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Just a quick note to say that the good people at Playful asked me to speak at their one-day event all about games and play on Friday 30th October, at Conway Hall, London.

I don’t know much about games, so I’ll be talking about books. Surprise! But they will be playful games, or playful literatures, or playful ways of constructing literatures… or something.

Get a ticket!

UPDATE: due to a previous speaker on the same subject, I didn’t talk about books, but about AWESOMENESS, MAGIC, and a computer made out of matchboxes. You can read the full talk, with slides, at shorttermmemoryloss.com/menace/.

As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. Much more of this kind of thing to come.

The very first session I attended on Friday morning was with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat (left). His first novel, Five Point Someone and it’s successor, One Night at the Call Center are among India’s biggest-selling English-language novels of all time, with his recent third book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life in hot pursuit. He’s huge here, as witnessed by the scrum of young and old readers that followed him around. Much of what he talked about in his interview with Jai Arjun Singh, of the Jabberwock literary blog, would have been of interest to booktwo readers.

One of the biggest issues in Indian letters – and indeed, in society at large – that’s become evident to me even in the first few days, is the divide between English and Hindi (particularly, but other Indian languages too). Bhagat believes deeply in trying to reach the widest number of readers as possible, but the distribution for Hindi books is much inferior to that for English novels. So, he says, authors should try to talk to their audiences in Hindi, do Hindi translations, and look to the movies (both his first novels have been adapted into Hindi films). “Bollywood”, he said, “is where India gets its stories.”

Jai Arjun Singh spoke of the frequently vitriolic comments he receives on his blog whenever he writes about Bhagat. This is down, he says, to the perceived lack of literary quality in the writing, a charge which Bhagat rejects: “Indian style is the style of the people, the country, and if some don’t like it: tough.” The audience nodded furiously.

Having picked up and very much enjoyed a copy of One Night at the Call Center, I can see why the accusation is made: to an English ear, it reads in a decidedly YA style. However, it deals in an extremely forthright manner with issues of central importance to India and its youth: the conflict between tradition and modernity, a yearning for Western commodities and Indian dignity, a pride in India’s achievements with a recognition of its shortcomings. In particular, it urges young people, in no uncertain terms, to use their educations for the good of their country, to live for themselves and not their parents, and to distrust those in authority. “The number one dream of every Indian male,” says the narrator, Shyam, “is to hit his boss.” Shortly following this is a desire for success that doesn’t involve ass-kissing stupid Americans (the book is not kind to those taking advantage of Indian’s educated workers), and winning the girl of one’s dreams, and it’s not hard to see why it’s done so well.

The other revelation of interest was in the pricing of Bhagat’s work. English-language novels retail usually around the 300 – 600 Rupee mark (£4.50 – £9.50), but Bhagat’s are a far more modest 95 Rs (£1.50) – still much to high, he says, for many of the readers he wants to reach, but a great driver of sales, and a good effort in widening his potential readership.

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Much more to come when I get a chance. You can also follow some more reactions to the trip over at the Bookkake blog, Times Emit, and the British Council’s Creative Economy blog.

Penguin Books, Russell Davies and, er, me, are hosting a day of bookish, techy mucking about in London on January 17th.

It’s for publishing folk, and for geeks, and there’s more info on the Penguin blog. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while (remember Slow Fire? Yeah, sorry about that), and it should be a lot of fun.

Hopefully, we’ll be taking the book apart and thinking about what we should be doing with it in the future. There’s been a lot of pontificating and a lot of “new initiatives” in the industry, but not enough poking, playing and general tinkering. I’ll probably be talking a lot about book data and formats, POD, experience and achievement – all the things I generally do here.

There are some places left, so if you’d like to come, drop me an email telling me why. Unless I know why. Go on, tell me anyway. If you’re coming already, or are going to try, see you in January.

Two years ago, I co-founded London Lit Plus, an open literary festival for London. We’ve had two excellent years, but with all kinds of commitments, it would in no way be right to attempt to keep running it in my somewhat useless and slapdash fashion, to the inevitable detriment of the events.

