Performing authors and Fiona's video

My friend Fiona Dunbar's new book Tiger-Lily Gold has just come out and to celebrate she made this video (I helped!)

Meanwhile, Nicola Morgan (Deathwatch) is aiming for a world record in school visits.

Anthony Horowitz (The Power of Five: Necropolis) is appearing in a virtual event targetting nine thousand children in 216 schools.

And big name authors are guaranteed roles at a proliferation of children's book festivals to draw the crowds.

The Book Brunch children's column wonders "how much the life of a children’s author has become about personal contact with children as well as contact through books ..."

 Have we lost anything since the days when we only knew writers and illustrators through their books? When we weren’t necessarily sure what sex E B White, E Nesbitt, P L Travers, and L M Montgomery were, let alone what they looked like? (Though A A Milne and C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien had got famous enough for us to know.) Was there something to be said for imagining an author through his or her work? P L Travers looked liked Mary Poppins in my head.

Is the standard of performance getting too high for authors who are "merely" good at writing? So it is not enough to write a gripping tale: you also have to be Eoin Colfer in front of an audience. Or do these showmen do the whole profession the favour of giving it glamour, and making kids want to be in it, as they want to be other kinds of celebrities? Read more

Should we resist the demands of our ever-more-swiftly spinning world? Should we insist that writers be allowed to do only that, write?

I recently acquired a Flip Mino - one of those easy peasy pocket camcorders.

I figure the Flip would make it easier for me to build up some useful footage for a future marketing campaign.

There is never a better time to surrender to the inevitable than now.

London Book Fair: The digital dilemma - obsessed or overwhelmed ?

Is it just geeky me or was the London Book Fair rather preoccupied with the challenge - threat? - of the digital life?

"Waiting for the iPod moment" was the headline of a Media Guardian interview of Harper Collins chief exec Victoria Barnsley to mark the opening of the London Book Fair.

The word "digital" "e books" "e publishing" "e reading" figured oftentimes repeatedly on the titles of the seminar list.

In the free London Book Fair Daily supplied by the Bookseller, an article by Chris Meade argued that though printed books "may have already had their day", it was not yet the end of reading "as long as publishers fully embrace the multimedia possibilities of the digital age".

A keynote seminar with the title "Digital Publishing: Where is the money?" resulted in a heated discussion that ranged from ebooks to piracy. The answer? Nobody knows. Read reports from Publishers Weekly and Book Brunch

A panel on the subject of "Online Publicity: Making the Most of the Digital Media" scheduled for one of the smaller seminar rooms ended up totally oversubscribed. And even as audience members were hunkering down in the aisles and spilling out the doorways, Bloomsbury was announcing that shortlisted Orange Prize title Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie will be made available for iPhone users as a free download for 24 hours from 12 noon, 22 April.

At a discussion comparing book trends in the US and the UK, Kelly Gallagher, VP of publishing services at Bowker, summed up the radical changes confronting publishers today:

Mass change is going on in the industry today, no one can deny that ... change is happening at an exponential rate ... and many times we are playing catch up and often it is from the rear view mirror that we discover the book market has moved on.

We have a lot of motivation for change – no denying economic marketplace – if ever there was a reason to engage in changing your strategy for publishing, today is the day.

Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away

I'm a Google enthusiast, I admit it. I've switched from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Google Chrome. I enjoy Google Earth. I use Google Docs. I use Google Maps. I run Google Adwords. I blog on Google's Blogger.

But for every wonderful thing Google giveth, Google taketh away. 

Today, literary agent Lynn Chu of Writers Representatives took a microscope to the labyrinthine terms of the recent Google settlement and spelled it out in language even an author can understand .

Chu warns authors to pay attention (all authors who've ever had anything published in the United States) -

(by 5 May 2009) ... every author and publisher in America is supposed to decide whether to "opt in," "opt out," or simply "ignore" a vast compulsory licensing scheme for the benefit of Google.

Given that authors are notorious at procrastination, I am helpfully bullet-pointing the highlights of the article below. But do read the complete article in the Wall Street Journal  titled 'Google's Book SettlementIs a Ripoff for Authors: Why allow a single publisher to throw out a functioning copyright system?'. 

• who are the winners of the settlement? the lawyers get $30 million, the Book Rights Registry gets $ 35 million, and infringed authors? $ 60 a book.
  
  
• "every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs"
  
  
• The Book Rights Registry - Says Chu:

  The Internet was supposed to eliminate middlemen, not pack multiple layers on. The BRR is in fact merely Google's contract negotiation and claims department

  • "Google's erstwhile adversaries are paid off with the aforementioned Book Rights Registry (BRR), which will compete with the U.S. Copyright Office and the federal courts"
  
  
  • "The BRR expects to read everyone's contracts to say who is owed what of Google's revenues -- net again of all its costs, which are sure to be huge"
  
  
• "The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out -- just for Google. But U.S. law does not grant any single publisher monopoly power to herd all of us into its list"

Meanwhile, several authors have suddenly woken up to the realisation that books are fair game to the piracy that has previously plagued other media.

Publishers and agents representing the authors J. K. Rowling and Ken Follett were battling last night to get free copies of their novels removed from a Californian website that claims to be the most popular literary site in the world. Read More

Scribd.com has earned the dubious title of the "YouTube for books".

I kind of disagree with Liu's point that the current copyright system is good enough. 

I think it's under siege.

