The Garden For The Blind

I have had no less than five emails in the last two days from different commercial organisations to inform me that ‘the most anticipated book of the year’ is now available for purchase. They’re talking, of course, about Dan Brown’s Inferno.

Now, as a matter of fact, I would rather gnaw off my own arm than read one of Dan Brown’s books. There’s more than one reason for this. For a start, having grown up a Catholic, been educated by Jesuits, and known people in Opus Dei, I find the premises of his works utterly ludicrous. For another, his prose continually strikes me as clunky as this piece in the Telegraph illustrates

But the man shifts product! It cannot be denied. He sells more books in five minutes than I will sell in my lifetime. So is this just sour grapes on my part? Maybe, but I think there’s to it than that. It reminds me of a time when I was very young and my mother took me to a nearby park in which there was a garden for the blind. As we were walking through this garden I told my mother that I couldn't understand the point of it because the blind wouldn't be able to see the flowers. My mother laughed. 'The point is all the lovely smells,' she said.

I didn't reply because I couldn't smell anything at all. As I eventually came to understand some years later, I have almost no sense of smell. (Indeed, I once woke up to find my duvet on fire but it wasn't the smell that had woken me up; it was thirst.)

I think I'm missing some sense when I read, also, and probably when I write whereas Dan Brown has that sense in spades. So when I try to read something like The Da Vinci Code I only get an overwhelming feeling of frustration because I can't smell the part of it that's likeable. I can only smell the bit that's terrible. I'm always trying to smell the bit that's likeable. I know it's there but I can never catch even the faintest whiff.

How Not To Become A Children's Author

I'm always getting asked to look at manuscripts by people who have written a story for children and are looking for advice before sending their work off to an agent. Unfortunately, a lot of people accompany their manuscripts with statements that drastically undermine their chances of being taken seriously by an editor. So in case anyone reading this has been thinking of submitting a manuscript professionally for the first time, here are three things it's really not worth saying if you want to become a children's writer.

First there's the Quality Time Delusion. This is when the author confidently states, that she/he has read this story to her/his own children and they absolutely loved it. Now on the face of it, this sounds like a ringing endorsement from the target audience. So how could it be anything but a good idea?

Actually, what you're really saying when you make this assertion is that your child enjoyed the extra attention they got from being part of mummy's or daddy's project. They liked having their opinions taken seriously. They got caught up in their parent's dream about becoming an author and it excited them. The truth is that your child's enthusiasm is no guarantee of anything except that you spent some quality time with them and they liked it.

Next there's the Children Of All Ages Blunder. In this one the author glibly asserts that the story is intended for all children from the age of six to sixty, or some similarly hackneyed phrase.

Frankly, this is a stupid thing to say. A five year old lives in a different world to an eight year old, a ten year old lives in a different world to a thirteen year old. The idea that your story might work for all of them is an admission firstly that you don't know anything about the market for children's books, which is highly segmented, and secondly that you don't know much about children.

Finally there's the hoary old chestnut of the Friend Who's Done Some Illustrations to go with the story. Take it from me, unless your friend is an experienced professional illustrator of children's books, never include his or her drawings with your manuscript.

This is because even though authors see writing as an art, to publishers it's a business and, like every business, it involves an element of risk. An unknown author represents a risk to a publisher. An unknown author combined with an unknown illustrator doubles that risk.

So don't even include that art-work on the grounds that you think it will give the editor an idea of the kind of book you have in mind. The only idea it will give them is that they should put your manuscript on the rejection pile right away.

The Fallacy Of The Dedicated Agent

I have been up since three o'clock this morning looking after my very excited and slightly apprehensive grandson while his mother went, with her husband, to the hospital to have a baby. Consequently this blog post may not be my finest piece of prose. However, it is with immense pleasure that I can announce to the world the birth of my third grand child, and my first grand daughter. I know that medical experts will tell you that new born babies can't smile but I swear she smiled at me.

Now it is six thirty in the evening and in a little while a builder is going to knock at my door and I will have to talk coherently to him about the work that we want done on our house. Also, I see from my emails, which I've only just had a chance to glance at, that my Mexican publisher has been experiencing problems making payments to my account. Oh, and a portfolio of work has arrived from one of the students at the summer school I have been teaching for the last couple of months.

All of this perfectly illustrates one of the points I was trying to get across at that summer school. It's a publishing myth that I have called the fallacy of the dedicated agent and it goes like this: the publishing world is full of agents who are constantly on the lookout for exciting new manuscripts by promising new writers.

