Idealism is so 2008

I published the following piece on my (now defunct) website, which I set up to distribute my books on the shareware principle, with, these days, predictable results. Since then the situation has only got worse. The agglomeration of publishing firms has continued; agents may or may not deign to reply to an enquiry; and between them Amazon and Apple have got the ebook market pretty well sewn up and can do as they please with recommendation algos and all the rest of it. Then of course piracy has continued to flourish. And as a final nail in the coffin of a print author’s income, the UK government has long since raised the VAT rate from 17.5 to 20%!

Anyhow, I though this might be of some historical interest, so here it is.

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Research published in 2007 by ALCS (the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society) reveals that British authors are struggling to survive.

According to the press release, ‘the typical UK author earns 33% less than the national average wage. If this trend in earnings continues will creators be able to continue contributing 8% of GDP in the UK? If we value our creative industries so highly, can the nation afford to let this decline in authors’ earnings continue?’

Moreover, ‘the top 10% of authors earn more than 50% of total income. In other equally skilled professions the bottom 50% of workers earn nearly 40% of total income. Only 20% of writers earn all their income from writing; 60% of professional writers need another job to survive.’

Why should writers be so badly paid? Why should such steep obstacles be put in the way of the small pool of talent on which rests the entire publishing industry?

Consider the hypothetical case of Jane, a young British author who has just written her first marketable novel. The book will have taken at least 1,000 hours of her time, perhaps twice or three times as much. To develop her craft she is likely to have written other novels already.

She has at last, after months or years of rejection, found a literary agent willing to take her on. (She knows it is pointless to submit a book directly to a publisher.)

The agent secures a deal with Quiggins & Craggs, a London publishing house. They offer an advance of £3,000 on a hardback edition, with a royalty rate on full-price sales of 10%. What this means is that, each time a book is sold at the cover price (let us say £15.99), Jane will be credited with £1.599. From this her agent deducts 15% in commission and charges 17.5% Value Added Tax on that commission, leaving Jane with £1.317 for every copy sold in this way. In order to earn her £3,000 advance, she must sell 1,876 copies at full price.

With the end of the Net Book Agreement and the rise of discounting by bookstores and supermarkets, fewer and fewer sales are being made at full price. Instead authors receive a percentage, typically 10%, of the price received by the publisher. Bookstores have a markup of at least 33%. The supermarkets and big chains get more.

Nevertheless, Jane’s talent is noticed by the critics, she gets some publicity, and the book sells comparatively well: perhaps 900 copies in all. She still owes Quiggins & Craggs £2,070. The hardback edition has little chance of recouping this, mainly because the shelf-life of a hardback novel by a new or middling writer is so short. Three weeks or a fortnight after publication day, unsold copies will be returned to the warehouse.

On the strength of her debut, Quiggins and the agent between them sell the paperback rights to Barabbas Books for £6,000. Jane’s standard contract with Quiggins requires her to share the proceeds of rights sales equally, so she is due another £3,000, less the £2,070 she owes them, making £930. Her agent sends her a cheque for £766. Jane’s earnings from her novel so far total £3,237. Assuming she has spent only 1,000 hours on it, her gross hourly pay for writing her book is something in the order of £3.25 – and she has been successful.

To quote ALCS again: ‘The first ten years are the toughest of a writer’s life. The typical earnings of a British writer aged between 25 and 34 are only £5,000 – a third less than their counterparts’ in Germany. This age bracket takes in those repaying student loans, starting out on their careers, getting on the property ladder and starting a family. Where’s the incentive to keep writing at this level of return?’

The only incentive to continue is the basic urge, in born writers, to tell a story. Jane is cursed with that urge, as well as blessed with the talent to fulfil it. Let us hope that she breaks through the ranks of also-rans: in the February 2008 distribution of UK Public Lending Right, which totalled £6.66m spread among 23,942 recipients, 359 authors received between £5,000 and £6,600 (the maximum payable); 17,923 received between £1 and £99.99.

I shall not continue with this depressing analysis of a British author’s earning capacity. By now you will have got the picture.

The word ‘author’ comes from the Latin word ‘auctor’, meaning an originator, causer, doer; the originator of an undertaking; the producer of a work of art; a writer. ‘Auctor’ in turn comes from the verb ‘augere’, to make, increase, cause to grow, fertilise; to strengthen; to enrich; to honour.

Without the author, there would be no publishing industry – no Quiggins or Craggs, no Barabbas, no agent, no hard-nosed buyer from a bookshop chain. Book-printers and binders and their suppliers would have to find other jobs to do. The government would be deprived of income; the Gross Domestic Product would not be swelled by publishers’ overseas earnings: the film rights, the TV rights, the Harry Potter merchandise and all the rest of it.

A book needs an author and a reader. Everyone in between is secondary, yet the reader must buy their groceries and pay their taxes. That is why Jane’s book costs so absurdly much in the shops; that is why Jane is living in poverty.

Another way

The physical distribution of paper books and their promotion comprise the beginning and end of the grip exerted by publishers on their authors. It is easy enough to get your book printed and bound, but another matter entirely to get it noticed by critics and stocked by bookshops.

The internet has already spawned quasi-conventional publishing companies, distributing text in electronic form and providing their authors with fee-collection services. Some authors are getting online for themselves and using various tactics to promote and market their work. But so far the results have been patchy.

