The Next Big Thing in Publishing

A conversation with the CEO of Penguin set me thinking. If writers are increasingly turning to self-publishing, why shouldn't publishers turn to self-writing? Think of it. Imagine you are a global publishing magnate. Your business is assailed each day with dire propositions from gormless agents who can't tell a good book from a wheelbarrow. Even when you find something half-decent you've no idea whether it is going to sell. You have a back-catalogue full of duds waiting to be pulped or remaindered. What other business allows its products to be invented by amateurs?  Did Steve Jobs and his team sit round waiting for hopeful agents to submit product ideas? Of course not.

It is time for a quiet revolution in publishing. One by one let us change our email addresses and phone numbers so that the agents can no longer pester us, and let's make the commissioning editors actually commission. Let them engage cohorts of professional writers- as full-time members of the staff- and let them market-research, design, develop, test and produce the novels of the future. Let us end the reliance on the contingencies of amateur authoring. Let us bring the work of product development in-house and do the job properly for once.

The Literary Games

Following our announcement of 'Live Literature'- a revolutionary development in the field of entertainment- we have made yet another huge cognitive leap. Today we announce The Literary Games!

For thousands of years men and women have competed in trials of strength, speed, skill, and stamina,  of which trials The Olympic Games is our most celebrated collection. Literature has never featured in these inspirational contests, and it is natural that a person of towering intellectual curiosity would ask why that should be so. The cause, I have concluded, is precisely the same at that which has prevented the development of writing as a performance art, namely the traditional use of pen and paper, which prevents the writing of the author from being viewed simultaneously by members of a large audience, a limitation affecting performance arts and spectator sports alike. However, today's ubiquity of digital broadcasting technology allows writing to be viewed live by huge audiences, opening up a gigantic opportunity for the literary-minded entrepreneur.

After minutes of effort I have the thing all sketched out.

The Literary Games will be an international event, held every two years, neatly filling the gaps between The Olympics and The World Cup.

The Games will be masterminded by an International Organising Committee, terms of reference for which I am already drafting. Naturally, I will be prepared to sit as the founding chair of the Committee, to oversee the first few delicate years in which The Games develop from being the brainchild of a genius to a fixture in the world's entertainment schedule.

Owing to its mountainous early workload, the Committee will meet fortnightly.  To ensure fairness to travelling participants, meetings will rotate between a number of convenient locations-  Bermuda, Nice, Geneva, Milan, The Maldives, Las Vegas, Acapulco, Phuket, Vail, St Moritz, and Monaco- with a modest scheme of stipends to defray the expenses of the members.

Countries will bid to host the prestigious event. The selection of the bids will be made in secret, and the results announced live during a quiet period in the entertainments calendar, thus simultaneously offering huge opportunities for publicity and back-handers.

The Games will span the literary spectrum, including fiction and non-fiction, and all established genres. Individual events will be scored by the 'weighted speed' method, in which the score is the quality of the written work (as rated by a panel of judges on a scale from 0 to 10) divided by the time taken for its completion. Thus competitors will face a tactical choice between gaining extra points through higher quality or speedier completion.

The 14-day programme is expected to include:

Short verse forms, including haiku and limerick. These to be in knock-out rounds each of 8 contestants, culminating in a final with four contestants.

Short-stories. To be between 1,995 and 2,005 words. Initial rounds to be in specific genres, with a cross-genre 'Grand Final'.

Long verse-forms. Length of the work to be at the choice of the competitor; however, the scores will be weighted by the number of words produced.

Non-fiction. Works to be full-length in genres specified by the judges ten days before the event.

Pentathlon. Authors compete in short verse-form, short story (two genres, selectable by the competitor from a list published by the judges on the day), non-fiction (freestyle), and long verse-form. Winner decided by normalised cumulative scores from individual events.

The Blue Ribband event will be the full length novel. To avoid cheating through the re-use of prepared material, the genre and synopsis of the novel will be stipulated by the judges, and revealed to the competitors two minutes before the starting gun. The most stringent security measures will be enforced to ensure no premature leaks of the specification. Authors will have nine days to complete their works, leaving five days for judging and speculation about the likely winner.

