I was out and about yesterday and so missed a flurry of online activity sparked by this article on guardian.co.uk, in which Nesrine Malik described Mohsin Hamad as ‘a thoroughly sound and pleasant man who wears his literary triumph lightly’ when encountered in the flesh, but (says Ms Malik) when Hamad goes online he morphs into a praise-retweeting, review-linking-to ‘monster.’

This, it seems, is a Bad Thing:

Most of us expect writers, especially novelists of a certain stature, to be, ascetic, lofty creatures, occupied with the intricacies of the human condition – which explains our surprise when they turn out to be hardnosed publicists seeking to maximise book sales by promoting their product as aggressively as one would push a new shampoo.

Ms Malik finishes with some advice for us writers who frequent Twitter (and, presumably, other online social media platforms, and The Internet Itself):

I love Tumblr. I love the way you can have an idea to make something and it can be there, in front of you, within minutes. The type of thing which fifteen years ago required major investment, rounds of meetings, hours of Powerpoint and weeks of arm-twisting can now happen in the time it takes to drink a beer.

I love lists of books. Not just any old lists. I love lists from institutions, from teachers, from experts. I love hearing answers to questions like “what are the best ten books on particle physics for non-scientists” from scientists. One of my favourite books is called The Best Books and basically consists of lists of books on every subject, compiled by people who know that subject.

So I decided to combine those two affections into one: a Tumblr called A List of Book Lists. It does what it says it does: compiles lists of the best books arrived at either by expertise, public acclaim or cultural importance. Already up there are the top 100 books according to the French, William Gibson’s favourite SF novels, the best New Jersey novels. Take a look, and maybe even submit your own in the link at the top.

A bunch of distinguished authors and reviewers put out this very good statement today on sock-puppetry and fake reviews, and although I wasn’t asked to sign it (nor would have expected to have been), I support it unreservedly. The picture below is by the brilliant cartoonist Matt Buck

These days more and more books are bought, sold, and recommended on-line, and the health of this exciting new ecosystem depends entirely on free and honest conversation among readers. But some writers are misusing these new channels in ways that are fraudulent and damaging to publishing at large. British author Stephen Leather recently admitted that he used fake identities online to promote his work. The American bestseller John Locke has revealed he has paid for reviews of his books. The British author RJ Ellory has now confessed to posting flattering reviews of his own work and to using assumed names to attack other authors perceived to be his rivals.

These are just three cases of abuse we know about. Few in publishing believe they are unique. It is likely that other authors are pursuing these underhand tactics as well.

We the undersigned unreservedly condemn this behaviour, and commit never to use such tactics.But the only lasting solution is for readers to take possession of the process. The internet belongs to us all. Your honest and heartfelt reviews, good or bad, enthusiastic or disapproving,­ can drown out the phoney voices, and the underhanded tactics will be marginalized to the point of irrelevance. No single author, ­ however devious, ­ can compete with the whole community. Will you use your voice to help us clean up this mess?

Linwood Barclay, Tom Bale, Mark Billingham, Declan Burke, Ramsey Campbell, Tania Carver, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, N.J. Cooper, David Corbett, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Stella Duffy, Jeremy Duns, Mark Edwards, Chris Ewan, Helen FitzGerald, Meg Gardiner, Adèle Geras, Joanne Harris, Mo Hayder, David Hewson, Charlie Higson, Peter James, Graham Joyce, Laura Lippman, Stuart MacBride, Val McDermid, Roger McGough, Denise Mina, Steve Mosby, Stuart Neville, Jo Nesbo, Ayo Onatade, SJ Parris, Tony Parsons, Sarah Pinborough, Ian Rankin, Shoo Rayner, John Rickards, Stav Sherez, Karin Slaughter, Andrew Taylor, Luca Veste, Louise Voss, Martyn Waites, Neil White,  Laura Wilson.

via No more sock puppets please | David Hewson•com.

I Spotted A Sock Puppet. Matt Buck.

I missed this exchange while on holiday – Letters of Note reprinted a clattering of faxes between Julie Burchill and Camille Paglia. I’m no Burchill fan, but Paglia’s tone is so staggeringly egotistical and bizarrely sinister that I’m giving this one to the Englishwoman, on points. Here’s a flavour of Paglia’s odd attitude:

As the years pass, it will become clearer and clearer to everyone, perhaps even to you, that this was a pivotal moment in your life. You had an opportunity to move forward and to grow by making an important alliance. But instead you chose to dig in your heels, clamp down, and sulk at the new girl invading your turf. You have behaved childishly.

I could have helped you far more than you could help me. I am read and translated around the world from Japan to South America, and the basis of my fame is not just journalism but a scholarly book on the history of culture. You are a very local commodity, completely unknown outside of England, and you have produced nothing of global interest. It is you who began this fight, and it is you who will pay the price for it.The more vicious you are in print, the stupider you will look.

via Letters of Note: The Battle of the Bitches.