Add: Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency posted this advice

Fighting the Sads

Siobhan Dowd has another book out, Solace of the Road

It's my constant companion at the moment, a great way to get the writing juices flowing. I read a little bit, then write a little bit. Then read a little bit. Then write a little bit more.

It's fantastic. How Siobhan Dowd could write.

And though I am so enjoying it, I can't help but feel sad.

Because Siobhan Dowd died in the summer of 2007 and this is it, the last one. Bog Child was the other Siobhan Dowd book published posthumously last year. And I am sad because when I come to the end of this book, there won't be another Siobhan Dowd to look forward to.

And tomorrow morning, the last ever issue of the DFC will plop through my letter box. Oh woe.

And I just got a sad email from Lookybook, the 'Try Before You Buy' picture book website, that it had decided to close. It had been named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2008 by Time.

Sad. That's me.

And then I meet up with friends Sue Eves, whose book The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog
is selling very well indeed, and Steve Hartley who you won't have heard of but soon will (Steve has signed a contract with Macmillan for not one, not two, not three but EIGHT books featuring his hero Danny Baker Record Breaker). Correction: it was FOUR books (two stories each)!

Steve and Sue

... and I remember that there is reason to hope and that the point of the whole exercise of trying to get published is that we are in the business for the sheer love it.

And to cheer myself up I watch the trailer for Where the Wild Things are
which was released today.

Picture Book Author Sue Eves visits the Slushpile

Welcome to the first of an occasional series in which authors who have managed to escape from the Slushpile visit our blog and give us hope! Our very first author is Sue Eves, whose book The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog will be out on the 5th of February.

Candy: thank you for visiting us on the slushpile even though you are on the brink of picture book fame and fortune.

Sue: ha! That’s what I thought the last time round! When my first picture book was published, I thought I’d never see the slushpile again. On the contrary, I spend most of my time here. I've spent the last several years writing and submitting and being rejected just like everybody else.
The only reason I've nipped out of it this time is because I happened to bump in to the submissions editor at a children's book event who suggested I submit my work.

Candy: Before you decided on a glittering career of rejection by children’s book agents and publishers, you had a pretty good job as a Tamba, the sweet little dragon in Tikkabilla. What was it like being a dragon?

Sue: Sometimes, a little cold! This is us on a sleigh ride to see Santa in Lapland, for a Christmas Special.

Sue freezing for her art in Lapland

Tamba had a brilliant view - I had to be hidden under a thermal mattress and a blanket.

It was physically demanding and I lost a stone in weight during filming. The whole body is involved in bringing the puppet to life. I had an upholstered trolley (a bit like a mechanic uses to wheel under a car) that I manoeuvred with my legs while lying on my back and held the puppet high over my head while singing and talking at the same time. Yes, a sweet little dragon!

At the time, I said it was my dream job and it was. Now I have to say that writing has taken over. I commissioned Neil Sterenberg, who made Tamba, to build me a dog puppet for author visits so I will still be puppeteering but I won't be hiding this time.

Sue and her dog puppet made by Neil Sterenberg

Candy: My daughter loved your surreal first book which featured a child climbing into bed with a cow. Where did you get that idea?

Sue: I wanted to write a story about food and a young child's significant times of day. We love food in our house and before my daughter started school, we were always cooking. She was the age when breakfast, lunch, tea and bedtimes were a familiar and comforting routine.

The teatime picture book text I submitted was rejected 11 times so I skipped tea and moved on to bedtime and writing about delay tactics - another story, a drink, anything to avoid having to go to sleep. Her first toy was a cow and when we lived in a flat, her bedroom overlooked a row of back gardens. We would sit in a rocking chair, my daughter and her cow, with a book and look out at the moon. The bedtime story became the one about a girl whose cow wouldn't go to bed.

Sue illustrated her first picture book, HIC!

Candy: Ailie Busby drew the lovely pictures for your new book The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog. She is an author in her own right. Did the process of working together involve a lot of negotiation?

Sue: We didn't really work together. I had finalised the text with the editor and agreed on AIlie Illustrating the story before signing the contract. I saw her proposed roughs for my text before I realised that she was the author/illustrator of Drat That Fat Cat! Many people will be familiar with her vibrant art. We didn't have any direct contact. We only emailed each other after the book was completed.

Candy: Can you tell those of us who are still stuck in the slush pile what it’s like working with a real editor?

Sue: The most amazing experience for me was working with the editors.

The submissions editor emailed me to start with, passing on revisions that the directorial editor had suggested. I revised extremely fast because the points the editor raised made complete sense. Funny how you can work on a text for years and years and not see a problem until someone else points it out. The editor knew exactly what she wanted out of the story and I think she pushed me until we both knew the story was finished.

Once Ailie was on board, the editor was in the hot seat passing messages between us and forwarding picture samples to me. I didn't need to give many illustration notes but the ones I had written in the margins were ones she used because they were part of telling the story. The text hardly changed at all during the illustration process, so I think the editor did a brilliant job and Ailie's illustrations are absolutely the ones I had in my head - only better!

Candy: What is the single most useful piece of advice you can give picture book writers stil struggling to get published?

Sue: Join SCBWI and participate in your regional events. If you can't get to any - network online. For UK residents - set up a profile on the SCBWI Ning thing!

Candy: And finally, the question that is burning in the hearts of all who inhabit the slushpile: is there hope?

Sue: I think of it as more of a Mosh Pit than a Slushpile.

