Recalculating....

This blog has been moribund. No, dormant; hibernating. It has slumbered through a long winter of attention-deficit. Let's see if I can prod it back to life, as I need prodding back to life. For nearly six years, I have spent a great deal of my non-earning time (virtually all, actually) dealing with a Domestic Situation which has left no time for this blog. The DS is shifting. I am allowed out. But the landscape is almost unrecognisable.

I don't usually talk about dreams, but I'll share the dream I had last night as it is a fine example of the subconscious speaking loudly and clearly:

I had an interview for a job; the first part consisted of playing chess in a well organised room on a neatly laid out board. I won the games easily. For the second stage, I went into a room with junk piled high and the chess sets were already half-played games. They were those travel sets where you have to push the pieces into peg holes. I tried to reset some, but it was a lot of aggro. I had to play against a disembodied voice. I told it I couldn’t be arsed with this and we could play without a set and spoke my first move. The voice was clearly disturbed by this change. It took a long time to make a move; it took longer and longer as the game progressed, and after a few moves I said I couldn’t be bothered — I didn’t want the job that much and I was leaving. The voice called, ‘Wait — you have the job.’ My response was ‘Why? And why would I want it if this is how you plan to run things? If it’s just gong to be a mindfuck, I don’t want the job.’ 

The second room is when things became complicated in my domestic life. The final question is now. Do I want this job? Being a writer has become a harder and harder way to make a living. But it's what I do. It's all I want to do, but I need to find ways to make it work better. I think that's something a lot of us in this job feel. I'll be poking around among my writer friends to find new strategies. One or two have shared their experiences already, in private, of how they added a self-publishing stream to their work which became very lucrative. I will be thinking about that. And thinking about other ways that give me more of the reward from my work. 

The next few posts will be musings rather than advice. There are fewer certainties in publishing than there were when I started this blog. The landscape has changed. The sat nav needs resetting. You can come along for the ride, or come back in a few months when I might know how it works. I will share the good roads, the back roads, the dead ends and the crashes here as I know a lot of other writers are in the same boat (whoops, mixed metaphor: if the boat is on the road, no wonder we're in trouble!)  

On giving up and giving in

Hard at work with Zola and coffee

Yesterday, at the tea after a memorial service for a talented woman who had packed much into too short a life, I mentioned to an acquaintance that I had gone away to write for a week and during the first few days had given up on a book I'd been working on for a few years and decided to write something different. My co-conversationalist considered this a very brave and decisive action, which surprised me rather as it seemed to me to be an entirely pragmatic and sensible one. There is also the knowledge that giving up on a book is far from irreversible. Unless I were actually to delete all the files and throw away all the books and notes, I can go back to it later.  Leaving a book project is not like leaving a partner or a house. No one else will move into my space while I'm gone, even if I leave it for a few years (as I have done in the past with this particular project).

Spot the fish: some things take
time to identify

It is, of course, hard to give up on something you have been working on for a long time, especially if you still think it is basically a good idea. And to be honest I have not given up hope of one day wanting to get back to it - but it will be a day when I can devote the time to it that it needs, in unbroken chunks, rather than a few hours here and there separated by weeks or months of more urgent work and domestic responsibilities. The week in Sardinia I thought would be enough only showed me one thing - I was restless, less excited by it than I had remembered being, and found it hard to get into. Now, I could throw good time after bad, or cut my losses. If I had been at home, I might have done the first but with only one week to write on something uncommissioned that would have been rash. Being unwilling to write off a substantial investment is one of the worst things we do to ourselves in all areas of life. I remember bemoaning to a wise writer friend (Louise Berridge) that a remark she had made led me to feel that I had wasted ten years of my life on something, and she said that it was better to have wasted the last ten years than the next forty. Which is entirely true.

Finding things in rockpools,
including books and sea urchins

But giving up is not giving in - it is moving on. I'm not going to sit moping about the half-formed novel. Indeed, there is a certain irony that this particular book might never come into being as it's about things that don't come into being. I did not set it aside because I don't like it any more, though I have lived with it for too long. Nor, I think, because it's hard - though perhaps because it's too hard for current circumstances. I set it aside because I realised it's not what I should be doing right now.

This is an exciting time in publishing, particularly in the world children's non-fiction which is my original territory. There will always be fiction publishing. It makes no difference to the world whether I write that novel this year, next year, in 2025 or never. It's not as though the world is short of children's fiction. But there are projects I want to do whose time is ripe. I will regret it if I let that time pass while fiddling with a book that's not going right. Better to have wasted the last three years on a book than the next ten.

Back to work

As soon as I decided I wasn't going to work on it that week, a weight lifted from my shoulders. I found a new pattern to the days - working franctically in the morning on the book I did want to write, then spending the afternoon lying reading in the sun and poking around in rockpools on the beach. And that spawned another book idea. I know what I'm doing now. I have lots of ideas, and I can even prioritise them. All I had to do was give up.

Retreating: running away from the battle to write

Have you ever been tempted by the adverts for writers' retreats? Do they really help you write more?

I've been on one official retreat, which was a bit of a disaster: after a single day of writing I got labyrinthitis and spent the rest of the time feeling sick as the world swayed like a ship beneath me. It should have worked. I went with three other lovely writers - all more famous and successful than me, and all better at not having labyrinthitis. It was a proper writers' retreat, with all our food provided, lovely countryside to walk in, a fire to write by, prosecco delivered to our desks at 6pm, and so on.

This year I'm doing it a bit differently. I'm at the Hilton in Olbia, Sardinia, with no one else. The hotel is in a cultural and aesthetic desert so there should be nothing to lure me away from the desk. There is no one to chat to. If I don't write I'll get bored.

Which brings me to pondering the word. Is a writer's retreat a sort of running away, like a retreating army? Or is it re-treat, as in have a nice time again? This place is definitely a batten-down-the-hatches-and-get-stuff-done kind of place. My only stipulation to myself is that I don't use the time to work on the commissioned work I would be doing if I'd stayed at home, but that I use it to do the projects that get shuffled aside: one that my agent has been waiting for for quite a long time and one that is brand new and she doesn't know is coming.

I started with the first, with reading and thinking and trying to find the holes and restructure where necessary. But I'm not excited by it here. I can't get into cold London fog when it's bright Italian sunshine outside. Also, I write best in cafes but it's been too windy the last couple of days to do that (I mean, to sit outside in a cafe). So I turned to the other one which is still fresh and exciting. I know, finish the old one first - but they are very different and the second is easier to do here. It's a bit like retreating from the retreat, though. Tackling the first project required a retreat from life to get the thing done and this is a re-treat - a chance to enjoy it all again. Perhaps that's what it should really be about: reinvigorating that love of the job that got us all here in the first place.

