Don’t do it!

James Delingpole

Amen, Susan. Perfect advice.

Chris

Perhaps if publishers published books which were at all worth reading, instead of publishing books written by their mates, a few more people might buy them.

Bunnykins

Maybe there are too many people around who think they can write? Everyone seems to be busy writing their autobiography or half-way through constructing some bizarre novel. Obviously the computer has made the writing process so much easier too. Then there's the proliferation of blogs. Everyone has something to say and many enjoy the opportunity to say it. So perhaps this may also give rise to a measure of literary impudence. And of course, it all takes time away from a trip to the bookshop.

Glen Green

Bravo, Susan.
In answer to your opening question, I have bought 2 books in the last week. One for my eldest and one written by my youngest :) . I published it myself. Yes, I know that only her grandparents will buy it, but she is amazed - and it has encouraged her to write more.

To date she has sold 3 copies and her school has put an order in for another 3.

wrinkled weasel

Let's talk about Jeffrey Archer. Yes, Let's. His book sales amount to over £100 million for one title alone. And he is still doing deals with advances, just advances, that would enable you to retire on your own yacht.

It seems to me that people have something he wants. I confess to have read one or two Archer stories myself, though it was a long time ago and they were short stories. I do not have an Archer book in my library, so my comments are based on material he publishes online. He appears to be a good story teller. He has that happy knack, that Enid Blyton, and J K Rowling, for example, of telling a good story. These people can apparently do this over and over. Recently, somebody published pieces of advice for writers along the lines of ten rules for writing fiction. a lot of it centred on not using adverbs and never using anything other than "said" to carry dialogue. (Susan can do away with "said" quite a lot of the time and it makes for a very compelling and intimate reading experience) Archer does all of these bad things, and JKR's adverbs multiply like swine flu, wrote Weasel, waspishly.

I think it goes to show that nobody can give you a formula, unless that is you want to write penny dreadfuls of the kind some very successful authors do.

It seems to me to hinge on the ability to tell any kind of story. I can't. I cannot even tell a joke since I my mind works impressionistically and not in a linear or chronological way.

I have gone from being an "ever-hopeful" to a pragmatic acceptance that it ain't gonna happen for me.

wrinkled weasel

ps
I have written millions of words and as yet, no coherent narrative has emerged, 'cept that of a plodding hack with a compulsion to write.

SUSAN HILL

1. Of course publishers don`t only publish books by their 'mates'. Just look through all the lists of all the thousands of new books every year and tell me you know categorically those books are written by the mates of the publishers. This is the sort of bitter remark people who have failed to get published often make.
p.s. My own books are all worth reading and they are and always have been published as a result and not because I am anyone's mate. So there.
2. There are NO RULES, none at all. Look at James Joyce if you think there are even rules of punctuation which novelists must adhere to. Well, there is one rule - just get on and WRITE.
3. GLEN GREEN. I am all for encouraging young people so if you send me a message via my own website (susanhill.com) I will buy a copy of her book.

Glen Green

Thank-you, Susan.
It's only a short book of her poems. She is 10 and loves writing poems.
I will send you the link.

Bunnykins

Susan. Is Glen Green your friend, perchance?

hadrian

Well, there are some of us, Susan, who would implode if books were to disappear entirely from the High Street. You love writing them and there are still many of us who love buying them- and eventually reading them too, as they clamour for our attention from the ever mounting piles of print!
On the topic of RULES, you suggest there are none- not even punctuation. Well, I can only speak for myself but if any author considers himself above the plebian rules of grammar, spelling and punctuation I am afraid they get very short shrift from me. As for the smart trend for rendering fiction in the dreaded 'historic present', I simply cannot abide the habit and feel ill reading just a few lines of it, except at a pinch, in a prologue to the main body.
I know a few authors and they all have the same story to tell ( pun excused, I trust!) which is that on average, modest sales they're lucky to be making between £2,000-£5,000 a year in royalties.
My own passion is for old fashioned detective fiction- our reading group is about to try an Ian Serallier case!
The element of luck you single out is often vital too. A late friend, James Anderson, penned some delightfully witty period piece whodunnits and other thrillers back in the 70s but changes in editorial personnel meant he never got his pieces de resistance from the early 70s( Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy; Affair of the Mutilated Mink Coat; Affair of the Thirty Nine Cufflinks)published here until by chance one of the smaller publishing houses very shrewdly rediscovered them and reissued them in splendid livery in the last few years. Such is luck, though sadly Mr Anderson died shortly after their reappearance.

Eliza Graham

Dickens uses (used?) the present historical in sections of quite a number of his novels. Does he make you come over all peculiar, too, Hadrian?

