Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

The long spoon

Lynne Patrick

People ask me from time to time whether I miss being a publisher. Now the dust has settled and my life has fallen (fairly) comfortably into its new shape, the answer is always the same: yes, some things – but there’s plenty about it that I don’t miss.

One of those things is having to grit my teeth and say nice things about people who behave in an unconstructive way. I recall getting very cross about the UK’s biggest chain bookseller on one occasion, and blowing off some steam about it right here on this blog – then regretting it as soon as the post was available for the world to peruse, just in case someone with power at the head office of said chain bookseller happened to read it and put a black mark against my small, powerless company’s name.

Now, though, with no axe to grind and no potential sales to lose, I can say what I like as long as it’s not actually libellous.

So I’m going to add my two penn’orth to This Week’s Hot Book Trade Topic here in the UK.
For benefit of non-UK readers, here’s a brief summing up with glossary.

Waterstones (largest bookselling chain in the UK, with nearly 300 branches, which means one in every halfway-decent-sized town) have climbed into bed with Amazon (no explanation needed, except that I avoid them as a matter of principle, being strongly opposed to any organization which uses dubious tactics – OK, tactics I don’t approve of – to achieve world domination.)

For some reason which none of us innocent bystanders understands, Waterstones have struck a deal which means they’ll be selling Kindles in their shops, and, presumably, eBooks for Kindle on their website.

The received (not to say obvious) wisdom is that they seem to have pressed a long-distance self-destruct button. Or perhaps not so very long-distance. Bookshops are about browsing, picking up and sampling, enjoying a tactile experience as well as an intellectual one – in short, they’re about real books, print books, not electronic machines. OK, I get that eBooks are the future, and the way the book trade is going to be before many years have passed, and even I and Jean-Luc Picard will one day own an eReader. And it’s not as if eReaders and eBooks are hard to come by. But how, exactly, is it in a traditional bookseller’s interests to make it easier for readers to defect to the electronic machines?

So far the press, the blogosphere, the British book world in all its variety is bemused at best, appalled at worst. I’ve only encountered one comment which hasn’t screamed, ‘OMG, what do they think they’re doing?!’, and that one only went as far as suggesting we wait and see what they’re up to, and admiring their cojones. Everyone else seems to think their cojones are where their brains have migrated to, though possibly they mean another part of their anatomy not a million millimetres from said cojones. (Sorry – I love that word. I can say it in public and my mother won’t scowl. Probably because she doesn’t speak even one word of Spanish. Me, I speak just the one.)

And I’m with everyone else. When James Daunt took over as CEO of Waterstones last year, I cheered, and I wasn’t alone. His pedigree was impeccable: he built his own small bookshop chain from nothing, by dint of top-class service, an interesting range of stock which didn’t consist of 90% top ten bestsellers, and a sensible pricing policy which didn’t leave small publishers wondering why they bothered. These were the qualities he brought to Waterstones. Or so we thought. Now, I’m wondering where he’s parked his common sense; he certainly doesn’t seem to be bringing it to work.

Far too many great little independent bookshops are losing the battle against Amazon’s aggressive pricing and the not-so-slow march of the eBook. Well within painful memory, Borders, the good guys of chain bookselling for many years, struck an eBook deal with Kobo which many say was a deciding factor in their collapse – and that was before the whole eBook concept had really gathered momentum.

I just hope James Daunt knows what he’s walking into. Or that he owns a very long spoon.

Old habits die hard 2

Lynne Patrick

Sometimes blog posts are a good way to put your thoughts in order on a particular topic. Last week I found I was giving myself a whole list of good reasons for changing my mind about self-publishing. Heck, for a few hours I even found myself considering going down that route with something of my own.

This week I’ve been reminded very firmly indeed of why I always thought it was a bad idea.

Hands up anyone who disagrees with this premise: it’s a rare and unusual book that doesn’t benefit from an editor’s attention before it gets into print.

I’m guessing not many hands were raised there, and none at all which belong to real working writers with a professional approach and a track record of publication.

Cut to the chase. I read a self-published book. Not on Kindle, you understand; that change of mind is a long way in the future. This particular book was the print version, of which very few exist – but those few are identical in every detail (except the way they’re actually produced) to the version which is available as an eBook.

Every typo, every punctuation glitch, every wobbly sentence, all exactly the same. Even the sadly inevitable bit where a character’s eyes change from blue to grey. (I know that’s an editor’s cliché, but clichés only become clichés because they’re true.) There were a couple of holes in the plot too.

I won’t go into why I read it; it’s not as if I’m exactly short of reading matter. Let’s just say it seemed like a good idea at the time. And potentially it was a good idea: even with all the errors, I wanted to keep turning the pages, and not just to see if there could possibly be any worse bloopers. There’s actually a great story in there, and some characters I didn’t want to leave behind when I reached the end. But if I had a pound for every wince or teeth-gritting as I was reading, I could probably afford the Botox to smooth away the new purse-string lines around my mouth. (Botox... Now, that’s a whole other post, though possibly not for this blog...)

All the above would be easy as pie to fix. If only someone had pointed them out in time.

I like to be absolutely, strictly and one hundred percent fair, so I gave the book to my other half for a second opinion, and I have to say he wasn’t halfway near as distracted as I was by the glitches. Maybe, as I was moved to observe a few weeks ago, these things leap off the page when you’ve trained your eye to look for them, but fade into the background for most people. That said, even other half spotted a handful, so in this case it wasn’t just me.

Of course, this is a problem not confined to self-publishers. To quote just one high-profile example, last year there was the Great Terry Pratchett Scandal, when the publishers were forced to withdraw an eBook edition of Snuff for a while, to correct a whole slew of errors just to make it user-friendly. And it’s not even just eBooks; plenty of conventionally published, conventionally printed books are littered with minor errors. And I have a feeling the problem isn’t going to go away any time soon.

If memory serves, and it sometimes still does, in the days long, long ago when this blog was young and I was, well, younger than I am now, I waxed eloquent about the need for even more careful editing than usual if you were planning to self-publish, because at its best a self-published book can be a showcase which may even lead to greater things.
Certainly Amanda Hocking, E L Grey et al didn’t say no thanks, I’m fine as I am, when the big guys came knocking. But these days every book trade newsletter or magazine I pick up seems to carry an article which challenges the need for publishers or editors. Does that mean another challenge too, for the premise that correct spelling, punctuation which ensures the words say what you mean, and proper consistency through the text actually matter?

If this is the way the world has turned, maybe it’s time I gave up.

Habits of a lifetime

Lynne Patrick

Earlier this week I did something which a few months ago I wouldn’t have believed I’d ever do.

I recommended to an aspiring author that self-publishing was a sensible option for his book.

Anyone who has followed my posts since they began five years ago (yeah, yeah, I can’t think who that person could be either) can’t help being aware of how I feel about self-publishing. I’ve heard it described as the last resort of the desperately deluded, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far, I wouldn’t stop so very short.

So what could I have been thinking of?

OK. Let’s look at a few facts. Amazon Kindle. Leaving aside the Amanda Hockings and E L Jameses, who are still the exception rather than the rule:

A couple of years ago I worked on a finance industry thriller with a client who left my tender nurturing after the second rewrite and self-published the book on Amazon Kindle. He didn’t go down the Facebook/Twitter promotion route; he just e-mailed everyone he knew to let them know it was there. Last I heard he’d sold 20,000 downloads. In my plainly misguided opinion, the book needed another rewrite. Or two. But come on, guys, those numbers speak for themselves.

A couple of weeks ago I met a woman whose first novel is also on Amazon for Kindle, courtesy of a tiny publisher who specializes in getting new authors into print – well, not exactly print – and takes a minimal cut through a very unorthodox contract. After a month of free downloads which netted a total of 15,000, she’s now selling upwards of 2000 a month. And she doesn’t even own a mobile phone, much less a Facebook or Twitter account.

I honestly don’t think either of these novels would have made it in the mainstream. The first, ahem, needed work; the second was a damn good book, but the author is so inexperienced and out of the loop that she didn’t have a clue how to get started and probably wouldn’t have without her unorthodox publisher.

Then again, what do I know? I’m the woman who would have rejected The Da Vinci Code after failing to get past the first page. People really shouldn’t seek out my opinion, much less place a value on it.

So, back to the client I’ve recently pointed Kindle-wards. (I still don’t quite believe this. I don’t even approve of Amazon, for goodness sake.) His novel is action-packed, fast-paced adventure; he writes a good car chase. It’s also crossover YA/adult. It’s not badly written, but sometimes he tries too hard to be ‘writerly’, and doesn’t quite get it when I suggest he tries to keep it simple. The biggest problem is that it’s the first of a series, probably a trilogy, and everything he’s told me suggests that this is the only way it’s truly going to make sense.

And I have a niggling feeling that it isn’t quite different enough, engaging enough, arresting enough to cut it in the big bad world of mainstream publishing.
If it was dreadful, I’d have to find a diplomatic way to tell him so. It’s not. It’s not bad. It’s just not blow-me-away good. But he’s in love with it. It’s been part of his life for five years to my certain knowledge, and quite probably longer. If it keeps boomeranging back for another five, it will break his heart.

And self-publishing on Kindle seems to work. The sales figures are to die for; even at 99 cents or 79 pence, there’s money to be made, and more important to most debut authors, lots of people like the look of it.

What I don’t know, of course, is how many books just sit there on Amazon’s Kindle page without accumulating any downloads at all. But on the evidence I have, that’s worth the risk.

I may live to regret this. But perhaps lifetime habits were made to be broken. I’ll keep you posted.

Not my cup of tea

Lynne Patrick

Mostly I love my work. This week for instance: I’ve put two budding authors in touch with agents, who I hope will enjoy reading the projects as much as I did, and also see the same potential and do what’s needed to turn potential into success. I like to think I had a hand in moving their work along a little too; it’s a rare piece of fiction that fails to benefit from a fresh pair of eyes.

But sometimes a project, or an author, comes along which/who I can’t connect with. It’s not that the work is especially bad, or the author is especially hard to deal with; it simply isn’t my cup of tea.

I’m not talking about a form or genre which is beyond my appraisal and editing skills: I know my limitations, and divert playwriting or poetry to colleagues with the appropriate expertise. The particular stumbling block I have in mind is fiction, which I’m led to believe I know a little about – but in this case of a type which, given the choice, I simply wouldn’t read. This hurdle doesn’t prevent me seeing where the narrative arc doesn’t run smooth, or the characters are inconsistent, or the plot is shot with holes; and poorly placed commas and missed apostrophes are the same no matter what the story’s about. But at its most basic – I just don’t like it.

The first law of freelancing is never turn down work; say no today, and tomorrow there may be no opportunity to say yes. And though I wouldn’t exactly starve on the street if the fees stopped coming in, my life would be a lot more frugal and far less rich in experience.

So what’s an editor to do?

It’s a fact of working life that there are always aspects of the job which are more enjoyable and inspiring than others. And mpty-mumble years of writing reviews has taught me a thing or two about recognizing quality (or the lack of it) even when what I’m seeing isn’t to my taste. So mostly I just grit my teeth and get on with it.

Fantasy fiction is a prime example. (Yeah, I know this is a blog about crime and mystery fiction; bear with me, I’ll get back to it.)

Unless it’s heavily laced with wry metaphorical humour, like Terry Pratchett’s delicious Discworld or Douglas Adams’s groundbreaking Hitchhiker’s Guide series, fantasy leaves me cold. There are more things in our own heaven and earth, Horatio, than one person could possibly comprehend in a single lifetime; why invent other heavens and earths?

But if I’m asked to appraise or edit a fantasy novel, I take a deep breath and plunge in anyway. There are a few extra conventions which don’t apply to real-world fiction, but mostly the rules are the same: unbreakable ones like the setting has to be consistent and there must be characters the reader can engage with; and there should preferably be a theme which actually means something, and the bits of plot need to connect up in a reasonably logical manner.

But I have to confess that when I’m working on a project I feel distanced from, a little voice not too far away keeps saying, I wish I was back in crime-land; doesn’t this fantasy world have an occasional murder and something that passes for a police force? When that’s done with skill and panache – Roz Southey’s brilliant Charles Patterson series, for instance – it pulls me right back into the middle of it and all is well again.

A favourite rejection ploy among agents and publishers is it’s well enough done, but I didn’t fall in love with it, and I need to if I’m to do right by it. In my last life I didn’t publish books I didn’t love – though when I was editing Criminal Tendencies, the short story collection I published a few years ago, a couple of the contributions made me blink and take a few steps back. I’m happy to admit that there are crime novels, and novelists, whose work I don’t get along with, and wearing my freelance hat I receive an occasional crime fiction manuscript for appraisal which makes me squirm.

So this week’s question is, do I trust the skillset I’ve built up over the years – OK, decades – and just get on and do the job? Or am I selling the author short if I’m not fully engaged with the work?

Work and play

Lynne Patrick

It’s been a more than usually interesting week. Last Thursday, the day Josh left London, I was there myself on a pleasure jaunt, though the timing was wrong and we didn’t get to meet. Which was a pity, as it would have made a lovely day even better, but maybe another year.

And now I’m just home from an arts festival at which I gave a talk and ran a murder mystery evening.

And that’s what’s on my mind at the moment. Festivals. Conventions. Events at which people with mutual interests gather. In particular, book festivals, which this one was, at least in part.

It was a small event: the first of its kind, and they have some work to do to make it grow, but nevertheless I met quite a few people who oiled the little grey cells and gave me food for thought.

These are some of those thoughts.

I’ve been to a few over the years. CrimeFest several times, the Harrogate Crime Festival two or three. Bouchercon just the once, and that, let me tell you, was one big experience. Several writers’ conferences too, where the writers were mostly unpublished and in search of advice on how to correct that situation.

At the other kind I met authors, listened to them speak, sometimes bought their books, sometimes didn’t. I made some good friends too. Mostly I tried to raise awareness of the books I was publishing; that, for me, was the point of being there.

But I’m not an author. So today’s question is, what purpose do festivals and conventions serve for authors?

At the one I’m just back from, two authors in particular made me think about this. One was new to it all, and kept apologizing for her inexperience – though her talk, to a dozen or so people, was fluent and entertaining, so there was no call for apologies.

When she fulfilled her advertised function, she had a lovely time simply chatting to people. It was probably the first time a group of strangers had told her, kept telling her, how much they enjoyed her book. There’s only one so far, and she was excited to find it on sale alongside much bigger names – and even more excited when people bought it and asked her to sign their copies.

So for her, a small festival was an ideal introduction to a world which will inevitably become more familiar as her career gains momentum. A huge morale-booster too; writing is a solitary occupation, and sometimes it’s important to be with people.

The second author was well-known: a headline act with a new book just out, so she was on the campaign trail to promote it. Her publicist came too, and their visit lasted little over twelve hours from arrival to departure. Her talk was fluent and entertaining as well, to about thirty people; afterwards she sold a handful of books, joined other speakers and volunteer organizers for dinner, then retired to her room, which, if it was anything like mine, was comfortable enough but not exactly four-star hotel standard. (The venue was a vast, old house with a lot of history and not very efficient heating.)
She left to catch a train before I was awake next morning, and I spoke to her only briefly, but I got a distinct sense that she was less than impressed. When I’ve encountered her at larger, well-established festivals, her audience has been in three figures and the accommodation rather more luxurious; maybe that had raised her expectations. I did hear tell of another author who had pulled out at the last minute; his previous experience led him to expect an audience of three hundred and a four-figure fee for his services, neither of which was available here.

Of course this was a British festival. Here the speakers earn a fee and often stay only as long as they need to do their thing. Festivals and conventions on the American model are slightly different; there, everyone, authors, fans, editors alike, pays to attend, and most people stay for the whole event. Which, if I’m honest, makes more sense to me; after all, authors are there to promote their books, and why should they be paid for doing exactly that? The same talk will do duty at a dozen events, so it’s not even as if a large amount of preparation is required. And there’s the social element; a lot of wine is consumed at book festivals. And the networking opportunities: I’ve seen useful relationships forged. It all feeds in to the career-building which is surely every author’s aim.

So are book festivals and events work, or play? What do authors expect from them? Any ideas?

The real thing

Lynne Patrick

A friend called by a couple of days ago and happened to notice that the bookshelves which cover all the available wall space in our living room were bare.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you’ve got rid of an awful lot of books!’

The strength of my reaction took me by surprise. I practically fell over myself in my haste to assure her that we haven’t actually culled a single one; they’re all packed away in boxes in my office at the end of the garden, in preparation for a refurbishment of our living space which will take place next week. It’s a little hard to paint behind bookshelves with the books, or even the shelves, still in situ.

The incident gave rise to two trains of thought. No, one of them wasn’t maybe it’s time I bought a Kindle. That day is still so far in the future that I can’t even see the horizon it’s over. But Kindles were part of the first one. It’s this: what’s going to happen to real books when even diehards like me have succumbed to machine reading?

Marilyn’s recent posts about the best way to handle and care for your books is part of this too. I do handle my books with great care, the many battered paperbacks as much as the handful of beautifully produced hardcovers. Hardbacks have been in decline for quite some time, but perhaps ten, or twenty, or a hundred years hence, the battered paperback will be the obsolete item, and hardbacks will have staged a revival as precious artifacts to be cherished, dusted regularly, handled gently and put on display like exquisite ornaments.