I'm starting to think a week won't be long enough, though. Maybe I need to become one of those people who lives in a hotel, probably Simpsons on the Strand, writing in pyjamas and having lunch and cocktails. But perhaps a permanent retreat doesn't work and I'd have to start borrowing houses and families from people so I had some responsibilities to re(-)treat from.

SATs 'n' all that

Those of you in the UK will be aware that there has been a lot of fuss this week and last about SATs, the tests that primary school children in England (that's grade school, or first school) are obliged to take. In particular, the fuss is about the way that writing - or grammar - is taught and tested. Young children are being obliged to learn not only grammatical terms but completely invented ones, such as 'fronted adverbial', and identify them in a sentence. Their own writing has to observe ridiculous practices, such as only using an exclamation mark after a sentence starting 'How' or 'What'. And filling their work with 'wow-words' - unusual words, usually adjectives, intended to give their writing a bit of oomph. (This latter is a widespread teaching practice rather than something the curriculum spells out as a requirement.)

This approach to writing runs a high risk of wrecking any child's nascent enjoyment of language. Nicola Morgan and I have, with the committees of our respective groups in the Society of Authors, have put together a statement against the government's practice in this regard; it's on the Society of Authors website. I have blogged about wow-words (this will also be published in The Author this month) and exclamation marks on ABBA, and Nicola has blogged about teaching grammar on her own blog. The statement has been taken up by The Guardian, who reproduced a chunk of it straight after it was issued. And now it's gone global, being taken up by the Daily Times in Pakistan. It's obviously something people feel strongly about.

None of us is against the teaching of grammar. And it's not an argument about testing per se. The people who object to this particular testing regime include some who approve of testing in primary schools and some who don't - but this particular testing regime is iniquitous. Essentially, the curriculum authority has come up with a whole lot of rules about language, supported with terminology, which it insists children as young as 6 learn. Some of this terminology and these rules are pure invention - they are not supported either by traditional grammar or by current and past usage by real authors. So children will see 'rules' they have to follow which the books they read don't follow - confusing in itself. These rules and terminology are very complex and so, correspondingly, are the tests. Adult professional writers, some with degrees in linguistics and English can't answer the questions. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, couldn't answer questions [video] about these grammatical entities when asked in the House of Commons. Consequently, a great deal of time in school is spent teaching to the test - training children to pass an insane test that does nothing to improve their use or understanding of language and a lot to destroy their burgeoning enjoyment of it. Many teachers are close to breaking point.

The test and work for it are demoralising and destructive. Children are set up to fail. Many parents kept their children away from school so that they would not be subjected to the test. The minister for education condemned them for it. But countless schools reported children in tears, even the brightest children unable to answer the questions. What useful purpose can this possibly serve?

It's not hard to frame teaching of writing and how it works in a way that increases rather than reduces children's enjoyment and understanding. Here is the bad way:

1. Which sentence contains a fronted adverbial?
a) 'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (I Was a Rat, Philip Pullman)
b) 'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (The Dead of Winter, Chris Priestley)

Here is a better way:

1. Which sentence tells us how a person did something before telling us what they did?
a) 'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (I Was a Rat, Philip Pullman)
b) 'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (The Dead of Winter, Chris Priestley)

And here is an even better way:

'Thrilled to be trusted with such complicated instructions, Roger took the crowbar from Billy.' (I Was a Rat, Philip Pullman) - do you see how putting the descrption first makes us eager to read on to the end of the sentence, to find out what Roger is thrilled about?

'I stood in the morning room with Hodges, not knowing what to do.' (The Dead of Winter, Chris Priestley) - this sentence creates a feeling of expectation and impatience. The standing is stretched out as the character and we, the readers, don't know what is he will do next.

Oops, no test there. Damn it. The kids might just see how the technique works instead of being able to name it. That's no good, is it? And if the explanation is considered too hard for young readers (Year 4 is the time fronted adverbials are introduced), then they are too young to need the term as it's useless to them. If you want to know which terms children have to learn - and/or what they mean - there is a list on The School Run's website.

How about we bolster #readingforpleasure with #writingforpleasure? Let our children enjoy language. If we don't, we'll lost a whole generation of writers - and not just writers of fiction, poetry, screenplays, and so on, but writers of biography, science books (and articles), journalism, history, philosophy...

Wow words - or not

Oh dear, I should have been here - but I'm over at ABBA again writing about what a terrible thing the 'wow word' phenomenon is: De-WOWing word words. It's got a lot of attention - obviously an issue people are concerned about.

Truffle-hunting

Over on ABBA today, with a truffle-hunting pig and Evernote. If you don't use Evernote, you should!

Grim and gruel

I have pleurisy. Doesn't that sound Victorian? Not quite as good as consumption in that regard, perhaps, but also not fatal, so it has its advantages. I feel I should be chopping up the furniture for firewood, but (a) the axe is somewhere at the top of the garden and (b) not much of the furniture is actually flammable, most of it being, according to the labels, treated with flame-resistant substances so that it can legally be sold. Clearly whoever regulates the flammability of furniture is not aware of the needs of starving, consumptive writers in garrets.

To be fair, I'm not starving. I can drive to Waitrose to buy gruel or, if things get really bad, have gruel delivered by Ocado. Though I am lying in bed in an unheated garret, so I'm halfway there. The unheated garret is my normal bedroom at the moment, as I've sub-let more sumptuous and comfortable parts of the house to people who seem to be strangely unafflcted by pleurisy. Perhaps next year I should sub-let the garret instead.

What's all this got to do with writing, I hear you grumble, while locating your axe and gruel-supply just in case. Well, it has a bit to do with it. I have deadlines - of course - and deadlines don't go with death or gruel. Usually, I don't tell editors I'm ill or inconvenienced unless the problem will definitely have an impact on their work, or I know them very well and trust they know that I won't let the problems have an impact on their work. It can go wrong otherwise, I've found. Warn an editor you might be a bit late delivering because of a health/family problem and they panic and take your decisions for you. 'I thought it would be helpful...' No, it's not. I will suggest what is helpful, thank you. You just deal with your end of things and trust me to deal with my end of things and decide what I can - and want - to do.  

You can see their point. They have a book to deliver to a schedule. (A schedule which is usually screwed up by people other than the author, but we'll leave that for now.) If you are going to miss the deadline, or might miss the deadline, it's professional to give them good warning so that they can put things in place to limit the damage. But it's important for editors to realise, too, that if we are acting professionally and doing that, they have to trust our continued professionalism and not panic. So I have told the editor who is expecting 60,000 words on 16th February that the book is likely to be a week late, and why. I have told him what else might happen - I might get worse, and the book will be later; I might get better quickly and it will be only a few days late. I trust him. He will tell the copy editor not to leave time immediately to deal with this book, so the slip won't mess up another person's work schedule. And we will, between us, win the time back on the schedule later because I'll turn the editorial queries around quickly. We will meet the print deadline. All will be well.

