What do publishers really really want?

In a white room...

When away from home my life is decided by my iPhone. My total control-freakery, weirdo nutjob iPhone. Arbitrarily it decides whom I shall see and whom I shan’t; whom I should talk to and whom I shouldn't. Whole lotta whoms here, huh? 


Sometimes it will cheerily download my emails; sometimes it has a hissy fit and refuses access.  If it does let me on, it often decides – quite off its own back – that my responses (time-consumingly tip-tapped onto its tiny screen – torture for touch typists) should not be delivered.  Ditto Twitter – sometimes it will deliver tweets and DMs, sometimes not.  Facebook?  Don’t even go there.

So, when I was in London, I saw some friends but not others; certain publishers but not others. I caught some PRs while others must have thought me exceedingly rude.  I had hoped to catch my old friend Sam Baker and couldn’t quite figure out why she hadn’t responded to my nudges, and then – finally – I realized it was because she hadn’t received my missives.  Sigh.  But - who knows? – maybe there is method in its madness. Maybe I saw the people I needed to see…rather than those I just really really wanted to see.

I did learn some interesting things though, from those I saw.  That sentence bothers me too, but never mind.  Like, apparently a review on a good blog can be worth more than a review in a national paper or glossy mag in terms of sales. Now - although I am a firm believer in the power of social media - that still surprised me.  But one PR cited the instance of a page feature in the Daily Mail drawing in far less response than a blog post. Amazing.  In my own experience (as both a blogger and a journalist) many PR companies are still sniffy about blogging.  But maybe that is changing. 

And, you know how people all whitter on about What Publishers Want?  And Which Way the Market is Going?  The wannabe authors amongst us, that is (cos the others, frankly, don't give a shit). Well, hey, guess what?  The publishers haven’t got a clue what’s going on either. We’re all of us together, paddling blindly in circles. Honest.  I popped in to see an old friend who is now a head honcho at one of the Big Six.  ‘We used to know our customers,’ she said wistfully, leaning back on her comfy sofa in her big corner office.  ‘Y’know, Waterstone's, Smiths, Borders etc.  We knew what they wanted; we knew who they were.  But now…’  She shrugged eloquently. ‘We haven’t got the foggiest. Our customers are now the public, and we don’t know them, not remotely.

‘Celebrity still sells,’ she said with an eye roll. ‘But the rest is wide open. Wide wide open.  And content is key.’

What about self-publishing, I asked her. ‘Hell yes, of course,’ she said.  Really?  
‘We can’t come anywhere close to offering the royalties Amazon do,' she said sadly. 'We just can’t afford it.’ 
But surely, I mused, people still want – or should want – a traditional publishing contract?  She looked deeply unconvinced. ‘Why? Sure we can get them a good cover and good editing but, really, you can get that yourself if you know where to look.  What we do do well is to hold people’s hands – we look after authors a lot more now, we’re much better at it. We have to be.’

As I walked away I got the impression of leaving a huge rudderless supertanker gyrating slowly in the middle of a vast ocean.

It was pretty much the same story when I had lunch with a much smaller, more niche publisher.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.  He shrugged and mopped up some hummus with a bit of bread. 
‘It’s easier to say what we’re not looking for,’ he said.  Paused, swallowed, and shook his head. ‘No, actually that doesn’t work either. It’s wide, wide open.  We just don’t know really; nobody does.’

And as I looked round the big bookshops in London I could see what they meant.  There are no real trends; no discernible patterns.  Which, actually, I found rather comforting.  
‘It comes down to passion,’ said Mr Small but Perfectly Formed. ‘If a book has real passion behind it, it can be a surprise bestseller.’ 

He also said that they were shamelessly watching to see which self-published books were making the grade and stepping in to offer deals.  Does that mean we get great new talent plucked out of nowhere?  Not necessarily. As everyone who's ever self-published knows, you don't just need a decent product, you also need uber-marketing skills - or a shitload of luck. 

