Blimey, I thought, elbowing myself from under the sheets this rain-splattered AM. The sound on the window was like ball bearings jumping in a frying pan and I smartly reached for my ten inch to check for weather alerts. It wasn't too far from here that hailstones recently fell the size of coconuts and I wanted to be sure that I shouldn't slip into my Kevlar PJs before continuing to idle through my Sunday morning.
Now, you might wonder about my proximity to high tech but it's my usual habit to wake and immediately check the news on my Android tablet. I like to know the day's running order and to see what the various tyrants have been doing whilst I was otherwise engaged. It was how I came to see the headline about Boris and why I untangled myself from the sheets as my bleary eyes took in the details. If the reports are correct, Boris has been commissioned to write a book about Shakespeare and Hodder are currently shelling his back garden with half a million in bundled fivers. I expect him to catch them all too, with those big novelty-sized hands of his.
All of this resolved itself into the loud sob I gave before sinking back into my pillow.
I fell back to sleep and had one of those strangely lucid dream sequences which shifted the stage scenery with remarkable fluidity. One moment, I was an MP, spending my every waking hour trying to help the people of my constituency. The next moment, I was Mayor of London and there wasn't an hour when I wasn't trying to earn the trust of London and improving the state of the city. Then somebody pulled a few ropes and my dream shifted again. This time I was a newspaper columnist and it was my life. Every day I'd devote to writing the most blistering column and earning the respect and trust of my readers. Then, just before I woke up, I was trying with every particle of my being to write the best biography of Shakespeare that I could.
Eyes open, I groaned again. It was still raining and Boris Johnson is still doing none of his jobs properly because he's being paid handsomely to do all four.
I don't quite know what to say now that I'm fully awake. Perhaps my response is just the jealousy of a man who struggles to earn a living from either his writing or his cartoons, no matter how much time and energy he invests into them. £500,000 would set me for life and I'd write twenty books, drawn thousands upon thousands of cartoons... Hell, I'd even do all that for a tenth of that.
Perhaps it's the disgust of a man who finds it hard to value his own work and could not write anything for anybody unless he'd put his soul into it. Perhaps this is what 'aspiration' means in this modern Conservative Britain. Is Boris simply one of those 'hard-working people' the Tories are always banging on about? Or is he simply greedy?
Apparently (thank you Google) as Mayor he earns a recently-reduced salary of £47,970 a year. As an MP he will be earning £74,000 plus allowances. As Shakespeare's biographer, he's going to earn £500,000. All of that in addition to what is apparently a £275,000 salary from The Daily Telegraph.
It would beg the question 'why' if it didn't also beg the equally obvious answer.
Boris is a name. You might have noticed that I've so far omitted the name 'Johnson' from this post, yet, if you live in the UK, I'm fairly certain you'd have still known who I'm talking about. There isn't another 'Boris'. Boris Becker is 'Becker' and Karloff is 'Karloff'. No other Boris is just 'Boris'.
The name means everything in a culture dominated by brands. The Boris brand is easy to describe. It's fruity, bumbling, larger than life, Edwardian, disheveled, witty and displaying that brand of intellect that is also slightly shallow as befits a man who read the Classics and received 2.2 from Oxford. Boris is the kind of man who can make any dumb idea sound brilliant simply by quoting Phaedrus's fable of the charging rhinoceros. Take some non-cyclists and put them on heavy unwieldy bicycles before throwing them into heavy London traffic? Why, as Phaedrus's rhinoceros says when it's about to gore the baobab tree: 'Boris Bikes are spiffing idea...'
The resulting book will reflect the Boris persona and if it sets the charts alight (and I'd be surprised if Hodder get their money back) it won't be because of the scholarship. There are few major figures in British history about whom we know less than Shakespeare and unless Boris has access to a secret library unavailable to the major scholars, Boris's book will be full of speculation and plenty of the old verbatim, cemented together with a pithy jokes in the style of a slightly glandular Jeeves. Boris's Shakespeare will be the Shakespeare of biscuit tins and tea towels. It will be the flag waving Bard whose history is presented as a homily to modern bombastic British conservatism and the next Tory leader. Huzzah and hurrah!
