The Blog

Following on from the post about publishers’ websites, I wanted to start looking at some specific sites and find out what they do well… and what they do badly. First up is Angry Robot Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, which I first discovered through a news post on NextRead.

The stated aim of Angry Robot is “to publish the best in brand new genre fiction – SF, F and WTF?!”, and it’s clear that their web presence is central to their imprint’s identity—as it should be. (more…)

I seem to spend a lot of time browsing publisher websites and, with some exceptions, I’m always surprised at how little effort these sites put into attempting to engage me as a consumer. The Internet is a great tool for communicating with your customers, and for direct selling, and publishers just aren’t taking advantage of this. In this post, I’ll try to lay out some of the specific features that should, or could, go into a strong web presence. I’ll develop these ideas separately in future posts. (more…)

If you are planning to write and publish books, or if you’re engaged in any kind of activity that would make an online presence useful, one thing you should do right now is get your name as a domain. It doesn’t matter if you’re not quite ready to start a website yet: you don’t need to do anything with the domain. The important thing is to make sure it’s yours. (more…)

One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is knowing what to leave out of the book. Whether the background details to a story are invented by the author or based on historical research, it’s the author’s responsibility to make choices, inserting only the most relevant information, where it’s most useful, and keeping things tightly to the theme of the story. Too much superfluous detail can suck the life right out of a story, and this is the problem with The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl‘s tale of a hunt for the final installments of Charles Dickens’s unfinished final book. (more…)

I’ve been revisiting the Atlantic Crime Classics range lately, taking a look at their February title, a new edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories, collected under the title of the first and most famous tale, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. (more…)

I’ve preached before about the importance of reading outside your comfort zone. While usually that advice was directed at new writers, it’s a good idea for all of us not to turn too quickly away from the less familiar shelves in the bookstore.

One of my own literary blind spots is poetry. While I appreciate and enjoy “poetic prose” (and there’s a vague term for you), and have a great fondness for a well-turned phrase, straight verse has always been something of a mystery to me. I don’t read it, write it, or edit it. So, while it’s not technically poetry itself, Edmund White‘s Rimbaud: Double Life of a Rebel, published earlier this year by Atlantic Books, looked like a good opportunity for me to place at least a toe outside of my own prosaic comfort zone, and start to read around the genre a little. (more…)

So much of the writing I see—even the good writing—isn’t connected to anything but itself. It seems to have come from a vacuum: the author knows the page, the words know the page, but neither of them have any association with the wider world. As a result, there’s nothing for me as a reader to carry away from the book. The prose is polished and utterly disposable.

The best fiction, on the other hand—the stuff that actually does matter—addresses our perceptions of the world around us, inspires us to have our own ideas, and brings us into a dialogue. To put it simply, the difference between competent fiction and worthwhile fiction is the difference between having dinner with a friend who talks knowledgeably about himself, and having dinner with a friend who talks knowledgeably about the world. (more…)

While I was reading The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle, I came across the following passage in which Conan Doyle described his reasons behind moving Sherlock Holmes from the original format of serialised novels into self-contained short stories—a move he credits with at least part of the detective’s subsequent success: (more…)

I’ve come across a few references recently to Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason. All of them have been positive, praising his use of the Icelandic setting and the development of his brooding detective, Erlendur. His latest, the first I’ve read, is Arctic Chill.

The book begins, naturally enough, with the discovery of a body. This time it’s a young boy, the son of a Thai immigrant, who’s found dead on the ice outside his apartment building. From this beginning, Indridason builds his theme of tensions surrounding Iceland’s immigrant communities, set neatly against the backdrop of the freezing weather. All of that’s exactly what you think it’s going to be: it’s good, it works. But there’s rather too much of everything else. (more…)

I think I’ve mentioned before on The Fiction Desk that I’m partial to reading the odd literary biography. The Brief Lives from Hesperus are handy little books, but nothing quite matches the satisfaction of a bulkier, blow by blow account of an author’s life, particularly when that author is as interesting as Arthur Conan Doyle.