‘I’m looking at our backlist,’ said Mrs Big but Vulnerable. ‘There are some real gems there which I’d like to see polished off and brought back.’ Ah, that’s rather comforting too. 

But how, I asked them both, do we (the customer, the public) choose books - with the sheer volume out there right now? How can we discover the real gems and avoid the cowpats?  Mr Small reckons like-minded communities are the answer – online forums. Interesting.  Mrs Big cheerily admitted she really didn’t know. ‘Amazon sure as hell can’t do it – their algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough.’  

I said the one thing I did like about Waterstones was their ‘favourite books’ lists and staff recommendations.   Because they seemed to like a lot of the books I'd already read and loved, I took a chance on Pema Chodron, figuring she might be good too.  And she was. 


And Mrs Big agreed.  But then, she would.  :-)


But seriously.  Word of mouth.  Which is maybe where we turn full circle and look at the value of blogs and social media again.    We're in a world of too many authors and not enough readers, with the big publishers generally no longer acting as decent gatekeepers.  The mainstream press doesn't really help either - they play the celebrity game and, to be fair, are simply overwhelmed by Too Many Books.  So perhaps this is where blogs and Twitter and so on come into their own.  Except...hmm... they're clogged up with people shouting about their own books.  Aaaghhh.  


Maybe we all just gyrate in a sea of more and more books? 


Anyhow, I wrote this a while back and it made sense at the time but, reading it back now, I haven't got a clue what I'm going on about.  what do you think?  Do we know where we're going to?  Does it matter?  


'What do you want to write next?' asked both Mrs Big and Mr Small.
'Not the foggiest,' I said.   :-) 

My love affair with Autumn and, er, my book

I’d forgotten how much I love autumn.  The SP and I took our walk along the river today as even I am not quite feckless enough to wander through the woods when bits of tree are whizzing past my nose.  The wind was wild and crazy and the SP went crazy too, leaping like an impala over the long grass, spooking at things that weren’t there (or at least not visible to the eye) and leaping up at me as if to say, ‘Isn’t this the best fun in the entire world ever?’ I had to agree it wasn't half-bad and, with The Black-Eyed Peas blaring in my ears, we danced our way round the big field.

The hedgerows were stuffed with berries and hips – blackberries, rowanberries, hawthorn, rosehips, big fat sloes – and the scent of wild honeysuckle drifted on the breeze. And it all reminded me that the wondrous Kim Jewell had gone a bit nuclear on me the other day.  See, many many years ago (so many years in fact that, as was kindly pointed out on Facebook, most of the original readers are probably dead!) I wrote a book called The Natural Year, all about living in tune with the seasons.  

Anyhow.  I'd been thinking for quite some time that I really ought to get my old books out there as e-books.  But, to be honest, every time I started looking into how to do it, I felt a bit queasy.  So, I was whinging in an unattractively pathetic way on Twitter about all the things that were stopping me self-publishing, like lack of a cover, not being able to format etc, and Kim said simply, ‘I’ll do it for you.’ 

And she did.  Just like that.  24 hours later The Natural Year was up on Amazon and available for sale. I tell ya, that woman is scarily awesome.  You wouldn’t want to meet her down a dark alley, that’s for sure. 

Anyhow, here it is and here you go.  It seems I have self-pubbed my first ebook (or rather, Kim has).  You can find it here. if you're in the US and here if you're in the UK.  If you're in Germany, you will have to find it for yourself as it seems a direct link is verboten.  And if you're anywhere else you are entirely free to buy it from wheresoever you so desire.  Kim interviewed me for her blog and you can read that here. Incidentally you can also find links there to her own wonderful YA titles (James is a huge fan of the Justice series).

Sooo.  What did I say, way back then in the mists of time, about Autumm?  Let's see....an abridged snippet (love the word snippet). 