And no doubt many people will love it. Marketing tends to do that to a book, so long as the book is half decent. They will love it because there is nothing quite so devalued in the world like true scholarship. And that is what is so deeply depressing about this story. It is more evidence to support the hypothesis that this is no meritocracy. We live in a country in which Ian Duncan Smith, author of The Devil's Tune (Amazon, one and a half stars), decides the fate of writers and artists. It's the society where David Cameron and George Osborne talk about hard work, having lived their entire lives cosseted by the establishment.
There are people out there who would leap at the chance to do any one of Boris's jobs and most of them would treat the work with the respect it deserves. There are people who would make better MPs. There are men and women who would make better mayors. It would churlish to suggest that some would be better columnists than Boris. The Telegraph gig is the one job he possibly deserves given he cultivated the Boris character in his writing. Yet as an biographer, we can only judge his talents based on his prior biography of Churchill which was readable and sometimes funny, but ultimately shallow and reads like the flim of history pasted together with plenty of flam.
It's hard to imagine Hodder throwing half a million at Jonathan Bate, Stanley Wells or James Shapiro to write the Shakespeare biography but for their money they'd probably get one of the best biographies of Shakespeare out there, using careful reading of the texts to justify solid scholarship and serious research to reveal new facets to the man. Yet consider this: £100,000 would be far more than even top academics get as the advance for a book, so why the hell doesn't Hodder commission five biographies from the world's top Shakespearean scholars? Except they won't because names like Bate and Wells and Shapiro don't resonate with the public who salivate at the name Boris.
Why would Hodder want authenticity when they can have Boris at five times the price?
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Sunday, 26 July 2015
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
My Problems With Being Richard Madeley (Revisited)
I'm not a man much given to hero worship. I have people I admire and whose work has inspired me. I could rattle off a long list of people who I hold up so they catch the light and sit bathed in a slightly angelic glow. Does that make them my heroes? Perhaps it does, though I've never really seen myself as a person who has 'heroes'. When I see celebrity in the flesh, I've always been a person who tends to give a shrug my shoulders and walk on, even if they're people I like. I see them as just human beings and I'd never want to impose myself on them nor demean myself by being 'fan like' in my admiration. It was good to meet Steadman on that day when I'd travelled to London to see his exhibition not knowing he was going to be there. Yet I was so conflicted. I didn't want to stand in line to meet him because I don't do that kind of thing. Yet fate had placed him in the same room as me on the one day in about ten years that I was actually in London. How could I not meet him and make a bit of a fool of myself? So, it was good to meet him but I really didn't meet him. I was presented to him and, in that sense, I think I lost something that day.
The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...
It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.
I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.
That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.
This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.
The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.
Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.
The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.
Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.
The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.
The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.
'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.
It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.
The reason I'm talking about this is that I realised today that many of the people I most admire in life are journalists and, if you count cartoonists as journalists (and I think you should), then they're probably entirely journalists. It means that I have a raised awareness of journalists and I have a respect for their kind. To be a journalist is to be one of the good people in the world. It's to be among the ranks of people who give my life meaning. It means being among that gifted literati that includes P.J. O'Rourke, Andrew Neil, Ann Treneman, John Simpson, Jon Ronson, Mathew Parris, Tim Marshall, Bryan Appleyard, Henry Porter...
It means that it's always a bit of a shock when I realise that many journalists are not P.J. O'Rourke or Jon Ronson. Many journalists are complete clowns.
I'm taking about this because I got an email this morning from the BBC.
That, in itself, is not unusual. I occasionally get emails from the BBC but never from the BBC departments from whom I'd actually welcome emails. I never get emails that begin 'We read your article on X and wondered if you'd like to write something about Y'. The emails I always get begin the same way and always involve the words 'Richard Madeley'.
This morning's email came from one of the BBC's regional radio stations. I won't name them because I don't want to shame them. The email was bright and familiar. It asked me if I wanted to appear on one of a regional breakfast show talking about niche societies.
The 'journalist' had discovered 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' and assumed that it was a society dedicated to the UK's Richard Madeley fans. They wanted me to talk about my devotion to Richard Madeley.
