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What I want for Christmas is a …

The New York Times is good at keeping an eye on the progress of ebooks. In the latest piece “Christmas Gifts May Help E-Books Take Root” they note that ebooks now make up 9 to 10% of the trade book market and publishers predict digital sales will be 50% higher in 2011 than 2010.

With ebook readers a Christmas present of choice, in the US they think “January could be the biggest month ever for e-book sales, as possibly hundreds of thousands of people are expected to download books on the e-readers they received as gifts”.

However publishers admit that they still haven’t worked out how to sell ebooks effectively to consumers. That times ten for Australia.

Apparently Life by Keith Richards and Cleopatra, a biography by Stacy Schiff are top ebook sellers in the US (but, oh, I like that Cleopatra cover – too bad about the B&W Kindle but if I buy it for my iPad I get the colour cover on my virtual bookshelf). The NY Times will publish an ebook bestseller list next year.

Full piece here.

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The Small Hand – Susan Hill

This book should have been right up my alley. It ticked all the boxes for a satisfying read. Narrator (antiquarian book dealer) stumbles into an old neglected garden and then feels a ghostly child’s hand take hold of his, a family secret, a possibility of madness, the ramping up of the haunting mixed with the searches for rare manuscripts and a remote monastery in France. Tick, tick, tick. It’s hardly original but handled well it can make for riveting reading, think Sarah Waters’ The Little Friend, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

So why did I find Hill’s book so dissatisfying? First and foremost it fails in its primary purpose which is to be frightening. The Small Hand just isn’t scary. I’m not sure why this is. It’s not as though Susan Hill can’t write terrifying books – The Woman in Black is deservedly recognised as one of the most chilling ghost stories ever written. I wonder if part of the problem is that the reader doesn’t empathise with the main character, the narrator – he is a rather stuffy, self-satisfied type and perhaps his retrospective reflections on his feelings of apprehension and fear distance the reader. There are too many “I shouldn’t have done that”, “if I had known”, “that was my last moment of peace”, “it  wasn’t a dream, it was real” etc.

Another problem may be the novella form. (The Small Hand is 130 pages or so long). Novellas have no sub-plots so they are of necessity a straight-forward telling, missing out on the complications a novel can provide. The Small Hand needed additional complexity to tease the reader more. As it is, the narrative is too obvious and the ending pretty lame. I also have a few quibbles with the standard of writing: repeated words, incorrect usages – a monk in the monastery in France says “for some months we are impassable” about being snowed-in in winter.

If you want an atmospheric ghost story, also in the novella form, Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts is more satisfying, proving that what a novella sacrifices in terms of narrative possibility can be made up via evocative writing.

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If you want to be published …

Kalinda Ashton, whose debut novel The Danger Game has caused a bit of a splash here and overseas (it’s longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC prize) made some useful remarks re writing in an interview with Stephen Romei in The Weekend Australian Review (4-5 Dec 2010).  Aspiring writers have heard if before but it is salutary to say it again, especially, as Kalinda does, in a nice pithy way:

  • If you want to be published for fame and fortune … choose another profession.
  • There are no short cuts, so be ready to experiment, fail, abandon, cut, reverse and shift point of view.
  • Get used to spending a lot of time alone, often frustrated or blocked, or approaching structural change with deep dread.
  • Find a reason to write apart from to get published or merely because you need to express yourself [such as] a genuine desire to do something, say something, question something in your work.
  • Persist, and finally
  • Do not think that being published changes everything, because it doesn’t.

The Danger Game is published by Sleepers Publishing and you can buy a copy from Readings here.

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Courses a substitute for writing?

The British writer Emma Darwin on her blog This Itch of Writing muses on how creative writing courses have become a substitute for actually writing. I’ve thought this for quite a while (and myself been guilty of indulging in the drug).

