Just One Book: the Debate

An excellent, judicious post about the Salt Just One book campaign by Sheila Bounford at Off the Page, written largely in response to a fierce debate on Jane Smith's How Publishing Really Works.

Just One Book: latest

Here's Chris Hamilton-Emery's latest Facebook bulletin on the Just One Book campaign:

Sunday, May 31 2009

It's been impossible to think. Just over a week ago we were facing oblivion, the backlist would have sold on, but the business as a going concern was all over. I was job hunting. Stress had left me deaf. We were about to lose our home and it seemed everything had fallen off some precipice and was hurtling down into the frozen dark. We began cancelling the list and preparing for the worst. Nearly a decade of effort was being lost.

Then our viral campaign led to an extraordinary sequence of events. Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of blogs all covered the story of Salt's Just One Book offer. The media picked up on the story and suddenly over a 1,000 orders poured in, supporters arrived in virtual droves and the goodwill and great ideas became emotionally overwhelming; we had support from Foyles and Waterstone's in the UK, from independent bookstores around the globe, The Bookseller and The Guardian covered the story, the BBC wanted to cover us. The office changed from its usual focus on editorial, marketing and publicity to become a non-stop postal service, sending thousands of books off around the globe.



Alex Pryce had arrived to do a week's work experience as a Salt intern (part of our widening programme to support those wanting careers in literary publishing), what began as a project surrounding audio developments was swamped as she was drawn in to picking, packing and despatching order after order. Beside Alex, the Salt team grafted away. Charlotte and Tom, Jen and I, still haven't caught up with it all. But we're working hard, all day, all night, and still the orders are coming in.

Last week was half term, and most of my days were spent at home with the kids, sometimes reassuring them that there was going to be a future and that we would get paid at some point. I was spending as much time as I could helping make those sales. Just over a week later and we've now raised £24,000 or our £55,000 target. There's still some climb ahead, a big climb, but the enormous support of our friends and customers has bought us all time; it's all about time. What we hope most of all, is that we can keep our new customers, and that we've shown them that there's something wonderful and fulfilling about our list and our site, something exceptional about our authors.

I need to keep it all going, I need your support for one more month. So here's an offer for everyone and we hope more customers will come and join the campaign to buy just one book:

A THIRD OFF ALL SALT TITLES THROUGHOUT JUNE

We're now giving you a huge 33% off ALL books till the end of June. Use the coupon code G3SRT453 when in the checkout to benefit. Don't forget if you spend £30 or $30 you get free shipping too.

Please continue to spread the word, and spread news of this offer. Please don't let up. It's been extraordinary, but we're not out of danger yet. Every penny goes into developing Salt's books and services. We want to start a new children's list, and offer more resources to teachers and schools. We want to extend our publishing in new areas including our translations programme, we want to offer you more free magazines online. We want to help develop more support for debuts with the enhancement of our Crashaw and Scott prizes. We're planning audio books, ebooks and new videos for you. We only want to move forward, to develop and expand what we do and deliver great books in new ways to you and yours.

We need your support throughout June. We'll try and organise more readings and promotions with our authors. Virtual book tours. More launches. We'll work with bookstores to bring you short story and poety evenings. Stick with us throughout June and we can do something astonishing. That's the power of Just One Book — we want you to be a part of it. Follow us on Twitter look for #SaltBooks and #JustOneBook. Join our Facebook Group.

And have a giggle at the vid, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s

Oh, and one last special offer — Catherine Eisner’s magnificent crime novel, Sister Morphine for £7.50 plus P&P, simply enter coupon code EISNER in the UK checkout http://bit.ly/8rHDa

Watch out for more special offers throughout June.

Thank you.
Chris

Bookshops take up Just One Book Campaign

Latest news in the Salt Just One book campaign from the Bookseller blog:

Chris will be on BBC2 "Newsnight" tonight (29th May). Foyles will shortly be running a benefit to help raise funds for Salt for the summer. Bookshops around the country are putting on displays of Salt's latest titles. http://www.saltpublishing.com.

