Is the Editor Dead?

'No book with a spider on the cover has ever sold'

An intensive writing bout has prevented me from keeping up this blog and attending many of the recent literary events, but I did manage to attend Manchester Literature Festival's panel discussion, 'Is the Editor Dead?'. Four editors representing a spectrum of publishing perspectives - Lee Brackstone and Michael Schmidt of established literary publishers Faber and Carcanet, and John Mitchinson and Peter Hartey of new internet-based setups Unbound and Poetic Republic - tackled the question posed by the Festival brochure: Has the democratisation of the publishing industry (the internet having enabled self-publishing and so-called peer review, a situation in which the role of the editor has seemed increasingly redundant) been good for readers and writers? Perhaps inevitably in a time of great flux in the publishing industry, the evening came up with more questions than answers, and to some extent a retrenchment of opposing views, but it was very interesting.

Speaking first, Lee Brackstone acknowledged that things in publishing are 'relentlessly grim': orders have dropped significantly, the traditional model is under severe strain and the role of the editor is indeed up for interrogation. However, he made a strong case for the importance of the editor: editors are crucial tastemakers; more importantly, the editor's role is to 'add value' to a writer's work. If editors are to continue, however, they need to adapt to the current situation, to think harder and more creatively about how to add value, and his own new role as Creative Director of Faber Social is a way of doing that. He envisages taking greater ownership of authors' careers, taking possession of the various channels now available and, among other stratagems, linking up with other independent publishers. While he may have abandoned the title of editor, he has by no means abandoned the role, and hopes, he implied, rather to enhance it. (Later in the evening, however,  Michael Schmidt would put in that he wishes Faber hadn't abandoned the title, with which I couldn't help agreeing, since names can be so influential in affecting the nature of the things they name.)

John Mitchinson of Unbound spoke next. For those who don't know, Unbound has adapted the eighteenth-century practice of subscription publishing for the internet age: via the website, authors pitch the ideas for their books to potential subscribers until there are enough subscriptions to finance publication by Unbound (and, depending on the level of subscription, subscribers can follow the process of the writing of the books). Mitchinson outlined how his background as first a bookseller and then in traditional publishing had led him to conclude that traditional publishing is a wasteful business - most 'published' books get destroyed rather than sold, in fact - and that the problem is not in our reading culture but in the economics of the way good reading material is delivered to readers. In reality the reading public is millions of people following their own interests, and publishing used to be an ecosystem catering to that, but has become an agribusiness, which is bad for both readers and writers. Unbound, he said, is a new way of bringing writers and readers together, and he expressed huge enthusiasm for the potential of the internet for literature, calling it the most exciting thing since Gutenberg. On the other hand, he acknowledged that it has presented an unforeseen problem: if anyone can write and produce and distribute a book (as is increasingly happening), what becomes of the role of the editor?  In spite of the fact that Unbound clearly encompasses the contemporary notion of crowd-sourcing, involving the public in the tastemaking process, and although Mitchinson indicated that editors should not be gatekeepers, he was in agreement with Brackstone that the editor should be a tastemaker, needs to be someone with an instinct. (Presumably Unbound editors choose the book proposals to present for subscription in the first place.)

Next up was Peter Hartey, co-founder of Manchester-based Poetic Republic, of which I had not previously heard, the online development of a writing group into a prize anthology where participating writers judge each other's work with anonymous peer reviews. Hartey came out fighting and began with an unequivocal and contrarian statement that the editor is indeed dead. He strongly stated that the editor of conventional publishing has indeed been an all-powerful gatekeeper, that the industry has been controlled by publishers who can buy retail space, that editors are fallible and can turn down great books, that there's 'a great sea of writing out there' to which they have no access, and that in practice they rely on contacts. Now, however, they are losing control of book discovery which is happening instead in the wider community and driven by reader behaviour. Traditional publishers are now signing contracts with authors discovered by the community, and the traditional relationship between authors, readers and editors is no longer relevant. If the editor has any role now, it is that of developing new systems. He also said it was all something to do with algorithms, at which point he lost me entirely.

