There's an article in the current issue of The Author (the magazine of the Society of Authors) which at first sight looks like bad news for those wishing to sell books... but I'm not so sure. It's by lifelong author Roger Williams, who like most lifelong authors wasn't making oodles of money and who had decided to seek "a market that would drive sales". He devised a cunning plan (well, I expect it seemed so at the time) to write a book of fact-based short stories all set in the 200 or so hotels around the world that happen to be called the Hotel Bristol. The idea was to sell them direct to the hotels to put with the Gideon bibles as light reading. He self-published High Times at the Hotel Bristol, at a cost of about 60p a copy for 2000 copies. That meant he didn't have a publisher's marketing dept to rely on. But I doubt any publisher would have gone the length he did in marketing.

He sent copies to the local press and targeted the city of Bristol. The local Waterstones and Blackwells took copies, as did the tourist office, it went up on Amazon and he went on local radio (BBC) to talk about it.

This resulted in some sales in the city but not one outside (he knew, as all orders came to him). Then the Mail on Sunday named it their travel book of the week. That brought a grand total of one new order. However this was better than the result of exposure on Radio 4 (he'd sent a copy to the producer of Excess Baggage; again classic author marketing strategy but not a single order resulted.

So he went online - set up blogs, put chapters online, made podcasts. He reports "barely a sale" as a result. Then his luck seemed to turn - the Wall Street Journal picked up on it and he got 29 column inches and a mugshot in both the US and European editions. Total extra sales? One.

So where's the ray of light for writers in this sad story? I think there might be two. One: before you market your idea you must have it, and if it's a dud it'll be a dud however good you are at the marketing. I think a collection of stories that just happen to take place at various hotels called Bristol was just not a very fascinating idea to start with. Neither do I see why the inhabitants of Bristol should have been likely to buy it just because it name-checked their city. (I do think he might have done better to home in on cities outside the UK called Bristol; "exiles" tend to have a more sentimental attachment to old-country names etc than those of us who live there).

And the other thing that's interesting is that he chose the idea not because it fascinated him but because he thought it would sell. The fact that it didn't suggests that at least for writers, who tend anyway not to know much about what sells and why, it might be better to write what pleases them, as well as they can, and hope it also pleases others. Do the marketing afterwards, by all means, but don't create your product with marketing principally in mind; it may work for beans but on this showing at least, it doesn't for books.

- and this is how the cover finally came out; I haven't scanned it in yet but the thumbnail version from Seren's website shows what I think is the one change, a sort of fade-effect on the words which I quite like.




Now we're trying to find an official launch date and a venue that costs sixpence-halfpenny - you'd think places would be reasonable, in these hard times, but it ain't necessarily so, apparently.

Haven't found any typos yet though I did find one factual error in the back cover blurb that someone, namely me, should have picked up on. Am hoping nobody will notice.

So... if you recall this post, about the various possible cover pics for my Later Selected (which looks like coming out in July), folks voted here, on facebook and on a mailing list I'm on. And the clear front-runners from all sources together were ( Map )

and ( Franklin )

In fact, Map was slightly ahead, but it looks as if the publishers will go with Franklin, if they can. I'm not too surprised by that, because I've heard before that there is a belief that human figures on a cover sell it better.

"If they can", however, is the operative phrase, because that image is owned by the National Maritime Museum and so far they haven't replied to emails asking if it can be used. If it doesn't work out, I guess they'll go with Map, because I think that's public domain.

My favourite three were definitely Map, Franklin and Landscape 1 - that was probably my ultimate fave but in the end you gotta go with what'll shift copies.

It was a fun exercise, anyway! Thanks to all who joined in.

Andrew Motion in today's Guardian:

"News editors don't think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn't like the poem - then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.

I'm not the first laureate to complain about this. John Betjeman (who got so fed up with it he considered resigning) and Hughes say exactly the same thing in their letters. But I am the first person to say it in public - call that a privilege of my 10-year span, if you like. My point is not simply that the response is tiresome for whoever happens to be laureate. The point is: it's bad for poetry in general - but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this."

This is absolutely true, though not just of poetry. It's true in a wider sense of literature - the Whitbread prize for biography was only news the year two authors who happened to be husband and wife were "rivals" for it, and I've been rung up a few times by BBC bods who were doing stories about fan fiction and hoped that, as a published author, I would tell them how terrible and intrusive it was. When I told them what harmless fun it was, they were gravely disappointed, though to their credit BBC Wales has latched on to this now and rings me up when some other author is getting stroppy about it. But the format is still "find two people to disagree on air, or find one to take a negative view", and it extends beyond the arts. "Government Initiative Succeeds" isn't news. "Exam Results Improve" isn't news unless you cast doubt on their accuracy. I happen to think this is bad for society in general - anyone would think our national newspapers were all edited by Eeyore - but I think Motion is right that it's particularly obvious in editors' treatment of poetry, perhaps because they see poets as an elitist bunch who need mocking. They do love being able to portray them as forever feuding and squabbling, though, bizarrely and inconsistently, they also see them as forming cliques to assist each other's careers in underhand ways, which you wouldn't think they'd do if they really hated each other so much.