The bookseller quotes Chris:

Over the past five days we've taken close on 1,000 direct orders and generated over £20,000 of sales: trade sales have tripled. For a little family business like ours this has been humbling and exhausting. No one likes being on the brink, now we've stepped back a few paces. We're not out of danger, but we've seen that linking a viral campaign to drive sales to bookshops and our own website can have dramatic effects. People are saving us one book at a time.

Salt Just One Book Campaign goes on apace

I'm up the mountain in Wales at the moment, so I may not be online much for the next few days - it's always worst in bad weather, and it took about 5 mins for this page to load!

I wanted to blog this, though: the Salt Just One book campaign goes on apace (Please scroll down to my previous posts for the link: it would take me no end of time to put it in here!). Apparently there were 800 orders in the first 4 days, bringing in 17,000 pounds. Today the campaign hit the Guardian books blog with an article by Shirley Dent (that's a link I prepared earlier!), and it seems that at this very moment director Chris Hamilton Emery is in London in an interview being recorded for BBC 2's Newsnight Review this Friday at 11pm!

Thank you so much to everybody who has bought Salt books. Salt isn't out of the woods yet, though, so if you fancy some more or if you haven't yet bought one, please do. Their website here.

Cross-posted with Elizabeth Baines.

Salt Just One Book Campaign

I guess it won't have escaped many people's notice that last week my publisher Salt announced that they were in trouble. The ending of their Arts Council grant, designed to get them on their feet while they built up a market (which it seems they had been doing with some success) coincided with the economic turndown and the apparent loss of market for books generally in spite of hopes expressed elsewhere that literary books would weather the storm.

When this kind of thing happens to independent publishers, they usually fade away quietly - perhaps no one ever wants to announce the problems before the end actually comes: too bad for business while there's still hope of some miracle! So it was with a fair amount of amazement that I began to read Salt director Chris Hamilton Emery's Facebook announcement of the difficulties Salt was encountering. But the statement led up to another announcement, of an idea which may come to be seen in publishing history as a brilliant marketing stroke - well, I hope it does anyway! Chris announced the Just One Book campaign. If enough people bought just one book, Salt could pay off their debt and the troubles would only be temporary, and Salt would not have to end.

The result has been astounding and proved the power of the internet for publishers. As Chris says, the news went instantly 'global': it was facebooked and twittered and blogged (this is why I've been busier on my other blog than this one), it made the Bookseller, and the response in terms of orders has been huge. It seems the backlist is now secured, and the frontlist is getting on track.

Susan Hill, expressing her familiar and indeed reasonable view that publishing is above all a business not a charity, has commented in a Facebook thread that books requiring their publishers to beg people to buy them in this way should not be being published in the first place. If people don't want books, she says, ie if there isn't a market for them, then they shouldn't be being published. It's more complicated than that, though: as I've said so many times, people can't want books if they don't know about them, and the thing which large publishers have and which small publishers don't is huge marketing budgets to get the knowledge of them out there, to the punters and to the bookshops - a point poignantly protrayed in the latest of Chris's searingly honest and vivid bulletins.

What so many emails and Facebook messages have made clear to me this week is that Chris's campaign has indeed alerted to the presence of Salt and their books many people who were unaware of them, or only peripherally aware, and whose interest has now been aroused.

He's created a market, in other words.

Writers and Commerce

Last week another writer and I were comparing notes, the way writers do over dinner, and we agreed that we find writing harder now than when we first began and were arrogant and first published. Much of it is to do with the fact that the more experienced you get, the harder you want to push yourself, the more new things you want to try, and the tougher your standards become for yourself - you just won't let things pass which once upon a time you would have done. After we parted, however, I mused that there is something else which makes it all so much harder nowadays, for me at any rate: the sense of the market breathing ever more fiercely over your shoulder.

Robert McCrum thinks it's a myth that there were more good or great novels published in the past, and the conclusion one might draw from this is that 'literary' writers are ultimately unaffected by the commercialization of our literary culture. And in today's Guardian Mark Ravenhill goes so far as to express an opinion that a market-aware theatre has opened up opportunities for new and innovative writing. In Saturday's Review Andy Beckett weighed up arguments for and against the case that serious non-fiction is in decline, noting that the commercialization of British literary culture is not exactly new but held sway before the introduction of the Net Book Agreement in 1900.

