A writer's life

I just make Facebook friends with fiction writer Viet Dinh and what's the first thing I do? Steal this cartoon from his excellent blog, that's what.

How do I live with myself?

Yes, my neighbour...

Millstones

Margaret Drabble claims that her publishers, Penguin, are trying to persuade her to dumb her work down and increase sales. She spoke to the Independent:

"I do feel publishers are under very strong pressure to sell books rather than encourage long-term readers. They have not asked me to dumb down ... but I have a feeling there's a problem. I write literary novels but I can sense my publishers have difficulty in selling me as a genre ... whether in literary fiction, or women's fiction or shopping fiction. They don't quite know whether I'm highbrow or literary," she said.

Penguin were 'unavailable for comment.' You can read more about it here. 

Pure as the driven slush

There's an interesting post by Mary Jones on the Picador blog, about slush piles (which gives me the opportunity to recycle in my title Tallulah Bankhead's pitiless analysis of herself). If you read it, don't miss my comment.

Talking about slush piles, I have the honour of having been winkled out from one, many years ago, by Neil Belton, or whoever did his preliminary reading for him, when he was at Cape. He held onto the novel for many months, trying to persuade the paperback division that they wanted to publish it as much he did. He didn't, alas, succeed, but the fact that he found, and supported, the book - sent cold, complete and without an agent - is very much to his credit. And it's proof that, at least once, a manuscript did make it from the pile to an enthusiastic editor's desk, even if it went no further.

Fame - elixir of youth

As you can see from this photograph, being published has had an oddly rejuvenating effect on me.

Courtesy of Mistress Montagiste (you know who you are!)

Pansies

There's an interesting piece in today's Guardian CiF by Mark Lawson. Entitled How fiction lost the plot, it looks at the presumed sorry state of modern fiction publishing and runs through the usual suspects: cliquishness, discrimination, book prize juries descending to compromise. In the end, though, he pinpoints the failure of the public library system to support literary fiction, devoting its shelves to DVDs and Citizens Advice Bureau pamphlets rather than novels. Books that were once guaranteed a thousand hardback sales now languish in warehouses and, finally, remainder book stores, assuming they're published at all.

I've always been too much of a hoarder to feel happy about borrowing books, though I valued the opportunity the British Council library in Rome once gave me to sample writers I couldn't afford to buy in the pre-Amazon days when imported books cost the earth. The only person I know who consistently used a library is Jane, who went to the public library in Mare Street, Hackney, at least once a week. She now buys her books almost exclusively from the new and extremely well-stocked Oxfam book shop on Dalston Road. This is great for her and, of course, for Oxfam, particularly as she regularly re-donates the books to the shop. It's less great for the author and publisher, of course, as the copy has already been sold further up the line, although I've often found that a book bought in a charity shop leads on to other works by the same author being bought from retail booksellers, much as downloaded music, in my case at least, leads on to the purchase of a legitimate CD.

Lawson concludes by saying that the success or failure of a book now depends on the vagaries of judging panels. My editor confided in me that prizes can actually make very little difference to sales, and can even have a deleterious effect on them if the effect of the prize is to provoke spitefulness among the winner's rivals and peers. It's also true, though, that a book with a very low profile indeed can't help but benefit from a little attention. I'm obviously thinking about Little Monsters, for which no longlist is too long, no recognition too abject. I remember, some years ago, Hari Kunzru turning down a prize from the Daily Mail and wondering at the time if I'd have his moral integrity. Well, I don't wonder any longer. I haven't.

A couple of last thoughts. One comment was left by someone who published a first novel but had the second one turned down as being 'not good enough'. Gulp. Another contains a link to someone who failed to find a publisher at all and took to droplifting his novel. Droplifting involves leaving copies of the book in booksellers. The piece is entertaining, thought-provoking and worth a read.

PS Pansies, as you know, was the title of DH Lawrence's best known collection of poems. It doesn't refer to flowers, and it certainly doesn't refer to the morally disordered (pace JP2), but is derived from the French pensées - thoughts which, according to Lawrence, come "as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head." In other words, I'm rambling.

Pip-pipped at the post

Publishing news. Picador has decided to scrap the traditional first-hardback-then-paperback process for literary fiction and to bring out almost all its novels in paperback editions from the outset, producing only a limited run of luxury hardbacks for collectors. The first novel to appear in this format will be Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey. You can read more about why this move has been made on the Picador blog.

