January 12, 2003

ALL this week - in the school playground while dropping off my kids, or in the street, or via e-mails - I've had people I half know coming up to me and offering me their congratulations or commiserations, adding, "I had no idea you're 41!"

I was chosen as one of Granta's 20 best young novelists - a list announced earlier this week amid a media fanfare loud enough to reach the ears of even the most half-hearted follower of literary news. But I'm not on the list - which includes Zadie Smith, AL Kennedy and Alan Warner - because the cut-off age is 40. My publisher (who, like everyone else, can't believe I'm 41) entered me in error, and when Granta phoned to say I'd been selected, I immediately pointed out the mistake, and was consequently booted out at the 11th hour. I thus write as a hapless evictee from fiction's Fame Academy, musing on what might have been, if only my parents could have waited a couple of years before conceiving me, or if only I was a little less honest.

What do I think of the list? Pretty much the same as everyone else in the literary world that I've spoken to this week: it's a rum mix. It reminds me of one of those book bashes you sometimes find yourself at, where one corner of the room is occupied by people you've seen on the telly and hardly dare talk to, while the rest of us munch our crisps and try not to stare too much. There are some stellar names here, including those I've mentioned already, and some first-rate writers who deserve to be much better known. And there are some whom one can't help suspect of being lucky gatecrashers. Indeed, two must have been put in at the very last minute, to fill the awkward gaps left by me and fellow 40-something evictee Nick Barlay.

No harm in any of that, of course. Lists like these are always arbitrary, and come down to the opinions of the judges - a strong panel that included novelist Hilary Mantel and literary editor Robert McCrum. Not the sort of people likely to be swayed by hype and media expectation, which is perhaps one reason for the widespread backlash the list has generated, with pundits quick to point out missing names, such as widely tipped Giles Foden - author of The Last King Of Scotland. And where on earth is Alex Garland? In retirement, apparently, having decided to give up writing altogether and live off his royalties from The Beach. Defending his decision to keep Garland out of contention, Granta editor and chair of judges Ian Jack pointed out that the forthcoming anthology of chosen writers is meant to showcase new work, and Garland would most probably have submitted a large number of blank pages.

As for my own exit, my response is not so much a Weakest Link "I could have offered so much more", rather a Big Brother "sobs and kisses and good luck to the rest of you." I honestly wish these 20 all the very best of luck. Some of them will need it.

Being thrust prematurely into the spotlight is one thing. Coping with it is another. Take, for example, Monica Ali and Adam Thirlwell, whose novels haven't even been published yet, and were submitted in manuscript. They are now suddenly hailed as being among the best of their generation. They might well be; but when their novels eventually appear, there will be plenty of critics lining up in full expectation of reaching a different conclusion. I can hear the knives being sharpened already.

Back in 1983, when Granta magazine first came up with their "best of young Brits" idea, novelists were mostly earnest, middle-aged or elderly men - people like Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene. The fact that you could line up a brat-pack of under-40s that included Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Amis junior - all of whom already had established literary reputations - was pretty remarkable. The age of the enfant terrible was upon us.

These days, of course, terrible kids are everywhere, and being famous for 15 minutes is part of every teenager's career plan. When Granta decided to do a 10-years-on reprise in 1993, there were rumblings of discontent. It was a strong list - Will Self, AL Kennedy, Iain Banks - but already nostalgia was setting in. There could never be another class of '83, never again a line-up that included so many undoubted stars. In 2003, those rumblings have erupted into an outpouring, with nobody sure any more whether Granta's venture is supposed to be a round-up of writers with a solid body of work, or of young hopefuls who just might be the next big thing.

The lesson of 2003 is that '83 really was a one-off, and these things don't work to a timetable. For today's tyros, cast your eyes across the Atlantic, where Eggers, Lethem, Franzen et al emanate a buzz that is more than publishers' wishful thinking. And if the Granta list is to continue, then the 10-year gap makes little sense since so many good writers slip through the cracks. Ali Smith and James Robertson were still unpublished in 1993; both are too old for this year's line-up. One gets the feeling even Ian Jack feels the game's up, conceding in interviews that it might make sense to change the rules next time round. If, that is, there ever is a next time.

Claire Tomalin, shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, commented this week that she didn't even begin writing until she was 40. She was too busy having babies and a career. Critic Suzie Feay tells me she misses the time when writers did something interesting first, then wrote about it. "I want them to have run away and joined a circus!" she says wistfully. Not have been to Oxbridge and met all the other aspiring writers whose books they will then start reviewing in the papers as a prelude to their own "astonishing" debut.

Writers under 40 may have been a novelty 20 years ago, but these days it's the other end of the age scale that is an endangered species, as publishers, booksellers and the media flock to trumpet the latest hot discovery. And as a literary editor I take my share of culpability here. You can't blame Granta; you certainly can't blame writers for being young; and you can't blame publishers for wanting to make a healthy profit. It's the rest of us - readers, consumers, critics, commentators - who have to question whether things like the Granta list really mean very much at all any more, or whether it's a bit of harmless fun. Reality literature, complete with all the fun of guessing and hoping, followed by transitory triumphs and heartbreaks. All that's missing is the phone-in vote. How long, I wonder, before we see the launch of "the people's list"?

February 2, 2003

IN CASE you somehow missed the news, the next Harry Potter is on the way. The next Harry Potter what, you might ask - film, book, game, tooth-brush?

The fact that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is to be a printed -paper version of the brand seems almost incidental. And already the tills are rolling in anticipation, even though the book will not appear until June 21, when kids of all ages (mostly grown-up ages) will swoop on freshly unwrapped copies in a flurry of credit cards.

A lot is riding on this one. After all the rumours that JK Rowling had hit terminal writer's block, publishers Bloomsbury announced the forthcoming fifth Potter book with unrestrained jubilation.

The scene for this announcement? The London Stock Exchange, of course, where shares in Bloomsbury promptly rose. If Rowling had instead sent out a press release saying she'd had enough of being a writer and was sending her computer to Oxfam, shares would have plummeted.

Three cheers for Bloomsbury, I say. One of our few remaining independent publishers, they have ploughed a chunk of their Potter lucre into fostering a first-class fiction list that includes the likes of Romesh Gunesekera and Meaghan Delahunt.

This is nothing new in the world of publishing - Faber and Faber piled up hefty royalties from TS Eliot - and it wasn't things like the Four Quartets that kept their bread buttered, but the kid-pleasing Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, and more importantly its musical spin-off by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

This is how literary-minded publishers have always managed to foster new and innovative work - by subsidising it with the income from a few bestsellers. If literary works themselves become bestsellers, that's a bonus.

What about the bookshops? The Harry Potter announcement was just what they wanted to hear after a Christmas season that failed to bring as much good cheer as most of them would have wished.

But there's a sting in the tail. You can't yet buy the new Potter, but you can pre-order it at a whopping 50% discount from online bookstores - 8 pounds 49 pence instead of GBP 16.99.

A price war has broken out, and maybe the conventional bookshops - the kind you can walk inside - won't be such hell on June 21 after all, as all those kidults will be sitting at home waiting for the postman to arrive with their pre-ordered copy.

Good news for me, perhaps, if I fancy a bit of old-fashioned browsing that day. But not such good news for the bookshops who have no choice but to play the online price-cutting game.

It isn't about profit - nobody will make much money with this sort of price -slashing, any more than supermarkets can turn a profit on a disgusting tin of beans for sale at less than 10p. What it's about is "market share", the holy grail of business leaders with their eye on a golden future, prepared to risk anything in order to attain it. Once you've persuaded a new customer to buy online, the theory goes, they'll come back for more.

Maybe. Buying online is certainly great when you know exactly what you're looking for (and even know how to spell the author's name correctly). But despite all their efforts - very good efforts in some cases - the online stores lose out on one simple, pleasurable aspect of book buying - picking the damn thing up and leafing through it.

February 9, 2003

GREAT rejoicing in the Crumey household last week as I opened the mail. Among the bills was news of some cash winging my way. My annual PLR statement had arrived.

Public Lending Right is how authors get a little financial recompense from the libraries where their books can be read for free. And I do mean "little" - at 4p per loan, we're not talking a holiday in the Bahamas here. More like paying for a trip to Asda, as long as the kids don't ask for too many Crunch Corners. But as with all gifts, it's the thought that counts. And for most authors, the happiest thought of all is simply knowing that somebody has borrowed your book.

Libraries have their top titles, just as bookshops do, and not surprisingly the lists tend to overlap. For years, Britain's most borrowed author has been Catherine Cookson, closely followed by Dick Francis, Maeve Binchy and similar household names. In the last couple of years, the top slots have begun to be occupied by the ubiquitous Harry Potter - though whether he proves to have the staying power of Cookson remains to be seen.

If authors like JK Rowling got 4p for every loan, they would bust the entire 7m pound PLR budget in an instant. So the scheme has a maximum payout of GBP 6,000. And lest you think writing a bestseller is easy, consider that while 251 authors reached the top threshold this year, 17,000 got less than GBP 500. And then there are all the authors who failed even to get enough loans to make the minimum payment threshold of GBP 5.

Nobody will get rich from PLR (unless they're rich already); but no matter how meagre the rewards, it is a scheme worth cherishing and preserving.

In existence for 20 years, PLR feels like a hardy survivor from a time when books had a special place in our culture - a position increasingly under threat.

A few decades ago, any new novel worth its salt would initially come out in a hardback edition. Hardly anybody bought them, but something like 75 per cent of the print run would go to libraries, where these hardy, well-produced books would withstand the onslaught of countless grubby fingers intent on breaking their spines, folding down their pages, scribbling in their margins and leaving behind the odd bit of dried god-knows-what as evidence of their passing.

The under-funding of our libraries has decimated the hardback market, with the result that a large proportion of novels now go straight to paperback. Walk into any Oxfam and you'll see what these books look like after five years. Within a decade or two your personal collection can resemble the papyrus section of the British Museum.

People dream of writing a book that will be read in a hundred years' time - but how many publishers these days produce books that will remain physically intact that long? Investors in Harry Potter first editions may find themselves outlasting the books themselves.

What is it that keeps books alive? Libraries, that's what. Benefactors like Andrew Carnegie knew this, when he put so much effort into providing communities with them. So look after your local branch. It may not be the most glamorous place in the world, but it is an important one.

February 16, 2003

A FRIEND of mine is doing a creative writing course at a university which, for reasons that will become obvious, is best left nameless. She described the set-up to me: there are weekly sessions of group "critiquing", when everyone sits round discussing each other's efforts in traditional writers' workshop fashion, and there are regular one-to-one meetings with a variety of tutors in prose and poetry.

That much sounds absolutely fine. Apart from the one-to-one aspect, it's pretty much what you would get at any evening class in creative writing - the kind where I learned the craft, and which I've taught many times since. But in a part-time postgraduate course that lasts two years (and costs a lot of money), there is presumably a little more depth on offer. So I asked my friend: "How many set books do you have to read?"

In the whole of the first term, she told me, the group had been asked to read one: Alan Warner's Morvern Callar. A fine novel, certainly, but not exactly a thorough grounding in the infinite potential of fiction. Even Don Quixote or In Search Of Lost Time cannot count as a complete run-down of what literature can do.

The students were made to read Warner as part of their term-long study of "point of view" (which in the case of Morvern Callar is what you and I learned at school to call "first person singular").

My friend, a school teacher who has gone part-time in order to do the writing course, suggested to her tutor that it might be worth doing something classic as well. George Eliot, say, or Flaubert. The tutor assured her there was no point studying old stuff that isn't relevant to today's market.

At this point I blew my top. Not at my poor friend who was telling me this, of course; but at the thought that people like her are being conned into parting with cash for writing courses which - in this case - sound little better than the sort of thing anybody could do with a few like-minded friends over a bottle of wine in each other's sitting rooms.

Don't get me wrong - there are great courses out there. But they are taught by people who know that the first lesson for anybody who wants to be a writer is very, very simple. You've got to read a lot and write a lot. But especially read. You have got to become like the hairdresser who can't go to a party without quietly checking everyone else's hairstyle; like the undertaker who can see someone walk down the street and knows just the box that will fit them; or like the schoolteacher (my friend, for one) who finds themselves ticking off attainment targets in their head while their kids are playing in the swingpark. In other words, to be a writer means constantly engaging - perhaps without even noticing it - in a never-ending affair with language.

George Orwell described how, as a boy, he would mentally narrate what was going on around him. In this way he knew he was going to be a writer: and from that moment, every sentence he read, in every book or newspaper that passed in front of his gaze, became vital to his vocation. Flaubert made a list of books he read while writing his last novel Bouvard and Pecuchet. It ran into hundreds.

But Flaubert is no longer relevant, apparently, to courses designed to make their graduates "marketable".

Much as I loathe the consumerisation of education, at least it might make students less afraid of complaining when they are being conned, and asking for their money back.

If you are thinking of enrolling on a university creative writing course, make sure you choose carefully. And more than anything, make sure you keep reading. There are plenty of "teach yourself" guides that will show you exactly how good writing is done. They are by people like Dickens and Austen, and are available free at your nearest library.

Andrew Crumey is currently reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain

February 23, 2003

A WRITER I know has been having a hard time lately. Dave (as I shall call him) published his first novel two years ago. It did pretty well, but since then he's been in that "difficult second novel" phase. They say everybody has a novel inside them, and for all I know it may be true. Question is, do they have a second? Book number two can be a stumbling block for some, and Dave - by his own frank admission - is one such case.

Perhaps if he hadn't had so much good fortune with his first book, following it up would have been easier. "A stunning new voice" is how he was billed when his debut hit the bookshop display tables. This is the moment every budding writer dreams of, when Joe Public (along with your mother, all your ex-es, and the school English teacher who said you'd never amount to much) can stroll into Waterstone's and see your name in great big letters on a stylish book jacket

This is the dream, and in most people's imaginations it's closely followed by a happy-ever-after consisting of TV appearances, film deals, beach-front apartments and unlimited amounts of sex, partying or inner calm according to taste.

The real world isn't like that. Dave's debut introduced a new voice stunning enough to pay off a large chunk of his mortgage; but the dosh comes in eight bite-size pieces (signature advance, hardback, paperback and so on), with half the cheques dependent on book number two. You can see why Dave's been having a hard time.

How do you get inspired, when things like money and deadlines are involved? The first-time novelist is untroubled by either: you can take six months or 10 years over that heart-rending love story spanning five centuries and three continents, with no idea whether any of it will ever get published. Book number two is a different beast altogether. Same again please, the publisher tells you, by next July. Otherwise you don't get to pay off the mortgage.

Dave's publisher wants more of that stunning new voice of his, and they want it ASAP. Otherwise - they tell him nicely - everybody will forget about him. Dave will become an ex-author, an un-person, like those unfortunate political figures in authoritarian countries who get airbrushed out of official photographs after quietly receiving a bullet in the back of the neck.

Still fancy seeing your name on the New Titles table? It's a tough old world, believe me. Ask Dave how he's doing and you won't see the spiritual peace of an artist at one with his medium. No, it'll be more like: "I can't go out any time in the next month. Got to get on with the novel."

Dave's problem is that he's been trying, in his second novel, to do something different from his first. And his publishers don't like that. The author they shelled out for in a lucrative two-book deal was someone young and hip with a talent for depicting casual violence in a stylish and amusing way (to paraphrase one or two of the reviews). So they've never been too keen on his intention to focus on the thoughts and feelings of an adolescent working-class boy with an unfashionable interest in poetry.

And there lies the essence of it. It's not writing a second novel that's hard. The tough part is fulfilling contractual obligations. So when your dream comes true and the 110th publisher you contact finally agrees to publish your novel, think twice about that tempting "two-book deal." It's double the money, and 10 times the headache.

March 2, 2003

FINANCIAL pundits have observed that all our current economic woes stem from putting too many eggs in the stock-market basket. It's worth remembering that the force that drives the stock market up and down - herd instinct - is also what governs literary reputations.

How many times have you seen an author described as "award-winning" or "acclaimed"? It's a way of praising them without actually having to commit yourself to forming an opinion: very handy for those with no time to read books - perhaps because they're too busy selling them - or those who lack the gene for critical judgment. Off-the-shelf opinions are what we pay financial advisers for - and look where it got us. Shouldn't we be more sceptical over artistic opinions too?

A great deal of publishing is speculative investment: this is why first-time authors are so appealing. Publishers throw money at a new writer in the hope of clawing back even more; and since the writer is new and untested, the only thing anyone has to go on is a favourable word or two from the right source. Zadie Smith deserves her fame, but might not have had it if Salman Rushdie hadn't cast ample blessing on White Teeth. His thumbs up, as far as the book trade was concerned, was like a nudge in the local about a dead cert in the 2.30 at Newmarket.