Michael Schmidt began by nailing his colours to the opposite mast and disagreeing that there was a 'great sea of literature' out there: there are small puddles, more like. He then said that he felt that the main change in publishing inimical to both writers and readers is that already pointed out by Mitchinson, its increasing homogeneity. Once there was specialism among the literary imprints of the mainstream houses, but this has gone. This creates a problem for the writer in finding a publisher, and opportunities for readers are reduced. Increasingly therefore, literary writers are turning to small publishers, who are now echoing the situation which existed among the larger publishers in the 60s and 70s. He questioned the 'decorum' which dictates 'what we want now' (and which presumably drives literature towards homogeneity), and with a thought-provoking sleight of hand turned this on Peter Hartey's concept of  'reader discovery', asking what is meant by 'peer review', especially if the reviewer is anonymous. Later, in the Q &A he would ask the question again, slightly differently: in what way are the commentatators/judges of Poetic Republic peers of the writers they are judging? Hartey replied that they are peers in that they are all writers being judged by the same system; they all have the same commitment and all understand the conditions under which they are operating, all of which leads to real validation of poems chosen, and to the result of great writing validated by a large number of people. This did not seem to me at all to answer the implied challenge in Schmidt's question, ie that, just as we cannot assume that there is a 'great sea of good writing', neither can we assume that all, if any, writers are up to the task of editing (personally, I'm pretty sure that since writers have an understandable tendency to judge everything by their own work and aims as writers, they are often the least objective of critics/editors in terms of what others are likely to appreciate), and that indeed editing requires a particular talent that (as with all talents) not every individual is likely to have. Schmidt, backed by Brackstone, then talked about the particular skills that editors bring and the collaborative process that is involved, citing the fact that Lord of the Flies was three times its eventual length before Faber editor Charles Monteith worked on it with Golding. On the whole, Schmidt didn't feel that the publishing landscape has changed as radically as Mitchinson believed - there's a provisionality about the web; blogs, for instance, don't have the weight of essays - and he ended by reiterating that the editor is crucial and endorsing Brackstone's concept of the 'added value' an editor can bring.

The Q & A threw up some interesting points, though I felt that there was a failure to bring them into a coherent discussion. My notes consist of the following observations:

John Mitchinson considered that the readership for literary fiction has not disappeared (in spite of mainstream publishers' assumptions that it has), that traditional publishers no longer publish for readers but for retail slots, that there used to be a backlist but that this has now been hollowed out by the current system, that under the current system (in conventional publishing) a publisher has to produce bestsellers, and that therefore that's the editor's job: to find bestsellers. That, however, we can't go on having a tiny number of gatekeepers choosing what the rest of us read, although since the internet has proliferated we are in dire need now of some kind of filtering, of curators and gatekeepers after all.

Lee Brackstone said that the elephant in the room is the retailer - a point which could have done with an evening's elucidation, and which I suspected could have been a riposte to Hartey's apparent assumption of the collusion between publishers and retailers. (Mitchison responded that yes, that was why they were doing Unbound.)

Michael Schmidt added that the elephant in the room is copyright and ebooks, a point which was annoyingly left hanging.

Someone in the audience asked Peter Hartey to explain algorithms, but his explanation seemed to presuppose an understanding of algorithms, so I and, I suspect, a lot of the audience were left none the wiser.

Going back to the point of copyright, someone raised the question of access to texts, and  Michael Schmidt said that AHRC is so keen on open access that it's leading to an erosion of new scholarship - another extremely interesting point which I felt could have done with far greater elucidation.

The woman sitting next to me asked in a wonderfully measured way about the fact that editors are inevitably biased and powerful, and that most in mainstream publishing houses are white middle class and therefore not in a position to assess, for instance, Asian writing. Michael Schmidt gave what seemed to me an admirably humble answer in which he confessed to his lack of confidence in editing a writer of a different nationality. The prophylactic, he reiterated, is a variety of outlets for writers - this is very important.