One result is that if a literary author of any kind wants publicity for a book, he or she is well advised to find some totally non-literary angle - invent a feud or a case of censorship. Which demeans things, but is scarcely unexpected....

- words I'd begun to think I'd never write. Maria's first was the unforgettable As Meat Loves Salt, a dark, violent, brooding tale of the English Civil War, a clash of politics and principles, not to mention a very stormy (and slashy) affair between a thinker and a doer. It had every ingredient for pushing my buttons, including a deeply unreliable narrator who doesn't know half of what he's done himself. I was present when its first draft was being read in a workshop, and recall vividly a scene of 17th-century dentistry which had strong men staggering outside looking green.

The second has been long in coming, partly because publishers are so obstinate about not wanting writers to do something different for their second novel; I think she wrote one set in modern times and couldn't get past this mindset. But now comes news that another novel, The Wilding is on its way,and I must admit I'm not ill-pleased to find it's historical too, just because I know how good she is at that period. The woman from faber says she read it in a night and I believe her; I did that with AMLS, and it was a doorstep. But an unputdownable doorstep. This is going to be worth waiting for.

This is a really interesting blog post about the current state of UK publishing, from a young man who works in the business.

I've been refusing the use of a certain poem to most people, including exam boards, for ages - not a matter of money, I just don't like the thing. Just got an email from my publisher:

"I've gone as far as we can with denying permission for the use of 'Sometimes' in the OCR exam, but this from the administrator:' I have as I said arranged for the poem to be greyed out before the exam paper is published on the web and therefore it will not appear after the exam, however I need to make you aware that candidates of the exam have been studying the poem as part of their syllabus and therefore it cannot be removed from the actual exam itself (their is an exemption in the Copyright Act for examinations).'"

Do note "their is", from an exam board - quis custodiet, eh? But what's even more interesting is that "exemption". I can understand that they may not need to pay you, but the implication is rather worse; it is that you can't refuse the use of it and they don't have to ask. Words like "unmannerly", "arrogant" and "semi-literate bastards" come to mind....

There should currently (or soon, depending when she gets around to it) be much rejoicing on the blog of Joanna Preston, A Dark Feathered Art Joanna, a graduate of the Glamorgan Masters in Writing who now lives in New Zealand, had sent her poetry collection The Summer King, which was more or less her Masters submission, to various UK publishers, Cape, Seren, Faber, Carcanet and Salt, and they'd all turned it down. This collection has now won the prestigious inaugural Kathleen Grattan Prize, judged by Fleur Adcock, and will be published by Otago University Press. From the press release:

The winner will receive $16,000, making it the richest poetry prize in New Zealand, and publication by Otago University Press. Such was the high quality of the entries that the judge, distinguished poet Fleur Adcock, found it hard to choose a winner, until she gave 'marks for technical skill, originality, verve, wit and humanity. In the end I chose as the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award: The Summer King by Joanna Preston.'

Joanna Preston is an Australian-born poet living in Christchurch. She grew up in various outback towns in New South Wales, with her grandparents' farm a constant, and started writing at an early age. She holds a BA in Theatre and Film Studies and has lived in New Zealand since 1994, apart from a spell in the United Kingdom during which she received an MPhil in Creative Writing from the University of Glamorgan. She has been a member of the Airing Cupboard Women Poets group, Canterbury Poets Collective, and The Australian Haiku Society. Her work has received a number of awards and appeared in numerous publications. The Summer King will be her first published collection.

Moral: as I keep telling frustrated friends and ex-students, the editor or publisher who just sent you that letter is not called Moses: his rejection was not written on stone tablets and may have been for all manner of reasons other than literary quality, and there is always the chance that he was simply WRONG.... the thing is to maintain an ego the size of a bus and keep sending the stuff out. The collection's good, btw; I say so and I'm NEVER wrong....

Did I mention I've got a vid on YouTube reading a poem from the new book? Probably not, because I hate the sound of my voice on tape same as everyone does. But Seren's poetry editor got a camera that would do it, so we made it at her kitchen table. It's here - and Paul Henry's, which is far better cos Paul's sexier than me, is here

Copies of the new book, Long-Haul Travellers, arrived last night, just in time to have a launch today at the gig I'd got booked in Bedwas, near Caerphilly, through Barrie Llewelyn's writers' group. It seemed to go well. they were a most friendly bunch and bought lots of books, indicating that they are Good Eggs, though the all-time record for book-buying is still with the incomparable folks of Haverfordwest.

Here's the final cover. I do believe the book has no typos....

