containing a six-line story about a Thomas the Tank Engine character. Of course it wasn’t the pinnacle of my aspiration, either as a writer or an editor, but it did happen. A friend of mine, Jonathan Clements, who now is writing under his own name, started out with the resplendent ‘I Love My Tamagotchi’ by ‘Bronwen Komatsubara’ (book history here. Another friend, an academic who really belongs in an ivory tower if there were any left, reports that he has hopes of talking his latest project fee ‘up from peanuts to at least, well, Brazil nuts’.

‘Authors’ in the popular, study-dwelling, high-royalty-earning sense, make up a very small proportion of published writers. Editors who write on the side are a fairly common breed too; it’s not so much that editors are failed writers as that the skills are often complementary, and the income from editing is steadier. Even if you are not already in the industry as an editor, if you are serious about making a living from writing I would recommend starting by targeting a small area where there will be limited competition – it could be tie-in titles for something you are personally enthusiastic about – as a way of breaking in. It might take a while before you hit the right publisher with the right idea, but then you spend an awful lot of time in the slush pile, too. I haven’t submitted original fiction for a while, but when it will go straight in the ‘read now’ pile because of all the credits I can list (yes, contacts help too, but credits help much more).

I do know that when I’ve mentioned this to would-be authors, they don’t seem to be convinced. The SCBWI organiser I chatted to was sceptical about whether the subject would be of interest to members. I guess the issue is that nobody looks at me and thinks ‘Wow, I wish I was her!’ But there are people who wish they were Jonathan, and there are people who would wish for my freelance income – it’s far from stellar, but it beats what you get from royalties on a midlist novel.

I suppose the moral is to write anything you get paid for, and be creative in your search for those things.

By the way – got anything you want written (and will pay for?). Do drop me a line…

On Emmas

2010-01-25T09:49:00.000-08:00

My name is Emma.

Well, it’s not in fact, but Emma is undeniably my category. Here’s a definition of the Emma phenomenon that dates from 2007 but is still entirely applicable today.

As an Emma, I’m female, white, young and work in publishing. On the other hand, I personally am working class by origin if not education, and I certainly weigh more than eight stone, so that makes me a bit deviant as Emmas go.

The sad thing is that the overall stereotype really is accurate enough for these minor features to make me stand out in a publishing environment. I am – mostly, but not entirely facetiously – worried that when I turn 35 in 2011 I will go up in a puff of smoke, disqualified from the world of books. You can escape that fate by becoming a senior manager, but that doesn’t really work for freelancers.

As the Guardian said, a lot of us Emmas are in fact very good at our jobs. But the homogeneity does create problems for publishers, over and above the obvious lack of non-white and male perspectives feeding into the books. Nobody will name names, but of course you sometimes get incompetent or vindictive managers in publishing like everywhere else, and the notorious cowering of Emmas en masse – each trying to be meeker than the other, in fear for her £20k job – gives the rotten apples scope to do what they like.

My downfall as an Emma has always been an inability to cower like that. I just know that if I forced myself to do it, I couldn’t face myself in the mirror the next morning. My approach on seeing a problem is to say “How can I fix it/help you fix it?” I do believe that this is actually a more valuable approach. It’s certainly one that fits with my decision to freelance. A sensible employer will value my contribution, but I also have the security of knowing that if an employer turns out not to be sensible (an experience, I must add, that I have luckily not had for a while now) I can go elsewhere.

I really love books so I am still working on them in spite of some of the things I have seen. And every industry has its nasty side, of course. But I do wonder how many of the most talented people – because the talented people are often the ones who will speak out against mediocrity and stupidity – are forced out of publishing by the kind of situation I’ve sketched above.

And that’s over and above the people who didn’t get an editorial job in the first place because they didn’t even look like they were called Emma.

Does anyone have any tales of Emmas or personal Emmahood? Anonymous responses welcome.

What editors think – the truth

2010-01-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

As any fule kno, editors think profound thoughts about the mysteries of the market. They make and break careers, not on a whim, but as part of their grand vision.

Sometimes.

With apologies to all those very sensible blog posts that tell writers they must think like editors in order to get published, here, with commentary, are some classic editorial thoughts.

1) “Yes! YES! I found a typo in the Commissioning Editor’s prize project!”

It is a truism that the first time a representative from the publisher opens any newly-printed book, they will find an error. It is – ignobly – reassuring to be the person who finds the error in a book edited by someone senior to you.

2) “OMG, that woman from Production is coming – hide under the desk!”

The Production department are the bearers of such uncomfortable revelations as, ‘If you don’t give us finished files for that book tomorrow, it won’t get printed.’

3) “What the hell did Fred from Sales and Marketing mean by telling me to give this football book a ‘classic, Peter Rabbit-y feel’?* Was that one of the things he meant to say, one of the things he’ll deny ever saying, or one of the things that’s true every alternate Wednesday after he’s had a meeting with the Early Learning Centre?”
*Not a verbatim example, but an accurately representative one.

Editorial departments are generally staffed by introverts. Sales and marketing departments are of necessity staffed by people who are good at enthusing and/or giving the hard sell, and, as part of keeping their ear to the ground, they are often heavily influenced by what was said at their most recent client meeting. Communication between the two parties can consequently be difficult – if vital.

4) “I hate this author. I hate this author. They are rubbish. They are arrogant. I have to be nice to this author. I have to be nice to this author.”

Frequently accompanied by an undercurrent of wondering how to rewrite the book without the author noticing.

5) “I love this author! I love this author! What’s their next project?”

No, really, this reaction is not hard to achieve by being sane, punctual and courteous.

6) “OK, so on a print run of 10,000 … 75% retailer’s discount for Massive Supermarkets Inc on [£4.99 - £1 off (ref deal struck by Sales department)] = £1.00 minus royalty at 10% = £0.90 minus PPB, shipping, warehousing costs as provided by Production = 66p minus standard percentile deduction to cover cost of running building and employing me = profit of … -7p per copy. Oh, ****, I don’t think the author is going to get that hand-tooled gold leaf they wanted.”

