Why social media isn’t the magic bullet for self-epublished authors

Social media: great white hope, or albatross? Photograph: Alamy

In the third in a series of essays on digital media and publishing, Ewan Morrison, who will appear at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, claims that as the project to monetise social media falters the self-epublishing industry’s defects will be laid bare

“Authors – become a success through building an ‘internet platform’!”. For almost five years we’ve been subjected to the same message. At the London College of Communication’s iGeneration conference this year, I heard that social media was now the only way to sell books, and witnessed glowing examples of the successful use of SM from epub authors such as Joanna Penn (who has her own consultancy and sells $99 multimedia courses on How to Write A Novel). At the Hay festival last month, I heard Scott Pack – self-described “blogger, publisher and author of moderately successful toilet books” – declare that mainstream media, papers and TV “no longer function in selling books”; that the net is now the only way for authors to – you’ve heard it before – “build a platform”. Already every fourth tweet I receive is from an “indie” author trying to self-promote, saying things like “Hoping for a cheeky RT of my last tweet on my book & the 99p offer. B v grateful.” And another – “Hope all is well! My dad just published his latest book on Amazon – if possible, I was wondering if you had any tips for him getting his book reviewed by any relevant bloggers. Appreciate any insight.” And then there are the hundreds of tweets from social media ebook consultants and so-called specialists offering “the key to online marketing success”.

I’m convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next 18 months. The reason is this: epublishing is inextricably tied to the structures of social media marketing and the myth that social media functions as a way of selling products. It doesn’t, and we’re just starting to get the true stats on that. When social media marketing collapses it will destroy the platform that the dream of a self-epublishing industry was based upon.

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The joy of Moleskine notebooks

Moleskine notebooks … the best of their kind? Photograph: Alamy

No, despite what you may have heard, Bruce Chatwin never used them but they are still the best notebooks money can buy.

By Emine Saner

It’s the  promise held in that unbroken spine, the smooth oilskin cover, the comforting rounded corners. But most of all in the pristine ivory blankness, ready to be filled with the beginnings of your first bestseller and sketches so groundbreaking they will require new ways of thinking about art. This notebook, the Moleskine pocketone you just paid £8.99 for, will deliver it all.

Apparently Van Gogh used one, and Picasso, and Hemingway – this history now rests in your hands. So long as you can find a spot in Caffe Nero and get to work. “It’s a masterful bit of excavation of the human psyche,” says Stephen Bayley, the design critic and writer – and user of Moleskines. “The stuff you’re writing in it could be the most brainless trivia, but it makes you feel connected to Hemingway.”

Except there is no real connection to Hemingway. Moleskine was created in 1997, based on a description of the beautiful, bound notebooks the travel writer Bruce Chatwin bought from a French bookbinder before it closed down. An Italian company Modo & Modo recreated it, sold it at a premium price and describes it as a “legendary notebook”. “It’s an exaggeration,” Francesco Franceschi, co-owner of Modo & Modo told the New York Times in 2004. “It’s marketing, not science. It’s not the absolute truth.”

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Mexican marvels: DBC Pierre and the axolotls

The future looks like this … the axolotl. Photograph: Alamy

Axolotls are salamander-like creatures that can regrow their limbs, jaws and even spines. DBC Pierre on why he is collaborating on a symphony inspired by the creatures he once kept as pets.

By DBC Pierre

Kismet – don’t knock it. I mean the little flurries of coincidences and symbols that seem to herald approaching change. I’ve been informally watching the dynamics of change for as long as I can remember. It seems to me change comes in clusters, and its triggers seem to fire independently and simultaneously, mostly in areas of life already pregnant with something: anything from a death to an unexpected success or an unforeseen setback.

Take the infuriating fairground game Penny Falls, where you feed coins into a slot and they drop onto a moving ledge of other pennies, forever on the verge of falling. It’s like that: energies, purposeful or not, gather and gather and eventually reach a critical mass, at which point a trigger sets them all falling.

