The Word Cloud

"What makes you think that my second novel is in the least inferior to my first?"

At the risk of making the heated debate even more heated I would point to the customer reviews on amazon which do seem to suggest that. However, I would be interested to know how you found the task of writing the second book compared to the first and whether you think your example is typical?

My comment was really trying to express a perception I have that, increasingly, authors are under commercial pressure to churn out several books quite quickly. This was highlighted in a one-to-one session I had with a prolific author who advised me: "These days you should have a second book in mind when approaching an agent or publisher. It can be the same as the first one, just change a few bits here and there." I made a mental note to avoid all of that author's books, except perhaps the first one.

Well, if you believe Amazon reviews... What's fun about the ones for ASA is that several of them take it to task for taking a different view of the historical characters from what the reviewers probably think are 'facts', and therefore give it low marks because they don't like what they think I'm 'saying'. I've had readers say they "shouldn't" like it, because they're Ricardians... Which I think is hilarious: they've obviously missed the central point of the entire novel, which is that it's not about the real historical characters.

ASA is a more complex book that TMOL, certainly - less straightforward in what it's saying (not that most people would call TMOL straightforward), and chiefly about marriage, not about romance-and-falling-in-love, much more complex in its structure and voices... it depends whether you like that, or not. Lots of sex and violence in both, mind you. Still, lots of people just don't get what I do. Others love it. So be it.

As to whether writers are under pressure, it depends partly on where you are on the literary-commercial spectrum. Certainly there's a lot of pressure for the new book to be coming out in hb when the old does in pb, and so on. I do wonder, though, what would happen if writers who truly hate doing that (all writers moan about it, but that doesn't fundamentally mean they hate it) looked their publisher in the eye and said, 'Okay, you can have a crap book in a year, or a good book in eighteen months.'

'The same as the first one' is rather daunting, isn't it, (There's a scary recipe for writing a follow-up to a hit record: take the lyrics and write a new tune, take the new tune and write new lyrics...). But then you could say that, in a superficial way but also a quite deeply structural way, about Rankin, or LeCarré, or Austen or Trollope.

But don't most writers have more than one book in their head? I certainly did and always do. I was dying to get on with the next one when I sold TMOL: I had a two-year deadline for ASA, which I hit, although work with my editor meant it ended up taking two and a half. It was a big project - much more complex as I've said than TMOL - and I was doing a PhD at the same time, as well as having TMOL published or it might have been a bit quicker. If the next one sells in the next few months, then it'll be 3 years or so between ASA and it, what with finishing the PhD 'n all. So be it - I'll have to live with the consequences, if any. I might be a bit quicker next time, if I can resist the temptation to start in on another parallel big project. Which is a big IF...

No, the second book/film/album/child isn't easy for just about everyone, although the reasons are many and varied - some internal, some external. And partly it's perceptual in the readers: some of what made your debut new-and-exciting is the outcome of your artistic nature, and in the nature of things, your next may be exciting, but it'll still be the outcome of that nature, so it can't ever be quite so new.

"Well, if you believe Amazon reviews"

I suppose I would believe them more than the comments on the back cover of a book. How do we make a choice about what books to read? I might walk into Waterstones, pick up a book with a nice picture on teh front, read the back cover and think "this sounds amazing". I pick up another book, read the comments on the back and think "Blimey! This one sounds amazing too!" But when I read it I discover that it isn't amazing after all. It's hard to know. It would be nice to have a 'neutral' website with a comprehensive list of books and reviews. Perhaps it already exists?

Thanks for being willing to discuss your own books as an example, Emma. The first one is on order, perhaps I'll give the second one a try too. Cheerio.

Yeah, dude, I would fully read her second book over my first one. Okay, maybe not, but I'm allowed to be biased, that comment was kinda... well your lucky Emma took it so well, that's all I'm a saying.

And I have to agree, writing a second story is way harder than writing the first, but also you've learnt so much more. I mean, yeah, there are some authors which just get a formula and churn our the same stuff for a few years, but in those cases there eighth book isn't really WORSE then there first, its just that its the same, so if you've already read the first there ain't much point. Chances are if you read them in some random order it would always be more interested in the whichever you read first.

Oh, and one last point, you may appreciate my "write for the sake of it" attitude, but this is the result of being under no finacial pressure. Come back in ten years when I've got a wife and kids then maybe I'll think different.

Hmmm... I seem to have wandered off topic.

"well your lucky Emma took it so well, that's all I'm a saying"

Yes, it was rash, and I realise I may have to apologise to Emma after I've read your first chapter


"Come back in ten years when I've got a wife and kids then maybe I'll think different."

Well, if you want to get a fair cut from your book in ten years, you might want to support The FairRead Campaign now. Thanks for your comments Babblefish.

Don't forget that many authors review their own books on Amazon under pseudonyms, and ask or even pressure friends to review too. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that it's not unknown for editors to support books they've published in a similar fashion. Sometimes writers even do several reviews under different names - some five stars, some one - to generate a volume of them and a sense of debate. Sometimes they review a rival book under pseudonym, etc. etc. and diss it - even mention their own as being much better. In other words, there is no depth to which someone hasn't sunk, in the Amazon reviews game (tho' if a review is directly and personally offensive, it is possible to get it taken down). Some big reviewers post so many it's almost a physical impossibility that they could have reviewed the book. So Amazon reviews do need reading in that light.

And this light:

http://open.salon.com/blog/jeanette_d/2010/03/27/amazons_one-star_book_reviews

You have to take any reviewing system which lets that kind of thing through with a very, very big pinch of salt.

In some ways I regret not having any one star reviews for TMOL - as a writer your biggest fear is to get no response. I'm almost as happy when a friend says they want to slap one of my characters, as when they say they adored them - the real fear is that they won't care either way. I never have asked anyone to review my work on Amazon or the blogs, but I can see that it would be tempting, given the loud silence into which most books are launched.