Having friends and supporters in the right places is nothing new, and anyone who can't enjoy a wry chuckle over such shenanigans had better steer clear of the book world. Marcel Proust bribed critics with gifts; a Russian writer recently told me that in his country the free market extends to newspaper book reviews. Not only can you buy good ones for yourself, you can even buy bad ones for your enemies.

But the 1990s did see a trend in publishing that closely mirrored the stock -market insanity which was to end in so many tears. Investors risked their shirts on hypothetical dotcoms that eventually cost them their entire wardrobe. And publishers pushed ever-larger advances in the direction of untried authors whose promise could evaporate as easily as a teenage web designer's credit rating. It went right across the board - from literary fiction to celebrity autobiography. Think Anthea Turner and you get the gist. Big money, big flop.

We live in harder times now. Instead of speculating on the next technological marvel, investors scramble in search of a safe haven, with many turning to the oldest and safest of all: gold. The book world is doing likewise, and their gold standard is classic literature, now one of the biggest growth areas in publishing. It's cheap - you don't need to pay anyone a penny, except the printer, if you feel like turning out another Jane Austen edition. And consumer demand is as strong now as it has been any time in the last century or two. Not the sort of thing that gets you into the bestseller lists, but enough to keep you in business. Penguin is redesigning its classics series in a bid to cling on to a market that is suddenly more competitive, as others get in on the class act.

A return to sanity? Perhaps. It would certainly be good to see our bookshops rediscovering their core product, even if only out of desperation. But nor should we see such back-to-basics tactics as a sure mark of elevated literary taste - in the trade, or in ourselves. We can scoff at journalistic tags like "highly praised" or "award winning", but the greatest puff of all is "classic", and this too is an opinion we pull off the shelf, given to us in reference books or guides to literary history whose word we take as gospel. If there was a ban on restating others' opinions without making up our own minds first, think how much quieter the world would be.

March 9, 2003

TWO things surprised me during a short visit to Greece last week. One was the inexplicable popularity there of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which does for the land of Plato what Harry Lauder did for our own. A more pleasant surprise was the healthy state of the Greek publishing industry. James Joyce once commented on the difficulty of traversing Dublin without passing a pub. You would have a similar difficulty getting across Athens without passing a bookshop.

Mostly they are small, independent, old-fashioned in appearance, and run by people who seem genuinely interested in books. A change from what we're used to here, in other words. And when it comes to the books themselves, the choice is equally large. Greece has a staggering 300 active publishing houses, with serious literature - according to an industry insider I spoke to - accounting for more than a third of book production. And this in a country whose population is only twice as large as Scotland's.

Why are they all so keen on books? The librarian of a school I visited explained it to me. Ten or 20 years ago, she said, books - especially for children - were hard to come by. Public libraries were - and still are - virtually non-existent. But with gradually increasing prosperity, the Greeks have been keen to expand their minds as well as their incomes, and books are seen as a vital part of the path to self-improvement.

Here, such attitudes would be viewed as outmoded or even suspicious. We flock to buy books that show us the comfortable familiarity of a world we know already from television soap operas or crime shows. We want entertainment: even our libraries (an asset we are privileged to possess) must be transformed into internet theme parks in the hope of luring anyone young enough to require something other than the large-print section. If there is anything in our lives that needs to be changed, we reckon, it's the layout of our garden or the items on our dinner menu; not the ideas in our heads.

So we could learn a lot from the Greeks. But then, just as I was beginning to think I had landed in some book lover's paradise, I got the views of a few local writers, and was almost relieved to find that whingeing is what novelists do the world over. Isn't it great, I said to one author: in your country, books are advertised on TV. "Only the trashy popular ones," he replied. But what about the beautiful new arcade in downtown Athens, devoted exclusively to bookshops? "It has not been a success," a second writer informed me. "All the units are allocated to individual publishers, and it makes it very hard for customers to find what they want."

A few blocks from the gleaming but admittedly quiet arcade stands the impressive new Patakis bookstore. It looks pretty much like any large bookshop here, complete with a first-floor cafe where I was invited to do a reading. First there was an introduction by a university professor; in Greek, of course, so I didn't understand a word of it. And even after it was translated for me, I still didn't understand. It seems that professors of literature, like writers, are the same the world over. But as I looked round the store, I thought of what the novelist had told me earlier. He doesn't like this new shop, he says; it isn't like the old, genuinely Greek style of bookstore. He's right; and my guess is that he will be seeing more and more of these supermarket-style mega-shops, and fewer and fewer of the little independents. If the British example is anything to go by, the 300 publishers may find their numbers diminishing too. And then the writers really will have something to complain about.

Andrew Crumey is a whingeing novelist, currently learning Greek

March 16, 2003

GET ready folks - we are about to embark on 'Bedtime Reading Week'. No, I hadn't heard of it either, until I saw the press release. It seems that hardly a week can go by without someone declaring it a time of national awareness; and these schemes are invariably dreamed up by somebody with something to sell. Bedtime Reading Week apparently comes to us "in association with Disney's Treasure Planet and Fairy Non-Bio." Quite what connection either of these has with reading, I shall leave you to ponder.

Meanwhile, I shall do my best to enter into the spirit of the occasion, although it's an uphill struggle. Bedtime stories are fine if you're the child on the receiving end. For the grown-up, it's just another item in the never -ending battle that is parenthood.

First-time parents have it relatively easy. With only one pair of ears to satisfy, possessed by a cosseted wee insomniac for whose benefit a large part of the parental home has been converted into a branch of Mothercare, the bedtime story is just one extra bit of undivided attention to be bestowed before little one closes his or her sleepy eyelids and mum or dad gazes sweetly at the dormant child for the next half hour, possibly with video camera in hand.

With two children, it's another ballgame. The bedtime story becomes a competition. In our house, the age difference is four years, which is a pretty big gulf. Older child crashes into bed with demands for the next instalment of whatever adventure was in progress the previous night.

Younger child wants The Ugly Duckling. Older child says he hates The Ugly Duckling. Younger child begins to cry. Dad considers creeping out of the bedroom and leaving the two of them to fight it out between themselves.

There's always the option of encouraging the kids to read to each other, which in large families is virtually a necessity. But that still leaves the tricky choice of what to put on junior's bookshelf. Seen through liberal adult eyes, our own childhood favourites can seem thoroughly un-PC.

Enid Blyton was my earliest literary influence (harsh critics would no doubt say it shows), but I'm not sure I want to pass on her values to my own offspring.

A while back, I tried Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Ian Fleming's book differs dramatically from Roald Dahl's screen version: I gave up round about the point where it turns into a spy story for children (as opposed to one for grown-up children, which was Fleming's more usual style). Despairing of the lame writing, I began making up the rest of it myself, flicking the pages at the right moments until we got to the end.

That was an act of desperation; but making it all up is what my kids usually want from me anyway. They prefer it, because unlike reading I can't do it on autopilot. I've tried explaining to them that asking a professional author to extemporise on the spot is a bit like inviting an electrician for dinner and making him fix your vacuum cleaner before serving him dessert - but somehow my children don't see it that way.

So over the past few years I've had to invent for them a succession of characters and scenarios, all of which I've forgotten almost as soon as the words have passed my lips; although my children, exhibiting the total recall so chillingly typical of their age group, are always quick to point out even the mildest of inconsistencies between the latest story and whatever I said weeks earlier.

So I hope you're reading this, you people at Disney's Treasure Planet and Fairy Non-Bio. Think of me this week, tired and haggard after another day at the computer, tucking my little sweethearts into bed (somewhere around 9pm if I'm lucky), then hearing from them the expectant, one-word question: "Story?"

"Sorry," I'll say to them. "It's National Go To Sleep Week. Brought to you in association with Slumberland."

Andrew Crumey is hoping for an early night

March 23, 2003

A FRIEND of mine has just finished his latest novel. There was evident relief in his voice when he told me over the phone: "It's with my agent." It was like he was saying, "It's a boy." I felt like offering him a cigar.

The agent is one of the publishing world's more curious beasts; and the species is largely confined to Britain and the US. Elsewhere, authors more usually deal directly with publishers. Perhaps it is because the Anglo-Saxon world considers books a part of the entertainment industry that we feel the need for sharp-suited impresarios who can fix us the best deal in town.

The usual advice to writers trying to get published is to get themselves an agent first. Land one of them, the story goes, and a fat cheque from a major publisher will swiftly follow.

But there is a snag. If you are a new writer, finding an agent who will take you on is even harder than finding a publisher. The agent stands to make 10 per cent or 15 per cent of whatever advance the book gets. And 10 per cent of zero is zero.

So agents are extremely cautious people who like to know they are backing a winner. Discovering unrecognised genius is a risky game with poor returns. Spotting a good little earner is a better way of paying off the mortgage.

This is where writers often get it wrong. They imagine the agent to be someone who will offer them advice on how to edit or improve their book, or at the very least give an opinion on whether or not it is any good.

Some literary agents do this (and do it extremely well); others will offer advice for a fee. But it is not their main task. Substitute "estate" for "literary", and you get a fairer picture of what they are about. Anyone thinking of changing their curtains would not go to Your Move for advice: so why ask a literary agent for an artistic response to your novel? Getting the right size of advance for you is their expertise: anything else is a bonus.

Agents are particularly suited to the British literary scene, as they ensure that publishers need never talk to the public. Anyone walking into an august publishing house with a manuscript under their arm can be politely steered back in the direction of the revolving door and chucked out onto the street. "We only accept submissions via agents," the person at the desk will call after you by way of explanation.

As for the agents themselves, their pest control is the frosty receptionist who will put you on hold until your credentials are checked out, after which you will be told that the person you are looking for is in a meeting.

Many smaller publishers do, however, take on new writers without an agent. They have found that they can make money on literary novels by effectively acting as agents themselves, selling translation rights to publishers abroad and taking a percentage of the income. Independently minded publishers, prepared to take a long-term view, really can turn a profit from innovative literature.

My novelist friend, having just delivered his book to his agent, is now in for a long wait. Like most authors, he forgets that he is only one client among scores whom his agent deals with, and everybody has to wait in a long queue ranked according to the size of expected advance.

My friend will spend the next few weeks or months hoping, waiting, worrying, nagging and complaining that his agent is taking far too long. Then at last he will get the deal that he is looking for, and all will be forgiven. Literary agents have to put up with a lot, but the worst of all is surely their neurotic clients.

March 30, 2003

ALONG with joining a gym, my other doomed resolution at the start of this year was to keep a diary. Not the kind we all write as teenagers: the anguished appeal to the person we fancy who'll say at our funeral that we were wonderful and never properly understood. No, the grown-up diary is a humbler affair: a recognition of the fact that life is short, and so is our memory of it.

I wanted to keep track of where we went on holiday; what the kids were up to; where that nice walk was that we wanted to do again. Mundane stuff: the kind real life is made of. Boring as hell when you write it down, but useful later on. Trouble is, I keep forgetting to write anything in the diary. I must make a note somewhere, so as to remind myself.

A creative-writing manual I recently came across advocated the "commonplace book." Now there's a term I don't think I'd seen since I long ago read Henry James's essay 'The Art of the Novel', which advises aspiring authors to carry a verbal sketchbook for noting down fleeting observations, random thoughts and moments of inspiration.

I've never in my life had such a thing as a commonplace book, always preferring to think that if an idea is genuinely good it will come back to me at the right time, when I'm sitting in front of my computer and can make use of it. But a less romantic, more practical aspect of the commonplace book becomes increasingly appealing as my grey matter succumbs to the creeping ravages of time. It'd be a good way of preserving all those little quotations and remarks I come across in books, and can never remember.

But again there's the old problem: when I next come across some great line in Nabokov or Kundera, will I remember where the damned notebook is that I'm supposed to write it in? And if I write it down, will I ever find the quote again when I want it?

Unless our whole life is meant to become some kind of filing system, perhaps we need to accept that most of it is destined to slip unnoticed into the wastepaper basket of oblivion. For some the thought is intolerable. James Boswell, for instance: one of the greatest diarists in history. Life alone was not enough for him; he had to write the whole lot down as well. His diaries came in handy when he wrote his Life of Johnson, since they provided much of the material. This is a significant attraction for authors: the diary as workshop and lumber room; the place from which new works might spring.

Novelists' diaries are often fascinating for the light they shed on the creative process, but it isn't always the soft glow the authors might wish. One of the most memorable episodes in the diary of Thomas Mann is the bit where he expresses mental and emotional anguish over the fact that size 37 underpants are too small for him, and the next size up is too large.

Should anybody one day come across my own spasmodic diary, they'll be able to find out how we got on at XS Superbowl, and what not to order at Tandoori Mahal. No ideas there for a novel, other than a very dull one.

And that's what truly marks grown-up writing: the realisation that just because it happened to you, doesn't make it interesting. It's a lesson notably lost on countless first-time novelists and memoirists, who enter the literary fray with the conviction that their childhood, love affairs, hangovers and career are surely the greatest story ever told, when it's more often the most familiar.

Perhaps that's what Henry James meant by "commonplace book." Write it down in private, get it off your chest, then think of something less commonplace to share with the public. A lesson for writers everywhere.

April 6, 2003

ME AND Josephine Cox? We're old pals. Jonathan Coe? I see him all the time. As for James Crumley, our closeness is almost creepy.

I'm talking bookshelf buddies here: the strange juxtaposition that happens once your name attaches itself to the spine of a novel, and you go hunting for yourself in any library or bookshop. Again and again you see them: those other novelists who happen to be your alphabetical neighbours.

Some readers will remember a character called JR Hartley, author of a volume on fly fishing, who used to appear in Yellow Pages advertisements.

The kindly codger would wander into some cramped bookstore of the old -fashioned kind and approach the counter in search of his own book, only to be turned away empty-handed.

I've been there. So has just about every author I've discussed the matter with. We all know what it's like to go into a bookshop, not find our precious tome on the shelf, and then (worst of all), pursue the staff in search of an explanation.

Forget the cosy sympathy of those JR Hartley adverts: the chummy retailers he visited have long since gone bust. A more realistic scene was the occasion, in a Waterstone's somewhere, when a goateed teenage assistant virtually ran up the stairs to get away from me, pleading: "All our buying is done centrally. Honest."

Central buying is how the bookchains ensure everyone everywhere is able to get the same books. In other words, it's why everyone everywhere ends up reading the same books, and why questioning the underpaid and undervalued staff about their title range is like proposing a debate about frozen peas with the checkout lady in Tesco.

I've given up on admitting to bookshop staff that I'm a writer: the suspicious attitude it brings out in them is just too embarrassing. They assume I'm a psycho who'll tie them up in the basement and put a gun to their head unless they stock my books. They could well be right.

These days whenever I'm on JR Hartley patrol I prefer a covert approach, quietly taking position before the C cabinet of the fiction section and then, in a swift and well-practised manoeuvre, tilting my head at the 90-degree angle that is the source of "author's crick", an ailment more common among scribblers nowadays than writer's cramp or RSI.

I say hello to my bookshelf buddies: Jim Crace, Michael Crichton, Edwina Currie. Maybe I'm with them, maybe not; but while snuggling together on the shelf is all very nice, being left on it is what nobody wants. For books to shift in any numbers they need to stop being wallflowers and get themselves a place on the coveted display tables. A publisher once explained to me how it works, and by "it" I mean the human mind. If 50 copies of a book are piled high on a table in the middle of a shop, those 50 copies will sell. If two or three are on the shelf, they'll be there for ever - or until the bookshop returns them to the publisher unsold.

Maybe one day the chains will give up on shelves altogether, and book buying will become like the random trawl of a church jumble sale. Some shops are nearly there already. Table-friendliness is why publishers take such effort over the cover design. These objects are meant to lie back and look enticing.

For some JR Hartleys it prompts an irresistible temptation, while staff aren't looking, to quietly relocate their books from shelf to table. There must be enough security video footage of them by now to make a half-hour compilation. John Suchet could do a voice-over. "Now watch Booker-shortlisted writer X as he plonks his three-year-old novel on New Titles."

It's a jungle out there. These days, dear old Mr Hartley is better off having a nice cup of tea while he orders his book from Amazon.

April 13, 2003

A CURIOUS book crossed my desk the other day. See if you can guess what it was from the entries in the index. For the letter E there was only one: "ecstasy." H offered "hard man", "heroin", "Highlands and Islands" and "homosexuality." For V there was the single entry "violence", though the subject had no less than 26 page references by way of compensation. And W provided a bumper crop: "Warner, Alan", "Welfare Sate", "Welsh, Irvine", "western swing" and "Williamson, Kevin".

