Quote of the Week

Reading too much, my brother explained in his English-teacherly way, is a disaster for a writer. To immerse yourself in literature – particularly those of your contemporaries – makes your work derivative at worst, and unoriginal at best. To keep your voice pure, he suggested, you must retreat, Kasper Hauser-like, only to emerge later with a voice as clear as God intended. It was an argument that almost culminated in our first exchange of blows since 1994. Should writers be readers

There are many exciting things happening within publishing and I draw parallels with what happened to the music industry in the 1970’s when a small but significant core of people grew tired of the same old record being sung by supergroups, such as the Eagles or Queen. From the streets came what at the time many thought was a revolution called punk rock. History though shows us that there are few, if any, real revolutions in art or entertainments just evolutions. Sometimes the leap is a little large, maybe it misses out a generation and that is what can be

The London Book Fair is one of the most highly anticipated events in the calendar year for publishers, authors and anyone connected with language and the ability to write captivating prose. As the event draws near the industry faces many new challenges, one thing that can be certain is that the Internet and digital technology is going to claim a bigger share of our thoughts and occupation. Sales of cut-price fiction in supermarkets, Amazon’s dominance of the book selling world on the net, digital technology, emerging markets, POD, e-Books, The Kindle and Internet piracy are all going to claim a

We must always remember that there are only two players that count, the author who creates the work and the reader who pays for it. All the rest are intermediaries who should add value and invariably also cost. If value is not seen then just like in other sectors no one’s position is safe, agents, publishers, printers, distributors, retailers etc. Write to Earn Write to Earn

Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend. As the mass market has risen so has the reality of a technologically connected society. This doesn’t just mean Facebook. Global communities are gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafes in 1900s Vienna. They are gloriously beyond corporate control and naturally antipathetic to the reductive mass market. We are only at the beginning of this social revolution. I am not an advocate of the life led online, but as broadband reaches all generations, genders and income brackets, so this will develop usefully. It won’t be

While I’m entirely in favour of digitising content – the idea that every book ever written in whatever language could be available at the click of a mouse or tap on a button seems like a grand utopian ideal to me, bigger, better, and more democratic and accessible than anything Gutenberg could have envisioned – the problem is that the royalty terms publishers are offering for digitisation are almost exactly the same as terms offered for publishing books. Figures vary from one publishing house to the next, but most seem to be settling on somewhere between 10% and 20% of

If a coffee chain is ready to sponsor a book award, and cash in on the publicity, why don’t they stock the book? It would look good on the shelves next to the French presses and the Fairtrade Colombian. Costa could give a few to its employees as a bonus (though with over 600 outlets, that would be a lot of books). Books with everything by John Freeman Books with everything

One thought that should console the upholders of print journalism is that while blogs make a great deal of fuss about being where the action is, they contain little decent criticism. It is rare to encounter good critical writing on the internet that didn’t start life in print form. Lively literary websites—or online magazines with literary sections—do exist, especially in the US: Salon, Slate, the Literary Saloon. But blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news. Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not

We get ourselves all hot and bothered about the teaching of reading, about synthetic phonics and the like, and we forget that none of it is much use unless children want to read in the first place. The motivation must come first, horse before cart. We all know that unless a child is motivated to learn, then there will be apathy or resistance in the learning process. They are much more likely to want to deal with the difficulties of learning to read if they know it is these words that give them access to all these wonderful stories. If

Well, I advise you to hold your horses just a minute. Much as I have enjoyed and learned from the books blog and its comments – in all their glorious technicolour variety – we need cliques in literature. Art would be poorer without them. Sure, cliques have a habit of disappearing up their own derrières. GK Chesterton rightly said that the clique “is wrong because it actually discourages the great man from talking plainly. The priests and priestesses of the temple take a pride in the oracle remaining oracular.” If a group believes that only its initiated are capable of