It is inconvenient to read a long text on a computer screen; that’s one of the reasons why paper still dominates the publishing industry. Texts can be read on most PDAs, newer mobile phones and some iPods, but paper is easier on the eye.

The advent of E Ink heralds the beginning of a fundamental shift in the publishing industry. Print will become less important; digital text more so. E Ink produces a flicker-free display which is every bit as legible as a printed page. It is used in devices like the Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and iRex iLiad. Such ebook-readers can store hundreds or even thousands of titles, doing away with the need for bookshelves. Some allow you to resize, reorientate, search, or annotate the text. Just as digital music-players have matured and become cheaper and universal, so will ebook-readers. The $100 price-point cannot be far away.

$100 will buy three or four hardbacks like Jane’s. At Project Gutenberg and elsewhere, there are thousands of public-domain etexts which can be downloaded for nothing. Once cheap ebook-readers become available, the market in paper-based editions of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens will all but collapse.

But what of copyright works? How can living authors be rewarded; how can they be encouraged to go on writing?

Some conventional publishers are selling their titles in electronic as well as paper form. Since the old model still prevails, the prices are high. To prevent unauthorized copying, these commercial ebooks are protected by digital rights management.

A protected ebook is normally device-specific. When your current ebook-reader is superseded, or fails, your library may become inaccessible, even though you have already paid for its contents.

A potential buyer of a paper-based book can pick it up and look through the pages. You can’t do that with a protected ebook. You might be able to see an excerpt, but otherwise you must buy such an ebook sight unseen. Would-be readers need to be able to browse: it’s an essential part of the choosing process.

Once a conventional book has been purchased, it becomes part of your household and anyone can read it. Your children grow up with books around and get into the habit of reading them. The same cannot be said of protected ebooks. DRM depletes the value of content of all kinds. For new writing and the spread of literacy, it is a disaster.

Reader and writer alike seem to be faced with an intractable problem. On the one hand, paper-based publishing is expensive and inefficient and keeps most authors in a state which is not conducive to creative work. On the other, we have the problem of deriving revenue from electronic books.

You’re probably familiar with the idea of shareware. Certain computer programmers allow their software to be freely copied and distributed. If users derive value from it, they are asked to make a modest payment. The main disadvantage is that some users do not pay. Nevertheless, those who do enable the shareware market to function. At least the programmers get a chance. In many cases they and their customers build up a happy and successful relationship.

Why do shareware users pay? Just to qualify for upgrades and technical support? Or to do the right thing?

I am sure that the majority of paying shareware users are actuated by conscience. The relationship between an author and a satisfied reader is even more personal than that between a programmer and a computer user. If computer software can be sold on the shareware principle, why not books? What is a book, if not software for the mind?

I suggest that new books should be released as unprotected electronic texts to be freely downloaded, copied, and read. The terms of use should be left to the authors, but most will need remuneration in order to go on writing.

The model I have adopted myself harks back to the age of artistic patronage and subscription. An 18th-century writer might have had a wealthy patron, or he might have produced a new work on the promise of payment from a list of subscribers; or both. In either case, the readers had a close connection with the writer and the book. I ask for payment of a one-time fee from those readers who have enjoyed or gained value from any of my novels.

The fee is related to the length of the work. The Tide Mill, my newest, is about 126,000 words long and I ask for £1.25 ($2.50). My first published novel, The Stone Arrow, is shorter, at about 71,000 words, and the fee for that is 85p ($1.70).

This is the shareware principle, adapted a little for novels. I not only let people duplicate and share my texts, I encourage it, because that way I might find new readers. The books are issued under a Creative Commons licence; I retain the copyright and remain free to license such rights as any third party wishes to acquire.

My blog lets readers post reviews, comments and questions; readers can also subscribe at no cost to a service which sends them all new blog-posts, so keeping them informed of developments.

I don’t expect to make a fortune from this, but the sort of people who enjoy novels like mine tend to be thoughtful and – dare I say it? – respectable. I trust them. They are likely to understand that the relationship between a writer and his reader is not purely creative: the writer must pay his bills like anybody else.

Whatever the returns from this model, they can hardly be more wretched and unfair than those from the present one.

The future

E-publishing by individual writers is the future of the book trade, certainly as far as fiction is concerned. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of titles will be offered by their eager authors, many of whom, alas, will be short of talent. The role of critics will be central. I foresee Web sites devoted to reviews and reader-rating, with features such as ‘if you liked that title, try one of these’. By this Darwinian process, good books will rise to notice. They need not be commercial, or popular, or constrained by genre. Quality will be the only criterion.

If talented authors are allowed to earn their living in this way, readers too will benefit immensely, obtaining the latest and best work for a fraction of the present price. There is no reason why paper editions should not also be produced, but their publishers will at last be relegated to their proper place in the scheme of things. There will be a place too for agents, to promote subsidiary rights.

Finally

The space between author and reader is at present not just populated by others: it is moderated by them. At every stage, from agent to publisher to bookstore, judgements are imposed on a writer’s work. Unseen and unaccountable decisions are taken as to what one may or may not read.

Freedom of speech is the fundamental freedom. Without it all other freedoms are compromised. I should be free to say whatever I like, as long as you have the identical right – even to the extent of publicly proving me stupid, evil, or just plain wrong. That is how the arts, how sciences and democracies flourish.