In fact, agents, being human beings with complicated lives, have a great many other things on their minds. They may be worrying about whether their daughter's labour will go well, or they may be rejoicing that it has. They may be trying to remember the key points they need to make clear to their builder, or they may be trying to get hold of their bank to find out why their money isn't appearing in their account. They may simply be wondering whether there is anything even vaguely edible in their kitchen that they might somehow be able to conjure into a meal tonight.

Whatever it is that is filling those agents' heads, it probably leaves very little space for all those manuscripts that keep arriving in their postbags. That is why, if you want to get their attention, you had better be good. You had better be very bloody good indeed.

Because if you're not then they are just going to sit at their desk with a silly expression on their face, gazing at a photo of their newest grandchild, thinking over and over again, 'Isn't she beautiful!'

Ysgol Jacob - First Welsh Talking Book

On Monday 28th March on the Glanfa Stage at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff the Welsh branch of the Royal National Institute for the Blind will launch the first ever Welsh language talking book. I'm happy to say that the title chosen is Ysgol Jacob, a translation of my novel Jacob’s Ladder.

I'm always pleased when a book of mine is translated into another language but I was delighted when Jacob's Ladder was rendered into Welsh because like the Welsh language movement itself, this is a book that concerns itself with identity and that's one of the main themes of my work.

As someone who grew up in London with Irish parents determined to maintain their ethnic identity and to pass on their pride in their heritage to their children I feel real solidarity with those people who are determined to see the Welsh language given the place in contemporary culture that it deserves.

Literature is something to which everyone should have access. That's why the cuts to library services that are taking place in parts of Britain at the moment make me feel so depressed. However, I'm cheered up greatly, and proud too, that through my book I am able to play a part in RNIB Cymru's initiative to increase access to those Welsh speakers who are visually impaired.

Idealised Story Syndrome

My next book, The Magical Detectives, comes out in just a few days time. A week ago I received advance copies. It’s always such a pleasure to finally hold the book in your hand. I can still remember the very first time I had that experience though it was over twenty five years ago. But I can’t help wondering how much longer there will be objects called books to hold proudly in your hand.

Right now I am trying to respond to the editor’s comments on the next book in the series, The Magical Detectives and the Forbidden Spell, which is due out in July. The thing is, I sent in this manuscript in December 2009. Consequently, I can’t remember all that much about it. I’m having to find my way back into the book emotionally. It’s like going back to a house you used to live in and trying to remember where everything was.

Then there’s the tricky business of deciding about each and every one of the editor’s suggestions. Mostly these are unimportant to me. For example I have written,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced himself to keep them open

and my editor would rather I wrote,

He felt a great temptation to close his eyes and drift away. But he forced them to stay open.

That sort of thing doesn’t bother me in the least. What I do find difficult, however, is the tendency that all editors have, to believe that a story is something real that exists independent of the words the writer uses to describe it. I call this Idealised Story Syndrome.

The truth is that there is no story behind the words; the words are the story. Tamper with them just a little and the story changes just a little; tamper with them too much and the whole glittering edifice comes tumbling down around your ears.

I honestly don’t think they realise what a fragile thing a story is. Sometimes they seem to me like burly physical education teachers, whistles strung on cords around their necks, knocking the spineless thing into shape while the author looks on like a parent gazing helplessly through the railings, trying to suppress a cry of dismay.

Party Time

This year my publisher held their Christmas party in a champagne bar in Soho. I am always grateful to be asked, of course. Indeed, I’d be distinctly miffed to be left off the list. Nevertheless, I always find the experience difficult. I suppose I’ve just never really learned how to behave at parties.

I generally try to find somewhere on the fringe of the party where I can sit down and quietly go into a trance; and I had managed to lay claim to a reasonably comfortable nook when a young woman came and sat down next to me. I knew right away that she was an illustrator. You can always tell. Generally it’s the shoes that give them away.

Anyway, she asked what I did and I said I was a writer. I knew what was coming because conversations that start like this always end up in the same place – the similarities, or differences, in how writers and illustrators work. Eventually this always leads to an exchange that goes more or less like this.

Illustrator: So you write on a computer?
Me: Yes.
Illustrator: What, the whole thing?
Me: Yes
Illustrator: What, right from the start?
Me: Yes.
Illustrator: But don’t you ever want to use a pen?
Me: Not really.
Illustrator: Not even to make notes or something?
Me: No.
Illustrator: But do you like writing on a computer or is it just because it’s more convenient?
Me: I like writing on a computer. You see it’s like a pen but much better.
Illustrator: (Pause while she considers this.) But don’t you ever feel like, I don’t know, like… you really just want to use a pen?

