RIP The Book?

Among the many fascinating events which made up this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival, "RIP The Book?" was one of the most interesting, not least because it intersected in a couple of places with my current interests.

China Miéville spoke first to reassure us that the linear narrative isn't going anywhere, which came as something of a relief. He went on to discuss the ways in which how those narratives are produces may evolve, touching on the idea of music-like remixes. This is something which we at Opuss have been working on for a while now. It will be interesting to see whether China — or his People — will allow his work to be available for treatment in this way.

There was some interesting musing on the subject of what form exactly a "book" would take, with the floor passing to Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital, and a tech gnome from a company called Liquid something, whose name I didn't catch. This was the first time I'd been to any literary events, but I've attended lots of tech gatherings and there is something very striking in the differences between the approaches taken by speakers from the two worlds. Literary speakers seem to talk with an authority and directness which is missing in their tech counterparts, who seem to favour vague, hand-waving statements and almost-motivational promises. Unfortunately this was evident from these two panel members, as they asked us to imagine a future where children's imaginations were fired not by boring old books but by future wonders which incorporated interactive storytelling and what we used to call Multi Media. When the gnome declared that he "wasn't really interested in the words", China's arched eyebrow was a thing of evil beauty. (It also didn't help that, as another audience member observed on the way out, "he wasn't bloody using the microphone properly".)

(This kind of attitude is nothing new. I've witnessed it firsthand myself, when working on a poetry app at a former employer. Faced with some of the greatest, most powerful writing in the English language, Creatives and managers started flailing around for animated gewgaws to make the content "interesting".)

Some of the properties of these future books — such as the ability to look up the definition of words while reading — are already available in current e-readers. Others — such as interactivity, with stories taking different paths depending on user choice — are describing things which have existed for a long time and aren't actually books. Many of the examples were directed at children's books, where there has always been this kind of innovation (think pop-up books and fuzzy felt).

Between China and the tech people came Mark Billingham, who seems like a really nice bloke with a bee in his bonnet about self publishing, particularly in its digital form. This is something which I'm slowly creeping towards (sometime this year, definitely...) so was particularly interested in. Taking a deep breath to quell the initial wave of annoyance his comments provoked, I found myself agreeing with many of his points. Digital self publishing is easy, and as a result there are a great many books released which were written in weeks, with a cover knocked-up by the author's neighbour. Mark also has a problem with the low price these are sold at, and how they are clogging up the best seller lists (and presumably keeping his Professional books down). This raises two issues which weren't really touched on.

Firstly there's the question of who should be allowed to publish. China made a comment about Jeffry Archer, to make the point that the standards of professional publishing aren't necessarily that high. (I think the swath of celebrity "auto"-biographies may have been a better example of this.) If I had a chance, I would have liked to ask Mark who he thought the gatekeepers to being published should be. There are many stories of classic novels being rescued at the last minute from publishers' rejection piles. Is it right that a small number of individuals working for (in the majority of cases) primarily commercially-driven publishing companies should decide what makes it into print? (And here I'll admit that I'm going down the self-publishing route because I don't have the confidence that my writing would be accepted by a publisher. I've tried in the past and been rejected after months or years of waiting for a response. Now I'm going to take a chance and go directly to the readers and let them decide whether what I've written is any good.)

Secondly is the simple matter of taking pride in your work. There is no excuse for releasing work full of copy errors with a badly-designed cover. At the "How Soon is Now?" event, one of the pop-up panelists — whose name I think was Alex something but he was a late addition and isn't in the programme and I didn't quite catch it at the time and oh god am I going senile already? — described how he wasn't allowed a copy editor for the indie project he was working on, on the grounds that someone's wife had found a spelling mistake in one of the Harry Potter books. Anyone who doesn't put in the minimum effort of hiring professionals to fill in the gaps in their skills deserves a thousand one-star reviews. Hiring an editor isn't expensive (in the great scheme of things, especially compared to the amount of your own time you've put into writing) and should be the least you do. (Here I'm following the wonderful advice of David Gaughran in his book Let's Get Digital — if you're considering self publishing you really should read it.) To do otherwise is to devalue your own work, and to give naysayers like Mark extra ammunition.

(Mark also appeared to be showing the signs of advanced Stockholm syndrome when it came to his views on the agency pricing model, but I won't go into that. I think I need to refresh my understanding of the issue, because it seems strange for his views to be at such great odds with how I perceive the economics of the situation.)

In all, the "RIP The Book?" session provided tremendous food for thought and reflected the high quality of the Festival as a whole. I can't wait for next year. (And if the organisers are planning another similar event and are looking for a panelist with experience in both self publishing and the brave new tech world of words...)