The Guardian's Blog, page 174
September 9, 2013
Open thread: the most lied-about books

A new survey reveals the top 10 books people claim to have read but haven't. Be it War and Peace or Infinite Jest, share your uncracked spines here
A recent survey of 2,000 people suggests that the majority of people pretend to have read classic books in order to appear more intelligent, with more than half of those polled displaying unread books on their shelves and 3% slipping a highbrow cover on books they'd rather not be seen reading in public.
The books most likely to be lied about are, naturally, the books most often filmed, talked about and studied in school (some of the respondents must have been lying since GCSE onwards). Are any of them in your pretend-I've-read/never-finished pile, or do you save your literary fibbing for Finnegans Wake and Infinite Jest? Share your guilty secrets below.
The top 10 books people claim to read but haven't
1 1984 by George Orwell (26%)
2 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (19%)
3 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (18%)
4 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (15%)
5 A Passage to India by EM Forster (12%)
6 Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (11%)
7 To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee (10%)
8 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (8%)
9 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (8%)
10 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (5%)
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Banned books – share a picture of your favourite censored titles
To mark the American Library Association's upcoming Banned Books Week, send us a photo of the books on your shelves that have drawn the censors' ire – and tell us why you like them
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Not the Booker prize 2013: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman excels when he concentrates on the world as we know it, but the supernatural can also be a handy tool for exploring the darker side of childhood
The ocean at the end of the lane looks like a pond when Neil Gaiman's seven-year-old narrator first sees it. He's there shortly after he and his father have discovered that their lodger has borrowed their Mini, driven it up that lane and gassed himself with exhaust fumes on the back seat.
The pond is on a farm belonging to Lettie Hempstock, her mother and her granny – all of whom, it turns out, have lived there pretty much since the beginning of time.
Pretty soon, strange things are happening. The narrator wakes from a nightmare with a coin stuck in his throat. When he tells Lettie, she takes him off into a strange land where "some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind" starts talking to them. This strange creature then lodges itself in the narrator's foot in the form of a worm. When he pulls it out, it disappears down a plughole, only to re-emerge as the beautiful Ursula Monkton and take over nannying duties in the poor boy's house. And so, it isn't long before the narrator finds himself on a quest to stop his childminder destroying his world.
Edward Docx provided a very similar plot summary when he reviewed this book for The Observer. He followed by writing: "I find all these flapping tent-monsters and worms in your feet and beautiful governesses slightly gauche."
There are quite a few things to say about that. Plenty of them, in fact, were said in the furious comments below the article. Docx provoked so much ire that it feels risky enough to say that I thought his review was thoughtful and interesting, let alone that I agreed with plenty of it.
Certainly, like Docx, I thought that the best bits of writing In The Ocean at the End of the Lane were those where Gaiman avoided the "mythic" (as Docx calls it) and concentrated on the world as we know it. (Or at least, I suppose, as we think we know it.) Docx highlights the scene where the boy's father pushes him into a cold bath, which was indeed a fine bit of "horrifying hyper-realism". He might also have mentioned the discovery of the lodger's body, or a terribly sweet and sad scene where the friendless narrator has a seventh birthday party consisting of "a table with iced biscuits and a blancmange and cake and 15 empty folding chairs". In fact, food is a frequent and vivid presence throughout the book. It's full of hunger and milk, and honeycombs and fantastic-sounding shepherd's pies – and what could be more redolent of boyhood?
As for the fantasy, I'm perhaps not quite so sceptical as Docx. But I do get nervous when writers start talking about "old tongues", labouring the mythology and messing with space and time. If you can bend the rules of physics enough to create a psychotic tent from another dimension, what's to stop you from bending them again at the last minute to give you just the denouement you want to your novel? Nothing much, as it turns out. The grand climax seemed to me to be pretty arbitrarily decided. The visuals were there (I don't want to say too much for fear of spoiling the ending), but there was no tension.
Okay, I should pause. I am aware that I'm starting to demand that a fantasy book should follow Newtonian physics. I know that's absurd and joyless:
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
I imagine that Keats would be on Gaiman's side. So let me note that I wasn't entirely sceptical about the book's fantastical excesses. They allowed Gaiman to do what may accurately be described as lots of pretty cool shit. Unlike Docx, I loved the idea of the narrator having a hole in his foot that could later be taken out and put inside a bottle and used as a door to another dimension. I also thought the scene where he pulled out the worm was brilliantly icky. The idea of the evil magic nanny – an anti-Mary Poppins – was also a complete winner for me, not least because Gaiman made it as dark as it was delightful. Elsewhere, I liked the jokes about the age of the three women on the farm, and I especially enjoyed the idea of a granny who was around at the time of the big bang. She can tell the age of a coin thanks to "electron decay, mostly. You have to look at things closely to see the electrons. They're the little dinky ones that look like smiles."
Plus, naturally, this supernatural material provides a handy way to talk about reality. Gaiman has interesting ideas percolating away about the loss of childhood, about how helpless you can feel as a child against the authority of adults, in a world that is too big and strange to comprehend. There are also some moving thoughts about what it means to have – and lose – a family.
On that subject, Gaiman has hinted that quite a bit of this book is autobiographical. Reading too much of an author into his work is always a perilous business – and I may well be wide of the mark in what follows. Even so, I couldn't help wondering about Gaiman's well-documented upbringing within the Church of Scientology. When people close to you are influenced by an organisation that believes in Xenu, having a family seduced by a giant flapping grey tent might not seem quite so whacked out.
That's speculation. What is certain is that much of this book feels raw and exposed. Yes, there's a certain amount of goth-lite decoration, but then, the thing we all know about goths is that they feel deeply. It's as an emotional and humane book that The Ocean at the End of the Lane really works.
Next time: Little White Lies and Butterflies by Suzie Tullett.
Neil GaimanSam Jordisontheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