Now, if you're new to my blog and don't know who I am, I should explain. I once wrote a website called 'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society'. I began it in a pique of self-hatred. I'd sold my first novel to a company which was bought by Harper Collins and part of the purchase involved the cancellation all their forthcoming books including my own. At this time, Richard and Judy were the nation's arbitrators of what constitutes literature. I, on the other hand, was a prolific writer, cancelled author who had countless degrees in English Lit and felt that the world was slowly going insane. So I spoofed Richard Madeley, thinking I'd be spoofing celebrity and publishing.
The only joke I had initially was that the real 'Richard Madeley' had launched a blog and given it the humble title of 'Appreciation Society'. This was in the days before Twitter and before celebrity spoofs were as rampant as they are now. I was one of the first people, I guess, to create a fake Twitter account and I tweeted as @richardmadeley for a long time. I gave up once the real Richard Madeley took to Twitter and the game lost its spark. I stopped updating the blog for a variety of reasons, primarily because it was my most popular blog and also because I'd moved on to other projects.
Primarily, I felt a great sense of failure that everything I did as 'Richard Madeley' was hailed as funny and hilarious. Everything I did as myself was passed over. It taught me a hard lesson about celebrity and how the context of celebrity fools us all into attributing quality to work.
The great literary critic I.A. Richards famously used to make his students read poetry from which the author's name had been removed. It was a simple trick yet groundbreaking and became a new form of literary criticism (so called Practical Criticism), which attempted to judge the words on the page instead of the preconceived notions of quality that are passed on via the name of a famously lauded author.
The argument is simple. You see the name Coleridge or Shelley at the top of a sonnet and you read it with a certain detached admiration. If you don't like it, you think it's a problem with your thought processes. You don't ever consider that it might simply be a bad poem. Strip away the name of the author and, hopefully, you judge it as a poem.
'The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society' is probably a bad poem with a 'great' name attached. If my writing or cartooning or humour meant anything, it wouldn't be here on a barely read blog. It would be between the covers of books in bookshops, the pages of newspapers and magazines. All I know is that this morning's email makes me revisit all these long forgotten thought processes. I get annoyed and so depressed that of all the things that I've done in my life, my only success comes because of a man who really did nothing on TV other than talk to other celebrities.
It's why I've been so perverse in my approach to my work, believing that the quality of the work should be judged and not the name of the author. It's why I stupidly wrote 'Second Class Male' under a pseudonym, thinking I was following in the footsteps of the great Henry Root. I never put my name first when perhaps I should. Perhaps names are more important than I've ever realised. Perhaps I should have mine at the top of the blog. At least it gives people an identity on which to hang all judgments good or bad.
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
Cartooning Hell: Even A Rejection Would Be Nice
Plenty of outgoing emails this morning and, so far, only one automated response suggesting that I’d managed to hit the nerve feeding raw photographs from field reporters straight into a newspaper’s command centre. My cartoon will clearly find the wrong person. I need to try again another day with another cartoon. Meanwhile, I'll have to throw last night’s effort away now that its moment has passed.
One of the biggest struggles I seem to face is simply finding the right person to talk to. Newspapers don’t list the contact details of the cartoon editor and newspapers increasingly don’t publish any email addresses of their staff. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed as the separation of them and us gets ever larger. It’s as if news operates at a level above that of your common man; a conviction that grows stronger every day as the people who make news always seem to know the people who report the news.
The paradox is, of course, that the media continually tell us that they’re listening. They go to great lengths to throw up their Twitter handles and to tell us to get in touch, but that’s one of the problems I realised about Twitter a long time ago. Behind this supposed utopia where everybody is equal is a great publicity machine working against our ultimate emancipation. Because social media feeds the media with free content (‘Hey! Send us your photos of the storm [whispers] but don’t expect to be paid’) it allows them to stop listening, stop seeking professional services, and to keep the controls inside a very tight circle in the heart of London.
I come from a family of news obsessives and once 24 hour news started, we rarely watched anything in the day followed by the BBC News at 6pm, 9pm and Newsnight on BBC2. Sky News used to be the best news channel but they reduced their service to a rolling 15 minute cycle of perhaps 3 news items and the BBC has become our regular source of information. It’s a shame. Sky News used to be something compelling and really special; as special, in fact, as Sky’s sports coverage or their 3D service, which I’ve had chance to glimpse a few times and is amazing at its best. They also had some of the best young journalists and come the day that the BBC retires the great John Simpson, Sky News have his ideal replacement in the even greater (in my opinion) Tim Marshall.