All the time this conversation is going on, it’s getting harder and harder for us to hear each other, even though we are only inches apart. This is because people are pouring into the bar all the time and the bar staff are constantly going round proffering trays laden with champagne. Consequently, everyone is getting increasingly animated and talking more and more loudly.

The illustrator says something else about using a pen. It sounds suspiciously like ‘But don’t you ever feel you like you just want to get dirty?’ I decide that one of us may be a little drunk and I’m fairly convinced it isn’t me.

‘I can’t really hear what you’re saying,’ I tell her.

She nods. ‘We’d be better of texting each other,’ she says.

I hate texting but I decide to keep that information to myself.

Advice To Aspiring Children's Authors: (1) The Morris Minor Trap

One of the mistakes aspiring children’s authors sometimes make is that they try to write books like the ones they read and loved when they were children. But publishing, like everything else, is affected by cultural changes and in the course of one person’s lifetime those changes can be very considerable.

This is particularly true of anything to do with children. The whole idea of childhood has been radically overhauled since I was a boy. And a good thing too, in my opinion. The version of childhood that I lived through had some serious design-faults of the seen-and-not-heard variety. Not to mention the physical violence variety. However, that’s another story.

Publishing is also susceptible to minor fluctuations, trends and fads. Children’s publishing in particular is affected by developments in education. If the educational sector suddenly gets in a panic about boys’ achievement and starts looking around for resources to throw at the problem, for example, then books targeted more specifically at boys start appearing in the marketplace. If a celebrity decides they like a certain kind of book, or a certain kind of author, then books of that kind or by that kind of author start appearing prominently in bookshop windows.

You can’t hope to second-guess all this, of course, but you can try not to get hopelessly left behind. Consider the analogy of the Morris Minor.

When I was a child I would go on holiday to Ireland every Summer and my Auntie Bella used to meet me at Sligo station in hers. It was a solidly-built car and it suited my Auntie Bella down to the ground. But then Auntie Bella seldom got out of second gear. An electric window would probably have given her a heart attack.

Now imagine if I were to take it into my head that I could design a new automobile and I went to an automobile manufacturer with the blueprint of the Morris Minor and offered them my services as a designer. Do you think they would snap me up and offer me large sums of money? Probably not.

So if you’re trying to be a children’s writer, it’s a good idea to avoid the Morris Minor trap and the way to do it is to read lots and lots of the latest children’s books. Not the classics. They have their place, of course. They defined the genre. But to gain an understanding of the cutting edge of contemporary children’s books, there’s nothing like reading some.

Finding Myself

I had a friend once whom I loved. He was the most generous man I ever knew. One thing about him puzzled me. He never seemed to do anything on purpose. He just found himself doing things. He found himself at university studying science. He found himself working for a large corporation. He found himself getting married to a woman he had known since he was a boy. He found himself having an affair with somebody else. One day other people found him dead.

I used to wonder what was wrong with him until I realised that I am just the same, especially when it comes to my writing. I never decide in advance what I’m going to write about. I just find myself writing a story. It’s only afterwards I work out why I chose that idea, why those characters.

For example, my book Jacob’s Ladder is about a boy who wakes up and finds himself lying face down in the middle of a huge field. He has no idea how he came to be there. In fact he can’t remember anything at all except his name – Jacob.

When the publisher came to design the cover they showed me a handprint. The background for the handprint was a fingerprint.
‘What’s the idea behind this?’ I asked. I couldn’t see what it had to do with the story.
‘Your book is all about identity, right?’ my editor replied.
‘Oh yeah, I suppose it is,’ I replied, lamely. I felt stupid not even understanding what my own book was about.
‘All your books are about identity, really, aren’t they?’ the editor continued.
‘I suppose they are,’ I agreed.

Except that this isn’t how I see them at all. Each one usually revolves around something painful in my life. I only realise what it is afterwards. Even when the books are meant to be light-hearted and funny For example, the next book I have out is called The Magical Detectives. It’s a romp. But it starts with an eleven year old boy coming home one day and finding that his mother has disappeared. I wrote this story not long after my own mother died.