Beckett's article ends thus:

In truth, it is too early to tell: serious non-fiction takes time to research and write and sell. But in the meantime, it may be a good idea for authors of such titles to be realistic about their place in the economic order. As John Feather writes in his history of British publishing, before Waterstone's, before agents and advances, before the invention of the modern book business: "The medieval author worked for himself, for God or for a patron, or indeed for all three." I'm not sure that career path would be so popular now.

Well, you know what? I know this is heresy nowadays, but that's precisely how the serious writer does want to write even now (well, for himself or God anyway: funding bodies, like medieval patrons, can be poisoned chalices): with total regard to his or her own moral, emotional, psychological and linguistic insights, and just hoping that someone out there likes the result enough to pay for it. It's the way, I believe, that good literature happens. Maybe great literature comes from authors allowing the market to breathe ideas over their shoulders as they write, but I kind of doubt it, and trying to block out those siren whispers - and struggling with the question of whether or not you have done so - is becoming one of the hardest tasks for a writer, I reckon.

Oh, PS: an article I wrote about the rise of the short story for the Writers' Guild mag, UK Writer, has just gone online.

Passion or Product?

Russell Celyn Jones, course director of the Birkbeck writing programme, responds in the Guardian to Ian Jack's criticisms of Creative Writing courses (discussed below). As far as Celyn Jones is concerned, the job of writers in the academy is to 'preserve the world of writing and reading (an art too) on both old and new forms of production.'

You can't argue with such an aim, I reckon, but Celyn Jones's refutation of Jack's claim that all applicants want to be professional writers seems a bit weak. Apparently at Birbeck there are 'doctors, journalists, police, actors and lawyers ... clear-eyed about their expectations: they want to pursue a passion communally for a year', and he backs up his argument thus:

Any individual who expressed only a desire to become the next Zadie Smith would not get past my radar... If 80% of students do not progress beyond being the gifted amateur, I have yet to hear of anyone demanding their money back.'

Disingenous, or what? He surely knows that anybody who thought fit to say such a thing in an interview would need their head examined, but it doesn't mean students aren't hoping that they will be the next ZS. It's actually that kind of arrogance and hope that keep one going as a writer. And of course no one ever asks for their money back, because to do so would be to admit defeat, to decide you are never going to be published, and how many people do that before the creative course is so far distant in the past you just wouldn't bother?

And at the end he gives the game away. Creative writing tutors have taken over the job of editors now, he says, honing the manuscripts of those students who will get published: 'We are guardians of the product now.'

Ah, so that's what's important: there's a product involved, provided by the 20% who will get published, and there is a professional point to it all!

Authors Marketing

I wrote recently on my other blog of my ambivalence about self-promotion as an author, and the necessity to get over the doubts in an age when authors must take active part in the marketing campaigns for their books. This week my fellow Salt author Tania Hershman writes on How Publishing Really Works about her own amazingly successful marketing campaign for her collection, The White Road and Other Stories, conducted on the web. There's an interesting discussion on the comments thread, and next week Salt's Jen Hamilton-Emery will guest and present her independent publisher's perspective.

Forget the Money, or Even the Publication

Two letters in today's Guardian defending 'creative writing' courses in response to the article by Ian Jack which I discussed below.

In fact, in doing so, they both strongly endorse Jack's case that the possibility of writing books for a living is becoming ever more a pipe dream. The first is from Neil Nixon, Pathway leader at NW Kent College who, he says, started the UK's first full-time HE course in professional writing in 1999. He asserts that his course 'require[s] students to back up career decisions with substantial research of the hard realities of the market' and that other degree courses are 'moving many undergraduates to understanding changing markets, concentrating less on declining areas of writing and more on the realities of turning ideas into money' [my italics]. He ends by sounding a death knell: 'This, put crudely, is where the future lies for those who, in Jack's day, saw themselves as writers.'

