9 Scary Words

I used to agree with Ronald Reagan that the 9 scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help” but now I think there are contenders in town: “I’ve written this book, tell me what you think”

Knowing how much I love to read a colleague (who doesn’t) (love to read that is) has provided me an advance copy of his soon-to-be published tome and is awaiting my thoughts.

This is a problem. While I do indeed love to read I am not indiscriminate with my affections. I don’t, for example, read business books. Neither, for another example, do I read self-help books. Ever. Under any circumstances. I’m not for a moment suggesting I need no help, I just believe that actual help is unlikely to be found between glossy covers emblazoned with phrases like ‘life-altering’ in large, colourful fonts. I suspect real help will also cost more than $29.95). Or, as my Dad would put it, “you get what you pay for in this life darling, if you can’t afford quality go without”.

Accordingly you can possibly imagine my total absence of delight when the aforementioned colleague presented me with a book that combines business with self-help and said “I’ve written this book, tell me what you think”. He also mentioned that he hadn’t shown it to other colleagues but that I was getting special treatment because he knows I am a reader.

Why do non-readers assume that readers will read anything put in front of them be it Pride and Prejudice or a TV Repair Manual? It’s generally understood that people have different tastes in food, clothes or movies so why are reading tastes not equally well appreciated?

And why are there so many non-readers who write books? Isn’t it more than a little arrogant to think you can produce something you have no experience of as a consumer? Or are these non-reading writers so gob-smackingly conceited that they think all the books that have come before theirs were lacking the one vital ingredient that they’ve unearthed?

Despite my annoyance and in what can only be described as a complete failure of maturity I have, to date, dealt with this issue by actively avoiding my colleague. Among other indignities this has included bribing my staff (with significant quantities of chocolate) to lie for me and, I’m ashamed to admit, hiding under my desk for a few minutes last week.

But tomorrow is d-day. I will not be able to avoid being in the same room as my colleague any longer.

I’ve decided to tell him that we he was wrong. That even though I am a reader I ‘m really not the target audience for a book about how to be a better sales person ‘even (to quote the blurb) if the only thing I have to sell is myself’.

Because I don’t imagine he wants to know what I really think which is that the kind of pseudo-psychology I sense his book is about (I sense this from chapter titles like “Selling Up: Why Should Your Boss Buy You?”) is just the kind of loathsome waste of dead trees that no human needs to read and I’d rather gnaw off my own arm than spend a moment with the damned thing.

But if he asks…

 

 

Homage or Heresy?

My favourite author of all time is Douglas Adams. Among other things he wrote a trilogy (in 5 parts) which started with the publication of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy in October 1979. Adams died suddenly in 2001 without leaving a single note or idea for future books in the series. Although he was quoted as predicting that he might, one day, write a sixth book we, his fans, were left wondering what might have been.

Apparently not for much longer. And Another Thing, the sixth book in the series, is to be released next Monday which just happens to be the 30th anniversary of the original volume’s publication.

Adams hasn’t risen from the dead or communicated from the other side. The book has been written by children’s author Eoin Colfer.

He has the blessing of Adams’ widow and daughter (everywhere you see the book mentioned in print it is preceded by the word authorised) but I don’t care. I won’t be buying it. Or borrowing it. Or reading it. I might not be able to stop myself from ripping it from the shelves and jumping up and down on it until it is pulp.

My gripe?

When did the world become so starved of creative talent that stealing borrowing someone else’s characters, settings and writing style is seen as acceptable?

When did we stop accepting that things cease to be? That people die? That series end? That sometimes this doesn’t happen to suit publisher’s bank balances?

Have we become pathologically and collectively thanatophobic or is just that anything fair game in the never-ending chase for money?

I’m just about prepared to believe that Colfer is an Adams fan with nothing but good intentions (and a sizable chunk of hubris) although I take issue with the statement he made in December

“I think it’s going to be a good book, not a Douglas Adams book, but one that will stand on its own”.

No, Mr Colfer however much of a fan you are and whatever the book will do it cannot possibly stand on its own. To stand on its own it would need to be something other than the sixth book in some else’s series.

I wish with all my heart that a good (great) thing had been left alone.

