“The decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.”

Part of this decline is seen in slipping in unattributable quotations in media articles that help to support the overarching ideology of a news outlet.

None of the phrases taken from an article in the Daily Mail today on the Motability charity (“Parent of a child with ADHD? Have a free car under £1.5bn taxpayer-funded scheme”) are attributed to anyone or backed up by traceable sources.

These terms are just there to support the initial ideological headline – the “political and economic causes” – that the Daily Mail pursues every day to sell papers.

It’s easier to sell a newspaper that reinforces someone’s ideas on the world rather than a newspaper which goes against them, so that’s what the DM does.

“naughty child syndrome”

“get new cars paid for by the state” (not free, leased using disability allowance for transport)

“what he regards as abuse of free cars” (not free cars)

“shocked”

“rocketed”

“soared”

“are believed to have been given vehicles” (no proof from DM)

“abuse”

“it has led to claims” (by who?)

“enraged”

“received free cars” (not free, leased!)

“fleet management outfit” (it’s a charity, not a scam as implied by term ‘outfit’)

“openly advises” (who says this?)

“some doctors believe” (who says this?)

“while critics believe” (who says this?)

“just a label to describe naughty children” (who says this?)

“psychologists insist” (who says this?)

“controversial drug” (why the word controversial?)

“rocketed” (repeated)

“no more questions asked” (implicit suspicion of disabled people)

“many people forced to sell cars” (proof? )

The Motability scheme is a not-for-profit charity that allows people receiving Disability Allowance to use their disability transport allowance (50 pounds a week) to lease a new, dependable car that they can rely on. It is for people that are disabled and want to drive to work, to go shopping, to see friends or go to the cinema, or want a designated person to do all these things for them.

Three reasons why a student without a trust fund would be mad to go to university after 2012.

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1) Vince Cable said in his Commons speech that 25 per cent of graduates are expected not to pay back the increased fees at all. This is a positive spin on an appalling consequence of the act. The reason a quarter of graduates won’t pay is because the limit triggering the payback has been raised to £21,000, and then linked with inflation. A lot of students don’t find jobs as graduates that reach or pay above this limit. Many spend years out of work, or working in book shops, Starbucks and admin roles.

This is why the graduate tax is termed a “progressive tax”, in that the less you earn the less tax you pay. The Coalition government paints this as a positive, but it’s not. Interest on the capital amount is ticking up when you’re not paying it down. Linked to inflation, 3 per cent interest will be £1,200 a year. By the time you’re 30, if you haven’t begun paying it back, the interest alone has reached £16,000.

Thinking about buying a house? You’re not anymore.
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2) Lord Ashdown said: “It’s better because no student pays a penny whilst they study“. Null argument – I didn’t pay a penny either when I went to university a few years ago, I paid in the form of a loan I’m now paying back. This is an argument by the Coalition government lifted from sofa superstores. It’s called “Buy Now, Pay Later” and it’s a scam. A customer receives 0 per cent interest for three years on a creamy white elephant, and then they have to pay it back at the end of the term or face severe penalties. It’s a salesman’s con.
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3) Back to the interest. Vince Cable said a graduate earning £30,000 a year – a fantastic amount reserved only for financial and specialist graduate jobs – will pay back £68 a month. That’s 8 per cent on £9,000 (the amount above the starting limit of £21,000). Even that won’t cover the minimum interest level on £40,000 (£100 a year on £40,000). Graduates will have to make much larger contributions to pay down the debt to prevent the crushing interest rate.

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In his book Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing a short story. I’m recycling them here because I’ve been told it’s “NaNoWriMo”, whatever that is.

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1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

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2) Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

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3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

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4) Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.

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5) Start as close to the end as possible.

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6) Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

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7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

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And finally:

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

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What a bleak picture Vonnegut paints of reading. It’s not all sadism, pneumonia and cockroaches – sometimes it’s tea, chocolate and comfy chairs.

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Anyway, if you are taking part in “NaNoWriMo”, remind yourself of the wise words of Vonnegut, and never, ever forget that every word you jot down is for a reader, and not for your own sense of worth. Your job is to entertain. If you’re producing rubbish work, never let anyone see it – no matter how much effort you put in.

Check out the article over at The Salon for an argument on why NaNoWriMo is an exercise in self-indulgence.

