A New Breed of Bookseller

I used to worry that ebooks would lure young people away from reading to online games, which offer a superficial dumbed down kind of story. I wrote a post about my dystopian vision, my answer to Ray Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451'. But so far the rise of ebooks does not seem to be leading readers away from books. Quite the opposite, in fact, as ebooks seem to be reaching out to increasing numbers of readers. 

As with higher education, you cannot hope to engage a wider audience without compromising on standards to some extent. But is any strand of culture necessarily superior because it is accessible only to a narrow - some might say narrow-minded - intellectual elite? The highbrow intelligentsia can continue to enjoy reading and writing challenging literary books, in the same way that University Challenge reassures us that there are still students who are exceptionally brilliant and knowledgeable. That has not changed. 

What is happening, I suspect, is that with the advent of cheap accessible ebooks, more and more people are enjoying commercial or popular fiction, just as increasing numbers of youngsters benefit from higher education. And that can only enhance the lives of those individuals, and society as a whole, as people become more educated and better informed, from formal studies and through wider reading.

The way readers discover new books has also opened up. Big publishers invest heavily in their blockbusters, which are promoted with marketing budgets running to hundreds of thousands of pounds. In the face of such competition, how do unknown - sometimes self-published - authors slip past the big names to reach Number 1 on kindle? Their success can only be explained by the potential for communication, and product accessibility, offered by the Internet. 

Word of mouth recommendation has always influenced our buying habits to some extent, but before the explosion in social media it could operate only on a small scale. Now a recommendation online, together with a link, can be a relatively powerful marketing tool. 

We are witnessing the emergence of a new breed of bookseller. They are not professional book reviewers, or book sellers in High Street bookshops. They are not book clubs or shop displays funded by publishers. They are readers who have found their voice on social media websites, blogs and online book clubs. The reading world is becoming a democracy. Let's hope people vote to read more! 

Interview

Thank you to Lainy for this interview. http://www.alwaysreading.net/2015/11/q-with-leigh-russell.html

Amazon

We read a lot of posts by books lovers criticising Amazon. Is it disingenuous of me to write a post in their defence, just when my agent has negotiated a three book deal with them for a new series I am writing? Well, perhaps you might like to read to the end of my post and then draw your own conclusions. After all, that is one of the glories of reading, that we are free to do just that, read and make up our own minds.

    We read a lot about Amazon decimating our bookshop chain, Waterstones, just as Waterstones was previously accused of destroying independent bookshops. Part of the perceived problem with Amazon was the rise of ebooks. But let's examine this. Waterstones rushed to take a share in the market for kindles. That appeared short term at the time, but turned out to be a sound business decision. 

    It may be ironic that selling kindles helped the bookshop chain to survive, but to some extent 'supping with the devil,' as some characterised it, meant that Amazon played its part in helping to save the bookshops. I am not suggesting that Amazon's motivation was anything other than commercial, but it created a virtuous circle. And that, surely, is what we are witnessing in the book world today. The truth is that the advent of ebooks and ease of purchase online have resulted in more people reading more books. That can only benefit all book sellers, and that is largely thanks to Amazon. 

    I value bookshops and libraries. It is well known that I have campaigned vigorously to support both. But I cannot see why there should be a conflict between print book and ebooks, or physical stores and online book providers. I appreciate the fact that I can buy books online wherever I am, at any time of the day or night. That does not prevent me from going into bookshops, which I frequently do, and buying books there. Amazon has not put up barricades outside bookshops. On the contrary, with more people reading, if bookshops are canny and make their spaces reader friendly, they could be selling more books than ever before, as the community of book readers and book lovers grows. 

    There has never been a better time to be a reader, or a writer or, I think, a bookseller. 

Does It Matter What We Read?

     It seems that amazon and Apple have whizzy computer algorithms (whatever they are) capable of analysing our reading habits in order to recommend books to us. As far as I can gather, they do this by registering data such as references to sex, and no doubt word length and sentence length as well.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? No, not that computers will soon be writing books for us -  if that isn't already happening. (How would we know?  Because some books are so badly written? Hmmm. That might explain a lot... ) Forgive me, there are some areas that are simply too horrendous to contemplate so no, I'm not musing about computer-generated books.
      I'm wondering about the subtleties of context.