Editors are responsible for costings, i.e. working out in advance that it is financially feasible to publish the projects they are responsible for. Generally they have to show a certain margin before managers will greenlight the project. A common editorial response to completing a costing is to wonder how the publishing business is still functioning.

7) Oh dear, the pigeon holes have collapsed under the weight of slush and buried the editorial assistant again. Now I can help her out, and deliver some nurturing advice at the same time. At least I’m not her, eh?”

Everyone needs something to feel good about, you know.

8) Right, just three hours of meetings this afternoon, then I can go home and maybe read a manuscript or two.

If you work in young children’s publishing, you are generally lucky enough to avoid this syndrome, given the length of manuscripts. If you’re in adult fiction, not so much.

9) I really, really, need that revised cover from the Design department. I have a choice of threats, flattery, complaining to the manager or doing it myself in Quark. Hm. Best go and talk to them.” [an hour elapses] “OMG, what has happened to this file? I only tweaked the text box and the file’s gone mad. Help, help call IT!!!

This is an ever-present temptation if you think you know your way around basic design functions.

10) “OK, I can just about afford to stay in my job if my husband/partner/hamster gets a pay rise.”

The publishing industry is notorious – if editors were any lower paid, they’d be writers.

***

There you have it. Think like an editor… at your peril.

Rhyming picture books - what's the problem?

2010-01-10T02:41:00.000-08:00

Three facts:

1) An agent I was in talks with complimented my picture book MS Ponder the Robot. then concluded: “It rhymes, so I can’t sell it.”
2) A quick google revealed this quote from an editor: “Rhyming books don’t sell.”
3) There is a certain recent book called The Gruffalo. And an older one called The Cat in the Hat. And, well, quite a lot of the content of your local bookshop’s picture book section…

Can I get a ‘huh’? This sort of thing confuses me, and I’m in publishing. But there are some good reasons why editors don’t like rhyme.

A certain amount of instinctive recoil arises from the fact that tin-eared pseudopoetry is a form favoured by the very worst no-hopers. That doesn’t mean rhyme can’t be executed skilfully, but there is also a sound business reason for avoiding it where possible, namely the question of co-editions (translations done by foreign publishers). The UK is a very small market, and picture books – which can effectively double the usual advance/royalties bill by involving an author and an illustrator on equal terms – are costly.

For a picture book to work out financially, the publisher has to be confident of selling the book on abroad. If it says ‘Julia Donaldson’ on the cover, that provides an incentive to overlook the linguistic awkwardness of dealing with rhyme. If it says ‘Julia Bloggs’, that probably doesn’t. I’ve published rhyme for children, but mostly in my capacity as couplet writer for the Rupert Bear Annual. So I’m demonstrably competent, but not personally saleable.

“So why,” the sane and hapless might ask, “is there such a lot of crud on the shelves? It’s not all The Gruffalo out there.”

This is another very good point, and the reason is the usual one in young children’s publishing: a lot of the uninspired stuff is churned out by editors with no budget for commissioning text. Some of those women are editor-writers, but some of them, understandably, just signed up to do fulfil their job description.

Then there are reasons why editors do sometimes like rhyme. These are best summed up under the all-purpose reflection that editors often have no clue what they like until they see it, and then they pounce on it, cooing. It’s not impossible to sell a rhyming picture book by a newcomer. It’s just that anyone trying to do so has even more than the usual number of obstacles to jump over.

What writers will know and agents and publishers probably won’t care about (unless it coincides with commercial necessity) is that sometimes a story just demands a certain format. That was the case with Ponder needing to be in verse; when I rewrote him in prose he lost his charm. I knew it was self-indulgence to write a verse picture book, but I did it anyway, because even writers of mass market novelty books have souls. Or I believe that I have one.

What I haven’t done is make huge and futile efforts to sell Ponder. I needed a sample for my website, and my relevant published writing is all copyrighted to other people, so Ponder has come in useful there, in a rather literal illustration of the truism that nothing you write is ever wasted.
It all comes down to the writer’s mantra: “Do what you have to do, but never forget what will and won’t sell.”

I wonder, do you have a rhyming picture book in the desk drawer? Is it there because it was an embarrassing beginner effort, or because of market conditions?

ETA: As Thomas Taylor points out below, and I should have put in originally, there's one more reason for editors being reluctant to take on verse books - and that's the editing process. It's so much harder when you've got to unpick and resew someone else's metre and rhyme!

My website is go

2010-01-03T03:03:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! I have been working a lot over the holiday, because I’m like that.

One result is that my website is up and running! It will be a while before search engines index it, but I hope people will start linking to it.

Mainly it’s designed to set out information about the services I offer, but there is also some content from the blog and some original content about publishing. Plus, of course, a small cartoon hippo.

I have particular areas of expertise within publishing, such as novelty formats and writing in different character voices, and I hope this will make me an obvious choice for certain kinds of work.

Oh and if you visit the site and find something doesn’t work, please tell me!

Among the charlatans

2009-12-20T03:42:00.000-08:00

I'm still busily working on my website. Given that there's not going to be a huge amount of content - being clear and to the point seems to me the key - and my boyfriend is doing the html, this seems to take a surprising amount of work. Oh, the probably gratuitous brain-sweat and heartache of working out how to divide the material and what to call the sections.

I have of course been doing a lot of googling to see how other writers and editors present their sites, looking for inspiration - and finding it in some unlikely ways.

Like a lot of people in this business, I secretly panic that my writing is crude and my editorial advice insane, even while knowing intellectually that this is not true (my professional self would at this point like to insert a disclaimer and a paen to my brilliance). So in a way I’m perversely encouraged by some of the charlatans out there, who are promoting themselves as able to give expert advice on other people’s manuscripts on the basis of their having completed a correspondence course and published one article online. Comparing myself, I realise that I do indeed have credible experience, and quite a lot of it.

Some of the dodgy websites seem to be the work of people who have lost their existing career in the recession and are now trying, enterprisingly, to start a new one. I can’t help but sympathise, to a degree… at the same time as wishing they hadn’t taken those ‘Why not be a writer?’ adverts seriously, and hoping nobody wastes money on their services.