What about you? Do you want to join me in armed combat against this kind of blatant cash grab? Or have I got it all wrong? Have you enjoyed other similar works? Perhaps you liked Devil May Care (a James Bond novel written by Sebastian Faulks in homage to Ian Flemming) or Scarlett (the ’sequel’ to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind penned by Alexandra Ripley some 54 years after the original and, presumably, after Mitchell’s heirs had squandered her estate)?

 

My history with Wexford (or timing is everything)

George Baker as Inspector Wexford in 1998's Road Rage for TV

Back in the mid-80’s when I started to look for crime fiction as an adult reader I was a rather strident young university student taking, among my other studies, a course entitled Women in Politics. From memory it covered a mish-mash of history and commentary about the treatment of women in society and was taught by the kind of Germaine Greer worshiping feminist that you don’t often see these days. Apart from turning me into a crushing bore for several months (Surely there’s not much more annoying in life than a newly converted disciple of any cause or faith) the course influenced me to demand my local librarian provide me with contemporary crime fiction by female authors. She suggested Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski series, Sue Grafton’s alphabet books and Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford novels. The first two of these, featuring young, adventurous female protagonists, were far more engaging to my 19-year old self than one starring two middle-aged blokes and I’ve never really gotten over my youthful disdain for Reg Wexford and Mike Burden. The books are forever identified in my mind as depicting an old-school ‘man’s world’ that I wanted no part of and even though I know now that’s a very superficial interpretation of the books I can’t help continuing to be influenced by the thought.

Regardless of this I have read at least half of the Wexford books over the years (they’re available everywhere) but they’ve never been the ones I wait impatiently for. Instead they’re the books I pick up from remainders tables when desperate or borrow from the library because it’s that or Danielle Steele (before the Internet made it simple for me to put holds on books I actually want to read). The only Wexford story I’ve liked is Road Rage which appealed to my inner hippie and focused more on Reg’s wife Dora than the other books I’ve read. I couldn’t provide you a single detail of any of the other novels if my life depended on it.

And so I shall dare to admit here that I groaned audibly when I saw From Doon with Death had been chosen for the upcoming classics month discussion at Oz Mystery Readers. But, because I do try to participate in the group discussions (and because I discovered the story is contained in the Wexford omnibus gathering dust on my bookshelves) I gave it a go.

I don’t think it would be quite fair to review the book properly given my gargantuan blind spot but this is what I thought of the book.

It’s the first in what has become a series of 22 novels featuring Chief Inspector Reg Wexford et al and was written in 1964. Ronald Parsons reports his wife missing to his neighbour Mike Burden, also a policeman. Initially skeptical, Burden starts half-heartedly making enquiries. When Margaret Parsons’ body is found the pace picks up and Wexford and Burden have to unravel a tale that started a dozen years ago when Parsons was at school in the area.

Because I really wasn’t terribly engaged by the book (refer above) I started to take note of the ways it let me know it’s 45 years old. I’d forgotten, for example, that there was a time, before the ‘war on terror’ prompted earthlings to give up any pretence of civil liberties, that an innocent person’s fingerprints would be destroyed once the case for which they’d been taken had been resolved. Imagine! There are a load of similar small details which ensure the book captures its time and place exceptionally well and I really enjoyed that aspect of the book.

The plot is well constructed and I suspect it would have been a little controversial in it’s day but it’s in no way salacious. I did get a bit bored by some of Wexford’s drawn out figuring out of things (the tracking down of the owner of a single tube of lipstick seemed to take forever for example).

We don’t learn much about Reg or Mike in the book which is probably at the heart of my disengagement with the series. We know Mike is married with two young-ish kids but I don’t think there’s any mention of Reg’s family here. We do learn that he’s 52 in this book which would have made him 97 in his last outing if he had aged the same way the rest of us do. I guess that kind of poetic license doesn’t really matter but I think it probably contributes to to my lack of ability to get drawn into the series. I like my characters to be a bit more concretely drawn.