We take it in turns to hitch a ride on someone’s shoulders to get a better view, unless we’re lucky enough to know someone in the band. I'm having a great time at the moment and anyone can get there who is really passionate about the band!

Candy: When is the official launch date?

Sue: The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog
is out on Thursday 5th Feb and you can pre-order it now.

Thanks for inviting me to the Slushpile, Candy.

Do websites and book trailers sell books?

Yesterday on Facebook, I launched my new wheeze - web mentoring workshops.

I've been trying out all the different website-creating tools that have emerged online since the advent of Web 2.0 ... and have come to the conclusion that like the dinosaurs, I as a web designer, have finally become extinct.

It's not that people don't need websites anymore, it's just that if you are a small business, a self employed individual or small organisation like most of my clientele it doesn't make sense to shell out a thousand quid for:

• A website that you don't have the skills to maintain and update.
  

• A website that will become obsolete from Day One. Read about it in the Trouble with Websites
  


• A website that you can't afford to constantly be contacting your web designer for support and advice (unless of course, you marry one, which is what my husband did).


• Something you have no idea what to do with. A website is only a tool. Once it's up there you've got to use it. That's something a lot of people who already have websites really ought to understand.
  

Anyway, I am hoping that a lot of authors will agree with my reasoning and sign up for my workshops. I like authors. I really believe that authors can do a lot more for themselves online.

Interestingly, the New York Times yesterday came up with an essay on whether websites sold books:

A survey released last June by the Codex Group, a research firm that monitors trends in book buying, found that 8 percent of book shoppers had visited author Web sites in a given week. It didn’t, however, say how many clicked on the “buy the book” link. Read it all

With publishers continuing to set new lows for book marketing budgets, the beleaguered author really has no choice but to face up his/her e-fears and engage with the internet. This has prompted the rise of a mini industry ...

Still, a sizable industry has sprung up around persuading them to do so. AuthorBytes, a multimedia company started in 2003, has built sites for more than 200 clients, including Paul Krugman, Chris Bohjalian and Khaled Hosseini. They cost from $3,500 to $35,000 — with writers paying about 85 percent of the time. The staff of 20 even includes three employees whose entire job is updating.

I love the Authorbytes websites. If and when my famous writer friends are ever granted lots of marketing spend, I will urge them to go get an Authorbyte site!

If and when.

Otherwise, I suppose they will just have to settle for cheap old me.

My first workshop is on 3 March 2009 in North London.

YouTube Bit Me! (But I Deserved It)

I've gotten away with it so far but now, technology is catching up with me.

I got the following email from YouTube today:

Dear Candy Gourlay,

Your video, Why Writers Need Agents, may have content that is owned or licensed by WMG.

No action is required on your part; however, if you're interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,

- The YouTube Team

Readers of Notes from the Slushpile will have seen this film I made with the kids on my street, to a soundtrack that included some blues guitar from Ry Cooder. I was rather spooked by the statement 'no action is required on your part' so I went straight to the video and had a look.

YouTube had solved the copyright violation problem by turning off the sound of my video. Next to the video a button appeared, offering to "Swap Audio". Thinking that some audio was better than none, I clicked the button and followed the wizards. Now the video now boasts a totally mismatched bit royalty- free blues soundtrack.

I was totally guilty as accused of course. I knew what I was doing. I'd even read the YouTube notices.

• It doesn't matter how long or short the clip is, or exactly how it got to YouTube. If you taped it off cable, videotaped your TV screen, or downloaded it from another website, it is still copyrighted, and requires the copyright owner's permission to distribute.
• It doesn't matter whether or not you give credit to the owner/author/songwriter—it is still copyrighted.
• It doesn't matter that you are not selling the video for money—it is still copyrighted.
• It doesn't matter whether or not the video contains a copyright notice—it is still copyrighted.
• It doesn't matter whether other similar videos appear on our site—it is still copyrighted.
• It doesn't matter if you created a video made of short clips of copyrighted content—even though you edited it together, the content is still copyrighted.

But of course I thought to myself, surely, in the vast scheme of YouTube video-dom, my itty bitty film was not going to attract any attention?

Not that I was unwilling to pay some kind of license to use lovely music for my little videos. But how?

I bought a book called Podcast Solutions:The Complete Guide to Audio & Video Podcasting 2nd Edition (I like reading manuals). The chapter on using music in podcasts opens thus:

Welcome to the minefield.

Apparently using music is not just a matter of one payment. You have to pay the writer of the song (composer's rights are handled by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC), the performer (record labels), and the owner of the master recording (or mechanical rights handled by the Harry Fox Agency). That's a lot of people to pay for a bit of fun.

The podcast book says:

Your best bet is to find music anywhere else but in your CD collection, unless of course your CD collection is made up only of independent artists who would be willing to grant you all rights to use their music ...

YouTube has not quite taken things to the level of the fingerprinting technology that MySpace uses to police its pages. But it's getting there. And giant media owners like Viacom spend zillions paying people to scour YouTube 24/7 for violations of their copyright.

I once was involved in the making of a radio programme for Radio 4. We were discussing adding some background music. I wanted to use some obscure Filipino pop music and asked my producer if there would be any copyright problem doing so. "Oh no," she said. "The BBC pays some kind of license that covers all that."

How I wish YouTube would charge us users "some kind of license that would cover all that". I would gladly pay.