But it’s a wonderful thing, and I still believe in the concept of the open festival, and I’d love to see it continue. So I’m appealing for someone or someones to take it on, with full blessing and support.

If you’re interested, read this for more info, and spread the word!

London Lit Plus, the literary festival I set up last year, kicks off for the second time tomorrow. I’d love to see you there.

After a slow start, we’ve gathered up a bunch of really fantastic events. There’s a great string of events for classic London authors like Derek Raymond and Chris Petit, walks across the territories of Patrick Hamilton and W.B. Yeats, live readings and poetry from Liar’s League, Spoonful of Poison, Legend Press (at Speaker’s Corner!) and the Stuckists, a great kids and comics event from the DFC, and the infamous LL+ Pub Quiz. And much more besides.

Please do spread the word – mainstream attention is very hard to come by, and we’d love all the links we can get so as many people as possible get to experience the extraordinary wealth of London lit life in this brief two week period.

I’ve been spending the day listen to friends twitter from NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference at the South Bank, and an Arts Council England summit on the future of literature just round the corner. NESTA was established by the government in 1998 with an endowment of £250 million. Just last week, ACE announced £16.5 million of Lottery funding for the Southbank Centre, the same week I discovered that my full-price membership of that institution no longer lets me take in a friend for free.

Meanwhile, the slash and burn of the literature sector continues (others too: film, theatre, visual arts, but lit’s what I know). Since launching London Lit Plus 2008 last week I’ve been hearing the same story from all over: we don’t have any money. They cut us off. It’s depressing, and frustrating. I’ve long been an exponent of using the internet and related technologies to bypass the need for huge investment, but real-world activities still need real-world money.

A tale of two literary magazines illustrates the point: The London Magazine, one of the longest-established literary journals in the world, has seen its budget drastically reduced, but they say “we are determined to continue, and to reach out to a wider audience.” Pen Pusher is a fantastic little magazine, only two years old, “publishing the best and most inspirational new fiction, poetry and features”. In that time they’ve proved that there is an audience for what they do, yet they were refused ACE funding on the basis of ‘insufficient priority’ (you can help by responding to their Sponsor-a-Page campaign).

I believe these audiences are better served by helping small organisations reach people directly rather than funding big-org beanfeasts so Gordon Brown can tell some of the countries wealthiest people that “innovation is the most important thing for Britain’s future”, not least because small companies use what they’re given better – they have to. I hope this year’s LL+ will be a show of defiance in the face of the bureaucrats who trade on our culture while contributing nothing to its economy.

I’m very pleased to say that my open-source literary festival, London Lit Plus, is happening again this year.

Full details at londonlitplus.com, with plenty more to come. Head over, check it out, start spreading the word – and think about holding an event!

Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement.

Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos – an open-access, distributed literary festival – and turning it into a template that anyone can use to set up their own festival. We’ll be using the same kind of tools – the power of the internet and free software – to create a resource for all.

We’ve already had plenty of outside interest in London Lit Plus and we want to use the momentum to build new and exciting literary cultures. We’ll need your help, so stay tuned.

Images courtesy of Yaniv Golan and Robert Brook, via Creative Commons.

Despite my repeated entreaties, no one bought me a ticket for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, on this week. It looks like a lot of interesting people, talking about important stuff.

Pleased to see that Manolis Kelaidis’ bluebook project, which I wrote about last year, has made an impactful appearance, and I suspect there’s a lot of similarly cool stuff being discussed.

Places to find out more: there’s the Conference blog, Andrea Laue’s jusTaText seems to be on the ball, as does Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, and there’s always Jeremy’s excited Twitter. If you know others, do let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll be over at London Lit Plus…

Saturday was definitely Interesting. A 300-person conference which noone really knew the content of beforehand, but which lived up to its name. And there were even some booktwo-related thoughts in there. Read the rest of this entry »