The second train of thought was a little more complex, and concerns not real books but real manuscripts. I’m old enough to remember the days when writers produced their work on typewriters. Publishers’ guidelines used to ask for typescripts, and, at least when I was setting out, mostly refused to accept handwritten work – though of course it wasn’t so very much earlier that pen and ink was the only option. These days the guidelines don’t even bother to mention handwritten manuscripts, and anything that isn’t produced on a computer is likely to get cursory attention; in fact, to a greater and greater extent, anything that isn’t submitted electronically meets the same fate, even though editors I used to meet always said they preferred to sit in an armchair with a pile of pages, rather than try to read 80,000 words on-screen. I suppose now they just load the electronic manuscript on to their Kindle.

The point I’m arriving at via a somewhat longwinded route is this: in the days of typewritten manuscripts, the ‘fair copy’ had a value. When making a relatively small amendment could mean retyping a large chunk of the finished work, if not the entire thing, writers took a lot of care to get it as near right as possible before sending it to seek its fortune. When the work is stored on a hard disk, and it’s possible to make major changes which can be reprinted at the touch of a key, the editing process can go on indefinitely.

Today’s question is, does this make us better writers, or just more picky ones?

And what are the implications for the future? Museums and universities keep archives of real manuscripts: typewritten or handwritten pages of work in progress, festooned with margin notes, crossings-out and amendments, dating back hundreds of years. Unless today’s writers of note are saving multiple drafts of their work for posterity, in a format that new generations of computers will be able to access, the days of these archives will soon be gone, and the process these writers went through to arrive at the magnum opus will no longer be available for study.

Would that be a sad thing, or just an inevitable consequence of technological progress?

The past is a foreign country

Lynne Patrick

For the past couple of weeks it’s been impossible to move, or at least to switch on the TV or open a newspaper, without coming face to face with the Titanic. (Quite possibly all the varieties of online information as well, but I prefer to sidestep them and keep TV and newspapers alive. Someone has to and it might as well be me...)

Titanic fever is rife because, of course, it’s a hundred years since the iceberg struck and history was made.

And by one of those strange quirks of happenstance, my current reading matter and TV viewing of choice have also used significant events from the past to hook the reader/viewer, though in both these cases the appeal is not so much to people with the romance of the Edwardian age in their souls, and rather more to those of a ‘certain age’, who actually remember the time in which the fiction is set.

All of which, in a convoluted way, has sent my thought processes off in the direction of history in fiction, and more to the point, where history ends and contemporary begins, and what we do about the grey area in the middle: two or three decades which don’t really qualify as either.

It’s a question I’ve faced on my own account several times recently, since I’ve had time to start a trawl through the boxfuls of old projects in my corner cupboard with a view to finding out if there was anything worth developing. Things I wrote ten or fifteen years ago were contemporary at the time; these days they hover around that grey area, certainly not historical in any meaningful sense because the story doesn’t turn on an event which was so significant that people still talk about it. The novel I finished in 2001, in which the in-story technology’s OK for the purpose, needed some adjustment to the ages certain characters were when certain key things happened in the past. I dealt with that, and I think it works. But the YA novel in which the kids didn’t possess a mobile phone between them, and had head-to-head conversations after school instead of heading straight for Facebook, went straight on the back burner.

So far it’s not an issue I’ve encountered wearing my editor’s hat, but I expect that’s because it’s been resolved further up the line, before the manuscript landed on my desk. I know it must happen because I faced it about once a month when I was publishing.
The covering letter would say something like: This novel is set in the early 1990s, because in those days policing was about catching criminals, not filling in forms. Or, more honestly, I decided on a North Yorkshire setting in the 1980s because it’s a time and place I’m familiar with.

My inner reaction to both (after I was done with Hey, young whippersnapper author, that’s my early middle age you’re consigning to the far past! for the first version) was Nobody said this writing business was easy; stop taking the lazy way out and do some proper research into the world as it is now. What I usually said in the rejection letter to the author was something like Most bookshops like to divide their fiction sections into Historical and Contemporary, and they have difficulty with anything that’s strictly speaking neither.

Sometimes there’s a point to it. Take the book and the TV drama I alluded to: both authors set out to explore the way the past impacts on the present, and how the reality of life here and now compares (and more often contrasts) with the dreams we built when we’re young. Which is absolutely fine: a valid use of the fairly recent past, with a well-drawn setting which really does evoke the time with plenty of appropriate details. And as long as the setting really is well-drawn and properly charts a period which in fifty years’ time really will count as historical, I don’t see a problem.

And of course the Titanic anniversary is a great opportunity for what British television does best of all: the big costume drama with lots of emotion and rattling of the class system cage.

But am I alone in being turned right off by fiction which is set in a badly defined time fifteen or twenty years ago, for no other reason than that’s when the author was young?

Meteorology, mindbendin and author relations

Lynne Patrick

I’ll have to beg your indulgence this week, blog-followers. It’s possible bordering on likely that this post will veer between vaguely garbled and totally unintelligible. My brain is in a state of even more addledness than usual, for two reasons.

One, I woke up this morning to find the world outside my bedroom window covered in a disconcertingly thick layer of the nasty cold white stuff.

And two, I’ve been reading Jasper Fforde.

Snow. Not just a picturesque sugar-frosting, but inches of the damned stuff. What’s that about? It’s April, for goodness sake. Spring. Last week it felt almost like summer – clear blue sky, temperature in the high sixties, balmy breeze, trees covered in blossom. Now it’s leaden grey sky, temperature in the thirties, north wind with arctic knives in it, daffodils flattened under an icy blanket.

Fortunately it’s picked a week when there’s nowhere I have to go and I don’t have to take the car out, so I suppose it’s not all bad. I must have mentioned the many and huge advantages of an office twenty yards from my house; days like today are when I like it best.

But snow. In April. Just when we thought winter was in retreat and we could breathe easy for a few months. Is this the shape of vacation yet to come? We’re coming to the States in a few weeks, and I still haven’t forgotten the year we visited Colorado and crossed the Vail Pass the last week in May, through almost a foot of it – enough to bring the TV cameras out. This time we’re coming to the east coast, Niagara, New York State, maybe some of New England. Any thoughts on places to avoid for weather-related purposes in early June will be welcome.

As if that wasn’t enough to addle my brain, I’ve just finished the latest in Jasper Fforde’s hilarious and mindbending Thursday Next series. I kid you not, this series gets under your defences and leaves you wondering what’s real, what’s fictional, and what the hell the difference is anyway.

If you’ve read him, you’ll understand. If you haven’t, it’s impossible to explain what he does, except that he manipulates fiction in a way that shines a searing satirical light on fiction, reality and the nature of imagination and still manages to amuse, entertain and beguile. When he’s not making me laugh, he scares me a little; he’s one of those authors who leaves me wondering what arcane knowledge he’s party to which ordinary folk can’t access.

Before matters meteorological and Ffordian invaded my consciousness, today’s subject for discussion was going to be authors, and whether readers should, for their own comfort, steer clear of situations in which they might make the acquaintance of their favourites. It came up in conversation the other day, with friends who are almost as bookaholic as I am, and I wanted to float it for a wider audience. (Well, there were only two other people in the conversation, and I sometimes get as many as three comments on my post. That counts as a wider audience, doesn’t it?) So I’ll just touch on it briefly, and see if it provokes a reaction.

I’ve been to quite a few festivals, conventions and other book-related events over the years, and met quite a few authors as a result. A couple have become good friends, and I’m on ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ terms with several more. And I read their books. Not out of duty of friendship, but because they’re great books. I wonder, though, if I would have started to read their books without that initial impetus provided by meeting them and getting along with them.

And the other side of the coin: a couple of times I’ve met people whose books I’ve begun to read, found that they weren’t people I could get along with at all – and stopped reading them. (No, I’m not going to name names; I can’t afford the legal fees. But authors are people in all their infinite variety after all.)

So here’s my question. Maybe even two questions. Does acquaintance with the author affect the experience of reading the books? And should I allow acquaintance with the author to affect that experience? Or should the books stand on my bookshelves on their own merits?

That’s three questions, isn’t it? I said my brain was addled.

The view from across the sea

Lynne Patrick

Something I’ve never been able to get my head around is why a book is popular in one country and not another. Especially when the two countries speak approximately the same language, so it can’t be down to the translator’s art.

The thought started going round my mind again this week, when I found a new edition of an early title by an American author I enjoy; it was originally published nearly twenty years ago, but only in the USA, carrying the strong implication that the publisher didn’t think it would succeed this side of the ocean. Fortunately this particular author’s early work will only enhance the reputation built by her more recent titles, though this isn’t always the case. Sometimes bringing out the backlist to bask in the reflected glory proves to be not a good idea.

It reminded me of an author I met whose book had been sold to a German publisher long before a British one saw the light. And one train of thought led to another, as they do, and I began to make lists in my head. Brit authors in the US, for instance: why do Val McDermid and Mark Billingham do well, but Minette Walters, who is a surefire bestseller over here, doesn’t seem to press the right buttons over there. I don’t think it’s down to location; all three place their narratives very firmly in a part of the UK which is recognizable if you’re familiar with it, and sufficiently well realized to seem genuine if you’re not. As does one of my top five American authors, Julia Spencer-Fleming. I’m planning to visit Clare Ferguson’s part of the US later this year, and I don’t doubt I’ll know it when I see it.

And to balance up the previous paragraph a little, I know of at least three people who will share my total incomprehension at why Julia hasn’t been snapped up by one of the big publishing houses this side of the Atlantic. Then again, it gives me a reason, if I needed one, to visit the USA as often as possible.

Sometimes an author, like a prophet, is almost a stranger in his own land. Well, maybe not quite a stranger, but one of my top ten authors Stephen Booth still dines out on the story of the time he was at an American book festival with Ian Rankin and found himself surrounded by fans while Rankin, who he openly admits is far more famous over here, was almost ignored.

Sometimes it’s not authors: it’s specific books. When I was publishing, our US sales were mostly steady, occasionally disappointing, and a few times far better than in the UK. In one case we had to reprint when the book had only been out over there for a couple of weeks; the memory still makes me smile. In two cases, titles which were well into a series suddenly captured the American imagination, when the previous ones had done merely OK. Just in case they’re reading this, I won’t embarrass the authors by naming names, but I expect they know who they are. If I’d been able to figure out the difference between the OK and the better sellers, it’s possible both I and those authors would be a lot richer than we are.

Is it all in the lap of the gods? Or is there some secret formula I’ve been missing all these years?

And will eBooks mean that national boundaries will shortly be irrelevant anyway?

House style, and other editing hurdles

Lynne Patrick

When I began freelance editing for publishing companies I didn’t run myself (there has only been the one that I did run, in case you were wondering), I received a couple of pages of guidelines to house style: things like double or single quote marks, -ise or -ize endings, how to formulate abbreviations, that kind of small but consequential detail.

It wasn’t unfamiliar; in the company I did run myself, we brought in freelance editors a couple of times a year, and we issued a similar document. One of the perks of the job was that it allowed me to indulge some of my favourite editorial minutiae: things like on to, not onto; OK, not okay; jail, not gaol; all right, not alright; and while and among, not whilst and amongst.

Some of those details are so firmly lodged in the nerve path that joins my reading eyes to my editing hand that I have to make a conscious effort not to ‘edit’ them when all I’m supposed to be doing is reading a manuscript and offering some feedback. It’s the same with misplaced commas and apostrophes; in some cases correcting them is outside my brief, but I can’t guarantee I’ve never done it on autopilot. If I’ve done it to your work and you’re reading this – I’m sorry! Not for the apostrophes and commas, but if I’ve inadvertently changed a spelling or a phrase when copy-editing wasn’t what you needed from me, I apologize most sincerely.

But whatever form of editing I’m undertaking, the fact remains that some things are going to leap off the page at me, and distract my attention from the job I’m really supposed to be doing. Heck, they even distract my attention when all I’m doing is reading a book that’s been through all the editing processes, found a publisher and arrived in my to-read pile.

Here, for your entertainment and possibly enlightenment, are a few of them.

Coming down the stairs, she closed the front door is a physical impossibility, as is ‘This is good lemonade,’ she said, taking a drink from the glass. And don’t get me started on empty bottles of wine.

Characters with green eyes. Especially bright emerald green. I must have mentioned this before. Very few people outside Scandinavia have green eyes, black- brown- or sallow-skinned people hardly at all. It’s usually a variation of olive green: very rarely indeed anything brighter. Yet there is a character with green eyes in 99% of crime novels I read, and the green is often unnaturally bright without recourse to tinted contact lenses. I know characters have to be distinctive, but let’s make them real as well, shall we, guys?

Cars with blacked-out windows. What a cop-out. I know they exist, but as a plot device they’re about on a par with the victim’s stopped watch that indicates time of death. Especially if the watch is a Rolex.

Characters with names ending in S. Not a problem most of the time, but a nightmare when it comes to plurals and possessives, and worst of all both of them together. After more years in this business than I choose to count, I like to think I’m pretty well au fait with how to use apostrophes, but this one has been known to make my head spin. It’s even worse when there’s a vowel immediately before the S. Think about it. I once knew a guy called Menezes. And Mr Menezes’s wife. Which makes them the Menezeses. And they have a house, which is the Menezeses’s house... excuse me, I need to go and lie down in a darkened room for a few moments.

There, that’s better.

Please understand, all the above, and probably a few more which my memory is protecting me from at the moment, are purely personal preferences; given the number of times I encounter them in published books, it’s plain that plenty of other people don’t regard them as empirically wrong. Maybe I’m just picky.

But picky is what some publishers are. Go figure.

When is a review not a review?

That is the question.
Reviews in general are a sensitive subject, but I hope I’m on fairly safe ground here, at least with my blogmates; since we don’t have a full-time reviewer on the team at the moment, and everyone else is five thousand miles away across the ocean, I don’t think anyone will pole up on my doorstep with a baseball bat.
OK, so when is a review not a review?
How about, when it’s a way of bigging up your chums’ new books? Or delivering a put-down to someone who has trodden on your toes?
Don’t get me wrong; the vast majority of reviewers are fair and honest, generous with praise when they truly believe it’s deserved, but frank about the flaws when they can’t be ignored. There are plenty of review columns and sites I consult regularly, reviewers whose opinions I actively seek.
But once in a while...
I once read a review of a book by a good friend which claimed he wrote ‘a decent, flat-footed prose.’ A sense of damning with faint praise there, wouldn’t you say? I raised it with my friend, a bit gingerly since like every writer I know including myself can be a tad thin-skinned about these things. He brushed it off with a laugh that didn’t even sound forced. ‘Oh, the guy’s just getting me back,’ he told me. ‘I reviewed his last book and said the writing sounded like a child’s school composition in places.’
The friend died a couple of years ago so I think it’s safe to repeat the story. Ever since, though, whenever I read an unfavourable review of one writer’s book by another, I’m left wondering when the pair of them crossed swords and what the spat was about. There’s certainly a case for leaving novel reviews to people who don’t write novels themselves.
I’m not sure if that kind of reviewer is more or less worrying than the kind who heaps glowing praise on everything, but only reviews a limited range of authors. Only yesterday I checked out a review site I sometimes visit; as on many websites there’s a tab at the bottom inviting comments, and one pointed out that every book reviewed on the site is described as brilliant and highly recommended. I may have imagined it, but I thought there was a distinct edge there. I’d read the book being reviewed, and I have to say I wasn’t exactly impressed, but the reviewer used words like rich, pacy and masterly. And on reflection, I realized that this particular reviewer has never, as far as I can recall, posted a review that didn’t praise and recommend the book.
I don’t review books, at least not often, though I would if I was asked. But in one of my several lives I do review live theatre. In the course of this work I’ve become acquainted with quite a few less-than-famous actors and a handful of equally unsung directors and producers, all of who work regularly at our little local theatre. Some of them have grown into good chums, and I hate to hurt their feelings. But to my mind the reviewer’s job is to tell it how it is, or at least how s/he sees it. I don’t think any of them would thank me for heaping praise on a production that didn’t work, for failing to notice that a performance wasn’t up to the actor’s usual standard, or, as happened recently, an actor past youth’s second or third blush had begun to lose his touch. As it happened this was a visiting player, not one of those ‘regulars’, but they know I’d do the same if it was one of them. If I start to praise my friends unstintingly and save the brickbats for incomers, my credibility is shot to pieces in no time and nobody bothers to read my reviews any more – a lose-lose situation if ever there was one.
Unstinting praise is the province of publicists, not reviewers. A review is surely only a review when the reviewer’s opinion can be trusted to be informed and honest.

Absolute ownership, and related musings

Lynne Patrick

A lot of murmuring seems to be happening on the edges of my life at the moment, about copyright. It’s something all writers have a vested interest in, so since nothing else is happening in the crime fiction area of my life this week, I’m going to take the opportunity to muse randomly on the subject for a few hundred words.

I don’t know a single writer who wouldn’t want to claim absolute ownership of the words which appear in print with his/her name attached – but there seems to be a school of thought which claims that copyright limits people’s right of access to written material by requiring – shock, horror – payment to be made to the author.

At the same time, the very notion that essays, dissertations and other writings of similar ilk might not be absolutely, completely and totally original – that they might contain someone else’s words, downloaded from the internet, for instance – is regarded with equal shock and horror.

Seems to me some people need to make up their minds.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not for a moment supporting the right to plagiarize, and I shall continue to regard an author’s copyright as sacrosanct till my last breath. It’s just that the two concepts I’ve described seem to contradict each other.

Aspiring authors often ask me how they go about protecting their work to avoid infringement of their copyright. The answer, of course, is that there’s no need to do anything, because your copyright belongs to you and no one can take it away unless you decide to sign over the rights in exchange for life-changing sums of money – and you certainly shouldn’t do for for any less.