It has always been hard for a writer to break into print, but at least in the past the decisions to accept or reject were taken mainly on cultural grounds. Today other influences are at work. In all parts of the media, the role of accountants has grown: witness, in publishing, the trend towards selling many copies of just a few titles. Accountants are not really the best people to decide on artistic merit. Nor are those whose judgement is clouded by some fashionable political belief. A young editor at a publishing house, fresh from university and with little experience of the world, is ill equipped to exercise the power of life or death over a submitted manuscript.

The information revolution is gathering pace. Change is coming for the publishing trade.

For open-minded readers and their long-suffering, exploited, and penurious writers, it cannot come soon enough.

Richard Herley, 8 February 2008

The Secret Joy of Reading

Just in time for the holidays I have released a collection of ten non-fiction pieces, all but one from this blog:

My First Fountain Pen
Kathleen
The Subconscious in Fiction
Nausea
The Good and Great Reader
Feminism
Politics and Fiction
The Super Panther
Fuzzy Computing
The Secret Joy of Reading

Please help yourself to a free copy from Smashwords. It is also available from Amazon in a specially formatted Kindle edition, currently priced at the minimum (99 cents), and should soon appear for nothing at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel and Sony.

The delusional writer

Eddie Wright posted this wonderful comment on a thread at Backword:

Since when is being delusional a bad thing?

I think the very act of sitting down to write is delusional. Creating something from nothing and assuming anyone, anywhere will read it and respond to it, is delusional. If writers weren’t delusional, nothing would ever get written. We’d all sit around all day working mindless bullshit jobs, coming home, eating dinner and watching reality TV while being perfectly practical and realistic and never finding that inspiration and perseverance and CONFIDENCE to sit down and just fucking do it.

But we’re not practical, we’re not realistic, we’re not traditional…we’re all a bunch of weirdo, delusional freaks who thought someone would actually WANT to read our highly personal, sometimes traumatizing, sometimes bizarre, sometimes ridiculous, nonsense. You bet your ass I’m delusional. I’m delusional as shit and I’m proud of it. The moment I get realistic, the moment I get logical, the moment I get rational is the moment I’m checking out.

Lobotomize me if you have to but I will not give up my delusions.

I got there from here, which I reached from Mike Cane’s latest and possibly greatest deconstruction of the Grand Panjandrum.

Learning from readers

There are currently 192 reviews of The Penal Colony at amazon.co.uk and 70 at amazon.com: that ebook is less downloaded in the United States, maybe because the cultural references pass American readers by. Many of the reviews, I’m relieved to say, are positive. Some of the exceptions are from readers who either haven’t finished the book or who haven’t understood what it is about.

Failure of comprehension is largely the author’s fault, but reading novels is a skill that must be acquired. The level to which public education has sunk, and the hegemony of the visual as a medium of entertainment, have produced a group of young people who have not been exposed to enough written fiction to know how to react to it. They suppose that if an opinion is expressed on the page, it must be the author’s. They have not learned to take a broad view, to wait and see what happens and form a judgement accordingly, but are instead blown about from scene to scene by every puff of wind. Nor have they any awareness of the resonances and undercurrents which make a piece of writing come alive.

The central driver of The Penal Colony is the change brought about in its protagonist by his experience on the island. He arrives with a fairly complete set of prejudices and loses them all. Thus I have been castigated as a bigot, a racist and a homophobe. Attitudes towards homosexuality, including my own, were less sympathetic in the 1980s (the book was drafted in 1985-6). This was the time of the AIDS scare, and there were controversies about homosexuality in the armed forces which I thought applicable to the social structure of the community in which my hero ends up. The Penal Colony is a story of its time and should be read as such.

Most reviews, however, should by no means be disregarded, even though some of the opinions may seem unreasonable to the author. The act of reading is a collaboration. If it fails in any consistent way there is something wrong with the book. A number of reviewers have expressed their dissatisfaction with the ending. They say it is too abrupt, and would like to know what else happens to the main characters. They accuse me of having got bored with the project, which was not the case.

My take on the story was that it should cover the protagonist’s time on the island. It begins with him waking up there and effectively ends with his departure. The brief final chapter was intended merely to put a cap on things and point the way to the future. Not a single professional reviewer complained about its brevity: but then professionals are expert readers fully versed in the language of fiction.

An author with any sense will take far more notice of the non-professionals – if he wants to be read, they are the people he must please. Disappointment about the ending is flattering, because it suggests that those readers who complain care about the characters. It is also sobering, because it reveals a lack of skill on my part. I am coming to the end of drafting a new book. The closing chapters are more explicit than I’d planned: I have heeded my critics’ advice.

Professional reviewers are part of the gatekeeping apparatus that interposes itself between writer and reader. Their opinions are often partial, and are primarily filler between the ads on the literary pages. Of course, you also have to read amateur reviews with a bit of scepticism, since some of them are planted by shills or the author in person, but by and large the amateur reviewer has no axe to grind. His or her review is likely to be honest, prompted by a sincere desire to share pleasure or warn others of trash.

This is one aspect of the ebook revolution which is not often trumpeted, but it should be. In the past all one got was the odd fan-letter forwarded (or not) by the publisher, and fan-letters are useless as a critical tool. Direct access to the opinions of the reader is an incredible gift for the author, and breaks down yet further the barrier between them. So please don’t hold back if you’re minded to post an opinion about any ebook you’ve read – you’ll be doing everyone an excellent turn!

Author rankings

Writing is a solitary craft, and many writers seem to be less outgoing than the norm. For such people, self-promotion is a nightmare. They see it as little more than boasting, which I suppose it is. Sometimes, in desperation, the writer crosses the line from boasting to begging, and then it’s even more painful to behold.

