Slices of the Literary Industry

1. Scandal at the festival 

Writers’ festivals have mushroomed in Australia in the last twenty years or so, with festivals big, small and in between, general or themed, held in every state and territory and in cities and country towns. It seems the public appetite for these events only grows; and speaking at festivals is an inescapable part of any writer’s calendar these days. Internationally, writers’ festivals are also growing, and not only in the “usual suspect” areas; from Bali to Slovenia, all kinds of places are getting in on the act.

Writers’ festivals are generally serious and polite affairs, with writers on stage discussing things ranging from political or social issues as expounded in books, or questions of style, genre, and so on. They usually feature many panels of mid-list and new authors clustered around keynote speeches and “in conversation” single focus on big-name authors interviewed by admiring “personalities”. There are readings and book launches and the like as well, and mostly these events are well-mannered affairs where people defer to each other, a consensus of some kind is reached, and there’s little confrontation, to the disappointment of those looking for a good biff. Egos are meant to be modestly hidden—some people simply can’t manage it, but most, including the most famous authors, make a pretty good fist of pretending! Writerly jealousies and dislikes are kept well hidden from public view, and even in the green rooms behind the scenes, people generally maintain a civil front, though cold shoulders can be in evidence and invisible force-fields operate. The audience is usually well mannered too, dutifully clapping, and when questions are asked, they are generally polite and precise—except when they are statements, the bane of any literary festival panel chair, especially at big festivals where some audience members seem to come not to listen but to make a bid for their own turn at the soapbox, at tedious and incoherent length.

But sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes the unexpected happens. Somebody breaches the unspoken protocol by accident or design … and then the cogs come loose from the well-oiled machine and fly off in all directions.

Every writer has stories—printable and not—about when the spirit of mischief took hold of a festival event and shook it from its polite serenity. As long as it’s not happening to you or someone you care about, such public discomfort can be very amusing, at least in retrospect. The time so-and-so suddenly began insulting the audience. When what’s-her-name turned up clearly drunk for a panel and after incoherently mumbling and shouting, fell asleep. When what’s-his-name was told off publicly by a member of the audience for something he’d done. When Famous Author X, known in public for charmingly self-deprecating wryness, turned, in the green room, into a monster of self-regard and rude snobbery, crushing publicists and fellow authors alike. When Not-So-Famous Author Y threw a glass of water over a fellow writer who had savaged Y’s book in print. When Notorious Novelist’s book launch was spectacularly sabotaged by long-time enemy. When Celebrity Personality Z, pontificating on and on for long and weary ages, paused to ask rhetorically and complacently, “Perhaps just one more story?” and a voice in the dazed crowd called out clearly, “No way!” Not to speak of the times when Visiting International Star was caught in an extramarital dalliance with Up and Coming Young Poet or any variation on the well-known theme of, er, very intimate networking.

Despite the potential for comedy and satire, there are few novels or scripts featuring literary festival scandals. One of the best however is also one of the oldest—perhaps the first time such an event was dramatised in fiction. It occurs in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel, Devils (also known as The Possessed) in which a prototype of today’s literary festival (called a “literary fete”) organised by the great and good of the province, is comprehensively destroyed by that very same spirit of mischief, in a long chapter at the beginning of Part 3. Dostoevsky’s gift for farce and pointed, even cruel satire is shown in full flower, and made this modern writer laugh out loud in half-delighted, half-horrified recognition.

The signs aren’t good even right at the beginning, as a series of enigmatically insulting poems are read out; but then in is wheeled the Star Attraction, the Drawcard, Mr Famous Author Karmazinov (based on Ivan Turgenev, whom Dostoevsky loathed) who complacently begins to read—on and on and on, in a high, squeaky voice, with long-winded explanations of everything, complacently convinced he holds the audience the palm of his hand—while all around people, after listening dutifully at first, begin to shuffle, to sneeze, to close their eyes—and still he doesn’t notice, but goes on and on and on—until suddenly, in a pause, someone blurts out, “Good Lord, what nonsense!”

Instead of magisterially ignoring this and powering on regardless—as the narrator Govorov says, “If he had restrained himself, people would have gone on blowing their noses and it would have passed off”—the Great Man gets stuck into the audience—and comes a dreadful cropper, wildly trading insults and rhetorical flourishes with an ever more excited audience, and finally stalks off the stage to a chorus of jeers. But the disaster isn’t over yet—for the next two presenters turn the place into a positive brawl as they yell and shriek at the audience and the audience shrieks back, and the whole thing ends in a rout, the stuff of the worst nightmares of any festival organiser. 

