…on what other readers made of Per Petterson’s ‘Out Stealing Horses’.

Is The Edinburgh Bookshop unique in running not one but three different book groups?  Within the space of 90 minutes – the length of the initial meeting, each group has established its own unique identity.  Tonight, the first group met up after reading its first novel, Per Petterson’s Impac Award-winning novel.

I reviewed this book some time ago – in August 2007 in fact – and so it has proven to be a good exercise to re-visit the novel and discover new things about the characters, the style of writing and the narrative.  After reading the novel for the third time, it is as though I have discovered a completely new novel that just happens to also be called ‘Out Stealing Horses’.

Italo Calvino once wrote (in ‘Why read the Classics?’) that the mark of a truly great book is not just one that we would recommend to others but one which we re-read.  In this sense, Per Petterson has written at least 2 classics (I’ve also re-read his incredibly stunning novel, ‘In the Wake’).

In discussion with Book Group Number One, I heard so many different versions of ‘Out Stealing Horses’ that I feel compelled to read it again.  so many factors made this book stand out for the readers: the language (which has survived the rigours of translation); the landscape; the light; the impact of memory on how we live today; the father-son relationship… of which it’s always interesting to hear a female reader’s perspective when it is felt some new insight into male psychology has been discovered.

We’ve chosen something a lot lighter for next time: David Sedaris’ latest ‘When You Are Engulfed in Flames’.

A year of reading from home without succumbing to the temptation to buy yet more titles to add to our collections would still leave many of us with a huge surplus of books to enjoy.  I was fascinated by the idea of this book when given an advance reading copy.  Susan Hill leads us through a grand adventure of books, authors, libraries, reading and writing, revelling in a world whose mysteries have never faded but open up to us each time we linger over a beloved narrative, fondly recall our years of learning or a treasured encounter with a sorely-missed mentor.

Having enjoyed a life rich in the vibrant heritage of literature in Britain, Susan Hill’s epic year embraces such differing experiences as the pop-up books of Robert Sabuda to an accidental encounter with an ageing E.M. Forster.  Each step of her journey through the tapestry of a life written with such verve and passion will be the envy of writers just beginning their careers.  As an autobiography to savour on the sofa or as a brief affair with one of England’s greatest living authors, this rich pageant is simply irresistable.

Link to publisher, Profile.

Lothian question, Barnett Formula and blah blah blah…

Again, a representative of the media based in London reports that Scottish MPs vote on matters pertaining to England.  No, no and again, no.  This is lazy, inaccurate and entirely in-line with what we expect of a reporter representing the under-siege Labour party.  The only ‘Scottish’ MPs who vote on matters relating only to England are those who belong to English parties: the Labour MPs, the LibDem MPs and the single ‘Scottish’ Tory MP.  The seven MPs at Westminster representing the SNP do not vote on matters relating only to England but do take part in matters relating to the so-called United Kingdom as they have been entitled to do since the Act of Union in 1707.  This quite obviously means that they will be voting on matters relating to both England and Scotland, a situation that ensures that English MPs also get to vote on matters relating to Scotland (at least in matters relating to taxation, the military and foreign affairs).

The inaccurate reporting of the ‘truth’ as reported by Labour supporters like Iain McWhirter is an indication of why the Labour government is failing in advance of a Tory recovery that is itself a nonsense lacking any substantial (and numerically accurate) policy.  David Cameron and his apostles do not have to tell the truth, simply ask whether Labour is being entirely honest and lo!  The Labour government lose another percent point in poll ratings.  We know Labour lie: we have to look no further than the gap between the promised end of child poverty and our own streets; the gap between a quality education and so-called ‘faith schools’.

Against such a dark background of repeated lies and un-truths, Alex Salmond’s boast that the SNP will gain 30 seats is not incredible and this is unfortunate.  This is a man who boasted in The Times that he will only employ among his staff people who think – and crucially, believe – like him.  When the majority of people in Scotland are either Catholic or atheist, will we be properly represented by our Scottish parliament next year or ruled by diktat of The Church of Scotland?

Yes, this is not a book-related article but as books are always written, published and sold within a wider civilised society, it seems the act of a responsible citizen to correct any untruths that are unfortunately being reported as fact.  How can the party of UK government put forward a credible argument for its continued existence when its supporters continue to peddle the sort of fiction that is doing most harm to its chances?  What Scotland, England and the UK as whole needs is a rational, fact-based argument based on the sound principle of what is going to be of most benefit to the people that live in the British Isles.  No man, after all, is an island alone…

(or, why you should never self-publish your book).