The point really of talking about videos in this blog about children's books is that we are in the midst of a massive digital revolution in which conventional notions of copyright and royalty demand redefinition. The music and film industry have been struggling to define the terms of this new relationship that people (like me) have with media.

We are no longer just consumers, we want to become creators too.

What lies ahead for the book industry, late as usual, inching its way into the digital world?

How We All Used to Think Getting Published Was Like

Lucy Coats (Coll the Storyteller's Tales of Enchantment) posted this on Facebook:

How sweet it is to remember those days when getting published seemed such a happy, easy thing to do.

Btw you might be thinking, she's just posting videos. She's not really blogging. But hey, I'm writing! I'm writing! That's what we're supposed to be doing. Oh, and I've got some website work too. Boo. ZZZ.

An Action Movie to Make Your Day and Thinking about Book Trailers

So over on my friend Addy's wonderful fiction blog about Wilf there's an action movie to watch in case there aren't any James Bond replays on at Christmas.

Screenshot from Addy Farmer's Action Movie. Watch it here

Addy's action movie comes as my other writing pal Sarwat Chadda discovers that his publishers have released a book trailer for his forthcoming novel, The Devil's Kiss. Here it is:

Agent Kristin Nelson over at the Pub Rants Blog posted this book trailer for one of her authors which takes the form of a West Side Story themed MTV rap - very interesting, but probably out of the league and budget of DIY book trailer makers like me and some of my friends.

All this adventuring in film-making is interesting and important if you're an author or author to be, as book trailers are now a must-have marketing tool and if your publisher doesn't give you a budget to make one, you might find yourself making one for yourself!

Rather fortuitously, social media consultant Angela Wilson at the AskAngela: Market My Novel blog, posted on the whys and wherefores of book trailers the other day. Her interviewee Sheila Clover English gave these five top tips for producing an effective book trailer:

1. Determine what you want people to know about your book and include that in the trailer.
2. Know what your goal is for the trailer.
3. Create a measurable goal to check how effective the trailer was.
4. Make the first 10 seconds of the video the most gripping or interesting
5. Know your audience and get the trailer to places where you will find that audience Read the whole article
   

As a YouTube dabbler myself may I add my own unprofessional advice:

1. Keep it short and to the point.
2. What IS your point?
   
3. Make it funny (unless of course it's horror - then make it scary)
4. Nobody wants to see ads on YouTube - try to have an angle (I've mentioned this before but Meg Cabot's video for her book Queen of Babble Gets Hitched has hook, arc and punchline and a bubbly, hilarious feel very attractive to her readers.
   
   
   
   
5. And finally: make the book trailer something people will want to forward to all their friends.
   

RIP Oliver Postgate: "Children are no longer children. With so many millions at stake they are a market"

The Guardian today published a 2003 article by the late Oliver Postgate - creator of the Clangers, Bagpuss (pictured) and Ivor the Engine - on a budget he estimates at £10 a minute for each finished film, a stark contrast to the multi-millions now spent on children's programmes.

Such frugal programming came to an end when:

Then, in 1987, the BBC let us know that in future all programming was to be judged by what they called its "audience ratings". Furthermore, we were told, some US researchers had established that in order to retain its audience (and its share of the burgeoning merchandising market), every children's programme had to have a "hook", ie, a startling incident to hold the attention, every few seconds. As our films did not fit this category they were deemed not fit to be shown any more.

My fellow writers of children's books, does this sound familiar? If one were to replace the word "stations" with "publishers" would this be a fair assessment of children's publishing today? Postgate wrote:

Today, making films for children's television has become very big business, requiring huge capital investment, far beyond the reach of small companies . . . entrepreneurs have to hurtle from country to country, seeking subscriptions from TV stations to fund their enormous costs. Each of these stations will often require a format to be adapted to suit its own largest and dumbest market. They have to do this because, for them, children are no longer children: they are a market. With so many millions at stake, the bottom line is "to give the children of today only the sort of things that they already know they enjoy". Or they might switch channels.

My own assessment is this comes close. But there are too many really fine children's books in the shops to say that publishing is dumbing down. Yes, children have become a market. Yes, children's publishing is under similar pressures to children's programming. But no, the fact that editors are constantly banging on about looking for that new Voice means that good things can still be expected from this highly important industry.

Read the rest of Postgate's article and have a good think.

Economic blah-turn: 'My fellow book lovers ...'

The writing is on his forehead: oh how to lead them out of the Recession?

And so it has begun.

The other day, I received a rejection letter that actually mentioned the economic downturn. Here's an excerpt with bits deleted for discretion's sake:

... Alas, I feel this is something I could have published several years ago, but right now, with the troubles we are facing ... this would be a very tough sell here at ...

Dear old Nathan Bransford, the Curtis Brown agent-blogger, gets real in his most recent blog:

Now, first of all, we must remember the advice of the late Douglas Adams and Don't Panic. The book industry has been through worse times than this, people will always read books, books will still be published, and until that changes most of us will still be here.

But any illusions the industry might have had about escaping the recession are going the way of a Bachelor engagement. Read the whole piece to see some very real examples of what's going on

At this point, as all anxious authors and wannabe authors recoil in fear and horror, let me direct you to an inspirational post-election think by agent Sarah Davies of the Greenhouse Literary Agency:

Don’t tell me that words don’t matter. Yes, most words need actions to accompany them. But those little gems of language still rule. And they can change a life - and the world. Read the rest of it here - it's great writing from an agent!