In theory, especially in the past, the publisher relieved the writer of this unpleasant chore. The writer might have been expected to do the odd reading, or bookshop signing, or – if he or she were at least semi-famous already – make an appearance on radio or TV. But the bulk of the puffing was done by a publicity manager, typically an extrovert who saw nothing wrong with hyperbole. In practice, nowadays, publicity budgets tend to get spent on authors who are already successful: the money is used to retrieve an inflated advance. B-list authors are expected to promote themselves.

Writers should write; publishers should make things public. The imminent collapse of traditional publishing has changed all that. What hasn’t changed is the underlying need of readers to find new talent and for new talent to be given a chance.

In a TeleRead article in October 2008 I suggested one solution, in the form of a dedicated ebook-review site, but now I can’t see that ever getting off the ground. Each ebook distributor (e.g. Amazon, Sony, Apple) has its own set of reviews, on its own site, put up by readers who just happen to use a Kindle, or a Reader, or an iPad. Yet more reviews are scattered all over the Web, at Smashwords, on blogs and boards and social networking sites like Goodreads.

The number of new ebook titles is growing at an explosive rate. Buried in all the self-deluding dross are some really good books – but how is the reader to find them?

For the sake of what follows, we’ll take Amazon as an example.

Books are already ranked there, and that’s fine, but I propose a ranking system for authors as well. Part of this would be an option for a reader to ask to be notified of an author’s next book. The notification could take the form of an email automatically generated when the book-file goes live at KDP. It would contain a link to the new book’s page. Or Amazon could simply send a sample to the reader’s Kindle without further ado. The reader should at any time be able to withdraw permission to be notified about any or all authors, and will need assurances about privacy.

The more notification requests an author racks up, the greater will be his or her ability to satisfy and intrigue readers. Data about the number of reviews posted for that author and their star-ratings, “likes”, etc., could be added to the mix, together with an indication, like a tag-cloud, of the genre or genres the author’s books are in.

The rankings could then be organized in various ways. Overall movers and shakers, who’s hot and who’s not in each genre, who has the highest-rated reviews per book, who’s popular in which country – the details need to be worked out by someone more computer-savvy than me, but you get the idea. A wonderful new writer with only one book would at least get a chance to be noticed.

All this would cost money to implement, but Amazon would be amply rewarded by the increase in sales and loyalty. Notified readers could even be offered a discount, or an exclusive opportunity to read the book before the official publication day. There are all sorts of possibilities, and I must say that Amazon, in particular, would be brilliant at exploiting them.

However, any of the distributors could take up the baton. Indeed, it would give them an edge against Amazon’s dominance of the market. If they all used author-rankings, readers would have a much easier time in finding new books.

As for the writer, he or she would have more time to write. This alone would improve the quality and quantity of the work, but there would also be an incentive to become technically educated, which many beginners are not. For the new novelist this means learning about story structure, dialogue, viewpoint, and all the other skills that must be mastered to make a novel come alive. It also means learning to be professional with respect to editing and presentation: readers don’t like typos and bad covers any more than they like cardboard characters and wooden dialogue.

The net effect would benefit everyone – reader, author, distributor. We would be taking a decisive step away from the capricious and often mistaken judgments of the traditional and self-appointed gatekeepers, and allowing, at last, true merit to rise.

The Drowning

I have just released a new book. The title is The Drowning and the extent about 125,000 words. It is set in England and Nigeria between 1944 and 2015 and represents something of a departure for me in that it is a purely literary novel.

One of the nicest things about independent authorship is freedom from the shackles of genre. Publishers, especially these days, have become timid. They expect their authors to produce more of the same: hence the popularity of series novels. That puts the author in a quandary. Should he continue on the treadmill, writing the same book over and over again? Why is he even bothering with authorship at all? There are many other treadmills in this world, and nearly all of them pay the operative more.

My previous books have all been more or less classifiable, but the classification is arbitrary and restricting. It exists for the benefit of booksellers, not readers – unless they are of that variety that likes to stick with what it knows and regards reading as an activity akin to chewing the cud. Nothing much wrong with that, I suppose, it’s harmless enough, but supplying fodder to such an audience was not really the siren call that lured me into this trade in the first place.

No, I like to tell stories. The setting and the “genre” are important only so far as they feed into and reinforce the narrative. Thus The Tide Mill had to be an “historical novel” because of the level of technology required to make the plot work. The mill itself, its dependence on the moon and tides, its function, its politics and legal status, and its place in the religious beliefs of the time, all act as a framework and a metaphor in the account of human relationships I was trying to portray. On their own, tide mills are not especially gripping for the general reader, and to find out about them you would be better off looking at textbooks.

The Drowning is about conscience, the phenomenon that may or may not be the end of a thread leading into the most mysterious labyrinth of all. Exploring the labyrinth – trying to understand the apparently senseless fact of our existence – is the proper business of the novelist. Of course, on the journey he has to intrigue his companion, the reader. Partly the reader must be entertained and informed, but more importantly he must be offered the chance to compare his own life with that of the characters, to wonder how he himself would react in similar circumstances, and to draw from the story whatever meaning the author has consciously or otherwise built into it.

If a book remains with the reader after he has finished it, then it is a success. I believe The Drowning may be such a book, but giving a verdict on that is not the proper business of the novelist: it is yours.