That's how a professional relationship works. Trust and openness and discussion. Editors sacrifice the right to be kept informed if they panic and act unilaterally when given early notification of possible difficulties. If they do that, next time they won't learn anything until the project is definitely in some trouble. If I ask an editor to work with me to avoid a problem, and they see that problem as already existing and needing their immediate action, without consultation, they won't get the same opportunity next time.

Authors might be mavericks in that they work in their pyjamas all day and don't see the need to attend meetings. And they might look like mavericks to editors if they turn down the chance to work on boring books with one-week deadlines for a paltry fee. But they are, mostly, proper professionals who want to deliver a good book on time and work with their editors again. So, editors, if we have pleurisy or sick relatives or our house has flooded, please listen to our suggestions for solving or avoiding problems before cancelling the project or fleeing to Cuba. And please tell us before doing it, too.

Of course, if I cut my arm off with an axe while hacking up non-flammable furniture, the schedule will not be so easily fixed. But I probably won't care then about remaining professional. At least not until I have sourced a decent prosthetic arm. So - off to the Ocado page for gruel and axes. And I'll bookmark the prosthetic arms page.

A view from the bridge

Lava in Lake Nyiragong

 

You could be forgiven for assuming I'd died or gone over to the dark side - maybe become a banker or something else that dare not lift its head in the booky corner of the web. But no. I've been that iconic squeezed middle that is pressed as thin as air by the needs of generations above and below. But enough of that. I miss being here. It's all too easy for the years to slip by that way. They will still all have my support. But somehow the days and minutes must be prised apart for other things, too.

The things I do all day matter and I have freely chosen to do them. But other things matter, too, and it's time to find a way to do some of them. So Stroppy is open for business again. Writing matters to me, and the fate of writers matters to me, and that children have access to books - good books. And these books don't write themselves, you know.

This year I am Chair of the Educational Writers' Group in the Society of Authors. There will be events (for EWG, I mean - I rarely do events-as-writer since the carbon dioxide of publicity chokes me). This year I will write all the books I'm contracted to write and I might even make real progress on one or two non-contracted projects. Because if I don't do it now, I will regret and resent that I didn't.

It's difficult to draw a line around what to do for others, and how far to let short-term demands compromise long-term aims or needs. I would rather have loved and cared for people dear to me than have written 250 books instead of 200 books. No one will miss those 50 books; even I will only miss two or three of them. I am a firm believer in sorting out what matters to you and prioritising it, regardless of what other people think should matter or what they want you to do. I would rather spend a day looking after MicroBint than doing a school visit, so that's what I'll do. But there must be balance, too. It's important to seek out those two or three books I'd miss and make sure I write them. And, of course, write enough books to pay for sticks to keep the wolf from the door. It would be nice if they could be the same books, but that's asking a lot.

Legend tells that Empedocles threw himself into the volcanic crater of Mount Etna, keen to prove his immortality (or to be turned into a god). I'm not going that far. But  I feel it's time to do a bit of prising apart of those dark wodges of time and let the red-hot ooze come out, fiery and enthusiastic to run downhill. Move aside, dark wodges....

Information wants to be free? It is already

 There are many people in the anti-copyright brigade who claim that information wants to be free, that the sum total of human knowledge is our joint heritage and that this is not compatible with copyright law and other regulations that restrict intellectual property.

A lot of things are covered by IPR. What I am not dealing with here is original research that discovers information that is commercially valuable - how to make a particular new plastic, for example. That's a different part of the debate. And I'm not talking about fiction, which might or might not be considered to be information. I'm talking here about the people who like to defend ending or vastly reducing copyright in books because 'information should be free'.

Information IS free. That's what wikipedia is for. Many, probably most, of the facts in my books are - I am fairly confident - available on Wikipedia. Not because I took them from Wikipedia, but because most things end up there sooner or later. You might have to go through a very large number of pages to find everyone of the facts that I have included in a particular book, and it will take a long time, but they should be there somewhere. So someone having to pay for my book about - say - gravity or spies or evoution or demons does not mean that information is not available. The work I have done on collecting and collating and connecting, on expressing and explaining is NOT free, and there is no reason why it should be. People who have freely given their time to write and correct Wikipedia (myself included) are giving you information. You don't need to steal it.

Let's take a step back. Assume I want to know about asteroids. There is lots of information about asteroids available on the NASA website and it's likely to be reliable. I can use this information - it's free - to write a children's book about asteroids. Why would a child read my book rather than look on the NASA website? Because I have selected the most interesting and relevant (for the child) information and presented it in a way that a child reader can understand. I have avoided unnecessary long words and complicated sentences. I have worked with an editor and picture researcher to find suitable images and diagrams that make the information easy for a child to understand and exciting to read.

I am not claiming to have studied lots of asteroids or to have collected data in space. Those are not my areas of expertise. The people who have collected that information have been paid for their work. My area of expertise is finding and presenting information in an appropriately accessible way for my readers. It's a type of work I expect to be paid for. And why not? I do it for 35-40 hours a week, just like people do other jobs, and I have spent many years learning and practising my trade.

If books are stolen by people who think information should be free, publishers won't commission more books. Then everyone will have to read through Wikipedia - plus a gazillion other websites, books and academic journals to find the information that goes into a book such as Evolution. So by all means take the information that is freely available online and through libraries, but if you want the particular expression, presentation, layout, combination and selection that makes a book more than information, please pay for it.

"I've been looking at your website..."

Do authors need websites? It's a question often asked. The answer, predictably, is 'it depends', though I'd tend toward 'Yes'. New authors are sometimes told by their publishers to get a website. Personally, I think this is a bit presumptuous. If a publisher wants you to have a website, they should pay for one. If they are going to give you a small advance, they can't then demand you spend it on promotion, which is their job. But see my later point about why it's better to have your own website than a page on your publisher's website.

Let's start at the beginning. Not all writers write the same kinds of things. I'm on the committee of the Educational Writers Group (EWG) of the Society of Authors and when I asked a group of educational writers a few months ago how many had a website, only half did. I was stunned. When I've asked that of a group of children's writers, they all - or pretty much all - have websites. The EWG people tend to fall into three groups (though I'm trying to extend it!)  - they either write in the English-as-a-foreign/second-language market (EFL or ESL), or they write test/exam papers and textbooks, or they write children's non-fiction (of any type) and schools fiction (reading schemes and so on). The first two don't generally have a website. They work for the same publishers again and again, their readers don't know their names, and they don't see a need for a website. I'd argue that there could still be a benefit, but if they are getting enough work, then why bother?

On the other hand, there are many writers who do/should have a website. Probably most. Why? What's the point? This is where it all depends. Ask yourself the following questions and answer honestly.