In all events competitors will be required to type their work on a standard digital device, so that it may be relayed in real-time to the judges and to a massive world-wide TV audience.  Suitable adjustments may be made at the discretion of the judges for authors with handicaps.

Authors may write in any language. Real-time translations will allow the events to be enjoyed by the non-polyglot, although the judging will be based upon the original transcript.

Publishing rights for works produced during The Games will vest with The Committee, and will be auctioned to sponsoring publishers to generate funds to re-invest in 'grass roots' literary participation schemes.

STOP PRESS

A late development in the formulation of the programme of events is the inclusion of the freestyle humorous sprint. Competitors to produce exactly 862 words on any topic. The work must be a genuinely new and spontaneous product of the author’s intellect, with no prior deliberation or planning, and produced in under 37 minutes.

Connoisseurs of literary humour the world-over: Sure, that’s a stitch-up. There’s only one person who could win an event like that. We’re going to lobby the committee to introduce a rule to prevent the Chair from being a competitor.

Self: Well if that’s your attitude I will resign, and let’s see what an utter shambles it all descends into without my leadership.

Trump on the up

A short item in today's Times claims that those who object to lowering standards of English are introverted under-achievers. Rubbish. I assume it must be some pathetic attempt at a joke (Readers- you should know!), otherwise how would they explain the long series of articles posted on his blog by Donald Trump, in which he instructs his media-relations staff on the subject of good written English, today's example of which is reproduced below:

Good written English #48,371

Expunge un-necessary occurrences of the word 'up', as found, for example, in:

Hilary rang up Donald to beg his advice.
Donald wrapped up the parcel of dog doo-doos he was sending to Bush.
Donald climbed up the stairs to the podium amid the cheers of adoring acolytes.
The singing cowboy coiled up his rope after a pre-rally nostalgia event.
The exhausted publican locked up the bar for the night after Donald's election victory party.
The conscientious journalist typed up her handwritten notes from the amazing interview with Donald.
Not wishing it to stop, Maude wound up the Napoleonic clock given her by Donald Trump.
Charisma genius and hard work helped me build up my business empire.
Donald tore up the campaigning rule book into tiny pieces.
Donald penned up all the Mexicans behind a big fence.
The failed nominees queued up to congratulate Donald.


His list goes on. I suppose, however, that in truth the advice might have been written by an introverted underachiever on Trump's staff and simply posted in Donald's name. After all, he seems not to understand where ups are needed, if we believe the following recent admonishment he uttered to a member of his team...

And don't be surprised if I pull you [up] if I spot a cock [up].

Either that or Donald has another little secret he hasn't let us in on.

iPhone insecurities

I was furious at last night’s confirmation by the FBI that an ‘outside party’ had shown them how to circumvent the security features of an iPhone. The predictable upshot of their careless indiscretion is that my phone (not an iPhone I need hardly add) has been red hot ever since, as virtually every journalist with the brains to add two and two has been seeking a quote from me about how and why I did it. I suppose I should be grateful that so few journalists are capable of adding two and two, otherwise there would be no end to their impudent calls.

Literature Live

In a supreme gesture of marital solidarity I sat with my wife through a  concert by a folk group. During about the fourth of the badly composed and badly played numbers that comprised the programme I was gripped by a craving for intellectual stimulation. Wouldn’t it be lovely, I thought, to be reading some well-written innovative literature instead of listening to this mindless dirge. And then occurred one of those astonishing phenomena of subconscious creativity which have come to characterise my prodigious intellectual output- why, I thought, shouldn’t the production of literature become a performing art?

