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Poster Poems: October

This month has long provided a source of literary inspiration, from shorter days and fallen leaves, to thoughts of liberty during times of war. Tell us what impressions it makes on you

And so we come to the 10th month, October, whose name means "eighth", of course; those Romans were out to confuse us all. In the northern hemisphere, the month of October is high autumn, which means that in the southern hemisphere it's high spring. Confused yet? I am.

In The Shepheardes Calender: October, Spenser, through the character of the pastoral piper Cuddie, sings a theme that may be near to many of our hearts, the neglect of poetry and the poverty of poets, who "little good hath got, and much lesse gayne" on account of their art. Piers, his audience of one, tries to console him with the thoughts of the praise he will receive for his singing, but Cuddie points out that you can't eat praise. In the coda, the poet is promised a gift of a kid from one of Piers's goats, which is, I suppose, a happy ending.

One poet who did manage to make a living of sorts from his pen and who certainly found recognition, and even a degree of fame, was Dylan Thomas. His 30th birthday, on 27 October 1944, was the occasion of his very fine Poem in October. It's perhaps the best of all poems celebrating this month, full of the changing weather, fruitful bounty and general sense of plenty of autumn in full flow.

Something of the same richness can be found in Lyn Hejinian's Come October, it's the lake not the border, an extract from the long poem The Fatalist. Hejinian's autumn is less lyrical, more American, perhaps, than Thomas's version, but underneath the surface many of the concerns being voiced are remarkably similar.

Ted Kooser's A Letter in October depicts another American autumn, this time a distinctly New England one. Kooser marks one of the defining characteristics of the month for those of us who live at more northerly latitudes, the sudden onset of very short days and increasingly late sunrises. As this is the norm for us, we shouldn't be taken by surprise, and yet I, for one, am every year. Kooser manages to capture this sense of slow, predictable suddenness extremely neatly.

If the sunrise grows later in October, the sunset grows correspondingly earlier, and it was in an early Galway October twilight that WB Yeats experienced a different kind of sudden shock when "nine-and-fifty swans" took flight from the lake at Coole Park in the poet's memory and settled in an enduring corner of the history of Irish literature, in the shade of the golden autumn leaves.

Although all the poems so far this month have had rural settings, October has been known to visit the city on occasions. In Anne Stevenson's To My Daughter in a Red Coat it arrives in a public park, and although the poem doesn't actually mention it, you can almost hear the satisfying dry crunch of leaves underfoot as the child runs and skips through them, snug in her warm red cocoon.

Perhaps the best urban October poem of all is TS Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, with its dark evening, yellow fog and overall air of the fall of the year and of man in equal measure. Eliot only mentions the month once, but that one naming is enough to place the poem irrevocably in the time of the year most suited to its tone of disjointed unbelonging. Prufrock is, perhaps, the October poem par excellence.

Of course, October isn't all short days, yellow trees and fog; important events can occur then, too. In October 1803, Britain and France were newly at war, and William Wordsworth, erstwhile admirer of the French Revolution, was moved to write a number of sonnets dedicated to the subject of British liberty that had that month and year in their titles. In a sense these poems mark the transition from the young radical poet of the Lyrical Ballads to the more conservative establishment figure that he was to become.

And so this month I invite you all to post your poems of October. You might sit in the window and watch the evenings drawing in. Or maybe you'd prefer to wrap up, go out, crunch some fallen leaves and breathe in the fog. Wherever you draw your inspiration from, just be sure to come back and share the results here.

PoetryDylan ThomasWB YeatsTS EliotWilliam WordsworthBilly Mills
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Open thread: The best Halloween books

Let us know which books light your candle for the scariest night of the year

As mornings take on the first breath of winter chill and evenings draw in our thoughts turn to things which go bump in the night. What's that coming around the corner? It's Halloween. As the sun sets and the trick or treaters gain a foot in height and a whole lot of attitude, you'll soon be wishing you were curled up in a back room with a favourite book.

So tell us, what are the best books to greet the night's ghostly visitors? What are the tomes to turn to if you're looking for something really scary? For Darren McManus choosing American Psycho or The Shining to scare the bejeesus out of you is a little too easy, but what about you? Is it as simple as looking for just the right Stephen King? What books will you be recommending to your nearest and dearest this autumn? And where will you be stepping out to find them?

