Buyers and Readers

Waterstones recently announced that they were doing away with their 3 for 2 promotion, which has generally had a good reaction in the publishing world. I looked at my To Be Read pile - which is actually more like a couple of shelves-worth - and realised that many of the books on it had been bought as part of the 3 for 2 promotion. I hadn't really wanted that third book, but got it any way as it was free. Having got it, however, I haven't spent my time reading it.

It's the same with my Kindle. I've downloaded lots of books - mainly the entire works by classic authors such as Henry James and Charles Dickens - but I haven't actually read any of them. The books I have read on my Kindle are the ones I paid for. And more than that, paid a reasonable sum for. (Your definition of what's 'reasonable' will probably be different from mine, but I don't think paying 99p is reasonable for a book that has taken an author maybe a year to write.)

People sometimes tell me that they've bought my books but haven't actually read them, and my standard response has always been, "so long as you've bought them, I don't mind". The flip side is that when someone tells me that they've read all my books from the library, it's hard to be thrilled. I've never been a writer who has said "I just want to be read" - I want to earn a living from writing!

But I wonder if I'm going to have to change my attitude. Someone buying a book for 99p doesn't seem much of an achievement if they don't actually read it. If they don't read it they can't tell other people that they're worth reading, and they won't bother to go and read the rest. Why should they, when they've already got a copy of one of my books waiting to be read?

It's not just about money. As a reader I'm handing over great wodges of my time to read a book. Whether I paid 99p or £7.99 for the product, it's taking up a lot of my leisure time. I want the book to be good because my leisure time is worth a lot to me.

I think anyone who says that they know where publishing is going is a fool. Things are changing too fast and what is true this week may not be true next year, next month, even next week. But a lot of the discussion around publishing - especially epublishing - is based around price. This year, when we've got new reading devices to fill, perhaps price is the key topic. I think however, that selling lots of books at rock bottom prices is a red herring.

What did I do last week? Bought two full priced books, because I wanted them. I've now read them both, along with another book that was lent to me by a friend with a good recommendation. That's anecdotal evidence. But many of the ebooks by best selling authors sell at prices comparable to their paperback price, and are doing well too.

I wonder if 2012 will see quality of reading experience coming to the top of the list, when we choose to be readers rather than just buyers. I hope so.

Does Conventional Publishing Deserve to Survive? I

At the RNA Novel of the Year Awards party I asked my editor - who is very senior in the Headline chain of command - why publishers were letting on-line retailers such as Amazon present themselves as goodies and the publishers as baddies when it would be easy for the Big Six publishers to mount a campaign of their own demonstrating the reverse. She agreed that publishers were being slow to show what they added to the publishing process.

So, what do they add? And can it be done by someone else - the author, or their agent, for example?

1. Editing

There are two sorts of editing and they often get mixed up. A copy editor will check for mistakes such as typos, grammatical errors and repetitions. They'll also point out mistakes like the heroine's eyes being blue on p36 but brown on p85. Publishing houses usually employ freelances for copy editors, so that's an option open to any one - author, agent, whoever.

But there's another sort of editor, who is usually an employee of the publishing company. This editor - usually a commissioning editor - looks at the bigger picture. They tell you if your main character is getting irritating, or if the middle section is going on for too long, or if you need more here. They don't copy edit. It's wonderful to work with a good editor: they enhance and strengthen your story and make you the best writer you can be. It's a real skill, and one that should be appreciated by all writers.

This sort of editing is, frankly, hard to get. The closest is the services offered by a book doctor. I used a book doctor for the first draft of my first book. It cost about £250, and about two pages of the seven page report were specific to my book. When I did the finished version (90% had changed) I got 15 pages of notes from my editor about the book - and that was after she'd bought it. I think that was the first of about four exchanges. My current editor also sends pages of notes, and we talk things through over the phone. Sometimes it's about small stuff, other times it's major. And the great thing is, all the time you're talking, you know that their sole interest is in making the book as good as it can be; there isn't a meter running.

Real editing is a skill that appears to have been undervalued by a lot of senior people in the publishing world so they have only themselves to blame if people outside publishing are hardly aware of the difference between a commissioning editor and a copy editor. One of the reasons cited by Amanda Hocking for accepting a print deal was she realised she needed better editing. She'd employed freelance editors on all her books, but the results were "shitty" - her word. I suspect she'd been using copy editors, rather than commissioning editors or book doctors.

2. Gate keeping

Yeah, yeah, I know this is contentious. But there is a lot of bad writing out there. I've read some of it. A friend told me recently that in his first year in publishing he read over 2,000 manuscripts that had come in from the slush pile. Only one was worth publishing. Another friend told me that a lot appeared as if the author had started on p1, got to The End and then never gone back to check over what they'd written, just bunged it in the post.

Watch any talent show, such as the X Factor or Britain's Got Talent. There are some really good people out there, and there are some horrors. Those are the ones we see on the TV because they make the best television, but what about all those thousands of people queuing up we don't see. They're the good but not star quality, the better than average, the middle ranks, the OKs. They're probably the best in their immediate circle, but can't compete on a national stage. A friend told me about being a brilliant runner at school. He won everything locally. Then he went up to county level and discovered he was average.

Not everything that gets published is great, but it's usually effective - and better than what didn't get chosen. It has to be said that over the past ten years, publishers have devolved a lot of the gate keeping process onto agents. That may turn out to have been a mistake if Joe Konrath is to be believed.

Part II tomorrow - Marketing and Career Sustainability

NEW!!! I've finally got round to organising some course dates....

How to WRITE a Novel: London 3rd May/Birmingham 7th May/

Oxford 8th May/Exeter 21st May/Bath 12th June

How to SELL a Novel: London 24th May/Exeter 4th June/

Bath 3rd July Details are on my website