Historically it is plain that the scope for writing as a popular performance art was limited by the physical constraints of its most common medium- paper. Performance art implies some form of simultaneous experience by a sizeable audience, and it would hardly be possible for a  more than a handful of spectators to be craning over the shoulder as an author put pen to paper. But today, with laptops and powerful high-resolution projectors there are no longer any barriers, bar prejudice and narrowness of imagination, to bringing the act of writing before a mass audience. Why, I thought, could I not be seated in some theatre, amongst ranks of like-minded enthusiasts, watching with avid appreciation as one of our favourite works is typed onto a huge screen….

Before even the end of the folk concert I had sketched out in my mind an entire paradigm for ‘live’ literature. Broadly, performances could fall into one of four schools, thus:

 

The Replicative School. Here the performer would type verbatim some established work of literature. To avoid simple errors of memory the performer could play from a ‘score’, a copy of the original work suitably marked-up to denote points at which the pace of the typing should be increased or reduced in sympathy with the sense of the words being produced. The description of a battle, for example, might be typed in staccato bursts, while a moment of maximum suspense in a thriller might be haltingly reproduced step by step.

The Impressionist.  Here the performer would type variants on the work to convey its essence without perhaps slavishly mimicking its every detail.

The Elevational. Here the performer would take a typical trashy best-seller and reproduce its plot but with all traces of cliché, pleonasm, etc expunged, rendering it a still popular reproduction but one less offensive to the sensibilities of the concert-going aesthete.

The Improvisational. This would be the elite realm of only the most brilliant and gifted  of writers, those of perfect technique and infinite creativity, writers who could be expected to type, from scratch, an entire evening’s reading matter to challenge, entertain and astound the most demanding of literary audiences. Doubters seeking proof that such an act of spontaneous literary creation is possible are directed to the forgoing text.

The Caitlin Moron, sorry, Moran Effect

To expand my portfolio of lucrative sinecures I have applied to be editor of ‘Times 2’, the trashy supplement introduced by The Times in 2005. The role is clearly a nominal one. I imagine its duties are confined to one short daily meeting at which the production team confirms that a) there are 20 pages ready to print, and b) they are all filled with something. Certainly no editing takes place- a red pencil would last the incumbent a lifetime. Take the following paragraph plucked at random from today’s tripe:

‘In his column Piers Morgan informs Kim Kardashian that since she is 35 her muff has, basically, passed its sell-by date. Addressing her directly, Morgan explained to Kardashian that she needed to put her clothes back on, and that the time had come to hand the baton on to the next generation of women who want to show their vaginas on the internet.’

With so much to criticise where shall we start... perhaps with the 'basically' at the end of the first line. Is it an unnecessary cliché, that should have been red-lined?  Or could it be a crucial insert to stress that Kardashian's muff is decrepit in some essential sense- not just some greying tangled pubes? I wonder. And what of the breathtakingly superfluous ‘on’ that follows ‘hand the baton’? What sort of...

Connoisseurs of Literary Humour the World Over: Hang on there. That’s Caitlin Moran you’re slagging off.

Myself: Who?

CoLHtWO: Caitlin Moran, award winning journalist and a fine strap of an Irish girl, Tubby Shaw. You should be ashamed of yourself slagging off a lovely Irish lass like that just to make a cheap point.

Myself: Yes, of course, you’re right. Most unfair. I was carried away.

CoLHtWO: How do you know that the superfluous ‘on’ after 'handing the baton' was hers and was left in by a lazy slattern of an editor? How do you know it wasn’t added in by the editor? Hey?

Myself, contrite and remorseful: True.

CoLHtWO: So what are you going to do about it?

Myself, after a pause:  How about this...

Beautiful journalist Caitlin Moran waits at the coffee machine for her cappuccino to froth. She is oblivious to the cooing crowd of acolytes who surround her. She is pensive, withdrawn. Her journalistic ethic is threatened by Morag Hilsten, the strong-willed and capricious new editor of Times 2.  Since its inception in 2011, each paragraph of Caitlin’s ‘Celebrity Watch’ has been agonisingly crafted by her to form, syllabically, a reverse ‘droighneach’, the Irish verse form practiced by the Morans of Neath from time immemorial. Of course, the effect is unappreciated by her colleagues and her hordes of hasty careless readers. All bar that one special reader to whom her work is devoted. He will notice. His eye will see beneath the tawdry content of her prose its syllabic poeticism. He alone will…

Whhaaa, whhaa, whaaa, a strident claxon sounds over the public address system at Times HQ. ‘Miss Moran to the editor’s office’ orders the harsh metallic tones she feared.  Gulping nervously she leaves her cappuccino to its fate and walks head down to Hilsten’s office.