See first chapter

Review by Ru Viljoen at Goodreads

Dec 09, 2011

Rated: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is beautiful. Romantic, subtle, politically insightful and philosophically insightful.

I always enjoy books that span a lifetime. It makes the reader re-appraise their priorities from a more distant perspective than is usually used.

I would recommend The Drowning as heartily as it was recommended to me.

Writer at work

Terrific insight from Michael Frayn, a writer I very much admire:

Q. Where do your ideas come from?

A. Ideas for things come into one's head, or bits of ideas; you feel there's something – there's some meat on the bone, there's something there that lures you on. The more you think about it the more you're led into this new world and the more of that world you see. And part of having an idea is having some notion of how you would tell the story. It's not just thinking it would be nice to write something about the Crimean war, it's having some particular way in mind of writing something about the Crimean war, and the idea for the way to tell the story helps you to see what the story is. The story suggests the means, the means suggests the story; it's mutually dependent. And you don't have very much choice in the matter. Ideas come, characters suggest themselves, and the nature of the story and the nature of the characters dictates how it's going to be done.

I suppose if people are not writers or painters or whatever they see the life of the artist as being one of great freedom, but it's not really; it's as constrained as anyone else's by the material that's available. The thing seems to have some kind of reality in one's head; it seems to be something that one is discovering, rather than inventing. I see that as a kind of psychological trick on oneself, because the whole point about fiction is that it's invention. It doesn't really seem like it at the time – it seems as if you are slowly discovering something that already exists and seeing how the different parts of it relate to each other.

And

Q. Do you have a routine? What tools do you use?

A. It's very difficult when each day you start with a sort of cold brain and nothing happens. In my case I look back over what I was doing the day before and make a few small corrections, often to typing errors, then maybe a few grammatical errors, and then I see a better way of putting something, and gradually you get drawn into the world you've created and you start rewriting what you did the day before and gradually coming up to the point where you left it the day before and going on. And certainly at the end of each day's work I try – when my brain is hot and stuff is happening, but when I'm really too tired to go on – to make hasty notes and write down bits and pieces of what's going to come, anything that's already in one's head, sort of scatter it down on the page so that when you start the next day you've got some stuff there to work on.

And

Q. What sort of a relationship exists between writers and the people they create on the page?

A. Well, you do get very obsessed with them. You can't help thinking about them a lot. However much you think in advance, however much you plan, the events will get changed as you come to them and work on them. And the events are the characters, the characters are the events. So they are in flux. It's not like thinking about friends, or people one knows, whose lives are not under one's control. With characters, you are actually creating their lives with them. It does seem – and I realise this is a psychological trick and it sounds very coy – but it is as if they are speaking and leading those lives. It's a very symbiotic relationship. You do seem to be with people who have minds of their own, thoughts of their own, but at the same time you're very much involved in leading their lives with them.

His is just one interview: you can read the others here (Guardian UK).

Authorship in the Information Age

I have just ended a two-year experiment. Readers were invited to download six of my novels and send me a fee if they enjoyed any of them. You can see the original proposition here.

The experience bears out much of what I have read about online content. Of more interest, it also got me thinking about the practice of authorship in the Information Age.

Downloads and payments

At least 36,568 ebooks were downloaded from external, authorized sites, and well over 100,000 from my own. Some titles were posted on torrents. Originally the requested payment varied with the title (85p and up), but PayPal took too big a slice of that so in 2009 I increased the rate to a flat £1.50 per book.

The gross income (after PayPal) was £522.28, net £258.38 pre-tax, or about 0.19 pence per download. 144 payments were made. The smallest was 85p; the largest a remarkable £50, which followed £10 from the same donor. Some other people paid more than the requested amount, a few less. A British reader sent me a £10 Amazon gift certificate on finishing The Tide Mill, while some members of the MobileRead Book Club (which made one of the titles its monthly choice) paid even though I gave them a waiver.

By far the greatest number of payments came from the U.S. and Canada, followed by Britain and then the rest of Europe. There was a handful from Australia, and a very generous one from a reader in Singapore. Despite the fact that Chinese visitors were almost as numerous as Americans, no other payment was received from Asia.

I am most grateful to all those who paid, many of whom wrote supportive or even flattering emails, blog comments, or messages in the PayPal dialog; and all of whom gave me great heart and confirmed my belief that there are plenty of thoroughly nice people out there.

Non-payment

Failure to pay can be ascribed to six motives:

1. Didn’t read
2. Didn’t like (at all or enough)
3. Liked but decided not to pay
4. Liked but forgot to pay
5. Liked but had trouble with the site (it was down for a while)
6. Liked but didn’t want to deal with PayPal (I had a couple of messages about this)

Of course, you never know how many downloaded ebooks are even looked at, never mind read. Of those that are read, you don’t know how many are enjoyed. Conversely you don’t know how many are duplicated and sent to friends. It is no use trying to guess how many readers enjoyed the books but didn’t pay. However, given that some people did pay, it is safe to conclude that a number of the others chose option 3.

For an analysis of this behaviour, take a look at a 2008 blog post by Stephen Poole, who conducted a similar experiment. The comments are especially illuminating; there’s no need to rehearse them here.

Attitudes to books

A common theme seems to emerge. Internet content is widely, but not universally, regarded as free: if it isn’t, then it should be “liberated” and shared via torrents. Of more concern to authors, what is printed in books is also widely, but not universally, regarded as free, an attitude fostered by (a) the free-at-point-of-service provision of books during education or by public libraries, (b) the existence of the public domain, and (c) the nature of paper books.