The latest tempter to purvey its wares is the Faber Academy which has set up shop in Australia. It’s offering exclusive (ie competitive) short writing courses for the select few and charging accordingly. I heard a figure of $6,000 for a six month course. The classes would be small and they’d include intensive individual tuition. That’s attractive – anyone who has done a postgrad creative writing course at an Australian university knows that classes there can be very large for workshops  – sixteen to twenty or more students.

But such is the demand there’s a plethora of other short courses to choose from run through evening colleges, state writers’ centres and, increasingly, by private individuals.

Emma Darwin posits some reasons for the addiction to such courses, and for serial course attendees. These mostly boil down to getting some form of validation from others (most especially from the tutor). Writing is a lonely task and the road to publication full of ruts, potholes and fallen trees, so you either have to have an overweening belief in your own talent and ability, or Emily Dickinson-like you continue on in private pleasing yourself and some “ideal reader”. The third path is to do a course, hoping to stand out from the pack. In my opinion, creative writing courses are not there to teach writing, they don’t offer anything on the craft that you can’t get (much, much more cheaply) from one of the many creative writing primers (Stephen King’s On Writing, for example). What students want is feedback from someone whose opinion they respect. All new writers know that the only other feedback you’re likely to get is the publisher’s proforma rejection letter. (I’ve heard tell some writers get a nice note with some constructive criticism and encouragement to keep trying – hmmm)

I’m sure as Emma Darwin suggests, the feedback you get from courses could become addictive.  How much easier it is to write a few short stories, or one or two chapters, and get immediate feedback that to slog along  for years on your own with just a small flame of hope to keep you warm at night. People write for different reasons but if it’s publication that is the goal, are courses value for money? A friend of mine got a high distinction for a short story at a top creative writing uni. The lecturer said, when she gave an HD, it meant the work was publishable (brave call). The friend did the rounds of literary magazines but to no avail.

What, I wonder, do the students who are paying top dollar to the Faber Academy expect? I suppose it’s the validation of being chosen and getting in – but no one is paying THEM for their talent. Even if their dreams come true and they get a publishing contract, they are unlikely, in Australia, to make back the money they’ve forked out for the course.

It is all a vicious circle. It is true that some students who do post grad writing courses do get published out of it. Most often, they’ve done a masters and worked with a tutor/writer on their “project” for a year or two, and then been recommended to an agent. On the other hand, plenty of people get published anyway, never having done a course. The plain fact of the matter is, for an emerging writer to get published, he/she needs an entree to a publisher or agent. As is the way with our capitalist culture, paying to do an expensive course is one way to get to the very first step of the Sisyphean task of breaking into Australian literature.

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On a dark and gloomy Late Night

On ABC RN’s Late Night Live (1 Dec) there was a rather subdued discussion with Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe and Mark Rubbo from Readings about the Australian book industry. They both sounded very pessimistic calling this last year one of the worst for the industry. While there was some attempt to finger the move to digital books with the drop in business, the real culprit, it appears, is the huge rise in the Australian dollar making it much, much cheaper to purchase print books online from overseas book sites (OK we’re talking Amazon).

Whereas, in the past, the postage paid on Amazon purchases somewhat evened out the price paid, now the differential is so great it is much more economic. A US or UK book is currently pretty much half the price or less of the same book published here. I can see this would depress Henry Rosenbloom as Scribe, like Text, are good at spotting quality overseas titles to publish here, and this must be an economic mainstay for them. Scribe, for example, publishes Norman Doidge’s very popular The Brain that Changes Itself. (Available as an epub, I notice, from the Dymocks website).

A smidgin of light in the gloomy atmosphere of the LNL discussion came when they let slip that Scribe and Readings were going to work on developing a site to sell ebooks. It wasn’t made clear what form this would take but they did mention value-adding on a portal the way an independent bookstore assists and directs its customers. I also like the idea (not talked about on LNL) of in-store downloads – where you could go in and browse around the print books, choose what you want and then have the genuine choice to buy an e-edition or a p-edition, and, in that scenario the bookshop would get a cut as the download hub. LNL podcast here.