I’ve always felt somewhat heretical for being a crime fiction lover who doesn’t go weak at the knees at the sight of a new Ruth Rendell book. But I don’t and I can’t make myself. This book, like all the others I’ve read, is a perfectly plotted police procedural but it doesn’t have the other part of what I need to want to spend time with a book: engaging characters. To me Reg and Mike are about as interesting as day-old dishwater and neither the victim of the crime here nor any of the suspect pool we were introduced to was much better. It might get me excommunicated from the crime fiction fraternity but I’ve decided I’m done with Wexford. I no longer believe eschewing him is striking a blow for womankind (I really was insufferable 22 years ago) but I am comfortable in admitting he’s just not for me.

 

Musing Monday – Library Gluttons

I haven’t participated in this particular meme before (although I regularly read and enjoy several people’s responses) but this week’s question hit one of my hot buttons and I couldn’t resist. Rebecca, who hosts the Musing Mondays meme from Just One More Page, poses the question

Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about library borrowing…Do you restrict yourself on how many books you take out from the library at a time? Do you borrow books if you already have some out? Do you always reborrow books you don’t get to?

I can’t believe I’ve been blogging about books for over 6 months and have never discussed the way I would change the world were I suddenly elected supreme leader. Before the securing of Middle Eastern peace and ridding the world of its carbon-induced woes (worthy aims in their way of course) I’d get stuck into the abusers of libraries. More specifically I would build special torture chambers for people who borrow more books than they can possibly read. Said chambers would be large comfortable rooms in which there would be thousands of books locked just out of reach behind see-through doors impervious to any form of breakage.

As a child of a not terribly well-off family and then in my own struggling student days and my ‘I’ve just moved interstate and have $1.93 to my name’ days I relied solely on libraries to feed my addiction to reading. And I will never forget the utter frustration at being unable to borrow anything I remotely wanted to read because all the good books were loaned out and the waiting lists were years long. I also remember the vaguely murderous rage that would build up inside me when I saw someone leave the library with a dozen or more books knowing full well they couldn’t possibly read that many books at once.

Fortunately I now have other ways to feed my habit. I buy books, I swap them, I occasionally receive free ones. I do still regularly borrow from the library but I have a personal rule to never have more than 3 books at a time which is roughly what I can read in a week. Often I’ll only have one at a time. Sometimes this means I have to visit the library every couple of days but I’d rather do that than have a whole swag of books lying around my home while some impoverished addict paces the library floor desperate for a decent fix.

My current library allows people to borrow 30 items at a time. It’s absurd and I told them so when I joined (the ‘don’t make eye contact with the crazy lady’ look the librarians exchanged with each other did not deter me). Such wanton over indulgence will be outlawed when I run the world.

You can read other people’s (possibly more balanced) views on this topic here.

 

Sunday Salon 2009-04-19: Quiet Solitude

…as was his habit, [Bottando] had passed ten minutes in the bar opposite the office drinking two esspresso coffees and eating a panino filled with fresh ham. The habitués of the bar had greeted him as befitted a regular breakfast customer: a friendly ‘buon-giorno’, nods of acknowledgement, but no attempt at any more conversation. Waking up, in Rome as in any other city, is a private matter that is best done in quiet solitude. [The Raphael Affair, Iain Pears, pg1]

Most days I walk to work. It’s a bit more than 5 kilometres and takes me a bit under an hour. The walk is through inner-city streets so I leave home early, around 6am, to avoid having to walk alongside roads congested with noisy cars. 

My rewards for this are many. An hour a day to listen to a favourite podcast or audiobook. Some gentle exercise. A smug feeling of virtue for the rest of the day. And, best of all, my end-of-journey ritual.

I stop for 20 minutes of coffee,  reading and contemplation at my favourite café. The street where I stop has numerous cafés but I stop at this particular one because 

1. the coffee is always excellent
2. the place is not part of a chain
3. they use good old-fashioned washable china to serve their coffee in instead of disposable cups
4. there’s no expectation I will participate in noisy, pointless conversation

This last point is very, very important. Both the staff and the other early morning regulars would concur with the sentiments of the quote above. They understand that the process of waking up has it’s own rhythm and is largely a solitary activity even when there are other people around. We’ll nod to each other and may even venture a “lovely day” or a hopeful “might rain” (hopeful because this is a city ravaged by drought) but we don’t converse.

We sit, we read, we sip, we listen, we wake up and ready ourselves for the day ahead.