Yes, words bring change.

And of course where can we find the best words? Books.

And that is one of the reasons why we've all got to help publishing through this.

Nathan Bransford proposes a stimulus package for the publishing industry:

My fellow book lovers, let me just second Moonrat and endorse her Publishing Industry Stimulus Package: buy books, and buy them often.

Most importantly: BUY NEW BOOKS

I third the motion.

New Technology's Eternal Problems

Thanks to Jane Friedman of the There Are No Rules blog for this.

And so it goes.


If you can't see video, click here

As Recession Looms, Consider Signing Up for Big Brother

I guess one of the great things about having an agent, is that the rejections come more quickly.

No, really. If you know a publisher has passed on your manuscript in two weeks rather than eight months, then you have room for strategy.

But it's still a bummer.

Even more of a bummer is if your submissions have coincided with this extraordinary economic downturn. If you have been in a coma for the past few weeks, here is a quick video explaining the financial crisis. Because this is a writer's blog, we got Hank Green, brother of award-winning author John Green (An Abundance of Katherines), do the explaining:

An agent friend told me the other day: "It's not just about quickly drawing your reader in. It's about quickly drawing a publisher in."

And then of course, you find out that David Walliams, star of Little Britain, has published a children's book. No, it's not about child transvestites.

You can't even hate him because apparently the book is not half bad (I had a peek at Waterstones and dang, it looked quite good) - he is a writer after all.

We can't begrudge David Walliams his children's book because he's
first and foremost a writer. Look, even Quentin Blake approved.

And you realise that now more than ever, publishers are going to be looking to celebrity to make their dough. And some celebs can actually write.

So here's a cunning plan.

Apply to become a Big Brother inmate. You only need stay for, oh, two days.

Germaine Greer managed to stick it out for six days before marching out because it was so unhygienic.

Two days would qualify you to add "former Big Brother inmate" to your query letter which immediately qualifies you as a B-List celeb ... which immediately also qualifies you as a publishable author (especially if you do something suitably ghastly that hits the headlines while you're in the Big Brother House).

Who knows, you might even sell more books than Katie!

Success is built out of small sacrifices like these.

The Great Literacy Debate: What is the Future of Reading?

The New York Times is running a series debating the future of reading.

In July, the NY Times wondered if the new realities of the web signaled a change to reading habits:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

There was a video interviewing a family in which reading habits fall along a generational divide.

Click on the screenshot or here to view the NY Times video.

Today, the NY Times series focuses on video games as a way to get children reading. According to the article, a recent poll by the Pew Internet & American Life project found that 97 percent of children 12 to 17 play games on computers, consoles and handheld devices.

Apparently, librarians in the States are using games to bring teenagers into their libraries.

Inspired in part by such theories, librarians now stage tournaments for teenagers with games like Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Dance Dance Revolution. In the first half of this year, the New York Public Library hosted more than 500 events, drawing nearly 8,300 teenagers. In Columbus, Ohio, nearly 5,500 youngsters have participated in more than 300 tournaments at the public library this year.

“I think we have to ask ourselves, ‘What exactly is reading?’ ” said Jack Martin, assistant director for young adult programs at the New York Public Library. “Reading is no longer just in the traditional sense of reading words in English or another language on a paper.”

In the UK, I hear that the super duper Jubilee library in Brighton holds Playstation tournaments!

Scholastic, the American publisher of Harry Potter has already published The Maze of Bones, the first of a series tied to a web-based game. Ricky Riordan (Lightning Thief) wrote The Maze of Bones and has outlined the story arc for the rest of the series.

“My main concern was crafting an adventure novel that would stand on its own, even if kids never access the Internet at all,” Mr. Riordan said.

During the brainstorming phase and after he wrote a manuscript, Mr. Riordan worked with editors at Scholastic, who suggested details that could be worked into the novel so that they could also be used in the game.

“There’s a lot of commonality between what makes a good game and a good book,” Mr. Riordan said. “Whether you’re a gamer or a reader, you want to feel immersed in the story and invested in the action and the characters, and you want to care about the outcome and you want to participate in solving the mystery.”

More about the Maze of Bones (The 39 Clues series) here.

Many authors, I imagine will throw their hands up in despair at this new turn of events.

But if you really think hard about it, what lies at the heart of this new movement is a love of Story.

And Story is something we authors can always work with. It's just a question of how.

Send Your Work to BrubakerFord Ltd - But Only If You are Nice

The FAQ item on Brubaker Ford Ltd's website says it all:

Frequently Asked Question: I am a best-selling and/or award-winning author but I am not a nice person. Will you work with me?

Answer: Absolutely not. We are committed to creating the world's finest books while working only with nice people. Good things come from love.

Brubaker Ford Ltd is a book packager/agent/literary consultancy. Yeah. A bit confusing. But it becomes clearer later on. They've been up and running for two years and last Thursday, founding partners Brett Brubaker and David Ford, as well as senior editor (and author) Dr Roberta Butlert came to meet SCBWI members. Here is a picture of (left to right) Roberta, David and Brett at the SCBWI meeting:

Okay, that's Michael York and other actors in a current production of Camelot.

But I couldn't resist because David really has a striking resemblance to Michael York. I swear, this is what he looks like:

I mentioned this to Brett and Roberta after the illuminating talk (yes, yes, I'll get to that later but this is much more important) and Brett said actually David looked a lot more like Harrison Ford in his youth.

