Stephen Hunt's Blog, page 12

The creative writing courses controversy?

With the uptick in indie authors, so a corresponding uptick in organisations offering creative writing courses, but are they worth the money, or just another way for commercial interests to milk money out of would-be writers? Radio 4 examines both side of the arguments in this week’s You and Yours episode. This piece ran on the radio today, and will be available as a streaming on-line repeat to UK-based license fee payers at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s46vg shortly (e.g. you’ll need a British IP address not to get bounced).

Well worth a listen to hear both sides of the coin. There was a great quote from the lady being pitted against the idea of courses (Publisher’s Lunch blog? Have to listen again to confirm her name/affiliation), who said that a famous author had cynically told her this about creative writing courses… “Lots of lovely money flowing towards me from people who haven’t got a hope in hell of ever being published.”

The ‘for’ argument was put by one of the executives behind faberacademy.co.uk, who noted that you wouldn’t expect a concert violinist to train alone and become a master without the feedback of peers and teachers, so why expect the same from authors? The idea that authors have to wander into the wilderness alone for years and come back a fully fledged genius seems to be unique to the literary field, and isn’t one you’ll find in stage, painting, music etc arts.

The sorry state of career journalism in 2013.

Following my last couple of posts, here’s a quick link to an exchange between the Atlantic Magazine and journalist Nate Thayer looking to solicit his professional services for an article the Atlantic wanted to publish.

It’s in the same ballpark as my two pieces. Noel Coward once sung ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs. Worthington’. Don’t put your daughter through a journalism degree, Mrs. Worthington, is what he’d be singing if he was alive today. Waste. Of. Money.

My thoughts on this matter are best put forward by author Harlan Ellison in this truly great YouTube video.

Rise again… work for free!

E-books… meet thy digital saviour?

This is a brief follow-up post to my last one. Among the comments the previous article received, were, “Has that friend of yours ever considered e-book publishing directly?” The polite comments in this vein are now sitting under the article. The deranged ‘YOU HAVE DISSED ME AND EVERY AUTHOR BY FAILING TO MENTION EBOOKS ONCE EVEN THOUGH THIS WAS NOTHING TO DO WITH EBOOKS I HOPE YOU BURN IN HELL YOU ELITIEST SCUMBAG’-type comments, sadly, didn’t make it past my fascist tendencies to pop the fouler-smelling bubbles that rise out of the internet cess-pit.

Yep, I authorize ever single comment that does/doesn’t make it onto my blog. Feel free to disagree with me… but doing it rudely and in the digital equivalent of crayon scribbles on pink paper will not make the cut. At least not here. Feel free to wipe the drool off your lips and be as rude as you like about me on your Twitter/Facebook account (hey, like you need my permission, right).

So, here in brief, are my thoughts on how the publishing industry works now. I have nothing against e-books – I have a couple of series of e-book novellas and early works released by myself in this fashion, floating around in the cyber sphere – and I applaud the freedom it gives any author to bypass the bandwidth restrictions of the old crapshoot of getting published. But as a path to earning enough money to sustain even the kind of poorly paid full-time writing career you used to get as a mid-list author in the Ancien Régime? Well, you might get lucky. And you can certainly work harder on promotion and marketing and polishing your writing, getting a little luckier the harder you work and the better the quality of your wordage. You might win the lottery too. Easier if you’ve bought a ticket.

Here’s the rub… the bandwidth restrictions and the statistical near-impossibility of getting a book read and accepted in the old days (you know, when Penguin received 100,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year in the SFF/H genres, of which they could maybe select two or three totally new authors to publish each year), they haven’t gone away. They’ve just shifted. They’ve moved from harassed test readers/agents kept by the publishing houses who would skim the first page of your MS before unfairly filing it in the form-rejection pile, to harassed Kindle(*) customers who are staring at web pages with hundreds of thousands of new e-books, most by authors they’re totally unfamiliar with, downloading free e-books or sample chapters, before sifting for the ones that match their taste/standards enough to be considered keepers.

When your authorly competition is everyone in the world with a PC and a copy of Microsoft Word, standing in that infinitely long hiring line and trusting it’s your book that is going to be the next Harry Potter/Wool/Fifty Shades of Grey is quite an act of faith. It always was in the old world, too. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, baby. It’s still as difficult as fuck. It just a different kind of difficult as fuck. And frankly, anyone who tells you different is usually trying to sell you $300 writing courses, e-books with titles like ‘You too can be an e-book billionaire’, or a thousand REAL followers for your author’s FaceBook page who all seem, curiously, to be based in Turkey and Russia.

