John Dickinson

Jennifer, a publishing M.A. student, has asked me if I agree there is a crisis in the publishing industry regarding mid-list authors.

Well…

(Hang on a moment. What, exactly is a ‘mid-list’ author? But since I seem to fit any definition I can think of, that’s probably all right.)

(And what, by the way, is a crisis? A mass extinction of a certain kind of writer? I doubt it. Writing careers can be beautiful and short, but there will always be more writers, writing all sorts of stuff. What matters is whether enough people want to read a particular sort of writing. And – let’s be brutal about it - if they don’t, then will its loss really matter?)

Those two questions begged, let’s go on. Here is some of what I said to Jennifer.

Yes, it seems to be harder these days to persuade the bookshop chains to put non-best-selling titles on their shelves. Yes, libraries are closing. Yes, there’s less space for book reviews in the print media. Supermarkets are selling best-selling titles at discounted prices, which means that the big profits aren’t as big as they used to be, which is why bookshops are struggling and publishers are risk-averse etc. All these things hit the business model that the less-well-known author depends upon. Sure. But we’re not going back to the Net Book Agreement, are we?

I’m optimistic. Not necessarily about my own career, which could die tomorrow. But people want to write and people want to read, and they’re going to find ways of finding each other. What we’re looking for is a business model that makes that possible. No one can yet predict is how the rise of blogging and on-line selling, and the advent of the e-book, will change things. Will on-line ‘buzz’ concentrate around the few titles that everybody is reading, or will bloggers will take pride in discovering things that no one else has discovered, so that otherwise unheard of titles will start to get momentum? I think the second is more likely. Doubt me? Here’s a review of WE that appeared on a US site. It’s very nice, but the point about it is that WE isn’t even published over there. The reviewer got it off Waterstones on-line in e-book form. Her review was picked up by a popular SF site, also in US. More people saw it. And the first to get in touch with me about it was living in Argentina. Doors close, guys. But the thing about them is, they also open.

And don’t give up on publishers. Don’t give up on booksellers. Most people in this industry got into it in the first place not because of the money but because they like books. They are being showered all the time with good, creative, stuff from people who want to write. Of course they can never publish more than a fraction of it. But if they can persuade themselves that this one here or that one there might really catch on, then they’ll get it out there.

I was in a Waterstones Café with the writer Julia Golding and other friends. The atmosphere was a bit subdued, possibly because many of us had been at a good party the night before. I began to ruminate on the future of the novel in a world where storytelling is dominated by film and TV drama. I thought it very uncertain.

No way, said Julia, would she become a screenwriter. The screenwriter was not the boss. They got told what stories they were to produce. And then someone else re-wrote them. As a novelist, the stories you told were your own.

I thought about it, for maybe a millisecond. Then I agreed.

Last week I had a similar exchange with my relative Nic West, a multi-disciplined designer. Both of us had built our own websites. Nic’s was undoubtedly superior in design and layout – he has those skills. But I thought his words could do with a little smithing, and I offered to write him some copy. No thank you, he said, politely. He would do his own. And I know why. He wanted to remain in control.

I remember, when I first quit the huge bureaucracy I worked in, quietly wondering how I was going to get along working by myself. In my conscious mind I was more or less OK with it. Under the surface, however, I was much more nervous. I dreamed vivid dreams of abandonment and loss. Now it’s almost eight years on, and I don’t get those dreams any more. Sure, insecurity nags all the time, but not at the same deep level. When I’m writing, I like to be alone.

Working in a team multiplies the skills and perspectives you can bring to bear on a problem. It gives you power to create things that may be better than you could do on your own. But working in a team of one, you are the creator. That’s power of a different order. It’s a privilege, and an enormous joy.

A young writer asked me this. She’s already done one novel, but now she has started work and is taking a university distance learning course at the same time. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for anything else, does it?

Hmm.

He’re’s some of what I said.

