Exploring Wattpad's Library

Exploring a little further on the Wattpad campus, (see yesterday’s blog), like some wide-eyed Hogwarts newbie, I came across their library of classics, (supplied, I believe, by The Gutenberg Project). I have now spent an entire afternoon wandering around the virtual shelves picking up and dusting off books, some of which, like The Secret Garden, I probably haven’t read for half a century. From Jeeves to Tarzan, Darwin to Beowulf, it was like stepping back into my grandfather’s library and letting Serendipity be my guide. Was there ever a more glorious way to while away a rainy afternoon?

Could Wattpad be the Greatest University of Writing Ever?

As well as being a showcase for indie books, could http://www.wattpad.com/ be the greatest University of Writing ever?

The site is designed to be a sort of YouTube for authors, a glorious, great, free bookstore in the sky, but it seems to me that it could be providing something else even more important than that.

Anyone can put their writings up there and anyone can read them. The books tend to go up one chapter at a time and some of them are read by millions – literally – mainly on phones and other mobile devices. Wandering around this campus in the clouds it is obvious that the majority of participants are young adults, with the odd greybeard amongst them. Millions of young people writing and reading; dispelling the fears of all those Jobs prophesising the death of the written word.

Readers leave comments, just like on YouTube, and the tone seems to be almost uniformly positive and encouraging, like a giant, friendly, creative writing group.

This is a campus filled with enthusiasts for the written word, potentially every English-speaking person in the world who wants to read stories and all those who want to write them, brought together in one place. How brilliant is that?

The books are divided into categories, with genres like romance, fantasy, historical fiction and science fiction receive the most attention, just like in any earthly bookstore. There are also some very useful texts on how to write, (the equivalent of lectures and seminarsif this analogy can be stretched a little further).

The Wattpad people single out the odd book to be “featured”, which is a bit like having your book put on the front table at Waterstones, but apart from that everyone seems to be equal, distinguished only by the number of readers their work has attracted.

Could this be a rather cheery glimpse into the future of books and reading?

What Would George Bernard Shaw be Campaigning for Today?

The Society of Authors has kindly nominated me for its Management Committee. If all goes smoothly and I join the other distinguished committee members I thought it might be useful to have a clearer idea of what it is that we would all like the Society to be doing for authors in these exciting times.

What, I wonder, would George Bernard Shaw, (an early and active member of the Society), be campaigning for if he was around today? What would his views be on e-books and self-publishing, for instance? Would he be championing Amazon for making books so accessible or criticising their monopolistic and capitalistic tendencies? Would he be sympathetic towards struggling high street independents or would he see them as the architects of their own downfall?
If you have any ideas on ways in which the Society should be making itself useful to its members please email me at CroftsA@aol.com.

Below is a short biography which the Society has published in The Author to support my nomination.

Andrew Crofts is a full-time author and ghostwriter. He has published more than 80 titles, a dozen of which have spent many weeks at the top of the Sunday Times best seller charts.
As well as using traditional publishers to reach readers, (including Arrow, Blake, Bloomsbury, Century, Ebury, André Deutsch, Hamish Hamilton, Harper Collins, Headline, Heinemann, Hodder, Hutchinson, Little Brown, Michael Joseph, McGraw Hill, Orion, Pan Macmillan, Penguin, Pocket Books, Sidgwick & Jackson, Sphere and Weidenfeld & Nicolson), he has also experimented with e-books, publishing “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”,(a prequel to his traditionally published “The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride”), on both Kindle and Smashwords, and has guided a number of international clients successfully through the minefield of independent publishing.

Are Electronic Authors’ Co-operatives the New Force in Publishing?

Marketing books has always been a grand lottery. Millions of titles are hurled out into the market in the hope that enough will catch on to support the majority, which inevitably sink due to weight of numbers and the lack of reading hours in anyone’s lifetime, breaking the hearts of their authors as they go down.

Now publication is accessible to anyone with a computer and broadband connection, but there is still no magical solution to the great marketing dilemma – how do you get your book talked about and heard about when there is so much competitive din going on all around?

One growing trend is the rise of electronic author cooperatives, where groups of writers combine forces to get one another’s, (and of course their own), work in front of potential readers.

“Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?”  (http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/ ), for instance, is a group of twenty eight authors, all experienced in different genres. We each blog on an assigned day each month and a diligent core of this band also works tirelessly, and extraordinarily successfully, to promote the site and the books therein and to advise and support one another on the technicalities and tribulations of e-publishing. Guest bloggers fill the other days.

“Awesome Indies” (http://awesomeindies.wordpress.com/ ) is the brainchild of fantasy and magical realism author, Tahlia Newland, where she selflessly reviews and recommends other indie books and authors who she thinks will appeal to her followers. (Here I must declare another interest since Tahlia has given a glowing review to my own indie e-book “The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie de Beer”, which is the vehicle through which I have been discovering this magical world of mutually supportive authors).

At the beginning of June three authors who are involved with the hugely successful on-line writing magazine “Words with Jam”, (www.wordswithjam.co.uk), Gillian E. Harmer, JJ. Marsh and Liza Perrat, are launching Triskele Books with three of their own titles.

Is this not how many of the oldest and most venerable publishing names first started out, with groups of writers huddling together for warmth in a vast and chilly ocean? Is it not a hugely encouraging and inspiring model for the future?

Independent Food Producers Are Widely Admired - So Why Not Independently Published Books?