This state of affairs hasn’t gone unnoticed by Amazon, who don’t care a whit about writers (at least, not the ones they haven’t signed to their in-house labels), but who do care a hell of a lot about their customer experience. Especially if it’s millions of Kindle readers refusing to buy books because they’ve now got an unlimited supply of free ones. Hence why most of Amazon’s tweaks now aim to stiff indies – aka strangling the affiliate income of any site that aims to address Kindle’s awful discovery issues by compiling charts of the BEST FREE KINDLE E-BOOKS. GET A FINE FREE E-BOOK A DAY. Or tweaking their sales algorithm to hobble the appearance of indie books in the charts, while flattering the (reassuringly over-priced) works of the Ancien Régime.

Also reads… Angry Birds?

So, to sum up. We’ve moved from a situation where there was a queue the size of the planet standing outside a really exclusive nightclub where you had to be incredibly hot and lucky to get in (and even then, you’d usually spend between ten and twenty years working on your make-up and desperately waiting outside for just the sniff of entry… took me fifteen). Everyone hated the bouncers and most everyone felt jealous of those who got in. Instead, we’ve traded that for a MMO-sized Hunger Games where instead of twenty-four combatants, we’ve got twenty-four million engaged in the world’s largest knife fight… and only a couple are going to walk away with the real prizes. Jeff Bezos is the President Snow character in this metaphor, BTW. He’s grinning at you with a camcorder while you work out how to stick a shiv into me.

I could go on in a lot more detail about this subject, but let’s just say that when it comes to the indie pubbed e-book/POD holy wars, I’m an agnostic. If it works, it works. It is what it is. My best advice to any new author would be to blend both the old printed world and the new direct-to-digital systems and see what happens when you shake the tree. Just remember, publishing is an industry, not a religion. But boy, do you still need faith (and now, more than ever, don’t give up the day job).

Now, before we part, allow me to point you in the direction of writer Chuck Wendig’s latest post, and tease you with his intro…

This is something I see often enough: an author talks about losing a series or having some difficulties with a publisher or whatever, and someone from the crowd eventually says, “You should self-publish. We want more of you, the money’s better, we’ll support you. Plus, so many options! Amazon! Kickstarter! Bookflipper! Pub-Burger!” Sometimes it’s a polite suggestion, sometimes it’s double-barrel proselytization and they start spouting off “facts and figures” along with a dose of venom against the oppression of the traditional system.

Like, what Chuck said, dude.

* I’m using Kindle as short-hand, here. I know about Kobo, SmashWords, CreateSpace, OnceWasPaper, etc etc. I embrace them… I embrace you, brothers and sisters. Much love… even to the crayon chompers currently filling my comments queue with missives about why my use of the word ‘indie publisher’ deeply offends their sub-sect in some heretical manner and I must DIE DIE DIE.

E-book Cornucopia… enough room in this arena for everyone.

I’m the author. Fly me.

In terms of setting expectations for an authorly career, Patricia Cornwell has a lot to answer for as a celebrated crime novelist, not least the circumstances of her private life which recently came out during a court hearing concerning alleged fraud on the part of her literary agent. Such titbits as the fact she spent $5 million on private jets and a personal helicopter as well as keeping a Bentley Continental and a Ferrari, even though she supposedly was also paying $1000 a day to a high end chauffeur service. Her many and numerous massive estates are said to rival JK Rowling’s private castle for opulence and grandeur. But then everyone knows that authors are rich and famous. Just look at Rick Castle. He has so much money he can bribe the mayor to allow him to solve crimes with his squeeze Detective Beckett, with nary a day off to do anything as mundane as putting pen to paper.

This, sadly, is the life that most people think you are talking about if the fact that you are working as an author ever slips into a conversation. Let me disabuse you of such an outlandish notion straightaway, and as an author, I shall do it by way of the story. And this tale has the benefit of being true, so I won’t even need to bring my imagination to bear on the story.

Late last year I went for drinks in London with an old friend who was visiting from Australia. Most the people who attended the shindig were acquaintances of my chum who I’ve bumped into every few years – usually when my mate is visiting over from down under. One of these acquaintances happens to be a professional writer the same as me. I won’t give their name (or even their gender), because I don’t possess their contact details to ask their permission to recount this tale in public, and I am not sure they would want me to. But in a certain sense, their name is irrelevant, because their story is the story of all professional authors in the last few years. Well, perhaps not Patricia Cornwall, Terry Pratchett and a few others at the top of the game. But it is the story of most of us. The rest of us, you might say.