In spite of the radically different views expressed, it seemed that all four editors were in agreement about one thing: that in traditional publishing there has been what someone called 'a race to the bottom' which has in effect made it difficult to make people pay for books, a situation which needs somehow to be turned around.

At some point in the evening someone - I think it may have been Mitchinson - said that no book with a spider on the cover had ever sold, and, readers, I'll leave you to ponder that.

Manchester Literature Festival discussion on prize culture

Last night, Booker announcement night, Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester University's Centre for New Writing held a very interesting panel discussion on the subject of Prize Culture, chaired by journalist Michael Taylor, and presenting some very different angles on the subject.

Manchester University literature lecturer Jerome de Groot opened, making it clear that he was approaching the matter as an academic and was interested in (if my notes have it right)  'conceptualising what the Booker Prize has achieved.' He referred to Richard Todd's 1996 study of the Booker,  Consuming Fictions, which argues that the Booker and prize culture in general have created and sustained a market for literary fiction that it might otherwise not have received, that it has enfranchised audiences by taking judgement away from critics and academics and created a modern Booker canon. Though De Groot questioned this last point: how many people in the audience knew who won the first Booker in 1969? No one besides me put up their hand, and I only know because I've been thinking about these things and looking into them. (It was P H Newby for Something to Answer For - and no, I've not read it.) On the whole, though, De Groot was in agreement with Todd that prizes 'create a space for new negotiations of cultural worth'. He thought in addition that they give us an insight into publishing as an industry, allowing us to see the ways that cultural capital is peddled and the way books are sold to us. Above all, it allows us to reflect on what we have allowed publishing to become.

The other four panelists were writer-teachers in the Centre for New Writing, and next came poet Vona Groarke taking a poetry prize perspective. Having been a winner, loser (she said) and judge of poetry prizes, she gave us a blackly funny list of tips for winning which included 'Suffer bereavement or die,' 'If you're not suffering enough be young and beautiful,' and be politically aware but not so much as to frighten the horses. Next she gave us a breakdown of the typical judging panel which included: the villain, ie the panel member who hasn't read the books, usually a celeb; the hung jury which is so split that it's fundamentally incapable of functioning or results in a mediocre acceptable winner; the over-enthusiastic panel member who is incapable of making a detached decision; and the king maker who prizes youth and promise over achievement. This last she saw as a big problem: too many judges want to be in at the beginning of writers' careers; they want to feel that they have found someone. Mostly she felt that decisions end in compromise, and that in order to win, a collection has to be either outstandingly irreproachably wonderful or outstandingly irreproachably mediocre. On the whole, she thought it was astounding that prize juries ever get it right, and acknowledged that sometimes they do.

Novelist M J Hyland, speaking next, commented that Groarke was lucky, as a poet, to be able to speak her mind so freely, and that as a prize-winning novelist she felt less able. She read to us from John McGahern's essay on being shortlisted for the Booker in 1990 in which he relates that he found the razzamatazz far from enjoyable and comments that sometimes it takes years for the worth of a book to be seen, yet the judges need to make a decision in such a short time. My notes got a bit muddled here and I'm not sure whether the following experiences were those of McGahern, or of Hyland herself, both of whom have judged prizes, but I'll repeat them for their interest: no two judges on a panel having the same opinion, and at one stage all rejected books having been admired by someone on the panel while the winner limps into the shortlist unopposed but championed by no one.

Novelist Ian McGuire then spoke briefly but very thoughtfully about literary value judgements and where the power to make them lies now. Noting that lit crit is not a science, and that even in a good situation it's hard to make value judgements, he said that it's nevertheless not all just a matter of taste. However, the introduction of literary theory into Britain in the seventies, undermining the whole notion of literary value and hierarchy, had, he felt, diminished the ability of English Departments to take part in debates about value. Newspaper criticism has decreased, and the power of judgement has largely devolved to literary prizes and online commentators.