But     we     do     not     converse.

This week all that changed. A woman who I’d never seen there before came every morning.

And she talked. A lot.

To me: “What are you reading?”, “Is it any good?”

To the dread-locked bloke who always reads The Australian “What do you think about that news story?”

To the chain-smoking Ad Exec who’s always on his laptop “Nice computer…is it a good one?”

And on she went. No one answered her with more than a grunted, two-word response but she seemed not to notice. Every day there were more loud, pointless questions preventing us all from enjoying our individual wake-up rituals.

By Friday tensions were a little high. We all sat, sipped and waited. Teeth gritted in anticipation of the unpleasantness to come.

She didn’t turn up.

There was a palpable collective relief.

One of the two construction workers, who each drink several short blacks in the space of a few minutes as part of their ritual, ventured a “she must have got the point”. We all smiled.

I’m hopeful that tomorrow thing will return to normal.

 

Censorship never goes away

The high school teacher who I remember most fondly was my English teacher and debate team coach who we’ll call Mrs Mac. She was the first teacher I can recall who engaged in a genuine argument with me rather than simply telling me I was wrong and she was right because she was the teacher. Our argument was about the merits of The Grapes of Wrathwhich she loved and I found to be the dullest words in human history. She was also a staunch opponent of censorship of any kind which, as a lay teacher in a Catholic girls high school in the 1980’s, required more than a little backbone. She had on the wall of her office a picture of Gough Whitlam (Australian Prime Minister from 1972-75) for the sole reason that in 1973 the Whitlam Government wiped the list of banned books in Australia. “He may have had his faults” Mrs Mac would say “but he understood the danger of banning things”.  I wonder what Mr Whitlam thinks about the current Labor Government’s proposal which would effectively censor the internet in Australia.

I’m sure I was influenced by Mrs Mac’s arguments but I have given this issue some independent thought in the intervening 25 years and I’ve never been persuaded that banning things has the desired impact (assuming the desired impact is to ‘protect’ society or some subset of it from hearing or seeing things that the censors think they’d be better off not hearing or seeing).

Yet, surprisingly to me, censorship of one kind or another continues. Increasingly, private companies are engaging in censorship of a fairly insidious kind and the latest example would appear to be Amazon.com. In an LA Times blog post Carolyn Kellogg describes how Amazon has effectively censored its website by ‘de-ranking’ certain books. To be clear, this doesn’t mean Amazon won’t sell the book (that at least would suggest some kind of staunch moral stance on their part) but it does mean that the book won’t appear on Amazon’s general or category best-seller lists and won’t appear in general or keyword search results. So you’d have to know the book exists and search by its author or title to find it. Kellogg quotes an author who contacted Amazon about the disappearance of his own book (a young adult novel featuring gay characters) from their lists and he was apparently told by a customer services representative

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Kellogg (and others) have investigated further and discovered that Amazon have a fairly fluid definition of ”adult” material but I don’t really care about that aspect of this. For me the problem with any kind of censorship is that we’re never all going to agree on what should, and what should not, be censored. Some people even wanted to ban Harry Potter books for pity’s sake.

I’m fairly confident that the reason Amazon have introduced this practice is because of some hefty lobbying by ‘concerned parents groups’ who’ve threatened to use their economic muscle against Amazon unless they implement these practices (why else would Amazon incur the extra work?). So all I can do is fight fire with fire and refuse to shop there until they change their policy. Which I’m more than happy to do.

The Norwegian Beacon For Freedom of Expression project has one of the best sites discussing the history of censorship and the issues surrounding the subject that I’ve come across.

 

Sunday Salon 2009-04-05: Authors are blogging daily

I wrote earlier this year about how some authors and publishers seem to be missing the boat with respect to the web. It seems as if some in the industry are scared of the web but I’ve written about my optimism for what new media and social networking might offer for readers and authors alike so I’ve been actively seeking out the authors who are actively participating in web 2.0. There are many authors with their own blogs and I may talk about them another day but what struck me this week is how many blogs being published by authors working in collaboration.