I had a dream about six months after she died that I was in her house in Ireland chatting to her. Then I happened to glance out of the window and saw my cousin coming down the front path. He was wearing a dark suit. I was surprised to see him there because he lived at the other end of the country. Then I noticed that his wife was right behind him. I stood up to look more carefully and saw that she was followed by a line of my relations, all dressed in black. I realised they must be going to a funeral and immediately I was gripped by terror thinking, ‘It‘s not my mother’s funeral. It can’t be. I was just talking to her.’ I turned round but she wasn’t in the room. I ran through the house calling out her name but she had vanished. Then I understood that she was really dead and I had been talking to a ghost.

A few weeks after that dream I began work on The Magical Detectives. That makes it sound like a dark and sombre book but it isn’t at all. It’s the tale of four characters who get whisked off to another world in an adventure that includes a talking cat, flying carpets and houses with attitude. But all the same it started with pain, like a pearl starts as an irritation to the oyster.

One day I would like to be a different person. Someone who takes control of his writing. Maybe I could even sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a best seller.’ After all, other people do it. So why can’t I?

What Editors And Agents Are Really Thinking

Most aspiring authors assume that editors and agents are constantly on the look out for new and exciting talent. But a fact worth bearing in mind is that editors and agents are ordinary human beings.

Here’s a sample of the sort of thing that might really be going through the mind of an agent or editor while your manuscript is sitting on the desk in front of them.

Oh god, how I wish I was still on holiday in Italy!
I could really murder a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Why has my car started making that weird noise every time I go over a bump?
I wonder if my partner still finds me attractive.
That mole on my left shoulder blade has started itching again.
What I really need is a new kitchen.
I'm not convinced my daughter is really happy at university.
Why am I always so tired?

You get the picture? They can be, and probably are, thinking of just about everything else except your manuscript. They’re at work, for god’s sake. Ok, so it’s a job they enjoy but it’s still a job, isn’t it?

Even published authors with long experience have little idea of what is really going on in the whole gigantic sausage machine that is publishing. If editors take a long time to get back to us, we start to think they don’t like the manuscript. Then we start to think they don’t like us. Then we start to think they might be right: we don’t like us either.

But really we are like someone trying to make their way round a room full of furniture in the dark with only a very small torch to aid us. All we can see is the bit of the room that the torch lights up; about the rest of the room we can only make assumptions.

The thing is that publishers don’t realise this either. They assume that the author must realise the reason for the delay with the book is that the art director has just announced that he's going freelance and the publishing director is off sick and the poor, harassed commissioning editor is trying to do about three jobs at once. Surely they can see that can't they?

That’s why so many editors think that authors are difficult or temperamental. Of course some authors are difficult and temperamental. But most of them are just blundering around in the dark with their pathetic little torch, stubbing their toes on something that could be a chest of drawers, or an upright piano, or even a stack of coffins.

How To Choose A Literary Agent

I’ve had more than one agent. When I was first scouting around, I was looking for status and success, hoping that the glitter of the agency would rub off on me. So for a time, I had an agent who was a partner in a well known, high-profile agency. At first I was delighted to be part of her list, but like many marriages of convenience, ours was a relationship that was ultimately doomed to failure.

She was a physically imposing woman with a large mouth, like a trout, and narrow, mean-looking eyes. Either she possessed a collection of identical tweed suits or she always wore the same one. I suspected the latter. Indeed, I used to fantasise about that suit, imagining it making its way around literary London all by itself while its mistress slept. I wondered which one cut the best deals: my agent, or her suit. Maybe I should have written a novel about it.

She behaved liked the head of a private boarding school in the nineteen fifties and whenever I was obliged to meet her face-to face, I always felt like an interloper who had been caught hiding in the shrubbery near the girls’ dormitory.

She did not like me calling her; she did not like me asking questions about what she was, or was not, up to on my behalf; in fact she did not like me, period. When I finally decided I’d had enough of this treatment and terminated our agreement, she wrote me a letter to say that she thought my latest novel was mediocre.

This was more than twenty years ago. But I still know writers with agents who behave in a not dissimilar way, writers who never hear from their agents and are too intimidated to pick up the phone and ask how things are going. So why do they continue with the relationship? Because they are impressed by the name of the agency and its list of illustrious clients, just as I was.

Writing is a lonely and insecure profession. Authors are at the mercy of editors, publicists, reviewers and booksellers, not to mention the general public. Even when you do have a success, book clubs, supermarkets and powerful book-chains demand outrageous discounts. In this dog-eat-dog world you need an agent who is fairly and squarely on your side. So rule number one: forget the list of famous clients, pick an agent with good manners.