Best booksBest bookshops
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World's worst book covers: would these make their authors cry?

As Henry James gains guns and Jack London meets RoboCop, it's not only science fiction novels that are getting the covers they never deserved

I have spoken before of my love for the website Good Show Sir, which collects the best of the worst science fiction covers out there: check out The Wild Alien Tamer, which comes with the wonderful caption: "As if the creature in the star-spangled thong isn't enough, I find my eyes drawn to the creature at the rear: "'What are you gonna do? I'm a giant bat, bitches!'"

But this morning, Bookslut has, joyfully, shown me that it isn't only science fiction novels that get covers they truly don't deserve. It pointed me towards the Caustic Cover Critic blog and its excellent takedown of Tutis, aka "the world's most incompetent 'publisher' of classics". Honestly, these covers are beyond belief, from the literal take on The Turn of the Screw to this Mills & Boonesque Balzac.

"Marvel at Tutis's intense campaign to humiliate Henry James," writes Caustic Cover Critic JRS Morrison, pointing to, among others, an incomprehensible version of Daisy Miller carrying a gun – "Henry James meets Red Dawn, coming soon from those tedious shitheads who brought you Pride & Prejudice & Zombies & Jane Eyre & Erotica & Vampires & Haemorrhoids". Delving deeper, we are brought Jack London through the lense of RoboCop, and an edition of Kim that defies comprehension. "At heart," says Morrison, "it's just a simple story about multicoloured zombies with Walkmen." Indeed.

These covers couldn't possibly be crazier – Treasure Island on bikes? – and I am strangely besotted with them. Tutis are, apparently, a digital print-on-demand press – and although they don't seem to be around any more (their site here has vanished), their books are all over the place. A search reveals many, many more excitingly awful jackets. I've never collected anything before, but I'm tempted to begin now. As Morrison puts it: "I literally cannot fathom the thought processes behind these covers. They're a perfect mix of ineptitude, inappropriateness, possible copyright violation, and sheer demented anti-genius." Could anything top this version of Cranford?

Art and designFictionScience fictionAlison Flood
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Up then, brave women!

A new book on Manchester's army of radical women is not just to read, its writer Michael Herbert tells Bernadette Hyland. It's a manual for action by the women of today

Michael Herbert, author of Up Then, Brave Women, believes that he has written not just a radical history of women who changed society but a manual for their successors. Here's how he puts it:

The book is a reflection of my own political beliefs. Changes in society can only be made by people themselves. These women campaigned and fought for equality and human rights and their stories can help women and men today to do the same - to make change happen.

Up Then, Brave Women is a retelling of the stories of radical women in Manchester, going back over two hundred years. They include feminists, socialists and trade unionists who shook the establishment in their campaigns for civil rights. It is not just the story of 50 years of high-profile struggling for the vote, but has many lesser known accounts of women at Peterloo and in the Chartist movement.

Herbert is not a northerner by birth, but has sought inspiration from local historians and the husband-and-wife founders of the Working Class Movement Library , Ruth and Eddie Frow. He says:

I came to Manchester in the 1970s to go to university and never quite left. I was active in the politics of my era, including Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League. Nowadays I am a trustee of the Library - Ruth and Eddie were inspirational and I am literally following in their footsteps, as I do radical history walks in Manchester, just as they did, and have written several books on working class history, like them again.

His other books include a biography of Manchester black boxer and Communist Len Johnson, Never Counted Out and a history of the Irish in Manchester, The Wearing of the Green. He runs Red Flag Walks, a radical history walking business. He does not seem himself as a guide but takes a political, activism-encouraging line:

My walks are steered from a socialist history perspective. I seek to educate people, not in an academic way but to encourage them to read history and also to get involved in campaigns generally. You could say it's a political education that I am offering the people who come on my walks.

Herbert has been doing history walks for many years and his inspiration for the book came from the people who attended his walks.

People were always asking me what books they ought to read about radical history - particularly the history of working class women who were active in all sorts of campaigns from Peterloo to the Suffragettes and beyond. Apart from the definitive One Hand Tied Behind Us by Jill Liddington and Jill Norris there is little else that one can recommend. That is why I decided to write this book.