Autumn – Season of the Mind

"Autumn shouts ‘wake-up’ to the psyche - it's time to dust yourself off after the languor of summer and take life head on once again.  In spring you started to ask yourself lots of questions about your life, your path and your desires.  Now is the time to get them going, to take action, to shift your external world.  Autumn is the season of the mind but it also concerns our relationship with the environment, with the world outside, the bigger picture. 

Autumn is a perfect time to decide what you want to make of your life; what you want to achieve; where you want to be; how you want to work.  It is the key time for deciding on your life path or making moves towards it.  That may sound frightening, even off-putting, but it needn't be.  Often we automatically find ourselves making changes, shifts, in the autumn.  We may not be totally instinctual beings any more but deep within we are still moved by the rhythms of the year. Our hearts and souls still beat to the ancient drum.  It is no real surprise that schools and colleges use the beginning of autumn as their starting point for the academic year.  What better time to make a fresh intellectual start? 

This is the perfect time to get your life in order.  It's the time to start looking for answers to the questions you posed yourself back in spring.  If you need to shake your life around a bit, this is the time to do it.  Don't feel you have to change for the sake of it - it's more a case that if you have been looking for a change, this is a good time to think about putting things into motion.  As always, if the time doesn't feel right, don't do anything.  I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone should go out and get a new job or a new relationship or move house or emigrate on September 1st!  Simply that if you feel there are changes in your life (however small) you might want to make, the energy at this time of year will help you make those changes.  It's like a car being given a dose of high-octane fuel or a horse being given a feed of oats - you should be feeling frisky and full of energy."

Hellfire, did I really write that???  Shit.  Think I need to read the book.  :-)

Oh, and while I’m here, keep an eye on those rosehips…. A couple of recipes from later in the book...

Wild rose hips abound during the autumn and early days of winter - pick them (best after the second frost but before the birds get a chance to eat them all) and use them as a cold-banishing tonic, jam-packed with vitamin C.  If you have an abundance of rose hips you could make rosehip syrup as did all wisewomen and good housekeepers of old.  If not, try a simple tonic drink.  The famous herbalist Culpeper said that rosehips are ‘grateful to the taste and a considerable restorative, fitly given to the consumptive person, the conserve being proper in all distempers of the breast and in coughs and tickling rheums.  It has a binding effect and helps digestion.’  In all a wonderful free tonic. 

ROSEHIP SYRUP

Crush around 450g of rose hips and put them into a pan containing 900ml of boiling water.  Bring them back to the boil and then turn off the heat and allow them to stand for around twenty minutes.  Strain (preferably through muslin), and then put the fruit which will now be pappy and mashed, into around 300ml of fresh boiling water.  Once again allow to stand for a further twenty minutes and then strain again. 

Mix the two sets of strained juices together and return to the pan.  Boil on a low but steady heat until the juice has reduced down to around 600ml.  It will be syrupy by now.  Allow to cool, sweeten to taste with wild honey and bottle in sterilized bottles as you would with any preserve. 

ROSEHIP TONIC DRINK

Simply chop up two teaspoons of rose hips and add them to around 300ml of boiling water.  Allow to steep for fifteen minutes and then strain and sweeten with honey to taste.  You can make larger quantities and keep in the fridge for up to three days.  It tastes lovely too.

X-rated Kindle? Should e-books come with warning stickers?

Should e-books come with warning stickers?  Well, should they? 

I bought two books on Amazon for my Kindle the other day.  One was The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore. The other was Django Zoon: The Straightener by Jobo Pooks.  One was for James; one was for me.  Because, see, James has sort of purloined my Kindle, having consumed Kim Jewell’s YA books, Invisible Justice and BruteJustice.  And I tell you, if you have a recalcitrant reader, try him or her with an e-reader…while adults may baulk at the lack of a ‘real’ book, children seem to feel quite the opposite.