1. How many books have you published?

• zero
• one or two
• several
• many

If you haven't published any books, what are you going to put on your website? Think carefully about that. A website needs content.You can talk about yourself and the book(s) you are writing, and what drew you to those topics/stories, but don't assume an air of authority about publishing and writing (though you can about an area of specialist knowledge) and don't say anything that you won't want future readers, editors, agents, teachers, librarians or parents to read. In particular, never ever slag off publishers or agents who have rejected you.

One or two books published and you're off to a good start. You can talk about those. You can talk about how you got to be a writer, what else you do, whether you do events (though frankly I'm not a fan of talking as though you're an old hand when you've published one book - but it's up to you). You can talk about your life and your next book, but be wary of saying too much if the book is not finished (and accepted).

Several is the best position to be in. You have books you can talk about, but not so many your website loses all sense of shape because there are too many. You can probably pick out some key themes or series or topics. You should be able to make a nice website out of this, with plenty of emphasis on the books and only as much extra material (about events, school visits, yourself, other interests) as you want to include - you won't be scratching around for stuff to fill the pages.

Many is not as tricky as too few, but it has its own problems. Your website is in danger of being obese and sluggardly. Do you really want to list and describe every book? Even those that have been out of print for years? Who's going to read that? If you are going to include them all, you need to develop a clear structure so that people can find what they want, and get an overview of your work - two different things. Look at the structure of publishers' catalogues. They don't give loads of detail about every book on the backlist. It might be time to let some go. There are books of mine I have mentally pulped. They get a mention, at best, but no big shout.

2. Who will look for you online?
Be brutally honest. No one? Your ex and your neighbours? Schools? Publishers and agents? Your readers? Readers' parents? People who thought you were someone else? People who have just met you or are going to meet you (at a meeting/conference/date)? Other writers?

This is a really important question as it should determine what you put on your website and how you present it (which is not really covered in this post, but I might write about it later).

You really don't need to cater to your ex and your neighbours. They might look and they might not - who cares? Except they will care if you slag them off - 'The evil car-park attendant in this story is modelled on my next-door neighbour.' Don't.

Schools (ie teachers, librarians) will look if you do school visits, or if they think you might do school visits. They might look if they are using some of your books and want to see what else you have written. They might look to see if there is any extra material they could use, such as worksheets to support your books, or ideas for activities they could do using them.

Publishers and agents will quite likely look if you submit to them (and your stuff is any good; they won't look if they have no intention of following up). It will give them an idea of what you are like, whether you behave professionally, and what else you have published. For this reason, a prominent page of your website might not be the place to foreground the problems in your life. Harsh but true - unless it is relevant to the subject of your books. If you are writing about depression/cancer/caring for an aged relative, it's good material for your website. If not, it might lead a publisher to wonder whether you will be able to meet deadlines. Your call - but bear it in mind.

Your existing readers might look at your website. Someone who has seen one of your books and wondered about buying it, or has had a book recommended to them, might take a look. Readers and potential readers want different things. See below.

Readers' parents and other gatekeepers might look from a potential-reader or reader point of view, or they might be checking that you are not an obviously evil influence. Still, if they want to decide you are an evil influence, they will do so regardless of what is on your website. (This is from a review of one of my books on Barnes and Noble: "One quick look at the authors' [sic] website and you will know exactly the type of values, and her MISSION to "educate" children." - I'm an evil influence, you know. But my website doesn't mention a MISSION or use the word "educate".)

People who thought you were someone else will probably be disappointed, but if your website is super-exciting, they might stay. But probably not. They're busy people. Unless, of course, your name is Kitten Video.

People who have just met you will look out of curiosity, and the kind of curiosity will depend on who they are and where you met. If they are a publisher/agent they fall into a category above. If they are someone you met at dinner, or a  party, or on a train, they will probably just want to see what sort of books you write. Someone who is expecting to meet you at a meeting or conference might want to be prepared (to introduce your talk, for instance) or want to look as though they are familiar with your books. If you are going on a date with them - well, this is one of the problems of a public profile. They are going to know a lot more about you than you know about them. The best solution is only to go on dates with people who are equally famous. And make sure you have read their website, too.

Other writers will be curious and look you up to see what you do. They might buy your books - writers buy or borrow a lot of books (well, good writers do). If you have helpful information for other writers, put it in one place so that it doesn't put off people who aren't writers. One nice thing you can do is put links to the website of other writers whose books might appeal to your readers - it will please readers and writers (but possibly not your publishers). That depends on whether you think of other writers as competition. I tend to think that people will buy more books if they find more books they like, not that they will buy one book instead of another, unless they are very obviously in direct competition - two books that are about the top ten biggest whales, for example.

3. Why will people look at your website?
Just as important as who will look is why they are looking. It is quite possibly not why you hope/think they are looking (on which, see below).

They might want to:

• find out a particular piece of information, such as whether you do school visits or live in Bristol
• find out what kind of books you have written
• buy a book you have written
• look for other books, if they have read and enjoyed one
• find out how to get in touch with you
• find out more about you generally.

It is pretty obvious that you should make it easy for people to find what they want. Otherwise they will be frustrated, and having a website will have done you more harm than good. Put yourself in the shoes of each potential visitor. A school will want to know what type of events you do and how much you charge. An existing reader will want to know more about the book they have read and see what else you have written. A potential reader will want information about your books, but without spoilers. A publisher or agent will want an overview of your professional path and aims, as well as a good idea of the type of books you have published (and who for). Publishers and schools might want to get in touch with you. (An email contact form is the best way to handle this.)

4. Why do you want people to look at your website?
Think about your aims. Why are you going to the trouble of making a website? It can be any or all of the following, or something else. The important thing is to determine what you want from the website. Getting it is another matter, but at least make it possible for your website to do what you want. You could very broadly divide the intentions of a writer's website as selfish or generous. Do you want something from other people (book sales, school visits)? Or do you want to give to other people (information, entertainment, freebies)? It can do both, but most have a bias one way or the other.

Many writers hope a website will sell books. That's probably what their publishers hope, too. If you are self-published, this will be an important part of what your website is for, and that's really outside my realm of expertise, so go and ask someone else for advice. If your books are published by mainstream publishers, you might:

• sell books directly through your website
• link to your publisher's website
• link to a bookseller, such as the ubiquitous Amazon or a real-world chain (such as Waterstone's) or a network of independents
• not link at all. 

You might think the last is stupid, but it's what I've chosen. I reckon people know how to order a book online, and I can't be bothered with creating all the links. If you have published fewer books, your enthusiasm for making links might be undulled. Good for you.

Some writers hope their website will sell them, either to schools or other organisations to do visits or events, or to publishers who might commission them. If your primary aim is to sell visits and events, they must be prominent, but remember that people only want you to appear because you are a writer, so it's important not to let that aspect slip out of view.

A website that gives might well attract more visits. If that is your intention, giving something - information, a good laugh, free stories or worksheets - might appeal to you. But make sure the material is good quality and - if it's downloadable - compatible with systems your visitors will have.