But I digress. Sending cartoons, articles, and books away in the hope that somebody will be willing to take a moment and look at them can be a shocking business for your self-esteem. I’d always been prepared for rejection. I’ve had enough in my time and I welcome rejection when somebody actually tells me what I'm doing wrong. However, nothing ever prepared me for the reality of the silence.
To break into the news circle as either a cartoonist of writer is extraordinarily frustrating. I end up sending work to vague sounding inboxes such as ‘the news’ or ‘tellusabout’ or simply ‘contact’, which probably aren’t read by anybody .
I thought writing books hard work but nothing was like the hard work of trying to get somebody read the damn things. It’s the same with writing essays and drawing cartoons. Selling them is the horrible side of the business when it should really be the easiest. I started last night cartoon’s about 5pm, worked on it at a relaxed (dare I saw blissfully happy) pace through the night and started to apply colour about 9pm. I was finished about 2am. It sounds like a long time and result isn’t going to set the world alight but then, I’m still learning and the time I take is time I put aside to learn this craft. Last night I also discovered that I can do a couple of things with my technology that I previously thought impossible. I wish my craft could make two breakthroughs a night. I should do some night school course on how to draw, though the thought of having to sketch some local hobo in his posing pouch doesn’t fill me with excitement given that very few of our local hobos look are as sexy as Kate Upton. But then again, neither are many cartoonists… It’s a cruel world.
One of the biggest struggles I seem to face is simply finding the right person to talk to. Newspapers don’t list the contact details of the cartoon editor and newspapers increasingly don’t publish any email addresses of their staff. It’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed as the separation of them and us gets ever larger. It’s as if news operates at a level above that of your common man; a conviction that grows stronger every day as the people who make news always seem to know the people who report the news.
The paradox is, of course, that the media continually tell us that they’re listening. They go to great lengths to throw up their Twitter handles and to tell us to get in touch, but that’s one of the problems I realised about Twitter a long time ago. Behind this supposed utopia where everybody is equal is a great publicity machine working against our ultimate emancipation. Because social media feeds the media with free content (‘Hey! Send us your photos of the storm [whispers] but don’t expect to be paid’) it allows them to stop listening, stop seeking professional services, and to keep the controls inside a very tight circle in the heart of London.
I come from a family of news obsessives and once 24 hour news started, we rarely watched anything in the day followed by the BBC News at 6pm, 9pm and Newsnight on BBC2. Sky News used to be the best news channel but they reduced their service to a rolling 15 minute cycle of perhaps 3 news items and the BBC has become our regular source of information. It’s a shame. Sky News used to be something compelling and really special; as special, in fact, as Sky’s sports coverage or their 3D service, which I’ve had chance to glimpse a few times and is amazing at its best. They also had some of the best young journalists and come the day that the BBC retires the great John Simpson, Sky News have his ideal replacement in the even greater (in my opinion) Tim Marshall.
But I digress. Sending cartoons, articles, and books away in the hope that somebody will be willing to take a moment and look at them can be a shocking business for your self-esteem. I’d always been prepared for rejection. I’ve had enough in my time and I welcome rejection when somebody actually tells me what I'm doing wrong. However, nothing ever prepared me for the reality of the silence.
To break into the news circle as either a cartoonist of writer is extraordinarily frustrating. I end up sending work to vague sounding inboxes such as ‘the news’ or ‘tellusabout’ or simply ‘contact’, which probably aren’t read by anybody .
I thought writing books hard work but nothing was like the hard work of trying to get somebody read the damn things. It’s the same with writing essays and drawing cartoons. Selling them is the horrible side of the business when it should really be the easiest. I started last night cartoon’s about 5pm, worked on it at a relaxed (dare I saw blissfully happy) pace through the night and started to apply colour about 9pm. I was finished about 2am. It sounds like a long time and result isn’t going to set the world alight but then, I’m still learning and the time I take is time I put aside to learn this craft. Last night I also discovered that I can do a couple of things with my technology that I previously thought impossible. I wish my craft could make two breakthroughs a night. I should do some night school course on how to draw, though the thought of having to sketch some local hobo in his posing pouch doesn’t fill me with excitement given that very few of our local hobos look are as sexy as Kate Upton. But then again, neither are many cartoonists… It’s a cruel world.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Frankie’s Magic Bollocks: The Lampard Effect in Publishing
[caption id="attachment_1823" align="aligncenter" width="480"]
Click me[/caption]
The blood boils. It sizzles in the veins and steams from the ears.
