Working the line

For those interested in this sort of thing, a piece of mine has just been published over on Futurebook, The Bookseller's digital-oriented blog. It's mainly aimed at publishers, but might be of interest to some of you lot. Also good if you like old pictures of American prospectors.

Overrated, overpriced and not great in the bath...

I quote Victoria Coren's article from yesterday's Guardian:

"...everyone tells me the book is a tremendous success. A thousand copies already! Meanwhile, the Observer sells nearly half-a-million copies a week and everybody says newspapers are "ailing and cannot survive". By that logic, books are dead, buried, maggot-eaten, mouldering skeletons without even a desperate scratch on the coffin lid from a single twitching finger."

Quite.

Freebies

Another little one - top banana item in Publisher's Weekly:

At NYU Event, Macmillan CEO Says “Free” Content Will Be Challenge for Books

Rejection, acceptance and a Merry Christmas

Over on dovergreyreader's armchair, Fay Weldon tells how she came to write her latest book, in opposition to expectations of her publishers and the marketing and sales departments therein. Guess what? It was rejected. Luckily, Corvus picked it up.

In other news, The Friday Project's An Atheist's Guide to Christmas is now available.

And in possibly my first fit of brilliant item linking, here's Weldon finding God after 70 years the non-believer. (Okay, so, yes, it's over three years old and she converted almost a decade ago, so shoot me.)

Sexy readers

Over on Lydia Hart's blog the hostess in question nabs a Joanne Rendell column from the Huffington Post. Very insightful it is too (although the bigger authors with marketing spends pushing their books may not be so keen on it).

I doubt very much if any publishers will take note, but working in and around the advertising industry, I think Joanne's points are valid. A shame the larger publishers are the ones who will have the budgets to actually achieve what she's suggesting, but the smaller ones tend to be the ones with the ambition to make the push.

Wanderer returns

I have been much absent lately, due mainly to two things, but mostly to my finishing my novel and considering where to try and place it. One editor has seen it, and considers it too short to market successfully. I've already expanded it a little (just a few thousand words), but now I feel a little stuck. Those few thousand words I am confident have improved the manuscript, but they really do feel like the end. It's still a pretty short piece, at just 50,000 words, give or take, but it feels done. Anything more, other than window-dressing (adding, as suggested, a certain amount of local colour to certain scenes), I can't see being able to add without having to create a completely different book.

What I'm interested in, is I know lots of authors out there have lots of finished novels that don't see publication. If you're one of these authors, with a publishing deal and a moderate amount of success, how do you view those past novels? Do you feel any of them are sitting there waiting to be picked up and dusted down (see David Mitchell's Black Swan Green as a for instance), or have you moved on; are they old news? (Roger Morris sounds like he has hundreds of completed manuscripts just hanging around intimidating the elderly neighbours).

Oh, I've also spent the past five months or so working on this, which has just gone live. Nice to finally have something out in front of the crowd at least.

Apex lives

If any of you bought from Apex, well done and thanks. The company is safe thanks to the loyalty and support of the reading public.

On the shoulders of, er, just the one giant

Demographic representations of the world. There's one map that shows regions proportionately by how many books they publish.

And talking of Atlas, you can see him in the night sky over the UK at the moment, along with his daughters the Pleiads and his missus Pleione.