There are two different positions on the role self-publishing has to play in a writer’s life.  The first argument is approximately: ‘Why let the middle-man, the publisher, receive the lion’s share of profits for what is, after all, an author’s original work?’  I have only ever heard this argument being offered as justification from someone who has already self-published their own work.

Here is a variation on that argument: ‘As the author, I wanted the reader to be able to approach my work as I intended…’  Laudable.  Very laudable.  But if I may ask, why would someone approach your work?

In an age when the television schedules are littered with programs full of people wishing to embarass themselves publicly, why should the world of books be any different?  After all, if there are people wishing to be taken-in by the idea that Katie Price writes her own books then surely, there must be people beyond an author’s immediate family and circle of friends who are willing to waste their money on what is to all appearances, a vanity project.

I am one of those people who believes that every book will find the reader it deserves – or none.  Logically, just because I have never encountered a well-written novel or collection of poetry that has also been self-published, it does not follow that such a book does not now exist or will not be produced in the future.  Statistically, however, I still don’t enjoy having to say ‘no’ to every (and I mean every) self-published author who wanders optimistically into the bookshop with that naive hope twinkling in their eyes or worse, telephones on a busy Saturday with the pretence of being an interested third party.

The second argument then boils down quite succinctly to three words: don’t do it.

Many, very likely, the majority of authors decide to print their own books because they have struggled to find a publisher for their work.  These authors have optimistically submitted their work to publishers and agents year after year until finally, they have persuaded themselves that the rest of the world must be wrong and that if only there was some way to reach out directly to an audience who simply can’t wait to read something so new, so invigorating and so refreshingly different that the unpublished, frequently rejected author simply can’t resist the temptation to self-publish. The question of why these authors have been rejected so frequently, so often does not seem to have occured to them.  This is fortunate for a number of scoundrels/ companies who will prey on an author’s self-belief and the trust they have placed in the opinions of family and friends.

To save yourself the heartbreak of discovering that even after you’ve replied to the adverts at the back of a newspaper’s review section and after spending so much of your savings for your book to be printed to your own specifications that, you dear self-published author, are still being rebuffed by every bookshop you approach, let me say what needs to be said:

Just because you enjoy writing and just because the people you love say that you’re good, it does not logically follow that you are.

I will go further: it is a plain fact that if your work has been rejected by every publisher you’ve approached (or, every publisher in The Writer’s & Artist’s Yearbook – delete as applicable) then you simply do not have the ability to write.

This is not to say that you should stop writing.  At the most basic, if you really wish to be a published author, you should probably try writing something else.

It is a most basic truth of publishing that very few ‘debut’ novels are in fact ‘first’ novels (I’m allowing for the fact that it may happen but I would wager it simply does not happen).  If you feel that you have it within you to embark upon the marathon effort required to write the 120,000 words that usually forms the basis of a novel then it is also likely that you have previously attempted some form of longer fiction.  There are no such thing as ‘muses’: to become good, a writer must train.  Learning to write is like going to the gym: you cannot lift the big weights until you’ve trained with the smaller ones first.

The other reason that debut novels are often not first novels is because a writer who is to earn any amount of regard for their abilities must first endure a period of purging.

It is very tempting to incorporate your own experience into your fiction – or your poetry – and I’m willing to place good money on the fact that every writer-in-training does this.  After all, every writing class teaches: ‘Write what you know.’  This maxim is not unlike: ‘Peace in our time’ and look where that got us.  These maxims sound great but they are just that: words.  Sometimes, you simply have to go to war and in any good writer’s case, that means getting rid of that part of your subconscious that demands revenge against all of life’s slights.

What you then find as you emerge from the horror of re-reading your first attempt at a novel is the growing realisation that (a) your first novel is crap and (b) you have nothing else left in the pot.

This is a good thing.  Now you can start writing about more interesting things than yourself.

As a writer, you will not grow unless you first fail.  You will also discover failure on your second attempt, your third attempt and so on…

I’ve been working in the book trade for more than 12 years and in that time, I’ve met a great number of publishers, editors and more important, writers.  What I’ve learned is that there is not one good writer who is satisfied with their own work (though there are a remarkable number of Nothings with a very high opinion of themselves – but don’t worry, books are like albums of music and very few survive the so-called Difficult Second Album period).

Good writers, that is, those who will go on to successfully publish a number of acclaimed works, will have made a very important discovery about themselves before they have so much as published their first work… that they are not much good at anything.

It is a fundamental truth of human experience that the more you try to do something well, the worse will be the outcome – at least in your own eyes.  This is why writers need editors and why both writers and editors need publishers.