''Did the victim have sex last night?'
'No, Sergeant. There's no evidence of any sexual activity, or any sexual interference of any kind last night, although she was sexually active.'
'Yes, and we know she was a lesbian.'
       That's four references to sex in what is clearly a (badly written) murder enquiry, with no mention of death.

Conversely:
'She lay immobile as a corpse when he entered her, and could have been dead throughout, her body rigid and unresponsive.'
Two references to death and no mention of sex in what is clearly a (terribly written) sex scene.

What might amazon and Apple's whizzy computer analysis systems make of those? Fair enough, they were written specifically to illustrate the point. Let's pose the same question with some proper writing:

'Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs Jones was already snoring.
As soon as the light in the bedroom went out there was a stirring and a fluttering all through the farm buildings. Word had gone round during the day that old Major, the prize Middle White boar, had had a strange dream on the previous night and wished to communicate it to the other animals. It had been agreed that they should all meet in the big barn as soon as Mr Jones was safely out of the way.'

      What conclusions might a computer draw from that? And what about Shakespeare's verse? Or the poetry of TS Eliot?

'Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.'

     The mind boggles. The mind of the analysing computer, that is...

And yes, amazon and Apple, I've read Orwell, Shakespeare, and TS Eliot, as well as Chandler, Lee Child, Edith Wharton, P G Wodehouse, Kurtz Vonnegut, Dickens, Mark Twain, JD Salinger, Dostoevsky, Kazuo Ishiguru, Jerome K Jerome, Jeffery Deaver... to name just a very few of the random and eclectic collection of authors I've enjoyed. I could name thousands - from Alfred Tennison to Jane Tennison, William Shakespeare to Just William... a hotch potch of authors most of whom who could  never be linked in any way, other than that they are all brilliant in their own way - in my very human opinion.
The issue is that taking any one of these books as a starting point, a computer programme would never recommend most of the others. 'You enjoyed Carry on, Jeeves? You'll like Crime and Punishment.' I don't think so.
Do we really want to restrict our reading experience to one kind of book, or one narrow genre? Surely that misses the point of reading fiction. Yes, we read to be entertained, but through reading the words, ideas and thoughts of others, we can also widen our horizons.
We shouldn't allow an ingenious computer programme to limit our understanding of the world.

The Death of the Novel?

First as reader, now as author, all my life I have  have been permanently engrossed in at least one book.  Like many people, fiction is, paradoxically, my 'reality'.
One of the appeals of fiction is that it offers us an escape from life where the pace of change seems to be speeding up all the time. Most events are consigned to the relative oblivion of history after a year, or a month, sometimes even less. As HW said, "a week is a long time in politics."
But sometimes it can be instructive to take a longer view, so let me take you back in time to 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London. One of the most remarkable records of that event comes from an eye witness account by Samuel Pepys, whose diary has survived. This is not a novel. Not only is Pepys telling us about real events, but he couldn't have been writing a novel in 1666 as the form did not yet exist. It would not emerge for nearly another century.
The first novel in English was published in the mid 1700s. It took the form of a series of letters, as writers had not yet envisaged the concept of the prose narrator as a character in its own right, or even as a disembodied omniscient authorial voice. The letters were a clever device, taking the reader inside the thoughts and feelings of different characters. This allowed for intimate first person narratives, from different view points. It was entirely new, or 'novel'.
Today we retain the name, but the form itself is no longer ground breaking, or even 'novel'.
There has been a lot of discussion recently, some of it on this blog, about dwindling book sales, and 'discoverability' for authors, and how they can attract more readers. But perhaps the real problem lies, not with the proliferation of authors, or the failing quality of writing, or that people are no longer reading, but with the form itself.
Has the novel had its day? And would that matter?
We can access stories from other sources - films, television, games, the media - but these are not the same as novels which go into more depth. Through the medium of stories, the best novels offer us insights into contemporary life and morals, and hence ourselves. Think of any great novel - Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Dickens, Hardy - not only were they instrumental in changing opinions at the time, but they provided a record of society and how people were thinking at the time they were written.
Which brings us back to Samuel Pepys, whose diaries tell us about his daily life in the 1600s - no different to a modern blog. Perhaps we have come full circle, and the reason new novelists are struggling to break into the market is that the novel form has outlived its popularity.

Postscript
No sooner had I finished writing this post than I came across an article about "embracing the artistic potential of social media". Really? Here it is:

"David Mitchell To Put Next Work On Twitter
"Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell is to publish his next work on Twitter. The British writer has penned a short story, titled The Right Sort, in 140-character instalments. It will be serialised in clusters of about 20 tweets at a time over the next seven days. In total there will be 280 Tweets.
But while embracing the artistic potential of social media, Mitchell himself is not a tweeter and had to open a Twitter account for the project."

The end of the novel as we know it? Sigh. Sometimes I would prefer not to be tuned into the current zeitgeist, but then that is the job of an author.
Or is it?

The Demise of Independent Bookshops

Is it coincidence, or inevitable in the current zeitgeist, that just before reading a request on the CRA website for "posts about independent booksellers and publishers" I saw that my local independent bookshop is closing. This is the reason they give: "Sadly, fast developing technology, changing buying habits and the domination of a few major retailers are ending the era of the independent bookshop. The local community has been displaced by the global community and has disempowered the High Street, and with it smaller ventures like our own."

I live in North West London. It's not what you might call a cultural desert. When I moved here (OK, it was twenty years ago) there were two local bookshops, in addition to the library. Within a couple of weeks there will be no bookshops at all. We have a WH Smith still flying the flag for books, but they offer a limited choice. I was recently told by a manager of a WH Smith Travel store that they can only stock my latest title, as they only sell the books that are in their bestseller charts. (Yes, you can work out the flaw in that logic too.) 

There are multiple responses to the demise of the indie bookshop. For the first time since records started, we had fewer than 1,000 independent bookshops six months ago, and the number has continued to reduce since then. I don't have an up-to-date figure, but it's not going to be an upward trend. To some extent this is one of many ramifications of a society increasingly dependent on the internet. It is a symptom of changing buying habits, reflected across our dying High Streets.

Are people reading less? Well, maybe not. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that ebooks make books far easier and cheaper to access, encouraging reading. So as long as authors are writing, and people are reading, does the disappearance of the physical bookstore matter? Of course it matters to the 'middleman' - the traditional publisher, with their teams of editors, proof readers, jacket designers, publicists, it matters to booksellers and distributors, and librarians. 

But what difference can it make to readers? Well, possibly quite a lot. 

I remember the excitement I felt on first entering a public library. I wanted to read every book in sight. The experience of looking at a screen isn't the same. You can't see walls of books with one sweep of your eyes, books you can reach out and touch, flick through, replace, against a background of books, books, and more books. 

I worry that if too few people buy physical books, they will cease to be financially viable to produce, and my children's children will never experience that visceral excitement of wanting to read every book they can see. 

Is this merely nostalgia, or are we losing something that helps to make human life precious?

Knowledge is Power

'What's so scary about smart girls?' Nicholas Kristoff asks, writing in The New York Times on May 10th. Sensible men might well reply that they have many reasons to feel scared of smart girls. But far from making a trivial sexist point, Kristoff is referring to the horror of teenage girls being kidnapped from school in Nigeria. The extremists perpetrating this atrocity want to sell young girls into slavery, rather than allow them a basic education. 'The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.'

This is one of most shocking episode in human history. It attacks the core values that underpin every civilised society, values of equality, human dignity, liberty, safety, and the right to education. It has echoes of classic dystopian narratives that posit a world where every aspect of human behaviour is controlled by political rulers, including even our thoughts. In Fahrenheit 451 reading is prohibited and all books are burned as dangerous sedition. In Nineteen Eighty Four Orwell introduces the spectre of the thought police, who watch and monitor people's private thoughts. Brave New World imagines a world where people are controlled by drugs, sedated to prevent them from thinking for themselves. Without education books become superfluous, and the capacity for independent thought is stifled. Reading matters. Without the inspiration of other people's ideas, without words to think about our own ideas, we are no more than intelligent animals with an unused potential for abstract thought.

When we were about eleven or twelve, my school friends and I leafed through Lady Chatterley's Lover. We were hunting for the sex scenes which are so subtly written as to be almost impossible to spot. It's natural for children and young teenagers to be curious about sex. Needless to say, we were disappointed in DH Lawrence. How times have changed! When fifty Shades of Grey came out, I made no secret of my views. I have no problem with consenting adults behaving in any way they choose in private. That's no one else's business. But I worry that girls of eleven or twelve are now leafing through a book where a woman masochistically submits to a domineering man. Is this what young girls today are accepting as a role model? Is this how they believe they have to behave in order to attract a boyfriend? It's a far cry from Lady Chatterley's delicately worded sexual encounters. And it's very worrying.

What we are seeing is an extreme from of censorship. Creationists in the US refuse to allow their children to learn about evolution, different faith schools in the UK restrict their syllabus to suit their own beliefs and bigotry, and now children are being deliberately denied any education at all. There is an old saying, 'Knowledge is power'. Literacy gives us the power to determine our own path in life, the power to think. In being denied education, these young girls in Nigeria are being condemned to physical and mental slavery.

Where should we draw the line in deciding the influences to which our children should be exposed?

Reading

For a long time I've been telling children I meet in bookshops that reading will make them clever. Reading uses the part of your brain that transforms squiggles on the page into sounds, and the part of your brain that interprets those sounds as words, and the part of your brain that connects those words to meanings. It also uses different parts of your brain to remember what has happened before in the story, visualise images of what is happening, and speculate about what might happen next. 'It's like a complete work out for your brain,' I tell them.

It's hardly rocket science to work that out, is it?

In the inimitable manner of academics, someone in the US has recently researched the effects of reading on brain activity and established that reading triggers changes in the brain.

'Being pulled into the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days after reading, scientists have said. The new research, carried out at Emory University in the US, found that reading a good book may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory. The changes were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the primary sensory motor region of the brain.'

Now, what was I saying?

At the BBC

DO BOOKS MATTER?

From as far back as we can trace, people have felt the need to share stories. Wasn't early cave man a forerunner of the fisherman boasting about 'the one that got away'? Imagine a prehistoric hunter with limited language but terrible injuries, posturing about the sabre toothed tiger that 'got away'. The cave man lived to tell the tale. Isn't that 'telling the tale' part of what differentiates us from other species of animal?
We hear a lot about the decline of reading, but I'm not sure that's actually a true picture of what's happening. Because we need stories.
I'm a great one for voicing fears of a 'doom and gloom' vision of  a dystopian future without books. Long before the phenomenal increase in ebooks I was writing about the 21st century version of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where books become obsolete not through political suppression but simply from people not longer reading; we have the technology to become a post-literate society.
My first series offers a snapshot of what has happened in the world of publishing. When Cut Short first came out, in 2009, I remember an author friend urging me to ask my publisher to bring it out as an ebook. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, but duly passed the message on. Six months later, the ebook appeared. Road Closed followed a similar pattern in 2010. By 2011, with Dead End, the ebook and print book were published on the same day. Since then, with Death Bed in 2012 and Stop Dead and Cold Sacrifice in 2013, the ebook has become available to download six months before the print book is published.
The medium itself is not the key issue. The important question is whether fewer people are reading as a result of this change. That's an impossible question to answer in terms of my own books. What I can tell you is that sales of the ebooks have been phenomenal and I suspect they have reached a far wider audience as a result of reaching Number 1 on iTunes, and amazon, than they would have done had they been published solely as print books. Of course that's anecdotal, and the 'people who know' - (whoever they are, I'm certainly not one of them) - may have another story to tell.
Which brings me back to the point of this post. For several hundred years (how long is that in man's history?) books have provided a medium for sharing stories. I am passionate about books. I love bookshops, libraries, the feel of a new book... but think about a book you have read and loved. What lives on in your mind are the characters, the emotions and insights you experienced while reading, the images of scenes and actions. Books can change us, not because of the feel of the paper, but by their content.
What matters is the story a writer tells.

The Future of Reading

I’m not convinced that initiatives to give away free books encourages a perception that books have value. I understand the rationale behind these initiatives which seek to engage new readers and promote particular authors. But I suspect the consequence of giving books away for free is that books will just become further devalued. Many readers say they never pay full price for a book – even though the average book will set you back the price of a couple of cups of coffee, or a couple of pints in the pub, and without revenue from readers, publishers and authors will largely disappear.
Bricks and mortar bookshops face huge competition from online suppliers, charity shops, supermarkets and free book campaigns – and that’s before considering the impact of ebooks. I’m passionate about the survival of bookshops and spend a lot of time in different branches of the major chains, and in libraries, talking to readers. I wish more authors would support bookshops and libraries in this way.

(Just in case the situation here continues to deteriorate, I’m building my intergalactic fanbase - you can see a few of them in the picture).

There is a more serious concern which is not how books will be delivered in future, but whether people will continue reading on a significant scale, with all the other forms of entertainment on offer. Today’s youngsters spend their time in front of television, computer or mobile phone screens and bookshops have their work cut out to attract them.

But it’s a campaign worth fighting and one they must win if they are to survive.

Writers and Readers

I received my PLR statement today. Around 3,000 people borrowed my books from libraries in the UK in the year to June 2010.
Who says libraries aren't popular nowadays?
As an author, it's hardly surprising that I spend a lot of time writing, but these days authors also spend a lot of time talking. As a relatively unknown 'name', my events vary and sometimes I chat to half a dozen readers in a library reading group, always an enjoyable experience. But here are a couple of photos, both taken at a recent talk I gave where more than 200 people turned out to hear me talk about my books. You can just about see me, a tiny dot on the stage.

Maybe one day I'll even see a queue of more than two people waiting in front of my table at a book signing...

Did I say people?

Libraries and the future of reading

Recent figures show the number of active library users has dropped by over 2% while visits to library websites increased by almost 50 per cent. In 1849 William Ewart introduced a Public Libraries Bill. Conservatives objected, concerned that the middle and upper classes would pay for a service used only by the working classes. One MP announced "people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage.” Nevertheless the Public Libraries Act was passed in 1850.
The 19th century MP who complained that reading makes people more difficult to control had a point. Setting aside powerful arguments about the arts, culture and the advancement of knowledge, reading is essential if we are to have a population able to think for themselves. Because reading gives the individual access to all the information (and misinformation) in the world.
Over the past four centuries we have established a largely literate society in the West but literacy is losing its appeal. Today’s children feed their imaginations playing interactive games where their parents’ need for stories was supplied by books. We have the technology to move towards a largely post-literate society. All the text we need can be recorded with voice activated software for a listening audience rather than a readership. It’s easier. Already we access much of our knowledge from the television or online, and we see more stories on the small screen than the page.
But watching or listening to stories or information is a very different experience to reading. Apart from the argument about using imagination, when you’re reading you can speed up, slow down, pause to reflect, reread and refer back to an earlier passage. There is no one else’s voice to influence or interpret the meaning of the words for you. As reader you control how you read and interpret the words for yourself.
All of this makes books not only valuable but “an essential part of having and educated and literate population” as Wikipedia puts it.
So it is worrying that libraries are not mobbed by people wanting to access free books.
When Britain’s first public lending library opened in Manchester in the mid 19th century it was seen as an event so significant for literacy and democracy that Dickens visited, saying this was an institution “knowing no sect, no party and no distinction; nothing but the public want and the public good.” He would surely be turning in his grave to know that libraries are losing their popularity. If enough people lose interest in books, we risk losing our independent access to knowledge and even our ability to think for ourselves.