September 6, 2013
Reader reviews roundup

John Williams's Stoner, Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis and Richard House's Booker contender The Kills are among the summer's most hotly debated books
Autumn is back and with it the readers' review roundup. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most reviewed book of the summer has been John Williams's Stoner.
First in was the ever-vigilant stpauli, who wrote: "There's been a lot of hype about John Williams's Stoner, first published in 1965 and recently reissued as a 'lost classic' – so much so that I still keep half-wondering if the whole thing is an elaborate hoax that will be revealed as a clever marketing campaign, and vaguely resisted reading the novel for some time."
But after all those doubts, stpauli was glad she had relented:
John Williams is a writer with the rare and enviable skill of being able to say so much in so few effortless, unostentatious words that the simplicity and subtle clarity of Stoner are almost (somewhat paradoxically) overwhelming.
It's the story, as st pauli puts it, of a junior professor's unremarkable career at an unremarkable college.
Trapped in a marriage devoid of affection and distanced both physically and socially from his ageing, working class parents, Bill Stoner, an archetypal introvert, is stoical, unambitious and inconspicuous, almost painfully shy, "held in no particular esteem" by and with few, if any, close friends.
swithering mused upon why such a minor-key novel, about a man who led a dull life and then died, should have been so loudly and eagerly talked up by so many influential people in its afterlife, concluding the key was that Stoner was a man in love with his job. "Here is the crux of it, of the wordsmith's weepy admiration for this deceptively simple book; most writers identify to some extent with Stoner."
This is why, after we've wiped our eyes at the end of Stoner, we rush outside to sing its praises, especially to those who are not writers. We're not simply saying "read this", we're saying "read this so you can understand".
Elsewhere, AnnSkea caught up with Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis, driven by a curiosity as to how a debut novel could be shortlisted for the Man Booker prize after being rejected by every Indian publisher to whom it was submitted.
She found much to admire:
The opening chapter is one long, seamless, opium-dream of a sentence. "I'm not human", says its narrator. "I'm a pipe of O telling this story ... it's writing it down straight from the pipe's mouth". But the story focuses mostly on Dimple, her past, her present, and the stories of those she lives with and works for. The history of opium in India and China underlies the narrative of the old Chinese man who teaches Dimple to make pipes. There is religious debate, too, but only because Dimple moves between religions, as she moves between genders. And there are stories and conversations; scraps of Indian history, literature, bits of music and poetry, all woven together in a language which is as hypnotic as the opium fumes in which it is soaked.
Narcopolis was certainly vivid and compelling, she continued, but it wasn't an easy book to stomach, as "it immerses the reader in a world which most would prefer not to see, and certainly not to experience".
One of this year's Booker contenders came in for short shrift from tenpenceplease, who wrote a long, damning review of Richard House's long novel The Kills based on the first 100 pages.
It's just as well tenpenceplease didn't perservere, if Beachboy101's conclusion is anything to go by: "First half – excellent, and then a slow downhill for me. Was so looking forward to a climax."
I'd love to hear from anyone who has read this multimedia novel in its enhanced ebook incarnation, and I look forward to more Booker reviews in the weeks to come. In the meantime, if I've mentioned your review, drop me an email at claire.armitstead@guardian.co.uk and I'll dig out something good from the books cupboard.
Jeet ThayilMan Booker prize 2013Claire Armitsteadtheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