Up then, Brave Women covers the period 1819 -1918 in nine chapters using a lot of new sources. Herbert says:

I concentrated on the larger, more significant movements and wanted to bring these campaigns to life by using lots of quotations from the women themselves. I also wanted to get away from too much focus on the Pankhursts.

There were a vast amount of other women involved in the campaign for the vote and in particular the campaign by working class women has often been ignored. I wanted to rectify this.

The book has been published by the North West Labour History Society, with the help of trade union sponsorship. Herbert sees this as an important part of the process:

There is a radical tradition of societies publishing their own pamphlets and books which goes back to the unstamped press of the early 19th century. The Frows continued this and I wanted to carry on this tradition. Although I have used all modern techniques in its design and its illustrations.

He hopes that the book will convey to people a sense of the main personalities and movements which have fashioned the history of Manchester, and then stir them to join the procession:

I hope people will enjoy reading it, will learn from its history and reflect on it in their own lives.

Up then, Brave Women will be launched during the Manchester Weekender on Saturday 13 October at 6pm at the Black Lion Pub in Salford. It will be in local bookshops or available from the North West Labour History Society.

Bernadette Hyland is a freelance writer and blogger. She is active in her trade union, Unite and volunteers at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford.

SalfordManchesterWomenWomen in politics
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What are you reading today?

Your weekly space to tell us the topics and books we should be talking about on the site, and a preview of the titles we'll be reviewing this week

Greetings tipsters, linkers and clarifiers. Since Hannah is away this week I am stepping out of my regular role presenting the weekly books podcast to host this column. And what should my eye alight upon but a response to our request on that very podcast for feedback from listeners, which delights me quite a lot, because part of my mission in life is to encourage connections between the different parts of the books community.

I'm indebted to a fellow podcaster, peacable, for a reminder that "the Guardian may be a national paper, but the podcast is international".

"I think you forget this," writes peacable:

One of your talking heads said dismissively recently, 'Well, who hasn't read Bring Up the Bodies?'. Actually, millions haven't, it's only one English novel: don't be so parochial. I'd like to hear more about other countries' literatures: the series you did last year was excellent, extend it!

To which I can only reply that I am both touched and touché.

Elsewhere in the column, a literary love-in was developing. AggieH writes:

FrustratedArtist: don't take this the wrong way, but I think I love you. I have just read Samarkand, solely because of your inspiring recommendation to Dylanwolf on a previous TLS. It is a very great, very fascinating, very thoughtful book. It is, as you said, a 'superb evocation of a remote time and place'.

Dylanwolf numbered Samarkand among the 10 brilliant books in translation he has read this year. He's off now to read Samurai, by Endo, on the recommendation of lukethedrifter, and Michel Tournier's La Goutte D'Or as tipped by mg71

But not all verdicts are unanimous, as Getoverit notes:

I'm loving the 'A Fraction of the Whole' chat by the way. I read Dylanwolf's review and thought, oh that sounds awful. Then I read Aggie's reply and thought, nope I with Aggie. And then......Dylanwolf replies.....ahhhh!

With contributors like these, who needs critics - a rhetorical question posed and deposed by Robert McCrum earlier in the week, in response to a provocation from this year's Booker chair Peter Stothard.

On which cheerful note, I will love and leave you with a selection of the books we are reviewing this week:

Non-fiction:

Mick Jagger: Satan from Suburbia by Philip Norman
The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hannah Rosin
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe
Mr Foote's Other Leg by Ian Kelly
The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us by David Thomson
Prince: A Celebration by Matt Thorne

Fiction:

Grimm Tales: For Old and Young by Philip Pullman
The Elephant Keeper's Children by Peter Hoeg
Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt
Where Have You Been by Joseph O'Connor
England's Lane by Joseph Connolly

Claire ArmitsteadGuardian readers
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Poetry prescriptions: verse to cure all ills

On National Poetry Day, poetry evangelist William Sieghart will be coming online to solve your predicaments with a well-chosen verse. Got a problem? Tell us about it below, and come back on Thursday to take your poetry medicine

This Thursday is National Poetry Day and, to celebrate, Forward Prize founder William Sieghart will be on hand between 1pm and 2pm to prescribe a poem for any problem that is presented to him.

The idea of poetry on prescription was born at the Port Eliot festival in July, where Sieghart was presenting a new anthology, Winning Words: Inspiring Poems for Everyday Life, which aims to take poetry out of the bookcase and place it firmly at the centre of everyday life.