The second letter, from John Petherbridge, seems to me to offer a better defence: that creative writing is a discipline to be learnt for its own sake: 'Those same critics think there is nothing odd about the fact that most students, who study history, for example, don't become historians.' This has certainly been the principle behind those Creative Writing BA modules on which I have taught, and I'd add further that practice can be a useful element of a proper study of English Literature. But that first argument is weaker in a climate where universities are moving towards vocationalism (and the departments of 'pure' disciplines are being closed down or starved of money). And I have to say that of all the many people I know who have done Novel-Writing MAs I don't think there are any who didn't do it without hoping to become professional writers as a result (let me know, any of you, if I'm wrong!) and whenever I've talked to MA groups - or for that matter, any workshop groups - the thing they're always most keen to know is how to get published.

And the thought of paying those fees just to have the 'hard-headed agents and publishers' shipped in to the City Lit by John Petherbridge to be 'frank about the problems of getting work published'...

Crumbling traditions

Interesting article by the ever-thoughtful Ian Jack in yesterday's Guardian, pointing out that the idea of making a living out of writing is historically a recent one, arising in the 19th century with the swelling of the middle classes, and that it's a historical bubble about to burst with the advent of the internet and a generation 'now growing up with the idea that words should be read electronically for free [as] a new human right'.

Imagine my feelings as I sit here at my kitchen table on a sunny Sunday morning and find myself agreeing with him! I, a member of the Writers' Guild, brought up on Trades Union principles of a fair (ie living) wage for fair sweat, even if it is at the typeface! I, who have argued passionately against those who assert that writers should be happy to write for love and use this as an excuse to remunerate everyone else whose job depends on the primary production (publishers, producers, sidekicks and secretaries to the same) but not the primary producers themselves!

Well, I still feel passionately about that, but let's face it, the far more important thing is to keep being published, since, as Jack says 'the moral and aesthetic case for writing' is to 'think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience'. And how many can keep doing that when the holy grail of huge riches for a book leads to mid-listers being dropped in their droves (what happens to their 'living' then?) and agents and publishers passing up any manuscript not thought likely to bring in those millions (no living in the first place for most, and, it could be argued, the best - in literary terms anyway)? Personally, I'm thanking my lucky stars to have found a publisher interested in literature above all else: inevitably with small literary publishers, there's no money, but your books don't need to be on the bestseller lists to stay in print for longer than it takes to whip around a bookstore, and if your next book doesn't get published it won't be because it's not likely to appear on Richard and Judy or whatever ra-ra platform is going replace them.

And if the worse came to the worst, I'd rather publish my books for free online than have no one read them at all. This is the kind of scenario Jack entertains, and which he says is going to lead to a new 'age of the gifted amateur'. He notes the irony that meanwhile, the 'professionalization' of literature continues apace, with British universities

'turning out about 1,300 "creative writers" every year.

Why do young people apply? Because they think they can be the next Zadie Smith. Why do universities encourage them? Because money can be made from fees. Is this responsible behaviour? We need to weigh the smashed hopes of creative writers against the financial needs of their tutors, who are themselves writers, and earning the kind of money that writing would never supply. A closed little dance: tutors teach students who in turn teach other students, like silversmiths in a medieval guild where a bangle is rarely bought though many are crafted, and everyone lives in a previous world.

Meanwhile, in the week that the first-ever women poet laureate is appointed, Robert McCrum salutes the Orange Prize. It's interesting and gratifying that he acknowledges that 'in 1996, no question, literary London was a boy's club', since it was a world in which he himself was of course a prominent figure:

The imprints were run by men. The books they published were mainly written by men and the critics who reviewed them would mostly pass in the catalogue as members of the male gender. Sex is a poor basis on which to evaluate a work of art, but the dominance of the male in the book world was hard to overlook.