Russell Miller’s The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle was published late last year by Harvill Secker, and as usual with that imprint, it’s a lovely edition. (Am I the only person who wishes more publishers gave their hardbacks the solid, flat spines that Harvill Secker use?) (more…)

From paid critiques to writing workshops and courses, there are a lot of good ways to spend your money on improving your writing abilities. Fortunately, there are also a lot of good ways to work on your writing without spending a penny. I’ve listed ten (well, technically nine) below. (more…)

One of the pleasures—and privileges—of my work is watching a manuscript evolve through rewrites, as the author develops new ways to settle the prose around the story. It’s also fascinating to watch published authors evolve from novel to novel, and thanks to Simon and Schuster, I’ve recently been doing that with Neil Cross. I started with Always the Sun, his fourth novel (published in 2004), and then moved on to his new book Burial. (more…)

As a rule, I’m highly mistrustful of software that targets itself at fiction writers. While the elaborate formatting conventions of screenplays mean that Final Draft is a useful tool for screenwriters, there’s a large part of me that believes the only things prose writers need are something to write with, something to write on, and a dictionary. Software that, for example, allows you to input a number of aspects of your novel—character name, inciting incident, plot twist 2b—and then arrange them into a pre-formatted structure, is a bad thing. Writers need to be do these things for themselves; if they can’t, they’re very likely going to have deeper problems that a piece of software isn’t going to fix.

So, when I read on the BBC Website that Neil Cross does most of his writing on a piece of specialist software, I was a little sceptical. Still, I thought I’d take a look. As is so often the case when I overcome one of my many prejudices, I’m glad I did. (more…)

Sometimes, when you read a lot of fiction, it all begins to feel much the same. A monotony sets in: sentence follows sentence, chapter follows chapter, book follows book, all trudging past like prisoners on a death march across a blasted winter landscape. The prose does what it must in order to survive, plodding ever forwards, and once in a while a book misses its step, falls, and receives a shot to the back of the head. (I mean that it gets put down unfinished. Bear with me.)

Then a book comes along that’s filled with such vital, remarkable prose, that it reminds you what fiction is capable of. Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is such a book, an explosion of language that leaves the reader wondering, as the publisher might say, How did he do that? This is the kind of prose that makes you want to get up and run around the room, and it’s another feather in the cap of CB Editions, who’ve finally given it a UK publication. (more…)

I have a theory that I revisit once in a while, but don’t often share with others because I suspect it’s largely nonsense. It goes something like this: Each of the main types of genre fiction, e.g. crime, romance, science fiction, etc. in some ways represent a distillation of one element of the writer’s art. So, for example, romance concentrates on character motivation, the drives of the separate characters and how they might conflict or be aligned. Fantasy—when it’s done well—might be said to look at the description of society and social setting. Crime fiction, following this theory, is all about the mechanics of story and plot exposition. After all, crime stories are often (although certainly not always) quite literally about the process of exposing the plot.

So whatever genre a writer might be working—or wanting to work—in, it’s worth taking a little time to explore some of the others and see what might be learned from them. For a lot of writers, the chances are that they’ll start such an exploration with crime fiction. Crime, after all, is often seen as “The genre it’s okay to like”, lacking the stigma of fantasy, sci-fi or romance. So, having decided to explore crime fiction, a writer would want to read some modern authors and the classics. The question of where to begin with an exploration of classic crime fiction has been neatly answered by a new series of Crime Classics from Atlantic Books. (more…)

Publishers John Murray have a penchant for thrillers and adventures set around the world, often written by expatriates. One example from last year was The Creator’s Map—Emilio Calderón’s tale of espionage in wartime Rome—and more recently they’ve published The Maze of Cadiz, the debut novel from Aly Monroe.

The Maze of Cadiz introduces British “economic warfare” agent Peter Cotton, who’s set to appear in a series of novels from the author. This first story sees Cotton sent to Cadiz in the closing days of the Second World War. His mission is initially to locate and relieve R A May, a British agent assigned to watch imports and exports in the port, and who seems to have gone rogue, withdrawing large sums of money and not replying to communications. Before Cotton can reach him and discover the reasons for his strange behaviour, May turns up dead. Cotton’s left to tidy up the mess, his only official contact in the region an obstructive vice-consul. (more…)

Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, the debut collection of stories by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, uses compact, unsettling prose to follow the strains of madness and obsession across a dozen generations of a family of doctors.

