The life of a writer is idyllic; long walks in the countryside, sipping latte in street cafes and pondering the greater meaning of life on the banks of a babbling brook. So everyone thinks! In reality, the writer’s life is very hard and in some cases deadly.

This week, after news of the death of several prominent internet writers, Litopia After Dark stresses about the exhausting, demanding pressure writers are under. Are we taking on too much?

We also discuss V.S. Naipaul (whose reputation is slated in a new biography out this week) and ask, can we overlook the imperfections of an author when they produce work of great literary merit?

Also, what’s the attraction of erotic fiction, (as if we didn’t know)? Are the days of the history book in the past? And book jackets, can you tell a book by its cover?

To discuss all these stimulating subjects our panellists this week are Beverly Gray, Donna Ballman, Dave Bartram, Richard Howse and John Quirk.

The Ustream chatroom opened at 7.30pm (GMT) and the heat became almost unbearable in there as the risqué discussion got out of hand. We’re sorry you missed it.

Nice book – shame about the author

In the TimesOnline this week Paul Theroux says…

Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors.

To what extent can we or should we separate our feelings about an author from our appreciation of the authors work? And do we think writers are uniquely vulnerable in this regard? Is this not reminiscent of the situation with Sebastian Horsley?

It’s all in the cover

(This gorgeous cover is for Invisible City by bestselling author MG Harris)

A new website called “Rate My Book Cover” aims to persuade readers to rate potential book covers created by independent presses and self-publishers before they get to market-because, as the book distributor says, “the vast majority of books are simply not packaged well enough to compete with other forms of entertainment and packaged information.” They add that more than 90 percent of the books submitted to it for distribution are rejected because they’re so badly packaged.

How important are book covers really? Would a good cover make a sale, a bad one lose one? Are readers really that superficial?

Collaborative book publishing – hit or miss?

A company called WeBook has just launched a website…

Let’s face it : The traditional process for publishing a book is a lot like ivy-league school admission. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself brownnosing a guy with elbow patches. And then there’s the endless waiting. And waiting. And waiting.

That is, until recently. What changed? Well, now there’s WEbook, a ground-breaking online resource for aspiring authors, which lets you take charge of your own destiny. This avant-garde book publishing company applies an interactive approach to the process – in every sense of the word – by using the Internet as a platform to connect truly brilliant writers to print publication.

Are we interested in writing by committee, sharing the royalties and sharing the author glory?

Erotic Fiction – let’s go undercover…

Writing in The Independent, Rupert Smith says…

Pornographic fiction, erotica, “one-handed reading”, call it what you will, is a publishing parallel universe. Books sell in large quantities – The Back Passage is now in its fourth reprint – and are gobbled up by extremely diverse audiences. James Lear’s most enthusiastic fans are straight women, who love reading about male/male sex. There’s an alternative constellation of literary stars in the world of porn – people who will never get invited to Hay, but who enjoy bigger sales than their legit counterparts.

So, where do you buy them? And since sales figures seem consistently high, what’s the attraction? And the biggest question of all – would you write porn-lit?

From Bonk, to Bunk

Bonnie Malkin in The Telegraph this week reports…

Literary agents have criticised one of Britain’s most distinguished publishers for dropping serious historical titles in favour of celebrity memoirs.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N), which is owned by The Orion Publishing Group, has published authors such as Harold Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger and Pope John Paul II.

But recently the company has dumped a number of planned titles while pushing ahead with celebrity biographies such as Charlotte Church’s second book Keep Smiling, and My Life Behaving Badly: The Autobiography by Leslie Ash.

And Boyd Tonkin in The Independent says…

Elsewhere, bitter after-shocks persist from the collapse of the NPI group – which owned the Sutton and Tempus history imprints – and its mutation into a new outfit, The History Press. Anecdotal evidence abounds that high-quality works of history fail to arouse the level of support in the retail trade that they once did. That, in turn, inhibits editors who seek to commission more of the same.

Is History dead? Could fictionalizing history bring it back to life or is this misrepresenting the facts? How can we safeguard the knowledge of our past?

Death becomes Us

A piece by Matt Richtel in the New York Times this week highlights the growing plight of the humble piece-work blogger…

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece – not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

With the recent deaths of Russell Shaw (60), Marc Orchant (50) we have to ask ourselves whether the stresses and strains of the writers life are worth it. And blogging, is it really worth the authors time, commitment and… possibly life?

He also says…

Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.

So why do people Blog and who reads them? A report in Ars Technica by John Timmer states…

What they found is that reading blogs has become a habit integrated into Internet use for many people, akin to instinctively checking e-mail. Several of the blog readers described it as simply a way to pass the time, using terms like “wasting time” and “doing nothing.” One of them described it in terms of addiction: “I don’t really look forward to cigarettes anymore, but it’s something that happens through the course of the day that I feel like I might need to do. It just becomes habit, I guess.”

The panellists discuss their own thoughts on Blogging – Visit Wondering Mind, a fabulous blog by Richard Howse. We discuss blogs we like – Pedro Almodovar . And we give suggestions of ways to shut out the stress of the writers’ life and embrace the serene and peaceful.

Download the show as mp3 file

Photo by mutantMandias

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