In fact there’s actually not a great deal you can do, except develop a more trusting nature. Agents, editors and the vast army of people involved in producing books are by and large honest folk who have a job to do; they’re not going to steal anyone’s magnum opus and publish it under their own name, which seems to be the fear besetting the poor insecure authors who feel a need to ask this question.

But what of the right to quote chunks of someone’s published work, properly attributed of course, for some non-nefarious but possibly lucrative purpose? Or to photocopy entire pages, maybe to use as visual aids or examples in one of the burgeoning plethora of creative writing courses available across the English-speaking world? Is there a way writers can claim a royalty when that happens?

Every now and again I get a phone call from someone from the Performing Rights Society, wanting to know why I’m not registered with them. The reason is that I don’t play music for the entertainment of my workforce – and the reason for that is I don’t have a workforce. But try telling them that. They take a lot of repeated convincing that there’s a) just me in the office, and b) no music playing in the background as I and my non-existent wage slaves ply our daily trade. The point, though, is that if I did employ people and even switched on a radio during working hours, I’d be liable for royalties which would then be paid to the people who wrote the music.

Here in the UK we do try to apply the same principle to the written word. An organization called the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society serves a similar purpose to the PFS. Any writer can join for a modest fee; the idea is that you register your published work with them, they collect fees and royalties for quotation and photocopying, and everyone gets an annual cut of the takings.

But you have to join. It’s up to the writer; the ALCS don’t chase up potential copyright infringers the way the PFS appear to.

I suspect that as long as writers join up words to make stories copyright will continue to occupy a place somewhere between vexed question and minefield. I don’t claim to have any answers. There probably aren’t any.

Endgame

Lynne Patrick

I wonder how many authors, when they begin their first novel, go into it with the intention of writing a series based on the same set of characters, or at least the same protagonist.

How many bad guys was Jack Reacher meant to see off? How many crimes was Inspector Morse supposed to solve? Come to that, how many clients was Sherlock Holmes going to take on?

There’s a school of thought that suggests that series fiction is a publishing invention, and not the authors’ idea at all. It has all kinds of marketing advantages: a loyalty factor will kick in; backlist will sell to readers who come in halfway through and want to catch up; it can be promoted as a ‘brand’, with family-feel covers and a ready-made strapline for the front; the author will probably work more quickly (and therefore produce more books) because some of the key elements of fiction are already in place; TV producers with an eye to an ongoing franchise might take an interest... you see where I’m coming from with this.

So more power to authors like Ann Cleeves, one of my favourite Brit crime writers, for stating right at the start that her Shetland series would be four books and not a syllable more. Four major crimes is pushing the suspension of disbelief on a remote group of islands where in real life shoplifting is enough crime to make headlines; stringing it out any further would have risked looking just plain silly.

Without that kind of common sense and the willpower to call a halt, once a series is under way it gathers its own momentum like one of those huge trucks that thunder down the dual carriageway, and can be just as hard to stop. And because of the increased earning potential of a series, few publishers are going to want it to come to an end. So we have unlikely situations like a quiet coastal town or a group of rural villages where there’s a murder every week. What’s more, readers seem to like it – maybe in some kind of backwards way it makes them feel safe.

So what’s a poor author to do? How does a popular series reach a full stop?

The obvious solution is to kill off the protagonist; there’s no coming back from that.

That’s how Colin Dexter dealt with Morse – though a TV company promoted poor old Lewis and gave him a backstory, so spinoff books are no doubt only a heartbeat away. And Sherlock Holmes survived the Reichenbach Falls; and the rumour that Reacher hadn’t survived the crunch ending of 61 Hours proved unsubstantiated.

Reginald Hill actually wrote a book called The Death of Dalziel, though since there are two subsequent titles in the series it’s not giving too much away to say he doesn’t actually die. And now we’ll never find out what exit, if any, Reg Hill planned for his large hero with a philosophical sidekick.
Sue Grafton has four more bites at the Kinsey Milhone cherry before she has to rethink her title format. Will she regard that as a good place to bow out, I wonder. It’ll be interesting to see...

My old chum Maureen Carter ‘rested’ her gutsy heroine Bev Morriss back in 2010, following a major body-blow at the end of book #7. She’s currently writing another great series, but there are those of us who really, really wish Bev would come back. But who knows? Maybe she’s taken one knock too many.

One thing is certain: however successful it is, no series should be allowed to continue past its natural life. The doesn’t apply to any of the above, but I’m sure we all have our own thoughts on people who should have called it a day a few books ago. So, short of untimely demise, what does an author do to draw a line under a series when s/he (or his/her readers) has/have had enough of it?

I have absolutely no idea. Have you?

What's in a name?

Lynne Patrick

An interesting discussion over the second cup of breakfast coffee this morning.

I’m reading a Tess Gerritsen I found in the supermarket – not that I make too much of a habit of buying books in the supermarket, but they’re the second best place to buy backlist. I’m allergic to Amazon and the bookshops I frequent lack the shelf space for entire oeuvres. And I only recently discovered Ms Gerritsen. Oh, I knew she existed – I just hadn’t read her.

Anyway – I’m reading this Tess Gerritsen which, it turns out, was first published in 1999. And the protagonist’s name is – wait for it – Emma Watson.

The question that arose was this: if the Harry Potter phenomenon had already been under way when she wrote that book (it wasn’t – the first film was in 2001) would she a) have given the character that name in the first place, and b) been allowed to keep it if she had?

The answer has to be no in both cases or either, if for no other reason than that a name that carries so much baggage which is completely unrelated to the book will surely be a distraction to the reader.

And there are other, potentially more pressing reasons.

When I was publishing, I used to advise my authors to Google the names of their main characters, just in case there was any reason not to use them. Like, we might get sued. This probably wasn’t a serious possibility 99.9% of the time – but love it, hate it or laugh at it, the litigious society is an unfortunate fact of life. It only needed one fictional serial killer to bear the same name, however inadvertently, as someone a little, um, over-sensitive, and lawyers might have been exchanging letters before you could say High Court. And it’s OK saying all publicity is good – but if the end product of the resulting media coverage was a large bill for damages, the cost could have outweighed the benefit by a margin too large to swallow.

I keep thinking I should slide in an ‘allegedly’ there, just to make sure I’m covered.

There was only ever a problem on one occasion, and that didn’t involve lawyers, for which I still thank whoever’s up there whenever I think about it. It turned out that the character in question was in the same line of work (no, not serial killing, but it could have been tricky) as a real person of the same name – and we didn’t find out until a whole lot of advance information about the book had already gone out. We managed to pull most of it back, and it all happened a few years ago now, so I don’t think any harm was done, but I’m telling you, the sweat stood out on my forehead for a few days.

Trouble is, people are protective about their names. In one of my many lives I run workshops on writing fiction, one of which focuses on developing characters. I’m often asked if it’s OK to base fictional characters on real people, maybe family or friends; the supplementary question is invariably, what are the chances that they’ll recognize themselves? This is my answer: I’ve written a lot of short fiction in my time, and much of it got into print; many – OK, most – of my characters had elements of people I know.

And no real person has ever identified him- or herself. On the other hand, a couple of times a character had the same first name as a friend or family member, though I took great care not to use similar personality or appearance traits. Yet each time I had to work hard to convince the real person that the character wasn’t based on him or her.

Love it or hate it, the label your parents laid on you is yours. Never mind that there are six other Lynne Patricks listed on LinkedIn and who knows how many on Facebook: my name is part of my identity. And I think I’d rather not find it attached to a fictional serial killer, however great the book. Though I probably wouldn’t sue.

What's in a name?

An interesting discussion over the second cup of breakfast coffee this morning.
I’m reading a Tess Gerritsen I found in the supermarket – not that I make too much of a habit of buying books in the supermarket, but they’re the second best place to buy backlist. I’m allergic to Amazon and the bookshops I frequent lack the shelf space for entire oeuvres. And I only recently discovered Ms Gerritsen. Oh, I knew she existed – I just hadn’t read her.
Anyway – I’m reading this Tess Gerritsen which, it turns out, was first published in 1999. And the protagonist’s name is – wait for it – Emma Watson.
The question that arose was this: if the Harry Potter phenomenon had already been under way when she wrote that book (it wasn’t – the first film was in 2001) would she a) have given the character that name in the first place, and b) been allowed to keep it if she had?
The answer has to be no in both cases or either, if for no other reason than that a name that carries so much baggage which is completely unrelated to the book will surely be a distraction to the reader.
And there are other, potentially more pressing reasons.
When I was publishing, I used to advise my authors to Google the names of their main characters, just in case there was any reason not to use them. Like, we might get sued. This probably wasn’t a serious possibility 99.9% of the time – but love it, hate it or laugh at it, the litigious society is an unfortunate fact of life. It only needed one fictional serial killer to bear the same name, however inadvertently, as someone a little, um, over-sensitive, and lawyers might have been exchanging letters before you could say High Court. And it’s OK saying all publicity is good – but if the end product of the resulting media coverage was a large bill for damages, the cost could have outweighed the benefit by a margin too large to swallow.
I keep thinking I should slide in an ‘allegedly’ there, just to make sure I’m covered.
There was only ever a problem on one occasion, and that didn’t involve lawyers, for which I still thank whoever’s up there whenever I think about it. It turned out that the character in question was in the same line of work (no, not serial killing, but it could have been tricky) as a real person of the same name – and we didn’t find out until a whole lot of advance information about the book had already gone out. We managed to pull most of it back, and it all happened a few years ago now, so I don’t think any harm was done, but I’m telling you, the sweat stood out on my forehead for a few days.
Trouble is, people are protective about their names. In one of my many lives I run workshops on writing fiction, one of which focuses on developing characters. I’m often asked if it’s OK to base fictional characters on real people, maybe family or friends; the supplementary question is invariably, what are the chances that they’ll recognize themselves? This is my answer: I’ve written a lot of short fiction in my time, and much of it got into print; many – OK, most – of my characters had elements of people I know. And no real person has ever identified him- or herself. On the other hand, a couple of times a character had the same first name as a friend or family member, though I took great care not to use similar personality or appearance traits. Yet each time I had to work hard to convince the real person that the character wasn’t based on him or her.
Love it or hate it, the label your parents laid on you is yours. Never mind that there are six other Lynne Patricks listed on LinkedIn and who knows how many on Facebook: my name is part of my identity. And I think I’d rather not find it attached to a fictional serial killer, however great the book. Though I probably wouldn’t sue.

While we're on the subject... or, social media: an alternative view

Lynne Patrick

Like every writer I know, I have a cupboard full of projects which refused to get properly started, reached the end but didn’t go anywhere, or were abandoned halfway through. Now I sometimes have a little time to take stock, that cupboard provides interesting rummage fodder. This week I started revisiting a novel I wrote many years ago, when I was going through a YA phase. (Writing YA, not being one; the being one phase came to an end a lot more years ago than that.)

It’s far enough in the past to allow me to be fairly objective about it, and parts of it are... OK. Except... it’s a contemporary story, but I wrote it so long ago that the characters seem to live in a different world. They don’t use the internet to research their coursework assignments. They don’t even have coursework assignments; this was an exam-only era. They don’t use mobile phones to text their friends as soon as they’re out of sight. And quaintly, they help Mom with the gardening or house cleaning as displacement activity from homework, rather than heading for the laptop and the world of social media.

Yes, folks, there was life before Facebook.

So now I have a problem. Do I leave the novel as it is, set in its own pre-technology world? Or do I thread in some references to all the above, to bring it into the 21st century? Since it currently inhabits the publishing nomansland which is neither contemporary or historical, I think the second option is the only serious one.

And that’s where I hit the real problem.

I’m not on Facebook. I’m not on Twitter. Heck, I don’t even have a mobile phone. The language of that world is alien to me. And absolutely nothing I read or hear about any of these three staples of the technological society gives me the smallest desire to change the situation.

I’ve resisted mobile phones from the outset. ‘Staying connected’ has no particular charm for me; if I’m off-duty I like to stay off-duty, and that means unavailable except to people I choose to be with. There are times when it might be useful to have one – delayed trains, car breakdowns – but I can stay in touch with friends and family without texting them a dozen times a day.

And Facebook and Twitter... What are they all about?

The view from outside is pretty clear. Marketing, that’s what. Displaying one’s wares. Selling one’s goods.

I used to think Facebook was a way of staying in touch with friends and family at a distance, or linking up with people from school or college with whom you’d lost contact. But how does that square with the tag on the soup carton or chocolate wrapper inviting me to ‘friend’ the manufacturer, or the TV show suggesting I ‘tweet’ my opinion about current issues, so they can add me to the viewer statistics which help them sell more advertising?

So much for social media. It’s not about keeping in touch; it’s about saying look at me, then buy what I’m selling.

I should have seen it coming. It’s happened at every stage of technological progress. Websites began as an adjunct to company brochures: an extra information source. Now you don’t exist if you don’t have one; every author, published or not, has to have a website. Google began as a way of tracking down information; now it’s yet another advertising medium.

Everyone reading this probably has a website, knows how to get their name on the first page of Google, tweets and friends in their sleep, and probably wouldn’t know any other way to live, so forgive me if I’m stating the obvious. But to me the obvious is a simple question: why? The only answer I can come up with is, because everyone does it. But think about it. Doesn’t this smother-fest of self-promotion and marketing quickly become self-defeating when absolutely everyone is doing it? There’s so much stuff out there that any novelty value was worn out long ago, and no one has time to look at a tiny fraction of it.

A suggestion for a new way of marketing a book: refuse to release any information about the author; create a sense of enigma; make the background as much of a mystery as the plot. It could work. At least until the novelty wears off.

For the moment, though, I think my YA novel will have to go back in the cupboard. The characters would need to inhabit a foreign country I have no inclination to explore.
And anyway, without all the tweeting and friending and telling the world it’s here, it would never sell.

Good news all round

Lynne Patrick

Freelance editing has always been a slightly precarious way to make a living: in fact, for a number of years now, rather more than slightly, especially for the likes of me.

Since publishing became big business and the so-called frills and deadwood got pared away, in-house editors have been cut loose in their hundreds – and people who have worked in house have an advantage, in that they have the right contacts to get first dibs at any freelance work that happens to be going.

But things are looking up, and it’s largely down to eBooks. In the wake of several high-profile boo-boos with eBooks by well-known authors, a school of thought seems to be growing that maybe books do need editors after all, if only to put right what the formatting software messes up. And more than that: not only have I read three articles this week which suggest strongly that people who decide to self-publish their magnum opus as an eBook should get it edited first, but also I’ve discovered a couple of publishers’ websites who make the same recommendation regarding manuscripts for submission.

I know I’m not alone when I roll my eyes, fling my arms wide and exclaim, At last! Haven’t I been saying exactly that for years!

So it looks as if my job is safe, at least for the time being. The former in-house editors will still get first dibs of manuscripts submitted to their former employers; but if people get the message that a fresh pair of eyes will pick up all manner of glitches that an author is too close to see, maybe there’ll be enough work to go round.

Which is good news for me, but even better news for the authors. Because if a novel contains typos, or continuity breakdowns, or ‘facts’ that clearly haven’t been researched or checked, it’s not the editor who gets blamed by the vast majority of readers. So one of an editor’s prime roles is to stop the author looking sloppy or unknowledgeable.

I learned early in the game that authors don’t always realize that there’s a gap in their knowledge. It may be something as basic as punctuation. I’m often astounded by how many professional wordsmiths don’t know the difference between its and it’s. Or maybe a fact or a date or a sequence of events that they genuinely believed they had right is actually wrong. I learned that the hard way: I read a review of a book I’d edited, and found that the critic had spotted several historical errors which I’d not only missed but hadn’t even realized were there. I cussed and threw things at the wall at the time, but afterwards I was grateful to that critic; the review had the effect of making sure I raised my game for future books.

One recent example was the use of an umbrella in a novel set in the early 18th century. When I saw it, I assumed the author had checked the date the umbrella was invented, and when they came into general use. But it stayed in my mind. Google, when it isn’t causing controversy and making a bid for world domination, is a very useful invention. It turned out that the umbrella wasn’t around for several decades after the book was set.

The issue there wasn’t so much that the author didn’t know; it was that s/he (gender disguised to protect the innocent!) didn’t know s/he didn’t know! And if the book had gone to print in its original form, you can bet your life some critic would have picked it up.

Of course, editors aren’t omniscient, and I don’t know one who would claim to be so. Mistakes will always still slip through. But that’s a whole other blog post...

Tell me a story

Lynne Patrick

When Reginald Hill died a few weeks ago, it started me thinking. Specifically, his comment about choosing to write a crime novel rather than a Booker Prize-winning tome started me thinking about The Great Debate about ‘genre’ versus ‘literary’ fiction – and yes, the quote marks are deliberate.

Cards on the table: I stand firmly in the middle of this debate, wondering what all the fuss is about, and asking whether the people who draw these distinctions actually read any so-called genre fiction. (I’m well aware that there are a lot of people who don’t read so-called literary fiction – but I rather think they’re not the ones who engage in the debate.)

I like to think my tastes are eclectic, and my to-read shelf contains books which the people who categorize these things would place firmly on one side or other of the divide. David Lodge and Louise Erdrich sit alongside Lee Child and Tess Gerritsen. Sometimes I’m in the mood for fast-paced action and adventure; other times I need something more slow-moving and reflective.

I suppose it all goes back to a pretty fundamental question: why do we read at all? For me it’s much the same as going to the theatre: I want to be entertained, and made to think, and preferably both at the same time.