As a reader, I'm convinced that this decision makes sense. Most of my reading these days is done on trains or planes or buses, or in bed, and hardbacks are simply inconvenient. They won't slide into pockets or side-by-side in bags, they weigh too much. Some of them don't even fit comfortably on shelves (at least not on those of the bookcases I've had made to hold my extensive collection of paperback novels). Nobody really wants them. Their only advantage is that you can use the jacket flap to mark your place. Even that awful commercial compromise, the 'special airport edition', is unwieldy and unlovable.

So why am I slightly anxious about the move? Because my own, my very own Little Monsters will be the last (or last-but-one) novel ever to be published by Picador in the traditional way, first in hardback, and then in paperback. This might make it highly collectable in years to come, regardless of its immense literary merit (although I doubt this), but I'm worried that it might also make it feel a little bit like yesterday's loaf from the word go. It also means I'll have to wait months and months for the paperback, which, as Crumey says, is the edition the author's friends - and everyone else - actually want to buy. Hmm.

There is only one way to make me feel better about this. Scroll up and down the sidebar until you see a little box with the cover of Little Monsters inside it and the magic words Buy from Amazon. Click. You will be rewarded in heaven.

The benefits of a university education

Shortly before New Writing 15 came out in June, I entered the title into Google to see what pre-publication attention, if any, it was getting. The faint, almost inaudible buzz I did find came from the blogs of a handful of the contributors, including my own and that of someone who operates under the name of Kingfelix. Kingfelix’s post said that he’d just received advanced copies of the anthology. I added a comment:

I got my copy today. Naturally, the first thing I did was read my own story. Now I’ll read yours… See you at the party!

This was his response:

Ah, sadly I can’t read your story as you attended Cambridge and I have a single-person boycott against all Oxbridge literary output (too much of it, too easily published), but nevermind, enjoy the party.

I would have left it at that, but someone called Tom interceded on my behalf:

Kennedy, will you please control your vituperative urges. Wait until you’ve met him before you insult him …OK, maybe if he was from Oxford. But Cambridge is fine.

Kingfelix, now revealed as Jason Kennedy, replied:

I did not insult him, I rebuffed him.

At this point, foolishly, I commented:

Your loss, boyo.

To which Kingfelix responded:

Of course, those of us who did not attend Cambridge are always incurring losses of one sort or another.

As far as I was concerned, that was the last of it. But I was unwise enough to mention, in a post about the NW15 launch, that I’d enjoyed Tod Hartman’s piece in the anthology. Kennedy, ruffled, rose to what he presumably saw as bait and intervened:

The boy's reading was excruciating and his story has less jokes and of a lower quality than my own story.

Ah, but he works at Cambridge!

Once again, the wisest policy seemed to be to ignore this. Kennedy’s issues with Cambridge and apparent conviction that praise of anyone else’s work automatically implied unfavourable criticism of his were outside my remit. Nonetheless, I continued to visit his blog every now and again, and enjoyed his posts in much the same way I enjoy John Fowles’ journals, for their self-effacing wisdom and intellectual modesty. And what should I find there a few days ago but news that his story from NW15 is about to be translated into Chinese? I click on comments with the intention of congratulating my fellow-contributor and find this:

I thought the fact my story is about work, rather than the gay scene in Tuscany as experienced by a Cambridge man… (yes, it is tough to accept that such a story and author profile has an easier time reaching market, but there you go).

It isn’t quite a sentence (just as nevermind isn’t quite a word and less jokes isn’t quite grammar), but the gist of it is clear enough. He’s referring to me. And now I’m beginning to get irritated. My first thought is that, if he had been to Cambridge, he would probably have known that Rome, the setting of my story (which you can read by clicking on Entertaining Friends here, by the way), isn’t in Tuscany but Lazio, an altogether less glamorous (as in Cambridge-y) region. My second thought is that no one who has been to Cambridge in the last half-century would refer to himself as a Cambridge man. My final thought is that the person who wrote this knows nothing about me, has no intention of finding out anything about me because that might shake his convictions, and that these convictions are, essentially, racist because rooted in ignorance of the worst, most wilful kind. It’s the kind of mindset that assumes Africans have rhythm, or that Jews are scheming and mendacious. It assumes that someone who has been to Cambridge has floated to success on a cloud of privilege. In my case, it assumes wrongly.