And if you’ve already got an agent, ask yourself this. Does he or she return your calls promptly (or at all)? Do you agonise before picking up the phone to discuss something to do with your career? Do you find yourself stuttering uncharacteristically when you’re in conversation with your agent? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then it looks like you’ve got yourself the wrong agent.

What If They Want To Change Your Book?

Like it or not, getting published involves making compromises. The trick is to make only those compromises you are happy to live with in the long term. Some times you get it right; sometimes you don’t.

In my novel Balloon House, the central character’s name is Neve. Originally I spelled this the Irish way, Niamh. The editor wasn’t happy. Your readers won’t know how to pronounce it, she complained. In the end I agreed to spell the name exactly as it sounds. It annoyed the hell out of me but I decided it really didn’t matter. After all, the character wasn’t even Irish.

In my forthcoming book, The Magical Detective Agency, the central character’s name is Otto. My editor clearly thought that this was an odd choice and wanted to change it. She suggested I look at the list of the most popular names and choose one. This time I stuck to my guns. In my mind the character was unquestionably Otto. He had been right from the very start and I could not possibly imagine him with any other name. I won that round.

The compromises I made when writing my fantasy trilogy, The Promises Of Dr Sigmundus, were of a completely different order. The American publishers paid quite a lot of money (by my standards) for the rights but only on the condition that I would work with the editor on the manuscript. I agreed. After all, working with someone isn’t the same thing as being dictated to.

The editor felt that for the US market, the manuscript needed to be much tighter, much pacier. My UK editor, who was clearly flattering me to win me over, put it like this, ‘What you’ve written is a bit like French art film, Brian; what they want is more like a Hollywood blockbuster.’

I had my reservations of course but I agreed because I wanted to get the best book and to do that you always have to be open to criticism. It turned out to be quite a revelation. The US editor went to work with her pencil and she did not beat about the bush.

As the process unfolded I was extremely impressed by how much work she put in and how clear she was about what she wanted to achieve; but the cuts were very significant and took some swallowing. The second book, for example, ended up very much shorter than it started out.

It hurt, but the new version was tighter, sharper and really cut to the chase. Of course a great deal had been sacrificed and when some reviewers complained that it was too short on atmosphere I wanted to cry out: there’s another much fuller version on the hard drive of my computer that will never see the light of day.

Does this matter? Yes and No. The fact is that a successful book is never just the result of one person’s work. If you sell the foreign rights (which is what every author hopes to do), the translator will always transfer his or her particular vision to the book – they won’t be able to help it – and unless, the author is fluent in half a dozen languages he or she will never even know what has been changed.

The truth is that writing a novel is a two-way process; it’s about listening to other people’s views as well as your own. After all writing is a form of communication. Besides, in my opinion a book only fully exists when it is being read by someone else.; and if it doesn’t get published, it doesn’t get read.

Finding A Voice - Narrator Characterisation

A distinctive voice is the thing that most editors say they are looking for when they read through their submissions pile. But what does this mean exactly? Well, there are many different ways to achieve a distinctive voice. One of the simplest is the device of narrator characterisation.

By this, I mean making the reader feel as if he or she is listening to someone telling a story, as opposed to creating the illusion that the reader is looking through clear glass window at a story unfolding all by itself

As the name suggests, this is achieved by creating a character for the narrator and it is most easily done when employing a first person narrative; but it’s also perfectly possible with a third person narrative.

The most important thing to think about is attitude. When I’m teaching a class on voice I sometimes employ a fairly simple exercise to show how you can inject attitude into narration. It goes like this.

I ask one of the class members to repeat some fairly bland phrase, something like, ‘I have been sitting at this table for half an hour,’ in a neutral voice, then in the voice of someone who is astonished at his discovery, and lastly in the voice of someone who is bored and angry. It’s not a very difficult exercise and most people can pull it off convincingly and often amusingly.

Afterwards, I ask them how they did it. They are sometimes a little non-plussed by the question because it’s generally an instinctive thing; but after some reflection they usually answer that they simply tried to feel the emotions I described. In other words, they acted the part.

This is exactly the same device that you use to inject characterisation into your narrator’s voice: as you write, you act the part. Now I’m not pretending that this is some incredible insight. It’s basic stuff. But even if seems totally obvious to you, it’s still worth thinking about again.