There’s a school of thought – not one to which I necessarily subscribe – which claims that genre fiction does the former, and literary novels do the latter.

My question is, how do you categorize the kind of book that does both?

I’m sure we all have our own favourite examples. Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River would be on many lists. More recently, John Hart’s The Last Child. And how about Philip Pullman’s majestic His Dark Materials trilogy?

The quality all three of these have in common is that they tell a rattling good story. And isn’t that the whole point of fiction? Stories are the stuff of life. Once upon a time they were the main teaching medium of many societies: probably still are in a lot of places.

In my experience that’s where ‘literary’ fiction often falls down. Not always; that’s why David Lodge and Louise Erdrich are on my shelf. But often. I’m in the middle of a ‘literary’ novel which had better remain nameless. It’s written with great skill and thought; the characters are intricately described and clearly live full lives inside the author’s mind; and their world is so detailed I could step inside it tomorrow and know where to find the car keys and the coffee. But when I reached page 100 I put it down without a wrench, stepped back, and asked myself what had actually happened so far. The answer was, not a great deal. There was no story: just an account of a family’s life at a point which could, I suppose, be called a crisis. I shall finish it, but I’m not aching to get back to it, and I shall certainly have no desire at all to re-read it. Unlike any of the three mentioned above (and just about everything Reginald Hill ever wrote), which matched it blow for blow for character and background, and also told a cracking good tale.

Now, that’s great fiction.

What's in a name?

Lynne Patrick

I was going to post about this last week when the furore was still raging, but the death of one of my favourite authors pushed it to the back of my mind. Which, actually, is where it belongs. But it does serve to illustrate at least one valid point, so I think I’ll go with it anyway.

(Cries of, what’s she blethering about? and get to the point, woman!)

OK. If you live in the UK, you won’t have missed it. If you live in the US, you probably did.

Waterstone’s. Or more recently, Waterstones.

For the benefit of blog-followers across the water, Waterstones is as close as the UK comes to Barnes and Noble. Not as big, and these days a tad less like a supermarket and more like an old-fashioned bookshop, but nonetheless a large national chain of shops with a branch in just about every town.

It recently changed hands, and for the third time in less than six years is undergoing what the marketing guys call a rebranding.

And boy, have they caused a commotion. And all because of an apostrophe.

Don’t get me wrong. I can and do wax eloquent on the subject of misplaced apostrophes. The correct use of it’s and its is right at the top of my list of issues to address when I’m line-editing. And if there’s one thing guaranteed to make my teeth grind of their own accord, it’s the all-too-ubiquitous greengrocer’s apostrophe (APPLE’S 50p A POUND, POTATO’S 12p. You probably call it something else in the US – the Dan Quayle syndrome, perhaps) which seems to drop like litter into brochures, website text and all manner of public communication. There’s even a shop a few miles from us which welcomes customers with a board that reads WE ARE O’PEN. (Yes, really.)

But Waterstone’s, or Waterstones. OK, so they’ve decided to remove the apostrophe from the name, partly in a bid to make it easier to search for on the www, and partly, I’m guessing, just because they wanted to change something now they’re under new management, and the brand is so well established that changing anything major wasn’t an option. But honestly, what’s the problem here? Why is it such a huge issue for punctuation purists, including the National Society of the Prevention of Abuse of the Apostrophe, or whatever politically correct moniker they give themselves?

It’s a name, and the last I heard, the law said you could name yourself, or your child, or your business, whatever you like. I was reminded of a guy I knew many years ago, who used to get on his high horse about someone who worked for him whose name was Derrick. A derrick, he’d say, was a kind of crane; the ‘correct’ spelling of the man’s name was Derek.

I forbore to point out that the crane derrick was actually named for its inventor, who was called, yes, you guessed – Derrick. But I did (gently; he was bigger than me) suggest that the poor guy was entitled to call himself whatever he liked.

And so are Waterstones. Removing that apostrophe isn’t setting a bad example to customers whose understanding of the apostrophe is a tad hazy. Nor is it an illustration of falling standards in the correct use of grammar and punctuation.

It’s an exercising of a democratic right to spell your name exactly as you choose. Or a big fuss about nothing at all from some people who need to get a life.

A gentleman and a gentle man

Lynne Patrick

When someone famous dies, lots of people have their own story about him or her.

Reginald Hill, one of the most brilliant crime writers that ever lived, died last week, far too soon, (seventy-five is absolutely no age at all these days), and this is my story about him.

About four years ago I decided to put together a collection of short stories with a crime theme, and publish it in support of two breast cancer charities, one in the UK, the other in the US. Publishing was always a steep learning curve for me, and I stumbled around this particular project without much idea of how to begin.

First off was to approach a whole lot of authors, to ask them to donate stories: some were hardly known at all, others known to crime fiction aficionados, a few very well-known indeed.

Reginald Hill came top of the third list – and he was the first to reply. By return e-mail. He liked the sound of the project, but he wanted more information.

And quite right too. I could have been anyone, asking him to give away his work for no fee. At that stage I hadn’t even finalized which charities the book was going to support. I told you I was stumbling around. Everything in the wrong order.

Reg Hill’s first contribution to the project was to force me to look at what I was doing and focus my thoughts in the right direction. The information he wanted was pretty basic stuff: which charities, how much would they get, that kind of thing. That tells you how woolly my thinking was.

The next part tells you that he wasn’t asking questions to be difficult, but because he was more clear-sighted that I shall ever be: as soon as I was able to give him the answers he wanted, he replied by return e-mail again – this time with a short story attached.

His was the first contribution I received. Like every wonderful book of his I’ve ever read, especially the incomparable Dalziel and Pascoe series, and the gentle but incisive humour of Joe Sixsmith, it bears re-reading; each time there’s something, some nuance, some detail, some clue, which I missed every previous time. And the quality of his writing is an object lesson; forget the great divide between literary and genre fiction, he should be required reading on every creative writing course.

I never met Reg Hill, though after making contact through the short story collection we did exchange e-mails from time to time, and he gave one of ‘my’ authors a great cover quote. He mostly stayed away from the conventions and festivals at which people like me get to rub shoulders with people like him, and if he engaged in any of the controversies the book trade throws up from time to time, I never heard about it. The closest was during one of his rare public appearances, when he said that given the choice between writing a Booker Prize winner and a new crime novel, he’d take the crime novel. I heard that secondhand and don’t know if he said why; I’d like to think it was because the crime novel would be more fun.

I knew him best through his books. There I perceived a man with a keen but kind eye, a positively scary intelligence and a refusal to compromise on things that mattered to him. Everyone I know who did meet him says the same: he was one of nature’s gentlemen, and a gentle man.

Never mind the quality, feel the sales

Lynne Patrick

In the absence of bestselling novels with my own name on the spine (though not for want of trying over the years), forgive me if I punch the air a little at the success of author friends.

And feel, as they do, much inclined to punch the noses of their publishers when they drag their feet unnecessarily about new work.

OK, maybe bestselling is putting it a bit strong; I don’t move in such high circles, so let’s settle for moderately successful. By which I mean selling steadily to a growing fanbase, going into reprint within a few months of publication, and getting great reviews.

A couple of years ago any two of the above would have had – did have, once or twice – me pleading with the author for a new title as soon as typing speed would allow. But in the wider world of publishing... well, let’s just say that the notion that it’s a business run by accountants must have come from somewhere.

Wearing my editorial adviser hat, I often have cause to tell aspiring writers that publishers seem to have thin skins, and don’t need much in the way of an excuse to reject a manuscript. I’d hate to be the cause of someone whose work deserves to be on every bookshelf in the land getting the brush-off for their first or next title, so I mention no names here. But the feet-dragging, and worse, has happened to more than one author friend at the hands of more than one publisher; and yes, OK, it’s just happened again, which is why it’s on my mind today.

Let’s be clear: I don’t live up on a dream-cloud. As I know from tough experience, publishing is a business, and as we’re all reminded every day in these straitened times, a business of any kind needs to turn at least a modest profit if it’s to survive. Leaving aside the celebrity culture (please!), any author’s first book is always a punt, a risk, a shot in the dark, based on instinct, gut reaction and plain old-fashioned love; I can honestly say that I never published a first book I didn’t believe in wholeheartedly, and for the most part, the second was never a let-down. But when it came to investing hard cash in the second, heart had to give place to head. There was never any guarantee that the bookbuying public would love a book as much as I did; my main criterion when deciding whether to publish the second was, quite simply, can I afford to do this? did the first one pay for itself?

The tricky part came when I had to make that decision before the first one had run its course; publication in the US was often a key factor, and that happened six months later than in the UK.

But that’s a problem which doesn’t occur if, as often happens in larger companies, UK and US publication are simultaneous, or one follows very soon after the other.
So what’s the excuse then for delaying the decision? If they know how well a book is doing, and at least two of the indicators of moderate success (see above) are in place, why keep the author dangling?

The virus has landed...

Lynne Patrick

Don’t worry, your screen isn’t about to start eating itself. You needn’t even close the page down and tell your computer security to run a check. This is a pre-technology virus: the kind that’s been around since the world began, and possibly even before that.

There I was, all ready for a New Year rant about something or other about the book trade that annoys me, when the tickle in my throat turned into the kind of intermittent cough and general lethargy that disturbed my sleep and sapped the energy for ranting about anything at all. Or indeed doing anything at all, other than curling up in my armchair with a large mug of something warm and comforting and one of the must-reads currently stacking up on the appropriately labelled bookshelf.

Though I have to admit that if this is as bad as the winter virus attack gets in 2012, I don’t really have much cause for complaint. For once it’s chosen a time which doesn’t interfere with urgent work or enjoyable social life; the cough and lethargy are pretty much the only symptoms; and curling up in an armchair with a good book is one of my favourite occupations, so a legitimate excuse to do it can’t be altogether a bad thing.

There’s a poster on the wall of my family doctor’s waiting room which points out that swallowing medication isn’t the solution to winter viruses, since it has very little effect and the virus usually goes away on its own after a few days. Unless the virus is the knock-out variety that puts me under the duvet for a few days, I find the best cure is comfort reading. And today some of my favourite authors, of whom there are many, are all lined up to ease my symptoms.

This morning I finished Lee Child’s Worth Dying For, and found out how he escaped at the end of 61 Hours, which to my mind is still the standard to which every other thriller should aspire. I did enjoy Worth Dying For, but some titles in a great series stand out above the rest.

This afternoon I’ll be going back to Reginald Hill as soon as I post this, um, post. Somehow the must-read shelf has acquired a multiplicity of Dalziel and Pascoe (I’m catching up with the early ones I missed) so I seem to be reading them alternately with everything else. So far I haven’t found the stand-out title in this wonderful series. There may not even be one; Reg Hill seems to have a knack of making each one subtly (or sometimes radically) different from the others.

After Reg I have Susan Hill, C J Sansom, Meg Gardiner and a couple of other favourites to choose from; and for later, when I’m feeling better, but not better enough for serious work (not that I’m really semi-retired, you understand, just taking things a little easier these days), my first-ever Tess Gerritsen to sample. (Yeah, OK, how did she come this far as a fan of crime fiction without reading Tess Gerritsen? All I can say is, so many books, so little time...)

So the ranting can wait a week or two. And maybe by the time the virus has taken off to land elsewhere, I’ll have something sensible to say about editing again.
Meanwhile, a pleasant, successful and virus-free New Year to anyone who happens to be reading this.

More glorious books

Lynne Patrick

No, I’m not recycling the best bits of 2011 like Jeff did. This is closer to Dale’s announcement that December is Read a New Book Month. Though I probably don’t qualify, since every month is Read a New Book (or two) Month for me. And it does kind of follow on after last week’s last-minute hint-dropping to Santa.

The old guy in red came up trumps as he always does: a total of five crisp new paperbacks now adorn my To Read shelf, and I hadn’t even got through what was already there. So that should see me nicely through to my birthday in a few months, by which time, fingers firmly crossed, a few more of the titles on the list I subtly left lying around the house in early December should have appeared in paperback.

But before I made a start on the new ones, there was one to finish. I was halfway through The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris. I don’t know if it’s available in paper form in the US yet, though Kindle-minded readers may already have discovered it; according to a prominent flash on the cover, it made number one in Amazon’s Kindle chart, and became ‘the word-of-mouth hit that left the others in its wake’ or words to similar effect – I don’t have it to hand, so the quote may not be exact, but that's the gist.

OK, I declare an interest. Gordon Ferris is another of my alumni. I published his first two, both of which will shortly be reissued by his new publisher, and this is the third. And doesn’t it make you feel good when as a former small indie publisher you see your fledglings stretch their wings and head for the big time?

Because, you see, that’s what it was all about for me. If I’m going to indulge in nostalgia for my brief career as a publisher (though less brief than some – small publishers rise and fall and often don’t even come close to the seven year mark) it’s not going to be for the money, of which there was very little; or for the fame, of which there was none at all. It isn’t even entirely about the books that sold out their first print runs and went into reprint. It might be, a little, for the year I was shortlisted for an award honouring women in publishing. The other shortlisted candidates were all people who had achieved something substantial for one of the big houses, and the eventual winner was a distinguished editor who was close to retirement, so I knew from the start I was never going to take the prize; but to be there, in that illustrious company when I’d begun from a point of almost no knowledge of the business, made me feel I must be doing something right against the odds.

But most of it, in fact 99% of it, was nothing to do with sales figures or Amazon ratings. It was about opening up a manuscript from the morning mail and realizing hours later that most of my to-do list for the day remained undone, because in my hand I had something special. Gordon Ferris’s first novel was one of those manuscripts.

Publishing is a business, of course, and sales figures had to play a part in my little set-up. Each book had to earn its keep, and unfortunately the lack of spare cash to spend on advertising campaigns and booksellers’ marketing fees meant that Gordon was one of several highly talented authors whose sales couldn’t justify a third title.
Unfortunately, that is, for me. For him it has proved a blessing. One of the reviews in the front of The Hanging Shed describes him as the next Ian Rankin; since the hero is a maverick, not a policeman, I’d go for a Scottish Lee Child, but you get the picture. When people start to say that kind of thing, other people sit up and take notice.

I have other alumni, several of them as deserving as Gordon Ferris and Chris Nickson (see last week), and I wait to see their rise to prominence.

Because for me, that’s what it was all about. We jokingly used to call ourselves the nursery slopes, where new crime writers tried out before heading for the big runs. And what do you know – sometimes it worked!

Books, glorious books...

Lynne Patrick

I can hardly believe 2011 is almost over.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a plunge into the icy waters of nostalgia for the year just gone; I need to save something for next week’s post... (just kidding). But it’s been a year of change and incident.

It’s also been a year of great books, and plenty of them.

Mostly it’s been new titles by well-loved authors: J D Robb, Lee Child, Reginald Hill, and not forgetting Terry Pratchett’s unique take on the country house mystery. And many more besides. But I’m always open to adventure. And in a tiny bookshop in the ancient city of York I discovered Meg Gardiner. Not literally, and actually not for the first time; I met Meg at CrimeFest in Bristol couple of years ago (for the uninitiated, it’s kind of Bouchercon for Brits, on a smaller scale). But until this summer the only book of hers I’d read was China Lake, the first (I think) of her Evan Delaney series. I enjoyed it a lot – but not as much as the Jo Beckett series, which gets better and better. I’m hoping Santa will come up with the only one I haven’t read, which, stupidly, is the first!

Another discovery was J A Jance: a prime example of the sub-genre in which someone with no connection whatever with crimebusting somehow gets entangled in something that takes them (and the reader) on a rollercoaster ride.

And at long last, after years of not getting around to it (so many books, so little time), I finally delved into Laura Lippman. And will be delving again.

Not forgetting, of course, a certain E J Copperman, who I discovered back in June in a bookshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, and who can’t produce new titles fast enough to satisfy my craving... Have a word with him/her, would you, Jeff?

Finally, not a new discovery by any means, but a recommendation to anyone who hasn’t yet sampled the delights of 18th century England: Chris Nickson’s Cold Cruel Winter has been getting stupendous reviews all over the USA. I told this guy he was going places when he sent me his first novel about three years ago; if he doesn’t break into the big time in the next couple of years, the book trade really does need to take a long hard look at itself.

Enough for now. We celebrate Christmas in this house in an unashamedly traditional manner, and I still have gifts to wrap, goodies to bake, a tree to decorate (though that won’t happen till tomorrow when my no-longer-so-little girl comes home for the holiday.)
Wherever you are, whatever and however you celebrate to brighten the bleak midwinter, I hope it’s a good one.

It's that time of year again...

This time last year I was gazing out over an Arctic landscape. More than a foot of snow covered the ground around my office, and I sympathized more than usually with people who have to travel more than twenty yards to work. Quite how I ever got there myself remains a mystery; I had to dig my way past the garage.
This year has been cold, wet, windy, sometimes icy, but so far we’ve been spared the disruptive white stuff, which, try as I might and pretty though it can be, I can’t bring myself to like.
But it’s still the middle of December, and a scary eleven days to Christmas, so it’s time for my last-minute list for Santa. You can keep your diamonds and fancy clothes; all I want for Christmas is... books. And maybe some chocolate. But mainly books.
Lots of my favourite series authors have new titles out; the main issue is whether they’re out in paperback yet. And whaddya know – I just checked Amazon to see if the new J D Robb was in pb, and found Time of Death, an Eve Dallas short story volume I didn’t know existed! (Am I the only person who visits Amazon to check books out, then goes to a real bookshop to buy them? According to something I heard on the radio the other day, indie bookshops in two continents are falling like flies because most people do the opposite. Which is at best rude, and at worst destructive.)
After that brief digression I’ll continue. The new Julia Spencer-Fleming is yet to appear in pb, so that’s a treat for the future. So is the latest Zoë Sharp. But C J Sansom, Susan Hill and Elly Griffiths are on the list; and there are backlist titles missing from my shelves by Meg Gardiner (a recent discovery – her Jo Beckett series takes my breath away, and I still haven’t read the first one), Ann Cleeves and Lee Child.
Hey, isn’t this making Christmas lists thing fun! Who knows, some of the above may turn up under our tree a week next Sunday.
And no, I really don’t want a Kindle, or any of its close relations. I’m holding out for the real thing.