Yet here was the puzzling thing. None of this bore any relationship to the truth about the reading public. Everyone in publishing knew it was women who were the devoted fiction buyers, women who avidly read and discussed novels and women who kept the business ticking over

and that he can refer to 'chauvinist troglodyte naysayers retir[ing] to their caves to growl angrily to themselves about gender politics'. I do like the way McCrum is prepared to re-examine things, a quality in short supply I think nowadays.

And as for Mark Lawson, well, I don't know whether he writes too much to have time to think or whether he's just too much in love with his own wordplay, but his statement yesterday that the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy and the death of U A Fanthorpe coinciding represents a 'changing of the guard amongst Britain's female poets' needs a bit of examination, I'm thinking...

Reading Books Through their Authors

Anne Michaels tries to stick to her guns about staying invisible for the sake of the text, while being interviewed by Sarah Crown for The Guardian:

"I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life," she says, leaning across a cafe table, taut with the need to put her point across. "I'm not being naive; I realise there's no such thing as a pure reading. But I'd rather keep myself as far out of it as I can."

Sarah Crown asks her about the time that a journalist asked her if she is Jewish, and she refused to answer:

"...yes, I did resist answering, because I really feel that to answer would be a cop-out... People would be able to say: 'Well of course she's interested in this, because she's Jewish, or her father was.' And it would diminish the enterprise. Because, you know, it's not about me. You spend your time when you're writing erasing yourself. The idea is to get out of the way of it."

It's a tricky one, though. I've written before on one my blogs about the reading of hers I attended where this did indeed happen (can't find the post now, though)*: a member of the audience asked her if she were Jewish. I may be wrong, but I got the strong impression that the questioner felt that Michaels only had the right to write her novel if she were, and that he interpreted the fact that she refused to answer as indication that she wasn't, and that for him the novel was indeed thus invalidated, diminished.

Honestly , if only we could return to that world (many light years across the universe) where books didn't have to be sold by their authors' personalities and lives, and texts were allowed to stand up for themselves. Michaels does a pretty good job in the interview of keeping quiet, revealing only one new fact, that in the intervening period since her last novel she has had two children, but one suspects that Sarah Crown was more respectful of her wishes than many journalists will be...

PS: More on my other blog about my own attitude an as author to this matter.

* As a result of the comment thread on this post, I've now found the reference: not a post, but a comment I made in the thread below a post describing my reading group discussion of Fugitive Pieces.

A Small Round-Up

Laura Elkin alerts us to The Millions on the future of book reviewing.

Meanwhile, today on my author blog I have my own review ( a rave one) of Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball.

And I must say I'm pretty thrilled that the Pulitzer Prize has gone to a book of short stories, Elizbeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge.

You Can Censor Comics But You can't Stop the Comedy

Katy Evans-Bush on a cartoonist facing a two-year prison sentence in Cairo for writing the first graphic novel in Arabic. The trial was set for yesterday, but was adjourned for a reason providing some comic leavening:

the judge charged the vice officer who originally reported the novel a fine of 50 EGP for not showing up during the hearing session after being summoned by the court for testifying.

Kiddies' History

In her Observer TV review on Sunday Kathryn Flett echoed something Adrian Slatcher and I were saying recently over a drink:

From Life on Mars to the recent Red Riding our screens are now regularly suffused with 1970s Hovis-coloured shades of greige ... where were the men in tightly fitting polycotton shirts repeat-patterened with drawings of vintage Rolls Royces? You never see them on TV, but they were all over men's backs like a virulent strain of psoriasis.

Yes, and what about the pinks shirts too, and the purple trousers and the red-and-yellow tartans, the hippy multicolours, and, towards the end of the decade, the womens' orange jumpsuits?

It's more than interesting, this tendency to turn the past to sepia, as we've discussed before. There's a parallel paradoxical tendency to paint the past in brighter-than-suitable colours, which I feel however comes from the same, somewhat worrying cultural impulse, and which I found in the programme notes for the production of Macbeth I saw at the Royal Exchange last week:

In Britain we have a very clear idea of what childhood during wartime is like: the excitement of air raids and hiding in shelters; hearing and being able to identify a dozen different models of aeroplane as they pass by; playing around in the debris and finding souvenirs; proudly boasting about fathers and older brothers in the armed services, smart and heroic in uniforms; being herded off into the countryside as evacuees and finding imaginary countries in wardrobes.