- Try to write something - however little it is - every day. It doesn’t matter how tired or bad you feel, write SOMETHING, even if it’s only for ten minutes before you go to bed. You may not feel what you’ve written is any good, but don’t let that stop you. Once you’ve stopped it’s horribly easy to stay stopped for months. (I’ve been there).

- Look for your dead time - that’s time in your day when nothing else useful is happening. Do you take a bus at any point during your day? Carry a pad and pen with you, and write some lines on the bus. You can type them up later. I once tried dictating into a voice-recognition package while I was cycling to work. It didn’t work terribly well because I was breathing too heavily, but at least it got me telling the story.

- Try to keep a sense of how your reader will perceive the pace of your novel. This is hard enough in any case for the writer, who is working at a far slower pace than the reader is going to read. It’s harder still if you are writing in fits and starts. But it’s possible. The Cup of the World was written like this, while I was in full-time work. Most first novels must be, if you think about it.

In the end, you keep writing because you want to.

I am one of Death’s minor gatekeepers. As Church Treasurer, I count funeral collections and dispatch them towards their appointed good causes. As chorister, I may be called on to swell the funereal singing. And last week I had an urgent appeal from a churchwarden – would I be prepared to carry the cross for a funeral procession?

Now, our cross is a venerable old lump of silver, heavy enough to be at risk of being dropped if held by the wrong hands. A quick inspection of its various dents and kinks suggests that it’s already been dropped a number of times in its career – not to mention the hedge it’s been through backwards and the vicar that had to be battered senseless with it. Anyway, only a limited number of church members are considered qualified to carry the thing. Of these, Mr A was a mourner at the same funeral. Mr B had a hospital appointment. Mr C was working. And Mr D – well, he was also working. But he’s a writer and he can always leave what he’s doing, can’t he?

Yeah, sure.

(This is one of the things about writing. It’s so flexible as an occupation that you can always leave it and pick up again afterwards. Which means you’re always being asked to do just that – or finding reasons yourself why you need to. And the only answer is to barricade the doors and scream ‘NO!’ down the telephone and on the e-mail and into the mirror. ‘GO AWAY! I’M WRITING!!!!!’ And do that again and again and again until you have been officially dubbed Cantankerous B*****d of the Year. )

Well…

All right, it’s a funeral. It’s important to somebody. And funerals don’t take long. There’s always time to catch up after one (provided it isn’t my own). Besides, the whole point about carrying the cross – if you believe these things - is that it’s supposed to be unwelcome. What did Simon of Cyrene say when the Roman soldiers collared him in Jerusalem? ‘Excuse me, I’m researching a novel and I’m on a deadline’? That would have worked a treat, wouldn’t it?

I went. I did what was needed. And unexpectedly, I got a little reward. Because I was allowed to be with a family while they wept for an old man they had loved. I could listen to the words they used and the way they said them: tough Gloucestershire people, dealing with feelings that come rarely but are very strong. I would say that was a privilege in itself, but for a writer it’s a little bit more than that. Emotion is the stuff from which we weave our stories. It helps to be reminded how others experience it. One day, maybe, when I’m aiming to make my readers weep, I’ll have a pinch of the real stuff to add into the mix, heard, digested and recycled from those moments at the churchyard gate. Not only am I one of Death’s little doormen. I am a microbe that acts on people’s feelings – bacterium lacrimorum. That’s what I’m for.

I went to hear our local youth orchestra perform. I went especially to admire their new third trumpet – one Master G Dickinson. The audience was full of fond parents like me. During the interval, I noticed the woman beside me was reading a novel. I watched her for a few minutes. Then I leaned across and asked: ‘Excuse me, but do you mind telling me…?’ Because she was reading it on her iPhone.

The reading world seems to divide into two about e-books. There are those who see them as the end of the printed page, a sweeping away of much that is traditional about the book industry – printing, binding, storing – and maybe the wholesale death of the bookshop as well. They could even be a serious danger for publishers. It is very much easier to produce a presentable electronic book than a properly-bound paper one. And of course they can be marketed and sold electronically too. Just imagine if the big-selling authors, whose names are already made and on whom the industry depends, started writing primarily for e-books, so that they could by-pass their publishers. Where would publishers be then? Where, too, would be the 90% of published authors who do depend on their publishers? Ouch.