Poet John McAuliffe then laid roundly but with characteristic good humour into the Booker.  He recalled the Booker in what he called its heyday, mentioning among others Midnight's Children,  The God of Small Things and Vernon God Little, books which he said administered shocks to British literary culture. In recent years, though, he felt, Booker winners have been echoes, imitations of those earlier books rather than making new noises of their own. This year authors whose books could have administered such shocks - Patrick McGuinness, Dermot Healy, Kevin Barry - had been left off *, the last two even from the longlist, and the problem with them having been left off is that they have already more or less disappeared. Altogether, in his view, while British poetry prizes are closer to the pulse of the form, the Booker is now a publishers' prize for the Christmas market.

A few interesting points that came up in the following Q & A: Someone suggested that the sales of shortlisted books are not always good, but M J Hyland said that sales of her shortlisted book far outstrip that of her others, and keep doing so. In response to the idea that the best books stand the test of time and rise to the top anyway, she said that getting a prize is a great thing for an author, though, because authors need to eat and can very rarely make a living out of writing.  On the idea that many winners don't stand the test of time, Vona Groarke made the point that we can hardly expect them to: in fact, we would be very lucky to get a truly remarkable book each decade, leave alone each year.  Someone, Ian McGuire I think, commented that to invest in just two or three writers a year (which results from the prize culture) does not make for a healthy literature culture. Writers need to be given a chance to develop their careers, to produce non-prizewinning books at the start, and I think the implication was that a literary conversation dominated by prizes pushes publishers away from that. On the other hand (my notes tell me someone said), prizes could contribute to such a different kind of culture, but I don't recall anyone saying how. De Groot suggested that literary festivals bespeak a public desire to have the kind of conversation about books that was generally felt to be squeezed. Finally Festival Director Cathy Bolton asked what the panel felt about the online platform to which Ian McGuire saw that the literary discussion had moved. M J Hyland said she found it scary - she could be devastated by a bad Amazon review - but such democratisation and widening of the discussion had to be a good thing. Ian McGuire said that some of it was excellent, more objective than newspaper criticism which often consisted of writers reviewing each others' books, and one had to view it as part of the changing world of books.

* In an earlier published version of this post an elision of mine had Patrick McGuinness left off the longlist. Thanks to Dan Holloway for pointing out the error, which was mine and not John McAuliffe's, and apologies to John and the judging panel.

The Bitch Munches her Words

I stand corrected: there was at least one other writer I knew at Murat Belge's talk on Freedom of Expression last Saturday. Last night we were waiting in the Museum cafe to be let into the Animal Room (!) for a reading by the American poet Sharon Olds (a Manchester Literature Festival and Poetry School event). Poet and Poetry School coordinator Linda Chase came up and said she'd seen our backs in the church. She was way at the back and left before I turned round at the end to check out the crowd - because, from what she said, she hadn't been nearly as impressed as I and The Partner were, though she was too busy organising last night's event to stick around and say why...

Voices and Ears

Yesterday afternoon I went to St Ann's Church in the centre of Manchester for the talk on Freedom of Expression by Turkey's Murat Belge, an Amnesty International event which was part of the Manchester Literature Festival.

How could this be more timely - two days after Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize and the French parliament approved a bill outlawing the denial of the Turkish massacre of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century. (Earlier this year, of course, Pamuk narrowly escaped trial for his 'insult to Turkishness' in referring to this episode and calling it a massacre.) Belge is indeed Pamuk's publisher in Instanbul.

Now, you know, I always have a funny feeling about churches. I can never enter a church without thinking of the tensions around religion in my own childhood household (my parents were of different religions, Catholic and Protestant), and they take me back to those days and Sunday School where I always felt like both a traitor and a heathen and was filled with a frightening sense of being out of place and somehow punishably in the wrong. But somehow yesterday...