It's time for science fiction to face up to discrimination

Why are most SF authors straight, white western men? Science fiction writers can't ignore the diversity that exists on planet Earth
Science fiction loves a good paradox. Here's one for you: how can a genre that dreams up alien cultures and mythic races in such minute detail seemingly ignore the ethnic, religious, gender and sexual diversity right here on the home planet, here in the real world?
In other words, for a school of writing that swims so deeply in the unconventional, why is science fiction and fantasy so darned conventional?
This summer, those conventions are finally being challenged. It started with a row over the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's (SFWA) magazine, Bulletin, which featured a woman in a chainmail bikini on the cover. But it has come to a head over the past week, after the World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon, set people asking why the majority of writers are straight white males from the US and UK, and why they mainly write about straight white males?
The author Jim C Hines sparked a conversation on Twitter after posting a picture of the all-white past, present and future chairs of WorldCon and coining the hashtag #DiversityinSFF. As the South African books blogger Lauren Smith wrote, it's a problem often talked about in SFF circles. "These genres – or at least their English-language versions – lack diversity, with the major problem being that white male authors and straight, white, predominantly male characters are favoured," she said, adding that it's clear "who and what is underrepresented: anyone who is POC [person of colour], female, gay, transgendered; settings and cultures that aren't North American or European; non-western folklore and mythology".
Saladin Ahmed, who was born in Detroit and raised in a working-class, Arab American enclave in Michigan, was one of the non-white males at WorldCon: his novel Throne of the Crescent Moon was shortlisted for best novel at the Hugo awards, given out at the convention. He called for diversity in science fiction to be extended even further – to class. He tweeted: "Class diversity also needs to be part of #DiversityinSFF. I want fewer kings and starship captains, more coach drivers and space waitresses."
One of the most telling tweets about the whole business came from London-born, US-based editor and writer Maurice Broaddus, who said simply: "Outside the #worldcon hotel, brown people everywhere. At #worldcon, it takes two hands to count us."
As Smith says, an often-talked-about topic. But the difference this time is that people seem hungry for change – and change there was, almost immediately. Tor.com is one of the largest publishers of online fiction in the world, allied to but separate from Tor Books, and within hours they had amended their guidelines to read: "We want our stories to represent the full diversity of speculative fiction, and encourage submissions by writers from underrepresented populations. This includes but is not limited to writers of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, class and ability, as well as characters and settings that reflect these experiences."
Maybe science fiction is finally catching up with the shift in the demographic of its audience – if you think it's spotty teenage boys with Buffy posters in their bedrooms, come on, what planet are you on? Or perhaps the freedoms offered by electronic publishing are allowing a wider cross-section of writers to find an audience. Or maybe this revolution is being driven by social media networks, such as Twitter, and a sense of community, especially among younger fans.
A note of warning, however, before the banners are unfurled and the barricades stormed: this shouldn't be about young guns v the old guard – ageism is an enemy of diversity, too, after all. And secondly, while Twitter storms often whip up a head of steam, just as often they blow themselves out. We have the impetus; now we need momentum.
Over to Cheryl Morgan, critic, publisher and Con veteran, who wrote on her blog: "Most of you who have been clamouring for change are not going to help with that fight. You are professional authors or publishers, or you are the sort of person who only wants to buy a ticket to a convention, not help run it, or you have an incredibly busy life doing other things and just can't afford the time for all that volunteer work. That's OK, I understand.
"The thing is, though, that if you don't help, who will?"
Science fictionFantasyFictionDavid Barnetttheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