I’ve also found that change-clusters send a signature up-front: a notice of impending change. A couple of pennies fall in advance, and you can see the area of pressure they fell from. This is how change seems to work. My first novel, Vernon God Little, came from watching the signature of a high-school massacre. The matter of affluent teens exploding was about to arrive, the culture was overheated, and these were the first pops – and it did arrive, and arrived to stay. Likewise, I sketched the setting of my most recent book, Lights Out in Wonderland, an allegory of late capitalism, when times were booming; but it was clear, once banks started giving loans to people without incomes, that the pennies were ready to fall.

Hence, strangely, axolotls. Bear with me: I don’t feel it’s wishful or magical thinking to say we appear to be approaching a change in the very foundation of thought about life and the universe. The pennies are stacking up. The signatures have appeared in the last year. I feel the kismet like the drawing-back of the tide before a tsunami. Towards a sudden time when the internet seems as baroque as wax-sealed parchment. Cancer treatment as dumb as being bled. Our notion of space as arcane as the flat earth.

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E-books are for porn but real books with survive, says award-winning author

Real books will survive as they are status symbols, Joan Brady has said Photo: ALAMY

E-books are “worthless” and have become the preserve of soap stars’ biographies and soft porn, while physical books will survive because people use them as status symbols, a Whitbread Prize-winning author has said.

By James Hall

Joan Brady, who won the literary prize in 1993 for Theory of War, a novel about a young boy sold into white slavery in post-Civil War America, said that paper books will never disappear because people use them to “confirm their social identity” and want to be seen carrying them.

Meanwhile lowbrow “pulp” such as “celebrity biographies, Mills & Boon and porn” will “disappear into e-books”, she said.

“Your Rolex watch? It’s a statement. A four-wheel drive? A statement. That’s what the books in your house are too,” Ms Brady told The Daily Telegraph.

She said that the millions of Britons who proudly display Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time on their bookshelves but have not actually read it are “proof” that physical books are used as status symbols.

“Hardly anybody read it; people bought it to put on their shelves so other people could see it,” she said.

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The novel saved by a police forensic team

Photo: Alamy

When Trish Vickers lost her sight, she decided to make use of her vivid imagination by painstakingly writing a book in longhand.

But after hours of hard work and careful thought, she was left devastated when she was told that 26 pages were blank because her pen had run out of ink.

The 59-year-old mother feared that the manuscript was lost but the generosity of her local police force meant that it was gradually recovered using forensic technology.

Miss Vickers said she was “gobsmacked” when Dorset police officers agreed to help by sacrificing their lunch hours over five months to study the indents made by her pen.

“I could remember the gist of what I had written but there was no way I could have written exactly the same way again,” she said. “I am so grateful. It was really nice of them and I want to thank them for helping me out.”

Miss Vickers, from Charmouth, near Lyme Regis, lost her sight seven years ago through diabetes and turned to her imagination for solace.

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Cover story: a year of beautiful books

It is not just jacket design that has upped its game in recent years… Victorian letterpress blocks. Photograph: Alamy/Steven Heald

This year for the first time more ebooks were sold than hardbacks. Publishers have responded by bringing out exquisite new releases and revamps of classics.

By Kathryn Hughes

In his recent Booker acceptance speech, Julian Barnes did the usual polite thing of thanking his editors and his agent. But then, just when everyone thought he was done, he veered off in an entirely unexpected direction to pay animated tribute to Suzanne Dean, “the best book designer in town”, who had turned his prize-winning novel into “a beautiful object”. The Sense of an Ending does indeed come clad in a lovely cover, an elegiac visual riff on dandelion clocks, which darkens at the edge to black, an idea of mourning that then runs over the edges of the pages themselves. At least it does in the early editions. Such little touches are both fiddly and expensive (which comes to the same thing) so subsequent reprintings have left off the darkened page ends. It’s a decision, Dean herself admits, that is going to make the first editions of the novel just that little bit more desirable in years to come.