It was a critical guide to contemporary Scottish literature. The book's introduction complains about a cliched view of Scotland consisting of heather, kilts and shortbread; but if the index is anything to go by, there is another equally cliched view of Scotland that differs from the traditional one only to the extent that some Scots themselves appear to believe in it.

Almost every week, I get e-mails from people around the globe who tell me they're doing a dissertation on Scottish writing, and wonder if I can help them out with some information on the current literary scene. My reply to every student is always the same: get hold of all the novels and poetry collections you can, read them, and make up your own mind whether they're any good. Any textbook professing to know which Scottish novels of the past 30 years will still be remembered in another 100 is worth about as much as Mystic Meg's guide to the stock market.

The smart money is on Alasdair Gray's Lanark surviving into future decades, and it certainly deserves to. But will it? Who knows. The reflex adulation the book routinely receives from people in Scotland who often haven't even read it is not echoed abroad. I recall once speaking to an American publisher who, like me, enjoyed and admired Gray's book immensely; but when I described to him the terms in which it is spoken of here (somewhere above Cervantes and Proust and below The Wasp Factory and Catcher in the Rye), his jaw not unreasonably hit the floor.

Milan Kundera has wryly remarked that small countries always have lots of great poets. He was speaking of the former Czechoslovakia, but his remark could equally apply to Scotland, and to novelists as well as poets. What Kundera meant is that small pools always contain lots of big fish who may really be minnows.

Kundera is not particularly liked in his native country, and no doubt my own words will not go down too well in university literature departments here. But simple arithmetic dictates that if students devote themselves to the writers of a country whose population is barely half as large as that of the Czech Republic, they will have a correspondingly meagre stock of world-class writers from which to choose.

Entire PhD theses get written about authors such as Jessie Kesson, who certainly showed talent and was no doubt an extremely nice person, but hardly counts as one of the 20th century's towering figures.

Once while chatting to a lecturer in Scottish literature, I confessed that what little I have read of Neil Gunn was enough to convince me I didn't want to read any more. "I don't think much of him either," the lecturer replied. "But I'm not allowed to tell the students that."

This cosy conspiracy of silence is the reason why I see so many dumbfounded expressions when I describe to literary people in other countries the pecking order that prevails in ours. Students are taught it, they reproduce it in their essays, and some go on to write the textbooks that the next generation of students will read.

So whenever a Scottish student e-mails me for advice, I tell them: go abroad for a while and get a sense of perspective.

April 20, 2003

YOU want to buy a coffee? You can have regular, large or extra-large. A milk shake? We've got big, giant or colossal. Popcorn? It's elephantine, humungous or absolutely ridiculous.

What ever happened to small, or even medium? Aristotle's watchword was moderation in all things; EF Schumacher told us "small is beautiful." But on the high street, big is the new average.

The infection has hit the publishing world too. In the old days, publishers used to split their books into three categories. There was the frontlist, consisting of their most important new titles; the backlist, containing everything brought out in previous years. In between came the mid-list. These were new authors who might hit the bigtime later on, and older ones who'd had their moment of glory - the regular cappuccinos of the literary cafe.

Not any more. Mid-list is now a term used as frequently as mammoth, and in both cases they refer to an extinct species. You're either frontlist or backlist, sink or swim. The cream of the frontlist are the season's "lead" titles. These are the ones the publisher will make some effort to promote: the ones trade and media pundits tout as names to watch; titles "sure to attract attention." They attract the pundits' attention because they are all over the covers of the publishers' catalogues of forthcoming books.

It's exactly like the game played in the fashion world, when the industry collectively decides that next spring will be pink. They have to: the shops need to stock all the right things. So do the bookshops, which is why bestsellers - even 'Booker favourites' - need a decent run-in time. Some are being put on order before the author has even finished writing them.

I could easily give you a rundown of what will be 'worth reading' over the next six months - but since I haven't read any of them yet to see if they're as good as they claim, I won't bother. Instead my attention is drawn to the language now being used to hype some of these forthcoming delights.

"Our summer superlead title," one publisher proclaims. Being plain old 'lead', it seems, is no longer good enough to stand out from the pack. And as if superlead were not sufficiently enticing, I see on a rival publisher's promotional leaflet the promise of - wait for it - their 'megalead'. You can almost hear them moaning under the weight of the literary colossus they are about to unleash on the world.

You can fill in the rest yourself. Next year's Oxbridge coming-of-age novel will be 'hyperlead'; the Indian vaguely magical debut thingy will be a 'gigalead'; the celebrity memoir will be "such a truly enormous lead we've run out of words for it".

I think the bookshops need to be redesigned to cope with this influx of books which, by the publishers' reckoning, can be described only in galactic terms.

Surely nothing less than an orbiting space station will be enough to house the zillion copies of John Peel's autobiography that will eventually be unleashed on a human race apparently short of DJs' life-stories. Small terrestrial outposts could deal with the humble 'ultraleads' that don't quite make the cut.

Meanwhile, whatever happened to the mid-list? No haven now for the 50 or 60 -something author who never won the Booker but continues to turn out works that easily could have; or for the hopeful young writer who made a splash with novel No 1, a smaller splash with No 2, and now finds no takers for the third.

Not a lot of froth left on those unfortunate lattes. More a case of "buddy, can you spare a dime?"

April 27, 2003

AN OLD movie about Beethoven shows the composer sitting at his piano, struggling to find inspiration. "That's the fourth symphony out of the way," he mutters to himself. "But how am I supposed to start the fifth?" Suddenly there is a loud knock on the door. "Of course!" Ludwig exclaims, wetting his quill with ink.

Very corny, like most films about artists, scientists or inventors of any kind. There always has to be the eureka moment, the lightbulb in the head, the flash of inspiration. The trouble is that most creative work makes very poor viewing. At least with Beethoven there is an opportunity for nice tunes. Any film about an author has to make do with their love life, domestic problems or other personal dramas as substitute for the only truly interesting thing about them: the words they quietly churn out at their desk.

So when great authors appear in films, they almost invariably arrive by virtue of a ready-made story. The trial of Oscar Wilde; the hellish menage of TS Eliot; Virginia Woolf battling her demons; Elizabeth Barrett trying to wed Robert Browning. And when it comes to fictional authors in films, they have their own stock of cliches.

One of the most familiar is the hungry novelist, typing away at what he (and it is usually he) is certain will be a masterpiece. At last he completes it and sends it off to a publisher, only to receive the most savage rejection. "This heap of garbage is a waste of perfectly good paper."

This is about as true to life as the knock on Beethoven's door. If you have ever considered sending a novel to a publisher but fear the response, let me assure you that the "you are a talentless cretin" approach is not much favoured by them these days. Even if the publisher's reader has been rolling around on the floor in hysterics at your efforts and has then e-mailed samples of it to all her friends, the reply you get will still be the obligatory form -letter that says thanks for trying and good luck elsewhere.

Hollywood can be forgiven for depicting authors as divinely inspired creatures battling the world. Trouble is, people are apt to believe it. If someone decides to give up his happiness, soul and sanity to writing a novel, that's his business; but I don't see how it's any different from someone opening up a cheese shop and spending every hour of the day on their pet project. Good for them, I say; but if they wind up bankrupt, their marriage fails and they lie on their deathbed wondering if it was all really worth it, well, tough. A life of art, in the final analysis, equals a life of cheese.

The author as hapless schmuck (my own favoured cliche) is a role perfected by Woody Allen, who nevertheless made the mistake of trying to tell us he was only being ironic. Underneath, we were supposed to believe, he was really Chekhov all the time. Yeah, sure.

Hollywood gets most things about the world totally wrong, but at least it knows how to keep writers in their place. Forget your art, your vision and your vocation, it tells them: you're here to do a job. The Player, Barton Fink and Adaptation have all depicted the author at his typewriter as a self -deluded fool who'd be better off getting a proper job with decent money and better access to attractive women.

The irony in those cases is more convincing: here are writers having to make a clear division between pleasing themselves and satisfying the public; between art and entertainment; between earning the respect of a handful of people, and earning a living. This is the balance every artist has to find for him or herself, and it's a tricky one. I expect you could make a decent story out of it.

May 4, 2003

DON'T judge a book by its cover: it's a saying we all learn in childhood. I could even sing you the jaunty musical version that appears in one of my kids' Thomas the Tank Engine videos, though you probably wouldn't thank me for it. And we all know what it means. Do not be misled by superficial appearances; it's what's inside that counts.

The trouble is that when it comes to actual books, judging them by the cover is what we do all the time. That's why publishers put so much thought into getting covers right. Many designs, like the books themselves, are derivative; they're supposed to suggest a similarity with an easily recognisable bestseller. Captain Corelli's Mandolin spawned a legion of look-alike covers; its Grecian-vase-inspired look says "love story against historic background in sunny climes." Joanne Harris clones opt for rustic interiors. Pink says chick -lit; silver lettering on black means thriller.

Some authors are a sufficiently strong brand name in their own right for them to have a cover style all their own: Iain Banks is the best example. Anyone trying to imitate his trademark covers would look an instant phoney. And when it comes to getting the right eye-catching image, these things are best left to the people who know. Unless you're like Alasdair Gray (as skilled in graphic art as he is in writing), my advice to any author is to concentrate on the words inside, and leave the jacket to experts.

The result might come as a shock; but allowing others to have an opinion about your work is as important a lesson in life as the cliche in the Thomas the Tank Engine video. One of my novels came out in America with a topless woman on the cover. Now that's what I call eye-catching. Apparently my editor hated the pic, feeling it too downmarket for a work of stunning literary genius (OK, I paraphrase). But what the heck; if a designer somewhere thought it was right, and it meant somebody browsing the new titles in Barnes and Noble would pick up a book they wouldn't have otherwise, that was fine with me. And it worked: the book sold well (surprise, surprise). At least the cover design looked different from most. Derivative it was not.

Judging books by their covers, though, is what I do here every week as this paper's literary editor. I have no choice: they arrive by the sackload, hundreds of new titles all begging to be reviewed. We have space for less than a dozen. The rest are sold for charity.

I have to wade through the pile, trying to guess which books might be worth reviewing. No, I don't read them all: a single day's delivery would keep me busy for a year. How do you choose between a dozen first novels, all by people you've never heard of? You've got to start somewhere, and the cover is an obvious place. Here beneath my chair is one with silver lettering on dark blue, "introducing the first in the Inspector Pons mystery series." On the desk, one with a painted illustration of a young woman in Victorian clothes: "A heartwarming tale of life in the Welsh valleys." Here's one with a salmon and a hacksaw and a blurb promising "a voice like Perec." Hmm, maybe. And so it goes on.

Do I always make the right choice? Of course not. To err is human. And that's not Thomas the Tank Engine, it was Alexander Pope, in his 'Essay on Criticism'. We all make mistakes, Pope says, so we'd better learn to live with them. What counts is being able to forgive.

May 11, 2003

WHATEVER happened to Sister Wendy? You might recall her sweetly angelic figure on the nation's TV screens some years ago: an elderly nun perambulating around the art galleries and churches of the world in search of great paintings. I see her now, in my mind's eye, standing beneath some Titian nude or Raphael Madonna, gazing up at the painted expression and saying something along the lines of, "Doesn't she look sad?"

That, as I recall, was the Sister Wendy school of art criticism. Look at that bloke with one ear - poor fellow, what a life he's had. And those apples in a bowl; can't you just taste them?

Sister Wendy offered a layman's view of painting; that was her charm, and the source of her popularity. That, and the simple fact that anybody with a gimmick on prime-time TV is bound to be a hit no matter what they do, whether it's nuns and paintings or suited spivs with antiques. Here was a nice lady who evidently knew her Arshile Gorky from her El Greco, reassuring us we needn't worry about all that high-falutin elitist nonsense they teach in art schools. All you need do is look at a painting and feel.

The Sister Wendy approach is no worse than the strange manglings of the English language to be found in any art exhibition catalogue, informing us that the splodge of paint in front of us is somehow recontextualising the conventional modalities of a can of Dulux.

I don't mean to mock Wendy's critical style, only to question it. Empathising with a painted image, or with the artist who possibly had a hard time making it, is the most natural human response one can imagine. But is it an aesthetic one?

If someone says his idea of a good painting is anything with horses in it, few of us would call him a connoisseur. Yet what happens when we move from painting to literature? Suddenly there are Sister Wendys everywhere.

"I hate science fiction," says one critic. "Family sagas leave me cold," asserts another. On Booker shortlists, the preponderance of some subjects over others has long been a source of comment. For a while, the Indian subcontinent was as ubiquitous a backdrop as the fields and trees behind a Stubbs nag. The First World War was all the rage; then it was the Second, by way of the Holocaust. Weighty themes do well; comedies less so. And in the same way that square feet of canvas have always impressed gallery-goers, a novel's page -count has much to do with its perceived importance. A heavyweight book, the reasoning goes, is one that makes a correspondingly hefty impression should you drop it on your foot.

In one sense, subject is everything. Rembrandt found his greatest theme in himself; so did Proust. Many aspiring authors spend fruitless years trying to get started on a novel, when often what is missing is not time or freedom, but the right subject that will unlock the door for them.

People battle with lifeless semi-autobiographical accounts of their sufferings, then discover their talent is for comedy instead. Others might want to write children's fiction, until finally realising that adult drama is their forte.

Should any of this matter to the reader? Maybe not; as a book lover I feel much sympathy for Sister Wendyism. Who can read Anna Karenina without a tear in their eye? The question, though, is whether one's personal likes and dislikes, one's gut feelings, can honestly count as critical judgment. The fact is that they are often presented that way.

And if I have been too hard on the delightful Sister, I apologise. Really, I'm not one to kick a nun when she's down. In fact, I believe that after vanishing from British screens she went to America, where her modus operandi has been a huge hit.

May 18, 2003

ROBERT Burrows, a retired English professor in Wisconsin, recently completed his first novel, Great American Parade. Largely concerned with President Bush's fiscal policy, it failed to excite any of the publishers to whom Burrows sent it, so he had 2,000 copies printed at his own expense. One or two Wisconsin newspapers charitably agreed to review it - local authors presumably being thin on the ground there - and considered Burrows' debut "unskilled", "naive" and "simply awful".

There it might have ended, with 1,900 copies of Great American Parade quietly being nibbled by the mice in Robert Burrows' garage. But then it was read by the literary editor of the Washington Post, who was amazed by what he saw. He phoned Burrows, telling him he was willing to review the book at length. But on one condition. It would be described as the worst novel ever published in the English language.

Put yourself in Burrows' shoes: 79 years old, having fulfilled a lifelong ambition to be a published novelist, and now with the chance of having your name in the nation's most prestigious literary pages, though at the cost of having two million people (including all your friends and family) seeing your work torn to shreds. What would you say? Would it be an eager "yes please" or an indignant "get lost"?

Burrows, to his credit, did what any genuine novelist would do - or should do. By all accounts he doesn't know how to write, but he sure as hell knows how to be a writer. He said yes.

The best the Washington Post could say about Great American Parade was that it was printed on very nice paper. The book - in which a character watching the planes hitting the World Trade Center says to her friends: "What an almost unbelievable tragedy! It will take a great resolve to overcome this terrible blow" - was hailed as "a wretchedly terrible product that shames the American publishing industry." It was given a mauling that would reduce many people to tears, a long period in hiding, and perhaps a change of identity as well as career. But not Burrows. "I am not terribly depressed by the reviews," he said. "Only disappointed."

What a pro. He knows, as every author should, that a bad review is better than none; and that if you can't take criticism of your work then you should keep it well hidden from public scrutiny, not send it to every newspaper in the country. Burrows wanted the world to read Great American Parade, and naturally he wanted to be called a great novelist. But he knew that this was something he could not automatically expect as his due. He took the risk, and didn't bawl and howl when it backfired.

The writer who takes every criticism as a personal insult, who looks for the hidden agenda in every slight, is someone who can never change, never progress, never learn to honestly criticise their own work. Most important of all - and hardest - is not taking feedback personally: not only the brickbats, but the bouquets too. Making a hash of something does not make you a bad person; but nor does a brilliant performance make you a good one.

Such Zen-like detachment seems to come naturally to Burrows, whose fictional characters "don't seem to have personalities", and who is perhaps protected from the slings and arrows of criticism by not having one either. For whatever reason, he seems uninjured by the publicity his book received, so that in the streets of Whitewater, Wisconsin, he can continue to hold his head up high.

In fact, undaunted by the negative response, he is now hard at work on a second novel, which will be about Bush's plan to exempt stock dividends in perpetuity from taxes, and promises to be every bit as riveting as its predecessor.

May 25, 2003

A FRIEND of mine is about to leave for two weeks at a writers' retreat - a cottage by the sea with no TV or telephone, no pressure, and only the squawk of gulls to disturb his literary reverie. Sounds idyllic? If you ask me, it sounds like a bloody nightmare.