Kennedy was born in Tamworth, the son of an engineer. (You see, unlike him, I’ve done my homework.) I was born, just down the road, in Lichfield, the son of a quantity surveyor. I went to a series of state schools and then, with no assistance from my last comprehensive, won a scholarship to Cambridge, which I attended on a full grant. Cambridge may have been, and may still be, a bastion of privilege, but it never made me feel that I wasn’t entirely within my rights to be there. Since then, I’ve travelled and cobbled together a living in a variety of ways, much as Kennedy seems to have done. I’ve been writing throughout this time and now, a week away from my 54th birthday, I’m about to publish a novel, the sixth I’ve written over a twenty-five year period.

I found my first agent after sending a manuscript, blind, to Cape. The editor who read it (Neil Belton, not a Cambridge connection) turned it down after 18 months, but recommended I get in touch with AP Watt, literary agents. They tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it and, soon after, we parted company. I entered a short story competition organised by the Independent of Sunday and Bloomsbury and was among the winners, without any mention being made of my degree or its origin. My second agent (Malcolm Imrie, not a Cambridge connection) worked hard to sell a novel, but was unsuccessful. My third (Isobel Dixon, not a Cambridge connection, although she lives there) was more successful, selling a novel of mine to an editor at Picador (Sam Humphreys, not a Cambridge connection).

As far as I know, the only use (in the vulgar, self-aggrandising sense Kennedy intends) that my degree has been to me is to facilitate entry into the staff room of one or two cowboy language schools – hardly a glittering prize.

Kennedy might not like my story for a number of reasons. He might have problems with what he refers to as the ‘gay scene’; he might see Italy as irredeemably fey and bourgeois when compared with the grittiness of Guatemala. He might assume my short story is an autofiction, as the French say, and that I and the narrator are one, and equally despicable. But to dismiss my work and me, out of hand, as ‘such a story and author profile’ in the public space of his blog, and to do so without even having the courtesy to name me, is indefensible.

Reasons to be cheerful, if you're Peter Kay

This article will probably have been blogged by just about every struggling writer in the English-speaking world. So why should I be left out? Sob.

Any ideas who 'Jane' might be?

Publishing

I've just read a very interesting post in the Tart of Fiction blog, about the difficulties of being published. I left this comment:

I sent my first novel cold to publishers around 15 years ago. (It never even occurred to me to find an agent in those days.) The first sent it back in a matter of days (four!), the second kept it for 18 months before admitting that the paperback division wasn't interested. The editor who wanted it, Neil Belton, suggested I get in touch with an agent. I did.

I was taken on, presumably on Belton's recommendation. By this time, I'd written another novel and she tried to sell that one, without success. We parted company. Novels three and four were circulated to agents, once more without success (nibbles but no bites), and it wasn't until two friends of mine who knew agents effectively introduced me that things changed. Both of them offered to represent me!

I made a choice, the wrong one as things turned out (for reasons I won't go into here), and another novel did the rounds without being bought. Humbly, I went to the agent I'd previously turned down, and she agreed to take me on. Eighteen months and what must have been thirty or forty rejections (for its quietness) later, she sold novel No. 5 to Picador. It's coming out in spring 2008.

The lessons? I'm not sure. The first is that I was picked out of a slush pile all those years ago and came damned close to being bought. So it can, or could, happen. The second is that the wrong agent is less than useless and the right one worth her weight in gold. The third is that no book will get published until it falls into the hands of the right editor. In my case, she'd turned the book down a year earlier and then, because she found herself thinking about it at odd moments, asked to see it again before making an offer. If the book had reached her without mediation, maybe she would still have bought it. But do books reach senior editors without mediation? I doubt it.

Interestingly, the whole commercial issue has only come to the forefront now, as we decide on the title and cover. My title - a quote from Shakespeare - was considered too quiet, apparently the biggest sin in mainstream publishing, and we've finally found an alternative with more zing that pleases us all sufficiently and has won the approval of the sales people. Now we have to decide on a cover! These, of course, are peripheral issues to the book itself.

Perhaps the most important lesson, to me at least, is that I kept writing.