And then there are those who say ‘Look. Working a screen will never be as easy as turning a printed page. Most people just prefer the feel of a book. E-books may take a piece of the market, but it’s not going to be a big one. ’ Well. My neighbour at this concert was working her iPhone with consummate ease. The words, when I looked at them, were perfectly clear on her little screen. She preferred e-books, she said. They were more convenient. None of that weight to carry around. She had audio books too. When I identified myself as an author, she immediately asked if any of my books were in electronic format. Answer: Er, one. I thought. (mem: speak to agent – get ‘em all onto e-book format, now.)

Suspicion confirmed. Electrons aren’t necessarily a less easy format than paper. If they were we would still be using typewriters. It’s just a question of what the reader is used to. There was a time, remember, when we were used to telling stories with harps, and before that we told them on cave walls. Nowadays millions of people are happy to carry little screens around with them. Look out, bookshops. As if you didn’t have enough to worry about already.

My fellow fond parent did say one thing that struck me, however. E-books are barely less expensive to buy than ordinary books. That chimes with things I’ve read elsewhere – that the costs of printing, binding, storing etc are in reality only a small proportion of publisher’s costs. So they solve fewer problems for the publisher than you might think. But my guess is, they’re going to be big. And once they are, they won’t just reshape the industry. They will change the way we tell stories. Again.

It’s happened again!

Someone’s put my book in the wrong age category. This could take forever to sort out. You’d think a single phone call would do it, but no. You call someone and they talk to someone and they tell someone else, and by the time the buttons are pressed up at Book Control Central the answer you get can be worse than the one you started with. And out in the shops the book is on the wrong shelves. If it’s made it to the shelves at all.

Categorising by age is fraught with problems. The categories are simple things: 9-12, teenage, adult etc. But the mind is not simple. It can reach in all directions. My daughter loves Jane Eyre and has read Camus and Primo Levi. But in the same month she was reading Camus she was also reading Tamora Pierce’s teenage fantasy-heroine fiction, and she was loving that too. And adults loved Harry Potter, didn’t they?

Books aren’t simple either. A rollicking child adventure story can work at profoundly different levels. So how do you categorise it? There may be no more misleading term in literature than the words ‘Children’s Fiction’.

We have to have age categories. Most authors are simply not well-enough known for their work to reach their intended audiences without some guidance. So this author does not fall down and start tearing up the carpet with his teeth just because someone might put an age-label on his book. What he objects to is getting an age-label that’s wrong.

My fantasy novels are aimed both at teenagers who like to think as they read, and at adults who loved The Lord of the Rings and who have never lost that. I don’t mind these books being categorised as teenage novels (although I would prefer to see them on the mainstream fantasy shelves, because teenagers do look there for their reading, whereas it’s a rare adult who goes browsing on the teenage shelves). But I did protest when I found them in the 9-12 category. It took months and months to get that changed.

WE is definitely mainstream science fiction. Never mind that the editor is known as a publisher of children’s fiction: that’s what it is. The hero is adult, the theme is dystopian, there is little zap-kapow and the young love quotient is nil. Sure teenagers will read it and like it for what it is, but I don’t want them misled about what they’re getting. And I want the book to be where adults will find it. When I heard that it was being put on the children’s shelves, I objected. So did my editor. Calls were made. The coding was changed, I was assured, within days of my protest. Hurrah! Maybe we’ve learned something.

Except that I was in a local Waterstones on Friday. I was waving WE’s Times, Guardian and other reviews under the nose of the counter staff. Yes, said the counter staff on duty (a polite and intelligent young man called George,) they did have the book in stock. Great. And, er, what category was it under?

George checked his screen. Nine to twelve, he said.

Sounds of teeth in carpet.

Not all my books have made it to the shelves. Here are three that didn’t.