And it's green(ish). Heslop would like it.

- which will hopefully be out in October. It needs a small alteration because I want a capital H on Haul. But I think it's quite pretty. OH took the pic, which AFAIR is the entrance to Trollfjord. And it is, ever so slightly, a green book (see icon).

I've been reading a fascinating article in the latest number of "The Author" by Peter Ayrton of Serpent's Tail, about the increasing difficulty of selling fiction to big publishers, and the way most of them won't stick with mid-list authors who may be getting critical acclaim and selling reasonably but aren't making them megabucks. "It is for this reason," he says, "that agents advise midlist authors to change their name and submit books in a new persona - they stand more chance of being published as a new writer than as a writer with previous books with mediocre sales".

Hmmm. Now to choose a pseudonym, and maybe that will suggest the corresponding persona..... My first notion was to use the forename and surname of a random two of my favourite fictional characters. Unfortunately this yielded, in quick succession, Ahab Corvinus, Ostap Midwinter and Seth Jenkyns. Actually he's a poss, isn't he? I see him as a working-class Northern writer with attitude, looking maybe a bit like the late Jake Thackray.

One reason Ayrton cites for the difficulty of selling fiction is the pernicious cult of faction, and of fiction-as-autobiography - as Ayrton says, rightly I think, this "closes down the imagination's space - readers more and more demand of fiction that it be 'real', whatever that may mean. [...] today's readers are in danger of losing the ability to read fiction, to allow themselves to be transported to an imaginary world created by the novelist". He cites the hostile comments on Amazon about his house's big publishing success, Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin - now I don't much like what I have seen of Shriver's Guardian columns, and her book using snooker as a background was wrong enough to be plain funny. But the Amazon objections to "Kevin" are apparently on the ground that a non-parent cannot write about being a parent - in which case Shakespeare must have spent a hell of a lot of his spare time killing kings. This goes back to the advice traditionally given to new writers: write about what you know. Of course there are good reasons for it, as I think each time I see another student story about gangsters in New York from someone who has clearly never set foot in the place. But I don't give that advice any more; I have replaced it with "write about what you can persuade people you know". Partly because if some students wrote only about what they know, they'd have nothing to write about except getting wasted in the union bar, partly because it is a part of being a writer to be able to convince your readers of things that aren't so. Shriver failed to do it about snooker, because she didn't do the research well enough; that doesn't mean it can't be done. Wilkie Collins' No Name is partly set in a town he knew well and partly in one he mugged up from a guide book, and I defy the casual reader to tell which is which.

To quote the late Bob Monkhouse: "The most important thing in this game is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you're made".

Now to work out Seth Jenkyns's biography....

Noted from author friend who doesn't wish to be identified:

"Amazon UK is in dispute with Hachette Livre, the biggest publishing group in Britain, and parent company of my own publisher Headline. To back up their demand for extra terms (they among others already get the best terms in the English-speaking world), Amazon are removing the 'buy the book' button from many Hachette Livre books, and withdrawing them from various promotional arrangements. [...]Hachette Livre are determined to stand firm, which I support, and hope I shall be unselfish enough to keep doing even if my own sales are affected, because this is about whether Amazon can be allowed to exploit its near-monopoly online, and its ever-growing slice of the whole market (at current growth it'll be the UK's biggest bookseller in three years). But it's worth knowing that just because a book doesn't show as available on Amazon doesn't mean it's not available elsewhere."

Now I like Amazon, I buy a lot of books there. But their info on whether something is or is not in stock can be misleading and I do get frustrated when people say they can't find something because it isn't on Amazon. There's always the publisher to go to, if it's still in print, or abebooks if it isn't.

An interesting and thoughtful blog post here from Danuta Keane about publishing in the internet age, blooks and small publishers in particular. I must say the advice to trawl through the riveting info at Companies House makes the heart sink, but there's a lot to think about and since I am currently marking student coursework I appreciated the image "The industry has spent so long in minor debates about the ebook and territory, it has failed to gen up on the grab power of the web itself. As a consequence, it is now trying to catch up with the speed and understanding of a lazy student on the eve of her finals.".

I was put on to this by the novelist Emma Darwin, who's with Bloomsbury and has her own fascinating booky blog at This Itch of Writing

Apart from being, from a writer's viewpoint, a fascinating article, this has to be from any viewpoint one of the funniest I've ever read. Det. Insp. Robert Fisk, with his faithful colleague Saef "Watson" Nasrawi and their taxi-driver, ransack the teeming streets of Cairo (which are even more interesting if you are Dr Spooner) in search of the cheeky blighter who put Fisk's name on a book he never wrote. The moment when he asks a bookshop owner for his cut of the sales is particularly hilarious.

This is one of these long and complicated stories-with-links-in that I sometimes give up on – I'll try to make it as short as possible, but it still needs a cut for length. ( more )