Real life, the theory goes, is precisely what gets in the way of letting the creative juices flow. Take away all the complications of daily living and you will suddenly be free to write the novel you've always dreamed of, effortlessly rattling off a masterpiece in a weekend.

For all I know it may work for some people. Personally, if I were heading off to some picturesque rural hideaway, writing is the last thing that would be on my mind. Holidays are for relaxing and writing is no holiday.

My own formula for creative stimulation is very simple. It consists of carpets that need Hoovering, a lawn that needs mowing, dishes that require washing, bills waiting to be paid. All the things, in other words, that I'm only too happy to run away from at every available opportunity, plonking myself in front of my computer instead.

When it comes to being disciplined with time, there are few better ways of sharpening the mind than not having much time at all. We all know how work expands to fill the available hours, and two weeks without television would leave an awful lot of spare hours.

If I was the one disappearing to that seaside retreat, apart from my taking my family with me I'd pack a good book to read and would expect to write absolutely nothing until I got back, suitably invigorated.

But which book to take? The temptation is to pick the sort you feel you ought to read, rather than what you really want. Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica recounts an ocean voyage she made in which her only reading matter was Moby Dick, a novel she had always meant to get round to. A few weeks trapped on a converted Russian whaling ship seemed the ideal way to get to grips with Melville's masterpiece. Instead, predictably, it made Diski thoroughly miserable.

I wonder how many poolside holidays have been equally marred by a futile attempt to understand James Joyce or Stephen Hawking. You could lock me up in the most beautiful reader's retreat on the planet and I know that at the end of two weeks, or a month, I still would not have been able to get past the first 10 pages of The Hobbit, because the fact is that I simply do not want to read the damned thing.

Why should writing be any different? If the novelist inside you has decided that the book you think you want to write is not going to emerge in your own home, why transport the problem somewhere else and spoil a perfectly good holiday?

I once heard AS Byatt say that the greatest pleasure she finds as a novelist is when the act of writing feels like reading - the times when she does not know what will happen next, and is surprised by what emerges.

Writing is a form of reading. Both come from the same impulse, and offer similar rewards. In my case it is escapism: a book can make me forget all the chores I do not want to do, distract me from whatever I would rather not think about. You don't need a retreat for that.

Every writer is different, of course, and I'm sure my friend will have a wonderful time amid the seals and fulmars during his solitary idyll.

Too bad he plans to write instead of watching the wildlife. But if you feel tempted to follow his example, just remember what happened to aspiring author Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

June 1, 2003

ANTHOLOGISTS of Scottish writing are at pains to give due regard to the "three languages of Scotland": English, Scots and Gaelic. Such inclusiveness is admirable, particularly with regard to Gaelic, whose native speakers now number less than 60,000. As for Scots, a third of the nation's populace, according to one survey, consider it their mother tongue, even if no two of them can agree exactly how to define it.

A language, it is often said, is simply a dialect with an army; so evidently the three languages of Scotland have plenty of artillery at their disposal. I do wonder, though, if the nation's other tongues should get a little more campaigning on their behalf.

More than 100,000 Scots are speakers of languages different from the big three. Punjabi and Urdu form the largest group, and anyone objecting that these are immigrant languages would do well to remember that the same could be said of English, Scots or Gaelic, which just happen to have been around longer.

While Scotland has just three languages it calls its own, in Multnomah County, Oregon, they have 54. At least, that is the number currently catered for there by the Department of Human Services, who are obliged by law to ensure that interpreters are on hand to deal with every language that might conceivably be spoken by anyone brought in for emergency treatment at one of the county's hospitals. They recently decided to add a 55th: Klingon.

The Human Services Department estimates the Klingon population of Multnomah County to be zero. Nor are there any records of Klingons having visited as tourists, or even having parked their spaceship in anybody's field during a coffee break between interstellar battles with Federation starships. But there's a first time for everything, and in Multnomah County they evidently believe in being prepared. So they placed an advert seeking a qualified interpreter who could be called on, should anyone ever be wheeled in after being hit by a speeding cattle truck and found blabbering in a language invented by the makers of Star Trek.

The advert was soon withdrawn due to adverse publicity: many thought the Human Services Department had gone barking mad. But they surely had a point. Klingon may be an artificial language, but so is Esperanto, which has thousands of speakers worldwide. Klingon is, according to the Klingon Language Institute (I kid you not), "the fastest growing language in the galaxy." You can buy dictionaries, teach-yourself CD-Roms, and audio tapes offering conversational Klingon for use during space travel or - more probably - at Star Trek conventions. You can even get Hamlet translated into it.

In the 17th century, Scottish novelist Thomas Urquhart claimed to have created a new "universal language." In the 19th century, some Aberdonians declared their dialect to be a language in its own right, and seeking a suitably ancient name for it, alighted on the Greek word Doric. In the 20th century, Hugh MacDiarmid pulled together archaic Scots words from all times and regions into something he called Lallans. With such a long history of linguistic invention, I'm surprised the Scots have not yet embraced Klingon as a valid poetic medium.

Something of Multnomah County's laudably cosmopolitan spirit can, however, be found online at the Scottish Language Resource Centre, which aims "ti gie a heeze ti the implementation o… schemes for trainin teachers, actors, braidcasters or ither fowk uizin Scots in public… ti uphaud an assist ither bodies wi similar aims an ti mind whit they ar daein." I say three cheers and good luck to them. Or as we say in Klingon, "jIyajbe!"

June 8, 2003

I'M VERY much looking forward to hearing Music In A Foreign Language, the new album about to be released by the excellent Lloyd Cole. In part this is because some years ago I published a novel with exactly the same title.

Perhaps it's only a case of two minds thinking alike, but I prefer to flatter myself with the notion that Lloyd Cole might have found some inspiration in my book - or at least its name. Either way I'm thrilled, since I can now consider Music In A Foreign Language as joining the likes of William Burroughs' Black Rider (a title borrowed by Tom Waits), Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (used by David Axelrod), and a host of other books that have lent their names to the world of music.

It doesn't only happen with album titles: many band names have emerged after a trip to the library. Aldous Huxley's The Doors Of Perception caught Jim Morrison's eye (though he kept only the first two words); Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and Camus's The Fall proved equally useful. As for song titles, my top pick would be Joy Division's 'Atrocity Exhibition' (courtesy of JG Ballard).

Do authors mind having their titles recycled? There is no reason why they should. As long as due credit is given to the original source there can be no question of plagiarism. I am sure Huxley and Hesse both earned a whole new audience thanks to their musical reincarnations.

On the other hand, try naming your band Harry Potter and you can expect a lawyer's letter in no time. That is because Harry Potter is a trademark; an exceptional case highlighting a curious anomaly of literary life. Unlike the words inside a book, or even the illustration on its cover, a book's title is not normally protected by copyright.

This is probably just as well, given the extent to which some titles - particularly the most cliched ones - get over-used. John Grisham's A Time To Kill shares its name with at least 10 other novels; First Among Equals occurred not only to Jeffrey Archer, but to half a dozen other writers as well.

Yet in most cases, serendipity can only be for the good. When I saw, a couple of years ago, that a new TV series called The Sopranos was about to be aired, I naturally assumed it to be an adaptation of Alan Warner's novel. The opening sequence had me scratching my head trying to remember the part of the book featuring American mafiosi.

More common, I suspect, was the reverse phenomenon, in which punters picked up Warner's novel expecting it to be the book of the series. If Hollywood would care to call a movie - any movie - Music In A Foreign Language, they can be my guest. Things get trickier, though, when two identically named items find themselves chasing after the same audience. Robert Irwin once published a literary novel called Exquisite Corpse, set among the world of the French surrealists.

At exactly the same time, American author Poppy Z Brite brought out a novel with similar literary claims and an identical title, about an escaped serial killer. Synchronicity of that kind is plain bad luck for both parties.

And if you cannot decide which of them to read, you could always listen to the band Exquisite Corpse instead.

When authors borrow album titles they often prefer some obvious alteration, either as a bit of ironic cap-doffing, or else perhaps in fear of litigation. Thus we have, for example, Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album, or Let It Bleed by Ian Rankin, Michael Clark, Gary Indiana and many others.

As Picasso once said, great artists never borrow, they steal - or did he pinch that quote from somebody else?

June 15, 2003

BEING a writer is good training for being a stand-up comic. Poets in particular are frequently called upon to stand up in smoky pubs and give their all before an audience whose primary concern is deciding whose round it is next.

I once found myself at a surreal event that was held in the bar of the kind of hotel Alan Partridge would stay in, at which a bunch of writers - myself included - gave readings from work we had been commissioned to produce for a multimedia CD-Rom that never saw the light of day because the computer consultants who were meant to put it all together ran off with the cash. Instead, by way of feeble compensation, we got to appear in front of a drunken, heckling audience composed of visual artists who were in the hotel because they'd been commissioned to do something else, and who were in the bar waiting for the disco to start.

I know all about standing up in front of unforgiving people whose only wish in life is to see you spontaneously combust. Anyone who's ever tried doing a literary reading should find the comedy circuit a doddle. At least, that's my theory.

The comedians have a theory of their own, which is that being funny on stage means they know how to write a novel. Now I'd make a crap stand-up because I have never been able to tell a joke. Yet many of the biggest comics in British entertainment have a similar ineptness when it comes to narrating a story.

Exhibit A: Ben Elton. I'm old enough to remember the days when he was funny; but somewhere along the line, he made the mistake of believing the people who kept telling him what a genius he was. The result has been a series of novels whose sole virtue has been that in each case their concepts have been expressible in a single sentence, thus saving on wasted words.

Exhibits B to Z are just about every other TV comedian you can think of, all of whom are persuaded by the kudos or cash they can get from being able to bill themselves "novelist and comedian." The list is endless; the straight-to -paperback books they produce are virtually indistinguishable.

I grant that there are exceptions to the rule: Hugh Laurie, for instance, could have had a career as an author of enjoyable light thrillers solely on the basis of his genuine ability. And Alexei Sayle is evidently someone for whom writing is more than an ego-boosting addition to the CV and another excuse for getting on Parkinson. The same cannot be said for many of the other joke-tellers who suddenly come over all authorial and decide it's time to express themselves artistically.

Would Frank Carson or Bernard Manning ever have written a novel? I think not; but what makes the latest generation feel any better qualified? And if they will insist on barging in on what is already such an overcrowded field, will they please give the genuine novelists a few slots at the Gilded Balloon, or a TV series or two, so they can recover some of their lost income?

Comedians are just the tip of the iceberg. There are all the other TV celebs who reckon they know how to write a novel (or more precisely, whose agents know how to sell one). Alan Titchmarsh may be gardening's Leonardo da Vinci, but his fiction needs more than a bit of well-placed decking to put it right.

So come on BBC - let's see Margaret Atwood scripting a new series of Blackadder. Or at the very least, please let's see fewer celebrity novelists.

June 22, 2003

PEOPLE warned me that if I did it once I'd want to do it again. It might become a habit; even an addiction. Well I tried it, and I'm hooked. I love online shopping.

I remember visiting an American university about five years ago, and over dinner with a few middle-aged academics, I learned that all of them, without exception, did the majority of their book buying on the internet. They still went into local bookstores to browse; but the serious business of library -filling was done mainly at home in front of their computer screens.

And I can see why. Only the other week, for example, I wanted to get hold of a copy of one of the acknowledged masterpieces of 20th-century fiction. I need not tell you which one, since it could be virtually any novel more than 10 years old and not written by a TV celebrity or turned into a film, and the story would be much the same.

I tried the library. No good: it was out on loan and I would have to wait a week. I went round the corner to one of the bookchains. They said I could order it and come back in a week. I went home, ordered it from Amazon, and it arrived a few days later. Why get on a bus or trudge through the rain in order to watch somebody else order a book for you on a computer, when you can do the job for yourself and get it at a lower price?

But online stores such as Amazon are cold, impersonal places devoid of any sense of human contact, where every book is merely an itemised commodity. Yes, just like any high-street bookstore. The main difference between a search engine and a store assistant is that a search engine is never surly.

Increasingly the high-street bookchains are becoming places for people who either do not own a computer, or else have a particular need to go out and see a cash register.

Neither of these is an attribute of the die-hard book-fiend, who would rather spend 10 minutes in front of a screen with coffee mug in one hand and credit card in the other, happily typing in his or her literary wish-list.

It is sad to see the death of the traditional bookshop so firmly on the cards, but they have only themselves to blame. The one element the online stores lack is a human being who recognises your face, remembers that you come in every week, knows the sort of thing you like and - above all - shares your passion for the written word. But when you look at the window display in any bookshop, do you sense a passion for literature, or a mania for marketing?

Take the human element out of any activity and you can be sure a machine will soon come along that can do it better.

The only reason we still have chefs is that we care about what we eat; the continued existence of human authors is perhaps a sign of hope, though I'm sure computer software will very soon be able to write a bestselling thriller or romantic novel. I even wonder if it is happening already, such is the speed with which some authors are able to churn out books.

If real-world bookshops are to stay in business, they have to offer something a computer cannot. So far, the only big ideas the marketing people have been able to come up with are coffee bars, comfy chairs and stacks of TV tie-ins to lure the non book buying public off the street and into the stores. Meanwhile the book buying public are voting with their feet, and their credit cards.

June 29, 2003

A TRIVIA question: name a famous German novelist of the 19th century. Unless you happen to be a student of the language, it's harder than you might think. There's Goethe, of course, who was a wonderful novelist in addition to excelling as a poet, and who died in 1832; but he was a product of the previous century, and doesn't really count. Knock him out of contention, and it's surprisingly hard to come up with a substitute.

I could probably go out into the street right now, collar the first unsuspecting passer-by, and easily extract from them a famous Russian, English, French or American author. You don't have to be a book-lover to have heard of people like Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert or Melville. And if my victim should happen, by some stupendous miracle, to be a literature aficionado, they could probably cite Galdos and Manzoni as the outstanding representatives of the 19th-century realist tradition in Spain and Italy respectively. But Germany?

A strong contender would be Thomas Mann for his family saga Buddenbrooks, but this is disqualified on the grounds that it was published in 1901, thus missing by a whisker the century to which it spiritually belonged. In a recent antidote to The Big Read, various people were asked to suggest the worst "great" novel in literary history, and Buddenbrooks got the vote of Monsignor Bruce Kent, who remembered it as being little more than an endless series of dinner parties - which was unfair, though only a little.

So the 19th century is a somewhat mysterious wilderness as far as the Great German Novel is concerned: a fact made all the more strange when you consider that Germany was no cultural backwater, and a list of its world-class composers, philosophers, scientists - even poets - would be as long as your arm.

Thomas Mann himself noticed the mysterious gap, saying that the only 19th -century German fiction writer of European significance was ETA Hoffmann. Today, most people know Hoffmann's name only through musical works based on his writings, such as The Nutcracker and, of course, Tales From Hoffmann. In any case, he was primarily a short story writer; his novel Tomcat Murr, wildly popular in its day, surely ranks as one of the strangest things ever written. A pair of jumbled stories - one written by a deranged composer, the other by his pet cat - it is the sort of thing that these days gets called "postmodernist." Balzacian it is most certainly not.

In my quest for the Teutonic Dickens, the best I can offer is Gottfried Keller, author of a long Bildungsroman (or growing-up novel) called Green Henry. I am sure it is very good; but I think it safe to say that Keller is not exactly a household name. And he was born in Switzerland.

That is one of the problems: defining what counts as German. Apparently the issue of "German-ness" was pretty hot in the 19th century, giving rise to arguments over the difference between Heimat - meaning the geographical region a person happened to come from - and Vaterland, which came to mean something altogether more ominous.

Countless novels were written which reinvented a glorious German past: a mythical world of medieval heroism, lost glory, future promise. These books were of interest to Germans suffering a crisis of national identity that Bismarck tried to resolve (leaving Hitler to finish the job), but have appealed to few outsiders subsequently.

There is a lesson here. When a culture turns in on itself, little of substance emerges. The best ideas come from elsewhere. The 19th-century realist tradition that produced Dickens and Tolstoy began with Walter Scott. And where did he get his inspiration? From Goethe and Schiller: a pair of foreigners.

July 13, 2003

YOU decide to get new double glazing, and a salesman arrives at your house to do his spiel. Going to the door to let him in, you are surprised by his appearance. A tatty jacket; hair that needs washing; faded jeans. Brushing past you with a grunt as he heads for the living-room, you notice that his breath smells of alcohol. You go and sit nervously on the sofa as he dumps his bag on the floor.

"I should start by explaining that I had a difficult childhood," he tells you.

What follows is a brief but harrowing tale of neglect, victimisation, abuse. It makes you uneasy, because all you really want to know about is his double glazing.