A Shred of Mercie. A fantasy with a seventeenth-century era setting, loosely inspired by Elizabeth Goodge’s wonderful novel The Little White Horse. I wrote this between about 1986 and 1991, in evenings and at weekends while I was working at MOD. There were some good scenes in it, but far too many beginner’s errors, and an immature desire to punish my audience through my heroine. It never went near a publisher. Wiser heads around me said, ‘Try something else.’

The Voice of the Waters. Another sixteenth-seventeenth century style fantasy, set on a remote coast in a world of feuding estates and families. Again this took about five years to write, because I was still doing the day job. The first chapters got shown to an agent, who was encouraging, and that agent eventually forwarded it to some publishers. Their verdict was ‘lyrical, but too slow’. I must have felt dashed, but I don’t remember it. By that time I had already begun to write The Cup of the World.

I Heard the Swan Sing. I wrote this after The Widow and the King and around the time I was working on The Lightstep. It was a short novel, aimed at the nine to twelve age group, and based on a play I had written for our church in London some years before. It was superficially humorous but with all sorts of spiritual and biblical undertones. The problem was ( I now think) that it was too preachy, and the children in it weren’t really convincing as children. Again people said to me, ‘Try something else.’ OK, I did.

Each time I put one of these aside, I would promise myself that I would be back for it. I would just tweak it and twist it and bring out the novel that was really there all along. After all, two of them at least had been part of my life for years. And there was good writing there – in places. There are scenes and themes that I could certainly re-use in future novels (in one case I already have done). But as time passes it seems less and less likely that I will attempt a wholesale resurrection. Trying to breathe life into an old corpse is never the best way to produce a perfect creation. Better to let them lie – loved, but buried.

So you’re writing a book, and you’re wondering if it might be published and earn you a lot of money. Fair enough. It’s a perfectly reasonable question. Let’s do some numbers.

Some years ago I did a stint as a manuscript reader for a publisher in London. In my time there I looked at 200 manuscripts. I passed twenty on to my bosses for a second opinion. Of those I thought six might be publishable. In the end they published one. They hadn’t been expecting me to find any.

So that’s one out of two hundred submitted. When I compared notes with my editor on this he thought that the ratio - at least in the UK - was nearer one in five hundred. I can’t adjust for the effect of one book being submitted a number of different publishers in succession (as Harry Potter was, and Watership Down and no doubt many other novels that went on to be very successful.) But let’s say the chances of acceptance are around one percent or below.

Depressing? Yes. But new authors do get published – even now. And lotteries do get won. So let’s say the book’s accepted. What are the chances of success (ie: big sales, household name, publisher clamouring for sequels and old life totally rotted up by celebrity)?

They’re better. But they’re still not great. A University of Bournemouth survey of professional authors in the UK found that 50% of earnings go to just 10% of us. So that’s say one in ten of us making the big time. The rest of us get by on sums that fluctuate from year to year but on average amount to about two-thirds of the UK average wage. That’s a useful second salary for a household (especially if you manage to do it part time) but not the path to riches.

The point is that there are far more of us wanting to write than the public want to read. Most readers enjoy reading more if they can talk about the book afterwards to someone else who has read it. And a reader is most likely to pick up a book by an author they haven’t read if someone else tells them it’s good. Today’s readers may well be far more diverse in their tastes than in the past. They will have more ways of chattering about more books. But the social need is, as it always has been, for small numbers of books that large numbers of people can talk about. Not the other way around.

And yes, quality is part of the social need, but only part of it. Beautifully written, intellectually challenging books only attract a minority. Anything that offers a good gossip or a nice, heart-warming dream will stake a far bigger claim on the reading public’s purse. Wail if you like, but that’s the truth.

I don’t think there’s any point blaming the industry for any of this. If publishers and booksellers get swept away by the advent of the e-book I think we’ll find that all these effects will persist, and will probably become even more marked. More of that another time, maybe.

Lily from Vancouver wants to write a book. She asked me how to do it. And here’s more or less what I said.