Instead of the routine hour-long event, he found people queuing round the block asking him for prescriptions to cure everything from a blue day to a broken heart. So successful did his cures prove that we've persuaded him to reprise the event for you

So now's your chance to check into the poetry pharmacy. Register your problems in advance to be sure of getting the perfect prescription.

National Poetry DayPoetryForward prize for poetry
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More on Yorkshire's most prolific writer, ever

Calderdale novelist Jill Robinson salutes a man whose output will be very hard to beat - though J.S.Fletcher wrote so fast that he sometimes lost the plot

Readers of the Guardian Northerner will have seen our recent piece on North Country Theatre's production of The Lighthouse on Shivering Sands, adapted from a novel of 1911 by Halifax-born and Wakefield-educated J.S.Fletcher.

While many other Yorkshire writers have enjoyed continuing popularity - think of Charlotte Bronte and her sisters or JB Priestley - Fletcher has rather faded from public consciousness. Indeed, on being asked to write this piece, this outpost of the Northerner believed that she had never previously heard of him, until she chanced on a battered copy of his Nooks and Corners of Yorkshire while dusting the bookshelves, itself a rare event...

In the pages relating to my own home of the Calder Valley, Fletcher writes:

In places like Ripponden, Mytholmroyd and Barkisland, any discerning traveller will see things which he will not find elsewhere in England

although annoyingly, he does not state what these things might be, going straight on to discuss the Halifax Gibbet, and not returning to the villages. He does, however, give a helpful list of inns and hotels nearby; the two listed for Halifax, the White Swan and the Old Cock, are still there.

Fletcher was an immensely fast and prolific writer, which may be why he forgot to go back to the Calderdale curiosities. He wrote 237 books, more than any other Yorkshire person ever, which leaves me, as a fellow writer, exhausted simply thinking about it. His oeuvre spanned fiction, history, dialect and poetry.

Born in 1863, the son of a clergyman who died when his son was only eight months old, Joseph Smith Fletcher went on to become one of the leading exponents of crime-writing's 'Golden Age'. Among his creations was the clerical detective Rev. Francis Leggatt, vicar of Meddersley, a place described in shorthand familiar today as being located 'away in the North.' Another creation was private investigator Ronald Camberwell, who features in several of Fletcher's books.

Loyally, Calderdale libraries still hold 131 of his titles, among them such enticing works as Cobweb Castle and Dead Men's Money, each one taking only a few weeks to polish off. Thanks in part to President Woodrow Wilson's admiration for his work, especially his best-known title Murder in the Middle Temple, Fletcher became better known in the United States than in Britain.

Originally a student of law, Fletcher switched to journalism for its greater excitement and worked on the Leeds Mercury and the Yorkshire Post. His wholly inappropriate byline for an urban child who continued to live and work in cities was 'Son of the Soil'. His plots often revolve around clever swindles, rather than murder, and he is quoted as saying:

I believe I got my interest in criminology right from the fact that a famous case of fraud was heard at the Quarter Sessions at a town where I was at school - its circumstances were unusual and mysterious and the truth hard to get at; oddly enough, I have never yet used this as the basis of a story.
Then, when I left school, I meant to be a barrister and I read criminal law and attended a great many queer trials for some time. But turning to journalism instead, I knew of a great many queer cases on famous murder trials. Also, I learnt a good deal about criminology in conversations with the late HB Irving the famous actor, who was an expert.

Another of his singular traits was creating a setting for his financial whodunnits which comprised a bank with bedrooms attached which helped the plots to rattle entertainingly along. Such arrangements were not uncommon in northern cities, where bankers and accountants liked to stay close to their work during times of crisis or major audit or not infrequently didn't just stay late at the office, but slept there.

Fletcher married the Irish writer, Rosamond Grant Langbridge, with whom he had a son. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and died in 1935. It is time for a revival of interest in his work and perhaps North Country Theatre's choice of play will get that under way.

Michael Nunn, who reviews plays at Lancaster for the Northerner from time to time, adds:

I was delighted to see your kind mention of my relative by marriage Joseph Smith Fletcher. His son, Rev Valentine Fletcher, married my late father's cousin, Phyllis Muriel (Mary) Hinckley, the daughter of a Birmingham schoolmaster, Arthur Hinckley MC MSc. The Hinckleys, including my grandmother Emily Jane, were originally from Altofts and Normanton, West Riding.