This attitude is consistent with a flourishing culture. It is reinforced early, by (a); (b) provides a vast and growing body of literature out of copyright; and with (c), once you have bought a paper book you own it and can transfer ownership to someone else.

Few readers, I should imagine, are much exercised about copyright. They might know it to be a limited contract society makes with creators in order to encourage creation, and that depriving an author of a royalty should piously be deplored. Into the mix, however, despite the perennial background bleating of authors, goes also a vague notion that every writer is a millionaire.

Authors and their agents and publishers depend on copyright for their living. We hear a lot these days about digital duplication of copyright works: this I believe is one of the main impacts on authorship, since readers appear reluctant to reward the producers of freely distributed books. There are other impacts too, nearly all related to computers.

A buyers’ market

The number of people who can write is dwarfed by the number who think they can but can’t. Press stories of huge advances paid to unknowns heap the slush piles even higher. The mountain of manuscripts is so big that few mainstream publishers will even look at an unsolicited submission: everything now has to go through agents.

The attitude of publishers to authors is a product of this buyers’ market, and has probably got worse in recent years. I won’t detail the Kafkaesque tribulations of my own dealings with publishers in the twenty years to 1997, but let me say that London publishing at that period was regarded as a socially desirable occupation. Perhaps it still is. Many staff were recruited by class and connection rather than ability. If an author’s sales shot into the stratosphere he was treated with shameless sycophancy; otherwise he was never allowed to forget his place.

I cannot imagine that some of this attitude doesn’t seep down to readers. When a reader enters a bookshop or library he is reminded of just how many books are begging to be noticed. The Romans had a proverb: quae rara, cara – what is scarce is valued – and the converse surely holds true.

The effect of computers

Word processors have made the physical composition of text much easier than it was in 1971, when I started out. The slush-pile is becoming not just a mountain, but a lofty and majestic range. As ebook displays and the internet loosen the publishers’ stranglehold on the means of production and distribution, so is a lot of that slush-pile finding its way onto the Web.

The availability of professional works is increasing too, as authors and publishers convert their backlists into ebooks: and, thanks to Project Gutenberg, more and more public domain material is coming online. And then there is Google Books.

All this is bad news for aspiring writers, but both good and bad for readers. Good because they have more choice and prices will tumble; bad because it will be harder and more time-consuming to find new books of quality. Not only will these be outnumbered by rubbish, but I predict that the means whereby they arise – the craft of authorship itself – will become a niche activity.

A dying craft

In his essay, Why I Write, George Orwell says:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. – Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.

Writers, then, are born with sundry traits and defects which come together in a pathological urge to tell stories. This is even true of non-fiction, but since my experiment involved fiction I will concentrate on that type of writing here.

Inventing a story is a creative act, needing talent. The storyteller’s rhythm and taste will develop as he grows, informing and refining his talent, but if he lacks the techniques to tell his stories effectively he will never fulfil his potential. The craft of fiction requires thousands of hours of preparation based in extensive reading, besides the acquisition of a large writing vocabulary and expertise in grammar, usage, and the structure and exposition of plots. A skilled editor needs only a few hundred words to tell if a writer knows his stuff.

If would-be writers are unable to acquire these tools of the trade, the standard of work must plainly fall. A writer needs time to learn and experiment, to find his voice, and he needs some sort of encouragement to sustain his efforts. For many of us time is in ever shorter supply. As for encouragement, that can be as nugatory as the hope of success. In the past, new writing had far less competition. Recognition of talent was more likely. The printed word was more precious than a fleeting collection of pixels on a screen, and in order to produce a script for submission you had to type the thing yourself – or pay plenty to have it done.

Hyperlinked reading

There could be even worse in store. I read the other day that the internet is supposed to be altering the way young people think.

Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: “It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web. Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate. There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.” ...

Dr David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University, added: “What I notice about students from the first day they arrive at university is that they ask nervously, ‘What do we have to read?’ When they are told the first thing they have to read is a book, they all now groan, which they didn’t use to do five or ten years ago. You say, ‘Why are you groaning?’ and they say, ‘It’s a book. How long is it?’”

People brought up on hyperlinks will not be receptive to the linear experience of a novel or short story. Still less will many of them wish to tell tales in that way or have the patience to learn the craft.

The word according to Jobs

Steve Jobs was vilified for his observations on the Kindle, “which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading”. Unfortunately, he has been right about such things more often than he has been wrong, and anyone who thinks that iBooks will amount to anything but a minor aspect of the iPad is mistaken.

It’s all a bit glum if you love books.

As long as there are old fogeys like me around, there will be a market for them, but (if  Mr Jobs and Dr Krotoski are right) as we die off the audience will become smaller and smaller, with ever less incentive for storytellers to choose linear writing as a medium. Linear fiction will never die out, but will become a backwater served by authors who have independent means and write purely to be read.

At the age of eleven, 20% of British children are functionally illiterate. I’ll say nothing more about educational trends, both here and in the United States, except that judgment on these is probably implicit in Jobs’s remarks.

Back to the experiment

The willingness of MobileRead Book Club members to pay, even though they were not obliged to, is especially interesting. As member of that forum myself, I had engaged in the discussion and the others knew they were dealing with a real person.