2. The new gold rush 

There’s a new gold rush apparently going on in the literary world in the USA, and though it hasn’t quite reached Australian shores yet, echoes of it have been crossing the Pacific to us. And what is this new literary gold rush? Why, it’s the supposed fortunes to be made in the latest miracle medium—e-books—which if you believe all the excited stories about it, not only looks set to be the greatest thing in the books world since Gutenberg, but also “empowers” independent (“indie”) authors to do things their own way, without regard to those dreadful entities, publishers!

The internet and other media are awash with excited stories of e-book self-publishing millionaires like J.A. Konrath and Amanda Hocking who, bypassing traditional publishers, have done it all themselves—and reaped enormous amounts of money and vast numbers of readers. Now, self-publishing isn’t new; but traditionally it’s not only been regarded as second-rate, given the lack of third-party quality control, but also it has been expensive. Publishing a print book is not cheap, and then there’s the cost of marketing, distribution, warehousing and the rest. E-publishing cuts down on all of this. No need for warehousing. Distribution is apparently a cinch now that your e-book can be listed at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and such places. And if you’re willing to have a go, you can go through sites like www.smashwords.com to do all the production yourself, from go to whoa, perfectly free—and still get paid royalties, the rate of which seems much more attractive than at traditional publishing. Or if you’re a bit nervous about attempting the huge task of getting a book from rough manuscript to finished copy with cover and all in heaps of different formats—Kindle, other e-readers such as the Sony or the Kobo or the Nook, iPad and smartphone applications—then you can get someone to do it for you, often for not very much (Smashwords recommends people who will transmute your Microsoft Word document into a finished book for about $25 an hour, for instance). Then hey presto, your book’s out there, listed on all those sites—all you have to do is sit back and wait for the gold to come rolling in and your book to climb to stratospheric heights on the Amazon lists—and all without those miserly “gatekeepers” in the publishing industry who’ve been blocking your way into literary heaven.

It’s a new literary gold rush, and it seems that more and more people want to rush off and join it, ditching prosaic thoughts of the ordinary publishing slog to dream of a chance at a Welcome Stranger, or at the very least, a bit of sparkly colour.

Trouble is, what a lot of people seem to have forgotten is that in the old gold rush, only the very few ended up rich enough to have their horses shod in gold and their significant others laden down with costly gems on every finger. A few more made a respectable income; but most gold-starry-eyed miners worked like Trojans wrestling with the miserly earth to yield them up a wage which was less than what they would have got at a regular job. Those who provided the services—such as shopkeepers, lawyers and bankers—made the real and enduring money. This is exactly the same in publishing gold rushes!

As the refreshingly down-to-earth Hocking herself pointed out in a recent blog post (at amandahocking.blogspot.com), e-publishing is exactly like traditional publishing in that you simply cannot predict which books are going to do well and which aren’t. Nobody—not authors, not critics, not publishers, marketers, booksellers or anyone else—has any real idea what will fire the reading public’s imagination and lead to publishing phenomena. Sure, you can have a general idea of what’s a reliable seller; but the literary Welcome Stranger is as difficult to predict as the metallic one—or even more so. Writing and publishing have a strong element of gambling, which is what makes them such an exciting and frustrating business to be in. E-authoring and publishing will be no different.

Indeed, no matter what the golden dreams of some today, I believe that even if e-publishing does become the mainstream way of the future, it will be even harder to earn any kind of respectable income from writing, let alone strike it rich. Not only will there be growing problems with piracy (which have already appeared) but the demand by readers for cheaper and cheaper books erodes any possibility publishers can have of making any kind of profit. And lest you think that doesn’t matter when the brave new world of literature will be controlled not by the reviled middlemen but by the producers themselves, independent authors, then remember this: there is already a staggering amount of books out there, but the tsunami of new authors that “indie” digital self-publishing will unleash simply risks becoming so overwhelming for readers that they will turn off completely and cannot be bothered wading through the dross to find that glint of literary gold.

Only a few days after I wrote this piece, it was announced that Amanda Hocking, guru of self-publishers, had just accepted a two-million-dollar deal from a traditional publisher for her books to appear in print. Seems like the old paradigm ain’t quite dead yet! 