Mary Fletcher went to Oxford in the 1920s and worked as a teacher and examiner. Valentine himself was at Oriel, Oxford, and served as an Anglican priest in Elland, Bradford, Duxford in Cambridgeshire, Dundee Cathedral and Littlemore in Oxfordshire. He published a monograph, Newman's Oxford, in the 1970s.

I am of course delighted (not least as a mere journalist but as one who's just had a newly-devised evening of rehearsed readings performed in Lancaster's Grand Theatre) that JSF's work is being reappraised and indeed performed. He certainly was a leading figure in early C20 detective fiction, owing not a little to Dickens and Conan Doyle. He also published guidebooks to his beloved North, including historical city guides to Leeds and Sheffield. Since a recent downsizing move I've given my Fletcher collection to our local Oxfam Bookshop, but I'm sure there are still plenty of his works available if one looks in the right places.

CrimeYorkshireCharlotte BrontëEmily BrontëAnne BrontëJB PriestleyJill Robinson
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Poem of the week: Among His Books by Edith Nesbit

The author of The Railway Children also did a nice line in Thomas Hardy-esque poetry – before Hardy was publishing his. Here's a wry, novelistic tale of a jilted bachelor

Few novelist-poets are as little known for their poetry as Edith Nesbit. An outstanding children's writer, whom most of us probably first met as E Nesbit, author of the much-dramatised The Railway Children, she produced 21 collections of poetry and numerous adult novels and story collections too. She was a political radical, a founder member of the Fabian Society, and collaborated on various works with her first husband, Hubert Bland, under the nom de plume Fabian Bland. Her poems continue to turn up in anthologies, and they are well worth searching out.

This week's choice, Among his Books, was first published in Leaves of Life in 1888. If it reminds you of Thomas Hardy, note that Hardy published no poetry before 1897. That timeline gives us some idea of Nesbit's originality in, for example, her blending of formal verse structure with informal speech.

Her technique is novelistic in several ways. The poem has a vividly imagined setting, and a narrative voice that suggests complex characterisation. The setting is immediately established. First, there's the dim room with its "dusty blight" redolent of desolation and even dereliction. Then we see the books, lots of them. In the first three verses, the point of view seems to be that of an anonymous observer.

Stanza four brings the first intimation that the speaker could be the owner of the books. The consciously distancing pronoun, "one" in "one's weary nerves" and the wry little bit of revealing wordplay of "It serves – deserves" – suggest the connection. Two stanzas later, the first-person narrator appears and confirms that, yes, it's our bibliophile speaking.

The depiction of the cluttered room has a touch of wry comedy. The repetition of "books" builds up a slightly overwhelming impression of sheer quantity, with exclamation-marks indicating surprise or mock-alarm. It's as if the speaker has suddenly seen his room, his obsession, through another's eyes (the reader's) and is responding to our criticism. The collecting has got out of hand. He admits it – but there's a justification.

Stanza seven is the revelatory one, identifying the speaker's gender: "For children and for wife / They serve me too." The conceit – that books behave in a humanly ideal way, and that, unlike some beautiful people, the beautiful volumes, the Elzevirs and Aldines, never turn out to be trashy "railway novels" – signals the theme of personal betrayal. I wonder if Nesbit, as she contemplated the notion of books turning into other books, and perhaps into people, had a fleeting sense of the magic she might have wrought in a different fictional context.

The narrator sustains our interest, although the humour of the opening stanzas rather evaporates. The details now have a strategic poignancy: two names on the flyleaf of the Book of Common Prayer and a forget-me-not pressed in the pages of the Marriage Service. The syntax remains informal: "Forget me not – / The Marriage Service …" The narrative style is almost stream-of-consciousness. Punctuation favours the dash, the casual grammar of someone muttering to himself, or thinking aloud.

So the outlines of the backstory emerge. The couple, it seems, did not get as far as marriage. Theirs was a broken engagement, at a time when "being jilted" was a seriously painful business, usually suffered by the woman in question. The re-gendering of the old story is interesting. It's even more interesting that the speaker has confessed that his favourite volume is the Book of Common Prayer – for sentimental reasons. We might now wonder how committed a bibliophile he really is.