Authors who dare to consider self publishing are still viewed with considerable suspicion, despite a growing number of notable successes. Author Susan Price, however, made an extremely interesting point in her monthly contribution to the writers’ blog Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? on Sunday 25^th March, (http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk).

Susan compares self published writers to food producers who prefer to sell direct to discerning customers through local markets rather than selling in bulk to the giant supermarkets.

Big publishers won't like being compared to Tesco and Asda, but the image has a certain resonance. The demands they make of writers are not dissimilar to the ones food producers complain about whenever they try to sell to the chains, (books that have to be pigeon-holed into “marketable genres” are not that different to potatoes or bananas which have to be the right sizes and shapes to make it onto supermarket shelves).

But whereas the brewers of “real ale”, the independent bakers of bread and makers of cheese and chocolate are all applauded for going out to sell their products direct, even seen as providing goods of higher quality than the mass producers, authors who do the same are still deemed to be second class, missing the necessary stamp of establishment approval.

One publisher was recently quoted as saying he turns away when introduced to any self published writer, which sounds like the sort of “posh people versus trade” scene that Julian Fellowes is currently doing so well with on television.

In the past I have compared writers without big business publishers to artists who do not exhibit at famous West End galleries, but I think I like Susan’s analogy better.

Are we on our way to Utopia or Back to the Dark Ages?

“James Martin: The Change Agent”, is now available on Kindle as an e-book – a highly suitable format for a text which provides a dramatic view of what the future holds for all of us.

The story started when I received an urgent invitation to a mysterious private island in Bermuda from an old friend who had recently donated more than £100-million to Oxford University.

The island gradually revealed its labyrinthine secrets as the host, futurist James Martin, explained the choice that faces us all: to create the greatest Utopia ever, or plunge ourselves back into the Dark Ages, maybe even destroying Homo sapiens completely.

At the same time he explained how a shy boy from a poor family in Ashby-de-la-Zouche had come to be Oxford University’s biggest ever donor, (bigger even than Sir Thomas Bodley), and the founder of the extraordinary Oxford Martin 21^st Century School. He is basically investing in ideas. The School’s many interdisciplinary institutes, and more than a hundred fellows across the collegiate university, are studying potential global catastrophes like climate change, bio-engineering, pandemics, mass migration and the possibility of human extinction before the end of the 21st Century. At the same time they are trying to harvest the incredible opportunities arising from new technologies and innovations, as well as studying social change and striving to improve our understanding of how to deal with systemic risk.

Along the way Jim has encountered people as varied as Bertrand Russell, and David Bowie, Bill Gates and Lee Kuan Yew. From prime ministers and presidents to cold war spies and business leaders, he has been called in to advise them all and his books have been read by millions.

"The Change Agent" also reveals the extraordinary secret history of Agar’s Island that he uncovered beneath the rocks and rampant vegetation and tells the story of how he has restored the underground labyrinth to its former glory and turned the entire island into his own eccentric, ecological, private paradise. Above all, however, it is a gripping conversation about the man’s ideas, which are the reason so many millions of people read his books and attend his lectures.

Falling out of Love with Physical Books

Last month in my allotted space on the "Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? blog ( authorselectric.blogspot.com ) I bared my soul regarding difficulties in my relationship with my desktop. This month I had to confess to the even more traumatising discovery that I might have fallen out of love with an even more long-standing soul-mate.

When I was first introduced to my pretty young iPad a year ago I imagined that it would merely widen my horizons, offer me more options and some lively entertainment. I stumbled into the relationship like some wide-eyed old fool who fails to realise he has been targeted as potential sugar-daddy material, never thinking it would make me question my relationship with the printed books who had been part of my life ever since I first met Paddington Bear. But suddenly I find myself irritated by features of my old love that I once found endearing or was totally blind to. I am impatient with physical shortcomings that I would once never even have noticed.

This realisation dawned when a book I needed for research purposes was not available as an e-book. So, the first annoyance came from having to wait a whole day for Amazon to get a physical copy to me. Imagine! A whole day! Most of that time, I tried to tell myself, was actually night, but already the seeds of discontent had been sown.

The book arrived and I carried it off to one of my favourite reading places, only to find that we now do not have bright enough lighting for anything which doesn’t have a back-lit screen, (a result of energy-friendly light bulbs and aging eyes). There was no facility for increasing the size of the print to compensate, which my obliging little iPad would have been happy to provide for me. When I did eventually find enough light I discovered that the print ran too close to the edge of the pages for me to be able to keep the book open without either contorting my fingers uncomfortably or cracking the spine back in a way that would once have seemed like sacrilege. With one spiteful jerk I snapped its fragile spine, immediately feeling like I’d kicked a kitten.

This book is perfectly well published by a highly respected house and in the past I would have accepted all these annoying little features without a second thought – just as I once accepted that a television needed to be “warmed up” and that Radio Luxembourg’s signal would fade whenever my favourite song came on. I have been seduced away from a long-standing and faithful love and I think I may just have to get over it and move on. When I was first permitted to use ink rather than pencil at school I had to dip the nib in an inkwell every few words, (an inkwell which was invariably clogged with old blotting paper which then stuck to the nib and …. I digress). I felt no guilt about the abandoned pencil, nor did I later feel guilt when I was allowed to move on to a fat, shiny, garishly coloured floozy of a fountain pen which held a decent supply of ink, (we were never allowed to use biros, that would have been taking technology too far), so I think I must now try to muster the same pragmatic approach to this latest betrayal of an old friend.

photo of author by Louis Leeson