The early stories in the collection are short and focussed almost entirely on their characters, with just enough period detail to fix them in place and time. This sparseness of setting makes some of the stories seem strangely intangible, like dreams related by somebody who’s just woken up, and adds to the curious atmosphere of the book. Those descriptive details that do exist have an unsettling quality of their own, such as this early description of Dr Olaf van Schuler’s relationship with his mentally ill mother:

When he was home, he sometimes released her so she could pace the thirty-foot length of their single-room dwelling, or kick the straw pallet he slept on. He let her shuck the corn that grew wild in the small lot behind their back door, and stir empty pots, which he set up on the dining table. She liked tangled yarn. He left bundles—in every color—on the floor amidst the clutter. He recited scriptures to her, knelt with her in prayer, and said nothing when she woke late at night to call upon God and plead for forgiveness.

As the stories progress towards the present, the background details begin to fill in, giving the collection as a whole the feeling of a picture slowly coming into view. Whether this is deliberate, reflects the comparative ease of researching the present day, or is just the chance by-product of a writer finding her voice, it’s a very pleasing effect.

Some of Menger-Anderson’s characters are fairly unhinged (the mother above being one example), while others are simply caught up in the madness, fashions, or ignorance, of their times. From phrenology to silicon breast implants, from the study of “animal magnetism” to Radium-based cures:

Dora found a whole shelf of Radium Ore Revigorators in the shop Rose recommended. In fact, the store sold nothing but radium cures: a Vigoradium, a Standard Radium Emanator, a Health Fountain, the Radium Apparatus, and the Lifetime Radium Water Jug. Glass cabinets filled with bottles of Radium tonics, tablets, and creams lined every wall of the shop. The Ra-Tor Plac, encased in cherrywood, promised to perfectly radiate water with its rays, while the Linarium, which came with a special offer coupon, would instantly soothe sore muscles. The shop was new and clean, the walls and floor so white that the daylight seemed brighter inside than out.

“May I help you?” The clerk, a short man with a pleasant smile and dark hair on his knuckles, handed Dora a glass of water. “On the house,” he said. “You’re looking a little peaked.”

Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain is a beguiling set of interconnected short stories, compact enough to be worth a gamble and good enough for it to pay off.

Dr Olaf van Schuler’s Brain is published in the USA by Algonquin Books.

I’m doing something a little different for the end-of-year round-up this year. Instead of the best books of 2008, here are some of the titles that I’m sure would have been good… if only I’d got around to reading them. (more…)

Salon.com and New York Times critic Louis Bayard has spent the last few years carving out a niche for himself as a writer of historical crime stories featuring real-life individuals and characters from classic fiction. Mr. Timothy (2003) followed the continuing adventures of Timothy Cratchit from A Christmas Carol, while The Pale Blue Eye (2006) was set around West Point Military Academy and featured a young cadet by the name of Edgar Allan Poe. Both novels had a lot to recommend them; in particular, The Pale Blue Eye was a more entertaining book than 2006′s other Poe-inspired yarn, Matthew Pearl’s disappointing The Poe Shadow (which was published on the same day and as a result must have drawn at least some of the limelight from Bayard’s novel).

In his new novel, The Black Tower, Bayard turns his attention to the French Restoration and the exploits of real-life criminal-turned-detective Eugène François Vidocq. (more…)

Inside Book Publishing, 4th ed.
Giles Clark & Angus Phillips
Published in the UK by Routledge.
ISBN 978-0415441575

If you’re a writer, it may seem that mastering your craft is more than enough work, but it’s worth learning what you can about the industry as well. Whatever else it may mean to you, finding a publisher and getting your book into print is primarily a business activity, and as with any other business, the more you know before you get involved, the better your position will be.

Inside Book Publishing, by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, is an excellent introduction to the subject, managing to be both comprehensive and concise. While its primary audience is academic (it’s used on several publishing courses, including at Oxford Brookes where Phillips teaches), it actually has a much broader appeal. Chapters explaining marketing, distribution and the allocation of rights are worth reading for budding authors and publishers alike, and a detailed breakdown of the costs of publishing a book will help new writers to understand why they’re not going to be able to retire from sales of their first novel. Each chapter concludes with a ‘further reading’ list, making this a perfect starting point for deeper research into whichever topics are most relevant to you.

There are shelves of books available on the subject of publishing (and in particular self-publishing), but I think it’s worth reading something that takes a serious-minded, academic approach to the core of the subject, and this book fills that role perfectly.

The latest edition was printed this summer, and is backed up by a respectable website, also called Inside Book Publishing. The site includes a blog, which has an interesting update on the potential effect of the recession on British publishers.