At the moment I’m reading books by two Australian authors: Steve Toltz’s A Fraction Of The Whole and Paul Temple’s The Broken Shore. These books could not be further apart in terms of voice. Reading Steve Toltz feels like you’re trapped in a lift with a stand-up comedian; reading Paul Temple feels like you’re trying to extract a confession of guilt from a laconic depressive. They are both utterly distinctive and memorable and in each case the first thing that I noticed when I began reading was the voice.

At this particular time the world of publishing is retrenching. Quiet books are not even being considered. Editors are looking for manuscripts that have attack, that make an impact, that stick in their memories. One way to achieve this is through a really powerful narrative voice.

Playing It Safe - Publishing In The Recession

I have just come back from a visit to my local Waterstones and what a depressing occasion it was. The children’s and teenage sections were utterly swamped by ‘Dark Fantasy’ books about hunky vampires, as if some minor publishing god had wandered in after gorging itself on Stephenie Meyer’s oeuvre with a side-order of soft porn, and then vomited copiously all over the shop.

The effect of the recession of publishing, as everyone knows by now, has been to make publishers less risk-averse, more keen to bet on winners. Hence the rush to turn out lookalike titles.

This faddist approach to publishing is not in anyone’s best interests. It creates a barrier to originality and makes it harder for new writers to break into the market. When combined with the near monopoly exercised over high street bookselling by a tiny group of retailers, it denies young readers access to the greatest emotional and educational resource mankind has ever created: the vast sprawling, bustling, metropolis that is literature. Instead it confines them to a purpose-built suburb, garishly painted but ultimately predictable.

The One Thing You Really Need To Become A Successful Author

Pundits always tell aspiring authors that that the qualities you need to get published include great storytelling, great characters, a terrific plot and fine writing. I don’t think this is true for the reasons that I will elaborate below.

You certainly don’t need fine writing. Many of the really successful authors, the ones you see in airport bookshops across the world, don’t pay an awful lot of attention to style at all. They concentrate on storytelling because that is why most readers turn to fiction: they like a good story.

It’s the authors of literary fiction who focus on style. Unfortunately, literary fiction, while it happens to be my cup of tea, is for the most part a minority niche in the book trade; the sad truth is that most of its exponents have to do another job to support themselves.

So what about the other factors: great storytelling, a terrific plot and powerful characters? Am I really suggesting that they can be left out of the mix altogether? Well, not most of the time admittedly, but there are always exceptional cases. And exceptions are worth studying because they often point to an important truth.

Take, for example, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer which, as most people know, has sold in container loads all over the world. To be fair, Stephenie Meyer can write well when she wants to. Indeed at the beginning of Twilight she adroitly employs a deceptively simple style to get the reader hooked. But once she’s got your attention she really takes her foot off the gas. The writing becomes repetitive, the descriptions formulaic. The male lead, Edward, is endlessly described as angelic, or godlike; the female lead, Bella, is constantly on the point of fainting away at his mere proximity.

Characters are given one or two signature attributes. Bella is clumsy, her father is easy-going, her friend Jessica is talkative, her unwelcome male suitor Mike is determined. There is no character development beyond this. People stay what they were at the beginning of the book.

Without fine writing or strong characterisation you would expect to find the strong motor of a plot to keep the reader moving through the story. But there isn’t one. Most of it is just girl meets vampire, followed by girl falls in love with vampire. Right near the end the girl gets threatened by another (bad) vampire but that’s not what the book is really about.

No, what the book is about is teenage sexuality and this is where Stephenie Meyer hits all the right buttons. As it happens, I find the messages that her book sends out about gender roles very unattractive. But, hey, it’s not aimed at me. It’s aimed at teenage girls and they have voted with their credit cards, or those of their parents.

The point of this post is not to trash Twilight. It’s not a book I could ever have written, or even one I would want to have written, but it’s a fine example of the one thing you really need in order to be successful: an understanding of your audience. If you don’t have that, all the rest doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. And if you do have that, you can get away with murder.

Don't Judge A Cover By Its Book

Is publishing becoming so fixated with marketing that it’s forgetting about the importance of text? I ask this question after reading The Truth About Melody Browne by Lisa Jewell. Lisa Jewell has been called the queen of chick-lit but that is to do her a considerable disservice. She’s much more like a younger, female and less depressed Nick Hornby. Her books are written in a deceptively easy style that uses everyday details to fix images powerfully in the reader’s mind.