In particular there seem to be a growing number of blogs hosted by a small group of authors who each post once a week. This seems like a great idea to me: it gets the authors some exposure but it cuts down on the workload for each individual. Blogs are a lot of work, especially if they’re being used as part of an artist’s publicity when there’s an expectation they’ll be updated regularly. In addition to sharing the workload I imagine each author gets exposed to far more potential readers than they would be if they had a blog of their own. I’m sure many readers are like me: find the blog because of an interest in one author and stick around to read content from the other writers posting articles.

The first of these shared blogs I came across was The Kill Zone and it’s an excellent example of this type of blog. The seven mystery and thriller authors who run the blog each ‘own’ a day of the week and write about a range of issues including the craft of writing, the publishing business and even about using social media to promote yourself. The blog also has occasional guest posts from other authors. Even though I’m not an author I find this a ‘must visit’ blog because it gives interesting insights into the business. I’ve deliberately started tracking down books by these authors and enjoyed the first one I got my hands one (I reviewed Michelle Gagnon’s The Tunnels in March).

Other blogs from groups of authors (or would the appropriate collective noun be a murder?) include:

• Cozy Chicks which, no surprise given the name, is hosted by seven female writers of cosy mysteries who talk about the book business, getting published and much more
• Jungle Red hosted by six female authors who write about the creative writing process, their inspiration and a little bit of politics
• Femmes Fatales (eight women mystery writers talk about the process)
• Poe’s Deadly Daughters is another one hosted by a group of women (I’ll leave the issue of where the blokes are hiding for another day)
• The Naked Truth about Life and Literature (there are some blokes here and a wide variety of sub-genres represented)

And an interesting twist is offered by Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room which is another daily blog but the posts come from a literary agent, a publisher, the editor of an online reviewing site, a PR expert, an independent bookshop owner and an editor as well as an author.

Honestly the above list could be much longer but I have to go and do some of the work I’m paid for now and you’ll find loads of links to more of these kinds of sites in the blog rolls of the ones I’ve included. I’m just chuffed to see that some people do ‘get’ web 2.0, I hope their dedication brings them all lots of new readers. Like me.

 

Sunday Salon 2009-03-22: It’s not publishing that’s broken folks

Michelle Gagnon, who writes the Kelly Jones thrillers and is one of the authors responsible for The Kill Zone, this week blogged about publishing being broken. She used as her evidence the recent $3.2 million two-book deal for the pilot who landed a jet in the Hudson in January and turned what would have been a disaster into the feel-good story of the year.  She argued that not only is that a surprisingly large amount of dosh for any book in these financially strapped times but the inclusion of a book of poetry by Captain Sullenberger in the mix is…unexpected to say the least and went on to suggest that publishers should get back to ’supporting good books by people who have devoted their lives to the craft of writing them’.

I take issue with this sentiment. 

Do I think it’s daft that such a large amount of money is being thrown at someone who this time last year would have had a snowball’s chance in hell of garnering $3, 200 for a book deal based on his life let alone a book of poetry? Of course I do. Where I disagree with Ms Gagnon is that she blames publishers and I blame you. 

There are, roughly, several gazillion of these books published each each year. Biographies and/or ‘life’ stories of near-nobodies and 15-minutes-of-fame ‘celebrities’ who cannot possibly have enough interesting things to say to fill a pamphlet let alone a whole book. But regardless of the worth, or lack of it, of a person’s story a lot of you are buying this rubbish otherwise publishers, a species not known for their philanthropy, wouldn’t be rushing quite so hard and paying quite so much for the rights to sell it.

A quick look at the biography section of a few online stores demonstrates my point:

• There are two Jade Goody autobiographies (here and here) which seems excessive given the 27 year-old’s entire claim to fame is having been kicked of UK Big Brother and currently having terminal cancer (the latter point is sad but hardly qualifies as unique)
• You can read about both sides of the marriage of Australian (sorry world) singer Peter André and his model/wife Katie Price (and again and again) even though it seems astonishing that anyone would be interested in even one musing of a 30-something fairly unsuccessful artist or his vapid wife. 
• There are enough books about so-called sports stars and celebrities who succumb to the ‘pressures’ of their ‘jobs’ by diving into lives of drugs, sex and general debauchery that you could read one a week for the rest of your life and never run out (though I wouldn’t wish such a punishment on my worst enemy) and in case you’re wondering try Surfing’s Prince of Decadence or The Heroin Diaries: Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star or Tales of Glamour and Excess
• In the great tradition of people selling out their more famous relatives for a few pieces of silver we have Madonna’s brother’s book or Britney Spears’ mother’s book (like the woman hasn’t done enough damage to her daughters).
• And when you run out of famous folks to read about you can start on this biography of a racehorse (presumably ghost-written)