I wonder if they do get clients?

New website pending - wibble

2009-12-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

I'm working on my soon-to-be (by the magic of Techie Boyfriend) website. Somewhat baffled as to how cosy or how hard-sell-ish I should make it, given that I would like it to encourage people to give me work if possible but don't want to give a false impression of myself.

Writer's bounce - dealing with rejections

2009-12-08T11:33:00.000-08:00

Is this a dagger I see before me? No, it is far sharper than that, or than any serpent’s tooth you care to mention. It is a rejection letter for a project I was confident about.

Now, because the editor originally solicited the project from me, it is a long, polite email with no typos and my name spelt right (see previous post on importance of not pissing off other people in the business). Plus I have already received a nominal fee. So there are consolations that were not available to me back when I was on the slush pile.

It only took me, oh, 14 years to get to this stage. I got quite a few rejections, and somehow eventually developed writer’s bounce, which is not quite the opposite of writer’s block, but involves the ability to process reactions with maximum efficiency.

This brings us to…

The unscientific but strangely effective Bowles Method for dealing with rejection

1) Say to yourself ‘Oh God, it’s true! I AM utterly and irredeemably talentless!’ and fall down a pit of despair for a few minutes/hours (depending on magnitude of rejection).

2) Eat far too much comfort food/indulge in other non-fatal self-indulgence, after which you can distract yourself either by a) feeling sick or b) thinking ‘Oh God, I’m terrible!’ for a whole new reason.

3) Do something practical so that you don’t default on the mortgage/drown in washing up/get abandoned by spouse etc.

4) Thanks to stage 3, feel you are coping jolly bravely and start to feel indignant that the universe is not rewarding you for this. Why isn’t there a Rejection Fairy, who goes around sprinkling joy and consolation on the heroic silenced scribbling majority who try and try and yet are spurned??

5) Contemplate what a Rejection Fairy would actually be like. Realise that you would probably want to headbutt it on sight. Feel restored to sanity by this consideration.

6) Time to go back to the actual work – but only for a couple of hours at most. Stare at it in horror, realising its utter inadequacies (beware of slipping back to stage 1 here, but if you do you can always work through the list again)

7) Either fix the easiest of the inadequacies, thus giving yourself a renewed feeling of empowerment, or if the project is beyond hope, do something easy but constructive and innovative on another piece of work, e.g. renaming a character who has never quite gelled.

8) Dump writing for a few hours or a day and pay attention to the spouse/friends/pet dragon who heroically did not abandon you. Fuelled by stages 6 and 7, your subconscious will churn away in the meantime.

9) Think ‘Hey, I really am dealing with rejection well! And I’ve got all these new ideas, too.’ and experience self-esteem boost.

10) And now it’s finally back to the serious work of making the next submission the one that does not lead you back to stage 1.

This guidance is obviously satirical – but the thing is, it also works. Do try it at home (but don’t blame me if you die of stage 2).

Rejection is never going to feel great, but I've found it's possible to streamline the reaction process. After enough practice, psychodramas that might once have occupied a week can be turned around in a few hours.

Professional vs personal opinion

2009-12-06T12:23:00.001-08:00

I just read one an accepted contemporary classic of children’s literature and did not much like it. I’m sure a lightning bolt should split the heavens and sizzle my scalp around now.

Admittedly, I would still have wanted to acquire it, had I been an editor in that position (or I think I would, as picking genius manuscripts with hindsight is always dead easy). Some aspects of the book are very strong indeed. I couldn’t call it bad, just very uneven; there are some powerfully realised small incidents but the eventful plot seems just too much for the author’s powers of description and emotional evocation. I enjoyed the first third but after that I was shouting internally, “Put down that mallet, step away from the tragedy, and don’t come back until you’ve grown some characterisation skills!”

I do see why this book has done so well, but darn it, I want my classics to be fully baked before I call them classics.

I’m the type to have strong – earnest – opinions, and I do miss being able to express them, but ‘in the business’ you soon learn various levels of discretion, basically because just about anyone else ‘in the business’ is someone you might end up working with.

There are obvious plus sides to this, but I think it’s also one of the reasons why publishing has come to be dominated by the notorious ‘Emmas’, very young women who are - or appear to be - far too nice and eager to please to ever think badly of anyone. For me, bad writing is bad writing and trying to cram myself into a meek, unquestioning little ball has just never worked.

Granny O'Grimm

2009-12-02T14:36:00.001-08:00

My friend works for a small Irish animation company, and their six-minute animation is in the running for an Oscar nomination. They hope to get lots of people to watch it, as it needs exposure to compete against the titans in the category.

I'm not very good at watching things I'm told to watch. But I think this one is pretty amazing.

It can be seen at:
http://www.grannyogrimm.com/#/home

The national snot deficit

2009-12-01T12:23:00.000-08:00

New job started today - three days a week in the children's book mines.

Brief handover meeting about the projects I'm handling/sharing. It's a small team, but we're on the ball where pink's concerned. Activity is sorted, and there's a team of freelancers for the series fiction.

But what about the machines and the bogeys, aka boys 6-9 publishing? We looked at each other, avowing a lack of personal specialisation in snot. There is one proven freelancer who will do the job we have coming up - and how glad we are. Without him, what to do?

"At home with farts, snot and car innards" is a golden entry on any freelancer's CV. Plus, boys' 6-9 writing is also underrepresented in most slush piles and represents a niche that most publishers are always questing to effectively fill.

Of course, getting something for the age group that's genuinely funny and *not* all about snot, that is the ultimate jackpot. But most of the time, hurrah for bogeys and keep that freelancer sweet.

Back from Arvon

2009-11-29T03:27:00.000-08:00

I'm back from my Arvon course, and want to go on another one right away! But this is probably not feasible.

A write-up will be in order when it all settles down in my head. Today's task is to familiarise myself with the briefs left by the outgoing HarperCollins editor whose job I'm inheriting for a few weeks.

Barbie the Librarian hits the shelves

2009-11-22T15:46:00.000-08:00

Fear! Terror! Inadequacy! Blog neglect! Yes, all these are the signs and sigils of The Greater Spotted Deadline. That and trying to do a week’s charity work in conjunction with the deadline. But the charity work was arranged before the deadline was.

