Category: Publishing

50 Shades of Bald – the feather or the chicken?

10/8/2012

That sound you can hear is not so much a bandwagon trundling by as a tumbril, taking the doomed hopes for uplifting literature to the guillotine.

What to make of 50 Shades of Grey? On one hand, we struggling authors look with the deepest green hue at the stratospheric sales, the publicity, the movie deal. On the other, we cleave to the general view that the writing’s a steaming pile of dinosaur crap.

We already know that the lookalikes and out-doers are in the pipeline but what’s a middle-aged male writer with virtually no hair (of whatever colour) to do?

So here are some new genre-busting suggestions.

Geriatric erotica: It doesn’t last long and you may have to break off for a pee.

Nostalgic porn: These are all the things I fantasised about doing before I put my back out.

Sexual Dementia: I know this used to go somewhere – but I’m fucked if I can remember where.

Isabel Allende said that the difference between erotica and pornography is that with erotica one uses a feather, with pornography the whole chicken.

You know you’re past it when that sounds tasty.

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Masturbatory publicity – the eye-wrecking need for DIY

26/7/2012

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Grosse Fugue has now been on the market for a month or two. What’s clear is that any author but the most established needs to be as much a marketer as they do a writer.

You only have to look at the fabled lists of looked-forward-to books to see the challenge. Here’s one example: Huffington Post’s 15 Best New Books Of 2012. Predictable, tedious and entirely elitist. Established authors from established publishers log-rolling their respective interests. This is no more a commercially competitive picture than retail banks or privatised utilities, with their cosy co-existence and identical offers (and that, of course, it no imputation of cartelling).

It’s a picture of those who are striving every sinew to keep what they’ve got. Conservatives in the true sense of the word. So, for the brave, entrepreneurial independent publisher and their stable of authors, the chances of penetrating the fortified walls of the publishing behemoths and the papers who review their works are slight indeed.

We writers have to do it ourselves. The proliferation of electronic media makes all this possible. Easily upgraded websites, Facebook, blogs and Twitter are all essential weapons.

The great challenge of course is content. It’s all very well having these media at your fingertips. It’s quite another thing to originate interesting things to say on a regular basis. And, sheesh, are they hungry! A bit like the burgeoning of tv channels inevitably resulted in a reduction in quality and the long, triumphant march of mediocrity, so that is the threat hanging over social media.

That means I’m off to a darkened room now to dream up screeds of interesting high-quality material to feed these voracious beasts. I may be some time.

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50 Shades of Bald – the feather or the chicken?

Masturbatory publicity – the eye-wrecking need for DIY

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