If you’re as behind with your gift buying as I am, and still looking for something a little different to give someone, I can strongly recommend three authors I ‘discovered’ not so long ago when my life was a different shape; I still have an editorial hand (or maybe just an interfering finger) in the work of two of them, and they’re getting better all the time. I speak, of course, of Maureen Carter, who I don’t edit, and Roz Southey and Chris Nickson, who I do. They all have new titles out this year, in the US as well as the UK, and they’re all going from strength to strength.

A brief PS, unrelated to crime fiction, or indeed to books in any way: a few months ago I indulged in a rant against construction companies who want to build cheap houses on beautiful green fields, and one company in particular which was threatening the village I live in. The little people of the village took up arms (not literally) with over a hundred and fifty letters of objection and over seventy valid points made to the local council’s town planning department. In this case the pen proved a more effective weapon than the sword, and guess what – we WON! The developers have slunk away with their tails between their legs, muttering over the shoulders as they went about submitting a new application; but for the time being they are well and truly trounced.
So Christmas, Yule, Hanukah, whatever you celebrate, will be a little brighter around here.
That’s it for now. Cards to write, presents to wrap, last-minute shopping list to compile.

Someone pick up that two-edged sword!

Lynne Patrick

The radio plays in my kitchen every morning as I make my breakfast, but mostly, until I’ve had my first coffee, I’m too brain dead to take in what people are saying. This morning, though, something penetrated the fuzz and made me take notice.

They were talking about the way literature reflects world trends and events, and how long it takes the literary world to catch up with the real one. The consensus seemed to be four or five years – so it looks as if serious literary fiction (this was a serious discussion!) will be dealing with world recession, potential economic collapse etc etc etc round about 2015 to 2016.

Is this an opportunity, I asked myself. Presumably people who write those serious books need more thinking time than us lesser mortals who produce stuff which people read for entertainment rather than for self-improvement.

Does this time lag mean we can jump in ahead of the game?

I ask because I’ve just been working with a debut author on a novel she describes as a literary post-apocalyptic thriller. To my mind it’s more thriller than literary, and all the better for it. It does deal with big issues, but it doesn’t preach its message; it delivers it through the people who live through the issues and find a way to survive them.

I’ll be interested to see what the literary establishment makes of the economic gloom and one-crisis-after-another scenario we’ve been living through for three or four years – when it finally gets around it it, that is. Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be great if someone who writes real page-turners got a handle on the situation and started to answer some of the questions which no one really seems to face up to? Like, what actually happens when a country goes bankrupt? What does the government do? What does anyone do? How does it affect ordinary people?

Topicality is something of a two-edged sword for fiction writers. Everyone wants their bestseller to be up-to-the-minute and in line with current events, but basing a plot on something that makes headlines in January could easily mean it’s become stale and old hat by August. The thing about the present situation is that it looks as if it may continue for a while – depressing to live through, but full of potential for a writer!

Free for all

Parents reading this may be familiar with the feeling I’m about to describe.
When you were a kid, did you sometimes glare resentfully at your own parents and think fiercely, when I have kids of my own I will absolutely not be doing that. And then, when you did have kids of your own, did you find yourself doing exactly the same thing, and maybe even understanding why your parents did it?
Yeah, me too. Occasionally. Usually through fear for their safety.
Tell you what, though. Having been in publishing for seven years, maybe not as long as an entire childhood but surely long enough to understand a little about why things happen the way they do, I still don’t get a lot of it.
Not just the things publishers do. I did get a handle on a lot of that, especially the question all writers ask at some time: why does it sometimes take months to respond to submissions? That’s not choice, or laziness, or not caring: it’s priorities, deadlines and only having twenty-four hour days like everyone else.
This week, though, what’s exercising my mind is the way people, ordinary people, regard writers.
A man called Keith Waterhouse, who died a couple of years ago after a long and illustrious freelance writing career based on being wise about the human race, had quite a bit to say about being a writer. Among my favourites is the one about writing a novel being akin to digging a small quarry singlehanded with a teaspoon.
But today’s anecdote, probably taken from one of his many newspaper columns, is the one about the editor of his local village magazine, who was a lawyer in his spare time. No, not really in his spare time, but you’ll see what I mean.
This editor asked Keith Waterhouse to write a piece for the village magazine: nothing elaborate, wouldn’t take long, just a few paras describing exactly what it was that he did, as people in the village would be interested to learn that they had someone in their midst whose name appeared regularly in the national press.
Waterhouse’s response was exactly what you’d expect from a freelance writer: Certainly; how many words, what’s the deadline and how much is the fee?
It was the third item that rather flummoxed the editor/lawyer. Waterhouse carefully and politely explained that writing was how he earned his living; if he’d asked the editor/lawyer to handle the sale of a house for him, he’d expect to receive an invoice, so he was meeting a request for his professional services in similar vein. Or put more succinctly, no fee, no article.
I used to get something similar when I ran creative writing classes as a local education centre. Students would present me with their grands oeuvres, sometimes tens of thousands of words, and expect a reasoned critique. Naturally that’s fine if the project is part of the course, but if it’s not... well, hey, I have a life too, and teaching three classes a week does not a living make.
The only other people I can think of who get similar requests are doctors. I’ve known one or two who turned down dinner party invitations because they invariably turn into busman’s holidays.
Can someone enlighten me on why this happens? I don’t know anyone who would expect the plumber who lives next door to service their heating free of charge, or the accountant they see in the pub to check over their tax return without a fee.
Why are writers expected to give away their skills and expertise?

The insanity that is the publishing industry

One thing leads to another, they say, and this week one thought has certainly led to a whole train of the things.
I touched last week on one of my favourite gripes about the book trade: marketing fees paid by publishers to booksellers, to ensure that certain titles are placed right under customers’ noses and therefore by all the best principles of marketing will become bestsellers regardless of whether or not they deserve it.
Then this week, wearing a different professional hat, I found myself asking why certain books never actually become books, even though they certainly do deserve it because their authors have that special something that makes them stand out from the crowd.
When I’m not editing for publishers (which of course means the books are already accepted), I appraise and edit work from unknown writers. I’ve been doing this for more years than I care to admit to; there seems to be a demand among aspiring writers for unbiased feedback from someone who has a little more knowledge about the book trade.
Most of the projects I’m asked to advise on are pretty run of the mill if I’m being honest. But occasionally something that makes me ask that big question: why is this not already in print? I can point to half a dozen published authors, some of them doing very well indeed, with whom I’ve dealt over the years; it doesn’t sound like many, but taken as a proportion, and bearing in mind that publishers take on maybe one unsolicited manuscript from two thousand submissions, it’s probably about average.
When people used to ask me why I decided to dip a toe into the murky pool of publishing back when the 21st century was still young, my answer was that for every half-dozen debuts that made it into print, there were six more, equally special, who didn’t – and I wanted to help give them a chance as well. I’d still like to, though I no longer have the wherewithal. All I can do now is encourage the ones who really ought to make it, if the world was a just place, not to give up. Perseverance is as vital a quality as writing talent.
As I said, though, most of the projects I’m sent are perfectly competent, but lacking in that essential spark which makes them shine out. For months there’s nothing out of the ordinary – and then, like buses, two come along at once which, if they don’t make it, prove that there really isn’t any justice.
But of course we know there isn’t, don’t we? Publishers pay out huge advances for celebrity biogs that lots of people buy as gifts for other people but no one actually reads; or worse, even bigger advances for novels by celebrities which somebody must buy. This has two unfortunate effects: one, it leaves a lot of people thinking that’s normal, that’s the way publishing works: write book, collect obscene amount of money, write another book, repeat the process. And two, paying out those advances plus the equally huge marketing budgets for a couple of these self-fulfilling bestsellers leaves nothing left in the pot to give two or three, or nine or ten, talented new authors the opportunity they would give their eye teeth for.
Having lived in the publishing world for a while, I’m still at a loss to see how on earth how the celebrity thing can be cost-effective. An awful lot of copies need to sell to cover the silly-money outlay. Just one example: the autobiography of the UK’s erstwhile prime minister had a cover price of £25, but sold for much less in a lot of shops; the reported advance (that’s shorthand for advance on royalties, remember, and hardback royalties are usually 10% of cover price) was £4 million. Yes, that’s four million pounds. I leave the maths to you, but remember there were a lot of other costs as well, including that marketing budget, and not forgetting rather large discounts to booksellers.
My personal agenda in all this is simple: I don’t like the way the system works against talented but unknown authors. But after all these years I still don’t see how that system can possibly work. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that whatever my intentions, I must have been stark staring mad to go into it at all.

The insanity that is the publishing industry

One thing leads to another, they say, and this week one thought has certainly led to a whole train of the things.
I touched last week on one of my favourite gripes about the book trade: marketing fees paid by publishers to booksellers, to ensure that certain titles are placed right under customers’ noses and therefore by all the best principles of marketing will become bestsellers regardless of whether or not they deserve it.
Then this week, wearing a different professional hat, I found myself asking why certain books never actually become books, even though they certainly do deserve it because their authors have that special something that makes them stand out from the crowd.
When I’m not editing for publishers (which of course means the books are already accepted), I appraise and edit work from unknown writers. I’ve been doing this for more years than I care to admit to; there seems to be a demand among aspiring writers for unbiased feedback from someone who has a little more knowledge about the book trade.
Most of the projects I’m asked to advise on are pretty run of the mill if I’m being honest. But occasionally something that makes me ask that big question: why is this not already in print? I can point to half a dozen published authors, some of them doing very well indeed, with whom I’ve dealt over the years; it doesn’t sound like many, but taken as a proportion, and bearing in mind that publishers take on maybe one unsolicited manuscript from two thousand submissions, it’s probably about average.
When people used to ask me why I decided to dip a toe into the murky pool of publishing back when the 21st century was still young, my answer was that for every half-dozen debuts that made it into print, there were six more, equally special, who didn’t – and I wanted to help give them a chance as well. I’d still like to, though I no longer have the wherewithal. All I can do now is encourage the ones who really ought to make it, if the world was a just place, not to give up. Perseverance is as vital a quality as writing talent.
As I said, though, most of the projects I’m sent are perfectly competent, but lacking in that essential spark which makes them shine out. For months there’s nothing out of the ordinary – and then, like buses, two come along at once which, if they don’t make it, prove that there really isn’t any justice.
But of course we know there isn’t, don’t we? Publishers pay out huge advances for celebrity biogs that lots of people buy as gifts for other people but no one actually reads; or worse, even bigger advances for novels by celebrities which somebody must buy. This has two unfortunate effects: one, it leaves a lot of people thinking that’s normal, that’s the way publishing works: write book, collect obscene amount of money, write another book, repeat the process. And two, paying out those advances plus the equally huge marketing budgets for a couple of these self-fulfilling bestsellers leaves nothing left in the pot to give two or three, or nine or ten, talented new authors the opportunity they would give their eye teeth for.
Having lived in the publishing world for a while, I’m still at a loss to see how on earth how the celebrity thing can be cost-effective. An awful lot of copies need to sell to cover the silly-money outlay. Just one example: the autobiography of the UK’s erstwhile prime minister had a cover price of £25, but sold for much less in a lot of shops; the reported advance (that’s shorthand for advance on royalties, remember, and hardback royalties are usually 10% of cover price) was £4 million. Yes, that’s four million pounds. I leave the maths to you, but remember there were a lot of other costs as well, including that marketing budget, and not forgetting rather large discounts to booksellers.
My personal agenda in all this is simple: I don’t like the way the system works against talented but unknown authors. But after all these years I still don’t see how that system can possibly work. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that whatever my intentions, I must have been stark staring mad to go into it at all.

Not so much a rant, more a round of applause

Lynne Patrick

Not much new happening on the editing front this week, so I thought I’d take a wider look at the book trade here in the UK, and revisit one of my favourite rant territories. Though actually... well, read on.

First a word of explanation for our American blog-followers.

I love the way your bookshops work. Big discounts and promotional offers simply don’t apply to books which are less than three (or is it six?) months old; when a book first comes out, it’s sold at full price or not at all – and that’s in Barnes & Noble as well as the great little independent bookshop in your town.

Not so here in the UK. For years bookselling has been a matter of three-for-the-price-of-two offers; the latest titles sold for not much more than half the cover price; tables laden with cut-price books that appear in TV and magazine ads. Promotion, promotion, promotion, all paid for by publishers in the form of four-figure marketing fees and swingeing discounts demanded by chain bookshops, and all focused on books destined for the top twenty bestsellers, which kind of makes their place on that list a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But not any more. The times they are a changin’, and I for one couldn’t be more glad.

Though I confess I’ve bought my share of books on three-for-two offers.

I was in a bookshop last weekend, and had an embarrassing moment at the cash desk when I apologized for having left my loyalty card at home, and then realized I was apologizing for leaving the wrong loyalty card. I should have known; I’d spent several minutes poring over the three-for-two table before deciding there wasn’t even one there I wanted, so I obviously wasn’t in Waterstone’s.

Yes, folks, it’s Waterstone’s, the UK’s sole remaining major bookshop chain, that is fulfilling the immortal Dylan’s prophecy instead of playing a part in that rather tawdry self-fulfilling one which surely said little about the quality of a book and more about the amount of money publishers were willing to lay out on marketing one they’d paid a huge, well-publicized advance for.

And it’s all down to a man called James Daunt, who I have never met and almost certainly never will meet, but who I already love as though he were my conjoined twin.
James Daunt is a real bookseller, and real bookselling is on its way back to the British high street in a big way.

OK, in some places it never left – but that, in a roundabout way, is exactly my point.

Before the blessed Mr Daunt became CEO of Waterstone’s under its new privately-owned regime, he was an independent bookseller – still is for all I know, in addition to his new role – and his small but perfectly formed group of shops was known for selling everything at cover price, no discounts, no offers, no publisher-driven incentives.

(I do have a small axe to grind here. It’s the struggle to match the big guys incentive for incentive that drives small publishers out of business, and though that’s not what happened to my own company, I still saw that struggle from the sharp end.)

James Daunt has openly admitted that Waterstone’s may lose sales in the short term; and he hasn’t done away with promotional pricing completely. But he has the right attitude. Instead of a blanket policy which means the 296 shops became homogenized, his plan is to devolve decisions on which books to stock to local managers and staff. So people will know the books they actually want are available, and the shops will become places people want to visit, rather than clones of supermarket book sections, visited as a chore when Aunt Gertrude who reads bestsellers as a matter of routine has a birthday coming up.

Can we have a round of applause, please, for a man who understands about books and bookshops, and whose heart is firmly in the right place?

Switching off

Lynne Patrick

I love my work.

When I’m editing, I get to read great books before anyone else does. When I’m writing, I get to write the kind of thing I’d like to find on the shelf in the bookshop. (And yes, there probably are at least two layers of meaning in that sentence; feel free to figure for a few minutes.)

But like any job, it has a downside. I’ve mentioned it before. Especially when I’m in editing mode when I go to the office in the morning, when I shut down the computer for the night, I don’t seem able to switch off.

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that my relaxation of choice involves a hefty dose of fiction, usually the crime variety, always in a comfortable armchair with a large mug of redbush tea close at hand. Book addiction set in at an early age, and my parents actively encouraged it; when a kid is curled up with a good book, you don’t have to chase after her or wonder why everything’s gone quiet.

One thing led to another, as they do, and the addiction turned into a profession, which introduced me a whole new way of feeding the addiction.

So what’s the problem, you ask. In what way does this apparently ideal way of life have a downside?

Look at it this way. Do accountants go home and start costing out the budget for the TV programme they’re watching? Do lawyers analyze the hype on the side of a cereal packet to make sure it doesn’t contravene advertising law?

I really, really wish I didn’t do this, but I can’t seem to stop – no matter what I’m reading, how accomplished the writing, how experienced/eminent/brilliant the author, as I read I catch myself picking up the tiniest of flaws. I don’t mean the inevitable missed typos I mentioned a few weeks ago. This is the kind of stuff that wouldn’t cross 99.0% of minds. A comma I would have placed differently; a sentence that could have been structured more effectively; even, occasionally, a factual error that got by all the in-house checks.

I spent most of last weekend immersed in the latest chiller by one of my favourite authors; most of his/her (I’m not saying which – don’t want him/her to hate me) books are on my shelf, and s/he is always on my Christmas list. But in the new one I kept tripping over... let’s call them a series of related factual glitches. A little piece of background research this highly competent author probably didn’t even realize needed to be done.

Simply because this author is so experienced and brilliant, if not as eminent as s/he deserves, and also because it was only background and didn’t directly affect the plot, I mostly got past it. It certainly didn’t stop me putting off a dozen weekend jobs to finish the book; between glitches it had me gripped. But as I read, each manifestation of it distracted me, and I had to drag my attention back to where it mattered.