The sardonic comments lift the poem from nostalgic overdrive. "Well, my dear, you know / Who first forgot" is the first address to the woman, and it's a sharp one. The ending is sharper still. The forget-me-not embodies nothing but an illusion, "the dear memory of what, you know, / You never were". It's as if the narrator had opened the book of his own fantasy. Finally, he acknowledges that the story was made up. The aside, "you know", isn't a meaningless embellishment: it implies that the woman collaborated in the pretence. She knew she wasn't the person he imagined.

In stanza 12, the speaker asserts that a great swathe of trust and innocence has been jettisoned. He has lost belief "in God, in love, in you – / In everything." Perhaps, once again, he's slightly over-relishing his plight? The tone in these later stanzas seems to fluctuate. At times it's tender and regretful. But the exaggeration suggests a fissure underlies the emotional display. He is still half fantasising. An unreliable narrator? Perhaps, just a little.

Nesbit's five-beat/two-beat stanza-pattern is ideal for the voice: the dimeter, particularly when it's the last line, give point to those curt or wry moments of emphasis and reversal. Only in the first stanza is the pattern different. Here, the third line has four beats ("A room with not enough of light …"). Perhaps the author hadn't fully worked out her metrical pattern at this stage? Maybe, on looking back, she felt the deviation justified by the fact that this stanza serves as a kind of introductory paragraph.

While the poem registers the weight of memory (and of those books) it retains a certain rhythmic and tonal jauntiness. The little story of a lover's broken romance and not-quite-tragic disillusionment is probably only a chapter near the beginning of his adult life. The rose by the church porch is still producing its yellow flower. Meanwhile, I suspect, he quite enjoys living in that dusty, book-laden tip of a bachelor pad, with no wife to insist on having her mantelpiece back.

Among His Books

A silent room – grey with a dusty blight
Of loneliness;
A room with not enough of light
Its form to dress.

Books enough though! The groaning sofa bears
A goodly store –
Books on the window-seat, and on the chairs,
And on the floor.

Books of all sorts of soul, all sorts of age,
All sorts of face –
Black-letter, vellum, and the flimsy page
Of commonplace.

All bindings, from the cloth whose hue distracts
One's weary nerves,
To yellow parchment, binding rare old tracts
It serves – deserves.

Books on the shelves, and in the cupboard books,
Worthless and rare –
Books on the mantelpiece – wheree'er one looks
Books everywhere!

Books! Books! The only things in life I find
Not wholly vain.
Books in my hands – books in my heart enshrined –
Books in my brain.

My friends are they: for children and for wife
They serve me too;
For these alone, of all dear things in life,
Have I found true.

They do not flatter, change, deny, deceive –
Ah no – not they!
The same editions which one night you leave
You find next day.

You don't find railway novels where you left
Your Elsevirs!
Your Aldines don't betray you – leave bereft
Your lonely years!

And yet this common Book of Common Prayer
My heart prefers,
Because the names upon the fly-leaf there
Are mine and hers.

It's a dead flower that makes it open so –
Forget-me-not –
The Marriage Service…well, my dear, you know
Who first forgot.

Those were the days when in the choir we two
Sat – used to sing –
When I believed in God, in love, in you –
In everything.

Through quiet lanes to church we used to come,
Happy and good,
Clasp hands through sermon, and go slowly home
Down through the wood.

Kisses? A certain yellow rose no doubt
That porch still shows;
Whenever I hear kisses talked about,
I smell that rose!

No – I don't blame you – since you only proved
My choice unwise,
And taught me books should trusted be and loved,
Not lips and eyes!

And so I keep your book – your flower – to show
How much I care
For the dear memory of what, you know,
You never were.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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What do literary agents really want?

Times are tough in the publishing industry, but agents still need to find new authors with a story to tell

"Are you completely mad?" one of my authors asked me. "I thought your agency was deluged by manuscripts – why ask for more?"

He was wondering why Curtis Brown, one of the UK's largest literary agencies, which receives between 600 and 800 manuscripts a month, wanted to welcome yet more at Foyles in central London last month. "Discovery Day" – an open day for any unpublished writer to pitch to an agent – was designed to open up the doors of the seemingly inward-looking publishing industry.