The Truth About Melody Browne however, is a mess and the reason it’s a mess is because it’s been shamefully badly edited. It’s not just the places where a sentence has been mangled, possibly because two versions of it existed at different times and bits of both have got left in. No, it’s things like the end of chapter 41 where Melody, who is trying to recover the vanished memory of her childhood, wonders whether she will ever discover what peculiar quirk of fate caused her to be living in a squat in the seaside town of Broadstairs when she was seven years old; in fact she’s already discovered this several chapters earlier. Or the conversation she has with her boyfriend near the end of the book about how joyful it has been meeting all the characters from her past life that she had forgotten, except she hasn’t told him about her past life yet so he can’t have any idea what she’s talking about.

So what happened to the editing? Was the editor asleep at the wheel? Or did it not get edited at all on the basis that Lisa Jewell’s readers are a captive audience who won’t notice or, if they do, simply won’t care?

Contrast this with the attention paid to covers of books nowadays. In April of last year I delivered the final draft of my next book which was originally to have been published about now. But the first cover got a bad reception, so publication was delayed until July. Then the second cover was also given the thumbs down. Recently I’ve heard that the book will now probably come out in January of next year. There’s no point in making a fuss because, as I’m assured by everybody and his uncle, it is absolutely essential to get the trade behind a book these days and that requires a really good cover.

I think this is all part of our society’s obsession with appearance, an obsession that is ratcheted up with every passing day. Whiten your teeth; flatten your stomach; if you’re a woman get you’re breasts perked up; if you’re fifty plus, don’t show a grey hair; and if you’re a book look glamorous, look sexy, seduce the reader.Don’t worry about the quality of the prose. Time enough to discover it’s a dog’s breakfast once the money has changed hands.

Author Rage

Author rage is a worrying phenomenon that is occurring more and more frequently these days. Those affected have been known to burst into spontaneous rudeness on the telephone, at a dinner party, and even on social network sites. There is at present no known cure. However, if you suffer from this problem you are advised to avoid potential triggers which can include any or all of the following.

People who ask you for a signed copy of your book and then sell it on ebay
Your publisher giving your book a duff cover
Being asked if you have a real job
Your publisher changing the title of your book without telling you
Your editor being constantly at lunch/in Frankfurt/in Bologna/on maternity leave/away from her desk at the moment
Books that you absolutely hate becoming enormously successful
People who say they are going to write a novel ‘when they have the time’
Another writer whom you know well giving your book a bad review
No one reviewing your book at all
Being asked where you get your ideas from
Someone you don’t really know describing at great length their supposedly fantastic idea for a book
Someone you don’t really know describing at great length their supposedly fantastic idea for a book and then saying, ‘You won’t steal it will you?’
People who insist that everyone has a book in them
People who say ‘I don’t really have time to read books’
Being asked if you write your books in a shed

Why Did That Book Get Published?

‘If he/she can get published so can I’. This is an assertion I regularly hear aspiring authors say. The brasher ones put it more bluntly. ‘That book (often some international best-seller) is a pile of crap. My book is a million times better than that.’

I think anyone who has ever found themselves thinking like this would be well advised to dedicate some time to reading books that they really don’t like and considering the question, ‘Why did this get published?’ And I mean really considering the question, not simply resorting to some easy formula like, ‘It’s because the general public is stupid,’ or 'he/she obviously knew someone in publishing.'

Reading books that you think are really clever, really well written or really profound, is an important thing to do. It feeds your soul. But reading books that thoroughly irritate you, that seem ponderous, or trashy or impossible to believe in, is also important. It takes you out of your comfort zone, it makes you think hard about the audience for books (i.e. other people). It teaches you lessons you won’t learn in any other way.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Once, following my own advice, when I was obliged to travel from London to Newcastle and back by train in one day, I took a copy of Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer and nothing else. I was determined to get to grips with it. But I failed. In the end I found that I preferred to stare out of the rain-streaked window for seven hours rather than lose myself in Jeffrey Archer’s prose.

Nevertheless I still think that reading books that you would never have published yourself if you had been in charge of the publishing house is an extremely useful exercise. Because the truth is that there is always a reason why a book gets published and it is not, no matter how much you might want to believe it, because the author is sleeping with, related to, lives next door to, or went to school with the editor. Or that people are stupid. It's because the author is doing something right. You just haven't spotted it yet.

The Invisible Path

The trouble with writing as a career is that it isn’t a career at all. The path before you is invisible and it only becomes visible when you step on it. But even then, only the little bit that you have just stepped on becomes visible.