Whatever might be thought of Barnes’s novel, there was wide agreement that his public acknowledgment of the book’s designer was a “moment”, one that needed to be parsed for its implications. And chief among those implications seems to be that judging a book (at least partly) by its cover has become a legitimate thing to do. In addition to Dean at Random House, there is currently a whole slew of art editors, production directors and book designers who are going about their business with a new spring in their step. Nothing raises the spirits more than knowing that people are noticing your work, think it good, and want you to do more.

Publishers have started building their marketing strategies around form rather than content. The Everyman Library, which is coming up to the 20th anniversary of its modern relaunch, makes much of its books’ elegant two-colour case stamping, silk ribbon markers and “European-style” half-round spines. In 2009, to celebrate its 80th birthday, Faber republished a collection of its classic poetry hardbacks illustrated with exquisite wood and lino cuts by contemporary artists. Not to be outdone, Penguin will next year be reissuing 100 classic novels in its revamped English Library series in what its press release describes as “readers’ editions”. What other sort could there be, you might wonder?

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Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-covered Paris tomb to be protected

A woman kisses Oscar Wilde's tomb. From now on his fans will find it harder to get so close. Photograph: Peter Horree/Alamy

Wilde’s grave in Paris has been restored after decades of unusual lipstick tributes.

By Dalya Alberge

“A kiss may ruin a human life,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. It can also ruin the stonework of a tomb, judging by the extraordinary graffiti – kisses in lipstick left by admirers – that for years have been defacing and even eroding the massive memorial to the Irish dramatist and wit in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery.

Wilde died in the city in 1900, aged 46. His restored tomb will finally be unveiled this week, newly protected from his devotees.

For years visitors would confine themselves to leaving gently admiring billets doux dedicated to the creator of The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere’s Fan. All that changed in the late 1990s, when somebody decided to leave a lipstick kiss on the tomb. Since then lipstick kisses and hearts have been joined by a rash of red graffiti containing expressions of love, such as: “Wilde child we remember you”, “Keep looking at the stars” and “Real beauty ends where intellect begins”. Surprisingly, perhaps, most are written by women.

Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, said the lipstick had become a “serious problem” because the grease sinks into the stone. “Every cleaning was causing a bit more stone to wear away,” he said.

“No amount of appeals to the public did any good at all. Kissing Oscar’s tomb on the Paris tourist circuit has become a cult pastime, which is proving impossible to break. Even if one could catch someone in flagrante delicto – there is a €9,000 (£7,700) fine – most perpetrators are probably tourists, so they would be home before the French authorities could bring them to court.

“From a technical point of view, the tomb is close to being irreparably damaged. Each cleaning has rendered the stone more porous necessitating a yet more drastic cleaning.”

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The End of Borders and the Future of Books

Borders seems to have been in the business of making mistakes Alamy

An inside look at the real reasons for the once-beloved chain’s demise

By Ben Austen

In September, just days before Borders Group met its end, one of the chain’s last retail holdouts, in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood, Tenn., was being liquidated, with prices slashed by 90 percent. It was difficult in the stark surroundings not to think of a battle waged and lost, of the armies of Kindle owners and e-book peddlars off celebrating victory while all around lay the carnage—two copies of a Paul Reiser memoir, the suspect Greg Mortensen book Stones into Schools, a still-brimming manga section. A couple of professional scavengers picked over the DVDs, cataloging them with their own scanners. Empty shelves were being stacked in the store’s growing hollows and themselves tagged with prices ranging from $25 to $50. The defeat felt so stunning because it seemed so nearly complete, not just for Borders but also for bookselling in general. A two-story Borders in Nashville proper, about 10 miles north, had shut its doors four months earlier. In November 2010, a 30,000-square-foot outlet of a bookstore chain called Davis-Kidd Booksellers, in business in the city for 30 years, had closed as well. With the shuttering of the Brentwood Borders, there wasn’t a store within 22 miles of Nashville that specialized in new books.