The number of downloaders who enjoyed the books and did not pay could be smaller than I suppose. The site at first allowed simultaneous download of all six books, two clicks away from the home page. Many visitors simply downloaded the files and took a glance, if that, at the rest of the site. They did not engage with me at all: they just wanted the “free books”. Those who downloaded from other sites had even less of a connection. How many copies were read all the way through, with the attention and pleasure that establish a relationship with an author?

When I first made my offer I tried to make my site as informative and engaging as possible. My subsequent disappointment at the low rate of return did not take into account the typical behaviour of people – of all primates, indeed, perhaps even all animals – in situations where they are anonymous and have no relationship with the provider. Add in our conditioning to the value of books (especially those we “borrow”); add in also the amount of reading material freely available on the net, and I think I did quite well to gross £500.

I am still offering my ebooks, but this time through Smashwords. Five are for sale; one is offered free, as a loss-leader, and you are very welcome to grab a copy. You needn’t read it, buy the others, or engage with me if you don’t want to. Keep it somewhere safe, though: fifty years from now it may turn out to be a curious antique.

Politics and fiction

Political fiction is not to my taste, unless, perhaps, it confirms my prejudices. The short story or novel is not at its best when used as a megaphone. Dickens's agitation for reform was always subordinate to his vocation as a storyteller. Even that most political of novels, Orwell's Animal Farm, succeeds primarily as fiction and is happily read by schoolchildren who know nothing of Stalin and the USSR. Whether he intended it or not, Orwell's talent for engaging the reader's humanity trumps the political message, powerful and memorable though that is.

In the hands of lesser writers, the political novel is not only lumpen and dreary but soon dates. Characters whose sole function is to embody some political idea have no life outside themselves. We cannot identify with them. They have no organic interaction with the other characters or the plot. That is because they are a product of the conscious mind: the calculating mind of the author, who is trying to persuade the reader to his point of view.

The best fiction is produced in the subconscious. Employing certain skills that he has acquired (for example, a knowledge of vocabulary and usage), the author uses his taste and sense of rhythm to order words on the page, but the ideas spring from a deeper source. He is often unaware of exactly what he is doing. He supposes that the story has taken on a life of its own, or that this character or that demands more attention than he intended, whereas all that is happening is that he is following the dictates of the mysterious vat where the story has been fermenting - his subconscious.

The act of composition is of two kinds. First, there is the Monday-morning, blank-screen, must-do-500-words-today kind, which is not only unmitigated torment but usually produces little that is not pedestrian. But then there is the other kind. Somehow, the author's brain slips into a different state. He puts self to one side: perhaps, as in meditation, there is some change in electrical activity. At any rate, he finds the words suggesting themselves. He imagines the scene and it is transmuted into prose. The more vividly he imagines it, the more vividly the reader will recreate it.

This second state is fragile and precious. When it is shattered - for example, by some trivial interruption - the author knows at once what he has lost and is angry with the interrupter. His anger may seem exaggerated and irrational, but it could have taken him an hour, a morning, a whole day, or even a week, to reach that magic state.

There is a widespread misconception, then, about the cleverness of authors who seem to have a God-like overview, who are aware of every nuance of symbolism that goes to reinforce the thrust of their work. If credit is due, give it to the subconscious, that receiver of all experiences and impressions, that vessel shaped by upbringing, class and personality. The conscious author is merely its clerk.

That is what makes good literature so engaging. As readers, we connect with it also at a subconscious level. Mind speaks to mind. Our subconscious can quickly spot a fake, which is why overtly political fiction is so dull.

The unwitting content (political and otherwise) of good fiction is fascinating. In telling his tale, the author inadvertently reveals much about himself and his beliefs.

These thoughts were prompted by a re-reading of Billy Liar by the late Keith Waterhouse. It is one of my favourite books, not least because it is, especially in the early chapters, very funny. Billy Fisher is nineteen and living in 1950s Yorkshire. He rails against the small-mindedness of his surroundings: his dead-end job at an undertaker's, his lower-middle-class parents and grandma; and he rails even more against the philistinism that assails him on every side. His solace is fantasy. To relieve his boredom he tells lies, many of them pointless. Of course, these land him in trouble, not least from the two girls to whom he is engaged simultaneously and who share a single ring. And he regularly escapes into his imaginary country of Ambrosia, where he sees himself as progressive leader and hero.

Keith Waterhouse was born in 1929, into a working-class household in Leeds, Yorkshire. His father sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow and his mother was a cleaner; she encouraged young Keith to apply himself to his books in the hope of getting a place at the local grammar school.

Grammar schools then were a stepladder to the professions for children of all backgrounds: the tuition was freely provided by the state. I went to one myself. I had to pass the 11+ (an exam taken at the end of one's time in primary school, ages 5-11), then sit an I.Q. test. Finally I was interviewed.

Once inside the school we were streamed. Half of us were earmarked for an academic education. The curriculum for the others was weighted towards vocational subjects like technical drawing and metalwork. Boys (it was a single-sex school) who failed to pull their weight were chucked out. They landed at the "secondary modern", the school for the also-rans. Here the teaching was as unashamedly vocational as ours was unashamedly elitist: such subjects as plumbing and typing were taught in addition to the core curriculum. Just as underperforming children could be demoted from the grammar schools, so pupils in the secondary moderns could be promoted.