My other half, whose favourite way of choosing what to read is to wait for me to tell him whether he’ll enjoy a book, saw how immersed I was and picked it up as soon as I finished it. And didn’t put it down again until he’d finished it. And guess what? He didn’t even notice the glitches. He’s as aware of the thing that was wrong as I am, but he doesn’t have an inner editor which refuses to switch off.

I can’t tell you how much I wish it didn’t happen. This isn’t the first time by a long stretch that the pleasure I treasure above all others has been marred by the little nagging voice that just won’t shut up. Maybe it isn’t even just a consequence of the job I do; it’s possible it’s been there all along. I have a recurring memory which has to go back to when I was twelve years old, of wincing at an unnecessarily pretentiously phrased sentence which went something like this:

Barbara (or someone – I forget the name) regarded with a measure of suspicion the ring which Cedric (or someone) had only moments ago placed upon her finger. Purr-lease! This was a book for twelve-year-olds. What was wrong with 'Barbara looked suspiciously at the ring Cedric had just given her.' ? I seem to recall I was enjoying the book till then...

My outer editor is worth her weight in vacations in the USA. But I really wish the inner one would just shut up once in a while.

Habeas corpus

Lynne Patrick

Which, literally translated, dear blog-followers, comes out as You shall have the (or a) body.

Yeah, I know it’s more usually a bit of legalese which means you can’t charge someone with a crime in his/her absence. But it’s also useful in other ways – like today, when I have a question to ask.

The precept of You Shall Have A Body seems to lie at the heart of crime fiction. If not absolutely all crime fiction, then an overwhelming majority of books which fall into that category.

My question is – why?

There are plenty of answers, of course, the main one being the excitement factor required for good crime fiction. Murder is the ultimate crime, therefore a sleuth tracking down a murderer makes for the ultimate crime fiction.

Which would be just fine – except that it rarely stops there. So now we have a crime fiction world in which authors seem hell bent on outdoing each other; like the catering at a Welsh funeral (trust me, I’m Welsh), each one has to go that little bit further than the last, and you begin to wonder where it will end. Serial killers bury more bodies; psychos find more ingenious (and unlikely, if not impossible) ways to kill their victims; the violence level is ramped up and up and up.

I ask again – why?

I suppose there’s an answer to that too. Some people are entertained by blood, gore and detailed accounts of violence, though I worry about the kind of mind that reacts like that. Don’t they have nightmares? And doesn’t crash-bang-wallop-punch-stab-stamp-on-his- head become tedious when it happens on every page?

And the multiple victims thing... Here in the UK we have a TV show called Midsomer Murders, in which the body count began to rise so high (in a beautiful, rural, traditional thatched cottage area of England where one murder a decade is pushing reality to extremes) that the scriptwriters had no choice but to start to send it up.

When I was in publishing, like all the best publishers we gave prospective authors guidelines on what we did and didn’t look for. They included these lines:

We love to see books that don’t slavishly follow the herd; a string of murders is not compulsory. A cracking confidence trickster yarn would really excite us.

Sadly, no one ever sent us one. In seven years, I can’t recall a single submission without a murder at its core. More usually multiple murders.

So what brought these questions to the front of my mind? There’s always something, isn’t there? A trigger moment, a spark that kindles the blaze. (That’s kindle in its real sense, not piece of technology which is trying to do away with real books.) In my case it was a book. No surprise there. It was a book by one of my favourite authors, which narrows it down a little for people familiar with my reading matter of choice, but that’s all I’m giving away, because you might read it, and I’d hate to spoil the ending.

The following words appear a couple of pages from the end:

Bodies in the morgue: none. Bodies in the cells: none. Crimes committed: any number.

Be assured the author doesn’t let the reader’s attention flag for a moment. The sleuths spend four hundred pages believing they’re chasing a murderer, and there’s a glorious piece of misdirection right at the beginning which leaves the reader wondering right to the final chapter. But the body count is nil, therefore there can be no murderer.

Intriguing, isn’t it?

And that, dear blog-follower, is surely what the best crime fiction is all about. Intrigue. Not more bodies, or gorier deaths, or more beatings up, than the last thing you read. Oh, you need engaging characters and a credible background – they’re part of the fabric of any fiction. For crime fiction the USP is intrigue.

But intrigue doesn’t always have to mean violence and lots of bodies.

Does it?

Trust me, I'm an editor...

Lynne Patrick

I wonder if I really am the pickiest person in the world about the way people use and abuse the English language, or if it just feels that way sometimes.

I almost feel I should apologize – but I don’t think I’m going to – for grinding my teeth at a positive plethora of usages because they’re not just clumsy or lazy, but imprecise, inaccurate, or just plain impossible. (Though I will apologize in advance for the multiplicity of words I’m about to put in upper-case; I’m not shouting at you, really I’m not. It’s just that after my recent blog-related battles with technology, I still haven’t figured out any other way to add emphasis. All advice on how to make Typepad retain bold, underlining or italics gratefully received.)

Needless to say (so why am I saying it?), when I try to think of examples to illustrate my point, my mind goes completely blank. But not for long. All I need to do is grind my teeth...

OK, here goes. How many times have you come across an EMPTY BOTTLE OF WINE or cup of coffee? In print, I mean. In reality, if it’s empty, it’s just a bottle or a cup. It may be a wine bottle or a coffee cup, but it certainly isn’t a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee if the liquid it once contained is gone.

How about HAIR THAT WANTS CUTTING, or a fence that wants a coat of paint? Did you ever hear hair, fence or any non-sentient object actually express a desire of any kind? The hair may be obscuring the vision and therefore be in need of a trim; the fence may be close to collapsing from wet rot and therefore need the protective layer. But the difference in meaning between NEED and WANT is blurred far too often for my comfort.
Here’s another, just as frequently blurred but a little more subtle:

SHE TRIED SHOUTING.
SHE TRIED TO SHOUT.

I can sense blank looks out there. What’s the difference, you ask. What is the woman blathering on about?

Come on, guys. We’re writers, or some of us are. Isn’t the whole point of having access to a variety of parts of speech and grammatical constructions to enable us to express subtle nuances and shades of meaning?

She tried shouting – but nobody heard.

She tried to shout – but her throat was so raw it came out as a croak.

And now we come to my favourite. This is the one I always, always, always flag up when I find it in a manuscript, whatever else I leave as I found it.

WALKING DOWN THE STAIRS, HE OPENED THE DOOR.

In every building I’ve ever visited, this is, quite simply, not physically possible. Nor is Taking a final swallow of beer, he put the glass down. Or Checking in the wall mirror to see his tie was straight, he walked down the path to the car.

For this one I blame creative writing manual style guides. AND THEN is not good style, they proclaim; find another way to say it. I agree that too much AND THEN (or even AND and THEN used separately) is not good style. Repetition of any kind is not good style, unless it’s for effect. Surely the key is to know what counts as too much.

OK, enough ranting. And yes, I’m picky.

But I’d bet serious money that the best writers are pickier.

There's always one...

Lynne Patrick

The mighty Amazon was in the news earlier this week. OK, when is it ever not, but not usually in this way! It was because their eBook edition of the new Terry Pratchett was absolutely littered with errors, to the extent that readers were too busy looking for the next one to focus on the story, and complaints poured in by the hundred. They’ve issued a corrected version, but there’s a sense of arms twisted up backs: almost a sense of ‘what’s all the fuss about? Why does it matter’.

Trust me, it matters. It’s like the tiny smear at the top of the newly polished window. Or the thin patch at the bottom of the door frame where the paint had nearly run out. Or the patch of floor which didn’t catch the light, and the crumbs blended into the pattern of the carpet. There’s always someone at hand to look smug and announce, ‘You missed a bit.’?

Mostly you’d hardly notice the missing comma on page 159, or the spelling error in the middle of a big action scene. Mostly they don’t matter much; they don’t change the meaning, don’t even affect the pace or rhythm. Mostly it’s only people like me who even see them. Call me picky if you like. I really wish I didn’t. Mostly.

I don’t see them in my own writing. I wish. When the words are mine, I’m as blind to the minor glitches (and some of the major ones) as the next person. You’ll probably spot half a dozen in this post. That’s why publishers employ copy-editors and proofreaders; the most meticulous of authors simply doesn’t see every single mistake, and the computer’s spell-check has limited value. I’m working with an author at the moment who apologizes profusely for every tiny glitch and vows to make sure there are none in the next batch of work, but she always misses two or three. I keep telling her not to beat herself up; it happens.

But sometimes it gets out of hand. Like Amazon’s eBook of the new Terry Pratchett.
My scant experience of eBook production tells me that proofreading is by a long stretch the most expensive part of the process, probably because to do the job properly you need to involve real people who recognize the errors and take time to pick them up – not a guy on a computer who feeds in a hundred edited manuscripts a day. And apparently, the process of converting to eBook format actually creates errors where there were none before.

There’s a popular impression that cost-cutting measures publishers mean they simply don’t bother with proofreading any more. If that were entirely true, there’d be a whole lot more errors, but the Amazon blooper does seem to suggest it’s not done as routinely or as meticulously as it used to be. Which is a pity.

I know I’m pickier than most. It’s probably because it’s my job to notice these things. But before I’m showered with protests, try this:

What’s the difference between a CAUSAL relationship and a CASUAL relationship?
Sometimes it does matter.

So what do you actually DO?

Lynne Patrick

It’s a question I get asked from time to time, if not more frequently. Actually, yes, more frequently. Most recently a few days ago, in, of all places, the bank. I was doing some business which entailed filling in forms (doesn’t everything that happens in banks?) and they needed to know my job. Freelance editor, said I. Cue pricked up ears. Really? How interesting, said the man in the suit. What does that mean? What do you actually DO?

Makes you think, doesn’t it? What does an editor actually DO? OK, for the uninitiated, here’s what this editor actually does. I’ll try to find something of interest to the initiated next time.

When I’m working for a publisher, what I would like to think I do is simple: I aim to make sure the author I’m working with has written the book s/he thought s/he had written in the first place. I try to pick up little holes in the plot, spot the occasional factual error, smooth out the odd bumpy sentence, make sure the protagonist’s eyes don’t change colour halfway through – the kind of thing you just don’t see when the whole thing is crammed into your head and it’s hard to tell what’s on the page from what’s in your mind. It’s a rare author who doesn’t appreciate the need for this process.

A downside is that I find myself unable to switch off editing mode when I’m reading for pleasure. The other day I noticed a highly implausible description of a rugby forward and a historical inaccuracy in the first few pages – which, of course, made me start wondering what other bloopers lay ahead, and kind of took the gloss off the book. But that’s by the way.

Occasionally there’s more to it than smoothing out the bumps. Sometimes, for reasons I kind of understand (though I wouldn’t say I like it), having been on the sharp end of book marketing myself, a publisher takes on an author who needs, ahem, a little more support. Celebrities are usually involved. I had to smile when I read the ubiquitous Katie Price’s take on her novels; apparently she has quite a lot of input to the plot.

Nuff said, I think. Except, for the record, I have never edited a book by Katie Price.
I understand why it happens; publishing is a business, and businesses have to stay in profit in order to exist. What I don’t understand, in these days of college courses leading to creative writing qualifications available on every corner, is that there are still people around who think this kind of support is also the right of the rookie writer: that someone will be there to put in the missing commas and apostrophes and take out the redundant ones, correct the spelling and ensure the grammar makes sense. Or put another way, to wield the tools of the trade on his/her behalf.

If that was ever the case, it was in days long past. The teams of copy-editors exist only in the untutored writers’ imaginations. Trust me, that is not what an editor actually does.

Or not unless there’s a healthy fee attached, from a publisher who claims a good reason for requiring it.

The Word

Lynne Patrick

There’s a radio game show here in the UK called Just A Minute. A panel of professional wits are challenged to speak for ‘just a minute’ on a variety of subjects, without repetition, deviation and something else I’ve forgotten, and if they commit any of those sins, the other players get to challenge them and take over the subject.

Listening to it the other night started a train of thought, about a phenomenon I’ve noticed quite a few times when I’ve been editing a manuscript.

Actually make that most times.

It’s not something you’d see when you’re reading, largely because if the editor has done his/her job properly, it should have been spotted and dealt with long before the manuscript appears as a book. And the reason the radio show made me think about it is simple – it’s repetition. Of a word. Not the same word every time, obviously; but a single word that appears in the course of a manuscript just a little too often for comfort.

I’m not talking about ‘the’ or ‘and’ or even ‘said’. The Word, as I’ve begun to think of it, is a ‘strong’ word: usually (though not always) a descriptive or qualifying word, and usually (though not always) one which has several meanings or senses depending on the context. And it seems to become attached to all kinds of phrases, as if it got stuck in the author’s mind.

Recent examples are preposterous; soft; dark. I’ve worked on a couple of manuscripts in which the characters did a lot of shrugging. In another the word count dropped noticeably when I took out all the nodding and shaking of heads.

If the authors in question are reading this, they’ll (mostly) know who they are. In each case they were quick to assure me it wasn’t deliberate; in fact they had no idea they’d done it until I flagged it up.

And hands in the air, it’s something I’ve been guilty of myself – which is probably why it’s something I notice in other people’s work. A good friend who is also an editor offered feedback on my last (unpublished) novel, and right there, top of the list of comments in block capitals underlined twice was TAUT. Twenty-three times I used that word: an average of twice every chapter. It described, among other things, silences and atmospheres, the protagonist’s skin texture, a sheet on a hospital bed... it’s been a while and I forget what else, but I’m still embarrassed to think about it.

That’s the trouble with words, though, isn’t it? Writers are urged to choose ‘strong’ words, the kind that carry a lot of meaning in a small package, so there’s no need for lengthy description or explanation – then before you know where you are, one of those strong words has clung like a limpet and attached itself to far too many situations and you just don’t see it. I noticed just the other day, flicking back through a file of short stories in search of something to rework as a way of kickstarting my long-idle Muse, that I’d used ‘echo’ twice in the same paragraph. Not quite as heinous as twenty-three ‘taut’s, but not to be allowed to pass nonetheless.

Some authors tell me this is why they need an editor: to pick up on this kind of thing when their own critical eye has begun to see what’s in their mind, not what’s on the page. Now, that is the kind of author I really enjoy working with.

A tricky question

Lynne Patrick

Something’s been niggling at the back of my mind this past week, for reasons which may or may not become apparent.

We hear a lot about agents and publishers needing to fall in love with a book before they’ll take it on. Conversely, most writers will have received that rejection letter – heck, I’ve written that rejection letter – which assures the author that the manuscript is perfectly sound, a good idea well developed, but ‘somehow it just didn’t get me excited and enthused’.

I understand that. If you’re about to invest time, effort and potentially a large sum of money in something, it should excite and enthuse you; in any walk of life you need a certain measure of belief in what you’re doing, and where books are concerned the emotions are, in general, more than usually engaged.

But what about further into the process? The people who pick up the ball when the decision-makers have sent it into play?

A small explanatory digression, in case I’m not making myself clear. In one of my many lives, I review theatre. I see a lot of it, some bad, some indifferent, some OK, some brilliant. Last week I saw a brilliant show, and I hated it. And that is not a paradox, an oxymoron, or any other part of speech that designates the simultaneous existence of opposites. It was a modern ballet: not my favourite theatrical form, but the paid critic goes where she’s sent, and I do usually enjoy this particular company’s work. They were every bit as brilliant as usual: the dancing was flawless, the storytelling clear as daylight, the visuals perfectly in keeping with the mood of the piece. And I still hated it. I had no problem appreciating the skill, emotional depth and all the other qualities they brought to it; they were doing it wonderfully. I just couldn’t enjoy what they were doing.

In publishing terms, my position that night equated to that of an editor who is given a book to work on which s/he hasn’t had any part in commissioning. What if that editor completely fails to see what other people find wonderful about it – doesn’t fall in love with it, in fact? Is it enough simply to appreciate the good qualities? What if, to push the analogy further, s/he (OK, she – it is a she, more often than not) actively dislikes the book? Can she still be fair to the author and make a decent fist of editing it?

In an ideal world, of course, the editor would turn the job down. But in the current climate – actually in any economic climate – not many editors are in a position to do that. A freelance editor can’t afford to make waves; acquire a reputation for being picky and ‘difficult’ and the work dries up faster than Death Valley in a drought. And a junior-ish editor employed by a publishing house doesn’t want to find her name on the next list of redundancies, so she does as she’s asked.

I suppose it all comes down to professionalism. In my case, the authors I edit for publication are all familiar; I used to publish them myself, which should tell everything you need to know; a one-person publishing house has more than the usual need to fall in love with the books it takes on. But wearing a different earning-a-living hat, I’m sometimes asked for editorial input on work I simply can’t connect with. That’s when it gets problematic.

Occasionally I can ask someone else to take it on. But mostly it’s down to me, and I can’t sack myself for being ‘difficult’. But if I don’t provide intelligent, dispassionate feedback, the word-of-mouth recommendations I rely on don’t happen, and the work dries up as surely as if some higher power was handing it out.
It’s a conundrum.

What I did on my holidays

Lynne Patrick

Well, kind of. Not really. At least not blow by blow, Gothic cathedral by Gothic cathedral, delicious French meal by delicious French meal.

What I do on all my holidays, when I’m not absorbing the ambience or sampling local cuisine, is read. Even more than I do at home.

And since I don’t have a lot – or anything, really – to say about editing this week, I thought I’d resort to what I’ve been reading lately. Mainly on my holidays, when there’s more time and self-indulgence is actually what it’s all about.