No, not the situation in Syria or the government’s austerity plans. I’ve been reading about Frank Lampard’s new children’s book, Frankie’s Magic Football.
What kind of hellish state are we in when these swine can appear in a quality newspaper publicising a book with such crass indifference to the poison-tipped spikes they are driving into the foreheads of struggling writers everywhere? I don’t know what’s more insulting: that these celebrities don’t seem to care that they’ve not written their own books or that these shallow bastards actually think that skills elsewhere should transfer effortlessly into having some skill with a pen.
Isn’t there some law in the land we can invoke demanding that the ‘author’ of a book must have written at least 51% of the words or drawn 51% of the illustrations? Because otherwise, how can we judge them or call them an author? We don’t accept horsemeat instead of beef so why should we accept this literary horsemeat posing as Grade A Rowling or Pullman? He might have had a few meetings with his ghost writer to hammer out a few ideas but let’s cut the bullshit: the only significant contribution Frank Lampard will make to this book is by allowing his name to be used. It’s marketing scam. It’s a publicity wheeze. It’s a sick indictment of our celebrity-obsessed culture. For make no mistake, it's not the grim-faced tyrants that will destroy us as a free society but the smiling celebrities who, in a very slick and clever way, make us think less and consume more. That they're selling their names to children worries me in the same way I've always been suspicious of McDonald's clown.
Perhaps I overstate my case but there is a generally ignorant and indifferent section of the public who will buy into this type of onerous deal, not thinking what it does to the publishing industry. Because that is the bottom line: if it makes money, publishers will invest more into other celebrities having fiction ghosted under their name. How long before Beckham has a novel out? Jordan’s done it with some success though, between her breasts and fingernails, I don’t see how she could have got within five feet of a keyboard.
Publishers will argue, of course, that the money they make from these celebrity deals will be reinvested into new authors. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps that’s one possible future where writers live like parasites feeding around the anus of some greater unthinking host. But I wish quality newspapers would expose the lie instead of treating their readers like fools. They shouldn’t bow to the celebrity, give them an easy time when they should be ashamed to be in the room without asking hard questions about these odious little books. Make them feel the shame that they should feel for passing themselves off as an author. If I ran onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge and tried to dribble around Frank Lampard only to fall flat on my face, he’d rightly laugh at me. Then I’d be escorted from the ground with a lifetime ban and the media calling me a fool and a lout. Except for the bit where I get chased by overweight men in luminous jackets, how is that any different with what Lampard is doing here?
Yet, of course, it doesn’t matter what I say. In fact, people tend to disagree with me for picking on dear Frank. They say that the man has a right to make a living, that he's an intelligent business man, that the book might be good, and aren’t I just a bitter under-published writer with an axe to grind. And, of course they are right. It is sour grapes and some jealousy. But what’s wrong with that? I love words and laud people who write well. The high horse I’m currently riding is called Righteous Indignation. It might not be the favourite in the field but he’s a stubborn plodder.
I also find it remarkable that anybody could consider my defence of literary talent objectionable. I don’t support Chelsea but I’d be the first to admit that Lampard is one of the finest footballers of his generation who deserved every penny he’s earned from his skills. However, I reserve the right to criticise him, along with any other celebrity, who dabbles in publishing merely to make a few quid off the back of their name.
As to Lampard’s book: does it even matter if it is good? My point is let the true author of the book take the credit, do the interviews, and become a household name. I am interested to learn about them, not to read yet another tedious retelling of how Frank’s scored a disallowed goal at the World Cup. Tell me about the illustrator too. I admire their talent but I’d be surprised if both author and illustrator don’t feel some deep resentment that somebody else takes much of the credit for their work. I want the ghost writer to earn the royalties and have an advance as large any Lampard received.