Nashville might seem like an archetype of the death-of-the-bookstore-everywhere narrative, but its story turns out to be different. The cashier who checked me out at the Brentwood store, Nancy DeVille, had transferred from the Nashville location when it closed, and she said both outlets were constantly packed with regulars drawn to the sight, feel, and smell of books. David Beddow, a supervisor at the Nashville store from 2005 to 2008, remembered costumed crowds snaking around the corner for the release of the latest Harry Potter.

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Why creative writing is better with a pen

A man's hand writing. Photograph: Acestock/Alamy

Not only is longhand a much more portable way to write, it’s also much more individual.

By Lee Rourke

In a wonderful article published on the New York Review of Books blog the poet Charles Simic proclaimed “writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity”. Simic was praising the use of notebooks of course, and, stationery fetishism aside, it got me thinking about authors who write their novels and poems longhand into notebooks rather than directly onto the screen. There must be some. I mean, I can’t be the only one? Actually, it turns out there are quite a few. A while back I was having a Twitter conversation with the novelists Jon McGregor and Alex Preston about this very topic. Alex had decided to write his next novel with pen and notebook and Jon McGregor and myself couldn’t urge him to do it enough.

Everything I’ve ever written was composed in notebooks first. I have hundreds of them filled with my scribbles tucked away in boxes. I also buy them obsessively, so I probably have just as many empty notebooks lying around the house ready and waiting to be filled. I find that writing longhand I can enter a zone of comfort I find hard to achieve when sitting in front of a screen – I find typing annoying, if I’m honest, not the mechanics of it, but the sound. The constant tap-tap-tap-tap on the keyboard reminds me of all the offices I’ve worked in. The sound bores into me, it fills me with an anxiety I could do without. I feel like I’m signing off invoices rather than writing my next novel. Writing longhand is a whole different feeling. For a start, I can take my notepads and pens everywhere I go; which means I can write anywhere I want, when I want. This is good for me as my writing comes to me in fits rather than prolonged spells. Only when my work is finished in longhand do I transfer it to a computer, editing as I type up. I find this part of my writing process the least enjoyable.

“Pen and paper is always to hand,” agrees Jon McGregor. “An idea or phrase can be grabbed and worked at while it’s fresh. Writing on the page stays on the page, with its scribbles and rewrites and long arrows suggesting a sentence or paragraph be moved, and can be looked over and reconsidered. Writing on the screen is far more ephemeral – a sentence deleted can’t be reconsidered.

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I’m not ashamed of what’s loaded on my e-reader – are you?

Highbrow or lowbrow? You can’t tell what he is reading Photo: ALAMY

A new survey reveals much about the trashy contents of people’s Kindles and other electronic libraries.

By Iain Hollingshead

One of the vanishing pleasures of life is nosing through your friends’ music collection while they’re next door cooking. Happy grunts of recognition would greet each sighting of a CD by U2, Radiohead, Oasis, Pulp or Simon and Garfunkel. Meanwhile, your friend’s age could be carbon dated to the exact month by spotting whether their Now That’s What I Call Music cassette collection started with Now 18 or Now 19. And, if you were particularly lucky, you might swoop upon an embarrassing novelty record, such as the Mr Blobby single, offering ample bullying fodder for the rest of the evening.

Today in the era of iTunes, hardly anyone displays their music (my CDs live in a dark cupboard, retrieved only if we’re hiring a car abroad and don’t fancy listening to France Inter down the autoroute). And as for that scary looking chap on the train with his iPod, he might be nodding along to Schubert.

Similarly, one wonders how much longer books will decorate rooms. Amazon announced this year that e-book sales had overtaken printed ones in America. The UK looks like following suit; e-books have overtaken hardbacks and are catching up on the overall total.

Furthermore, are those remaining books becoming mere decoration? A survey published yesterday found that, although three quarters of the books on our shelves are weighty political memoirs and autobiographies, many of us have read fewer than a third of them. Meanwhile, a quarter of us are too embarrassed to admit to owning the e-books we are actually reading – mainly thrillers, mysteries and fantasy. One fifth of those surveyed said they were so ashamed of their electronic collections that they wouldn’t bother claiming them back if they lost their e-reader.

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