Emma

"You have to take any reviewing system which lets that kind of thing through with a very, very big pinch of salt."

Are their any better reviewing systems about? If not, would it be possible for an unbiased, non-profit making body to provide a comprehensive set of reviews of all published (and self-published) books? I would suggest The Society of Authors but they seem to be putting all their energy into turning their noses up at new, unpublished writers.

Simple. Just as there are game review sites online (such as Zero-punctuation), I'm sure there are plenty of blog sites online where a blogger disconnected from all the pbulishing scene happily goes through and review titles, the only catch being that they will only be able to review say... one book per week. Would these fall into the catagory you are thinking of, or is the single view point and limited number of books too restricting for what you are imagining?

"the only catch being that they will only be able to review say... one book per week"

Hmmm... ideally it would be comprehensive, but according to this site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year

There were 206,000 books published in the UK last year. That's 564 a day. Our reviewer would have to be quite busy wouldn't he? One solution for new writers would be to move to Nigeria, where only 5 books were published.

That 206,000 is based on ISBNs, so it includes all the ISBNs for what we'd regard as a single title - an ordinary novel might have six or seven or more, new editions of the Bible, say, or the 13th edition of one of three versions for three different syllabuses of a physics textbook - and includes things like corporate histories, and of course the full set of self-published books, textbooks, etc. etc. If you're talking about trade fiction and non-fiction the numers are a fraction of that. But it's still a lot. Interesting to see that the UK tops the list. What a civilised country we are!

There are terrific booky blogs and the publishers are finally realising that a review by Dovegreyreader, or Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room, or Scott Pack's Me and My Big Mouth, say, are just as well worth having as the prayed-for and almost-never-got newspaper reviews. (Acres of book pages have been ploughed up in the recession, and Books editors sacked.) There's quite a strong culture in blog reviewing, though, that if you can't say anything nice, you don't say anything at all, which some feel lacks the rigour of professional reviewing; others feel that it counterbalances the way print reviewing can sometimes seem like a blood sport. And there's a slightly different ethical fret about whether the fact that you've been sent a book for free makes you biassed, and so on. And some 'review' blogs just reproduce others (but then some local papers do that too...).

But, actually, though it's nice to have some help to find books you'd like, ultimately its the reader's responsibility - society isn't obliged to help you, though it may be in its interests to do so. If you want a steer towards good reading your best bet is to get to know your friendly local bookseller - a good indie, or a good Waterstones person - and start a conversation. They really do know their stuff: to hear a professional bookseller handselling to a customer is a privilege, and well worth hanging around for, as part of your professional education. (Also very instructive, if you're lucky enough, is to hear them talking to a rep, though it's fairly rare that reps go into bookshops these days. That's where the real interaction between books as passion and books as product is most obvious.)

"That 206,000 is based on ISBNs, so it includes all the ISBNs for what we'd regard as a single title"

Phew! That is a relief, Emma. Even so, I am impressed by how much bigger this industry is than I at first thought. I am also interested in what the trend is in terms of sales, and whether Babblefish's concerns about the supply and demand are justified?

You seem to have your finger on the pulse, Emma. Any idea what the numbers are for trade fiction in terms of published new titles and book sales per year?

I think sales are down - no suprise there - and would be down more were it not for Twilight: we should all be deeply thankful to Stephenie Meyer for making things much less awful than they might be. Proper figures beyond the ones quoted by the week's bestselling titles in the papers and so on are very hard to come by, unless you're in the trade. FWIW, the only bestseller list I really looked at (I think I've quoted this before) was for fiction including pb and hb, and had the top couple of sellers at 30,000, the next at 20,000 and the remaining between 5-10,000 for that week. Inflate that by 30% because Nielsen under-reports, and you've probably got around 170,000 fiction books sold that week.

But though I'm interested in the structures of how the industry works, and feedback from my trusted readers in the trade - agent, editor - is hugely important to me, I don't follow the day-to-day stuff, of either sales or what one or other industry voice is saying about what's selling or what's next or what's going wrong. Half the time they're saying different things, anyway, and besides, the devil's in the detail. And for another thing there's no box you can tick, or mistake you can avoid, which will make your book good/saleable, if it isn't good/saleable in all the hundreds of other ways it needs to be.

Interestingly, my editor is also a prize-winning novelist herself and says not altogether jokingly that as an editor, she forbids her authors to read The Bookseller, for the kind of reasons I had written about a while before on my blog here.

"and you've probably got around 170,000 fiction books sold that week."

I meant, the top 20 titles are responsible for 170,000 sales, and no. 20 was 6,400 + 30%. So I don't know what the next 100 titles sales would be like - the book trade is a very long tail business. And I think they exclude classics and things - so the day the exam boards announce that Jane Eyre is on the syllabus, I'd imaging Our Charlotte would dominate the list, if she was allowed. But that kind of info's no use to the trade, so no one bothers to transmit it.

Correction - I've just looked that week up, as it's the only one I know anything about, and added it up. The top seller was 40,000, then a 30 and two 27s... The adjusted total is a bit over 500,000, and I didn't hear that that week was anything out of the ordinary. Half a million current novels were sold that week.

It's quite a lot.

Hi guys still looking for authors to promote themselves on www.all-review.co.uk
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Good luck

Neil.

Emma. "It's quite a lot."

So, a lot of books being published, a lot of books being read. In theory there's also scope for increasing the demand for books, though not sure how that is achieved... e-books?

Emma "Would you sign an e-book only contract?"

At the moment, in all the confusion, it looks like publishers are trying to take advantage of eBook authors, so until authors get a bigger cut I would not sign an eBook only contract.