"Can you show me the samples?" you eventually ask.

"All right," he says. "They may not be perfect but they're the best I can do. And they're not quite finished yet."

Then from his bag he begins to pull out various disconnected pieces of windowframe in conflicting styles. "Like I say, I don't know if they're any good. That's for other people to judge." He spreads them over the floor, leaving you thoroughly puzzled.

As a double-glazing salesman he gets nought out of 10 from me; but his performance is not unlike one I saw at a reading recently by an author peddling his wares before wine-sipping punters who found absolutely nothing odd about the spectacle they were witnessing.

The first rule of salesmanship, as Gerald Ratner once learned to his cost, is believing in your own product and defending it to the hilt, no matter what your private misgivings might be. Yet when it comes to selling yourself as a writer, self-deprecation is the rule. At the very least, a writer should bow out gracefully from the task of actually giving any critical assessment of their work.

Yet whenever I hear someone stand up in public with a poem or short story in their hand which they then preface with a lengthy disclaimer about its imperfections, I cannot help sniffing false modesty. Effusive protests of "it's nothing really" are a plea for praise as blatant as a little dog sitting up on its hind legs with its tail wagging and tongue hanging out. They are also a perilously tempting invitation for the response, "you're right, it's nothing." If the author genuinely believes their offering to be so inadequate, why are they sharing it with us?

Getting a furniture manufacturer to admit they produce the best quality goods on the market is not exactly difficult, but dragging a similar confession out of an author is no easy task. That is because authors know such things do not go down well at all. When Jeanette Winterson once took the unfashionable but entirely reasonable step of declaring her faith in her own genius, she was ridiculed. Had she been selling oranges instead of writing about them, there would have been no problem.

We do not like our artists to sell themselves, that is the problem. We want them to be somehow oblivious to a talent the rest of us can spot a mile away. Great writers are meant to be discovered by other people, not by themselves.

Those who deviate from the prescribed code of fake diffidence may find themselves wishing they had been a little less sincere.

Jeffrey Archer once asked his publisher, in all seriousness, if he might ever be in with a chance of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. You may snicker - the publisher certainly did with all his mates afterwards - but at least Archer on that occasion was being totally honest. His heroic lack of self doubt, his sublime freedom from artistic qualm, should be an example to every writer. Which of course is more than can be said for his books.

July 20, 2003

I HAVE a confession to make. A very long time ago, back in my schooldays, there was something I found very hard to deal with. There were plenty of other kids in my class with problems of their own: children, for instance, whose brains turned to putty when confronted with a percentage or a long division. For me, the maths lessons held no fear. Nor was I one of those for whom spelling was an ordeal, thanks in part to a string of handy mnemonics. To this day, I always imagine booking two double rooms whenever I write the word accommodation. There was, however, one thing I could never get my head round: poetry.

I understood why the plural of crisis should be crises. I found it perfectly reasonable that division by a fraction should equal multiplication by its reciprocal. These things were logical; they made sense. What I could never fathom was why any intelligent person should decide to write something then, before they get to the right-hand side of the page, suddenly start a new line - with a capital letter in the middle of the sentence!

Poetry, I realised, is illogical. It's all about expressing yourself, all about feeling. We were occasionally made to write it, and I learned that as long as I used lots of adjectives and a few unusual monosyllables (poetic -sounding words such as shard, smirr, cusp) I need not worry about the fact that I had nothing to express except a sense of pointlessness at having to chop up a perfectly good sentence.

So there you have it: I'm dyspoetic, verse-blind. I learned to live with my shameful affliction. I even found many poets whose work I grew to love, in my own inadequate and uncomprehending way.

The best thing I got out of studying German at school was Goethe's 'Wanderers Nachtlied', which is probably the only poem in the universe I can recite completely from memory. (I should add that it is extremely short).

But still the dark shadow of doubt hung over me. If a collection of phrases, no matter how beautiful and profound, do not rhyme or scan, then what apart from their layout on the page distinguishes them from prose? What is the magical ingredient that lifts the observation of a novelist or short-story writer into the realm of the poet?

And why, when researchers in artificial intelligence are still unable to make a computer write a novel, is it so easy to make a machine produce something resembling verse?

I was well into adulthood, and nearly on the point of setting up a support group for fellow sufferers, when the moment of enlightenment finally arrived. I was talking to a poetry buff about a newly published verse collection that had attracted some glowing reviews, yet left me cold.

What is it, I asked my friend, that makes this count as poetry? Nothing, he told me; it isn't poetry, it has only been laid out as if it was.

In my head, a little light bulb switched itself on. If you've struggled with percentages all your life, imagine you can suddenly understand them. That's what it felt like. The reason I couldn't fathom poetry, I realised, is that a substantial proportion of it isn't poetry. It only pretends to be.

And having made this confession, I should mention that a poet once told me he could see no point in anyone reading - or writing - thousands of words about made-up people. He had a point; and perhaps his difficulty with fiction arose because so many novels are really just bedtime stories that happen to be about grown-up things such as sex or murder. The magic ingredient, whether for poetry or prose, is that it should have something to say.

July 27, 2003

LITERARY prizes are a great thing for the people who win them, but while successful authors wave a fat cheque in one hand and a champagne glass in the other, their excitement might not be widely shared beyond their nearest and dearest.

The trouble is that book awards, like any other form of in-house back -slapping, are dull affairs. Fine if you're invited to the dinner and no-one tells you that you can't have a 10th glass of wine, but not exactly prime-time entertainment.

Television producers learned this painful lesson long ago. Close-ups of shortlisted authors are as near as they can get to suspense, and it simply isn't near enough. So I have a suggestion to make.

Invite the nation's finest writers to submit an extract from their unpublished work in progress. Get a panel of critics to whittle these down to the best half-dozen. Then take everyone to a small and pleasant town where the final judging process can be done in full public view, before a live theatre audience.

One by one, the authors read out their submissions. The television camera pans across the judges' faces. Some are lost in ecstasy, others twiddle their thumbs impatiently or doodle on napkins. Cut to the audience, where the writer's parents are shedding proud tears.

After the readings, it's the judges' turn. They give a detailed assessment of each piece they've heard.

On the nation's TV screens an author's lip trembles as she is told she has the poetic sensibility of an ox. Another smirks as his work is called a modern classic.

And if the audience don't like it, they can boo, heckle and even vote for an alternative winner at the end.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Pop Idol meets the Booker. And in case you think it a lamentable form of dumbing-down, let me point out that the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize - which is what I have been describing to you - has been held every year in Austria since 1977, and remains the nation's most coveted literary accolade.

In the hope of pocketing 22,500 euros, German-speaking writers head to Klagenfurt - birthplace of the famous poet and novelist after whom the prize is named - and submit themselves to the televised ordeal of having their work critically dissected. This year's top winner was 36-year-old Inka Parei from Berlin. Other awards went to Feridun Zaimoglu and Farhad Showgi; a Turk and an Iranian.

I think it safe to say that none of these international authors is exactly a household name here. None, as far as I am aware, has been translated into English, which is a further reminder of our cultural insularity.

For more than a quarter of a century, the German-speaking world has had what must surely be the best bit of televised literary entertainment on the planet, and not only has nobody in Britain ever heard of it, we've never heard of the authors either. So I do hope that a few lessons might be learned over here before the prize-giving season kicks off again in the autumn.

Let's have no more of this 'every one's a winner' crap. No more overblown speeches about the fantastic state of our current literary scene. And for God's sake, please send the bookies back to the race track. Let's have Ingeborg Bachmann UK. You can bet I'd tune in.

August 3, 2003

THE hardest part of writing a novel is finding a good title. In the space of a few words you've got to sum up the kind of book it is, and also make people want to read it.

In the thriller world, you don't even get a few words to play with. Instead there is often only one. Retribution. Prognosis. Vestige. I've no idea if these are genuine thriller titles, but they might as well be. If Ian McEwan were not a sufficient brand name in his own right, he would never have got away with calling a deeply reflective literary novel Atonement.

It's a perfect thriller title if ever there was one. Come to think of it, perhaps the book sold so well because buyers expected corpses and a shoot-out. Many authors find their chosen title rejected by agents or publishers who know the importance of getting the front-cover formula just right.

For chick lit, keep it light and frothy and avoid anything that sounds weighty, depressing or male. Hangover Hell would not be likely to do well with the focus groups; Kiss and Make Up would fare better. And if you insist on giving a chick lit novel a one-word title, make it Wedding.

Literary fiction naturally considers itself above such marketing ploys, which is presumably why the titles of so many literary novels are so dull. One of the most highly praised first novels of the past couple of years was Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. But I confess I have still not read it because I am unable to remember the title for more than five minutes - I had to look it up again now.

It is when novels get translated into other languages that the fun starts. I was in Germany a few weeks ago to do a reading with Michel Faber and Magnus Mills. All three of us, I noticed with some amusement, had had our book titles 'improved' for the German market.

Mills's All Quiet on the Orient Express poses an obvious problem for German readers, since its title is a pun on All Quiet on the Western Front, itself the English retitling of a German novel literally called Nothing New in the West. So in Germany, Mills's novel has become India Can Wait. Somewhat less enigmatically, Faber's Under the Skin is rebadged as The World Wanderer.

As for my own book, I suppose I only have myself to blame, having gone for the Jon McGregor school of unremarkable titles in my own choice of Mr Mee. In most countries where it has been published, there has usually been at the very least the inclusion of an extra adjective or two to give some hint of what sort of fellow the eponymous hero might happen to be.

In Italy they even went so far as to call it Rousseau, the Professor, and the Art of Adultery" (picking up on a guest appearance by Jean-Jacques, and a bit of artistically relevant how's-your-father).

But in Germany I really felt as if I had drawn the short straw. When I told people the new title, they raised an eyebrow or laughed out loud. Rousseau und die geilen Pelztierchen. That's Rousseau and the Randy Furry Little Animals; and it's apparently going down a storm. German humour, eh?

August 17, 2003

IT IS one of the most important moments in any writer's career. It takes a second but can last a lifetime. It is the photograph of the author that appears inside the book.

We all know that the camera never lies, but people do. A quick look in any bookshop will be enough to remind you of this. Throughout the entire output of the most venerable of authors, it is often the same youthful face that is to be found posing ever more hopelessly down the years.

You might recall that Oscar Wilde dealt with this phenomenon. And for every handsome Dorian Gray smiling on a book jacket, there is some real-life counterpart - greyer, flabbier and altogether less attractive - ready to lumber out of the attic for the next bookshop signing or festival reading.

Photographers cheat. I once posed for an expert in the art of author pics. "Don't worry about your chin," he said to me reassuringly, "I can fix that." Ever since that day, I have worried about my chin, which will no doubt triple and quadruple while my retouched mug-shot continues to fool the punters.

The photographer was an old hand in the profession, and I asked him who else he had taken pictures of. I soon realised it was more productive to try to find authors he had not photographed. He was particularly proud of a series of shots of Samuel Beckett, sitting among rubbish bins at the back of the Royal Court Theatre. Had he airbrushed away Sam's wrinkles, I wondered. Or even added a few more?

What was Beckett like, I asked him. "Very nice," he said. Primo Levi? "Oh, he was extremely nice." Simone de Beauvoir? "She was really nice." It was good to know that all these people were so nice, even if they might have sometimes required a bit of facial improvement in the darkroom. "Tell me," I said eventually, after we had been through what seemed like a hundred or so "very nice" authors, "was there anybody you didn't like?"

He thought about it for a moment. "Jean Genet," he said. "He really wasn't very nice at all."

The photographer could have avoided the one unpleasant assignment of his career if Genet had instead gone down the DIY route. Many authors opt for this, and the results can be truly awful. I have seen books in which the author shot looks like the one you take back to Boots, complaining they must have made a mistake developing it.

As for full-face photos with a bit of passport-booth curtain dangling in the background, one can only call such things slightly lacking in professional polish.

How fortunate authors are to live in the age of computers. Not only can they have an editor tidy up their linguistic mishaps, but they can also rely on a technological helping hand when it comes to making sure they are as photogenic as modern marketing requires.

As for those tricky public appearances, it can only be a matter of time before we see the advent of the author's clone, brought out of suspended animation for each book launch. Come to think of it, perhaps it is happening already.

August 24, 2003

I WOULD hate living with a writer. At least I think I would, because my mental image of it is living with me, which I wouldn't wish on anyone (though somebody manages, bless her). Yet writing couples are surprisingly common, somehow fitting two literary egos under one roof, and under one duvet.

It is the sort of thing we take for granted in other walks of life. Teachers often marry teachers, film stars marry film stars. But that seems natural, since these people work in jobs where they can hardly avoid coming into contact with each other.

Writing is another matter. Franz Kafka was not far off the mark when he described the perfect writing life as being locked in a cellar, getting your meals pushed through the door at regular intervals. Forget all those TV and movie images of novelists whose entire existence is a succession of bookshop signings, media appearances and convivial chats with adoring fans. If it was like that, there would be no time for writing.

The real life of an author is more like that of any other self-employed home worker. They see the postman, the woman at the supermarket checkout, the people they invite round for dinner. Thank God I found my other half before I gave up the day job, otherwise I suppose I would now be cohabiting with the postman.

Meeting other writers happens mostly at public readings, which are about as romantically promising as a singles night at an abattoir. But some writers still manage to pair off, leaving me to wonder what life must be like for these literary couples.

Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble are a famous example; another is Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin, who illustrated the perils of book marriages when both were shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. Interviewed beforehand, each expressed hope that the other would win. Well, they would, wouldn't they? But did they mean it?

Consider what a wily publisher once remarked to me: a writer is either going up or going down; there is no in-between. What this means for any writing couple is that one of them might suddenly find themself on the up, while the other is heading in the opposite direction. And that cannot be nice, even for the most devoted and supportive spouse. In Jonathan Franzen's case it seems to have cost him his marriage. While he was finding fame, his wife (now ex) was still trying to find a publisher.

The novelist Claire Messud has as her other half the critic James Wood. When Wood recently ventured into his spouse's trade it was, he confessed, initially difficult for her. I hope for both their sakes it does not get any more difficult.

Perhaps the happiest solution is to work in different spheres: Holroyd and Tomalin are both biographers married to novelists. But if novelists must marry one another, there have to be ground rules. One writer told me how hard it was for he and his fellow-novelist wife to work in the same house. The slightest domestic issue could cost either of them a day's work. So they made a ban on all conversation during working hours.

Such monastic self-denial might seem too great a sacrifice to art; but what in any case do writing couples talk about? "Had a good day at the computer dear?" "Yeah, another chapter. How about you?" "Only a paragraph." "Oh, never mind."

Life with a writer? No thanks. Kafka must have known a few, which is why he thought solitary confinement in a cellar would be preferable.

August 31, 2003

A LEADING Moscow newspaper recently asked me to write a piece for their book pages on Russian novels published in English. No, I don't speak Russian - they said they would get my piece translated. And I didn't even ask about a fee - I figure I already have enough potatoes in the cupboard to last me through the coming month. Being game for anything, I said I'd have a go, then suggested some titles I might include.

How about Andrey Kurkov? His novel Death and the Penguin went down well with British critics, and a follow-up, The Case of the General's Thumb, was published this year. The Independent hailed Kurkov as someone set to "get Russian literature going again after the post-Soviet hiatus".

The response from my Moscow counterpart could be summarised as "Eh?." Over there, my contact informed me, Kurkov is considered an entertaining and popular crime writer, but no literary icon.

Then what about Andrei Makine? Critics in Britain appear to be having an ongoing contest to see who can offer this writer the most lavishly fulsome praise. At this year's Edinburgh Book Festival he was billed as "one of the most important living novelists in any language".

The reply to this was the e-mail equivalent of Muscovite jaws hitting the floor in disbelief. But in any case, the Russians don't regard Makine as one of their own (he writes in French, having lived there for years), so perhaps this was mere snootiness.

Even so, it highlights the fact that fame is always local. Anybody can be famous for 15 minutes, but the big question is where? Tony Parsons summed it up neatly. Described by UK papers as "a household name in 20 countries", he recalled being interviewed by an American radio host who invited him to "tell us about your book, Dave".

Continuing my search for Russian authors to write about, I offered Yuri Buida, whose novel The Zero Train garnered glowing reviews here from a select bunch including yours truly, though I had never previously heard of him, and his book came into my hands with little fanfare. "Great, Buida is one of our leading contemporary authors," I was informed.

Why should literary landscapes be so different between countries? And why are the heroes of one the unknowns of another?

Partly it is a matter of taste: literature is no different from food or pop music in having national boundaries. But at least readers overseas have a good range of international literature to choose from.