And now I have a whole hour to myself before launching on next week’s course, which will probably be intense too, but in a different way. I get to wallow in literary merit!

The one other booky thing I did this week was to pick up a title which I edited two years ago, and which is finally in print. It is Barbie the Librarianand it has a special place in my heart.

Of course, the book is not actually called Barbie the Librarian, but The Snow Palace, and it’s a Christmas Special addition to the Barbie Story Library series. The set-up is that Krista, aka Barbie, finds an unhappy snow kitten on her windowsill, and it tells her that it is from Snowland, where everything is going wrong because of the Ice Queen. Barbie then goes off to sort things out, accompanied by cute animals and aided by magical happenstance as is brand appropriate.

The series author had written up the story in a suitable style, but for some reason I now forget the beginning and end weren’t working for Barbie licensor Mattel, so I had to change them. Standard editorial duties, of course – only on the day I was doing this I apparently took leave of my senses. I don’t know what I was thinking (probably something like “argh wibble I have fifty books to edit,”) but I decided that a great solution to the narrative difficulties would be to have Barbie living alone in a tower full of books and reading one to find out how to get to Snowland. Then at the end she scarpers home “to curl up with a book”.

So I fixed up the MS accordingly and emailed it off to Mattel, then showed it to the designer on the project, who said almost immediately, “Oh my god, you turned Barbie into a librarian!”

At which time my brain kicked in, and I wondered if a nifty retraction might be in order, since the duties of an editor on a branded series emphatically do not include remaking the brand in your own image.

However! It turned out that Mattel liked what I had done. They said it was certainly unusual for Barbie, but as this was a one-off book they would give it a try. The MS was passed, and in due course illustrated with suitable pictures of bookcases, etc, alongside the more familiar Barbie symbols.

So that is how I turned Barbie into a librarian. I don’t suppose the career choice will stick, but perhaps there's a little girl or two out there who never felt that her friends' Barbie DVDs about fairies and dresses were quite her. And then she reads that Krista lives in “a tower filled with wondrous books”…

Just maybe, that could be of value to someone.

Back to school for a week

2009-11-14T12:53:00.000-08:00

I’m doing three interesting new things in the next three weeks. Week one, I’m helping my boyfriend and his parents with their annual week of charity work. Week two, I’m going on an Arvon course. And week three, I’m starting a temporary job as a senior editor at HarperCollins, filling in until they can find someone who wants to work full-time.

I’m looking forward to all of it, but I hesitated over week two. The same bit of me that was suspicious of the SCBWI worried about going on a general-access course. Wouldn’t it be more professional to make out I already know everything? Oh well, I was never convinced by ‘professionalism’; I prefer to just be good at things.

I might have spent huge tracts of my life writing or dissecting one thing or another, but spending a whole week acknowledging writing with a bunch of real people, that’s different. It’s a luxury (as the price tag makes clear).

Almost all my creative skills are self-taught or developed on the job, in spite of having an English degree. At Oxford, student writing was completely ignored You crafted your essays about the masters, but if you dared to imitate them that was your business. I got on the sole available extra-curricular writing course, but it was the wrong form of writing for me long-term.

I don’t regret this, as I’ve managed to get plenty practice in elsewhere. But talking to other writers about writing (as opposed to demanding that they send me 500 words on Thomas the Tank Engine by yesterday) – how exotic and delectable. Want!

Still, note to inner editor– you are on holiday; do not try to commission Melvin Burgess to write Barbie books.

Anyway, Arvon courses are repeatedly proven to be good for you – I know Candy Gourlay enjoyed this same course in the summer, and she’s just got her longed-for book deal. Congratulations to her, and I could do with one of those when I’ve got my material together – but most of all, I want her enthusiasm! If Arvon can animate me even a quarter that much, it will be money well spent.

Trying the SCBWI

2009-11-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

This week, I went to a SCBWI social. That’s the word ‘I’ and the word ‘social’ in the same sentence, which is usually the sort of thing that causes my boyfriend to protest: “Who are you and what have you done with Anna?”

But reader, I went.

I joined the SCBWI a couple of months ago, and I must confess the move was preceded by a certain amount of hesitation. I googled widely before stumping up for membership, and came across a body of opinion to the effect that the organisation is simply in the business of extracting an entrance fee from newbies then providing little more than an opportunity to experience shared cluelessness with people in the same boat.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Certainly there is a total lack of people handing me MSS in green ink as soon as I utter the word ‘editor’. One of the organisers – who has a tasty events schedule formulated for next year judging by the quick rundown I heard her give last month – remarked that, while some of the criticism might originally have had some grain of truth in it, the make-up of the organisation is diversifying as members get published and stay in the society. People don’t think: “Behold, I am published, I shall depart wreathed in the effulgence of my glory!” – they stick around because it’s a fun and supportive environment.

My main regret now is that I don't have an active project that's suitable for mulling over in a SCBWI context. At the moment my time is split between writing for fee and in-house editing; I'm hoping SCBWI will keep my appetite whetted for when I have some serious original fiction time.

During my brief membership to date, I’ve spoken to some people who knew a lot about publishing and some people who were just starting out, but they all seemed to be united by a good attitude and a work ethic. This reminds me – or rather sets itself up in opposition to – the experiences of a midlist crimewriter friend, who opines that her professional association dinners are all about eyeballing the next person along and wondering if and why their sales are much better than yours.

Perhaps it’s just that amateurs/aspirants can afford to be nice, while being professional hardens you, if not in one way then in another. One unexpected but predictable-in-hindsight effect that meeting some ‘scoobies’ did produce was to make me suddenly reflect that 10 years in commercial publishing has turned me into an evil old prune. There’s all these people talking about books being ‘good’ while my approach – spoken and thought – revolves around ‘marketing spend’ and ‘skew’ and other such jargon. Show me a ‘good’ idea and my immediate response is to bash it repeatedly with the marketability stick to see if it survives. I have to be careful not to go playing the ‘I’m an editor so I know best, nyah!!’ card and shouting people down – just because I know some corners of the business well, doesn’t make me oracular about everything.

