The Fiction Desk Blog

One of the areas where I think even some of the best book blogs let themselves down is in their outbound links.

Nowadays, I tend to ignore links in book blogs. I’ve just come to expect them to lead to either the Wikipedia entry or a page on Amazon. It’s not that I disapprove of those websites; I just already know that they’re there. They’re easy to find, and if I want the information they carry, I can go straight to them and get it for myself.

When I’m reading somebody’s blog, I’m really looking for something new. This can be what’s written in the blog itself, of course, but the outbound links are part of that, and it’s really a shame how many blogs waste these opportunities to improve their readers’ experience. (more…)

This week’s literary news includes the publication of an unfinished Nabokov novel, a computer game based on the life and work of the Brontës, and a bizarre mistake in a new biography (more…)

If you’ve got some time on your hands, US magazine Poets & Writers has a very interesting interview with literary agent Nat Sobel (more…)

This Telegraph article, claiming to list the 50 best cult books, is causing much puffing up of chests over missed classics, and sniping at overrated ones.

With book bloggers queuing up to argue over their favourite titles, it’s worth a read. (That said, I’m not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend an article that seems to favour John Fowles’ awful Durrell lite The Magus—which even its own mother couldn’t love—over The Alexandria Quartet; or that thinks the UK still had rationing in 1957…)

It’s not really possible to start a new publishing house.

As a small press, if you want to be sold through the big chains, you’re going to be selling your books through a distributor, which cuts further into your rapidly diminishing profits. Amazon will buy directly from you, but they charge you for the privilege of selling to them, meaning that most of your sales will earn you no more than 40% of the cover price. So, if your book costs £6, that’s £2.40 to pay for printing, author royalties, book design, advertising, administration, delivering the books to the distributors, getting the ISBN number, sending out review copies, mortgage payments, rent when you lose your house, telephone calls to your wife’s mother, hiring a divorce lawyer, the bus fare to go and visit your children, and paying somebody to pulp the unsold copies of your books.

Charles Boyle has started a new publishing house. (more…)

A couple of months ago, somebody shoved something called Monocle under my nose. Some kind of style magazine, it didn’t really interest me until I found its tiny books section. (Sadly, I mean a tiny section about books.)

One of the titles mentioned was The White Room, from the new independent publisher, CB editions. It was unusual to see a small press book mentioned in a glossy magazine (or anywhere else, for that matter), and so I looked online and started to find out more about them. What I discovered was very interesting…

More about CB editions in a future post; for now I want to talk about one of their books, Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson (more…)

One of the great things about the internet for publishers is that it gives them a chance to communicate directly with readers. Gone are the days of those “cut out and post” coupons, which would appear at the back of books to be mailed off for the publisher’s latest catalogue. Now we can go online, see what else the publisher’s doing, find out about their upcoming releases, and even buy their books directly.

These direct sales can be an important revenue boost to publishers—they don’t have to share the price of the book with a bookshop—and offering customers a discount is an obvious way of increasing sales.

But now, just as Amazon.com has come under fire for allegedly trying to strongarm Print on Demand publishers into using Amazon’s own POD system, Amazon.co.uk has been revealed to be getting up to some mischief of their own, and it could threaten the future of publishers’ direct sales (more…)

Okay crops up a lot in fiction writing, particularly in dialogue and first-person narrative. Where does it come from, and how should it be spelled? (more…)

There’s really no need for me to make a lengthy post about the semicolon; The Guardian has done it for me.

I can, at least, single out the paragraph that actually explains how to use it: (more…)

Wealthier readers of this blog might be interested in this news item on the BBC website.

Of course, buying the desk won’t make you a better writer, but it will mean you’re never short of something to talk about in restaurants (more…)