St Bruno

I bought a book last Saturday from a small local bookshop.

I don’t very often frequent the large bookshops, more’s the pity. I’ve bought some from abebooks and other on-line sites but I much prefer to wonder round looking at the piles of paperbacks and thinking should I buy one of those instead of another history tome. I can’t justify paying £20 or so for a hardback novel no matter how well it is written, or £9.99 for a paperback. My wife borrows six or more novels at a time from the local library, more often than not most are cast aside as ‘awful can’t get on with that!’ The remainder is devoured in a week. I’ve not even got to chapter two yet. Being an ex-teacher of history she says she will read what she likes for a change, I’m fed up with reading politics and history.

The curse of the reader is TV and blogs!

Sam Armstrong

'I'm The King Of The Castle' was a set text for me in 1989 O Levels. It was selected because it was good. Good enough to teach to a classroom of boys, who were convinced by every word.

It seems to me that the digital age has transformed society. It has meant that all disciplines which were once the realm of only the talented, have been infiltrated by amateurs who 'have a go' thinking they are the next best thing.

The cult of celebrity and the instant gratification of the web means that people think that talent is a thing of the past.

The industry I am in has similarly been infiltrated. I studied many years only to find that the marketplace has been flooded with amateurs who dilute the atmosphere.

However, I do think that REAL talent is still rare, and still shines through. You just have to look much harder.

John Lea

As Woody Allen famously pointed out, people's taste for highbrow art has been systematically worn down over the years by television. I like Waterstones, and think it's important that we keep our one remaining High St bookshop, yet every time I go in there the shelves are groaning with crap celebrity biographies.

David Short

I very much doubt that the percentage of CH readers who bought a new book is only 1 or 2pc, even tho CH is itself part of the vulgarisation of The Spectator under its new ownership and management. I would think it is more like 20 to 25 pc.

For myself, I have bought far more new books in the recent past because of Amazon - probably four in the last month.

The reason is not just the convenience - you read a review, click, click, click, and it's on its way - it's also that I just don't like bookshops anymore. I don't mourn their demise at all. Cannot even remember being in one in years that wasn't WHSmith.

wrinkled weasel

You don't need bookshops. You need libraries and online booksellers. If you are cautious, you can get anything from the library, for free. If you are sure, and you really want it, you can get it online. I buy a lot of books, and all of them are ordered online and all of them plop onto my coconut matting in the morning.

Browsing in bookshops takes the risk and the sense of serendipity out of the transaction.

Looking back to last year, most of the stuff I got was at least fifty, if not, a hundred years old, the one exception last year being someone not a million miles from this blog. Otherwise it's the library and the smell of children and old people and books that have strange annotations.

hadrian

I think the observation that browsing in a bookshopdetracts from the pleasure of serendipity is ( excuse the crudity!) arse over elbow, or exactly the reverse of many readers' experiences. If bookshops and outlets for books were to disappear from the high street completely I fear not only would the lure of shops be immeasurably reduced but illiteracy'd flourish even more virulently than now. Dusty shelves, piles of tomes tottering precariously on floors, old tables, ledges, etc- such delights are surely the very meat of the avid and hardened bibliophile/maniac. The net may land us a few very elusive items but our real fix is in the browsing. Perfect holiday- rest of the family go off to do their own thing, oneself loiters with intent in recently discovered aladin's cave of printed magic!!

As for the historic present, I am afraid even Dickens when he so indulges could not overcome the revulsion! Mind you, I do admit that even the Good Book itself, in for instances certain stretches of Mark's Gospel and the Acts, 'lapses' into this tense and I manage to live with it.
There must be some deep seated psychological reason why we like our fiction in the past tense, neatly packaged up and complete, perhaps?!

wrinkled weasel

Hadrian, I have a thousand years of literature to catch up on. From Beowulf to Brecht, from Dante to Dickens, I have a fairly good idea of what I am going to get, because they have provenance. Bookshops up and down the country are full of rubbish that nobody wants. Either new rubbish, in touchy feely covers, or old rubbish with mysterious brown stains on the pages. The solution is to search online. You can have the edition you want, in the condition you want, at the price you want. And you can have it sent. Same with music. Browsing is for vegetarians and sentimentalists. I don't live in Oxford or London or Ross on Wye. What am I aupposed to do?

Sarah AB

I thought at first when you said 'new' book you meant 'mint condition' - but 'just written' seems to fit better with the article and the statistic? I buy lots of books but not so very many books which have been published recently.

Andy Carpark

My two most recent purchases, online last week, were 'Phonology of Mongolian' by Jan-Olof Svantesson and 'Down Among the Meths Men' by Geoffrey S Fletcher.