3: “I’d need to have a brain injury before I write for children” 

No—those are not my words, but the words of the British author Martin Amis, notorious both for the size of his advances and his controversial comments. This particular comment was made in a recent radio interview in Britain, and was followed by Amis’s explanation that he didn’t like the idea of having “constraints” put on his fiction (as if all fiction doesn’t have constraints of one sort or another).

Of course this boorish and ill-judged (and it has to be said, pathetic and ignorant) outburst was met with outrage from British children’s writers—though an exception was Jacqueline Wilson, who, knowing Amis personally, said he’d probably not intended the offence but often blurted out things that were intended to be deliberately provocative. But beyond the feeling that Amis’s rudeness does not merit being dignified with a response—it got me thinking, once again, about why it is that so many people think it’s quite all right to talk about children’s writers and children’s literature in such a way as to imply we are really defective pretend-adults, most likely the prey of all kinds of babyish hangups, and our books are hardly worth mentioning in the same breath as “real” literature. (In fact, I’ve been asked more than once that very question—“When are you going to write a real book?” And I know I’m not alone in that experience!)

Of course partly it’s an extension of adult society’s attitude to children. All adults were children once upon a time—but many of us seem to want to forget it. And not always because our childhoods were bad—rather because it was a time of life when we often felt powerless. Dwarves in a land of giants. Mutes in a country of big talkers. Invisible without invisibility cloaks. We had to accept things as they were, not as we wished them to be. We weren’t sure about the world and what it might contain. We felt as if anything could happen and yet here we were stuck in a kind of endless home–school–home routine.

Consequently, many people can’t wait to grow up, to put it all behind them. But within those “constraints”, what dreams there were! What amazing adventures in your head! What jokes and ironic asides you made up with your friends about the giants towering above you! How amazing the world could be, unpredictable and weird and terrifying and exciting! What moments of intense pure happiness there could be—including that plunge into a book that completely enveloped you, wrapped you in the likes of a spell that would never come again in adulthood (or only very very rarely).

And I think that’s part of the other problem. Children’s writers haven’t lost touch with those things—the highs, the lows, the in-betweens. We haven’t forgotten what it was like in the years before we entered the morphing chamber of adolescence to emerge blinking into the “new light” of adulthood. (And YA writers are of course often routinely derided in the same way as children’s writers, for similar reasons, with the added rider that “nobody needs YA fiction. Teenagers should ‘graduate’ to adult fiction.”) And sometimes I think that is seen both as a scary thing—what might such a weird unforgetting creature do, given half a chance—and a thing to envy.

Because here’s the crunch: when a child loves a book, it is a passionate love. That love stays with them, blood of their blood, bone of their bone, embedded in their most cherished memories as they grow up. People remember the books they read as children far more than any books they read later. Not only do they remember the books themselves; they often remember the moments they read them, and the feelings, those intense feelings of pure happiness or excitement or fear that the books might have evoked in them. They remember details they often don’t remember with books later; even apparently ridiculous details such as where the book was on the shelf when they took it out, the smell of the carpet in the library, the way someone had turned down a corner of a favourite page …

But what of the “constraints” Amis talks about? He means of course that when you write for children, there are certain things that probably “constrain” you. You can’t be self-indulgent. You have to steer clear of graphic sex, graphic violence, ugly political sentiments, nihilistic hopelessness, long convoluted explanations of finance or politics or religion or philosophy, look-at-me experiments with language, stories where nothing happens and people are indifferent to each other, and readers have to guess what anybody thinks or feels and it all ends pointlessly. You have to—oh, the horror, the horror!—think of your reader, not just indulge in navel-gazing.

Oddly enough those very constraints often produce books that are elegant, entertaining, funny, beautiful, exciting, moving and totally unforgettable in a way that Mr Amis could only dream of. And as to approaching topics of the “seriousness” that critics all too often assume is missing in children’s fiction, due of course to its writers’ defective understandings—let’s just say that sometimes restraint and constraint produce far more telling, subtle and deep explorations of life, death, love and human nature than those of a literalistic permissiveness where anything goes.

Critics will sometimes also say that children’s books are “escapist”. That is also the charge levelled at genres like fantasy or thrillers or mysteries—genres that are also regarded with suspicion by many critics as being altogether too close to the inner child. When this is said, I’m always reminded of how somebody once took Tolkien to task for writing stories they deemed were “escapist”. Well, Tolkien replied, only jailers fear escapees.

Sophie Masson has written more than forty novels, most of them for young readers.