I got that far and I thought: 'Tell that to the seventy-odd-year-olds in the audience!' In fact, it seems on reading further that the author is agreeing with me: his point is that this is an illusion, and he goes on to state that 'writers in particular have given us a skewed picture of childhood during wartime' (and there is of course that dig at C S Lewis). But the piece here is sloppy and muddled and indeed colludes with that rosy picture of life for children in wartime Britain. As a point of fact, the falsely rosy view he describes is mainly derived from postwar children's comics, though he doesn't say so. He says: 'The softening filter of nostalgia has meant that whole generations of wartime children grew up remembering 'the good old days' and the Blitz spirit.' Who is he referring to here? There was only one generation of wartime children, after all, and it is 'whole generations' who have followed. He must therefore mean the latter: we generations who were brought up on the myths. But he muddies this by his use of the word 'remembering' (we can't remember what we haven't actually experienced) and of the phrase 'wartime children'. Thus a reader not seeing the flaws in this sentence (and indeed reading quickly at the theatre, as one does) will come away with the impression that wartime Britain was not so traumatic for children as to prevent them forgetting that it was bad at all - which was enough to make my companion, who was born during the war, throw down the programme in disgust and indeed some upset. But then perhaps that is indeed what the author of this piece is saying, since he then goes on to conclude:

Compare this to children living through wars elsewhere and... well, there's no comparison.

Well, it's just a theatre programme, you might say, and the standard of those is often pretty dubious, but when you consider that this production would be aimed at the scores of schoolchildren studying Macbeth for exams, you'd think a little more responsibility was in order. And I'd say the same for the production itself. This was a production screaming RELEVANCE - to Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, with the soldiers in modern combat gear and operating modern warfare technology, and to the schoolchildren themselves, with the witches transformed into the demonic wraiths of female children raped and murdered in war. This last, by which a subsidiary theme of the original, that of the effect of war on innocents, is made a central one, is not the only way that the production radically skews the play. I'm getting pretty sick of Shakespeare productions in which actors say their speeches as if they have no idea what they mean and simply can't wait to get to the end, and compensate by shouting them, and, with the exception of a beautifully judged performance by John MacMillan as Malcolm and a (less satisfactory) one by Hilary Maclean as Lady Macbeth, this happens here. But it's made much worse by the fact that the complex psychology of the main characters is subsumed in this production's pursuit of spectacle. Macbeth is a deeply psychological play about the pull between personal ambition and guilt, which both of the Macbeths suffer, but not here: the coke-sniffing Lady Macbeth takes one frenetic angry note throughout, and Macbeth's conversion from coward to tyrant to troubled soul is, well, laughable - and the audience did indeed laugh at him at one moment during the scene where Banquo's ghost appears at the feast.

Honestly, I know this play through and through - I've studied it, I've taught it in schools (even so, I'm not precious about it, I'm always up for new insights) - but I just couldn't follow, so distracted was I by working out the modern parallels, and the flashing lights (which as a migraine sufferer I had to close my eyes to, missing some crucial moments), and the weird experience of listening to apparently garbled (shouted) speeches ringing with phrases which were so familiar to me and the meaning of which I thought I knew...

Director Matthew Dunster made some interesting revelations to Kevin Bourke in the Manchester Evening News:

It’s not, I put to Matthew, a play any director undertakes lightly.

“I probably did, actually,” he replies, confoundingly. “I was asked to do it and I said I’d love to do it, just because I wanted to have a go at it. I wanted to have a go at it in a very populist, contemporary, theatrical way ... one of the problems with Macbeth is that people do tend to come at it with this heavy weight and one of my bugbears with Shakespeare is it carries so much intellectual baggage with it. I thought, ‘I just want to make a really good show'.

"I’ve taken not scissors but a big pair of garden shears to it!,” he laughs... Where we think [Shakespeare] would benefit from our contemporary eyes saying ‘we don’t need that, that’s no use to us’, we’ve just got rid of it."