Now then.  Here’s the thing.  Zoon is huge fun – I read the first few chapters on Authonomy and it’s a wild roller-coaster ride, totally crazy and, in places, laugh-out-loud funny. Incorrect in every which way but that’s part of the charm. However  it also has a high filth level and some pretty fruity language.  Is it the kind of thing even a feckless liberal parent like me would want their twelve-year old to read?  Umm, no, not really. 

It kinda crossed my mind at the time whether I should say anything about it to James but I figured that doing so would only draw his attention to it, thus making it quite quite irresistible. So I kept schtum.  But I joked to Jobo, on Twitter, that my son was enjoying it – and he didn’t think it was remotely funny; in fact he was pretty perturbed.  And we batted it back and forth a bit – this question of books being available to buy online.  I really hadn’t given it any thought and, okay, I thought he was overreacting a bit.

I just don’t think children will be out there buying books for their Kindles in the first place by and large – they’d be getting their parents to spend the dosh, won’t they?  But, stop right there – James did order himself a copy of the Stig’s biography the other day.  Hmm.  Then again, even if a child did buy x-rated porn, the parents are going to get the email bill, right?  They’re going to see what little Bob or Kylie has downloaded and, unless Bob or Kylie is a speed reader, could nab it off them and lock them in their room to think about it before you could say ‘wildly inappropriate tits and arses’.  Anyhow, how is it an e-book any different from a paper book?  A lot of ‘normal’ adult books (I’m not talking erotica here) have scenes of sex and violence. Some have pretty ripe language.  If you have anything other than Barbara Cartland on your shelves (in which case we have a whole other conversation to have), surely your children could get a dose of adult material if they really wanted?

But then I thought again. It’s  not so much what they can buy but what’s already on there. And it is different because, with a paper book, you’re going to spot ‘em, aren’t you?  If James wanted, he could climb up on a chair and grab any number of explicit sex tomes (left over from my sex columnist days, of course). But I’d notice him thumbing through Extreme Tantra, wouldn't I?  Whereas Kindles are secretive little things.  Someone I know (I won't out her) says she loves her Kindle because she can be cruising the web, chatting on Twitter or Facebook while everyone thinks she is quietly reading Jane Austen.  Sneaky little baggage. 

Cos, think about it, there’s no cover to act as a giveaway, is there?  There’s no physical presence, no hard evidence. 

And I got to wondering.  Has James looked through the contents of my Kindle?  My tastes are pretty tame on the whole but a few of the authors I know from Authonomy write saucy stuff and I’ve got a couple of Poppet’s raunchy tales stashed away there.  And some of Jake Barton's crime stuff is pretty graphic in a blood and guts way. Not to mention Sessha Batto's intense homo-erotica!  We get so worried about children not reading that maybe we've lost sight that perhaps there are books they shouldn't read. Not yet anyway. 

Hmm, I said to Jobo.  Maybe books should have stickers – like they put on rap records – warning that they have adult content.  Absolutely, he replied, and went off to get Zoon reclassified.  ‘Amazon should categorise stuff,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t want children reading it full stop.’ 

But that’s just looking at it from one end and I still don’t think it’s actually the major problem.  However, if you share a Kindle with your child, have you thought about what they could read?  Would it worry you?  Should it worry you? Ought e-readers come with some kind of parental lock that you could put on certain books?

Bottom line: do you know what your children are reading? 




btw, going back briefly to Jobo and Zoon - it's an interactive project and the music is pretty cool too (and, as far as I can hear, there's no filth there)... check it out here.  You can download tracks for a donation to charity- or see/hear the audio/visual on YouTube. 
  


PS: I'd like to point out that I do also know plenty of people who write nice books which aren't full of filth... :)

Girls v boys (warning, contains penes)

Now don’t get me wrong on this.  First things first: I adore my son. Totally, utterly adore him. But I do sometimes wish I’d had a daughter as well.  I always thought I would.  Way back, when my sister was having her fourth (or was it fifth?) child she said, very firmly, ‘I can see you with one child.  A girl. I just know it.’  Now, see, maybe this is why I’ve always been a bit wary of the psychic malarkey.   Cos while she got the one bit right, I have ended up being the only female in the house – yup, even the dogs have dicks.