Very few foreign-language novels are published here. Those that are come mostly from a few small publishing houses brave enough to put their money in something traditionally seen as a no-hoper. Either that or we get books that have already proved themselves as "international bestsellers", which usually means doing well in France or Germany.

So the British view of world literature is based on a tiny sample - whatever British publishers deem worth translating. Trying to say anything remotely sensible about who are the most important living novelists in any language is therefore pretty hard unless you can read every language yourself, because you can be damn sure that most of the world's great authors are not available in English.

Or to put it another way, the term "world literature", in UK parlance, refers to a very small world. And it is getting smaller all the time.

September 7, 2003

BUSINESS people are a brainy lot. The world of high finance, it seems, is too complicated for the average punter on a jury to understand - even though the intricacies of DNA testing are deemed to be within anybody's grasp.

The whacking salaries enjoyed by chief executives are necessary, we are told, to ensure the best people can be found for the job. So I have a question. Why, if the captains of industry are so smart, are their books so awful?

In case you are not a regular browser of the business section of your local bookstore, let me describe a typical example of the genre. The title includes a word like "win", "succeed", or "performance." Inside, there are lots and lots of bullet points. If there is one thing I know about business - thanks to these books - it is the importance of the bullet point, and maybe a big box around it to emphasise that this is a Really Big Idea.

Perhaps the need for such succinctness is proof of how genuinely busy the authors of these books are, with scarcely a moment to jot down a few inspirational ideas before leading their companies to ever greater heights; or else it demonstrates that their mantra - 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' - is, after all, directed primarily at themselves.

Some business books bravely strike out from the PowerPoint school of composition into the realms of fiction.

A highly popular series concerns a golfer being led on a Zen-like path towards personal (ie financial) growth. The fact that a golf course should be the most natural setting for a business fable only confirms the suspicion most of us harbour, that our top people spend a large chunk of their time working not on their spreadsheets but on their handicaps.

Invariably the most amusing business books are the professional memoirs: 'How I did a brilliant job'. The formula usually consists of taking hard decisions, being firm but fair and "keeping it simple, stupid." I do not recall ever having seen any chief exec who was honest enough to admit he was plain lucky. Instead, the vagaries of chance get a walk-on part only when describing the occasional unfortunate dip in share value.

I have before me a new addition to the corpus: Talking Shop: Quotes To Help You Through Your Working Day, published by Bloomsbury. This handy reference book offers 5,000 wallet-enhancing nuggets you're presumably meant to transcribe on to post-its, then stick all over your computer and work desk so the power-vibes can seep through.

"Passionate leadership won't succeed if contradictory signals are sent out." The words of Bill Gates - a man whose billions prove he can do no wrong. "I believe absolutely in one man having one vision for the way something should be done." Ah, how uplifiting. But hang on, that one comes from Chris Evans, whose vision of how to do things was storming off in a huff and getting plastered.

In the book's 'Selling' section we are told: "A salesman has got to dream, boy, it comes with the territory." Wise words to hang up in big letters in any call centre. Except that the source is Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

The best items are the most obscure. "Fireworks," according to Terence Conran, "are the best fun you can have spending money." But when it comes to real wisdom, the book's compilers are forced to abandon financial gurus altogether and turn to poets.

"Experience teaches that it doesn't." This comes from Norman MacCaig. He did not, I think, die a millionaire. Perhaps he should have heeded the advice of Anita Roddick. "To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality." Excuse me while I levitate.

September 14, 2003

ONE of the little pleasures of travel is the books you come across. Hotel suites may not be the best place for literary discovery, unless it is the Gideon Bible you are after, but in any hostel, B&B or holiday cottage you can always find a veritable library of dog-eared, sun-bleached books that other people have left behind: a cryptic guide to former guests that is a lot more entertaining and far less terrifying than examining the stains on the mattress.

A guesthouse in Greece was where I first read Terry Pratchett. I never made it past page 10 before moving on to John Grisham (with similar results), but I was grateful for the experience. In similar episodes of touristic idleness I have sampled Jeffrey Archer and Jackie Collins. I would never normally give 10 minutes of my time to either, but as with nude sunbathing, there are some things you only ever do while on vacation.

Such serendipity has been taken to a new level by BookCrossing.com. Members of this self-styled "global community" leave books in public places with little stickers attached bearing identifying code numbers.

Anyone who finds one of these books can record their comments at the website before passing it on once again. The aim, say the site's founders, is to "make the whole world a library".

But not everyone is happy. BookCrossing.com has come under fire from British writer Jessica Adams, who says the site's growth may hit "charity bookshops, which rely on second-hand books for their income".

Adams' charitable sentiments are undermined by the main point of her objection, which is that BookCrossing.com raises money through advertising, and none of this dosh gets sent in the direction of authors like her. Sharing books generates no royalties, and she does not like the idea of people reading her books for free. It is an attitude which, in all honesty, makes me feel disinclined ever to want to read any of her books, even if I were paid.

I suppose we ought to shut down every library, then find a way of building slot machines into books so that you have to keep putting 10p pieces in every few minutes in order to keep the pages turning. Oh, and redesign the human shoulder so that nobody can ever look over it. That, I suppose, would make the Jessica Adamses of this world very happy indeed, safe in the knowledge that no access to their literary output will ever be possible without a corresponding production of revenue.

Yet as every chocolate bar manufacturer knows, giving away a few freebies does no harm to sales. Instead it creates grateful new customers who might come back for more. Being greedy is bad for business.

A few weeks ago, police in India raided a publishing house that was printing unauthorised versions of Harry Potter in the Marathi language. It is seen as a breakthrough in the fight against piracy in the book world. But I wonder, does JK Rowling really need the few extra thousand pounds she can accrue in royalties from the pockets of Delhi schoolkids?

Both stories exemplify the rapaciousness that is the norm in our money -obsessed culture. All art, it has been said, is a gift to the world. We've all got to live, but if writers such as Jessica Adams and JK Rowling truly consider themselves artists, perhaps they might one day consider loading a small sackful of their books on to Santa's sleigh and getting them dropped around the globe with BookCrossing.com stickers attached.

Their bank balances would hardly notice the difference, and it would do wonders for their PR.

September 21, 2003

IN A restaurant that was new to us, my other half and I were unsure what to order. "What's the duck like?" we asked the waiter.

This is the kind of dumb question beloved of retailers and sales staff everywhere: the open admission on the part of the customer of complete and utter ignorance. An almost touchingly naive way of saying: "Here's my wallet, help yourself."

The duck, you will not be surprised to learn, was described to us as being very nice. Ditto everything else on the menu. Admittedly the waiter was hardly likely to tell us that the lamb was iffy and the venison frankly overrated, but it would have been nice at least to have been offered a four-point scale, from very good to excellent, that could have directed us to that little hidden speciality the chef keeps back for specially favoured customers or his mum.

It was not to be. Punters like me still cling to an antiquated and wholly fallacious notion that the people we hand our credit cards to are in some way qualified to offer expert advice on the goods they are offering. The fact is that the waiter had never tried the duck. He only ran around with it on a plate, for lousy wages.

We are all suckers for it, though, the idea that our needs are being personally attended to by knowledgeable staff. Bookshops are only too glad to play on this, in the form of gimmicks like the "manager's recommendations" you find in many chains.

The pretence is that the branch's top bod has spent the last month patiently sifting through hundreds of new titles, and now has alighted on a neglected gem: a book so good you have simply got to read it.

The reality is that the book chains are as centralised and regimented in their choice of stock as any supermarket. Those handwritten recommendations you see stuck to new titles might as well have been dictated at gunpoint by head office. Quite possibly they were. Has anybody even read these recommended titles? It hardly matters; the main thing is that these are the books that for one reason or another are expected to sell.

A more honest approach is not even to pretend to express an opinion. Some bookshops are content to give an endorsement to their wares in the form of newspaper reviews - an approach I approve of wholeheartedly, since it gives me the chance to re-read old extracts from these very pages while perusing the shelves.

A degree of selectivity is naturally in order, though. If a book has been mauled by our critics, one can hardly expect the massacre to be put on display in a shop aiming to shift copies of the offending item.

That then leaves another option. Someone alerted me last week to a book seen displayed with the reassuring legend: "Well reviewed in Scotland On Sunday." That set my brain churning, because my own memory of the review suggested that a more accurate description would be: "Hanged, drawn and quartered in Scotland On Sunday." In fact, the only thing that could be said in the book's favour was that we had taken the time and space to give it any consideration at all.

Bear this in mind whenever you see our name and reputation used to hype books, since on some occasions a crucial bit of punctuation may have been left out. The only feeble praise merited by the item you are thinking of shelling out for could be that it was "Well, reviewed in Scotland On Sunday".

At least the duck lived up to its billing. We had absolutely no cause for complaint, on gastronomic grounds at any rate, when my credit card was finally taken away for a thorough flogging.

September 28, 2003

WE LIVE in a confessional age. Got an unusual illness? Then write a book about it. Hellish childhood? The world is waiting to hear all about it. As the planet gradually transforms itself into an enlarged version of the Big Brother household, self-revelation is the norm.

Except in one area - a final taboo that can make even the most nakedly frank author suddenly go all shy and retiring. Money.

Why are authors so reticent about exposing their financial affairs to the world? They may be happy to reveal the deepest secrets of their sex lives or psychological histories, but opening up their accounts to public scrutiny is another matter.

And yet the only thing the general public really want to know about a writer is how much they earn. If an author is in the news, it is almost invariably because they have either won a prize (worth X amount of money) or been given a zillion-pound advance.

Whenever people ask me what I do, and I tell them I write, they then ask: "What sort of books?" A friend told me that whenever she mentions to people that she knows a writer, the first thing they ask her is: "Does he make much money out of it?"

So these days, when asked what sort of books I write, I say: "The kind that don't make much money." And believe me, it is the truth. A full disclosure of my lifetime's crimes and perversions would shock nobody except my grandmother. But if I were to tell you the advance I got for my first novel a decade ago, you probably would not believe me.

To make serious money, you need things like television and film deals. Even then, you can probably forget that private island you've got your eye on. A children's author whose book became a major Hollywood film told me the resulting windfall "paid off the mortgage".

Perhaps she was only being coy. When it comes to money, the one thing you can rely on authors doing is being imaginative. Boasting about one's wealth is so un-British. Being falsely modest about it, in the hope that other people will do the exaggeration for you, is far more in keeping with our national style.

Publishers are no slouches in the art of exaggeration. A first-time novelist made news some years ago with a "million-pound advance." It turned out to be GBP 50,000 for a two-book deal, paid out in chunks just about large enough to pay off the Visa bill and give him a holiday or two.

Whenever you see a news story about a massive book deal, just knock off the extra zeroes that have been put in so as to make it news, and you will get a more accurate picture of what counts as stunning success. If your first novel bags you more than ten grand then you can count yourself as having done pretty well out of the five years it has taken you to write it.

A hardback novel can get into the literary bestseller lists on the basis of sales in the low hundreds. With royalties of a few quid per book, you can do the sums yourself. Rare mega-sellers perpetuate the myth that well-known writers automatically make lots of money. Some do; but many do not.

Am I complaining? Certainly not: I consider myself lucky to earn anything at all from a hobby I love. If it is fame and fortune you are looking for then get in line for Pop Idol, and good luck to you. Writing has its own rewards, and you cannot put a price tag on them.

October 5, 2003

WHY do some books sell by the bucket-load while others languish on the shelves? It is a riddle every author and publisher would love to unravel: the secret of the bestseller.

When things go right, success is put down to literary talent and business acumen. When things go wrong, everybody blames someone else. Publishers are never so unsporting as to criticise their own authors, at least not in public. If a book has done poorly, it is because the bookshops failed to back it, or else it was a case of "unfortunate timing".

Publishers have to go easy on their authors, because it was the publisher's decision to take on their book. Such touching loyalty is not mutual, however. When authors find their sales below par, they know exactly who to blame: the publisher. They chose the wrong cover; they failed to get it printed early enough; or they printed it too late. Most of all, there was not enough advertising.

This is bugbear number one among disgruntled writers: poor promotion. Where were all those posters and newspaper ads? Where were the discounted copies in supermarkets? Where was that barrage-balloon somebody promised, lit by lasers, floating over the proud author's home town and being photographed and admired by his friends and family?

The stark reality is that the advertising budget for most new books is zero. Instead, publishers rely on their books getting promoted for free; and they succeed very well. Book reviews in newspapers and magazines cost publishers nothing.

Writers do not always see it that way, though. For some, reviews are a kind of social duty on the part of the newspaper. And this adds another tier of people to blame if the book fails to sell: not enough reviews from the evil, conniving press.

A writer once contacted me, complaining about my review of his book. In a piece that was generally favourable, I had dared to make some adverse comments that he took umbrage about. What, he wanted to know, are reviews for? Why bother to print a hostile review of a book? Did we at Scotland on Sunday take perverse delight in putting the public off authors we happened not to like? Was it all part of some personal vendetta?

I told him what reviews are for. They offer the opinion of one person who has read carefully and critically, and can hopefully express their view in an interesting way. And for most authors, this is the only bit of advertising they are ever likely to receive.

Seen from that point of view, it is evident that even a bad review is better than none at all. No book has ever been sunk by hostile press: Martin Amis's Yellow Dog has no doubt been bought by many people eager to find out if it really is as bad as catching your uncle masturbating in public, as Tibor Fischer claimed.

Amis believes his harshest critics are merely envious of his success. Perhaps he is right; though as William Hazlitt once noted, envy is an essential part of criticism. If Hazlitt could not feel envious of someone like Byron, he had no business writing about him. It is only when envy is not acknowledged as a natural artistic response that it sours into jealousy.

No personal vendettas, then; though when the complaining author told me that he preferred no review to a bad one, I had to inform him that in that case we would not be reviewing him in future, since I could not promise to print only whatever he would want to read. If you want that kind of PR, you need to pay for it.

November 9, 2003

THE mindless amusement of searching the Amazon.com online bookstore has been given a new twist. Entering a keyword and hunting for a title or author is only the start. Now you can look inside the books too.

Amazon has fed the texts of thousands of books into its search engine, offering users a chance to trawl through volumes at the click of a mouse.

The company says the aim is to make online book-buying even more like the increasingly endangered real-world kind. You browse books in a conventional store, so why not do it in an online one too?

There's a difference, though. Try walking into a bookshop and asking the assistant to rustle up every instance of the word "muffin" in the shop's entire stock and you'll be justifiably treated as a nutcase.

But on Amazon? In less time than it takes to bring out a credit card, my computer offers me a long list of titles beginning with If You Give a Moose a Muffin, and continuing with the somewhat more intriguingly grown-up Once Upon a Tart, complete with an invitation to look inside.

Having satisfied myself from its cover that Once Upon a Tart is actually only a cookbook, I resort instead to every author's professional vice: sheer vanity. Searching for "Crumey" gives me all my own books - which I have no need to look inside - as well as Blues & Gospel Records: 1890-1943.

Its computerised pages turn out to contain several references to Estelle Crumey, who recorded an unaccompanied version of 'Running Up De Shiny Way' in a South Carolina funeral parlour in 1940, and who presumably belongs to a branch of the clan my parents never told me about.

All very interesting - but what about muffins? If I can download info on gospel singers so easily, then why not grab a few recipes while I'm at it? One thing they don't much approve of in real world bookstores is people coming in with a photocopier and Xeroxing pages of Jamie Oliver. But what's to stop online browsers doing the same?

The book industry, needless to say, is alert to the danger. In fact, since Amazon introduced its new search facility two weeks ago, publishers and authors have been tied in knots trying to figure out whether it will prove good for business or a pirate's charter.

The publishers of Once Upon a Tart clearly take the latter view. My attempt to rustle up a good muffin recipe is met with the bland, digital equivalent of a wagging finger and a "not blooming likely, mate".

Blues & Gospels Records, meanwhile, bares its all - doubtless luring countless other namesakes like me into its index of long-forgotten singers.

Amazon says it will only allow users to download 20 pages from any single book - and it asks for your credit card details, though no cash, as a way of keeping tabs.

However, concerned moles from America's Authors Guild were able to grab pages by the hundred, simply by varying the search words. What you get for your efforts is text that is readable on-screen but supposedly incapable of being copied to hard disk - a claim that any computer-savvy geek will instantly greet with the rejoinder "yeah, sure".

Even so, publishers are mostly in favour, since the browsable titles in Amazon's stock have immediately leapt in sales by nearly 10 per cent.

Cookbooks, travel guides and reference books are seen as the problem area. In other words, the sort of books that are actually useful. But for the likes of me, or the author of Blues & Gospel Records, the news can only be good. I might even order a copy as a souvenir.