5. Why do you visit websites?
The visitors to your website will be human beings. You are a human being. Use that to your advantage to gain insight into your visitors. Think about what you want from a website and how your website might satsify those requirements in someone else. Do you ever go to a website thinking, 'I hope it will be full of shouty endorsements for a product and lots of chances to buy things'? Probably not, unless you are actually going to a retail site. Do you go to a website thinking, 'I hope it will be really hard to find what I'm looking for'? Unlikely, unless you are writing a guide to web development and need some examples of bad design.

Do you really have to?
No, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do. You are not an employee. If you really don't want a website, don't have one. We are all allowed to make choices, even stupid choices. It's the prerogative of grown-ups. If your publisher is desperate for you to have a web presence, they will build you one, or put a page on their website. This, in their view, is better than nothing. But really think about it. If you have your own website, you are in control of how you are presented. Your publisher won't mention books you have written for other publishers, or anything you have self-published, and they probably won't mention school visits or how to contact you. You won't have the chance to build a web persona - all they want you to have is a profile. A profile is flat, it's a view from one side, it's an outline. You can have more than that. You can have a personality. If you want.

We're not finished with this yet. There will be more. But this is long enough for now...

Dear Editors...

Most of you are very lovely and a joy to work with. Some of you have also become valued friends. Some of you - while still lovely - are rather young or inexperienced. Which is fine - everyone has to learn their job before they are good at it.This is not a stroppy post at all. This, I hope, is a helpful post for new, young editors.

Firstly, as an author, I am very pleased to welcome new editors into the publishing world. The more editors the better. We need you. And, sadly, editors get older and retire and we don't want any gaps in the supply. I hope you will enjoy working in publishing and that we will become friends.

No doubt when you took your new job someone in-house told you all their procedures, and how to work the coffee machine and all that. I doubt anyone told you how to deal with authors, though, and we have more buttons than the average coffee machine. So here is a little guide to working smoothly with authors.

Five steps to a good relationship with your authors

1. Authors are people, too
We have families, friends, domestic commitments, lawns to mow, supermarkets to visit and existential crises to fit in. Please assume that we work around 35-40 hours a week and those hours are not all overnight or over the weekend at the time of your latest crisis. Do not send work late on Friday that you want back on Monday. If we choose to work weekends, that's our business. In exceptional circumstances - and that doesn't mean when the in-house people have taken too long to turn things around and eaten into the schedule - you may politely ask us to work over a weekend if you already have a good relationship with us, have not made the same request already in the previous 12 months, and as long as you will be polite if we say 'no.'

2. Authors need to eat
We don't write these books for fun. Or not only, or always. We need to earn a decent living. Let's do some maths.

Say you pay an author £1500 advance or flat fee. How long do you think the author can afford to spend on your book?

Let's assume an experienced author with years of expertise would like to earn £35,000 a year. That's not unreasaonable, is it? That's not very much for the expertise the author brings to the job. A senior author should not be paid less than a senior editor - they are comparable jobs.

So imagine an author works for 5 days a week, 46 weeks of the year (four weeks' holiday and 10 bank holidays; no time off sick). In general, 20% of an author's time is not productive in that it doesn't directly earn money. It is time spent chasing the invoices publishers haven't paid, reading and arguing about contracts, writing outlines for books that don't go ahead, attending meetings, computer admin, going to and from places for research or other purposes, ordering stuff, buying stamps, doing tax returns, picking up books from libraries and bookshops, fixing the network, fixing the printer, calling the ISP when the internet doesn't work for three days in a row, and all the other things that are magically done by someone else in your office. So we need to earn about £27 an hour to make £35,000 turnover, not profit.

My expenses during a year are in the region of £5,000. So I need, let's say, £40,000 turnover. This comes to £31 an hour. Call it £30 to make the maths easier. Your £1500 buys you 50 hours. OK? If you want a 48-page book, you're looking at just over an hour a page. And that includes the hours spent writing the outline, answering emails, talking on the phone, writing a picture list, dealing with editorial queries, checking layouts, suggesting replacement pictures when the ones chosen are inappropriate or the ones we wanted are not available or too expensive, checking the layouts (twice). Oh, and writing the text.

3. We have the same number of hours in the day as you do
This is related to point (1). Try to remember this when you send a request for a book outline that you want in three days' time, especially if two of the days are Saturday and Sunday. For a book of less than 30,000 words, the outline is most of the work. That's when we have to feel the shape of the project, set the parameters for the book, do most of the research, divide the material (that we are not wholly familiar with yet) into workable chapters or spreads, find out what could be used to illustrate it, search for artwork reference, and persuade you we know what we're doing. Do you really think that is going to fit into three days? Especially as we will also be answering emails from other publishers, checking layouts of the last project - and quite often answering queries from you, too. Plus sleeping, eating, getting dressed (optional), going to Waitrose and dealing with other people in our lives.

3.5 and the same number of days in a month
You go on holiday sometimes and leave an auto-response email saying you are away. Sometimes (rarely) authors like to go on holiday, too. We try to give you good warning so that you can build it into your schedule. If your schedule slips, we will still be on holiday. We will not cancel our holidays to do the work. We will not take it with us - or we might if you pay a lot extra. I have done that once. It was an extra £770 to check colour layouts on holiday. Just so that you know.

If your schedule slips (your end) it is NOT our fault and NOT our responsibility to make up the lost time, though we will try to help you with that. If we have booked out time - following a schedule you wrote - to do your work and it doesn't turn up, that is wasted time when we earn nothing. We can't push other publishers' projects out of the way to pick up yours when it comes back, all late and urgent. You won't have thought of this, because if the designer doesn't send the book back to you on time, you will still be paid to sit at your editorial desk. We have to suffer a week or two unpaid because of those cock-ups. We can't just magic work out of the air, and no one pays us extra because the work didn't come back on time.

Further - if we said we could do something in two weeks, that was because we had set aside time in those two weeks to do something. It doesn't follow that we can do it in two weeks if you send it at a different time, because we will have other work then - or maybe we will have gone on holiday for a fortnight. Letting your schedule slip a week means it might take us four weeks to do the work, alongside our other commitments. And the less you are paying, the less likely we are to prise our schedules apart to make a crack to fit in your late project. So don't pay £1000 for a book and then say, 'It took ages for the designer to do this, so can you just turn it around for tomorrow, please?' Because the answer is often 'No, sorry.' We will always try to help - but you can't rely on us being able to. There was a schedule to help everyone plan their time, including us.

4. We are proud of these books and want them to be good
We like this job or we wouldn't do it. After all - we'd hardly do it for the money, would we? To you, this book is one of many that you are struggling to get finished, or off your desk for a while. For us, it represents a piece of us, and it will go out into the world with our name on it, and will represent us to readers and to other publishers. So we will put in more effort than you are paying for.