What you will discover as you attempt to build upon your skills as a writer-in-training, is that being able to form sentences correctly, to write with an unerring understanding of why one sentence is considered good grammar and another not, to write without bursting the banks of metaphor or simile, to avoid cliche with the skill of a veteran in a minefield, to understand the correct application of alliteration and punctuation do not account for much and in total will never be the mark of a great writer.  Such literary skills are prized only by literary critics and people who whistle when they try to fart.  Great writing doesn’t exist except in antiquity, that is to say, the mantle of greatness is always conferred posthumously.  Good writing, however, is more mysterious inasmuch as it reveals itself instantly.  Editors (though it is now more likely to be agents) and booksellers know it as soon as they read it.

If you cannot find a publisher for your novel, collection of poetry, play, screenplay and so on, it is because it needs more work.  Publishers are commercial operations who – despite their willingness to embrace future financial difficulties with their continued supply of supermarkets – exist to make money.  Publishers make money by selling books.  If they do not believe that publication of your work will make money, they will not publish your work.  It is that simple.

On the other side of the publishing coin are bookshops, supermarkets and internet suppliers.  They will not stock your book if it will not make them money and this belief is always grounded in one simple question: is it any good?

If you, the author, cannot find a publisher for your work, why then do you believe that even the most indepedent of indie bookshops will stock your book?  On Thursday, I had a ‘poet’ admit after failing to persuade me of the merits of her work, that she did not understand how the marketing of books worked (this is where the various publishers and booksellers come into their own).  Why then, I wanted to ask, was she stood in front of me with a (very poorly) printed copy of her work?

Self-published books never have attractive book jackets, are usually seen in a non-standard format (ensuring the poor quality binding really stands out) and are printed on the sort of paper that is churned out by the local public library photocopier.  Worse, these charmless efforts not only have the margins set wrong by the printer leaving the left-side of a paragraph en vacance somewhere in the binding but also have the most amateur font styling. However, the piece de resistance, is a higher retail price than a standard mass-market paperback.

When I am told by the self-author trying to sell their self-published work that it has taken them years, I want to cry on their behalf for the wasted time that could afforded them a richer, more worthy use of their time.  I want to tell them that rather than spend several thousand pounds to print the book properly or worse, share their humiliation with the world through sites like Lulu.com, they should have spent a little more time simply reading works by people who had taught themselves to write.

Writing should always be about the pleasure of the experience.  As an author, you are creating a world of characters that no-one else has imagined and are writing them in the way you want to see these people presented.  That’s good.  It’s a fun occupation that harms no-one and is perfectly legal, creative and mentally stimulating.  The part that comes after – the production and marketing of a book – should be left to the professionals.  Taking on this work requires knowledge and skill acquired through experience and learning.  With that experience and learning comes the so-called gut instinct that tells you on first impressions alone whether a book is good or not and whether that book will find a strong market.  Admittedly, publishers – and on occasion, booksellers – get it wrong.

In 2001, HarperCollins paid stupid money for the ‘autobiography’ of TV smarm, Bruce Forsyth.  More than a half-million pounds was spent advertising the book on the London Underground alone and it sold fewer than 6,000 copies in hardback.  What was the biggest book that Christmas – in fact, the biggest celebrity book that year?  It was a book that was also published by HarperCollins for which they’d paid peanuts.  Pamela Stephenson’s biography of her husband, Billy Connolly.

Celebrity biographies are, however, a brand apart.  The big sales on these books subsidise the publishing of the really interesting books, the books that editors really live for: the books that are written by unknown authors who have spent years learning their craft, often in complete obscurity.  Though publishers have spent the best part of 2009 laying-off staff, there are still editors like Ravi Mirchandani editor-in-chief at Atlantic who has a fantastic eye for a great book: he’s the brains in the UK behind such literary – and prize-winning – books as Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger‘ and more commercial works like Mario Reading’s ‘The Nostradamus Prophecies‘.  If someone like Ravi is saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ then you need to take just one lesson from his refusal: go back and do it again.

If I have one piece of advice to offer any author who feels defeated by rejection, it would be this: take the rejection to be the most essential part of the learning experience and start writing a completely different work, embark upon the sort of book you would not normally consider to be your genre, read widely from authors who have already made a success for themselves (in that genre) and change everything about how you write from where you sit, to whether you write long-hand on paper.  In essence: rip it up, start again, repeat.

The week is not yet done and the self-congratulatory slaps on the back still resound around the redundant halls occupied by London and New York’s publishing ne’er-do-wells.  Random House must surely be pleased that one of their authors has climbed the pinnacle of the bestseller charts and sold more volume than any other author is likely to this year. Oh, well done you… How extraordinary that the largest publishing conglomerate in the world has finally made no.1 spot after years Pottering about, oh, well done…

…and Hark!  Following hard on their heels as mad dogs chase cars are the various supporters of e-readers.  Bark!  More versions of e-readers are on their way.  Woof!  The iPod moment has come.  Arf-arf!  As many digital copies of Dan Brown’s ‘The Lost Symbol’ have been sold in this first week as hardback copies in the U.S.