Simply, what’s wrong with wanting to give credit to the person whose talents have created the book? Anything else is simply pandering to the people who believe that marketing, spin, hype, and branding are more important than depth, quality, passion, and individual talent.
This was rewritten from the comments I wrote as ‘UncleZippy’ beneath yesterday’s Lampard story over at The Guardian. You will probably disagree with most of this, as some people over there also disagreed. I don’t give a damn because I know that I’m right.
Click me[/caption]The blood boils. It sizzles in the veins and steams from the ears.
No, not the situation in Syria or the government’s austerity plans. I’ve been reading about Frank Lampard’s new children’s book, Frankie’s Magic Football.
What kind of hellish state are we in when these swine can appear in a quality newspaper publicising a book with such crass indifference to the poison-tipped spikes they are driving into the foreheads of struggling writers everywhere? I don’t know what’s more insulting: that these celebrities don’t seem to care that they’ve not written their own books or that these shallow bastards actually think that skills elsewhere should transfer effortlessly into having some skill with a pen.
Isn’t there some law in the land we can invoke demanding that the ‘author’ of a book must have written at least 51% of the words or drawn 51% of the illustrations? Because otherwise, how can we judge them or call them an author? We don’t accept horsemeat instead of beef so why should we accept this literary horsemeat posing as Grade A Rowling or Pullman? He might have had a few meetings with his ghost writer to hammer out a few ideas but let’s cut the bullshit: the only significant contribution Frank Lampard will make to this book is by allowing his name to be used. It’s marketing scam. It’s a publicity wheeze. It’s a sick indictment of our celebrity-obsessed culture. For make no mistake, it's not the grim-faced tyrants that will destroy us as a free society but the smiling celebrities who, in a very slick and clever way, make us think less and consume more. That they're selling their names to children worries me in the same way I've always been suspicious of McDonald's clown.
Perhaps I overstate my case but there is a generally ignorant and indifferent section of the public who will buy into this type of onerous deal, not thinking what it does to the publishing industry. Because that is the bottom line: if it makes money, publishers will invest more into other celebrities having fiction ghosted under their name. How long before Beckham has a novel out? Jordan’s done it with some success though, between her breasts and fingernails, I don’t see how she could have got within five feet of a keyboard.
Publishers will argue, of course, that the money they make from these celebrity deals will be reinvested into new authors. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps that’s one possible future where writers live like parasites feeding around the anus of some greater unthinking host. But I wish quality newspapers would expose the lie instead of treating their readers like fools. They shouldn’t bow to the celebrity, give them an easy time when they should be ashamed to be in the room without asking hard questions about these odious little books. Make them feel the shame that they should feel for passing themselves off as an author. If I ran onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge and tried to dribble around Frank Lampard only to fall flat on my face, he’d rightly laugh at me. Then I’d be escorted from the ground with a lifetime ban and the media calling me a fool and a lout. Except for the bit where I get chased by overweight men in luminous jackets, how is that any different with what Lampard is doing here?
Yet, of course, it doesn’t matter what I say. In fact, people tend to disagree with me for picking on dear Frank. They say that the man has a right to make a living, that he's an intelligent business man, that the book might be good, and aren’t I just a bitter under-published writer with an axe to grind. And, of course they are right. It is sour grapes and some jealousy. But what’s wrong with that? I love words and laud people who write well. The high horse I’m currently riding is called Righteous Indignation. It might not be the favourite in the field but he’s a stubborn plodder.
I also find it remarkable that anybody could consider my defence of literary talent objectionable. I don’t support Chelsea but I’d be the first to admit that Lampard is one of the finest footballers of his generation who deserved every penny he’s earned from his skills. However, I reserve the right to criticise him, along with any other celebrity, who dabbles in publishing merely to make a few quid off the back of their name.
As to Lampard’s book: does it even matter if it is good? My point is let the true author of the book take the credit, do the interviews, and become a household name. I am interested to learn about them, not to read yet another tedious retelling of how Frank’s scored a disallowed goal at the World Cup. Tell me about the illustrator too. I admire their talent but I’d be surprised if both author and illustrator don’t feel some deep resentment that somebody else takes much of the credit for their work. I want the ghost writer to earn the royalties and have an advance as large any Lampard received.