December 21, 2003

JANE Austen once did a sex change on a dog. Though not commonly known to the general public, the fact is one with which serious Austen fans are well acquainted. It happens in Mansfield Park, and the unfortunate animal is a pug that switches from dog to bitch through a lapse of memory on the part of the author.

Writers are only human and every book has its inconsistencies, but at least present-day authors have helpers at their disposal who are meant to root out such glitches. Before any manuscript goes to press, the publisher's copy editor carefully searches for the equivalent of Austen's canine cock-up.

A good copy editor would have caught another of her slips, when she let news spread a little too quickly of Elizabeth's engagement in Pride and Prejudice. Instead the job has been left to modern-day nit-pickers like John Sutherland, who gleefully unravelled the blunder in Who Betrayed Elizabeth Bennet?

As well as finding holes in the plot, part of the copy editor's job is to point out straightforward factual errors. Like, you can't take a train to Peebles. No, not Jane Austen this time - for whom taking a train anywhere would have been an amazing bit of anachronism. The phantom station is in Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal, and the fact that it made it into print shows copy editors make mistakes too. Perhaps they need a copy editor's copy editor…

Nor were the fact checkers working at full tilt when Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix went through the presses. In chapter 31, Harry and his chums do their end-of-term astronomy exam. The month is June, the time around midnight, and Harry observes the planet Venus and constellation Orion.

Perhaps there aren't many astronomers at publishers Bloomsbury, but there are a good many among JK Rowling's readership, and the episode has provoked a flurry of comment in this month's issue of astronomy magazine Sky and Telescope. Orion is one of the glories of clear, cold winter evenings, when his three-starred belt is one of the most recognisable features of the night sky. You cannot see Orion in June.

What about Venus? This planet, so bright it is often mistaken for a UFO, is known as the morning or evening star because it is never far from the sun. In quests to identify the Star of Bethlehem, Venus is regularly offered as a candidate. But can it ever be seen after midnight? You wouldn't think so.

Eager to save Rowling's reputation, one of Sky and Telescope's correspondents used planetarium software to ascertain that yes, very occasionally the planet could be viewed so late. But in order to derive this result he had to assume the geographical location of Hogwarts, based only on the information that it is well north of London. His chosen co-ordinates, in fact, would place the castle on the outskirts of Birmingham, which sounds to me even less likely than seeing Orion in summer.

Now, you could argue that since Harry Potter is all made-up it hardly matters. In his alternative universe the stars and planets are different from ours - and people can ride around on broomsticks. But authors pride themselves on getting things right and hate it when they get them wrong. I know this from experience - my own forthcoming novel has just gone beneath the copy-editor's beady eye, and the errors she found have left me wondering how many more might remain. I suppose I shall just have to wait until the book comes out and let readers tell me.

Nobody's foolproof. But at least it's good to know that even the likes of Jane Austen could sometimes get her dogs' unmentionables in a twist.

February 8, 2004

IN THE publishing world's latest bid to sex up that boring old commodity, the book, HarperCollins is launching a new imprint called Harper Perennial. "We wanted to make the paperback a completely different entity," a spokesman explains excitedly.

So how is this feat to be achieved? A pop-up Nigel Slater perhaps, or Annie Proulx in 3-D text? No. Harper Perennials consist of a reissued book (one of the first titles will be Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus) plus "about 15 pages of author CVs and interviews, critical opinion, newly commissioned articles, notes on cover choices and recommendations for further reading".

It is not hard to see where the inspiration comes from. HarperCollins has taken its cue from the DVD industry, where add-ons are the norm. Still, compared with out-takes, subtitles and a documentary or two, 15 pages of tagged-on promo fluff sound like pretty small beer to this jaded consumer.

The hidden agenda became apparent when HarperCollins announced last week that the arrival of its Perennial line means it can axe the Flamingo imprint, all of whose authors will now be published under Fourth Estate.

This menagerie of brand names may mean little to the average book buyer, but the upshot is that a fine and discriminating publishing director - Philip Gwyn Jones - has found himself out on his ear, leaving behind a legacy of authors he signed up for Flamingo that includes JG Ballard and Magnus Mills.

The justification for axeing a man who always made literary quality a top priority is that "one needs to be extremely focused." No prizes for guessing what HarperCollins is focusing on.

The author interviews sound the most interesting feature of Perennials, though initial indications are that these won't let us delve into the personality, private life and inspiration of the author in question. Instead it will be more like the "what's your favourite colour?" type of questionnaire that any novelist can bang out in a five-minute e-mail without causing too much interruption to the latest book tour.

Most authors have ready-made answers to the sort of questions they invariably get asked, such as: "Where do you get your ideas from?" I have yet to come across an author honest enough to say "From other people's books".

Another favourite is "What are the best and worst things about being a writer?" I've no idea why this question is so popular, but as old chestnuts go, it's up there in the branches along with, "Do you use a pen or a computer?" I've never heard anyone ask Tony Blair what's the best thing about being Prime Minister (imagine the sudden glint in his eye as he whispers "Power!"), nor does anybody fill in the awkward but obligatory "Any questions?" slot at the end of a job interview - the bit when you want to ask how much dosh is on offer - by wondering, "What's the worst thing about a career in fish farming?"

So why ask a writer? Perhaps because people want to be reassured that it isn't all media schmooze and launch parties. And the stock response? "The loneliness, darling." Ah, yes, writing is such a solitary business, shut up with nothing but a computer (or pen) for company.

The best bit? "Meeting my readers," is the approved response, to which I can only say, "Like heck it is, mate." A more likely answer would be, "Receiving royalty cheques."

Such soul-baring, one suspects, will not figure prominently in the Harper Perennial interviews, which are apparently "a way to bring author and reader closer together." A closeness consummated, one assumes, to the sound of a jangling cash till.

February 22, 2004

WORLD Book Day rolls round again on March 4. Last year, the organisers took a poll to find the books that best represented Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This year they've come up with a new angle, hoping to discover which is the best-read profession. "Do vicars read more fiction than nurses?" they wonder. "Do builders spend more hours a week reading than city traders?"

I could hardly resist their invitation to log on to www.worldbookday.com in order to fill in their questionnaire. But I came away wondering if the World Book Day people are living in some kind of parallel universe.

The first questions were straightforward enough. "How much time do you spend each week reading for pleasure?" That's easy - virtually none. I read for work; pleasure is a bonus. "Where do you mostly read?" The list of suggestions included the obvious bed, loo, holiday and commute, with the category "other" left to take up all the really interesting responses like "underwater" or "in prison".

It was when I reached the part asking for my occupation that I began to suspect these World Book Day folk are taking their own job far too seriously. They need to do a little less reading, and get out in the real world a bit more.

Admittedly, there was no problem for me - "journalist" was in their list of options, along with other likely responses such as "teacher", "student" and of course "not working." The remaining dozen or so professions on offer included some as unusual as "politician", "clergy" and "dancer." Too bad, though, if you should happen to be a shop assistant, cleaner, call-centre worker, electrician or child minder.

It seems that when the World Book Day organisers say they want to know which is the best-read profession, they have a very narrow view of how many professions are out there. That's understandable when you consider the way working life is represented in most books.

There are plenty of novels about city traders and barristers (both get listed), and the simplistic portrayal of hospitals in fiction no doubt accounts for the entire medical sector being summarised as "doctor" and "nurse." As for the inclusion of "farmer", I can only assume that somebody at worldbookday.com had a distant memory of reading Thomas Hardy at school; while "taxi driver" is perhaps prompted by cabbies' frequent appearances in fiction as essential guides to local knowledge, whenever the metropolitan hero ventures beyond the M25 to some god-forsaken provincial town.

So let me suggest a few top reads for professions not in the list. Estate agents might like to try Anne of Green Gables or The House with the Green Shutters. For postal workers, I shall refrain from the obvious Pat and his black-and-white cat, and also The Postman Always Rings Twice, since in my experience he's more likely to give up after the first attempt and leave a little card before I can get out of the loo (where I will have been doing some professional reading). No, a better choice would be Dangerous Liaisons, a fine example of the mischief to be had through letter writing.

Security personnel could have Bulgakov's The White Guard; for musicians there's Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher. And to the staff of my favourite curry house, I affectionately offer Gone With The Wind.

As for the World Book Day poll, we'll have to wait and see what they come up with as top choices from chefs and "sportspersons." The most surprising thing about their weirdly skewed selection of jobs, perhaps, is that they failed to include fiction's favourite occupations - novelist, criminal and wizard.

September 12, 2004

ARE you "fashion forward"? Not content with planning your autumn wardrobe, you've already sussed what spring's style will be. Or maybe you're an "early adopter", with an order already placed for next year's must-have gadget. And when it comes to holidays, naturally you only go to the spots that are still "undiscovered".

Forward thinking is what every business aspires to, and many consumers too, but we all know there are only two ways to predict the future. Either you're telepathic, or you have inside knowledge.

So get this. The "book of the year" is about to descend on our nation's stores. It's Harry Potter, JRR Tolkien and Jane Austen combined. You might want to get on the phone to William Hill and bet on it winning the Booker.

I already knew all this four months ago. That's when I saw the cover of the Bookseller Buyer's Guide - the trade journal which is to books what London Fashion Week is to the rag trade. And there it was, a full-page ad heralding the September 20 publication of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - "the novel of the year".

The book is all about a magician and his apprentice in 18th-century London, and is about 800 pages long - which is 799 more than I can usually stomach of anything involving spells, potions and "faeries", not to mention other olde -world spellings like "chuse" and "shew." Still, many American reviewers thought otherwise, ensuring that Clarke's debut was already set to arrive here with a fair wind behind it.

It may indeed be a wonderful book, but what's interesting is the way its wonderfulness becomes an accepted fact before anybody has even had a chance to see it for themselves. Like all those cliches about the "new black", Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has become the new Harry Potter - for this season at least.

It's not only books - everything is run more and more along the same lines as the fashion industry. Predicting the next big thing is a major preoccupation of the media - and it's very easy for pundits to make themselves look clever and in touch, since they're told what to look out for months in advance.

While it all makes perfect business sense - for producers, sellers and the media - it still leaves me wondering if choosing a movie to watch or a band to hear is really the same as buying a new shirt. People who want to make a fashion statement generally don't care too much about quality - after all, it's not meant to last. Nor would they try arguing that this year's colour is any better than last year's - it's just different. But in the arts, isn't quality meant to be the main issue? And aren't we supposed to judge these things for ourselves?

The Booker Prize is a barometer of the way times are changing. Booker judges face a lot of media scrutiny, and they want to get it right. Ten or 20 years ago, that meant choosing books by safe names from the "literary establishment." But who exactly is the establishment today? As the Amis/Barnes generation get closer to their free bus passes, where are the authors to replace them?

Debut novelists have become the preferred commodity. Monica Ali and DBC Pierre were the hot tickets last year, and now Susanna Clarke has taken her place on the Booker long list alongside several other first-timers. The judges, it seems, have their finger on the literary pulse. Or at least, they read The Bookseller.

None of this, of course, is Clarke's fault. She took 10 years to write her novel, and if she had started out with a business plan instead of a synopsis then nobody would now be interested in her work, which happens to fit perfectly into a ready-made marketing niche.

But spare a thought for all those other people who spent the last 10 years writing books for which no niche exists. Will any publisher take the time and effort to make one for them? Not these days, they won't.

So get ready for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. You can even choose between a white cover and a black one. Which will be more collectable? That's the great thing about being a fashion-forward reader - you don't even need to open the book.

December 19, 2004

SCOTLAND already has its share of literary awards - such as the Saltire Prize won by Andrew Greig (above). But let's for the moment imagine that a new one were to be launched. What might it be called, and what would be its remit?

It happened in Wales this year: their new initiative is the Dylan Thomas Prize. Who would be our own eponymous scribe? It's hard to imagine anyone nowadays warming to a Walter Scott Award: our national novelist is more or less officially identified with tartan and shortbread, and all the things by which we claim to be embarrassed. Living authors won't do: sycophancy has its limits, even in the Scottish book world. As an equivalent to the hard-living, bohemian Dylan Thomas, some bright spark would perhaps posit the safely deceased Alexander Trocchi.

But who would be eligible for it? That's easy: if there's going to be a major Scottish prize, it has to be for Scottish writing. And that's where the problems start. What does 'Scottish' mean?

This weighty problem was confronted this year by the recently launched Scottish Review of Books. Intended as a quarterly (one issue has so far appeared), the new literary magazine is closely modelled, at least in name and appearance, on the well established and highly influential London Review of Books. But while 'London' is a mark of origin alone (the LRB covers world literature), the new SRB will deal only with Scottish books. In which case, exactly how far do our cultural borders stretch?

In bookshops, the media, and in places such as the SRB, a curious consensus has emerged. A 'Scottish' book is one whose author was born in or lived in Scotland, or whose work was published in Scotland.

The first two are reasonable enough, even if they ought to mean including the likes of George Orwell and Pierre Ronsard in our national canon. But the last is truly weird. If being published in Scotland makes a book 'Scottish', we can presumably call The Bible German, thanks to the efforts of Herr Gutenberg.

Claiming Scottish-published books as Scottish really began with Yann Martel's Booker-winning Life of Pi, whose UK publisher is Canongate. Never mind that the author is Canadian and the book - which has nothing to do with Scotland - was first published in Canada. If it's a success, we want part of it.

Such jingoistic tub-thumping makes good economic sense for the likes of Canongate and other Scottish publishers. I'm all for a free market and good PR, but the rest of us should be wary of such hype. Unfortunately, however, this same expedient stretching of definitions beyond all meaning also afflicted the team who put together this year's successful bid for Edinburgh as Unesco World City of Literature.

Literary luminaries invoked in supporting Edinburgh's case included Robert Burns and James Kelman - neither of whom could seriously be called Edinburgh writers. The excuse was that this was really a bid not for Edinburgh, but for Scotland. In which case presumably Yann Martel was in there too.

The rapid success of the World City of Literature bid caught the organisers on the hop - they won the honour before coming up with any specific plan. While everyone sincerely hopes the initiative will succeed in doing something useful, there remains a sense that once more, our national self-obsession has got the better of us.

So, what about our Alexander Trocchi Prize? With such a wide definition of Scottishness we could at least be assured of some interesting shortlists.

That's not how the Welsh have seen it, though. Their annual Dylan Thomas Prize - worth an impressive GBP 60,000, put up mostly by Welsh private enterprise - is to be for the best work (novel, poetry, story collection or play) published in English anywhere in the world. The only caveat is that the author must be under 30: Wales is branding itself with youth, rather than daffodils and eisteddfods.

Dublin's well-respected IMPAC Prize, with another hefty GBP 60,000 jackpot, is for a novelist of any age and nationality whose work has been published in English. No room for literary leprechauns there. Wales and Ireland both know the best way to put themselves on the world stage is to embrace world literature. If that encourages homegrown authors to produce work good enough to get on a shortlist of international stature, that's a welcome bonus.

Scotland is not without its international prizes. The James Tait Black Prize, for example - our oldest award - is open to writers of any nationality whose work is first published in Britain. Past winners include DH Lawrence and EM Forster. The Dundee Book Prize this year went international, its organisers having quietly conceded that there are only so many outstanding unpublished novels to be had each year from Dundee. If you haven't heard of either prize, that is perhaps because their cash awards of GBP 3,000 and GBP 6,000 don't grab headlines.

The idea is right, though, and such simple common sense is the way forward. Too often cosmopolitanism in our literary life is seen as suspect. A writer choosing to live in Holland or Ireland rather than Scotland has somehow let the side down; one whose work is set outside Scotland has abandoned their roots. Yet the alternative is parochialism, and we have far too much of that.

We see an ever-increasing flood of books purporting to tell "Scottish literary history" - a BBC 2 television series this year (and accompanying book) covered the same ground. Here, another consensus has emerged: Scottish literature slots into a series of 'themes', and classic works are judged in relation to these. What this overlooks is the fact that the most 'typical' works, by any standard, are also the least exceptional.

The other day I glanced at the latest of these potted guides, which informed me that "childhood is a recurring theme in Scottish literature." When things reach that level of crassness, you know it's time for a serious rethink.

Let's not forget where all of this is coming from. Celebrating literary heroes is good for national ego, good for tourism, good for keeping cash tills jingling. That's all it's good for. As Milan Kundera observed: "Small countries always have lots of poets." That's because they need local heroes. But do we really want our writers to be 'local'? Don't we and they deserve better?

If there's an example we should follow, it is that of Wales or Ireland - or even the North-east of England, where the privately sponsored Northern Rock Award each year offers GBP 60,000 (that magic figure again) to the best writer from the region. If you're wondering why GBP 60,000 is today's benchmark for any serious new prize, it's because it tops the Booker by 10 grand.