Being a professional writer at home is a rather lonely and uncertain profession. You usually only get to meet other professional writers at conferences where you are an invited guest, and your conversations are often prescribed by the fact that agents, editors, and professional gossips are frequently in tow… so, what I’m trying to say, is that we rarely get to talk honestly or frankly with much candour. So it was great to be able to get to sit down in private with a fellow comrade fighting in the muddy word trenches, knowing we could chew the fat without judgement. The last time I had met this particular person, they had been working on producing various authorized biographies of celebrities… football stars, TV personalities, actors and actresses and sometimes just those famous for being famous. They’ve been doing this job for over a decade. The writer, like myself (and incidentally like Patricia Cornwall) had worked in newspaper and magazine publishing before drifting into the world of books.

‘So’, I asked, ‘what book are you working on right now?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ they replied. ‘When it comes to advances, ten is the new fifty.’

I had an inkling of what they meant here, but asked them to spell it out just for the sake of clarity.

‘Well,’ said my fellow writer, ‘publishers used to give you £50,000 to write a biography for them. I mean, it would take a year to create one – six months to research, six months to write. So £50,000 a year seemed like a decent fee. But now there isn’t a biography publisher in London willing to pay more than £10,000 for a book.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Although, to be fair, what I was actually thinking was Publishers were willing to pay £50,000 a year for a biography? Nobody I know ever got that much for writing a flipping fiction novel.

‘So then, if that’s the situation, what did you do?’ I queried.

‘Well, who can afford to live on £10,000 a year, especially in London? I stopped writing. I had a look at getting back into journalism; but you might as well be trying to get work as a saddle stitcher in the 1920s, standing in the shadow of a Ford model T. factory. The Internet has killed off that gig. Then, I saw an advert for international cabin crew for an airline. I applied and got the job and for the last 12 months I have been flying to various long-haul destinations. It’s great. I love it. No stress, no deadlines, no agents taking a cut of my wages, no editors on my back, and no more having to pander to the egos of the famous. ‘

Now, for anyone who knows anything about publishing, or has eyes to see, you can walk into a WH Smith or a Tesco supermarket and its top 20 books will be dominated by celebrity biographies. It’s about as profitable as publishing gets, unless you sign an accident like Fifty Shades. And you can’t even make a living wage as a writer of that stuff?

In fiction, there will always be an endless slush-pile furnished by writers of science fiction, fantasy, crime and other genres, writers willing to accept pretty much any lowball offer to be published, regardless of the financial strings or contractual obligations. All for the dubious emprunteur of printed respectability. But in the celebrity biographies sector, I guess they are fewer people intelligent enough to be able to write a decent product, while also willing to spend six months hanging around in nightclubs with some vacuous C-lister, before devoting another six months of your limited lifespan to immortalize said cleb’s glorious existence.

So next time you hear about New York court cases involving multimillionaire authors and you go green at the gills about their lifestyles, give a thought to the rest of us. Because the life of a professional writer these days is very rarely deciding whether you will be driving your Ferrari or allowing the SAS-trained driver from your chauffeur company to pick you up this morning. It’s more likely to be asking the family in aisle six if they want the vegetarian option on the flight, and, on a good day, topping up your tan at the backend in Marrakesh before bounce back.

I’m the author. Fly me.

The life of Patricia Cornwell… Do I take the Bentley Continental or the Ferrari out today?

Here’s a sad song to go along with Sunday’s true story. Mr Writer from the Stereophonics. It’s the anthem for all writers these days, ‘cept for Patricia Cornwell. And even she’s been having a few bad days lately.

Listen closely T-rex, hear how the dinosaurs howl!

An interesting radio program on the digital future of book publishing from the BBC’s Bottom Line. With the exception of Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn, most of it is the confused howling of Argentinosaurs as they stumble through the nuclear winter following the asteroid’s impact, but a fascinating piece of history, nevertheless.

I’ll be doing a longer blog piece shortly on how Waterstones can save itself from going down the shitter (maybe), and avoid HMV’s recent fate. Here’s a clue… it’s not what they’re doing at the moment! Am I optimistic anybody will do what it takes to save the mass book market in the UK (or the USA, for that matter)? Not really.

E-book wisdom? More arse than bottom, this week, sadly.

Here’s the program’s blurb, anyway.

Like the music industry before it, the print book industry has been turned upside down up by the digital revolution. As sales of ebooks continue to grow, bookshop sales are down from a peak in 2007. So what does the future for hold for the bricks and mortar bookstore? Will physical books become a thing of the past? And what role will traditional players like publishers, agents and retailers play in this brave new world? Evan Davis and guests examine what the landscape might look like once the dust settles. Joining Evan in the studio are Jonny Geller, literary agent and joint CEO Curtis Brown; Victoria Barnsley, CEO of publisher HarperCollins UK & International; Michael Tamblyn, Chief Content Officer at Toronto-based ebook retailer Kobo.