Most of this is inevitable, I suppose – developing a strong market instinct is part of a modern editor’s job, and those scoobies who become successful authors probably start thinking the same way, or at least understand the logic behind the commercial approach.

But I also never want to forget why I like good books! All the more reason, then, to hang out with aspiring, craft-loving authors.

Yay work - aaargh?

2009-11-06T09:14:00.000-08:00

It’s a balancing act, trying to be a freelance editor and a writer. I just got a call from a publisher wanting me to do a few weeks’ covering for an outgoing Senior Editor in one of their children’s divisions while they interview to find her replacement.

My immediate simultaneous reaction: YAY, interesting work! NOOO December was my original projects writing time!

Particularly as I haven’t been freelance for all that long, the ‘YAY work’ impulse wins out – you have to take care to keep your skills current and build contacts. And while I certainly hope my original projects will eventually result in payment, I need to build up a bit of a portfolio first.

On the other hand a little part of me insists that if I was sufficiently devoted to writing I’d drop everything and dedicate myself to my craft, and reap the rewards afterwards. I don’t know why this part hasn’t shut up after 10 years’ involvement in commercial publishing, but it seems to be congenital. It must have got used to me ignoring it by now. I’m the terminally sensible type.

Which would explain why my glamorous Friday night is about to consist of a few hours’ writing-to-order, then an editorial night shift in Whitehall.

All medalled up and nowhere to pass it

2009-11-05T15:14:00.000-08:00

Keren David has kindly bestowed a Superior Scribbler award upon me.

With honour come great responsibilities, and these are they:

*Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass the award on to five most deserving bloggy friends.

*Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author and the name of the blog from whom s/he has received the award.

*Each Superior Scribbler must display the award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains the award.

*Each blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr Linky List. That way, they'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives this prestigious honour.

*Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

Most of these are easy. My trouble is with passing on to five friends. Really, to date I have mostly been posting and following the big writing blogs and not made any friends! So I am not going to try to pass judgement on blogs that I don’t really know yet, or go poking someone with a high profile who’s quite busy enough. Maybe if I get a similar meme in future, I will be able to do it justice.

(So, nobody cares about novelty books? Yet I laugh in the face of indifference. Twitter cares! Yes, two bots picked up my last post, goodness knows why, gifting me a sudden huge readership spike consisting entirely of people who wandered straight off again.)

The mystery of novelties

2009-11-04T10:19:00.000-08:00

I recently told someone I thought they should give up on a project (here, in the comments) and gave them a detailed run-down of why. Fortunately they took it well, and in this case the recipient is obviously a talented illustrator so clearly all hope is not lost for a fine career.

But I wondered about whether taking the ‘definitive bullet-pointed list of why this is economically unviable’ approach in a public thread was the kind thing to do. Of course, plenty of people rubbish work that is posted for critique on writing forums, but that’s slightly different from explaining why a project is inherently doomed for (as far as possible) objective economic reasons. That sort of thing could squelch a dream as easily as spur it on in new, more fruitful, directions.

On the other hand, the technical and stylistic considerations that you need to take into account before pitching a novelty book are simple enough when you know them, and yet the information is apparently hard to come by. In the example above, a talented illustrator tried to approach a children’s project without really understanding the format she was going for.

Working in brand tie-in books as much as I have, I’ve been largely shielded from slush pile duties, but I wonder what proportion of the average agent’s pile consists of novelty projects which are doomed from the outset because of lack of format knowledge? (If any agents read this, please do tell.) There’s a lot of advice out there on writing and illustrating, but I don’t in fact think I’ve ever seen any about novelties. Possibly because it’s a notoriously hard market to break into, so the advice is usually ‘don’t try’.

Admittedly, my rational advice would be ‘don’t try’ too. Every novelty I’ve edited, I wrote myself because there was just no money for the text, it was all going on those paper bells and whistles. Still, a publisher probably isn’t going to turn down a one-in-a-thousand killer idea.

I guess it’s time for a ‘how novelties are published’ post, if anyone is interested. Any takers?

test

2009-11-02T17:38:00.001-08:00

Blogger doesn't seem to let you delete posts, which strikes me as somewhat stupid if it's true!

A rough guide to schedule slip

2009-10-29T16:45:00.000-07:00

The series I’m currently doing for a book packager has had its schedule put back a couple of months. The ins and outs of that particular project are confidential, but it got me to thinking how confusing and worrying delays can be for writers who don’t know much about the inside workings of publishing. Disturbing questions crop up in the mind, such as: “Is it because the publisher doesn’t like my manuscript after all, the project’s going to be dropped and the world will shortly end?”

Well, it’s possible that’s the case (except perhaps for the bit about the end of the world), but if so the editor should be telling you about it. If she isn’t, the difficulties are probably internal to the publisher.

To understand why schedules slip it helps to understand why pub(lication) dates are selected in the first place.

These days most books are published on either the first day or the first Monday of the month, so gives the publisher 12 options for the pub date, which will either be set soon after decision is taken to acquire, or sometimes as part of the process.

Basic practical factors go into this, such as the time needed for editorial work, but there are also numerous issues to do with marketing. Some are obvious – for example, it’s no good publishing a Halloween recipe book in November. Others are related to the target audience, such as the publication of textbooks at key points in the study year. Some choices are dictated by the economic year, for example in January nobody spends much so it’s not a good time for high-priced titles (the whole book business is skewed by the effect of Christmas).

There are also other factors that may not be apparent to the author. A major retailer may have confidentially told a publisher that they are looking to promote a particular kind of book in May of next year, and does the publisher have something that will fit? Likewise a deliberate decision can be made to buck the trend, such as publishing a book in January when there is traditionally not much happening, so that book may get more attention.

The third issue is what else the publisher has in the pipeline. They may only have a certain amount of marketing spend allocated to April and it all has to go to their star author who’s publishing then. Or they may wish to avoid publishing your book at the same time as another one that has turned out to be rather similar in theme.