And that's how much I'd like to see coming from Scottish business (most definitely not from the public purse) as the prize money for a new award - call it the Alex Trocchi Scottish Book Prize or anything you like - to be awarded annually for the finest international literature. If Edinburgh is to make its World City of Literature status meaningful, perhaps it should start a campaign to give us the Edinburgh International Award: the Book Festival would be the perfect venue.

More likely, though, is that most celebrations of literature within Scotland will continue to be - unlike the Book Festival - solely of 'Scottish' literature, leaving us to argue among ourselves over definitions.

How then do we define Scottishness? Presumably in much the same way as a word like 'black'. If it's imposed on you by someone else without your consent, it's exclusive and discriminatory. If it's a word you embrace as an accurate description of your identity, it's empowering.

So if we want to include George Orwell and Yann Martel in our national canon, in the SRB, and in Edinburgh book trails, then perhaps we ought to do the decent thing and ask them first; though admittedly this would involve a Ouija board in one case.

Alternatively, we need to do something that doesn't come very naturally to us as a nation: adopt a bit of humility. Celebrating Scottishness is harmless fun, as long as we remember that it doesn't really mean very much. If you'd asked David Hume or James Boswell their nationality, they would have said "British" or "English." For myself, I'd put "European" first on my list. But in this country there are no prizes for daring to take the broader view. So go on: shoot me for being a cosmopolitan.

March 6, 2005

'IN THE list of world literatures Scotland is right at the top." So says Professor Willy Maley of Glasgow University. Some in France, Russia, the US or indeed England might disagree, but to say otherwise in Scotland is more or less a hanging offence. We are the best, full stop.

In keeping with this Braveheart spirit, Maley has unveiled his guide to the "100 best Scottish books of all time." At the press launch this week, the professor explained that in the foreign universities he visits, he hears pleas for a "road map" to Scottish literature; a guide that will help in the planning of course syllabuses. His glossy pamphlet is the answer. It will be distributed free to every school in Scotland.

The list is a joke. As revealed in Scotland on Sunday last week, the decision was made to exclude poetry entirely. Consequently this is a list of Scottish greats that excludes the one Scottish author with worldwide name recognition: Robert Burns.

It includes only "works of continuous prose"; but the same restrictiveness is not applied to the definition of "Scottish." "Our Scotland is a big country," writes Maley in the pamphlet's introduction. Well, his certainly is, since its writers include Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. The former gets in because his novella Heart Of Darkness was serialised in Edinburgh-based Blackwood's Magazine. Woolf set To The Lighthouse in Scotland, hence the book is Scottish. Now we can see why Scotland is right at the top of world literature: it must be hard to find a book that isn't Scottish. Maley even includes the Bible. Well, King James was a Scot, wasn't he?

Those university course planners in Lahore and Buenos Aires are going to be pretty confused by this particular road map. Scottish school kids will hopefully know better, and use the guide to make paper aeroplanes.

Needless to say, there is a vox pop dimension to all this tomfoolery. The public are invited to vote for their favourite Scottish book, with the winner being announced at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Place your bets now on Rowling, Rankin or McCall Smith. Please, somebody discover Tolkien took holidays in Rothesay, then it'll be more of a contest.

There is also, predictably, a marketing angle. I doubt this will do much to affect sales of the Bible, but for living authors it's a boon as they make up just under half the list. It's good so many of the greatest Scottish writers of all time are still around to receive royalties.

Among those in the pamphlet, there is a marked presence of some who, while they might not have international name recognition, have an association with the creative writing degree course at Glasgow University, run by Professor Willy Maley. Funny, that.

Did he read all 100 books? And how many other books were read but judged inadequate? The question hardly arises: nobody is expected to read books any more, only to put them on silly lists like this one. What message does that send to our schools, and to universities around the world?

October 9, 2005

PRIZES are the closest thing that novelists have to a career structure. The lowest kind of promotion is being shortlisted on one of the countless small -money prizes nobody outside the book world - perhaps even inside it - has ever heard of. The Man Booker, whose winner is announced tomorrow night, is a different matter altogether. Entry to the circle of shortlisted authors is like being given the key to the executive loo.

To get on to the list it definitely helps to have been there before. This year's line-up bears that out, with four of the shortlisted authors (Julian Barnes, John Banville, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ali Smith) being re-entries. Just going by past experience, that gives them the edge over Zadie Smith and Sebastian Barry, who both make first appearances. Barry's A Long Long Way - a tale of the First World War and the Irish Rebellion - will impress readers who like their trench warfare with a hefty dollop of Celtic lyricism, but it left me unconvinced.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty, however, is one of the best books in the contest. A campus novel that owes much to EM Forster, it is funny, perceptive and has much to say about race attitudes. It is also about 100 pages too long - but most readers will welcome the chance for an extended stay in the company of a bright array of characters. A win for Zadie Smith, though, would buck Booker statistics. In the literary promotion stakes, she is not next in line.

Winning twice is rare - only JM Coetzee and Peter Carey have done it - and that makes Kazuo Ishiguro a long shot this time round. In fact, Ishiguro's career seems to be going in reverse. Since winning in 1989 with a novel that had huge mainstream appeal (The Remains of the Day), he has produced ever stranger, more experimental books. His shortlisted work Never Let Me Go, set in a boarding school whose pupils gradually learn the dark secret of what awaits them when they leave, is rather like a less spooky version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. But Atwood wrote that when she was still at the bottom of the literary ladder, not trying to hang on to the top.

John Banville, in The Sea, strikes the same poetic tone as fellow Irishman Barry; but his story of an elderly man revisiting the scene of a youthful passion has an unappealingly pedantic protagonist. Ali Smith's The Accidental, describing a holidaying family invaded by an enigmatic female stranger, has an intriguingly art-house feel, but also, in the end, an art-house sense of inconclusiveness.

That leaves Julian Barnes. Having failed to win twice previously (with Flaubert's Parrot and England, England) he is owed one now, and has been the bookies' favourite since the outset. As an added and almost incidental bonus, his book Arthur and George happens to be the best on this year's shortlist.

Based on a real-life miscarriage of justice investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle, it may lack the sparkle of On Beauty, but its vivid recreation of a bygone age also touches on issues of racial prejudice in a work of great richness. Either would be a worthy winner, but my money is on Barnes.

December 18, 2005

THERE are few things more irritating than hearing any of our national figures referred to as "English", and for decades, Scots have been tirelessly campaigning to remind the world just how many artists, scientists, inventors and heroes came from north of the Border. All that good work appears to be paying off - but now it is in danger of flying back in our faces. Things have gone too far.

The problem was highlighted by a campaign launched at the start of this year by magazine The List to find the greatest Scottish book of all time. There are certainly plenty of great Scottish books to choose from, but the organisers decided to help things along by producing their own initial list of one hundred titles. Eyebrows were raised by the inclusion of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness, George Orwell's 1984, and even the Bible. The excuses were that Woolf's book was set in Scotland, Conrad's was published by a Scot, Orwell's was written in Scotland, and the Bible was translated by order of James VI.

With definitions as broad as that, just think what a list of great "English" books would be like. Burns, Scott and Stevenson would all merit inclusion, if they could make it past Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Austen. The reaction in Scotland would be outrage at such presumptuousness - so what makes us think we can get away with exactly the sort of thing we've complained about for years?

The eventual winner of the "best Scottish books" poll was Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song, but 1984 came a strong sixth, just behind JK Rowling, Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh and Dorothy Dunnett. Is 1984 really a "Scottish" book? Well, if Orwell were alive today and still living on Jura, he would presumably be considered just as Scottish as JK Rowling or Michel Faber. And if people south of the Border now want to call Ali Smith an "English" writer, we'd better not carp. She lives there, after all.

That is the price of national aggrandisement: other countries might follow suit. There is another price too. This month, the website BooksfromScotland.com was launched. Set up by the Scottish Publishers Association, it aims to become self-financing within its first year of operation, but received start-up funding from the public purse by way of the Scottish Arts Council. BooksfromScotland reckons it will need to shift 15,000 books in the next 12 months to break even, and that might not sound much. But in the crowded market where it hopes to carve out its own new niche, it's an ambitious target.

Who is the site aimed at? Evidently, people who are looking for Scottish books - a category not specifically searchable at online book giant Amazon. But go to the BooksfromScotland home page, and one of the bestselling titles being promoted there is Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. Atwood is Canadian, but the book's publisher, Canongate, is Scottish. Whether such subtleties will figure prominently in the mind of the average net surfer remains to be seen. Would you think of going to BooksfromEngland.com if you wanted to buy the London-published Trainspotting?

BooksfromScotland describes itself as "a guide to the maze of books coming from, and about, Scotland", and aims to include everything that is of Scottish interest, or by a Scottish author, or has been published in Scotland; but the only way they can satisfy the first two criteria is by manually sifting through every new book and its author biography to see if it fits. That's why you can't search for "Scottish" books on Amazon, any more than you can "good" ones: it all comes down to someone's judgment. The problem was highlighted on the day the new website was launched, when someone tried looking up Kate Atkinson. Born and published in England but long resident in Scotland, she had won the Saltire Society's Scottish Book Of The Year award the previous week for Case Histories, but it was not on the site (a mistake that had to be quickly rectified).

The website's organisers exist to promote the interests of Scotland's 80-or-so indigenous publishers, so the true and laudable aim of BooksfromScotland is to boost sales from them. But not every book published in Scotland has an obvious Scottish interest. How many people, for example, will go to BooksfromScotland in search of Essential Chemistry For Safe Aromatherapy?

We'll have to wait to see how the site progresses, but if we really want to set ourselves up in the book world as a nation apart, we should presumably take as our model the distinction between the British and US markets. Go to the States and you will find many of the same books you can buy here, but they are in US editions, from US publishers. That is why there is an Amazon.com and an Amazon.co.uk. If Scotland were an independent publishing territory there could be an Amazon.scot.

For an author such as myself it would be good news. At present I sell my novels first to a UK publisher, then to foreign territories such as America, with every rights sale bringing in extra cash, as well as the fun of seeing the same book reprinted in differing editions. If Scotland were a separate book territory, I could re-sell rights here too. Walk into a Scottish bookshop and everything on sale would be a genuinely home-produced book.

The downside? Well, Scottish authors already complain about how hard it is to market their books in England, if they happen to be published by a Scottish house. If they actually had to re-sell their works to English publishers, many Scots would never make it into print at all south of the Border. Equally, the range of titles on offer in Scottish bookstores would dwindle alarmingly, with shoppers having to rely on "imported" English titles. Proclaiming the distinctive identity of Scottish books is all very well as a way of boosting our national ego, but as an economic strategy it is distinctly perilous.

The high street book retail market is dominated by the big chains - HMV's proposal to add Ottakar's to a roster that already includes Waterstone's and Dillon's has drawn protest from AL Kennedy, Janice Galloway and dozens of other Scottish writers. Independent publishers feel themselves being squeezed out in the same way that independent booksellers have been - and in Scotland, every publisher is an independent.

The real value of BooksfromScotland is that it gives them a platform - but English independents like Dedalus, Bloodaxe, Tindall Street and many other fine but struggling houses could do with similar help. We can shout all we like about the fantastic state of Scottish books - the real war of independence is being waged elsewhere.

February 12, 2006, Sunday

THE outing this week of American author 'JT Leroy' as a carefully planned hoax has come as no great surprise to long-term watchers of the book world. After all, making things up is exactly what writers are supposed to be good at.

The JT Leroy saga began six years ago with his first novel, Sarah, about a 12-year-old transvestite male prostitute. Heady stuff - especially since the book was billed as semi-autobiographical. Leroy told interviewers he had been saved from a life on the streets by a psychologist who encouraged him to turn his experiences into prose.

Those interviews, though, were all done by phone or e-mail - the author himself was notoriously cagey, and in rare public appearances, surrounded by minders, he would always hide behind large dark glasses, leaving onlookers to ponder the curiously elfin, androgynous appearance of the shy writer with long blonde hair.

It was all made up. We now know that JT Leroy was the brainchild of partners Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop - she wrote the books, he took care of the business, and his 25-year-old half-sister was the one wearing the shades and trying to keep a straight face.

No doubt it will have come as a disappointment to some Leroy fans to learn that 'semi-autobiographical' meant, in this case, not autobiographical at all. But that's what happens when we keep clamouring for reality literature to go alongside our reality TV. What we get is manufactured reality: a product more interesting - or at any rate a lot more sensational - than the dull, ordinary stuff we encounter while queuing in Tesco. And there's no shortage of wordsmiths eager to supply this strange, hybrid and potentially very lucrative commodity.

Take James Frey, whose memoir A Million Little Pieces quickly became a bestseller on its release three years ago, telling a harrowing tale of drug abuse, alcoholism and run-ins with the law. "Intense and unpredictable" was how publisher Random House proudly billed it on their website, and it was unpredictable, all right, because if you look at their website now, you find a humble apology for any "unintentional confusion" which might have been caused by the book, shown in recent weeks to have been riddled with porkies.

Even Frey's own agent has dropped him, and if his decline continues he may well end up being exactly the kind of sozzled wretch he portrayed himself as.

Frey's only mistake was to claim his book was true, and he only did that because "truth" is what publishers, agents and book buyers want to believe they're getting. But most of us don't care if it's made up, as long as it reads like the real thing. Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is a novel, and was published as such, but people nowadays read it as if it were a wholly truthful memoir. Ditto Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Proust's In Search of Lost Time and countless other works of fiction.

Plath, Kerouac and Proust didn't need to do the interview circuit, though. Their books said it all for them, but nowadays we prefer a more complete product - hence JT Leroy and his ilk. Hiding behind a pseudonym is nothing new, but having to invent the entire package, complete with stand-in, is a sign of the times, and we'll no doubt be seeing more and more of it.

Perhaps what we need is a literary Gorillaz - a cartoon author looking suitably moody, tortured and glamorous, stepping on to the Booker rostrum to accept a cheque on behalf of the hidden team who have written a wonderful novel, but don't happen to be particularly telegenic. When it comes to 'reality', the media have simply set the bar too high, and authors who can match up to expectation are as rare as people with perfect bodies, or perfect gardens.

It was all so much easier for Rousseau or Goethe, whose fib-ridden autobiographies would have merited fulsome website apologies. Or for Walter Scott, who understood early on that writing a book is a kind of magic trick - audiences know it's fake, but they don't want to know how the trick is done. When Waverley was published anonymously, speculation was rife about the true identity of the "wizard of the north".

Just as well he didn't have to field a stand-in wearing shades.

April 16, 2006, Sunday

IF YOU want to learn how to cope with rejection then being a writer is ideal. Getting your first story or poem published is hard enough, but then you face the even bigger hurdle of getting your first book into print. And there are all those prizes you don't win. With each little setback, your skin grows a bit thicker, and you remind yourself that writing is not about pleasing the masses - it's about pleasing yourself.

Yet after telling myself so many times that not winning things is good for the authorial soul, I find myself the grateful and delighted winner of what is billed as the UK's largest literary prize - the GBP 60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Award. My thick skin being what it is, I know that what really counts is not the cash, or even the nice things people have been saying about my work, but the freedom it gives me to devote myself fully to my writing.

The award is notable for several reasons, quite apart from its size. For a start, it comes from private enterprise. As a way of boosting cultural life, what is happening in the north of England where I live is surely an example worth following in Scotland.

For any creative artist, the greatest dream is to be freed from financial need and allowed to work in peace. The Northern Rock Foundation makes it clear that its award to writers is a completely no-strings-attached deal: the prize is given on the basis of a 10,000-word work in progress, but while the foundation naturally hopes the money will be used to complete the book in a way that lives up to its promise, there is no come-back if things go otherwise.

There are plenty of Scottish writers who would love to have such an opportunity and would benefit from it. The Scottish Arts Council-funded Creative Scotland awards, at GBP 30,000 each, are the most lucrative available to writers north of the Border, but being publicly funded, they have to be appropriately accountable, given for clearly conceived and well planned projects with a definite timescale and likelihood of completion.

As we all know, from the case of the Scottish Parliament building, timetabling and budgeting do not always go hand in hand with creative imagination. Any investment in creativity is a risk, and that risk is best taken by the private institutions who make such speculations their business.

What Scotland could really benefit from is its own equivalent to the Northern Rock Foundation, not only for what it would do for lucky recipients of awards, but also for its wider cultural impact. I hope Scotland's financial institutions will take note.

What all of this means from a personal point of view is that after six years, I will no longer be editing Scotland on Sunday's book pages. It has been a tremendous pleasure to work with such a great team on such a fine newspaper. I will miss it - but I am delighted to hand the reins to new Literary Editor Stuart Kelly, a fine author already familiar to readers of this paper for his incisive reviews. Meanwhile, I shall be quietly getting on with what every writer wants to do, eternally grateful for being given the chance to do it.

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