But anyhow. I don’t have a daughter and, unless I become one of those ancient mothers with babies (which SO isn’t going to happen) it’s going to stay that way.

I was going to crash in front of the fire but, having successfully ignored the phone ringing, I caught a late tweet (perils of Twitter) from Charlie:

nice, innit? particularly without us being noisy

‘It’s Rachel’s birthday; you’re ignoring the phone! Just join us at the Thai. Now!’ 
What can you do?  So I whizzed down the pub to tell Adrian and James I was off out - again.  Problem with the pub is that you can’t whizz.  So, by the time I’d wriggled away and got to the restaurant, they were finishing off the noodles. 

Their youngest, G, is my godson and he’s delicious. But oh, I do love their girls so much:  The Mistress of All Evil and Princess Delicious.  The MoAE wanted to talk books and music and fashion.  The PD was keen to tell me how she’d pulled a fast one on the MoAE who now owed her a small fortune (plus interest).  I admired the PD for her business acumen but felt a stab of pity for MoAE who has as corrosive an Amazon habit as I do – books, music, shoes – we’re soul sisters.  She wanted to know about Samael – she was my first beta reader, inhaling every chapter as I wrote it.  So I told her about the rewrite: she wasn’t impressed.

‘But I loved the surfers, and the crusties.’

‘Yeah, but what the zombie beheading and the crucifixion and that unseemly tussle at the gates of Hell?’ I said with a sad shrug.

‘Oh God, yeah! You haven’t…??  You HAVEN'T???? But those were the best bits….’

I explained that editors seemed to think the book was too complex, had too many sub-plots, was too dark.

‘But we teens love horror!  We devour dark,’ she said with venom, with a firm emphasis on ‘we teens’ (when you’re thirteen that teen bit is mega important). ‘We love complex stuff.  We teens are deep.  Dumbing it down is just patronising.’

Well, couldn’t argue with that.  She did a great eyeroll (told you we were soul sisters). ‘I can’t think about it,' she said flapping her hands. 'Let's listen to this instead.’ She pulled me down and stuck an ear-bud in my ear. 

‘Are you trying to shock Jane?’ said her mother, ‘Cos it won’t work.’

‘I know, silly,’ said the MoAE. ‘She’s cool and trendy….’  See why I love this girl? 

‘You’ll love this,’ she continued. ‘It’s called….’ She dropped her voice…’I’ve Just Had Sex.’

So we listened to it together. Catchy tune so we started jigging around a bit.  And then I just howled with laughter.

‘Penis. He said penis….’ I covered my mouth with my hand. ‘Shit, sorry.’ (flapping my hands guiltily in the direction of my young godson). Rachel gave me The Look. ‘The penis bit was okay…’ she said witheringly.  ‘….the shit wasn’t.’  Damnit, bad godmother again.

‘But, but…you can’t say ‘penis’ in a song; it’s just such a ridiculous word.’
‘I know,’ said the MoAE happily.  ‘It’s hilarious.’

And it was and we just howled with laughter.  And then laughed more about hair and friends and how ridiculous boys can be.  And tried on sandals and considered doing the helium out of the birthday balloons, like we did last year. 

I left with the biggest smile on my face.  Big hugs from everyone apart from my godson who took my hand very carefully, bent over and gave it a soft, respectful kiss (he always does this – it is just edible).  When I got home, I asked James if he’d heard the Penis song. He frowned with total disdain. ‘God no. That’s disgusting. Why on earth would I listen to something like that?’

Girls and boys. Different creatures.   

But, but…just watch the video – it cracks me up.  Maybe it's a girl thing.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/lQlIhraqL7o