A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel at the Frontline Club on the future of publishing. It was an interesting evening, and I spoke alongside Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller and Chris Finnamore, test editor at WIRED. The whole thing’s now online if you’re so inclined:
During the talk, one particularly vocal member of the audience took issue with ebooks in general (standard trigger question: “will they smell like real books?”) and stated that vinyl was on the way back. I countered that, well, no it wasn’t – it has a growing status among collectors, but I wouldn’t stake my house on it. I stand by that, but I’m as pleased as anyone to see that David Sedaris (yes, I’m a fan) is releasing an abridged audiobook on vinyl:
“Albums are enjoying something of a renaissance, posting $57 million in sales in 2008, more than double the previous year and the best for the format since 1990, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The format is so rare for audiobooks, however, that the Audiobook Publishers Association has never even tracked its sales. But Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group, said she was drawn to the idea precisely because it was quirky. Mr. Sedaris’s ‘audience is very attuned to irony and is going to find this funny,’ Ms. Thomas said. The 31-minute album, which will be released on Jan. 5 and cost $24.98, will include only two of the five essays on the CD version of the audiobook, but will feature a code enabling purchasers to digitally download the entire program.” [Source: NYTimes]
Ms. Thomas is not wrong about Sedaris’ demographic, but I’m particularly intrigued by the addition of a code allowing purchasers to download the entire audiobook in digital format. This is a brilliant idea (assuming it’s for no extra cost, and not a mere discount), and one I’ve been suggesting to publishers for some time.
If we really want to grow the market for electronic books – as well as audiobooks – in order that, in future, this market is controlled by publishers and not by a third party (in the way that Apple has effectively taken control of the music market from record labels), the bundling of digital versions with physical copies is a very smart way to go. Imagine if every book you bought came with that sort of code to download the ebook. Sceptical consumers could try out the new technologies at no risk – and no extra cost to the publishers – and, who knows, perhaps they might actually like them.
As a little end-of-year project, I’ve just launched jocelynbrooke.com, a site dedicated to the life and work of English writer Jocelyn Brooke (1908—1966). I’ve become somewhat obsessed with Brooke in the last few months, and have begun a small campaign to revive his reputation.
Brooke’s writing, which clusters in the decades around the Second World War, is unique in English letters. I’ve managed to amass an almost complete set of his books with a particular penchant for the Kafkaesque Image of a Drawn Sword and the angst-ridden The Scapegoat, and extending to his delightful botanical treatise The Flower in Season, and his extraordinary Surrealist work of 1956 The Crisis in Bulgaria, or, Ibsen to the Rescue! His semi-autobiographical novels are works of a rare quality, combining a deliberately Proustian longing for things past with a very English melancholy and sense of place, and a sensual quality that feels quite out of its time, and which is deeply rooted in his private and currently little known life. I can’t recommend them highly enough.
Brooke’s works are currently in a kind of limbo. I approached the agents for Brooke’s estate several months ago with a view to acquiring the rights to republish several of his works, as some of the lead titles of a new imprint launching later this year. Although I was initially informed the rights were available, it subsequently appeared that Faber, in the form of their ‘Finds’ POD imprint – who are already republishing Brooke’s Military Orchid trilogy – have expressed an interest in the other books as well.
While I’m pleased that anyone is interested in republishing these works, anyone who knows my opinion of Faber Finds won’t be surprised that I’m deeply opposed to this – and not for entirely selfish reasons. Faber Finds, while a great way to get little-known works back into print, does no promotion of the titles on its list, and there is no way that Brooke will find a new audience through this method. As time passes, it becomes harder and harder to revive a writer’s reputation, but it can be done: see the recent renaissances of B.S. Johnson and Julian Maclaren-Ross. For this to happen to Brooke, he needs to be republished properly, and promoted.
Conflicts between long-tail POD databases like Faber Finds and true classics republication are only going to increase, and Brooke’s agents are currently considering their position on POD and the way they license rights. I hope I get the opportunity to work with and increase the readership of Brooke’s outstanding work, and in the mean time I’ll crack on with jocelynbrooke.com.
I have mixed feelings about creative writing courses, but Hanif Kureishi doesn’t:
“One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.”
I recently gave a talk to some Creative Writing students. They seemed nice, if mad – but in roughly the same proportions as professional writers, so probably for the good. I may stand before them again. Kureishis’s hypothesis, therefore, struck me as worth testing.
Wikipedia’s index of School Shootings lists a total of 68 incidents between 1966 and 2008, 47 from the USA, 7 from Canada and 14 from the rest of the world. Of these, the majority are Middle or High School students studying no major subject, and a high proportion are security personnel, police, or outsiders (be particularly afraid of Custodians). Of the remaining 12 incidents in which the Major subject of the perpetrator is known, we find a strong bias towards the hard sciences and business:
Of these, only one was committed by a student with any connection to literature: Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator of the worst of all such attacks, the massacre at Virginia Tech. Cho had recently changed his major to English, after several years studying Business Information, a combination of Management and Computer Science.
We found no writing students at all, nor even the suggestion that some of the perpetrators were struggling authors on the side. As much as we admire Mr Kureishi, we must must find his hypothesis demonstrably false, much to the relief of Creative Writing teachers – himself included – everywhere.
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If you’d like to know more about this issue than the rather flip approach I’ve taken, I recommend Mark Ames’ excellent Going Postal, which I had the privilege to publish last year. Ames’ conclusions are fascinating and highly readable, both on the real causes of school and workplace violence, and on the corrosive societal and educational system that breeds such causes. (Also: that’s me on the cover.)
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