WHEN the sales figures were released
for last year, the Booker winner, The
Life of Pi, was top of the list for fiction
sold in that week of present-buying
before Christmas: 20,279 copies. And
rightly so. Here was Yann Martel,
virtually unknown in the UK, writing a
genuine literary masterpiece, difficult to
categorise, whose quality overcame the
faint praise which greeted his award. It
revives my faith in the reading public.
Allegorical novels are not easy to
market and apart from publicity
surrounding the Booker this novel has
sold virtually on word-of-mouth
recommendations. Other statistical
highlights revealed that 5,000 new
novels were published in 2002 and that
Random House had published 103 first
novels in the USA, St Martin�s 63 and
Little, Brown 50. The best-selling
paperback last year was John
Grisham�s A Painted House with
893,695 copies (grossing �6.25million)
while Pamela Stephenson�s biography
of her husband Billy Connolly sold
778,650 copies. Good news for authors
is that Russia is promising to clean up
its act on copyright as part of its move
to join the World Trade Organisation.
We phoned the Russian embassy in
London to see if there was any hope
that this might be retrospective. Niet
bloody likely was the colloquial, off the
record reply. Naturally the CLA is hoping
that this will put an end to print and
digital piracy while prodding Armenia,
Lithuania and Moldavia to follow suit.
IN EACH issue we provide thousands of
words of advice on the craft of writing.
Sometimes it must seem bewildering for
beginners, bombarded as they are with
so much information. If you want to
write a novel in nine days, if you want
to write westerns, if you want to write
a play, poetry, short stories, TV scripts,
comedy, a guide book, how to
self-publish or how prominent writers
achieved success, all is contained in this
issue. There are, fortunately, a few
guidelines which are almost moral
absolutes. Write something every day.
Find your own voice. Read analytically
as well as for enjoyment. And as
somebody once said: listen to all advice
and you will eventually reach a point
when you know which suits you and
which you can safely discard. You can,
of course, treat Writers� Forum rather
like a part work and the volume of
binder sales we made at the turn of the
year shows that many people file their
copies carefully and appreciate the
annual index we published. Publication
of the index also led to an
unprecedented demand for back issues.
We are again surveying our readers to
discover which topics they would like
covered or re-visited. But you do not
need to wait for a survey form. Drop us
a line at any time with your
suggestions.
LIKE most people I spend more time
than is good for me watching TV but I
felt fortunate to see George Eliot�s
Daniel Deronda. It�s a strong
argument against anti-semitism which
made it better than most TV
adaptations for the dressing-up box.
Strange to think Eliot was born nearly
200 years ago in Warwickshire and
blazed an early trail for women writers.
After Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss and
Silas Marner she spent a month in
Florence in 1861 preparing to write
Romola. She was offered �10,000 for
the copyright and Cornhill Magazine
paid �7,000 for its serialisation. How
much would that be worth in today�s
money? |
PARTLY because of magazine deadlines
we seldom carry obituaries but we feel
we should mention Mary Wesley and D J
Enright whose deaths at the ages of 90
and 82 occurred at the turn of the year.
Mary Wesley was a remarkable women
to whom success came in her 70th year.
Her first novel, Jumping the Queue,
marked a huge change in her lifestyle.
When her agent rang to say the novel
had been accepted by Macmillan she
had to borrow the train fare from
Dartmoor to London to review the
contract. From then on she published a
novel a year and after the televised
success of The Camomile Lawn her
paperbacks alone sold at the rate of
10,000 a week. She was born into that
upper, middle-class set that seemed to
exist before the war in Knightsbridge,
Chelsea and Mayfair. Although she
never enjoyed much formal education
she spoke French, German and Italian
and was recruited by the wartime code
crackers of Bletchley which gave her a
release from an unsatisfactory
marriage.
LATER she was ostracised by her family
for �living in sin� with the man who
was to become her second husband.
From the public she enjoyed much the
same adulation as Mary Cookson
although they were from different
backgrounds. As The Times said of
Wesley�s early work: �It is too
entertaining to win a literary prize.�
She was, and remains, an inspiration to
those who begin to write late in life. D J
Enright, a disciple of F R Leavis, spent
most of his life teaching abroad at
universities in Egypt, Japan, Bangkok
and Singapore. He was a genuine man
of letters as a poet, translator and
outstanding reviewer. The reviews he
wrote for The Listener in its heyday
were brilliant essays. He also edited the
Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse
1945-1980 and was co-editor with
Melvin Lasky of Encounter from 1970 �
72 and a director of Chatto and Windus
for eight years.
ALEXEY TALIMONOV, whose quirky
cartoons appear frequently in our
pages (see above), was born in the
Ukraine and has spent 25 years in
publishing and printing. He has
published several books in Russia and
Britain and has just clocked up his
3,000th published cartoon. Apart from
his homeland and the UK his work has
appeared in the USA, Canada,
Germany, the Netherlands, Poland,
Italy, Iran, China and South Africa.
Publications handling his work range
from Izvestiia and Pravda to Poetry
Monthly and the New Statesman. He
has also been awarded the
International Goncharov Award as The
Patron of the Arts and is well known for
his support for artists in Russia. Long
may he entertain us. � �. . .The best
book I�ve read on antique chair
restoration. |