Andrew Flintoff launches new career – as literary critic

The former England cricketer brands Ian Rankin's new crime thriller the 'dullest book ever' on Twitter
After retiring from his brief stint as a boxer, another career beckons for Andrew Flintoff: that of literary critic.
The former England cricket captain took to Twitter last night to lambast Ian Rankin's novel The Impossible Dead, calling it "the dullest book ever", and branding it #binned. Not content to write off Rankin's literary work, the 35-year-old former cricketer, who helped England to a stunning Ashes victory in 2005, went on to diss the 53-year-old author's mugshot.
From now on, Flintoff added, he would be sticking to comedy.
It didn't take long for Rankin to respond, with the award-winning author joking that Flintoff's criticism should appear on the cover of the next edition.
Adding …
Ian RankinCrime fictionFictionAndrew FlintoffCricketLiz Burytheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






Poster poems: origins

It's a riddle that has inspired poets for millennia: where did we come from? Give us your existential reflections in verse
It's an old riddle, and one that science is finally coming to grips with: which came first, the chicken or the egg? Behind this light-hearted puzzle lie deep concerns about our origins that have fuelled a great deal of science and mythology, as well as inspiring a lot of very fine poetry.
Most pre-scientific cultures used poetry to express ideas about the creation of the earth, and many of them are surprisingly similar. From the chants of the Maori Io tradition to Hesiod's Theogony, poets have propounded theories and told stories of the creation of something from nothing, stories that still inform the work of modern poets like Billy Marshall-Stoneking, who draws on Aboriginal Australian legends for his poem Tjukurrpa (Creation Times).
In the 19th century, advances in geology began to make more fact-based scientific explanations of the genesis of the earth more achievable, and a key landmark was the 1830-31 publication of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation. Lyell's driving principle was that "the present is the key to the past", and this clearly struck a chord with Kenneth Rexroth, who links geology, the formation of the earth, and present human love in his poem Lyell's Hypothesis Again.
If anything, Hugh MacDiarmid's magisterial On A Raised Beach makes this link even more explicit right from the opening lines 'All is lithogenesis – or lochia,/ Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree'. The birth of stones and childbirth are balanced one against the other as the source of 'all', and the forbidden tree whose fossil fruit they are recalls one of the most famous genesis tales of all.
Most people will know the story of Eve from the outside, as it were, but in Paradise Lost Milton has her describe her creation from her perspective, starting with her awakening to wonder 'where/ And what I was, whence thither brought, and how.' It's a typically daring conceit, giving a new twist to a familiar narrative.
As a result of the work of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, a new way of understanding the origin and development of species, including the human species, has taken shape. The story of the genome is one of the most fascinating ever told and has inevitably appealed to poets interested in exploring origins.
In his Mapping the Genome, Michael Symmons Roberts treats it as a classic road adventure, the genome becomes a kind of primal American landscape to be explored at speed. In her poem Darwin, Lorine Niedecker ponders the impact of these new discoveries on how we see ourselves in their light, a combination of a thirst for new understanding and regret for old certainties lost.
Of course, while the science of genetics may be relatively new, an interest in heredity is as old as kingship and possibly older, and it shows no particular sign of going away, if the viewing public's appetite for programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? is any indication. This is origin-hunting at its most personal, and despite the fact that we did an ancestors Poster poems already, I just wanted to take this opportunity to encourage everyone to read John Montague's Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People, a poem that combines rock, myth and genes in a powerful statement of how our origins shape us, like it or not.
And so this month's challenge is to ponder that old chicken-and-egg puzzle. Where have we come from? What does the answer to that question tell us about where we are and where we might be going? Myth, religion, science: the choice is yours, get digging into your roots now.
PoetryCreative writingEvolutionGeneticsReligionGeologyAnthropologyBilly Millstheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