While the Dogs of Bore are yipping their way through the suburbs of Tedium and No Skills of Observation to Speak Of, let us pause and reflect on this ‘digital publishing revolution’ that has been hailed for every year since the marketing department figured out the various uses of the ‘On’ switch on their PCs.

Though there are folks in marketing and politics who don’t know that ‘Strategy’ is something you plan before going into action and not conjure to fit the facts after the proverbial horse has raced away, military types will tell you that no good strategy fails to take into account ‘the situation on the ground’.  In book retail terms, this is best encapsulated not by the result of action (the bestseller charts) but the how, why and wherefore of those charts, that is, the behaviour of customers that produces the outcome observed on those same bestseller charts.  To begin: how many booksellers have noted that they have seen an upsurge in the number of people visiting their shops?  How many booksellers have been welcoming people into their shops that they have never seen before (and never will again at least until the next Dan Brown), despite the massive discounting from supermarkets and online sellers?

It is patently obvious that this increase in customer numbers is logically produced by people who do not regularly buy – let alone actually read – books, people who do not generally take part in the so-called book conversation, the same sort of non-readers in fact who have most recently been encouraged to make a purchase by a single boy wizard.

While it could never be argued that people buying books is a bad thing, what good is the momentary lapse of reason that compels people to make their one book purchase the badly-written sh*t (sorry Dan) that is ‘The Lost Symbol’?  No wonder people don’t buy other, better written books, if on their rare forays into bookstores this is the best they are going to read but anyway, I digress.  It is surely a greater lapse of reason that those who are part of the book conversation, the various book industry professionals who should know better the reasons why readers choose to make a purchase, to extrapolate from a once-in-a-blue-moon occurence and project this onto trends about the state of book retail in general.

Simply put, despite the sales of digital versions of Dan Brown’s latest tome being an ‘iPod’ moment for e-readers, digital books will not take-off in the manner forecast for a number of very sound reasons:

1. For e-readers to become a mature market, users of the machines must become regular purchasers of digital files to put on their machines.  They will not do this because:

1. the sort of books they would like to read (and buy) are not available;
2. being animals at a fundamental level, book lovers reading from a machine, even one producing an image in ‘digital ink’, will find that they do not enjoy the same sensual, tactile experience as reading from a book made of paper;
3. page turn.  People whon love to read, read quickly and fluently and no matter how smart the software, how a reader turns a page is as individual as a reader’s response to the book.

2. Digital Rights Management.  In short, when we pay money for something, we take ownership of it.  Private consumers are not used to licensing product from a seller and then – as some Kindle users recently found – mysteriously finding their right to reading a text being taken from them without their permission.

3. Or, Digital Rights Management Part Two: a burglar robbing from two houses steals an e-reader from one house and a whole library of books from the second… You get the idea.  The collection of books costs the same but one is infinitely easier to steal – and one presumes, sell on – than the other which leads us back to point 2, that is to say point 4.

4. It is something of an arrogance for a retailer to require in the small print that when an e-reader is lost, the book lover must buy (that is to say, license) all those titles all over again when the seller, for arguments sake, Amazon, has a record of all the files sold to a Kindle user.  If Amazon can make copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984′ disappear from a legitimately bought Kindle then surely they can scrub all the files from a Kindle that is reported stolen.  It’s just a thought but then as book lovers who are used to buying books made of paper from real bookshops will bear witness, that would require Amazon to offer genuine customer service that is more than just prompt delivery.

We are years away from an iPod moment but for argument’s sake, let me leave you with a thought…

At the time of posting this article, The Edinburgh Bookshop has been open less than 2 weeks and as many young people are entering the shop and ordering books as people of their parents and grandparents age.  These are people studying at school and university who have been educated on computers, who were born after the dawn of the information age and guess what?  They still appear to prefer paper books.  That’s ‘the situation on the ground’.

People who already have e-readers and technology that enable them to view digital book files – like the iPhone – are coming into an old-fashioned bookshop and ordering books made of paper when they could do this more quickly on Amazon.  There can be no doubt that the digital age has changed publishing and book retail: books are prepared and manufactured using computers, they are ordered and distributed through computer systems but they are read by people.

If there is one piece of the mystery that has been overlooked it is that what various marketing departments and electronics manufacturers have forgotten is that books, whether fiction or non-fiction, are always about people.  They are read by people who talk to people and who listen to people who in turn talk to and listen to other people and so on and on and on…