I could go on. And on. And on. But my doctors have warned against elevating my blood pressure above a certain level. My point is that publishers are only paying silly amounts of money for non-stories because they believe someone will buy them. Given the rise and rise of reality television, the continued success of celebrity gossip shows and websites and the fact that Britney Spears has (at time of writing) 492,282 followers on twitter they can be forgiven for thinking that way. Much as I might wish it weren’t so, celebrities are ‘in’ and publishers are just looking for their slice of the pie. Supporting writers devoted to their craft doesn’t, apprently, pay the bills.

On a positive note we can all be grateful for the small mercy that it was Captain ‘Sully’ who scored the poetry book as part of his deal and not the week’s other big book-deal winner: George W Bush.

 

Sunday Salon 2009-03-15: Can no one else see the silver lining?

This week I was quite chuffed to see crime fiction author Sara Paretsky posing some intelligent thoughts and questions about how the book business can move forward in this web 2.0 world. In response to a Wall Street Journal article that noted the dangers of clinging to the past Paretsky, acknowledging her own preference for some aspects of the existing book business, asked for some creative suggestions as to how books and readers might come together in our brave new world and, no less importantly, how anyone will make money out of it all.

Alas, several of the commentors on Paretsky’s post talked about the changes facing the industry only in terms of the problems posed and there was a fair amount of ’look at all the things we’ve lost’ nostalgia. I, as a passionate reader, can see more silver lining than clouds and I have some real world examples to account for my optimism.

Back in 2005 an independent musician by the name of Jonathan Coulton started something he called the Thing a Week project. Every week for the next year he released a song on the Internet using Creative Commons licensing which, essentially, meant he gave his music away. Being a former computer programmer Coulton was clearly at home in the tech world and promoted his songs heavily on the Net especially to the geek community who were the early producers of and listeners to podcasts. In a February 2008 interview on technology podcast This Week in Tech Coulton talked at length about the success he had made out of creating a niche for himself and interacting directly with the people he wanted to be his audience. He also reported that, despite the fact he continues to give virtually all of his music away, about 40% of his income is derived from the sales of digital downloads of his music (the rest comes from touring, merchandising and using his talent in unexpected ways like writing music for computer games).

Just like the geek community embraced Jonathan Coulton they have also taken several authors into their hearts including horror/sci-fi writer Scott Siegler whose books have all been released on free podcasts. In 2007 his printed book Ancestor, published by an independent publishing house, reached #7 on the Amazon.com best-seller list despite having been available for free in both audio and e-book format prior to its release.

Of course some of the changes we face are scary. And we may lose some things that we’ve loved. But is no one else prepared to admit that the traditional publishing business has its problems too? In the same blog post I mentioned earlier Paretsky stated that she didn’t become a national best seller until she had written her sixth book yet to hear authors talk you’d swear it’s only the new ways that will engender this kind of problem. At least now if you can’t get publishers interested in your work you have options that don’t rely on them. You too could podcast your writing like Scott Siegler and build up your fan base to the point where the publishers are coming to you or you don’t need one at all. Was something like that possible 10 years ago? Maybe there won’t be as many big name authors whose works are everywhere in the future, but maybe there will be more authors who provide to niche, international audiences and they’ll still be able to put food on their tables as Siegler and others are doing.