It also occurred to me that Dead Guy doesn’t have a full-time book reviewer on the team at the moment; we all fill that role from time to time. So maybe you won’t mind this digression.

First up was Nicholas Evans. Sorry, Nick. You’re not going to like this.

Don’t get me wrong; this is an author I’ve always found hard to put down. The Horse Whisperer was magical, The Loop was better. I read The Divide a few years ago, when we were travelling through Wyoming and kept seeing the sign indicating that we were crossing the very Divide that gives the book its name. I loved that too. Until now he has brought the American West to life right there in my living room. Or motel room. Or rented cottage in France. Whatever.

But I’m afraid The Brave didn’t give me quite the same glow. The characters felt as if they came from Central Casting, and so did the 1950s Hollywood part of the setting. The big plot revelation was too obvious for words. And generally the whole thing left me with the impression that someone had said, go away and write a big, highly coloured bestseller, Nick, there’s a good chap.

OK, enough. The poor guy’s been to hell and back this last year or so, what with poisoned mushrooms, twice-weekly dialysis and a kidney transplant. It’s a small miracle he wrote a book at all, and I’m sure he’ll be back on form for the next one. And I don’t suppose it matters what I say; he’s popular enough to ride out a disappointed reader or two. But it’s always sad when someone at the top of his game loses his form.

And so to more cheerful matters. Who’s heard of R S Downie? Possibly known as Ruth Downie in the USA?

If you haven’t, you will. You definitely should.

Ruth is a brilliant writer, witty and vivid, with a keen eye for a neat turn of phrase and a cast of characters whose real-life counterparts I’d love to meet but never will because a couple of millennia separate us. She’s one I’d have been proud to publish if someone else hadn’t jumped in first and offered her more serious money than I could dream of.

She writes about Gaius Petreius Ruso, a doctor in the Roman army when they were occupying Britain. He accidentally becomes an investigator in the first book, Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls (Medicus in the USA) and it all goes on from there.
I was reading the fourth, Ruso and the River of Darkness (aka Caveat Emptor). Suffice to say they get better all the time. For some reason they’re more popular in the USA than at home. Someone needs to spread the word over here.

Other persons in the rented cottage in France were reading other things. My daughter, for instance, devoured the first E J Copperman haunted guesthouse mystery at a single sitting, which tells you all you need to know, since she applies the first-twenty-pages rule rigorously. When’s the next one out, Jeff? There’s a whole family champing for it here!

My favourite hat

Editing was, as regular blog-followers will know, always the part of publishing which made me want to go to work every day. It’s also the part I’ve taken away with me; after selling my mini-publishing house just over a year ago (omigod, is it really more than a year? Where is my life disappearing to?), I seem to have edited upwards of a dozen books, not to mention offered feedback on twice as many extracts and short stories.
And you know what? It still gives me a buzz. So it’s good that the little world that is Dead Guy now has a functioning publisher on board again (hi, Ben) and I can slip quietly into my comfort zone, after twelve months of something I can only describe as roving commission.
So where do I begin?
A few years ago... yes, that’s a good start. A few years ago, before I jumped into the big, deep pool called publishing, I became aware of the various layers of editorial input that go into a book – not unlike the long list of people in the credits of a movie. This awareness was heightened by a good friend who worked as a proofreader for a couple of large publishing houses, and had also pursued an eclectic career in the media. Along the way he’d become conversant with the way things happen in a TV studio where different forms of drama are made; most relevantly to this story, he knew the difference between a soap and a sitcom. Not the content: the way they’re produced.
He was sent a novel to proofread: the latest by a very well-known and equally well-respected literary figure, who had better remain nameless to save him from embarrassment and me from lawsuits.
The novel involved – you guessed – a TV studio. And the well-respected author had got it wrong. Totally, hopelessly wrong, in a way that a development editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker really should have spotted long before the proofreading stage, which, for the benefit of people who are new to the business, comes right at the end of the process, just before (sometimes just a few days before) the book goes to print.
What was the poor proofreader to do?
A lot of people in that position might have thought, not my problem, chum, you’re not paying me to do someone else’s job. And who could blame them? But my friend liked to get things right. What’s more, he admired the author’s work and was one of the many who well-respected him, so he didn’t want him to look like a complete prat. (Translation: jerk.) And there are always – always – readers who pick up on these things and write ten-page letters to both author and publisher pointing out the error of their ways.
The story ended happily. The publisher was suitably horrified, and no doubt editorial knuckles further up the line were soundly rapped. Publication date was put back so amendments – actually major rewrites – could be made. My friend got a generous consultancy fee, a grateful phone call from the author, a credit in the acknowledgements and lots more proofreading work. And the book was a bestseller. You’ve probably read it.
The reason this long-ago incident is so fresh in my mind is that I’ve just hit a similar hurdle in a book I’m editing. Fortunately editing, not proofreading, so there’s time to sort the problem. Again, no names, no embarrassment or lawsuits, and it will require compromise, not major rewrites. We’re part way to resolving it. I just hope the author, who is less well-known and certainly not a literary figure, agrees with the solution.
I’ve just remembered: I was away on holiday last week, and had planned to write a What I Did... post. Isn’t it funny how real life crowds in? Maybe next week. Oh, and thanks a million to Sharon; the seat was lovely and warm.

Putting my two penn'orth in

Lynne Patrick

Or two cents’ worth if you prefer.

Since libraries seem to be the subject du jour, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring.

(OK, Patrick, enough with the mixed clichés. You didn’t learn those in any library.)

Life without libraries wouldn’t really be life at all. I don’t use my town’s as much as I should, or as much as I once did, but I do use it. Any attempt to close it will be met with strong opposition – and I’m getting good at that, ask anyone on the street where I live.

I can’t remember a time when one library or another didn’t play a role in my life. I joined the local public library for the first time when I was six; the official age was seven then (long, long ago – they sign babies up these days), but I escaped my mother’s clutches and went exploring while she disputed the issue with the librarian in charge, then while she filled in the form I made short work of a pile of picture books and demanded to know where they kept the big girls’ stories, so they realised they were on a loser insisting on the letter of the law.

I’d graduated to the adult library by the time I was eleven – again against the rules, but by then I’d read everything in the kids’ section except Biggles (definitely not for girls!) and the baby stuff (outgrown before I joined). And since Young Adult was a thing of the future (though not, apparently, in the US – see below), I needed access to Catherine Cookson and H E Bates.

At primary school I decided I wanted to be a librarian myself when I grew up, and at high school I took charge of junior library day when I was fifteen. I’m still not sure why I strayed from that path; a working day surrounded by books is still my idea of the right kind of working day. But when you’re at the age when you choose a career path, all kinds of influences kick in. I didn’t apply for jobs in publishing companies either; it took another ftymumble years to get there.

So what did libraries do for me?

At first they provided an escape from the real world. I was the skinny kid with glasses and a funny accent, so sometimes I needed somewhere to run from unwelcome attention in the school yard. The cool kids don’t follow you to the library.

Then they widened my horizons. Holidays abroad didn’t happen till my college days, and I didn’t visit the USA till I was in my late 30s. Cherry Ames and Kay Tracey (a precursor to Nancy Drew, and my introduction to mystery fiction) gave me a taste of a world where things weren’t at all like home (hey, showing my age or what?!).

Then came research. Essays and papers in my college years; background for fiction when I realised I was a writer. I still have pleasant memories of afternoons spent in the town library with a list of titles I needed to get the background right for a novel based in the First World War. I’m not sure which of us enjoyed those times more – me, or the librarian who hunted down every last one.

But mainly, from when I was six years old right up to last week, just losing myself in a world of someone else’s making, without running up a huge overdraft and wondering where to store all the books that won’t fit on the shelves. Or where to put more shelves...
These days, there’s the opportunity to try out new authors before parting with hard cash. I try to strike a balance between buying and borrowing; fortunately here in the UK we have something called Public Lending Right, which ensures authors get paid (though not a lot) when people borrow their books from public libraries, but I’m all too well aware that the only way to help writers keep writing is to buy them. So I try only to borrow books by unfamiliar authors, and buy all but the really hard to find titles by my favourite authors.

OK, so there’s nothing remarkable in any of that. I didn’t use the library to educate myself from the ground up; no chance of that, my mother was a teacher and achievement at school was not optional. I just used it, and still use it, the way most people do.
And the way most people want to go on using it.

Are you listening, politicians with eyes permanently on red alert for soft targets for your budget slashing?

One a penny, two a penny

Lynne Patrick

I’m not safe to be let loose in a bookshop. If you ever see me there, confiscate my Visa card immediately, before I spend next month’s supermarket bill. Or do something dreadful.

Like last week. It’s confession time. One day last week I came out of a bookshop hefting a bag which contained ten books – but I only paid a quarter of the cover price. It was that bane of small bookstores’ lives, the remainder shop. Not only that: they were having a sale. Paperbacks were crammed too tight on the shelves, stacked on the floor, piled by the cash register, and they weren’t even the usual remainder shop fare of out-of-date cookery books and biographies of minor celebs. Fiction was in the majority, crime fiction accounted for well over half, and we’re going on holiday in a little over a week. Well, what’s a girl to do? Reader, I bought them.

But not without a certain sense of guilt. Actually a very strong sense. Having lived in that world for seven years, not only do I know what a publisher pays out to turn a pile of manuscript into a glossy-covered paperback, so I bought those books for only pence more than it cost to produce them; I also know the real bookshop a few streets away was losing sales, and the authors made peanuts, if anything at all. I’m really, really sorry about that; I’ve been on the authors’ side of the fence as well, and the last thing I want is to make little of the effort and energy that go into writing a novel. I think it was the lovely Keith Waterhouse who said writing a book is akin to digging a small quarry with a teaspoon.

But... Yes, here come the excuses, I’m afraid, though I don’t expect you to be any more approving of my behaviour.

1. A market stall in my local town also sells cut-price books and I don’t have any problem giving it a wide berth; the books have flimsy covers and no prelim pages, and are poorly printed on low-quality paper. Go figure. But the books I bought were not pirate editions; they were the real thing, with covers, information pages and the whole nine yards absolutely intact, the production values comparable with anything on my shelves. So I wasn’t contributing to a major rip-off business.

2. What had clearly happened on this occasion was that a publisher or six had decided to offload some of the stock that had lingered in the back of the warehouse for years. (Though why they can’t offer genuine bookshops a good deal on them is a mystery to me.) I found eight- and nine-year-old titles by a couple of my favourite authors for which I’d previously trawled new and secondhand bookshops in vain. (Yeah, OK, I know Amazon can usually deliver those particular goods, but I’m a dyed-in-the-wool bookshop person with an acute and ongoing allergy to putting my Visa details online.) At some point in the past I must have added my grumble to the many, about the difficulty I’ve had getting hold of early titles by authors who have been around for years but whose work I’ve only just discovered. This was treasure.

I know I’ve been a bad person, and I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I’m truly sorry. I promise I’ll try not to fall into temptation again. Well, not for a long time. And I also promise I’ll only buy cut-price books by authors who have made the big time and aren’t trying to scrape a living without resorting to punching a supermarket till.

One thing leads to another

Lynne Patrick

Looking through my reading pile the other day in search of inspiration, I was struck by the paucity of next-in-series titles. I think at the moment it’s because I’m waiting for the latest by some of my favourite authors to come out in paperback; Susan Hill’s Serrailler series and C J Sansom’s Shardlakes come to mind, and there are probably others.

Then, as these things do, it triggered a whole new train of thought. Several of my favourite series authors have recently begun to develop a second series alongside one that’s working perfectly well, and I began to think about why that might be.

Publishers like series. When I was a publisher, I liked series. Why’s that, you ask. I can think of two reasons, one practical, the other creative. The first is a marketing thing: if readers connect with a lead character, they’ll keep coming back for more; and as more readers pick up a series three or four books in, that creates an ongoing demand for the earlier titles.

But it’s also a satisfaction thing. Watching a series protagonist develop background, layers and complexities as the author learns and grows is one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.

Which begs the question, why start all over again? If it ain’t broke, why go in search of a new one?

I asked a few pertinent questions, and again got two answers, one practical, the other creative.

Maybe not practical; try aspirational/career-minded. Publishers like series – but not many publishers will want to pick up a series halfway through. Unless the author is hugely successful, of course, in which case all rules are suspended. Val McDermid recently moved from HarperCollins to Little, Brown and I suspect will be able to write whatever she likes for them. But more generally, if an author’s series has a solid but unremarkable track record with a medium-sized publisher, and s/he has ambitions to move out of the midlist, a new series could be the answer. The track record gives the author’s agent some leverage; the new series is something to sell.

But writers, by and large, primarily write not for the fame or fortune (though both are nice if they happen), but because that’s what they do. Which brings me to the second, creative, reason. This was the answer I got from one crime writer friend who falls into the non-Val McD category above: I spend most of my life in that world (her books grew out of her day job) and sometimes I feel the need to go somewhere else.

I suspect it’s also because any creative endeavour has an element of challenge, and a few books into a series, when the lead character is so well developed that new surprises are growing thinner on the ground, some breathing space might offer a new perspective. A year or two out to explore new territory provides that. And of course the new territory may well yield up new fruit which will cross-fertilise with and enrich the old.
I suspect there are series authors out there with their own take on this, and who knows, some of them may even be reading this. If I’ve got it all completely wrong, do let me know. I’m as open to growth and development as any established author. It may even feed into my own writing, if I ever get back to it.

Not with a whimper

There I was, thinking August would be a quiet month when I could do some thinking, forward planning, maybe even a little writing – then famous last words syndrome kicks in and the world erupts around me.

Not just my own little world this time, either. First the Horn of Africa descends into famine, which, OK, happens every few years, but wouldn’t you think that will all the scientific advances we hear about we could have got it sorted by now? Then the US nearly goes bankrupt – sorry, guys, but that’s how it looked from out here, even though I think we knew deep down Obama wouldn’t let it happen and would find a way out somehow. Then global finance spirals into meltdown again, bringing back grey memories. Then the police in London shoot some bad guy whose name will probably be lost in the smoke and havoc of what ensued: riots, looting, arson and general mayhem in most of the UK’s big cities, out of all proportion to the spark that lit the tinder. One small mercy is that the smashers and looters seem to be ignoring bookshops. Maybe they’ve all got Kindles, quipped one observer. Nah – more likely they can’t read, quoth another. Whatever the rationale, long may it continue!

Once again real-life crime shows the fictional kind how it’s done. I suppose ‘twas ever thus, though when when you’re living through the Chinese-style interesting times it feels like all of history is revolving around what is actually only a passing moment.
A few years ago (eleven to be precise – the reason I remember that will be clear if you do the maths), I undertook a local history project which involved researching the big news stories in each decade of the 20th century, assessing which were the biggest and summing them up in a couple of paragraphs for a weekly feature. There was a lot of ‘oh, yes, I remember that!’ and ‘did that really make national headlines every day for a week?’; and not a little of ‘now, remind me what that was about again?’ and ‘my word, I’d forgotten all about that’. Distance lends perspective. And maybe a kind of misty sense of there-but-for-the-grace... After all, that’s in the past now; it can’t touch us.

I wonder if that’s one reason, apart from good stories and great characters, for reading crime fiction. (And maybe for watching the TV coverage of famine, riots and other symptoms of international breakdown.) Sitting in our own armchairs, protected by four strong walls, we can look at other people’s havoc-filled lives, real or fictional, with a kind of fascinated horror well laced with relief that we don’t actually have to go there and do that.

And once August’s over the hurricane season will be upon us. There are still reasons to be glad I live in the UK. I’ll be thinking of you, American friends.

Doing it yourself

Lynne Patrick

Top of today’s to-blog list is a big thank-you, to everyone who offered support and solidarity as I prepare to lie down under the wheels of rampant entrepreneurial opportunism (great phrase – I may use that in my objection letter) and stop the bulldozers in their tracks. Um, mixed metaphors there, not to mention imperfect (actually non-existent) engineering knowledge, but the thanks are no less heartfelt and the battle continues. I’ll keep you posted.

Next up, more thanks for the sympathy and practical help from several quarters regarding Typepad’s strange behaviour. The wonderful Jeff Cohen shoehorned two possible solutions from the horse’s mouth (ouch! more mixed metaphors), and I’m trying one of them today. Watch this space!

Finally to today’s topic. I’ve probably harped on about this before, but the world moves on and technology puts a different slant on things, so here goes again.

Self-publishing.

Ebooks, of course, is (are?) the technology which has offered the different slant. It’s no longer necessary to lay out serious money to get your book out there under your own steam. Amazon will do it all for you, for a relatively modest share of the income.
What worries me, and has always worried me, is that it’s the rare cases of huge success that you hear about – not the many, many people who sell a just few dozen copies of their life’s work to loyal family and friends.

When my publishing days came to full stop, one of the loose ends we had to tie up was the eBooks agreement on the backlist. Mostly the authors were happy enough simply to sign up with our former partners-in-E. A few decided to go it alone – possibly influenced by the Amanda Hockings and J A Konraths. It’s worked well for one. He’d already struck a deal with a bigger publisher than I was, and they’d put some marketing money behind his next book. About the others I’ve heard nothing. Go figure.

After all the hype about Amanda Hocking, I had to indulge in a quiet ironic smile when I read that she’d accepted a large advance from one of the big publishing houses – and that she’d warned authors in search of the same success that they were more likely to sell a hundred self-published copies than a hundred thousand. I rather think that deep down, like every aspiring author I’ve ever been acquainted with, she felt that real success didn’t come until she was acknowledged by someone who spots bestsellers for a living.