You can listen to this for the next 12 months over at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qfjdq (not sure if they are still blocking non-UK residents from listening to it, though).

A poster rises… for ‘Rise of the Iron Moon’.

It’s always interesting to see my readers’ take on the Jackelian novels when it comes to paintings, art, models and the like. Here’s a fine example… a poster designed for Rise of the Iron Moon (the third novel of six in the series). This was produced by Chris Lewis (@c_j_lewis), who is a writer for TV and stage as well as the producer of live comedy show… Live and Up Front at the Palladium. From the look of this, he’s also got a knack for graphic design!

Book 3 in the series.

It’s interesting that lots of fans rave about book 3, where I normally recommend newbies to start with Kingdom Beyond the Waves if they’re coming new to the series.

Immortality in 5 points (size).

News floats in that author Dame Daphne du Maurier’s legion of friends have been left fuming by the showing on ITV of ‘The Scapegoat’, a direct adaption of DDdM’s novel of the same name. National newspapers in the UK have focused on her friend of thirty years, Michael Thornton, who summed up the reaction to the high level of ‘respect’ accorded to the book’s creator during the TV programme.

‘Daphne’s name on the credits was in a tiny line in dim red lettering that vanished in less than a second and was virtually illegible. One of the most celebrated storytellers of the past hundred years was accorded less prominence than the credit for ‘make-up trainee’. Whoever was responsible deserves to be fired.’

Sadly, this news is of far less surprise to anyone actually earning their daily bread through the trade of writing. Most businesses – from newspapers to magazines to copywriting to tech manuals to TV and films and book publishing – regard the writer as an expendable milch cow, marginally less interchangeable than the brand of biro their office stationery section sources (and ever was it thus).

Weren’t you a writer once?

For many of these industries, actually having the author dead is a real bonus. You don’t have to pay the creator royalties after seventy years, you’ll never have to deal with an annoying agent again, and consulting the author about the authenticity of the TV adaption is no longer even a fig-leaf two minute phone conversation with the pesky writer (always a good opportunity to check your Blackberry while they witter on speakerphone for a bit).

Any novelist who becomes dragged into that weary death-march from Stalingrad which is getting an optioned novel dragged into becoming a full movie will know that when it comes to the pecking order, the writer ranks just below the sweet old chap that trundles the coffee cart around the set asking if you would like a croissant with that.

The situation is worsened for creators by the chasm-sized disconnect between reality and public perception, where the very mention of the fact that you are a published author immediately creates a storm of questions along the lines of ‘Where do you park your Learjet?’, ‘What does Boris Johnson eat for desert at your launch parties?’, and ‘Can you lend me a million or two to back my idea for an online pet food retailer?’

There isn’t an author alive who doesn’t devoutly believe, then waveringly trust, then vainly hope, their works will become a classic and bring them their well-deserved gift of ever-lasting immortality (we’re all insecure egomaniacs: bullet-point to take-away, never marry an author or an actor). The truth is that it will. Just don’t expect it to look larger than five point Garamond or rank higher than ten million and two in the 2130AD Amazon chart.

There are a handful of superstar authors; the ones still drawing breathe, anyway – you know, with names that rhyme with Berry Hatchet and Hay Fey Bowling – for whom this fundamental law of creative gravity doesn’t currently apply*. But for the rest of us? Sorry, Daphne’s ghost, just be grateful the credits didn’t read, ‘For extra production credits, please visit ITV.com’

Stephen Hunt

* If you’re reading this in the 22nd century**, I’m trusting those authors’ names don’t leave you reaching for whatever passes for Wikipedia in the same way that the 19th century’s Über-bestselling author George Lippard will have my current crop of readers furiously Googleing away and muttering WTF?

** Ah, the classics, I hear the audience of the future sighing, ‘Shakespeare, Austin, and E.L James.’

Fifth season Merlin trailer

There’s magic about, yes there is – it’s the 5th season of the British fantasy TV series, Merlin.

Season 5 of Fringe

As the trailer for the 5th season of Fringe shows, it’s 20 years in the future after the Observers have invaded Earth, and the Fringe team come out of suspended animation (well, amber) to help humanity fight back.

Firefly reunion video.

Not at ComicCon to see the Firefly reunions panel? Not a problem, watch it via the wonders of the intertubes here.