Alliances? Fights? What is this, literature or cage-fighting?

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

Not a button, or feather, or mark,

By which they could tell that they stood on the ground

Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

While writing a post on three books by female authors I’ve read recently, I tried to track down exactly where the oft-asserted figure of “80 per cent of fiction is read by women” comes from. I haven’t been able to.

Which is odd, because it does seem to be an established belief. People quote it pretty loosely (I’ve done so myself, and often) – but no-one ever sources it.

Hmmm.

Here’s some links I found while trying to find this particular literary Snark:

- a 1998 Princeton paper on called “Why Do More Women Read Fiction?”  I’ve not read the whole thing, but even the title seems a bit lazily suggestive. Presumably it means “more women read fiction than men.” But it could also mean “women read fiction more than non-fiction,” which would be something very different.

- a 2006 blogpost with a link which no longer works to a dissertation that apparently said: “Women are more likely to read fiction and borrow from libraries than men.”

- an old Ian McEwan thing in the Guardian in which he tried to give away books in the street, and the only takers were women. From which he draws possibly exaggerated conclusions.

- an NPR story which says “men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain”, but then doesn’t say what that means or link to any surveys. Gah!

- a really interesting study into the so-called “literary gap” between men and women, which looks at empathy, education and social factors – and is also unable to track down the source for this “80-20″ assertion

- A pretty good Guardian summary of the spat earlier this year which pitted Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult on one side – arguing that review pages were dominated by books by white male authors – and Teddy Wayne on the other, who claimed that male authors were at a financial disadvantage because, yes, you guessed it, 80 percent of fiction is bought by women. Wayne linked to some places in support of his assertion. But hang on: do they assert anything of the kind?

First up is a mid-2011 report from the Book Industry Studies Group on Consumer Attitudes to E-Book reading, reported on by Tomorrow’s Book, which says:

The BISG says most eBook power buyers — that is, someone buying an eBook at least once a week — are by and large women (some 66 percent), who mostly buy fiction. Out of the entire eBook market, power buyers make just 18 percent of all buyers, but they buy 61 percent of the eBooks.

Where’s the 80-20 rule then? Not here.

The second of Wayne’s links is a Seattle Times piece from September 2010 by Mary Ann Gunwin. She quotes a report from Bowker, which says this:

Women make 64 percent of all book purchases, even among detective stories and thrillers, where they buy more than 60 percent of that genre.

80-20? Not here, guv.

In other words, I’ve not been able to find the source for this oft-quoted stat. Does anyone know where it can be found?

What’s the best thing an author can do to promote their work? I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit, prompted by the realisation that the Facebook Page I set up as an “author” page was a complete waste of time (or, I was doing it wrong, which is quite possible). Here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head list of things an author can do, as opposed to anything a publisher or agent can do, to get their book into the public mind:

• write something that people want to read (see, for instance, my post on Fifty Shades of Grey)
• get well-known authors and celebrities you might know to say they like it (difficult if you’re starting out and don’t know anybody)
• get onto Twitter (essential, I think, or at least it is for me – a public platform where you’re visibly active and easily available)
• write a blog (as opposed to just “having a website”, a blog which is updated often has more chance of attracting links from other places)
• attend events (something I’m trying to do a  lot more of, and am getting better at)
• have a pitch (again, something I’m trying to do better, and something I was rubbish at. It’s vital to know what your book’s about, know how to describe it succinctly, and know how to make it sound exciting)
• give away copies, personally

It’s the last one I’m thinking about today. I’ve given away quite a few of my complimentary author copies of The English Monster, and am beginning to think this method might be one of the most productive things an author can do, in the long term?

Why? Because it puts the book into people’s hands. And if they read it (a big if, still), and if they like it (an even bigger if) you’ve just sent an advocate for your work out into the world.

Buzz, word of mouth, whatever you want to call it, these are the things which make a book live over time. I’m convinced of it. Amazon recommendation algorithms, front-of-store positions and all the other dark retail arts are essential, but in an oddly indirect way; they simply serve to make more advocates possible, by virtue of more books being sold.

If your book’s good, and if you have confidence in it, my recommendation is to give it away, personally and with a signature and with thanks. And build out your army of advocates.

PS: This is not the same as demanding your book be heavily discounted on Amazon or elsewhere. That may help, again by putting it into people’s hands. And it will happen anyway. The author can’t do much about it. But he or she can give their book away, to the right people at the right time and in the right way.

PPS: If I’ve given you a copy of my book, it’s not because I’m a cynical bastard exploiting your propensity to be nice to me. It’s because I wanted to. All I’m saying here is that this has nice, long-term effects. I love you. I really do.

I’m watching Twitter just now going a little mad at the latest sales figures for EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. It sold 400,000 copies in paperback last week. In fact, all three editions of the trilogy outsold the previous paperback sales record in the UK.

The word phenomenon gets batted around a lot, but this is now beyond a phenomenon. It’s a sensation, a wonder, a nonpareil. And it raises the interesting question: who on earth is reading these books?