And here is a totally gratuitous picture of Harrison Ford to keep you all going.

Okay, having got the important stuff out of the way, I will tell you about their presentation.

I have to confess that I came to the talk purely with the intention of seeing my SCBWI friends and hanging out. Book Packagers have never been in my radar, having invested all those years on the slushpiles of publishers. Now I thought book packagers develop ideas themselves, then employ authors/illustrators on a work-for-hire (no royalties) basis. The ownership and creativity is all on the packagers side and the authors/illustrators provide a service.

But the moment these guys began to talk about what they did, I became very confused.

Like any book packager they develop books that they sell to publishers.

But they also take picture book and YA submissions.

And then they said they liked to work with authors to turn the author's idea into the best book it could possibly be.

And then they said they don't believe in a flat fee or work for hire.

They then said they put the author's wishes first and will only negotiate a contract with the full agreement of an author. Where some publishers don't involve an author beyond the text "we make sure our authors are involved".

Brett Brubaker, whose scintillating marketing pedigree includes Armani and Prada, puts it this way: "When we are representing an author for a novel, we are like agents. When we are working on a picture book we are more like publishers."

They chose to base themselves in London (with outposts in the US and Canada) because the UK market was small enough so that "here we are able to get together face to face ... we do think it is terribly important to sit around a table". A Publisher's Weekly report described their move thus :

Although Ford and Brubaker are working with authors and illustrators on both sides of the Atlantic, Ford said initially they will spend most of their time in London. "It's far easier to work more intimately with people [in the U.K.], because the country's smaller."

Ford was part of the formative years of Walker Books, spending over ten years as Managing Director before moving to the United States to launch Candlewick Press. He was Candlewick's President and CEO for several years then ran a bookstore in Georgia before returning to publishing via Little, Brown and Co Books for Young Readers as Vice President and Publisher. At Little, Brown he played a part in the launch of the now monster bestseller Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

"We were taught by Sebastian (Walker Books founder Sebastian Walker) that it is the author's name on the cover of the book." Thus whenever there was a disagreement between an editor and a writer, the author inevitably got their way. And what if the editor was right? Says David: "You have to accept failure to get better."

In part, the BrubakerFord collaboration appears to be a reaction to the new realities of publishing, in which the creative control of editors is subsumed to the opinions of accountants in the search for ever bigger profits.

The aim, says Ford, is to do the FUN side of publishing. Distribution and Sales? Boring! Their website explains:

Recent developments in the publishing world have resulted in many authors and illustrators feeling more and more distanced from the creative minds and caring hands within some publishing houses. Working with innovative and imaginative individuals is what we most enjoy, and it is for that reason that we have decided to concentrate on the collaborative development of ideas and leave the business of sales and distribution to others ... Our authors have told us that this personal interaction reminds them of the "good old days" of publishing ...

It made me feel quite sentimental for those good old days.

They talked about lots of other things of course - like the cultural differences between UK and US publishing, what works and what doesn't, the currency of chick lit and vampire books, novelty books, YA, Gossip Girl, Maurice Sendak, Helen Oxenbury, pop-up books, what they're looking for, how to submit, and about all their exciting projects and some inside gossip about some other famous people but no, can't report it here. Not because I don't want to but because I can't read my handwriting and I have to tidy the hallway.

Maybe next time!

Having Sold My Soul to Google Will There Be Anything Left to Sell to Amazon

I lifted these from
TheChetan.com.
Thank you!

It was Google's tenth birthday yesterday and I feel almost nostalgic.

I've pretty much sold my soul to Google ... my browser opens straight onto my iGoogle page so I can check out the latest things on my friends' blogs and my news subscriptions, I search the net with Google, I search my computer with Google Desktop, I keep my calendars on Google Calendars, I use Google Docs for my spreadsheets, I blog on Blogger (which belongs to Google), I even have a Picasa account (Google's photo service).

Google itself says it isn't quite decided when to celebrate

Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.

So happy birthday, Google, whenever you decide to have the cake!

Having sold my soul so comprehensively to Google, I wonder if I have a little something left for Amazon. Ebooks have been in the news with the recent launch of the Sony Ereader. The one I've got my sights on is the Amazon Kindle.

Some folk might accuse me of being party to the death of the book, but I'd rather take a cue from the FT Weekend's Jan Dailey:

So is this, finally, the death of the book? If so, it may be a death that heralds a rebirth of reading

Dailey predicts that digital readers will revolutionise not just the way we read books but the way they are published - indeed, we may have to re-invent the agent-writer-publisher relationship:

It’s more likely, though, that these devices will mean a substantial shift in the way books are published. Conventional publishers of treeware will be under pressure to create every title in e-book format at the same time as on paper; they’d be crazy not to. Soon the e-book market may overtake the other. And in that case, who really needs the publisher?

Writer’s agents are the principal quality-filter these days, as well as increasingly responsible for the editing that most British publishers no longer bother with – so what is to stop writers and their agents doing deals directly with (say) Sony/Waterstone’s? And if a few libraries and Luddites and the author’s mum want a paper version, that can be easily arranged in small-run special editions.

But I have no intention of abandoning the purchase of books.

Like Dailey, who writes how she "used to hug one in bed instead of a teddy", my family has a long history of bedding down with books.

Here is picture of my daughter Mia, age 2, sleeping with Jill Murphy's Peace at Last - such a lovely book, I am always giving away copies as presents!