September 5, 2013
Hidden pictures take book art to the edge

Can electronic editions ever match the delights of fore-edge artwork?
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch video
I've discovered a whole new erogenous zone today – an erogenous zone for books, obviously. An archivist at the University of Iowa, Colleen Theisen, has found a series of images hidden on the edges of her books. They're revealed when you riffle your fingers over the pages – the epitome of a book-tease.
The images Theisen discovered date from 1837, when an author called Robert Mudie concealed images in his series of books about the seasons. My favourite is autumn, with its own tiny narrative of a lakeside walk. But it turns out people have been hiding images – such as this one of Windsor Castle in diarist John Evelyn's biography of Margaret Godolphin – since at least 1649.
Which made me wonder what future readers will make of early 21st-century attempts to bust the boundaries of the printed book. That is, if their hyper-turbo-powered iThinks will still be able to read them ...
ArtLiz Burytheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






September's Reading group: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

This month will be spent in the company of a modern masterpiece about the final day on Earth of a disgraced diplomat
A slight change this month in the Reading group. Instead of following our usual formula – taking nominations and pulling them from a hat – I thought it might be interesting to look at the book that has been nominated most often – and most fervently – over the past two years, but somehow always slipped through when I'm pulling out the names: Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano.
I haven't read the book yet, so can't say much at this stage. Except that this novel's reputation as a modernist masterpiece precedes it. I'm expecting something very special, something with more than enough intrigue and ambition to keep us going for the next 30 days. And also something that will pose an agreeably stiff challenge. Even the author recommended reading the book more than once for it to explode properly in the mind...
But help is at hand. Once you get stuck in, there's this wonderful website containing all the annotations on the book you could ever wish for. And more.
Before then, have a read of these two fine introductions on the Guardian site from the mighty Chris Power and from Daniel Myers (aka Bysshe22) in the recent summer voyages series. I'd also recommend this excellent Canadian documentary on the author and his work. It starts with the author's death, a suspected suicide, in a Sussex boarding house, after taking barbiturates and drinking – as was his habit – too much. He wrote his own epitaph:
Malcolm Lowry,
Late of the Bowery,
His prose was flowery,
And Often Glowery,
He lived, nightly, and drank daily,
And died playing the ukulele.
But of course, the novel we're about to read is also an epitaph. Many say that it was because he poured so much into it that he died so young and so broken. We're about to find out what they mean.
I hope you'll join me as I read through. And before we hit the first chapter any other tips, reading suggestions, approaches and ideas will be gratefully received, as always.
Also, by way of encouragement, we have 10 copies to give away to the first 10 people to post "I want a copy please", alongside a nice comment relevant to the book. And if you're lucky enough to get in early, don't forget to email Ginny.Hooker@guardian.co.uk as we can't track you down ourselves. Be nice to her too.
Malcolm LowrySam Jordisontheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