Perhaps the worst defect of this system was its reliance on the 11+, for which some comparatively gifted children were not, at that age, ready, and which (if exacerbated by ambitious parents) put intolerable pressure on the candidates. If you failed, you were perceived to be a failure, doomed to a lifetime of servitude - a palpable untruth, by the way, since many graduates of the secondary modern schools went on to become successful business-people earning far more than their grammar-school peers in the Civil Service, say.

The system's blatant meritocracy also offended on ideological grounds. In 1965, under a newly elected Labour government, its abolition began in earnest. Anthony Crosland, Harold Wilson's Secretary of State for Education and Science, is quoted by his wife as saying: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland". By 1970 my former school had been turned into a "comprehensive", admitting children of all abilities.

A debate has raged ever since about the destruction of the grammar schools. Some say that the socialists (many of whom themselves attended such schools) spitefully kicked the ladder away; that the abolition was part of a larger, Gramscian, and entirely successful, plan to dumb down the voters and make them more susceptible to propaganda and, by impoverishing their life chances as well, to make them ever more reliant on the state. Others say that the comprehensive system allows all children to flourish, not just the privileged few who happen to be able to pass an exam; that such inequality so early in life can lead only to a perpetuation of the class structure which is such a curse on Britain. The issue, as neatly as any other, divides left from right.

Waterhouse failed his 11+ and the experience scarred him for ever. Thanks to an inspirational teacher at his secondary modern, he did not give up his ambition to write, but the going was very hard, and it was not until the success of Billy Liar, published when he was thirty, that he was freed from poverty.

Yorkshire, the north of England generally, has a tradition of supporting the Labour Party rather than the Conservatives. Coming as he did from a lowly background in the Labour stronghold of Leeds, it is not surprising that Waterhouse espoused left-wing views. These are on display in Billy Liar. Billy is contemptuous of the middle-class pretensions and capitalistic attitudes of Shadrack, his boss at the "funeral furnishers". Because Shadrack, a former car salesman, inherited his share of the firm on the death of his father, his position is seen as undeserved. When Billy's grandmother dies, he recommends that his mother enlist the Co-op (a socialist organization) rather than Shadrack. When Billy fantasizes about standing for Parliament, he unquestioningly casts himself in the role of Labour candidate. During Billy's daydreams about Ambrosia, his arch-enemy is categorized as the "reactionary" Dr Grover; and so on.

Yet, reading more closely, one detects something else at work. On almost every page we see that Billy is an individualist, a lone wolf who refuses to be bound by convention. His burning ambition is to be a scriptwriter: he has already submitted jokes to a famous comic in London, whose vague but encouraging response Billy tries to twist, in his own mind, into an offer of work. Billy and society are at odds. It is very hard to picture him living by the socialist creed.

Besides the two girls to whom he is engaged there is a third, Liz, a free spirit whom Billy genuinely loves. Each of the other two is a parody of the mindless voter for Labour or Conservative, but the enigmatic Liz is different. We do not know her politics, even though, in Ambrosia, she is cast as Billy's Home Secretary. She plays an increasingly important part in the story, becoming pivotal at the climax when Billy must decide between the adventure of London and staying at home in Stradhoughton.

After Billy Liar, Waterhouse actually lived Billy's dream and went on to great success as a journalist and writer for theatre, film and TV. In 1970 he joined the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror as a columnist and remained there until 1986, when that paper was bought by the fraudster and quondam Labour M.P., the late Robert Maxwell. In what might be seen as a surprising move, Waterhouse went to another mass-circulation daily, the rabidly rightist Daily Mail, where he remained for 23 years. To quote from his obituary in the Times:

By that time the tone and content of his columns had moved a long way from those of his early days on the Mirror. The socialist convictions nurtured by his upbringing in the industrial North had been sorely tried by the direction he felt the modern Labour Party was taking, and he came to see its years in Government from the famous electoral victory of 1997 as being rudderless and without conviction.

I used to read his column whenever I got the chance, for his use of language, for his wit and inventiveness, and for his wry point of view. Even before Tony Blair's victory of 1997, I was struck by what seemed a drift to the right. It is likely that Waterhouse and his many friends believed himself a socialist to the end, an adherent of old rather than New Labour, but I am not so sure.

The seeds of my doubt are in Billy Liar. As an employee, a member of the team, one of the collective, Billy is hopeless. He is late for work, idle, and accomplishes the minimum. He steals from the petty cash and, when tasked with sending out promotional calendars, dumps them and trousers the postage money. He has no respect for his family or anyone else except himself and Liz. These are hardly socialist virtues: yet they make a sort of vague prototype, however repressed and transmogrified, of the author himself.

I am not suggesting for a moment that Keith Waterhouse was ever like that in reality. It is the subconscious, contradictory portrait I find interesting: the portrait of someone who would be unlikely ever to vote at all; or, if he could be bothered to vote, it would certainly not be for Labour.

But then ... contradiction within contradiction: let me end with a quotation from the book itself.

The strange, poppy-like flowers seen nowhere else in the world were in full bloom in Ambrosia, or what was left of it. We had won the elections, and I was pressing forward with my visionary plan to build an entire city over the dunes on a gigantic wooden platform. The reactionary Dr Grover had got a commission set up to investigate me, but I knew for a fact that he had been bribed to put forward a rival plan for another city to the west, over the marshes. In the inner layers of No. 1 thinking, Grover got his way and the houses began to sink, seventy-one dead and fourteen unaccounted for. "We will rebuild," I announced in The Ambrosia Poppy. "We will build on the dunes."