I would not even encourage the reading, let alone the writing, of fiction. Brain-rot, most of it, although I've still got a soft spot for 'The Good Soldier Svejk'.

Roger Goodacre

I buy lots of books, but mostly online having been motivated very often by book reviews. Having told myself I'd cut down because all my walls are now insulated in books from floor to ceiling, I was offered a consultancy assignment in India - where I find that English-language books are around 50% of the UK price. So I've now acquired another hundred or so in the last nine months (mostly India related, but also William Boyd, Alain de Botton, John Updike, Antony Beevor etc).

On the question of the hard work needed to make a success of writing, I was pretty startled to find my local Ottokar's (as it then was) in Putney organising readings by some of the US's great contemporary crime writers - I wondered what could possibly motivate established best-selling authors such as Hunter Davies aka Ed McBain, Lawrence Block and Harlan Coben to take the time to address 30 or 40 people in a London suburb on a cold Monday evening.

The answer seemed to be that they loved what they do (or did, in McBain's case): and they projected their enthusiasm very convincingly - they were extremely communicative and approachable. They were visibly committed to the hard slog of going out and selling themselves direct to the customer - very impressive, but I can imagine it would not be the life for every budding author.

Peter

Yes, I buy books - but I have so many already and do not own a mansion! But no, most people do not buy many books - or read them if they do - and so the trash will sell thousands and always will, just like Peyton Place in the 50s or the Victorian 3 volume novels. Also, one big problem: so much of 'quality' literature has disappeared up its prolepsis... There are no good, welltold stories - NO GOOD YARNS -in pretentious Booker-nominated stuff. I hate them, mostly.

Writing is tough as is any creative vocation (music, art...) - that's why most people cannot live on income from that alone. That's why the rish and privileged are advantaged - their wealth buys the time and lack of stress to write their (often dreadful) novels.

Sadly, all this means the exponential increase in creative writing courses (eg MAs) at unis, which bring in the cash for the unis and promise students the earth, and give broke writers a source of teaching income. But are they worth doing? No. What an utter scam those courses are!

The publishing trade - like the media, the BBc etc - is VERY cliquey and croneyistic and yes, people do get agents and deals via their contacts (sometimes their families. Why on earth are certain radio 4 plays or TV dramas commissioned? So many are SO bad it's laughable. But - There is no other way in other than using contacts.

Also, fashions mean that certain topics for novels and TV/radio dramas and novels are in vogue and others are not - so, northern working class, multiculti stories of womenfolk who have to put up with useless feckless men whilst celebrating diversity and pointing our how Muslims are mostly just grrrrreat are IN; so much else is OUT.

Having said all that, if you can write and are persistent you WILL succeed - if only in a small way. Even though up-themselves publishers and agents, and snooty tutors from pointless creative writing courses look down on it, self-publishing is an option to publish without having to beg and bleed at the feet of publishers and agents - who will of course take notice when your sales look good...

How do I know? Well, I have recently self-published my first novel. And now I have people (agents etc) contacting me to ask if they can represent me, rather than the other way round.

Rhoda Klapp

Roger Goodacre, I think it was Evan Hunter who was Ed McBain. Not Hunter Davies. Just to be pedantic.

I don't take to Waterstone's much, don't know why. I liked Borders. It used to be the only place on Charing X rd/Tottenham Court Rd with a decent loo. Unless there's one in Foyle's which I'm not aware of. Every so often I venture into the big smoke to browse my way up and down that street. Amazon doesn't do it for me, but I am sure there is no real future for retail brick-and-mortar selling things which are identical and identifiable by a reference number or ISBN. They just act as showrooms for online vultures. It can't be helped.

Greg Heywood

Susan, I found your article honest and inspiring. I am a new author who has chosen to self publish and the market is as challenging as you say. I love writing and I get excited when people buy my book. The numbers will never make the 'Archer' league but everytime I receive feedback from readers - good or bad - I sense a wonderful achievement has been born again. By the way, for the sceptics, I haven't met Susan but I would really like to.

Sarah AB

I find that I buy far fewer books in bookshops now - I prefer to buy them online. I've read articles mourning the loss of the small, independent bookshop - but when I do go to such shops (or big ones like Waterstones) they rarely have what I want. I love the reprints issued by Broadview and Persephone Press but I rarely see any of these in Waterstones. At the moment I'm working my way through Sinclair Lewis - the only one I've seen in a bookshop is Babbitt - but if I go online I can get any title I want.

Peter From Maidstone

I buy books at leats monthly, although the really expensive theological works I tend to get for free as review copies.

The last book I bought was actually Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. I was slightly miffed to discover my literate twin daughter had already read it at school. I liked it better than she did. In fact I liked it quite a lot.