Each of these factors has differing levels of applicability to different kinds of books, but I don’t think there is any kind of book for which the publisher would think ‘Right, let’s just lay out a normal schedule that starts today, and the pub date is the month that schedule ends in’.

And so the pub date is carefully decided. Great! Off we go into the schedule.

Editors will give a hollow laugh at this point. Assuming that the text itself doesn’t cause problems – and a dizty proof-reader could cause those as well as a poor MS – there are a huge number of elements which could cause the project to get delayed. Problems with getting the illustrations in, and approved by the relevant senior staff, are a big one for children’s and other illustrated books; this is less important for mass market adult paperbacks of course but even they can suffer from in-house cover design angst.

Then there is the question of book production, a part of publishing which is often hidden. Printing sounds like it should be a fairly quick process, and for a simple paperback the physical part of the process can be fast, but many publishers will be looking for the cheapest printing deal possible, and that often means producing the books in the Far East. They then have to be shipped over here, and that can’t be hurried, unless someone wants to pay for them to be airfreighted (a request editors do not like hearing from the sales department). Arcane questions like current paper prices and industrial disputes at ports suddenly have a major effect on the pub date of your book, particularly as publishers try to print books as late as possible, to save warehousing costs.

Additionally, retailers sometimes change their advance promotion plans or announce late additions, so for example your chick lit novel could be bumped from April to July because the Sales department reckons there’s a good chance that Waterstones will put it in chick lit three-for-two they are planning that month. Various factors make publishers reluctant to shift a pub date – for example, the book may already have appeared in the publisher’s catalogue – but the prospect of a significant boost to sales will win out every time.

The Sales department needs time to big up your book to retailers before the physical item is out there. This means that cover, sample material and other promotional bumpf (if any) needs to be ready six months before the pub date. If that doesn’t happen, retailers will just see your book as a title on a list among hundreds and very probably not buy it. For some titles, a substantial amount of sales material is needed, particularly for titles about concepts that are hard to grasp. Major book fairs, at which the publisher will want to be showing off the sales material, also have a big influence on timing. So a publisher will move the pub date on rather than allow these elements of the selling process to be missed.

All this is why, in some cases, a delay of just two months at manuscript stage can sometimes lead to the pub date being bumped by a year, to make sure that everything comes together.

Hopefully this will not happen to your book. But if it does, then there is a silver lining to the annoyance of delayed royalties etc. Unless you have reason to believe that they are incompetent, delays are a good sign that the publisher does not just intend to chuck your work on the shelves and see what happens to it. They assign your book importance, and are aiming to publish it at a time and in a way that will maximise the sales, and thus the success, of all involved.

Hidden cliches #1: "We won't kill him, we're not like that"

2009-10-21T17:36:00.001-07:00

Killing people: it’s not good. But books with lots of carnage, they’re popular. And tight endings, they’re important.

So, in the immediate wake of a hundred thousand climactic fictional confrontations, we get a hundred thousand iterations of this exchange:

“Should we kill [the rapacious villain]?”
“No, because then we’d be just like him/her/it, and we’re not, we’re better than that!”

This little trope, which concisely reaffirms the sympathetic humanity of our heroes at the same time as preserving the villain to rampage anew in the next instalment, occurs, with varying degrees of sophistication, across modern literature. Sometimes it fits with the story, but the other day I came across it used in a YA fantasy novel unadorned, two lines of dialogue hardly less bald than my summary version above. The author was flashing a big ‘Am desperate to end story quickly” sign, for all who wanted to see.

There’s a particular temptation to use this kind of wrap-up in YA, because the invisible safety net for the reader means that your heroes probably can’t turn into executioners. The trouble is, though, that the apparently obvious morality is not quite as clear-cut as it seems. In real life, most opponents of the death penalty are arguing against the execution of captured (and thus neutralised) human murderers – not against the only means of, for example, preventing vampire Count Bloodflood from arising again and slaying thousands.

Declaring your own ‘not being like that’-ness to be more important than eradicating said daemonic threat is a serious moral undertaking. It is arguably justifiable from certain moral perspectives, but if your protagonists jump into it as a default position, they are in danger of looking irresponsible, thick or – worse still for an author – distinctly cardboard.

Can you edit yourself?

2009-10-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

You can’t edit your own work... can you?

‘Don’t edit yourself’ is part of the canon of wisdom aimed at absolute newbies. It's often a polite way of saying: “You don’t realise it but you probably need a neutral third party to disabuse you of the idea that your work is remotely publishable yet.”

One step up the ladder, advice against self-editing reflects the basic fact that the creator of a story is never going to be in a good position to judge how it will strike a new reader. Also, the fact that it’s harder to spot your own typos. I don't know quite why that is, it’s just life.

Unfortunately a successful author is going to have to edit their work. Not in the sense of dumping their editorial team – a mainstream publisher is hardly going to allow that anyway – but in the sense of getting material ready for submission in the first place. Even if you have a book contract, an editor who receives a shoddy first draft is not a happy woman, and not a woman who likes her author any more. I’ve seen a few such documents, and believe me there was mockery in the office. Worst case scenario, the publisher will decide to cut their losses and the project will get dumped. (See the wise and crabbit Nicola Morgan on why authors shouldn’t leave their job to editors for more.)

A huge swathe of nasties that can be lurking in an apparently finished MS, including but definitely not limited to: plot inconsistencies, descriptive inconsistencies, forgotten plot strands, characters who merge into each other, excessive infodump, overuse of adjectives, overuse of certain phrases or grammatical constructions (you’d think the dash was the fundamental building block of English to read some of my drafts), “darlings”, randomly changing POV and of course bog-standard typos. All of these will hide from by whatever means they can, and the more this process involves persuading your authorial vanity (or mine) that they are signs of genius, the better they will like it.

But of course you can’t edit yourself, well-known fact. So, apart from the universal wisdom of putting the MS in the drawer for a month to give yourself as much of a fresh eye as possible, what can you do? There are a few tips and tricks to help you think as much as possible like that editor who is going to be bashing the MS into shape, or deciding whether to acquire it in the first place.