And if that’s not put you off, check out my article on how the money’s about to drain out of the book industry once piracy takes off.

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At its heart is a quote from Ford Madox Ford, who said: “Open the book to page 99, and the quality of the work will be revealed to you.”

Page 99 is crucial – it’s roughly one third of the way into the book, so the story should be running at full pace, but shouldn’t be at the point where plot points are revealed. It’s a good trick when scouring for books in charity shops, although I’m more inclined to open a new book at about the page 40, just in case.

The rules are simple:

1. You sign up (which allows you to submit your own page 99, and critique others)
2. You upload page 99 of your unfinished or finished novel (taking care to scrub out any spelling errors or grammar mistakes)
3. You wait for feedback and act accordingly.

My finished, unpublished first novel is up on the site. I had input from 15 users before I took it down and re-drafted it (which unfortunately automatically deletes comments). At that point two-thirds of readers were enjoying it, and the criticism was harsh, but well-founded.

With the re-draft I have had five votes, with a 100 per cent record for readers who want to “turn the page” and read more. It feels good to hear that from unbiased readers, and it’s helping to spur on my writing.

I’m writing from a pseudonym, but the book is one I began working on and completed last year.

The criticism is invaluable, and even though the reader only glimpses a single page, some of the comments have been intuitive to the problems I have faced in writing the novel.

Criticism is incredibly important for new, unpublished writers, and aspiring authors should search for it at every opportunity. Listening to honest feedback will help to iron out mistakes, sharpen grammar points and help spot problems that the author may have missed.

The other website I recommend for aspiring writers is Reasoning With Vampires. An anonymous writer forced to read the Stephenie Meyer trilogy is now re-reading the books and pointing out every single plot issue and grammatical error she can find (there are lots). Never has learning grammar been so funny – they should use it in schools.

Why? Because book publishers are like water companies which control the water, not the pipes (this analogy from the brilliant Merchants of Culture, a book about the publishing industry in the 20th century). Publishers control the content, not the form (that’s what printers do, and they will be worried). If customers want the latest bestseller on ebook rather than in print, publishers can arrange that. The pipe changes, but the water doesn’t.

So what should publishers be wary of?

Here are six straightforward reasons why piracy in ebook publishing could take off even easier than it did with Napster in music.

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1) Books are losing value: Customers think ebooks should mean cheap – no printing, no shipping, no storing, no rent and no employees. When Amazon started selling $35 hardback editions for $9.99 as ebooks, people considered this a fair price. It didn’t matter that Amazon was losing $8 on every sale. Amazon is continuing to subsidise sales of its Kindle ebooks by selling digital bestsellers at below cost price (against publisher’s wishes).

The reality is that printing and distributing is only a very small portion of the publisher’s overheads. I’ve previously linked to the breakdown costs of a print book compared to an ebook, and when you strip away author royalties, marketing, design and the publisher and retailer’s profits, the actual printing cost is only a small percentage of the sale: just $3.25 on a $25 book. Strip away printing costs and you still have a $22 ebook.

The price of a book is linked to the value of its content, not the physical cost to make it.

A book as a collection of blank pages is worth nothing (except as a notebook). When a reader buys a book, the value they are paying for is in the content, the writing, the knowledge. The value of content is undermined by Amazon charging below cost for an ebook, and the fear is that the perception of cheap ebooks will stick, and people will be unwilling to ever pay near-print price for a digital version again.

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2) Ebooks are tiny digital files, and even easier to share: Print files are much smaller even than music files. A gigabyte of space will hold maybe ten albums, putting an instant cap on illegal downloads. Ebooks will be measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, and this means people can download thousands and even millions of books at a lightning fast rate, and store them indefinitely on hard drives. Ebooks can be passed around through emails and instant messaging, or just posted in full on hosting websites. Once a book is unlocked from any digital management rights, it is gone forever.

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3) With ebooks, there’s no issue on quality: The opening weekend is incredibly important for the movie industry. Hollywood films are saved by the initial poor quality of illegal copies filmed in the cinema on handheld cameras. No-one can stand the appalling audio and visual quality of illegal movies, which provides an incentive to go to the cinema. Similarly, no-one likes listening to new music if the sound quality is bad, or if DJs are talking over the song.

Books have no variance in quality, and need no quality control. No audio problems, no visual issues. It’s just black and white text, whether it’s scanned, downloaded or photographed.