Please do not introduce random errors because you can't be bothered to check something. Don't think of extra things to put in - there is usually a good reason that thing you just thought of is not in there. By all means make suggestions: we welcome suggestions, and sometimes we did just overlook or not know something. But please don't make changes without telling us. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and we check everything carefully. So you found a nice snippet on Reddit you thought would fit in that book about Nostradamus? I read Nostradamus in the original, and that 'quote' is not in there. If you want to make changes, give us the chance to check them. We won't always just spot them when you send the layouts - we don't remember every word we wrote, and our minds have moved on to a different book in the weeks it has taken for the book to go through design. And don't introduce grammatical errors. The proofreader should pick them up, but it doesn't look very professional and it's very annoying.

5. We are proud of these books and want to see them
Don't forget to send our contractual copies of the books when they are published. This is what we have to show for our work: a shelf of books. There is no excuse at all for not sending the pitiful number of copies you are contracted to give us. We need them. Not just to gloat over, but to show other publishers at meetings what we can do. Don't imagine we are going to accept that it was an unusual oversight that you didn't have them sent out. Unusual oversights like that happen with about half the books we write. You are not special in your discourtesy. You know what [some] novel-writers get? A note of thanks and some flowers when their book comes out. We usually discover they have come out because the publisher advertises the book on twitter, or we notice the publication date posted on Amazon has passed. Do you really think that is a polite way to treat the person who put more work into the book than anyone else?

Oh - and please also tell us when new editions come out. This is not just a pride thing, and we won't hassle you to send a copy (though it would be nice if you did, especially if it says in the contract that you will) - we need to register all editions in order to get our payments from PLR. This is not money you have to pay. It's money we are entitled to and you prevent us getting (but can't get yourselves) if you don't tell us the book has come out with a different ISBN. So please tell us.

That's it
That will do for now. There are other things you can do, but if you could do these five it would be a great start. It would make working with you even more of a pleasure. And you will learn, as you ease into the job, that good writers are easy to work with. That you need good writers on your list of contacts. That when you are promoted, or move to a different publishing house, you will need people to commission, people you know can write, know can follow a brief, know will deliver on time. And you don't want to have pissed us off, because we do turn commissions down. We turn them down if the book is ill-conceived (or just not interesting), if the schedule is too tight, the fee/advance too low or the editor impossible to work with. Don't be that editor.

Enjoy your career. We look forward to working with you again, many times, in your many different publishing houses over the coming years. And let's meet for a drink at the London Book Fair.

[This post was not prompted by any recent experience with any specific editor. Please, lovely editors, don't try to work out if it's you - it isn't.]

The flipside of PLR: the books people don't want to buy

The media have just started their annual assessment of what can be learned from the library loans (PLR) statistics. The answer is - not entirely what they think can be learned. Someone needs to teach these journos about statistics. An article in the Guardian, for example, claims that fiction totally dominates borrowing because  most of the top 100 most-borrowed titles are novels. That doesn't follow. Bestsellers are less of a thing in non-fiction. There could be more non-fiction loans in total than fiction loans, but just spread over far more books so that few make the top 100. Indeed their table of 'loans by genre' puts fiction in second place (largely because they didn't include children's fiction, probably - but no matter).

But that aside - PLR figures tell you which books people borrow. Or, looked at another way, they tell you which books people don't buy. The Guardian is surprised that the only cookery book in the top 100 is Jamie Oliver's book on cooking for cheap (laughable, really, as his view of cheap is not everyone else's). That's not at all surprising. On the whole, you want to have a cookery book in the house so that you can use it again and again over a period of years, not borrow it for a couple of weeks. Cooking for cheap (whatever it's called) is an exception, and  is presumably borrowed because the book is so expensive that people who want cheap food can't afford it. (£26! WTF?)

The books people borrow from the library are those they can't afford to buy or don't want to buy. Some people can't afford any books (or think they can't - some just have different priorities) and so borrow anything they read. Then there are people, including me, who will borrow books that are very expensive and which they don't expect to use repeatedly. I do occasionally buy books that cost over £30 but I try not to.

Children's books are heavily borrowed. This is good, of course, as the children get to read the books. But it also indicates that people are unwilling to buy books for their children. Fine, many kids get through books at a rate of knots and it's too expensive to keep up with them. But that's not all that's going on. There is a perception of value related to book length. Picture books in particular are heavily borrowed - often because people think it's 'not worth' paying £5 or more for a book that's only a few pages long and has few words. I won't even go there. I've read the 19 words of  Duck is Dirty about 200 times in the last fortnight. And will read them again and again and again over the coming months. Plus all the times I read them 23 years ago, and 19 years ago. That was money well spent. Looking at my own PLR figures, I get way, way more PLR on very short illustrated children's fiction than on anything else.

What else don't people want to buy? Blockbuster/bestseller novels they would read once and give to the charity shop - hence Dan Brown being top of the 'not bought' chart. Obviously lots of people do buy these books - that's why they are bestsellers. But if I ever felt the need to read a Dan Brown novel, which I can't see happening, I would be quite likely to borrow it from the library and leave my book-buying budget for books I will value more and want to own.

Anyway, the cheque should come soon, so I shall be happy enough to benefit from people not wanting to buy my books. I hope those who don't get very much PLR are comforted by the thought that there are not many people who don't want to buy their books.

Why use the web when you can use a book?

Evolution, Hachette, 2014

Over on ABBA, a quick summary of my talk to the Hampshire school librarians on defending books to pupils and teachers keen to turn to the web.

Paper or online? (Paper)

Is it a map? Çatalhöyük, Turkey, 6000 BC

Today I'm working on The Story of Maps, the next in my Story Of... series. The principal source I want to use for the theoretical history and development of cartography is the seminal work on the subject, The History of Cartography, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward and published by University of Chicago Press in 1987. But.... although I have Cambridge University Library on my doorstep, there is only one volume of the series available in Cambridge. (It is, happily, in Newnham College Library and as that is my current college affiliation, I can easily see it.) Here are my options:

go to London and use it in the British Library. Can't afford to - £15 a day each day I need to go, which will be many - perhaps 20

buy it.
Can't afford to - each volume changes hands at around £150 and there are seven.

use it online.
This is what I'm doing. The whole thing is available as PDFs from the UCP website - which is a brilliant resource and very generous of them.

It is a map - Jianxi, China, 18th century

 I am hugely grateful that it's there, but I would SO MUCH prefer to use paper copies. Then I could flick through to find pictures of maps I want to discuss. I wouldn't have to wait for hi-res images to appear on the page (not normally a problem, but after my poor computer has buffered about 50 of these it starts to get tired).

The frustration with using the electronic version will probably boost sales of the paper copies. I'm going to be filling in recommendation slips for CUL to buy all the volumes. But this is just the sort of book that should be a real, paper book.