Self-editing tricks

1) Read it aloud: This is a popular piece of advice for good reason. All sorts of problems suddenly come into focus, from pacing issues to characters’ individual voices. If it’s a book that’s likely to be read to children you could also get someone else to read it to you. It doesn’t matter how useful or otherwise that person may be as a literary advisor, the points where they trip over the language or rhythm will be the points where a parent reading aloud is likely to trip.

2) Simplify your plot into a numbered list of events: This will be dull, but it’s particularly good for complex narratives as it shows up timeline errors.

3) Think or read several times through your plot or story with a different secondary character in focus each time: Mary may be a more important character than John, but if John behaves inconsistently just because it’s important for Mary’s character development, the book is weakened. It’s worth giving John a bit of time at the front of your brain to make sure this isn’t happening.

4) Be honest about your own reactions, all of them: Sometimes you will just be too close to your own work to have much idea about it, but usually even early on there are clues. If, when rereading, you find yourself rushing over Chapter Four to wallow in Chapter Five, it might mean Chapter Five is great – but probably also that Chapter Four needs work.

5) Follow the niggle: In my rueful experience, if you have a niggling feeling that something is not quite on the money, then you are almost certainly right. If you absolutely can’t work out what the problem is just now, highlight the offending section in another colour and come back to it. These days I actually rejoice (well, in a mild sort of way) when I work out what’s wrong with a scene because I have almost invariably known on some level that the problem was there, and now I can fix it.

6) Kill your darlings: This one gets bandied about even more than ‘read it aloud’. But how to identify a darling? Sometimes you might like what you’ve written just not because you wrote it, but also because it's good. You can usually tell a ‘darling’ because it's a one-off that doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the story. It may be a phrase that includes a stunning but thematically inappropriate image, or a scene which is terribly poignant but fails to develop the characters and holds up the plot. That said, the darlings which are most painful to remove are the ones that have been woven into the text because you loved them so much that you built some of the story around them by way of life support. If trying to work out what’s wrong with a specific scene is driving you fruitlessly mad, it may be that this is the problem. Look at each element of the story in turn, asking what the consequences would be if you removed it. Something that appears to be very well embedded in the text may on examination turn out to actually shored up by filler material, and this kind of analysis can detect that.

7) If you’re stuck for a solution, go back a stage from your apparent problem: I’ve spent dozens of hours sweating over my writing thinking ‘this bit doesn’t work!’ but being completely unable to figure out what I should replace it with. It took me a while to cotton on, but eventually I realised that a good proportion of the time the difficulty was that I wasn’t pruning back far enough. Very often the sentence or paragraph prior to the offending text was harmless in itself, but it was leading me gently down a dead end. This seems obvious for plot problems, but it also applies to subtler issues of characterisation and style.

8) Cut and cut again: This is another general one that everybody knows. The trick is motivating yourself to hack away at your lovely prose, even the bits that aren't darlings. It can be done – after some years, I’ve actually come to find cutting enjoyable. It’s liberating, and it allows the best bits of your book to shine out more, concentrating it into shinier and shinier pure diamond. The mild regret at the loss of some elegant touches pales in comparison with the thrill of regarding the taut new shape of the whole.

9) Keep note of things you repeatedly find yourself doing wrong: This isn’t a very edifying experience. But if I’d been doing it I’d have cottoned on to point 7 years earlier. A more positive spin on this would be to keep a file noting serious problems you’ve encountered with your drafts, and how you’ve fixed them. The chances are you’ll spot some characteristic weaknesses and may even be able to avoid introducing them at draft stage.

10) Keep reminding yourself that self-editing isn’t a boring extra, but a vital aid: It may not be fun, but that’s why a lot of people don’t bother. If you do, you’ve greatly increased your chance of getting out of the slush pile and/or of making your editor like you and want to acquire more of your shapely MSS.

Mortgage vs art

2009-10-13T08:57:00.001-07:00

Another week, another literary sequel. This time to Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, causing my earnest techie boyfriend to fulminate about ‘heresey’ in an endearing fashion. But I intend to read it!

It is also another week of spending all but one day at my desk writing. The schedule for the current commissioned work has hit a snafu (as, lord knows, is the way of 99% of publishing schedules), so here I am, excavating immortal art from the depths of my soul unhindered by anything much except the need to occasionally take breaks to read a book or blog.

If you are, like me, a stunningly versatile freelancer with a glowing CV and a brilliant future (or a repeat galloper into dead ends, delete as applicable), the kinds of work you do divide interestingly as follows:

a) non-publishing editorial work: score 4/10 for self-esteem, 9/10 for earning value
b) publishing editorial work (on more or less glamorous projects): 4 to 7/10 for self-esteem depending on said glamour level, 6/10 for earning value
c) commissioned writing work: 8/10 for self-esteem, 3/10 for earning value
d) rustling up more of the above no score out of 10, but keeps the whole process functioning
e) writing work for which you are not currently being paid and which may well be wanted by nobody, ever: N/10 for self-esteem, N/10 for earning value.

It’s the values of ‘N’ that cause the trouble. I might not know for years what the values of N are, and they have a high chance of ending up nil. That means that, because I am not indifferent to my mortgage, my categories of work tend to get prioritised in alphabetical order.

I’m betting almost every writer outside the hallowed and miniscule band of big earners has a version of the same dilemma, and your personal feeling about the importance of self-esteem vs the importance of mortgage payments is bound to have a big effect on how you use your time (even before we take into account the value of ‘N’). If/when you start having a public profile as a writer but still need other sources of income, the question of time-consuming self-promotion activities comes into it too. I for one almost always err on the side of the mortgage, causing myself to worry about my Commitment to Art. Art presumably being some kind of ethereal fairy that lives on rejection letters.

Perhaps the only solution is to earn so much money from original fiction that the need for income-generating activities ‘a’ through ‘d’ goes away.

And what then? Surely the luxury of worrying about being out of touch.

Literary sequels, fantasy worlds and Neil Gaiman’s Wuthering Heights

2009-10-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

It’s my intention to discuss aspects of writing and publishing in this blog, and with any luck eventually get other people discussing them in the comments. Until such time as there are people to do the discussing, I shall talk to myself…

**

I’ve been professionally involved with literary sequels, so I might be said to be biased in favour of the genre (if it is one), but if you look at the public reaction to any book in this mode the cries of ‘Blasphemy!’ and ‘It should never be done!’ tend to drown out cautious positive responses.