‘Ah, Moran,’ says the brutish illiterate control-freak behind the expansive teak desk, ‘this copy of yours.’

‘Yes?’ Caitlin awaits the worst with proud defiance in the attitude of her queenly head.

‘Shouldn’t there be an  ‘on’ here after ‘baton’?’

‘Er.. not necessarily, Miss Hilston.’

‘Well readers might think the baton is being passed back, mightn’t they?’

‘The phrase is an idiom from the sphere of athletics, Miss Hilton, and the racers in a relay only ever pass the baton to the next runner; they never hand it back to an earlier one.’

‘Yes, well, you might know that and I might know that but the readers might not know, so we’ll have an ‘on’ there thank you.’

‘Yes Miss Hilston.’

‘And where you say ‘the next generation who want to show their vaginas on the internet’, shouldn’t that be the next generation ‘of women’? After all, men don’t have vaginas.’

‘Well, Miss Hilston, that’s the point.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Men don’t have vaginas, so the ‘of women’ can be taken as read.’

‘Yes, well, you might know that and I might know that but the readers might not know, so we’ll have an ‘of women’ there thank you.’

‘Yes Miss Hilston.’

Later…

Sobbing inconsolable Caitlin sits hunched over her Mac, an emulsion of tears and mascara staining its keyboard. Her anxious colleagues are grouped in whispers at the coffee machine. She…

CoLHTWO: OK that’s enough.

Myself: Are you sure? I could go on for pages yet.

CoLHTWO: No we’re sure.

Myself: Right-ho. But if you change your mind…

Clichometry

How many times have you heard a conversation along the following lines:

A: I read The Da Vinci Code yesterday.
B: What was it like?
A: Atrocious unbearable hack-spawn.
B: I bet it wasn't as bad as AA Gill's tripe in the Sunday Times.
A: Nooooh. Gill's crap, I grant you, but surely not in the same league as Brown.

And so on.
The differing opinions that motivate such discussions are never satisfactorily resolved as there has been no agreed standard way to evaluate the extent to which any given work of literature is debased by cliché, especially where the works may take such different forms as, say, a novel and a newspaper column.
To eliminate the problem I have developed and today announce clichometry, an ingenious standard of measurement that will transform the practice of literary review.
The rules of clichometry are as simple as they are revolutionary, and may be stated thus:

1) In any given work each occurrence of a cliché is awarded a point.
2) Where the work itself is one big cliché- say a medieval whodunit with a crime-busting nun- each point is doubled.
3) The 'cliché index' of the work is its total number of points divided by its word-count, conventionally expressed as a percentage.

Informal applications of clichometry may be based on sampling to relieve the assessor of the debilitating effects of cumulative exposure to clichés; they may also substitute the figure 250n- where n is the page count- for the word count. However, in scholastic or competitive assessments rigorous counts of words and clichés must be completed and independently verified.

Future conversations may now be concluded in a far more harmonious and enlightening way:

A: I read The Da Vinci Code yesterday.
B: What was it like?
A: Atrocious unbearable hack-spawn. By my rough count the cliché index was eleven point two.
B: Just be glad you didn't read AA Gill's tripe in the Sunday Times- thirteen point eight.
A: (wincing) That's fierce. You've taken it easy since, I hope.

And so on.

My team of crack North-Korean programmers has developed and tested an algorithm that will determine the cliché index of any work presented in a machine-readable format (and which aren't nowadays). Negotiations with Google and Bing are reaching an interesting state.