That would be the complex psychology of the tyrant, then. And, er, that's not relevant to Iraq...?

Not so much a case of teaching Granny to suck eggs, I'd say, but of teaching Granny to suck eggs when you don't even know what eggs are...

Amazon Censorship

On Thursday last week the ranking disappeared from my Amazon page for my story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World. Well, no one can call me paranoid: I just decided that they must have removed the ranking facility altogether (and I was busy so I didn't bother to check anyone else's). Then on Saturday it appeared again and I decided it had just been a glitch.

But what do I discover today but that Amazon have apparently removed the ranking facility from all books with 'adult' content. Seems that in response to a massive protest Amazon are now saying that it was just a glitch but here's the reply which Mark Probst received from Amazon when he inquired:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature. 

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.
Best regards,
Ashlyn D
Member Services 
Amazon.com Advantage (Quoted from Mark Probst’s Blog)

The most outrageous aspect of this is that by 'adult' Amazon seems to mean 'gay and lesbian', so that classic gay and lesbian books without the inclusion of explicit sex have had their ranking removed while books including explicit hetereosexual sex have been left alone. (God knows what happened with mine: did they take another look at the one erotic story in my book and decide that because it was heterosexual sex it was OK after all?)

It is of course a matter of extreme concern that an organization with the power of Amazon could practise such censorship, and I urge you to sign the petition set up to protest.

Here's a post by Anne Brooke on the Vulpes Libris blog, which supplies more details.

Short Stories on the Up

I was going to post about a couple of recent Guardian articles which seem to indicate a resurgence of interest in the short story, but Tania Hershman has beaten me to it with an excellent post on the Short Review blog, which I do recommend you read.

What she doesn't mention there is that this resurgence is reflected by the judges of the Orange New Writing prize, who have commended Tania herself for her wonderful collection, The White Road and Other Stories! Very many congratulations to Tania!

A Different Kettle of Fish?

Sometimes, when there are other, more desperate things going on, one is tempted into thinking that writing about literary things is a little effete. But then the way we use language is at the root of everything, as Orwell taught us, and a letter to The Guardian yesterday from Professor John Veit-Wilson reminds us of an earlier use of the word 'kettling' for containing crowds:

The word was used in 1942 about the practice of the Nazi government in Warsaw when they "shut us [the Jews] up in a manageable area - the 'Kettle' - and combed through our helpless crowd", as John Hersey's fictionalised account of the Ringleblum archives reported in 1950.

Perhaps those who have little sense of history or political philosophy are unaware of the connotations of the term, but for the rest of us this police practice is one more sign that the government of covert forces behind it are putting into place, little by little, whatever would be needed at some future stage for totalitarian control.

Literary Agents

Much ado about literary agents over at the Guardian books blog.

How to Dress for Safety

A PS to yesterday's post:

So, city workers were advised to dress down to avoid being targeted by G20 protesters. Perhaps others should have been advised to dress up to avoid being targeted by riot police.

Kettles, Cages and Clean-ups

I'm sorry to have been silent for a while. I got stuck inside my own head, the way you sometimes do as a writer, and got to that stage where I just needed to get out and away and look at the outside world instead. So I borrowed someone's London flat and went walking and here are some of the things I saw:

A clean-up operation on the River Lee:


Some very nice polite schoolboys:


Environmental protesters on a bus stop in Bishopsgate:


Lib Dem Shadow Climate Change Secretary Simon Hughes and an environmental campaigner:


Some dancing environmental campaigners:


The City of London police in formation across Bishopsgate:


A very nice polite policeman:


The kettle in Threadneedle St not yet steaming:


Every exit barred:


Business as usual on the Millennium Bridge:


Three hunched figures and beds like cages in the Tate Modern:


John Siddique launching his Salt poetry collection, Recital: An Almanac under a beautiful moon at the National Portrait Gallery:


A lovely part of the (I presume) cleaned-up Regent's Canal:


Some more caged creatures:


Some free birds in a cultivated park: