Some things don’t change

In the past few weeks, the papers have been full of Cherie Blair, Lord Levy and John Prescott washing their tawdry linen in public – sorry, promoting their heavyweight political memoirs. As books go, they’re all something of a disappointment. One thinks of previous political memoirs – Denis Healey, Tony Benn, Barbara Castle – and how well-written, revelatory and ick-free the genre used to be. As a way of raking in the cash, though, they continue an extremely time-worn tradition. I’ve just finished Richard Aldous’s The Lion and the Unicorn, a fascinating dual biography of Gladstone and Disraeli (I know that sounds like the worst kind of wanky Summer Reading pull-outs in the Observer, but bear with me) and when Disraeli leaves office for the last time, he is offered the then megabucks sum of £10,000 to write a novel. Considering how this was more than the heavyweight novelists were on at the time (Dickens and George Eliot were the biggest earners on £9000 a book), and you can see that in 150 years, very little has changed.

Are books getting longer?

One of the books I’ve been really enjoying over the last couple of months (the ones I’ve commissioned aside, of course) is Mark Penn’s fascinating Microtrends. Penn is an American pollster famous for coining the phrase ‘soccer mums’, a small but influential group of voters who could swing elections. In Microtrends, he describes dozens of these other groups that aren’t large enough to make headlines, but still plenty big enough to change things. One movement he notes in culture is that of the rise of the long attention span – that despite culture supposedly dumbing down, there are many of watching longer films, loving The Sopranos and The Wire, and not being put off by doorstep books. There’s a graph in the book, which shows how the length of the average book has risen over the past ten years, from just under 400 pages in 1995, to just under 500 pages in 2005.

That might be a sign that people want stuff in more depth. But my first reaction as a publisher was to think, whatever happened to the art of editing?

Fair Enough

Monday to Wednesday this week has seen publishing taking part in its annual gathering to moan about the London Book Fair. I think it’s compulsory to go on about how much you hate it, even though secretly everyone quite likes a couple of days out of the office swanning around as though they’re dead important. The days of the big fair books felt a long time ago, with most of the major announcements being books that had been bought months back and the rights people seeing more action than editors. The best bits, as always, were not the appointments themselves, but the people you bump into in the corridor. On Tuesday night, an impromptu gathering in a nearby pub swelled into what felt like half of publishing by the time I wended my way. I got more out of those couple of pints than the rest of the fair put together.

And the Winners Are...

Ever so slightly belatedly, here are the results of the Bad Idea/ Portico writing competiton. The winner was Emma Hooper, with the following writers shortlisted: Susan Jackman, Caroline Moran, Tom Williams and Benjamin Wood. If you ever want to know what it feels like being an alcoholic, try queuing up with competition prizes of five bottles of whisky plus a sandwich for your lunch! There was a whole range of quality entered, but what I particularly enjoyed was the passion that people showed for the process of writing itself. I was disappointed, perhaps a little bit, that every single one of the entries were electronically written, and no one had written in pen. But I think that's just me. The rather wonderful Bad Idea Anthology itself, is out next month, complete with an exciting looking evening at the V&A.

Competition Time

For the past month or so, Portico and Bad Idea Magazine have been running a writing competition. The prize, apart from various alcoholic inducements, is to be included in the first Bad Idea Anthology, which we are publishing later in the spring. The competition was to write a 1500 word piece on the subject of 'The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard'. In front of me, I have a large stack of entries to read through by the end of the week -- on Friday, the editors of Bad Idea, hot literary agent Charlie Campbell and my good self, will retire to argue the toss about who deserves to win.
So far, the entries I have read have been the following: funny, touching, scary, terrible, wrong, right, unreadable and rewriteable. One entry came as a tracked document with all the changes and deleted sections. I'm guessing this was a mistake (either that, or an incredibly clever piece of postmodernism that was way too smart for me), though it was interesting to follow through the train of thought. Overall, though, I was touched at how many people were willing to enter and how much thought had been put in. Maybe it was the subject matter, but I found myself thinking about the process of writing a lot more than I was expecting. Which made for a very nice surprise.

Cashing up, cashing down

The perennial argument about whether people in publishing are paid enough has raised its head again, with that current zeitgeist twist being a well-subscribed Facebook group bemoaning the lack of decent salary. I’ve been there myself – when I started out years ago, my salary was well down on what friends in other industries were earning. It’s a situation exacerbated by the fact that publishing is almost exclusively London based, which doesn’t exactly help in making the money go far. But it’s a situation that’s not going to change in the short term, for simple reasons of supply and demand. I’ve been interviewing for a new assistant in the past couple of weeks, and both the number and standard of applications is remarkable: scores and scores of good, bright, well-educated graduates eager to get their first foot on the ladder. The truth is that for everyone complaining about how much they are getting paid, there are many more people who would love to be in a position to have something to complain about.

Could this device really spell the end of books?

Shouts the Metro in one of many obits in today's press for the printed form. As with virtually every newspaper article that starts with a question, the answer, of course, is no.