Interesting little magazine piece on the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5377752.stm

So all you aspiring Houllebecqs out there had better get new ideas.

Creative Writing with Accountancy????
It sounds like a Monty Python sketch.
But the creative writing/ archaeology thing sounds good, though.

On the other hand, maybe it's not so strange after all ... - my husband is an accountant and his so far only venture into writing anything netted him a shortlisting for a DSJT Writers' News competition!!

)

A
xxx

Must add Houellebecq and Nothomb to the reading list. They must be good to have attracted such a following...

Can someone please explain why publishers complain (as in this piece) about the paucity of manuscripts being submitted, and yet so much dross makes it into bookstores.

Why can I taste sour grapes?

M

Believe me, I think you can be sure that however drossy you think the contents of your local WH Smith might be, ninety-nine percent of the slush pile will be much, much worse...

Well, I've just had dinner with a very senior editor at Penguin (not showing off, she's married to my cousin) who's spent a week in New York and found nothing she wanted to buy, and is about to go to Frankfurt, and think's she'll find nothing she wants to buy. The bar is just very, very high indeed, I think. What we think is dross must be things that have a market somewhere, or they wouldn't be published, even if it's hard for us to imagine.

And yes, it's hard for WWers to imagine the extreme awfulness of 90% of the slushpile - green ink, rhyme, worrying fantasies, total incompetence. I think it's fair to say that anything a WWer would submit would be in the other 10%.

Emma

On the subject of slushpiles, I will always remember something Mike Barnard of Macmillan New Wrtiting said to me: "It's amazing how many people are capable of producing book-length documents without considering the need to make them interesting."

I think the term 'book-length document' is telling.



<Added>

Just to add a bit of detail: I think he reckoned on dealing with about 5% of publishable manuscripts, out of the total pool submitted. Those in the 5% were competently written, perfectly valid stories/ideas etc.. but... not all of them would be published, at least not by mnw. The final cut was less than half a percent of total submissions. So the books that make it into that have to have something extra - something that resonates personally with the editor making the decision. Editors have to believe in, be passionate about the books they publish because their first job is to communicate their enthusiasm internally - to all the other people in the organisation whose job it is to help them sell the book to bookshops and ultimately the public.

Mike said he only published books he believed in.

I'm sure that isn't the case with all publishers. Or rather, their belief in, or enthusiasm for, a book may be based on its perceived marketability rather than literary quality.

Or rather, their belief in, or enthusiasm for, a book may be based on its perceived marketability rather than literary quality.

I think this is exactly right. It's easy to forget that publishers don't have entirely the same attitude to books and writing as we do: at certain moments they have to have more in common with the marketing department of United Biscuits. The publishers who do it best are the ones whose own genuine enthusiasm reproduces that of a particular section of the market.

It's significant that someone starting an operation like MNW came from production, not editorial, though obviously he then recruited a good editorial team. One (not the only) reason so many small publishing start-ups - specially in the short story mags - don't work is because they're started by passionate readers/writers, whose personal enthusiasms (almost by definition) simply don't fit with a big enough market.

Emma

Which explains why Dan Brown gets published AND read...