The sun was drenching Manchester as we drove in, mid-October and people strolling in sleeveless vests and sandals; this wasn't the Manchester we have always known (it used to be frosty for the Poetry Festival!), it was Manchester autumn easternised, and the John Rylands Library on Deansgate, newly cleaned and extended, no longer seemed simply grimly Northern Neo-Gothic but glowed a mediterranean red. And St Ann's Church was filled with light, the stained-glass windows showing up as delicate pastel, and all the wood coloured like honey.

At the front, as people filed in, Murat Belge was trying out the microphone, which didn't seem to be working very well. He was a little man, and he wasn't fierce or intent as the picture above portrays him, but he looked like someone's grandad, and he had a twinkle in his eye. 'Come nearer to the front,' the organisers asked us, because of the microphone problem and because , they said, Murat Belge had a 'very quiet voice', and we did. Beginning his talk in an indeed quietly husky voice, Belge explained: he'd had glottal cancer, and having the choice of surgery, had opted (he said with a twinkle) 'to lose a little of his voice rather than his life.'

And then in his quiet husky voice he talked for forty minutes, about the significance of Pamuk's Nobel Prize and the French parliamentary vote, about the history of Turkey which has given rise to its present position, caught between east and west and the forces of traditionalism and modernisation, and about the prospect of Turkey's entry into the EU. No need for microphones: everyone was riveted, and you could have heard a pin drop in that church.

Magaret Atwood in Friday's Guardian and Robert McCrum in today's Observer praise the choice of Pamuk for the Nobel as the absolutely right moral decision, and of course they are right. I have only read Pamuk's Snow, and at the time I and my reading group, bringing to it our contemporary western literary expectations, found it heavy going, but that novel has stayed with me since in a way few novels do: dream-like and snowbound, aching with isolation and confusion and the sense of lost empire. However, Belge, an avowed internationalist, fears that the prize, and the French parliamentary vote, will provoke a backlash. He told us that although at one time 70% of the Turkish population was in favour of EU entry, that figure, under the influence of the traditionalists, has now dropped to 40%. Pamuk is viewed by many in Turkey as a traitor, and now, Belge said, in the wake of these two major events, the traditionalists will be able to say, Look at the kind of people we would be joining if we joined the EU. And he agreed with a comment from the floor that if Turkey does not join the EU, the way will be paved for a strengthening of fundamentalist Islamism.

Another question from the floor: 'What would happen to you if you gave this talk in Turkey?'

Belge paused. Then: 'Nothing.' He twinkled. 'Nothing. Usually. When it happens [arrest or prosecution for speaking out], it happens because a certain group decides go to the authorities and force them to act. And the authorities will act thinking, Well, nothing will really happen... But then of course sometimes it does [and people are imprisoned].'

He paused again. In the gap I noticed that the stained-glass window to my left was a modern replacement, a result of the IRA bomb.' But you know, the worst thing that happens is that you speak out, you give a talk, you write a paper and nothing happens. It is as though you never said it at all...'

And then it was over, and there was tea at the back, and buns made by the ladies of the church, just like in my childhod, and I swallowed mine too quickly, because, I tell you, I don't care, this Bitch was crying, and also wondering why I recognised no one here in the church, only one Manchester librarian. Murat Belge is a literary man, a publisher, a scholar of English literature, a Professor of Comparative Literature, and this was a literature festival, but as far as I could see the audience was made up not of literary people but of members of Amnesty International who had travelled from miles away, and politics students. Not a writer among them. Well, of course there may have been, for all I know, but there was not a writer that I knew, none from the Manchester writing scene who could be expected to turn up to events at a literature festival.

Aren't writers interested in these issues? Aren't British writers political nowadays? Oh well, these aren't our issues, are they, we're free, aren't we, to say whatever we like, and we've got such a great life nowadays there's something almost embarrassing about people who write dark novels... But these are our issues, increasingly: Murat Belge may have 'sacrificed some of his voice' but his message is loud and clear. So why, as in Turkey, are there people not listening here?