In the good old days when a book meant a wedge of paper between card covers, I used to receive at least one such a week, accompanied by a long letter explaining that the author had explored every other option before resorting to d-i-y, and the self-published volume had proved so popular in his village/college/workplace that he was now sure it would be a huge success for my company. Etc, etc, etc. Actually I received one yesterday; the writing world hasn’t caught up with real life yet, and I still get two or three submissions a week. So as well as needing the validation of a ‘real’ publisher, there are clearly aspiring authors out there who don’t think an eBook is a ‘real’ book. (Well, I don’t either, so there! We’re off on week’s flop-out holiday next month, and my reading pile will take up more suitcase space than my clothes.)

So what am I saying here? I think it’s that nothing apart from the format and the cash outlay has really changed. You may strike lucky with a self-published eBook – but then you might have struck lucky with a self-published print book too. People do. It makes headlines.

Ask yourself why it makes headlines.

Crimes Against Humanity

Lynne Patrick

Inspired by Jeff’s explosion of ire against shortsighted bureaucrats on Monday, today I’m going to veer away from crime fiction and head towards crime fact.

OK, maybe not literal crime. At least, not in the sense that they can go to jail for it, or even be led away in handcuffs, hanging their heads in shame. And if I start using too much emotive language, the handcuffs could be on me as I’m banged up for libel. So I need to watch my words.

But you tell me if this is a moral crime – a bad thing which will affect the future of a lot of people if it’s allowed to go ahead.

I live in a village: a concept which American Dead Guy followers may interpret differently from us Brits. I’ve visited cities in the US which had populations in the low hundreds. Over here, a small independent community is a village, usually surrounded by countryside: in this case woodland and agricultural fields, with moorland not far away.

Village is only a label – something administrative, I think – and not an indication of the number of people who live there. Ours has a population of several thousand, and in the thtymumble years I’ve lived here, it has just about doubled in size. In number of houses and people, anyway. In terms of facilities like shops, schools, medical services and leisure, it’s hardly grown at all.

And now a developer wants to expand it still further – not on to scrub land or the site of old farm buildings, as has happened before, but on to one of the lovely green fields which surround us, and provide us with some fresh air and breathing space before the urban sprawl which lies a mile or so away.

That mile or so matters to us. We live on a small island, not much bigger than South Dakota, but with a population the size of Texas’s and California’s combined. So unlike South Dakota and Texas, where you can drive (or better still walk) for dozens of miles and not encounter another human being, much less arrive at a town, fresh air and breathing space are at a premium. We need to preserve as much of it as we can. Didn’t somebody say the countryside acts as the lungs of the world?

Of course people need houses – but there are plenty more available spaces, already eaten into by previous construction work. One of our key arguments is that there’s a space like that just a couple of miles away.

Battle commenced a couple of weeks ago, at a public meeting; we expected only a handful of people to come, but the hall was packed out. People care about this stuff.

A month ago I’d have said the biggest crime people commit against themselves is apathy. The average voter turnout in elections is less than 50% – even lower than that when it’s local administrations rather than national government. But an issue like this brings people together.

So we’re fighting. For the right to fresh air; for the good of our community; for the sake of the little people against the big corporations.

And if we lose... well, if I’m missing without explanation one Wednesday, look out for the newspaper headlines and the picture captioned WOMAN PROTESTOR LIES DOWN IN FRONT OF BULLDOZER.

Spot the Deliberate Mistakes

Lynne Patrick

This week I’m wearing my editorial hat. The one with the Kevlar pad right where my forehead meets my hair, to absorb the thumps of despair. In the life I’ve just moved back into, post-publishing, I offer feedback to aspiring novelists on the standard 10,000-word submission package. Like this one.

Dear Sir or Madam...
I would like to send you my first novel to be published by your company. It is an action-packed thriller, 240,000 words long, and is about all the adventures in four years in the life of an American spy working in the USSR during the Cold War. I know it will be a bestseller.
Since you have an office in New York, it will be easy for you to bring out the book in America as well as here in England, and though I have never visited America, I will be very pleased to come there when you have arranged an appearance on Oprah or something like that.
I am enclosing a 5000-word synopsis and some sample chapters – the first, so that you know who the main character is, and two from the middle, because that’s where the book begins to gather pace and become really exciting. Also enclosed is a CD of the whole book, along with the cover design I have chosen, made by my friend who has been to art college.
I look forward to receiving my contract and advance in the next few days.
Yours sincerly
Bill Smith.

OK, that’s an exaggerated version – but not that exaggerated – I did get submission letters which weren’t a million miles from this, and they still come in at the rate of two or three a week, from people who misguidedly don’t keep in touch with developments. So let’s look at it all the same. You never know, it might contain some enlightening moments.

First mistake is mine: nothing in this specimen letter is deliberate. The author really believes it.

Second mistake: Dear Sir or Madam. Grrrrrr!

Third mistake:all he has to do is send in his manuscript, and a few weeks later receive a life-changing cheque and box of free copies. Amazingly, some people still think this. It’s an illusion I came across quite often back in the 1990s when I ran creative writing classes at a local education centre, but you’d think aspiring writers would be more clued up these days. Evidence points to the contrary.

Fourth mistake: 240,000 action-packed words... a contradiction in terms, wouldn’t you say? Hard to maintain packed action much beyond 100,000. And a four-year span? Hm.

Fifth mistake: Cold War thrillers are so last century. Literally. They fall into that nomansland between historical and contemporary; neither publishers nor booksellers know where to slot them in.

Sixth mistake: it’s his first book; how on earth does he know how it will sell? It’s a question which makes strong marketing men gnaw their fingernails. (The subtext of the sentence is because books like this always are – that’s why I’ve written it.)
That’s six mistakes in the first paragraph. I don’t think I need to go on, do I?

Well, OK, then, just one more tiny point – HE DIDN’T PROOFREAD HIS LETTER! I know how to spell sincerely. So will the editor.

And one more – no one who has done their homework would ever submit chapters from the middle of the book as a taster package – much less admit in the cover letter that it doesn’t get exciting till then. But you knew that, didn’t you?

Some people still don’t, though. In my feedback role I’m constantly amazed by the number of people who think a synopsis is an optional extra, or not necessary at all; and astonished by the ones who cherrypick chapters.

I suspect I’m preaching to the converted here, so I won’t go on any longer.
Except to say thanks again to the phantom blog repairer, who sorted out the recurring glitch for me again last week and still hasn’t told me who s/he is so I can thank him/her properly. I tried a different approach this time: I typed directly into the Compose box. As before, the word count still registered zero after two paras, so I’m assuming the problem still exists, and am taking alternative action as before.

Technology does not like me!

Getting To Know You

Lynne Patrick

First of all, thank you to the kind, generous and technologically literate person who sorted out the glitch on my last week’s post. (Jeff C, if it was you, you’re a star. In fact, whoever you are, you’re a star.) I can’t promise it won’t happen again this week, because I have no idea what I did wrong and therefore no idea what to do/not to do to prevent it; all I did was exactly the same as almost every week for the past four and a quarter years.

And so to the business of the week. It’s been one of those weeks when a lot of brain-racking has taken place in order to find something to post about. Not that nothing’s happened; the past few days have been pretty action-packed. But not with crime-fiction-related matters; the threat to build a small housing development in the lovely green field opposite our house may be a crime, but it’s not fictional. And though it’s occupying a large portion of my mindspace, it doesn’t really qualify as a Dead Guy topic.

So, from my reinvented position of voracious reader of crime fiction – the final link in the idea-to-bookshelf chain formed by my fellow bloggers (you’re all OK with me taking on that role, are you guys? Please say yes; I need to feel useful) – here are a few thoughts that came up as I indulged in my second favourite activity this week.

Series. Ongoing backstory or not ongoing backstory?

I have divided loyalties and mixed feelings. On the one hand, take Jack Reacher. You kind of feel he doesn’t really have a life outside the books. He drifts from one town and one adventure to the next; he has no roots, so nothing to grow from. Between books he digs swimming pools, works as a nightclub bouncer, anything to pay his motel bill. And in his case it doesn’t matter, and certainly doesn’t detract from my reading enjoyment. In fact it makes it easier. I often pick up a book at random and find I’ve begun reading a new series somewhere in the middle, then once I latch on to it, I go back to the beginning and read them in order – but I know I can pick up a Jack Reacher at any point in the sequence and just enjoy the ride.

On the other hand, I love watching protagonists grow, and their lives move on. I ached for Maureen Carter’s Bev Morriss through a broken love affair, rape, family trauma, pregnancy, a burgeoning relationship with... no, read the books for yourselves... and a wealth of other character-building life crises. I cheered when Roz Southey’s Charles Patterson was finally backed into a corner by the woman he loved but dared not marry. I followed with held breath when Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne found himself entangled in a relationship which didn’t involve a football team or a cat. And I cheered when my brilliant family tracked down every single one of the hard-to-find early titles which fill in Charlie Fox’s pre-bodyguarding history in Zoë Sharp’s action-packed series. I love that sense that my favourite series characters go on living their lives between books, and my visits to their worlds cover only a small part of those lives.

Which brings me to the technical stuff. Well, story construction. Does that count as technical?

In the second case, the not-Jack Reacher style of series, how much backstory does an author need to include for the benefit of readers who dive in somewhere in the middle? How much does it matter that we know how the protagonist met his/her partner in book 2, what happened to the pregnancy in book 5, who killed his/her best friend back in book 1, setting the scene for an ongoing hunt-down-and-destroy strand?
A lot? A little? Not at all? Or what?

What do you think?

Hello, 21st Century, Part 2

Lynne Patrick

Wouldn't you just know it? There I was last week, in shock because the website I'd set up actually worked, amazed because I'd actually achieved something technological - and when I tried to get my post up on the Dead Guy site, which I've been doing for more than four years now, so you'd think I had it sussed, it all went pear-shaped on me. A little lateral thinking provided a solution of sorts, but the post appeared without a heading, so something had clearly gone wrong. Probably me. Serves me right for being ambitious. Fingers crossed it all goes according to plan this week; I've applied some more lateral thinking, but if that doesn't work I'm out of options.

Meanwhile, back at the cyber-face... I did it, guys. It's up there on the web for all to view. You can look if you like: www.mysterynights.net . I still haven't got to grips with hyperlinks (which is why everyone else's posts have pictures and bits of video and sounds, even smells for all I know, but mine are just plain text) so you may need to type it into your search box, but if you do, the website comes up. And the e-mail works too.

It's far from perfect. Actually, it's far from finished. Call it a work in progress. But all the essential information is there, and at least I now have something I can direct people to if they ask about the murder mystery evenings.

So Mystery Nights is open for business. (Not that it ever really wasn't: just that until now you had to know about the old version.) Have entertaining evening event, will travel. Though not, alas, to the USA, which is where I gather a substantial proportion of Dead Guy followers live.

Then again, the deal is we'll go anywhere as long as the customer pays our travel costs, so if you want to make us an offer...

Who said publishing was going to be my last big adventure? There's life in the old girl yet!

This is the way the world turns

 The death of the novel has been predicted regularly for as long as I can remember, but it seems to survive all attempts to talk it into oblivion.

Now I’m wondering if the same will happen to bookshops.

The concept of big chains certainly seems to be in a nosedive. The huge Borders organisation hived off its two main satellites in the UK and Australia some years ago. They both kept going independently for a while, but the UK version bit the dust about eighteen months ago, a casualty of the economic crisis that pretty well brought the whole world to its knees; and now both the Aussie version and what used to be the parent company in the USA are set fair to follow. A pity: here in the UK at least, Borders were the good guys among chain booksellers.

Waterstone’s is still afloat for the time being, thanks to monetary input from the Russians, who seem to be the only people with any cash to spare at the moment. But according to the handy little information sources that drop into my in box most mornings, the remaining American giant Barnes & Noble isn’t exactly in clover. Maybe that explains why I was stalked by an over-keen assistant in the Flagstaff branch last month: something that’s never happened before. Possibly he was just trying to be helpful, but I had a hard time persuading him that I wasn’t looking for any particular author’s work - I wanted to see what was on the shelves before I decided what to buy. (Not quite true, actually, but a bookshop is for browsing, not the hard sell.) I’d better hold on to the printed carrier bag they gave me; it could become a collector’s item.

There’s better news about independents, who, it’s devoutly to be hoped, are motivated by their customers’ tastes and requirements rather than by the blandishments and marketing fees of vast publishing conglomerates. Only this week I read of one which has doubled its floor area, and a couple of months ago I visited another which had just moved up the street into larger premises.

It’s not that people aren’t buying books. Amazon is thriving, and other online booksellers aren’t doing so badly. And of course sales of eBooks are growing exponentially. Which is probably the shops’ biggest problem.

I don’t have an eReader, and for the time being at least, I have no plans to buy one. Partly because I’m a quaint old-fashioned creature who actually loves the feel, smell and experience of paper leaves between cardboard covers.

No, not partly: mainly. But there’s also an element of waiting for the technology to settle down. When manufacturers of eReaders sort themselves out, decide on a single format and become interchangeable instead of pulling against each other and jumping up and down for attention like spoilt children, I may possibly succumb. We haven’t just run out of bookshelf space in our house; we’ve actually run out of walls to hang new bookshelves on. So there may come a time when necessity outweighs sentiment.

Then again, maybe not. Curling up in an armchair with a piece of plastic somehow isn’t the same.

So what’s to be done? Do we just sit back and let it all find its own level? Going back to my first observation, it could be deduced that the book trade seems quite good at looking after itself; the novel certainly hasn’t died yet, and given the stack I’m currently working my way through – mainly crime, but not all by any means – if I’m any kind of microcosm, it doesn’t even have a dose of summer ‘flu.

Maybe what’s happening to the chain bookshops is just an Awful Warning. Perhaps some booksellers have got it wrong, in which case we have to ask if they actually deserve to survive. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Waterstone’s now they’ve put a real bookseller in charge.

Or maybe it’s just the world turning and settling into a new shape. It does that now and again.

Any thoughts, Dead Guy followers?

Self-fulfilling prophecies and other trivia

 No, I haven't retired. Really, honestly, truly I haven't. My computer was still running at a quarter to seven last night, and I promise I wasn't playing Freecell. I'm open to all offers of editing work and theatre reviewing, and when there's none of either to get my teeth into (not often) I keep looking at the last unpublished novel but one and wondering if the idea I had for turning it into a murder mystery would work if I did this...

Then again, I suppose if I'm really honest, I have to say I've slowed down a little. And anyone looking at my diary for the past few weeks could be forgiven for thinking I'm a lady of leisure these days. Well, maybe not lady exactly...

Two weeks' vacation in the USA last month, and now this afternoon we're off to the south coast of our own little UK. It's partly work; the murder mystery evenings which we used to promote the books I used to publish weren't part of the package when I sold up, so we still run them whenever we're asked. And we do get asked. They're fun. In fact, it's high time I did some proper promotion to get that little business working as it should. I will, I will – just as soon as I get back from my weekend break. The thing is, this particular murder mystery evening is about twice as far away as we usually travel, and close to the Isle of Wight, which we've never visited (can you believe that? we live on an island less than a thousand miles end to end and there are huge tracts of it we've never seen). So we're visiting it this weekend.

Meanwhile, it's Wednesday, and we're not leaving till this afternoon (OK, OK, five-day weekends and she keeps insisting she hasn't retired...) so there's plenty of time for my Dead Guy slot. So while I'm on the subject, sort of, how about we look at promotion from the publisher's point of view. Someone did suggest that even though I'm not actually doing it any more, now I no longer have to be careful about treading on tender book trade toes, I'm in a position to offer a full and frank view of how things look from the publisher's side of the fence.

Several years ago I was at a seminar on marketing run by one of those large gatherings of writers which collectively carry some weight when there's a cause to be lobbied for, but individually seem to consist of a lot of people who simply don't know how publishing works. And for the most part, they had very little idea how book marketing works.

Before I go any further, let me say this: what I'm about to describe is my perception of how it is – certainly not how I think it should be, or how I did it myself.

What seems to happen in large publishing houses is that 90% of the marketing budget goes on 10% (or even fewer) of the books. The lead titles in any given season get a huge slice of the cake – and usually, though not always, the lead titles are the latest by the big-name authors – leaving very little to support other authors. And since the best way to get that all-important word of mouth going is to make sure the book is in the public eye as much as possible, the success of any given book is directly related to the amount of marketing budget it gets, and the success of any given author becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

OK, I know there are exceptions. Occasionally a book captures the public imagination without much promotion. Even more occasionally, once in a lifetime maybe, you get the Harry Potter phenomenon, when all the publisher needs to do is mention to a few people that a new one will be out soon, and the promotion does itself. And sometimes the public imagination refuses to bite and the book bombs anyway.

But mostly, the more promotion a book gets, the better its chance of success.

Back to the seminar. Hackles rose. Questions were asked. Mainly the subtext was, so that's why my books only sold a few thousand copies and my publisher dropped me: I didn't win the big marketing budget lottery.

The question is, is it really a lottery? Or are the publisher's choices and decisions based on the knowledge and experience which ensures they recognise a quality product, and that all-important reliable gut feeling which sorts the best from the rest?

I don't have an answer to that. But from my current position straddling the fence between publisher and writer, I can offer this dubious wisdom: the writer isn't always best placed to know what makes a bestseller. I mean, come on, guys – we all write works of unparalleled genius, don't we? Who's to say which are going to be bestselling works of unparalleled genius? Or why?

Publishers may not do it the way we want them to – but at least they do something.