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4) Most people don’t cherish books: Some people love print books, and have the heavy bookshelves to prove it. A lot of people don’t. A lot of people read celebrity biographies, trashy crime and romance thrillers, and books about conspiracies and sports. A lot of people only read on holiday, and might leave the book in the hotel. It is to these people the ebook – or more likely the illegally downloaded ebook -  is perfect. They can take it with them, read it on the beach and the plane, and then discard it.

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5) Authors have no ancillary income: When musicians got hit by illegal downloads, the industry changed. Global and national tours became an important revenue stream for musicians and bands, and ticket prices got higher. Authors have no such fallback. When piracy hits book sales, authors will get poor. This will strangle creativity, lead to less books being published and push true talent to the sidelines.

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Print books will never leave the market,

The sales figures for the Man Booker Prize list, courtesy of The Guardian, and current as of today, are below:

Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America – 5,987 – £87,426.92

Emma Donoghue – Room – 33,923 – £290,352.26

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room – 1,210 – £15,850.87

Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question – 3,505 – £54,614.36

Andrea Levy – The Long Song – 15,251 – £201,915.7

Tom McCarthy – C – 2,649 – £35,073.98

By comparison,the seventh and final volume of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 11 million copies… in its first day. This is a grossly unfair comparison, because by then Harry Potter was a major international brand, backed by investment from one of the biggest media conglomerates and with a backlist of unbelievably popular novels and films. The anticipation for the final tome was dizzying, hence the galactic sales figures.

Emma Donoghue’s Room (reviewed here) has sold incredibly well. Its subject matter is a particularly grizzly kidnapping case, and many readers will be intrigued by the concept of writing from the perspective of a five-year-old boy (I know I was).

In any case, well done to Jacobson.

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Does the growth of authors who choose to self-publish rather than sell to a traditional publishing house hail a new golden era for the novel?

Will self-publishing remove the power of the old guard?

Or will the e-book marketplace simply become congested by millions of poorly-written novels, cluttered by an absence in the digital marketplace of any quality control?

In the best case scenario of the e-publishing realm, international book publishers will no longer hold aspiring writers to ransom. Authors can simply publish their work straight to the online marketplace as an e-book, and the reader can pick up their book on a Kindle or iPad.

Publishers have a commercial objective in every book they commission. Every book must make money. If it doesn’t, the route to the reader is closed off, and the book will not be published. This is the perception of the jilted author, who has produced a novel of such literary genius he worries it has been rendered unviable as a commercial entity. And yet it must exist, so the author turns to e-publishing.

And yet, finding no audience, or rather, having no audience find the book, it bombs. E-book marketplaces are like libraries without a Dewey Decimal System:

E-books  will not be the death of the old publishing model. Ultimately, the old publishing model will control the new e-book market.

Reading John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture (blogger’s review here, Jungla review coming up) reveals the error in the misguided perception of e-publishing’s future. I have a limited understanding of the commercial mechanics of the book publishing world, but by explaining the real role of publishing houses, Merchants of Culture has revealed exactly why e-publishing is doomed for authors without the backing of publishing houses.

The reality is that publishers do not merely buy author’s rights, print them and sell them to retailers. Publishers create markets for books, and that’s very different to bringing a book to market. Anyone with an internet connection can bring a book to market, but like the proverbial horse to water, they cannot make it sell.

Good publishers build markets in a world in which it is attention, not content, that is scarce.

As more and more authors publish half-baked novels online, the e-book marketplace will become an impossibly competitive marketplace, in which a search for “Twilight” will bring up Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling nightmare, and a thousand copy-cat versions written by aspiring authors in their bedrooms (Twilight in Space, Twilight Nights, Twilight and George, Twilight: The Prequel, Ode to Twilight, repeat ad nauseum).

The only books which will rise to the surface of this electronic landfill will be the books which are supported in print, by publishing houses with enduring and valuable commercial links to retailers, book reviewers and with dedicated publicity engines.

The e-book may be sold digitally in the future, but its market will be created offline, in the traditional world of publishing houses.

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1 Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .

2 The edit.

3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

4 Stop reading fiction – it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already (assuming, that is, you’ve read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven’t you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is ­indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you’re writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: “Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . .”

8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.

9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.

10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.