Objections range from the reasonable: “It’ll never be as good as the original and I’d rather read something completely new,” to the inane: “Any author with talent would surely choose to create their own characters!” As well as showing up the varying levels of public understanding of the writer’s craft, literary sequels seem to poke some book-lovers at a particularly sore point.

Historically, it was hard to establish ownership of a story, and it often wasn’t considered a vital issue. Copyright law has changed this absolutely – an author’s claim to their material is their livelihood, and a big hairy plagiarism lawsuit is the stuff of publishers’ nightmares (remember Opal Mehta?), with the potential to damage public perceptions of the whole industry.

Even now, though, there are plenty of stories and characters whose reuse will not get you into trouble. A new take on biblical characters or Greek gods demands inventiveness, but you probably won’t get bankrupted in court.

The legal reasons for the difference are obvious: copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death and the children of classical writers are not living in Surrey waiting for someone they can sue. Copyright, however, is not much of a motive for visceral distaste; a yearning for ‘authenticity’ is. In a world of proliferating stuff, that limited amount of stuff which can claim ‘authenticity’ is considered to have substantial added value. Hence public perceptions that sequels have a descending level of legitimacy, starting with those written by the author’s heirs, moving through projects commissioned/endorsed by estate trustees and reaching the bottom with books whose authors have no formal connection with the original texts.

With this in mind, it’s odd to remember that at grass roots level, particularly in the field of children’s fiction, literary subcreation is not so much rife as pandemic. It’s probably a condition of parenthood, at least for the kind of parents who read to their children in the first place, and it’s certainly it’s a condition of childhood. Lottie the Otter may be a controversial public addition to the Hundred Acre Wood, but I wonder how many thousands of little-known predecessors she has had, as a child’s favourite toy gets included in an extemporised story.

Nobody would see this as a threat to literature. But if we move up the age range we get to fanfiction, and there the snarling really starts – I can’t think of a form of writing that is more maligned, when it isn’t being simply ignored. Some people in publishing won’t even utter the word, perhaps lest it somehow adhere to their lists of titles about detectives, vampires, aliens and other popular archetypes and taint them like a drop of black in a pot of white paint. Personally I’d recommend at least keeping an eye on what the fans are doing. Some of them are no fools.

Whatever you think of the screeds of fanfiction that are so little officially discussed yet so easily accessed, they show that there is a substantial hunger for literary subcreation, from the perspective of both production and consumption. It’s interesting to note that the rise of literary sequels has coincided with the rise of the internet. Googling tells me that Gone with the Wind sequel Scarlett (1991) was the first of the modern batch, though there were a few things published before that such as Jane Austen sequels. It seems that professional publishing noticed that there was a market being filled by amateurs, and moved in properly during the 90s.

For individuals, the ethics of literary subcreation are not as clear-cut as the law tries to make them: no less original a worldbuilder than J.R.R. Tolkien feared divine judgement for his hubris in devising Middle Earth.

Fortunately for those of us who make a living out of books, the line between formal legitimacy and illegitimacy is still fairly clear. Written law makes it so, and the difference between a computer screen and a bound book with the weight of a distribution system behind it make it visible (self-publishing erodes this, but a self-publisher of plagiarism is taking a level of legal risk which dabblers on fanfiction.net are probably not). But the underlying unease is still there, and it links up to the overarching worries of the technological age. How do you protect what’s yours, when what’s yours is just a bunch of kilobits? Sequels by new authors break the ‘one creator, one copyright’ rule, and some feel that shakes the whole literary house. Where will it all end? Will people stop writing genuinely new books? Probably not… but on the other hand there’s obviously something in the argument that because Eoin Colfer wrote a story in Douglas Adams’ world (And Another Thing is due out next week) he produced one less book in a setting of his own.

What if – by way of a thought experiment – we could ignore questions of ownership, whether they be based on moral or legal grounds? Then we wouldn’t just get Eoin Colfer continuing the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide series, or even Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. We could possibly have Neil Gaiman (disclaimer: I’m just picking a random famous name here) rewriting the story of Wuthering Heights in his own style. Would there be a market for this? Big posters in the tube saying ‘Neil Gaiman presents Wuthering Heights’, in the style of ‘Wes Craven presents Dracula’?

I really don’t know: the concept may just be a reductio ad absurdam. But it was also normal procedure for Shakespeare.

Coming soon: discussions or one-sided disquisitions on professional falsness in publishing, lazy literary conventions and coming over all necessary...

Plot devices

2009-10-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

I can think of a few authors who are apparently using this as their bible (cos the thing is, it sells):

http://news.ansible.co.uk/plotdev.html

Return to the Hundred Acre Wood is upon us

2009-10-01T09:57:00.001-07:00

It’s a curious feeling, seeing a book you authored or edited hit the headlines and garner reactions when in your mind it’s history. But that’s the way of book publishing.

When I abandoned the safety of in-house editorship at Egmont a year ago, the news about Return to the Hundred Acre Wood had (rather to our surprise) still not leaked. And now we are finally at the pub date.

Egmont is skilfully dropping publicity bombs in the final run-up to Monday’s publication. First chapter 1 was released, now it’s the Revelation of the Otter – and what a revelation. Angst in both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, where one commenter goes against the general grain to suggest that, never mind Lottie, Kanga was a single parent lesbian. (Don’t look at me, I edited Benedictus, not Milne.)

Ahem. In other news, the book is tipped at 12/1 for the Christmas bestseller position. Cliff Richard, eat your mince pie of a heart out.

What am I working on at the moment? Well that’s one of the things about the glamorous world of publishing, you frequently can’t tell anyone. Blog readers will find out in a year.

Post the first

2009-10-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

This is the first post, and there’s nobody here, so I shall welcome myself.

Hello, me!

I see you have no friends yet. But you do have all these books, and chocolate. And that is what life is about.

Mmmmm.