On the shoulders of giants

Phew. Just finished the creative writing summer school I teach at Pembroke and King's Colleges in Cambridge each year. It's always very sad to see the lovely students heading home, as I love those manic eight weeks that come along just as everyone else is planning to wind down and go on holiday.

The format of the course is simple. There are two of us teaching it; my partner in crime is children's author Brian Keaney. Every week, there is an evening lecture (with wine), sometimes with a guest lecturer, but more often just our double-act. And the rest of the week, the students write, and each have an hour-long, one-to-one supervision (=tutorial, outside Cambridge) on their work.

But of course it's not just us two. We have lots more guest teachers, many of them dead. Each year, we drag many other writers into the lectures - sometimes as reference points, sometimes as illustrations or examples, sometimes for proper discussion and sometimes just mentioned in passing. Of course, none of the students will have read all those we refer to (they aren't old enough, they haven't had time yet) but many will have read a lot and all will have read some. The range is huge - last week's 'mentions' stretch (in time) from Aesop to The Hunger Games, taking in Sophocles, Euripides, Hamlet, Macbeth, Shelley, Pride and Prejudice, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rosetti, Edgar Allan Poe, Dubliners, Ulysses, Stephen King, Raymond Chandler and Anne Lamott amongst others. During the course, there have been many, many more.

Previous writers are our currency of debate as well as our models. We don't want the students to write in the style of Jane Austen or Matthew Arnold - they would never sell anything. But we do want them to learn from the structures, the intensity, the insights into human psychology, the depiction and development of character and all the other universal aspects of their predecessors' writing.

So as they all go off into the world, back to Yale and Cornell and Berkeley and all the other places they came from, and ask us what they should to do improve their writing, we tell them to keep reading. To read the type of books they want to write and the types of books they don't want to write. To read recent books and to read books by people long dead. To read books they like and books they don't.

The course is not about writing literary fiction - we are as happy with them if they write a decent fantasy or sci-fi story - and it has a commercial aspect: how to write books that will sell (if they want to make a living as a writer). We tell them there is no shame and a lot to be gained by writing (and selling) books of many types and that reading widely will help with all of it. One of the questions we ask them to come back to when they are reading contemporary books is 'why was this published?' There is always a reason. If there is a book they hate, we encourage them to work out why they hate it, and not stop reading it until they know. Of course, no one has to carry on reading a book they don't like, but if you haven't worked out what you don't like, your work with it is not done. And then they have to decide whether it is a badly written book (and how) or a well-written book that is not to their taste. We don't have to like things to recognise their qualities. There are plenty of good books I don't like.

And so to all our students, just past and longer past, and to everyone - just keep reading, and read thoughtfully and critically. You don't need a living tutor - there are plenty of dead ones that will let you climb onto their shoulders and see far into the distance.

PS - and these two came out last week when I wasn't looking.
Both from Arctuturus, both adult/teen books. All types of writing - it's what you need to do to make a living.

Not dead yet...

Over at the other place again... sorry. I will be back. Working crazy hours to finish a book (delivered yesterday - hurray!) and teach summer school at the same time.

On ABBA - do you read books to find out how to survive being different or how to fit in? The same of different?

At the other place: What are words worth?

Long absence... back in summer school and deadline trauma. But I have been over at ABBA writing about the ALCS report on authors' earnings. If you haven't read the report, you should. You don't need to read the media coverage, which is mostly rubbish, but do read the report.

How to speak publisher: F is for Feedback

Publishers don't often use the word feedback. They are more likely to call it 'editorial input' or 'comments'. Or, of course, 'rejection'. But feedback is what the rest of the world calls it when someone tells you what they think of your work and how you should change it to improve it (or not bother).

Feedback in a creative writing course aims to help the student to become a better writer and to improve the specific piece of writing they have submitted. In an ideal world, feedback from a publisher would have the same aims, but generally the publisher is only interested in improving the current piece of writing - the one they are paying you for (or might pay you for if you can make it good enough). There is also feedback from agents. If you already have an agent, their feedback will be aimed at making you a better writer, and also at improving the current piece of writing.

'Improving' is a tricky term. It doesn't necessarily, in the vocabulary of agent and publisher, mean making the work aesthetically better, though it might include that. Primarily, it means making the work more saleable - because that's the agent's/publisher's job: to sell your work. If I write a totally brilliant piece of young adult fiction that's 20,000 words long, my agent is likely to tell me it's unsaleable. There is no established market for fiction of that length for teen readers. (Of course, I haven't done such a thing - I know there's no market for that. So please don't tell me to self-publish it, because it doesn't exist. Also please don't tell me there is no reason why there should not be such a thing, or list the few exceptions you can find. In general terms, it's not a thing - my agent won't want to try to sell it.)

So what IS in feedback?

In electronics and broadcasting, it's the garbage or white noise that is reflected back, it's interference. Sadly, interference and garbage is just how some writers feel about editorial feedback. They are generally the ones who feel they know best, even if they have never had anything published, and they are often the first to turn to self-publishing. But what feedback should be is intelligent and constructive criticism and commentary.

If you are working with a publisher, you need to remember that they have an idea of the type of book they want to publish and the audience for that book. Their idea will be more or less rigid depending on the type of book.

If it's fiction, they will know the age group they want to target and the approximiate type of reader. Irritatingly, that might be gender-specific. 'A funny novel that will appeal to 8-year-old boys', for instance.  'A romantic teen story with girl-appeal.' Well, you can decide not to work with them if that riles you too much. You can challenge the wording, and they might change it, but they will still be looking for the same thing.

If it's non-fiction it might be more specific still. You might have to address an area of the UK curriculum and also cover various US curricula. Or, if it's a trade book, there could be requirements such as 'a book about technologies developed in the last fifty years; the book will sell into the UK, Australasian and Chinese markets.' That means there must be plenty of Australasian and Chinese examples as well as the UK and US ones you first thought of.

Feedback will point out if you've missed the mark. The thing is, you might have written a perfectly good book, but if it's not the book the publisher intends to publish it isn't any use. Indeed, sometimes you might write a better book than the one that is wanted, and you will have to go backwards to meet the target. This sounds ridiculous, but it's not. Say you have written a wonderful book about technological innovations, but none of them is Chinese or Australasian. You might have to pick some lesser innovations in order for the book to achieve its target of selling into those markets. Or perhaps you wrote a really good story that will appeal to 8-year-old boys, but it's not funny. If the book is to be part of a list of funny books, that's no good, however wonderful your story is.

So the upshot of all this is, that while feedback from a writing group or tutor might be about improving your work in purely aesthetic terms, feedback from a publisher or agent is generally commercially-oriented. A lot of the time, if you are sending your work on spec, you won't get any feedback beyond 'very nice, but not for us right now.' Even that is useful feedback - it makes you think 'what does this editor/agent need right now, and why/how did I get it wrong?' It doesn't (necessarily) mean 'your book sucks; never write to me again.' Of course, if they do say that, that's useful feedback, too. But a bit harder to take.