Presumably, she did not buy her own copy

I haven’t read them myself. The only person I know, anywhere, who’s read them is the book blogger and writer Isabel Costello, who had this to say about the experience:

By the time I finished the first chapter of E L James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, two things were clear: everything I’d heard about the writing was true, and it wasn’t going to be a long read. One of these was regrettable, the other a blessed relief. I’m not writing this piece as a Book Review because I’m not recommending this title as a good read. I wouldn’t be able to review it properly anyway because I have no context for it, as I don’t read romance, erotica or pornography.

Isabel is careful not to be sneery or rude or abusive in her analysis, but it’s pretty clear: she hated it. She thought it was terribly badly written, and a fair few of her commenters agreed with her. I thought it was particularly interesting that she said “I have no context for it.” Because that seems to be the problem everyone is having with it.

But there, you see. I said everyone. When what I meant was everyone who reads a lot and writes about what they read. This is presumably a rather small proportion of the population. We’re all trying desperately hard to be polite about Fifty Shades, but the two questions we should perhaps be asking ourselves are:

• what has this woman written which seems to be so massively popular among so many people. 
• who is reading these books?

Because if I don’t know anyone who’s read it apart from Isabel (who read it with her finger holding her nose), then presumably other people don’t know anyone who’s read it either. So who’s reading it? And why?

I don’t know the answer. I’m just struck by the fact that people aren’t asking the question. If EL James has found a way of putting words down on paper which a vast constituency of readers are determined to read, I think finding an answer to those two questions might be worth the candle. It might just be that publishing’s salvation might not lie in technology or new retail models or new forms of storytelling. It might just be about publishing stuff that a very large number of people are desperate to read.

Or, alternatively, we could just take the piss and hope the whole thing blows over.

I finished The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall a week or so ago now. It’s stayed with me. I still don’t entirely know what I think about it, so I’m going to carry on thinking about it. But I thought this reading, by Tilda Swinton, of perhaps the key conceptual (I choose the word advisedly) scene in the book, was absolutely brilliant.

Well, that caught everybody napping, didn’t it? A day after telling Robert McCrum that Waterstones would be “different” and “better” than Amazon when it came to selling digital books, Waterstones announces that it’s signed a “commercial agreement with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) to launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops”.

Hey, Daunt? My gun's bigger than yours

Twitter this morning has erupted in a volcano of dismay, incomprehension and more than a little sarcasm. The words “suicide note” are being bandied around. And on the face of it the deal does look barking mad: plucky British bookseller puts its head in gigantic American lion’s mouth, instead of lying down on the plush sofa in the next cage.

Some random thoughts on all this:

• Commenting on any deal like this is like shooting a pistol in a dark room. There’s an information imbalance here. If one assumes that neither Waterstones nor Amazon is run by reckless idiots with an appetite for self-immolation, one has to consider what the reasons for a deal like this would be. In fact, when a deal is this startlingly unexpected, one has to think even harder.
• The Waterstones press release is short, lacking in detail and, perhaps, a bit rushed? One of my first thoughts was that perhaps this deal is a reaction to something else external to both Waterstones and Amazon. What could that be? Well, is Nook up to something (see below)?  That’s the kind of thing that could have sent Waterstones scurrying into the arms of Amazon.
• This is, paradoxically, a bet on the physical, by both companies. Waterstones is essentially saying it is happy to outsource much of its digital future to a third party, leaving it to concentrate on physical bookselling. Whatever you think of the intelligence of that move, you shouldn’t ignore the benefits of freeing up management headspace. Digital has been a huge distraction for Waterstones; arguably, it now won’t be. Again, I should say that doesn’t make this a smart move. But it might be a tick in the “pro” column. Also, some analysts in the U.S. have been saying that Amazon’s main weakness is its lack of a physical High Street presence; this is certainly the line Barnes and Noble has been peddling. Well, that problem is now sorted, in the UK at least.
• So much remains to be made clear. I find it interesting that the press release refers to “new e-reading services”, which seems to be a careful phrase with lots of headroom. How then will Waterstones handle DRM? File formats? Buy one format, get the other free (presumably impossible without publisher buy-in)? Customer data? And, following on from that, community activities like highlighting and commenting and sharing – all of which sit within the Kindle data store? What are the “dedicated digital areas” in stores the press release mentions?
• What is Nook doing? Did it have a deal with Waterstones which was then dismissed? Was Waterstones using Nook to negotiate with Amazon? Is Nook talking directly to publishers about direct digital distribution of their books?
• Did WH Smith just become the most complete, vertically-integrated bookselling company in Britain? What does that mean for book retail, and for publishers?

Random thoughts, as I say. Will add to them as and when. But what do you think?

UPDATE:

Here’s the video Waterstones have put out with James Daunt discussing the deal. It doesn’t really answer any of the specific questions, but the emphasis is very much on the “reading experience”.