Funnily enough, the thought of books was high on my mind this weekend. Husband has just finished an epic DIY job of installing these book shelves and I've been dusting off the books we've got in storage and putting them up.

The epic DIY job, finished at last.

A lot of these books have been tucked away for ages and suddenly I came face to face with these books from my childhood.

A set of Collier's Junior Classics (1962) and The Children's Classics (1961)

My parents purchased these sets from the Reader's Digest man who used to sell them from door to door in Manila. I smuggled them back to England from the Philippines in my hand carry luggage one year when my bookish brother (who would have nicked them first) wasn't looking.

I could of course, purchase most of the classics in the set from any Borders or even from Amazon. But there is a special something about these books, yellowing and ragged with age and survivors of typhoon flooding and childish ill-use. When I flick through them again, I am transported back to that FIRST time I read them, the thrill of the Prince and the Pauper or Tom Sawyer or Heidi or Robin Hood or Black Beauty unfolding for the first time.

And that's why I will never stop buying books.

Even after I get myself a Kindle.

Writers: Thou shalt Not Be Boring

So today's Guardian G2 cover story was about Reader's Block. Oh I know that one. Had it bad in my pregnancy years - a book seems like too much of a long term investment when your main priority is to spot the sick dribbling down the back of your shirt before someone else does (or becoming an expert at fashion camouflage, as comic Victoria Wood once suggested, finding clothes the colour of poo).

Apparently, though we Brits trump other Europeans in buying books, we are not very good at reading what we buy. Writes Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian:

It is often said that everybody has a novel in them. The current problem is that so many of us bring that novel out of ourselves and get it published. It would help cure reader's block if lots of people resolved not to. But that is not what is happening. Instead, we are made so anxious by the accelerating onrush of books, especially novels, that we say: "Enough! I can't - I won't - read the winner of the Orange prize, whatever Mariella Frostrup says."

This is not a time to blame the attractions of other media even though other media do play a part:

According to Teletext's 2007 study of 4,000 Britons' reading habits, the top reasons for not reading are: too tired (48%); watch TV instead (46%); play computer games (26%); work late (21%).

TV, the internet, computer games are all worthy competitors and the onus is on us writers (especially in the children's book world) to keep our readers reading.

My advice to younger readers has always been: if you're getting bored, skip paragraphs until you get to something that interests you. Serves the author right for being boring.

It's the perfect time to revisit the tenth commandment of crimewriter Elmore Leonard's classic Ten Rules on Writing:

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

***

The article had a sidebar 'The Author's View in which they asked authors like Lionel Shriver, Alain de Botton and Germain Greer three questions: Have you experienced reader's block? How do you overcome it? Could you recommed a book to get people reading again?

I was very happy to see Joanne Harris (now officially one of us since the publcation of her children's fantasy Runemarks) say that she overcame reader's block by reading graphic novels. That, and the fact that Ray Bradbury is one of her heroes makes her a really cool author in my book.

***

Hey Star Wars fans, today's Eoin Colfer vlog, some Lucasfilm people attend his show and take him back to Lucasfilms for an exclusive tour that has him playing with Darth Vader's sword (oh and stealing the Artemis Fowl bus while the driver was off on a break and trying to flip it over).

Eoin as he drives away with the bus: "When the driver went off for a cup of coffee, I hit him on the head with my boot and stole his bus."

I wonder if they're planning to make a film about his travels.

Can Writers Compete With Focus Groups?

I attended a British SCBWI meeting yesterday, planning our conference in November. We met in Waterstones, Picadilly - you know the massive one, several stories high, with a Costa in the basement and a restaurant at the top? I'd never been there before, it was HUGE.

Of course it had all the de rigeur big comfy sofas and reading corners that are usual for bookseller chains these days.

So when Costa threw us out at closing time, where did we choose to hold our meeting?

In the children's book department.

It's surprisingly comfortable holding an hour long meeting on tiny kindergarten sized chairs. It didn't even occur to us to go for the reading tables in the adult section. Talk about obsessed with children's books.

When I think about it though, this is why I joined SCBWI.

I was determined to think, live and breath children's books in my quest for publication. SCBWI lets me do that, giving me access to learning the craft, meeting the people that matter, and befriending like-minded souls which in turn feeds into taking me to the next level and the next and the next (I hope, I hope).

As I often say to my writing friends, SCBWI has saved me a lot of time.

A bit like hot-housing really.

Which brings me to the story of Hothouse - a "book-by-focus group" business that seeks to save publishers the bother of reading slush piles:

Hothouse uses a market research company to put story ideas to children, who are observed from behind a one-way mirror. Using dummy covers, short excerpts and blurbs to prompt conversation, researchers ask the children their opinions on which characters, plots and ideas they enjoy most. Each child is also visited at home by a researcher, who finds out what kind of books they already own and read. Drawing on this research, Hothouse commissions a team of writers accordingly. Read more in Painting by Numbers, The Guardian

They haven't done badly either. Their first offering, Darkside by Tom Becker, won the Waterstone's Prize for children's fiction and the Calderdale Children's Book Prize.

So fellow, garret dwellers, I ask you: is this our new competition?

The concept behind Hothouse is similar to that of Working Partners, sponsors of our recent Undiscovered Voices anthology. It's a system that works well in other media, notably film development.

It is hard to say whether this is ultimately a bad thing or a good thing for children's publishing.

