While in the bookshop yesterday I happened across a book, the name of which eludes me, which nevertheless stuck in my mind because the front cover loudly hailed it as THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT EVOLUTION SINCE DAWKINS’ SELFISH GENE. You’ll note there’s no attribution or quotation marks there. It’s just something they slapped on. I didn’t know you were allowed do that.
Naturally, I got in touch with my publisher tout de suite.
Axel, baby,
Has The Tau-Upsilon Procedure gone to print yet? Don’t answer that, there’s no time. Pulp them if necessary. We have a new cover. Print the following, 18pt:
A MOST EXCELLENT NOVEL. SO EXCITING MY EYES HAVE MELTED. FIVE STARS. NO: ELEVEN STARS!
Is that cocky? Print FIVE STARS in Comic Sans so as to create ambiguity. Title and my name can go on the spine. Omit title if necessary.
Won’t keep you any longer. Get to it.
yrs in sport,
E.
PS: I think the boy has been drinking my sherry. Have him fired.
PPS: Working on a new series, The Continuing Escapades of Selfish Gene. Send advance pls. Will forward manuscript on my return from Ecuador.
PPPS: Will be in Ecuador for the foreseeable. Have the boy take care of my post.
Maybury posted yesterday about Harper Collin’s free book experiment, in which they allowed everyone to read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free online. (Not, strictly speaking, a new idea, but still.)
How did it go? Gaiman reports:
68,000 unique visitors to the book pages of American Gods
3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate
And that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%
A pretty impressive result. Wu Ming (authors of Q and the brilliant 54) have been advocates of this sort of thing for a long time now, and it’s interesting to see a major publisher dipping its toes in the pool.
I think books are the medium most likely to succeed with this kind of model – apart from the whole “owning the artifact” thing that applies to all media, I find that reading from a computer is much more tiring than reading from a book. Certainly, I never got past the first five pages of 54 until I bought it. (I may be out of the loop on this, feel free to contradict me.) If it becomes common practice it’ll be a step closer to treating people, as Jeff Tweedy put it, as patrons rather than consumers, and that’s something I find utterly delightful.
Maybury has a post up about our recent interview with Radio 1 in which he tackles the claim that we, as writers, shouldn’t bother our heads with the business end of, uh, writing.
I will soundly second his assertion that
the business of writing is very much the business of the writer, literary fiction or otherwise. That includes the general administrative aspects of writing – how to make a submission, where to submit work, help with making contacts as much as the financial ends.
One of the panellists joked (was he joking? I don’t know, he laughed anyway) that writers would be scared off if they knew the truth about publishing. Well, having a half-arsed knowledge of the publishing industry, which you can pick up by wandering within ten feet of a bookshop, just makes writers paranoid, and I’m not sure how knowing what you’re getting into is supposed to be worse than getting a nasty surprise when you think you’ve finally made it.
I for one am much more comfortable now that I’ve built up a more detailed sense of how the business works. As I said in an unaired part of the interview, the single most useful piece of information I picked up on the writing course was how to do up a proposal to send to an agent or publisher. It seems immensely silly to suggest that writers shouldn’t pursue this kind of knowledge.
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