Far off in the distance you believe you can see your destination and sometimes that looks incredibly clear, certainly by comparison with the nothingness that surrounds you right now. At other times it is shrouded in mist. It doesn’t make any difference anyway because you never get any nearer, no matter how far you travel.

Other people who are involved in maintaining the path can see their parts of it very clearly. Publishers see the part they are responsible for in high definition and they find the way that writers blunder about, stubbing their toes on rocks, tripping over their own feet and wandering off at a tangent quite ridiculous or even frankly irritating. Booksellers, librarians, reviewers and readers - they can all see very clearly what we’re up to, how successful we are,or are not. But most of us haven’t a clue whether we’re even heading in the right direction.

Why am I indulging in this display of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth? Because right now, I’m going through one of my frequently recurring cover problems with my publisher. By which I mean that they have just decided that the most recent cover design, the latest in a long line, simply will not do. They’ve had some negative feedback from the sales and marketing people. So it’s back to the drawing board.

That’s okay by me. The cover is important after all. So I want them to get it right. It’s just that they never tell me what is going on unless I email and phone and email and phone and email and phone until they finally crack and say. ‘Oh Brian, how nice to hear from you. Yes, I’m afraid there is a bit of a problem with the cover. But don’t worry, we’re working on it.

Of course the reason publishers don’t tell writers what is going on is because they don’t really see stuff like the design of the book cover or the selling of the finished product as being anything very much to do with the author. He or she has done their part by delivering the manuscript. Now it’s up to the experts. Don’t you worry your silly little writerly head about a thing like that. Your book is in safe hands.

It’s like when you’re stuck at a railway station because there has been the faintest hint of snow. Consequently all the trains are up the creek and they just won’t tell you what is happening. If they’d just admit that your train is cancelled you could go and have a cup of coffee or make a decision to work from home. But oh no, they’re not prepared to concede that much information. They think it’s much better for customer relations to leave you to freeze on the platform and to keep putting meaningless information on the notice board

I Hate To Tell You But Your Editor Is Cheating On You

A former editor once said to me that the relationship between an author and an editor is like that between lovers, except that the author believes he or she is involved in a monogamous relationship whereas the editor is secretly carrying on affairs with all the other authors.

It’s true. For the author there is only one book that matters. His or her own book. And when he or she speaks to the editor that’s essentially all they talk about. So the author exists in a permanent state of delusion imagining the editor going away from their meeting and thinking all the time about that special book.

In reality, of course, editors are thinking about umpteen things: all the other books they are handling in all their different stages, not to mention the myriad other things that might be going on in the company. Is their job safe? Will their workload increase dramatically when a colleague goes on maternity leave? Are they ever going to get a pay rise?

And then, of course, there is life outside work. Authors generally forget that editors have lives of their own, and that these private lives might sometimes leak into the professional sphere. So while you are busy outlining your plans for a sequel or even a whole series, they might secretly be wishing they were back on holiday in Italy, or worrying about the funny noise their car was making that morning, or trying to decide which character from a tv soap you remind them of.

Another way of looking it is in terms of cosmology. The author lives in a pre-Copernican word with his or her book at the centre and the editor (along with everything else) revolving around it. The editor lives in a post-Copernican world in which lots of little books orbit round individual editors in a galaxy of publishing houses that itself exists in a endlessly expanding media universe. Let’s face it, seen from that perspective we authors are nothing more than space dust.

It can be tough to negotiate a relationship which is founded on such misapprehensions. It gets worse when one of the parties introduces an element of comparison. You wouldn’t like it if a girlfriend or boyfriend compared you unfavourably with a former partner, would you? Yet that’s what it can feel like sometimes.

I parted company with my first publishing house when I asked for a higher royalty rate on a foreign rights deal and was told, ‘But Brian even (insert Big Name in Children’s Writing here) doesn’t get that much.’ That was it. I’d heard far too much about that particular Big Name In Children’s Writing already. (No, it wasn’t J K Rowling. This was years and years ago.) This particular comment was the last straw.

Maybe it was a good move, maybe it wasn’t. As with old love affairs, there is always a temptation to look back and think about what might have happened if you hadn’t gone your separate ways. But an author does like to feel wanted. That’s it really. Even if we are only deluding ourselves, we like to imagine that our editors really mean it when they stand up once a year at the Christmas party and propose a toast to the people without whom there would be no books at all, the authors.

So Who's Your Editor Now?

Overheard at a meeting of the Society of Authors Children's Writers & Illustrators Group: "I've decided that the collective noun for publishers is a maternity-leave."