On the one hand, publishers struggling with an ever tougher market get more bang for their buck and must feel more secure producing pre-tested books. Writers who are struggling to get published can get experience and kudos by writing-for-hire, for companies like Hothouse and Working Partners. And publishers groaning under the weight of unread slushpiles can relax a bit. I met a publisher the other day who said she has only ever published one book out of six years of reading her slush pile - it's not the part of the job she likes.

So: a good thing for publishers.

But certainly not a good thing for writers on the slush pile. And where's the art in a focus group?

What can we on the slush pile do in the face of such formidable competition?

Instead of gnashing our teeth about this new reality, I guess we just have to be tougher, better and more well-informed about the business.

Join SCBWI, learn the craft, meet the people. Write the thing and write it well. When you've written it, make it better by joining critique groups etc etc.

And you can take a cue from Hothouse's own business plan. They create books out of focus books? Fine. Go get your own focus group.

I am reading my book Ugly City to a group of Year Fives every Wednesday for half an hour. It's a rewarding experience. They gasp when exciting things happen, they jump when something startles them, their jaws drop with every revelation - AND you very quickly learn to skip the bits where you might lose them. And last week when half the class missed my reading because of some other activitiy, I had to come in and do extra time because they wanted to know what happened next.

What can kids teach us about our books?

Reg Wright, CEO of Hothouse, points out that one of the great advantages of listening to young readers is that they have a surprisingly good feel for where a story should go. "We've had children come up with great ideas for plots," he says. "They may not be sophisticated, but they'll make it their own. Our job, in the end, isn't to implement what they say, but to interpret what they want."

Having written this, I looked back at the quote again about our job being to interpret what children want. We-ell. Sometimes what is fabulous about a book is when it is something you had no idea you wanted ... something fresh and new and completely out of the blue. Just saying.

Living with the New Realities of Children's Publishing

I haven't signed the Philip Pullman led No to Age Banding declaration. I haven't signed even though I agree with much that has been said by that side of the debate and although I am tempted to add my name to the formidable list which includes many of my writing heroes - Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo, Michelle Magorian, David Almond, Neil Gaiman and many more.

Why do I dither?

When I do my talks about how authors can market themselves online, I call on my audiences to face up to the New Realities of publishing - the fact is, they simply have no choice, I declare. If authors don't get real and engage with these new realities, they will be contributing to the slow erosion of the culture of the book. But then my talks are about online marketing.

This is what I think the anti-age-ranging list is all about. Apart from all the other strong arguments about pigeonholing children's reading, it is yet another turning away from the special qualities of books. To label a book the way one would label a DVD or a computer game somehow reduces it to the level of commodity. To which, my practical side whispers, but books are commodities, aren't they?

The age banding debate has carved a rift between supporters and detractors within the publishing community.

Witness the intemperate language of commentators to Adele Geras' recent blog on the issue - with the the antis arguing with emotion and more than a little irony and the pros claiming to be on the side of democracy.

Thing is, the list of New Realities in Children's Publishing is stacking up.

A Times article about how Richard and Judy's Book Club has shaken up publishing gives an interesting assessment of the state of the industry:

(The) British book business is, to a rough approximation, incompetent. Since the abolition of retail price maintenance, power has shifted from the publishers to the bookshops, and they, in turn, have aggregated into a few big chains, primarily the near monopoly of Waterstone’s. This has made publishers absurdly timid in their approach to marketing.

“They have such a primitive idea about marketing,” (the R&J club's creator and book selector Amanda) Ross says. “I knew nothing about publishing. It is an incredible industry, full of really nice people, much nicer than television. But the thing that surprised me is that they all want their products to be exactly the same. I don’t know about you, but I never want to read the same book twice. Their covers were really similar. If there was a successful book, they put the same cover on other books so people would think they were buying the same book twice.” She was also shocked to discover that publishers were made to pay for display slots in shops. If you see top picks in a bookshop, don’t be fooled: the only picking process is money.

The bookshops have also been apeing the record industry by pulling titles the minute they don’t sell. “A few years ago, they stopped giving books enough time in shops,” Ross says. “Books tend to be word-of-mouth. It’s not like buying an album, going home and listening to it in an hour. By the time you found a book you liked and recommended it to your friends, it had been removed from the shops.”

And then of course, there is the brouhaha over celebrity authors, many of whom don't write their own books.

Interestingly, on the same day the Times demonstrated how daytime telly (Richard and Judy) was killing literary snobbishness, the Guardian reported that the brisk success of celebrity fiction made literary snobs look stuffy.

The Times article, titled 'The book wot I wrote', reported:

A burgeoning section of publishing has opened up with the appearance of books in supermarkets, which relies mainly on celebrities and abuse stories ...

Of children's fiction, the article went on to say:

The counter-argument says that using a celebrity's name as a brand is no different from putting the Disney logo on a book, and HarperCollins Children's Books, which publishes (Colin) McLoughlin's Coleen Style Queen series, has been careful not to make claims that won't stand up. "It's very much about Coleen endorsing and inspiring this series," says her publicist, Geraldine Stroud. "She's not in any way trying to claim that she's the sole author."

(To those who've been in a coma for the past few days, Coleen of course, is now Mrs Wayne Rooney.)

So here I am, dithering.

Publishing is in the midst of a big shake-up.

If we resist the inevitable, what is at risk?

If we capitulate, are we guilty of speeding the end of the book as we know it?

How do we engage with these realities and still nurture the culture of the book?