Simply, what’s wrong with wanting to give credit to the person whose talents have created the book? Anything else is simply pandering to the people who believe that marketing, spin, hype, and branding are more important than depth, quality, passion, and individual talent.
This was rewritten from the comments I wrote as ‘UncleZippy’ beneath yesterday’s Lampard story over at The Guardian. You will probably disagree with most of this, as some people over there also disagreed. I don’t give a damn because I know that I’m right.
Friday, 22 June 2012
Knitting Air
I thought I’d be animating vulgarities today but, due to circumstances outside my control, I’m forced to go back to my novel earlier than I’d hoped. I wanted to leave a few months before looking at it again but life does this to me sometimes: it’s a matter of get a publisher/agent or get a job, so I’m sitting here trying to hammer some sense into 95,000 words (and about 30 illustrations) that still don’t fill me with confidence. Fixing a novel is about as easy as knitting air.
The problem with comedy writing – indeed the same can be said of cartooning – is that you’re far too close to the work to be able to laugh. Familiar with every joke, one-liner, or groaning pun, you no longer see the finished article as a sustained piece of comedy. You see it as the unstructured outpourings of your mind. Of course, I’ve asked people to read it but you can’t believe your family’s judgement. In fact, the age-old ‘my mother loved it’ is the worst thing you can tell a prospective agent, even if, as in this case, my mother loved it. The feedback I’ve received from friends has been next to minimal. One person could only manage half the book, hated chapter two, and didn’t like the name of my protagonist. That has been the sum of meaningful feedback. I don’t blame them for not reading it, not least because they have busy lives and there’s nothing worse than being obliged to read a book when you don’t normally read books. The problem with writing something as long as 90,000 is that you pity the poor buggers who you ask to help. Writing a book is as much an organic process as it is sequential. The finished article has to make sense when you read it from front to back, but discovering that sequence involves making mistakes, taking the wrong path, backtracking, and countless rewrites.
So now I sit here trying to rewrite Chapter Two, with very little sense of there being anything wrong with it, compared with the rest of the book which I wrote too recently to approach with a fresh eye.
Even if I wrote about 400,000 words for my book of spoof letters (only 60,000 made the finished book), writing that was so much easier than working on a novel, not least because feedback came 1000 words at a time.
So what am I doing writing this? I’m avoiding looking at Chapter Two. I worry about what I might find. Incidentally, if anybody comes across this blog post and does want to read my book to provide feedback, then please email me at david@the-spine.com. If you sound serious, I’ll send you an epub of the book. I need all the help I can get.
The problem with comedy writing – indeed the same can be said of cartooning – is that you’re far too close to the work to be able to laugh. Familiar with every joke, one-liner, or groaning pun, you no longer see the finished article as a sustained piece of comedy. You see it as the unstructured outpourings of your mind. Of course, I’ve asked people to read it but you can’t believe your family’s judgement. In fact, the age-old ‘my mother loved it’ is the worst thing you can tell a prospective agent, even if, as in this case, my mother loved it. The feedback I’ve received from friends has been next to minimal. One person could only manage half the book, hated chapter two, and didn’t like the name of my protagonist. That has been the sum of meaningful feedback. I don’t blame them for not reading it, not least because they have busy lives and there’s nothing worse than being obliged to read a book when you don’t normally read books. The problem with writing something as long as 90,000 is that you pity the poor buggers who you ask to help. Writing a book is as much an organic process as it is sequential. The finished article has to make sense when you read it from front to back, but discovering that sequence involves making mistakes, taking the wrong path, backtracking, and countless rewrites.
So now I sit here trying to rewrite Chapter Two, with very little sense of there being anything wrong with it, compared with the rest of the book which I wrote too recently to approach with a fresh eye.
Even if I wrote about 400,000 words for my book of spoof letters (only 60,000 made the finished book), writing that was so much easier than working on a novel, not least because feedback came 1000 words at a time.
So what am I doing writing this? I’m avoiding looking at Chapter Two. I worry about what I might find. Incidentally, if anybody comes across this blog post and does want to read my book to provide feedback, then please email me at david@the-spine.com. If you sound serious, I’ll send you an epub of the book. I need all the help I can get.
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