To start with you need an idea of what the book’s going to be about. This is the spark that gets you going. (I’ve talked about this before “The Golf Club and the Sponge”, so I won’t repeat myself. In any case, Lily’s already got her idea. Let’s go on.

The next thing you need, I’d say, is an outline of the basic story. There’s got to be a sequence of events that finishes with a satisfactory ending. This isn’t difficult, but you’ve got to have it. For example, ‘boy meets girl and after a lot of trouble they fall in love,’ is one. ‘Child that everyone laughs at finds special powers and saves the world’ is another. There’s actually a very small number of basic storylines and we use them again and again.

Next, you need to think about how you are going to keep your reader wanting to read on until they get to your ending. This is difficult, and I guess many of the successful writers just do it instinctively. You need an idea of what your reader is like - probably they’re someone quite like you - and what’s going to grab them. You might want a lot of suspense, or funny scenes. You might want a lot of fascinating characters. There will almost certainly need to be a central character whom the reader likes, finds interesting, and wants to come through. (Excellent books with unsympathetic central characters do get written, but it takes a special sort of writer to do them well and a special sort of reader to soldier through them and still enjoy the experience).

Now we need to start writing. This is also hard. The first few pages can often seem unsatisfactory. Don’t worry too much about it. You can come back and re-write them later. Just get going.

And above all, you need to keep writing. This is also hard. Try to write something every day, even if it’s only a few sentences. If you can’t write something every day, have a time or times in the week when you do write. Don’t let yourself put it off. Once you stop, you can stay stopped for weeks or months. It’s very hard to start again. Don’t let yourself lose confidence. Confidence is key to the writer. Have faith.

It’s been raining for three days. The wind blew heavily last night. This morning the children drove off for the first day of the autumn term. The author (who is very fond of his offspring) danced a little jig in the drive and came back into a house that was empty for the first time in six weeks.

Except for the cats, one of whom had been sick on the carpet.

Leave the cat-sick for the moment. Clear breakfast. Brush teeth, shave, make bed, hugging all the time the thought of four quiet morning hours, solid and serene, and nothing but the gentle chatter of the keyboard. After a summer of visits and visitors, excursions and distractions, at last a chance to do some real work!

Eight twenty-five. The bed’s made (as much as it ever is). It’s time to warm up the computer. Press switch, open blinds, let daylight in. Daylight reminds me that there is cat-sick still uncleaned on the carpet. Clean cat-sick. What next? Oh, the washing’s still sitting in the basket, damp and threatening to go mouldy. Can’t leave it like that. Start hanging up washing. Shirt, yes, Jeans, yes, sock, sock, odd sock – yes I know time’s beginning to creep by – sock, tee-shirt, sock, another odd sock – and the computer’s still humming patiently in the corner of the study. But what’s the point of starting something if I’m going to leave it unfinished? Sock, sock, sock. And the cats are beginning to look at me. It’s the sort of look that says, ‘We knew it’. I knew it too.

I knew this would happen, all through the long summer when I was telling myself that if only I could have a clear morning I could get such things done. It’s just ten minutes into the autumn term and already I’m shy of the keyboard. Regimented regime? Hah! And now I must admit that there were clear mornings in the summer – my family arranged them for me – but I found it convenient to use them for things other than writing. All creators are in some sense driven, I suppose. If we were not we would not be creators. It’s just that I seem to be driven by my ability to procrastinate.

And I’m sure I’m not alone. Ask any ten authors what it is they fear most and nine of them will probably say ‘Loss of inspiration’ or something like that. (The tenth will tell you that it’s the call from the agent or publisher who says ‘Look, this latest typescript of yours. I’m sorry, but…’ and yes, that’s true too.) There is something a bit frightening about a blank white screen. Looking at it, you feel a sense of enormous potential. And that potential includes the possibility of failure. A little mental battle has to be fought and won, each day, with that first touch of the keys. I’m catching up on six weeks of mental battle right now.

OK. The washing’s hung. And the blog’s done too. The novel – the real thing – is still waiting. It’s just a screen away. So, then…

Cup of tea?