And from a reader’s perspective, especially one who doesn’t live in the USA, the opportunities offered by the Net are pretty sweet. Now, instead of relying on what the big publishing houses choose to flog in the two bookstore chains in my small city at the bottom of Australia I, literally, have the world at my feet. Since discovering the wide variety of online outlets for discussing books and reading a wide variety of reviews and opinions from genuine, knowledgeable fans my reading habits have changed dramatically. I’ve gone from reading multiple works by the same few American and English authors that seem to churn out product factory-style to devouring authors from places as diverse as Sweden, France, South Africa, Canada, Italy and, most shockingly of all, Australia. If it weren’t for the Internet, and the capacity it has to bring people with similar interests together, I wouldn’t have heard of (let alone read) two thirds of the books I read last year. I’ve used reading groups like 4 Mystery Addicts and blog aggregators like the Crime and Mystery Room on Friend Feed to get information about books and authors, including debut authors, that’s never been available to me via traditional mechanisms. I know there are some badly written blogs and others online with opinions for sale but the traditional book business hasn’t been free of that stuff in my lifetime and it doesn’t take any longer to spot the geniune from the fake online.

Another of the ways the Internet wins out is that it can offer an immediate and direct connection between artist and consumer. The geeks didn’t embrace Coulton or Siegler solely because their product is good (although in both cases it is) but also because both engage with their community. They blog and podcast and host forums and interact in a dozen other ways with their audience who are scattered across the globe. That audience repays that engagement by becoming ardent promoters, fans and collectors of the artists’ work and I see the same thing in the crime fiction universe.  On the Cozy Armchair reading group, which is devoted to the sub-genre known as ‘cosy mysteries’, many of the participants are authors and the other members obviously enjoy interacting directly with the people who provide the books they love to read and so support and promote those works in a way they would never do if they simply stumbled across the books in a store. Oz Mystery Readers is yet another online discussion group, this time focusing on readers or authors from Australia, and there too I’ve found many authors hanging out and discussing their craft and their love of books. I know I’m not alone in having that kind of thing make a direct impact on my decision making when I go to a bookstore (which these days is usually online too).

I’m not naive enough to think the future is all bright but I am heartily sick of hearing the book business’ future discussed only as a problem. I see loads of opportunities for readers and authors alike and am genuinely excited by what the next few years will bring to my reading experience.

 

Sunday Salon: Web not on publishing radar?

When I post a book review I usually include a link to the author’s website. Perhaps because I’ve read more books than usual this week or perhaps because I’m seriously involved with web design in my work right now I’ve been struck by how few authors have decent websites.

• The first review I posted this week was of Alex Barclay’s Blood Runs Cold. Barclay’s website commits one of the cardinal sins of web design by having a slow to-load flash gizmo that you can’t skip through and for your trouble you get three lousy links to PDF extracts of Barclay’s books. Ho hum.
• My next review led me to Alexander McCall Smith’s website which contains some useful information but would not win any design awards in 2009, especially not from anyone with even a slight vision impairment given that its standard font seems to be about 6 or 8pt.
• At least those authors have some kind of web branding of their own whereas the only site I could find for Leah Giarratano when I posted a review of Voodoo Doll was a short blurb at her publisher’s site. 
• Finally, yesterday’s review of The Red Dahlia led me to Lynda La Plante’s website and prompted this posting. Why on earth in this day and age would a successful author have a website that hasn’t been updated in nearly three years?

In some ways I guess Giarratano has got it right: if you can’t maintain a website properly then don’t have one at all. That’s certainly a better alternative than La Plante’s outdated site or Barclay’s singularly uninformative one. But the phenomenon of bad author websites got me thinking: why are there so many authors without a decent web presence? Do they, or the publishing industry in general, still believe that if they close their eyes and wish it to be so the Internet will disappear in a puff of smoke? Do they not realise that the old selling models are crumbling in the web 2.0 world and that making the most of social networking and new media will increasingly be the difference between putting food on the table and having to work a second job to pay the bills? Does no one see that today’s consumers want a little more than hundreds of advertisements for the books?

Of course I’m generalising. There are authors with web savvy including the six authors who collectively blog at The Kill Zone and talk about everything but where to buy their books. These are people whose work I will seek out because of their interesting web presence. Irish crime writers also seem to ‘get it’ if Declan Burke’s Crime Always Pays blog and Gerard Brennan’s Crime Scene NI are anything to go by. And new generation thriller writers like Scott Sigler and J C Hutchins are so enmeshed in new media that they don’t even bother with traditional publishers. They blog and podcast and participate fully in a range of online communities and are, undoubtedly, models for the new millennium. 

 

What about your favourite authors? Any of them have a web presence to be proud of?