Eight minutes of expert feedback were followed by a 15-minute surgery in the café to probe further, and then a panel discussion with a leading author, a publisher and an agent to round off the day. Three hundred and fifty writers signed up within two days.

To be honest, we didn't know what to expect. Hundreds of smartly attired, serious minded and slightly nervous writers trickled through the doors. A 15-year-old schoolgirl who told me she was serious about her writing; a mournful-looking accountant who had quit the profession to finish his first novel, which sadly was not worth quitting the profession for; a heavily accented artist who was willing to listen to edits as long as they didn't change any element of the story. One woman told me about her eco mystery, which sounded good aside from the terms "eco" and "mystery". We turned it into a high-concept thriller with global impact.

A woman came from Texas, another from Cyprus and daytrippers from Southampton and Belfast. One young dad pitched with a baby strapped to his front who remained silent during the whole thing like a true pro. A new breed of writer is emerging. Savvy, informed, focused and in control.

So what advice did we give? Drill your story down to 10 words and then build up; if your novel has too much back story it is not a novel but an explanation; speak your dialogue out loud to test if everyone sounds the same ... and so on.

Publishing is going through a revolution – bookshops are in turmoil, self-publishing is on the rise, the big six publishers are on the run – and yet one truth remains. We all want a good story, told well. So, to my author's question "why ask for more?", I say: why ask for less?

• Jonny Geller is joint CEO of Curtis Brown

PublishingJonny Geller
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Are professional book reviewers better than amateurs?

Man Booker chairman Peter Stothard's comment that "not everyone's opinion is worth the same" is worth taking seriously

There are just over two weeks to go until the 2012 Man Booker prize judges announce their verdict. As usual, no one really has the faintest idea of the outcome. This year's jury has been impressively disciplined. The key to unlocking the mystery of this prize has always been the internal dynamic of the panel.

Thanks, too, to the grown-up chairmanship of Peter Stothard, there have been none of the silly, ephemeral brouhahas that have blighted previous shortlists. Stothard has not only come up with one of the best shortlists in living memory, he has also treated it with respect.

Indeed, everything Stothard has said about the prize (not much, frankly) has been sensible, measured and quite interesting. I don't envy him and his colleagues the task of choosing between Hilary Mantel v Will Self v Deborah Levy v Alison Moore, etc. But that's another story.

Chairing Britain's top book prize, meanwhile, offers a tempting platform for sounding off. Even such a zen master of discretion and self-control as Stothard has not been able to resist trailing his coat.

Last week, worrying aloud, he took aim at what he saw as the diminished critical standards of the literary blogosphere. Speaking to the Independent, Stothard said, "There is a widespread sense in the UK, as well as America, that traditional, confident criticism, based on argument and telling people whether the book is any good, is in decline." He went on: "Criticism needs confidence in the face of extraordinary external competition. It is wonderful that there are so many blogs and websites devoted to books, but to be a critic is to be importantly different than those sharing their own taste … Not everyone's opinion is worth the same."

Rather than simply denounce this position, I think we should take it seriously. Stothard has a point: the citizen journalist's review is not the same as the professional critic's.

Consider the standard print review of a book in, say, the Observer, the Times, the TLS or the New York Review of Books. Such a review will usually run somewhere between 500 and 1,500 words. Before publication, it will be subjected to a prolonged and intense process of subediting. Crucially, it will be signed, and usually paid for. Compared with the raw material of your average blog, it has been refined and distilled to within an inch of its life.

None of this guarantees that such a review will not be savage, destructive, ad hominem or partisan, but it will be considered, and it will loosely articulate the idiolect of literary criticism, a genre that stretches back to Hazlitt, Coleridge, Emerson, Dr Johnson and Macaulay, to name but a few. Any good print reviewer today stands on the shoulders of giants. In other words, such criticism is a) professional, b) not anonymous and c) placed in a literary critical context.

No question: the power concentrated in a few hands has, in the past, been bad for the publishing ecology. Agreed: the democracy of the blogosphere has given voice to neglected points of view.

There is, however, a case for some self-discipline, and self-consciously high standards. Stothard has sounded a timely warning bell. Here's hoping some of us in this trade will take note of his remarks, and strive to elevate the quality of the debate.

FictionBooker prizeAwards and prizesRobert McCrum
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