By the way - one of my daughters, when very young, was asked by one of my publishers to assess a new series he was planning. She read the work, and emailed him without my knowledge. It went: "Dear [publisher] - your series is boring and lacks interest." It was canned the next day. Feedback is useful. (She was right, but I could have wished she had been more diplomatic.)

Books without lumps. Or, Are some books trash?

A post on ABBA a couple of weeks ago by Clementine Beauvais prompted a storm of comments. The question it asked - is it better for children to read 'trash' than nothing - mostly brought a resounding 'yes' in response, but with plenty of people pointing out that the definition of trash is up for grabs.

I do think some books are 'trash' in adult terms. I feel entitled to say this because I am also willing to own up to having written trash. You won't find it - it's not under my name, and it's not linked with me anywhere online or offline. I don't include it in my list of publications. I suppose the only people, apart from the editors, who could identify me as the author are the people who work for PLR.

Why did I write trash, and why do I think it is trash?
The books were commissions, and I needed the money. I won't write for peanuts, and I won't write something I think is damaging, but other than that I'm fairly promiscuous. I have to be - I have bills to pay. The trash, as you've probably guessed, was for character-led fiction series, and one was a tie-in with a TV series. The publishers already had the cast of characters, the 'bible', and the scenario for the books. It wasn't one of those in which the plot is also provided, but there were certain limitations and requirements constraining the plot.

Why is it trash? Actually, I'm starting to change my mind as I write this post. But I'll say what I first thought and then review it and you can all join in. Socratic method - all good.

It is not challenging to the imagined reader. It says nothing original in terms of characterisation, themes, or plot. It is formulaic. Once the characters have been set in motion, you know pretty much (in broad terms) what will happen. OK, you don't know whether there will be a ghost, or a burglary, or whatever. But you know there will be some conflict between the central group of characters, which will be resolved. You know there will be some external challenge (the ghost or other antagonist) that will force the characters to be resourceful or resilient or both. You know that at the end the problems will have been solved, the characters will be firmly welded together in their friendship and might have learned a lesson. Good will triumph over evil. No one is going to die of cancer, no one's dog will be run over or killed with a pitchfork, no one will develop a second head, there won't be a pack of rabid, zombie wolves [oh, there's an idea] and the world won't be wiped out by a killer virus. It will all take place in its domestic+school world. (Other types of trash take place in other types of fictional world - with fairies, ponies, talking pants, dinosaurs, whatever. But they all have their tropes and formulae and follow them rigidly.) There are also plenty of books for adults that are written in the same way - look at any of the 'pulp' series of romances, westerns and erotica.

It's anodyne, predictable, shallow and - to adults - dull. But it serves a function. In fact, it serves many functions.

The phrase that starts off Clem's post is "at least they're reading". I suppose this means 'at least they are decoding text, practising the basic skill of working out how marks on the page relate to words'. Yes, my trash books do that. By reading something rather than nothing, the child develops reading 'muscle' - it becomes easier each time as the basic skill is slowly mastered.

The child is not only learning to decode words, of course. They are also learning to understand life. Most of the 'trash' books contain very simplistic depictions of human interactions. They are formulaic in their endorsement of friendship, showing good actions generally rewarded and bad actions reflected on and revised (rather than punished, often - we aren't Victorian moralists). The Enid Blyton-style school or adventure story doesn't have challenging characters, plot twists, stylistic elegance or anything else that adults like. But if a child is still working out how narrative works, they will learn that. I would not defend the outmoded showing of girls as simpering ninnies and boys as adventurous - that type of thing is truly harmful trash. But the books discussed in Clem's post are not, on the whole, toxic - just easy.

We know children struggle with what makes a story and they need to learn that in simple steps.  Look at any 'story' written by a small child: 'The dog went out for a walk and found a bunny. Hello bunny, he barked. Then he went home and went to sleep. The next day it rained.' The stage after decoding words is understanding narrative. My Director of Studies used to say that readers developed in sophistication from interest in plot, through interest in character, to interest in style. Leaving aside whether that scale is useful in assessing adult readers, it certainly maps out the progress of the emerging reader. (Though I could argue for an occasional reversal of character/style in some cases that allows 2D characters to be carried by style - Mr Gumm, for instance.) A trite story about fairy unicorn princesses that illustrates a very simple view of friendship or kindness - the archetypal trash, if you like - provides a useful model of narrative structure and human experience recreated recognisably in fiction. The child - even the child who has no friends, or a distant and cold family - is not alone if they can see some aspect of their experience mirrored in a book. I would consider a lot of the fairy-unicorn-princess stories to be trash, but as long as they don't promote discrimination or endorse an overly gendered view of girls (which sadly they often do), they aren't in my view harmful.

Imagine you are a child who has just got the hang of reading. You're not desperately struggling, just not fluent yet. You can read a fun romp in which you don't have to worry about themes, complex character motivation, or tricky intellectual (or even imaginative) challenges. Or you can pile on all the challenges in one go - and probably give up. We give babies food that is easy to eat; we give small children tricycles, and then bicycles with stabilisers. We don't feed a one-year-old filet mignon or onion tart with parmesan. We don't ask a five-year-old to take their little bicycle straight up a dirt track over a mountain. Trash books are weaning food, they are bicycles with stabilisers. They are care and concern for the weaning mind.

We don't feed our babies rubbish, though. We don't give them food stuffed with salt and sugar and additives - we just give them food that is easy to identify, hold and digest. Food without lumps made from healthy ingredients (though they are sometimes bland, to adult tastes). And easy books are not necessarily rubbish. As long as they aren't stuffed with unhealthy stereotypes, lies, misleading ideas, they do no harm. They are books without lumps.

So - were my books trash? No, actually, I don't think so. They are not even trash if children choose to read them when they 'should' have progressed to more challenging books. There is a huge elephant in the room here. Writers are always banging on about 'reading for pleasure' and how the GOVErnment pays it no heed. But here we are, the people who are supposed to care and champion reading, saying kids CAN'T read for pleasure if we don't like their reading choice! They must read for challenge, for education, to develop their taste. They must read Northern Lights instead of My Fairy Unicorn Princess Annual. No wonder reading drops off when children get the choice. We all have preferences.

If we want a child to read for pleasure, we have to let them read what pleases them. Only after the stabilisers and the lump-free stage can they progress to allegory and trauma - if they want to. They don't have to. That's the whole thing about pleasure. Some won't progress to more challenging books, and some adults don't read challenging books. I'm sure there are people in the anti-trash camp who would baulk at being told to spend their days reading Finnegan's Wake or Tristram Shandy.