The big short – why Amazon's Kindle Singles are the future

All hail the 'bookeen', a new format that's perfect for short stories, novellas and essays
New formats in literature are rare, and disruptive. They usually accompany a change in technology. Amazon was the first big player to realise that digitisation would allow for a new literary format. In January 2011, it quietly launched a substore on its US website to sell something it called a Kindle Single: Compelling Ideas Expressed At Their Natural Length, as a press release headline blandly put it.
"Typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words, Kindle Singles are editorially curated and showcase writing from both new and established voices – from bestselling novelists and journalists to previously unpublished writers."
Those lines may not sound like a call to revolution. But they are. Writers can seldom express ideas "at their natural length", because in the world of traditional print only a few lengths are commercially viable. Write too long, and you'll be told to cut it (as Stephen King was when The Stand came in too long to be bound in paperback). Worse, write too short, and you won't get published at all. Your perfect story is 50 pages long – or 70, or 100? Good luck getting that printed anywhere.
Hence the revolution. Because the new length exploits this hole in traditional publishing.
The hole has existed for 500 years; it's baked into the print model. The high fixed overheads of book production – printing, binding, warehousing and distributing a labour-intensive physical object – have tended to make books of fewer than 100 pages too expensive for the customer. (And print magazines and newspapers can take works of only 10, maybe 15 pages, max.)
But although commercial print publishers have never liked novellas or novelettes, authors always have. Indeed, many writers have done their best work at that length, despite the difficulty of finding publication (Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener; Kafka's The Metamorphosis). However brilliantly written, though, they have often been disrespectfully published, awkwardly bundled up with other stories to pad out a commercially viable print book.
Worse, many writers have taken a strong 70-page idea and stretched it into a weak 300-page book because that was what the industry demanded.
I know an excellent young author who feels she ruined her second novel because her contract demanded 100,000 words; the story should have been told at half that length. And I know several short-fiction writers who have wasted painful years writing bad novels instead of superb short stories and novellas.
Digital pricing can vary smoothly with length, as physical print pricing cannot. The hole in the heart of publishing has been fixed. And the Single is now being embraced.
In the US, writers such as Chuck –Fight Club – Palahniuk, Susan Orlean, Amy Tan, George Saunders and Ann Patchett are writing Kindle Singles. Niall Ferguson had a big transatlantic hit in April with his short biography of Margaret Thatcher, Always Right. The Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson has released a Kindle Single. And Margaret Atwood (the only winner of both the Man Booker and the Arthur C Clarke award) is publishing Positron, a long work of erotic science fiction, Single by Single.
Given that Kindle Single is a trademark, it would be useful to have an open-source word for the format. I suggest adding the affectionate Irish diminutive suffix -een to the sturdy Anglo-Saxon "book".
Writers have been publishing bookeens for years, of course, but they were seen as oddities, fragments lost among the big books. Without a name, they couldn't fully exist. But Amazon, in giving the format a formal identity, has put the bookeen on a solid commercial footing. Kindle Singles have sold "only" 4m or 5m copies thus far, but they are coming from a base of zero. Crucially, the Kindle Singles programme is not a closed shop: Amazon both publishes its own signings and distributes curated works by other publishers under the Kindle Singles brand. Many of the most successful Singles come from small, nimble new digital publishers such as Byliner, Atavist, DailyLit and TED Books. It was DailyLit, run by the literary novelists Yael Goldstein Love and Jennifer 8 Lee, who commissioned my own bookeen. I wrote it; they showed it to Amazon; it was taken on.
Any writer can approach Amazon directly, as Stephen King did in January with Guns, a nonfiction essay too long, at 8,000 words, for most newspapers or magazines. If King had given Guns to his usual publisher, it might have come out in a hardback collection of essays in about eight years' time. He offered it to Kindle Singles on a Friday; they read it over the weekend, and it was published within the week. It has 1,654 reviews on Amazon.
And King may have made significantly more money per word from his Kindle Single than he makes from his mainstream published novels. Amazon pays authors who go directly to it 70% of revenue on Singles. It pays promptly every month, and allows you to retain the rights to your work.
A traditional print publisher will pay you, at best, 15% of retail on hardback books and 8% on paperbacks. For Kindle Singles? At best, a disgraceful 25% of the 70% Amazon gives. (The new digital startups often split that 70% 50/50 with authors.) A traditional publisher pays those royalties only twice a year, six months in arrears, and will potentially own the rights until you've been dead for 70 years.
The attractions for authors are powerful: more freedom and more money. But even a small swing towards Singles could prove damaging to Waterstones, Barnes & Noble and the independent bookshops. Soon they will have the albums of the industry – the novels, the big non-fiction books – but they won't have the hit singles; they will have the books but not the bookeens. And a bookshop that can't stock the new one by Stephen King, Amy Tan, Margaret Atwood … Ouch.
Well, that's just the way it is: technology changes art, and then art changes retail. And now, if you'll excuse me, I must go back to work on my next piece of fiction. I reckon it'll be about 20,000 words long.
PublishingKindleE-readersHoward JacobsonMargaret AtwoodStephen KingChuck PalahniukNiall FergusonGeorge SaundersAmazon.comInternetE-commerceJulian Goughtheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds






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