One
day about 50 years ago, Paul McCartney read an article in the Daily Mail about
an aspiring writer. The topic fascinated him, he told The New Yorker decades
later, “because I was a young paperback writer, sort of. My age group was.”
McCartney drove to John Lennon’s house in Weybridge and proposed a song written
as a letter. “Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book/It took me years to
write, will you take a look?” Lennon said, “Good, that’s it,” and so we
got Paperback Writer(1966).
The
song captures an eternal fantasy. I’ve just begun writing another book myself
(though if McCartney wants to make a song about me, he should call it Ebook
Writer). However, the fantasy has grown ever more detached from reality.
Writing a book used to be like spending years carving out a stone, then
chucking it into a lake and watching it sink without a splash. Now writing a
book is like chucking that stone into an ocean. You don’t even hear a plop.
Back
when Paperback Writer came out, only about 20,000 books
appeared in Britain a year. A paperback writer could expect his publisher to
post his book to all the reviewers, and then nag them over lunch if they
ignored it. Often, especially for non-fiction, the reviews were the way a book
marked the culture. Few people would actually buy your iconoclastic new
biography of Hegel, but many in the bookish classes would read the 2,000-word
review in the New Statesman or The New York Times.
Soon
afterwards the book would probably go out of print, which meant that it
effectively died. Even by the 1980s, when I was working in a London bookshop,
if a customer asked for an obscure text, we’d pull out a thick red volume
called, simply, Books In Print. It listed about 100,000 titles. If
a book wasn’t in there, we told the customer to forget it. If the book had only
appeared in the US, it would cost a fortune in shipping. The deaths of past
titles helped focus the reader on new ones.
How
times have changed. Last year, well over one million books (many of them
ebooks) were published in English. Each of them is available to anyone in the
world at a click, as are all the books published the year before that, while
even your father’s long-lost tract on fly-fishing is for sale somewhere online,
probably for 1p. “Books, for perhaps the first time in literary history, are
cheap to buy,” writes DJ Taylor in his elegant new The Prose Factory,
“and at times — as many an author has noticed to his chagrin when touring the
download sites — obtainable gratis.”
But
in this ocean of words, many new books will be noticed only by the author’s mum
and dad. Publishers now focus their marketing budgets on a few potential
bestsellers, while thick review sections have made way for Amazon reviews that
rarely mark the culture.
Even
the people who buy your book won’t necessarily read it: just look at the
unopened tomes on your own bookshelves. A book is usually an aspirational
purchase, symbolic gift or status marker more than it is a consumer item.
Thomas Piketty’s 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century sold
more than 1.5 million copies, but when maths professor Jordan Ellenberg studied
which pages readers had highlighted on Kindles, he concluded that few got
beyond page 26. Distraction is almost inevitable when the internet is a click
away, especially if you’re reading on a device.
Then,
probably quite swiftly, your book will go out of date. When my grandmother
died, she left shelves full of 1950s and 1960s paperbacks that had become
irrelevant, often ludicrously pompous and, if non-fiction, generally plain
wrong.
Yet millions
of us keep writing, almost always as a second job. There’s the joy in the
crafting: it’s hard to write a sentence, harder to construct a paragraph, and
almost impossible to make a whole book cohere. There’s the triumph of
completion: writing a book, even a mediocre one, elevates you above the frauds
who tell people at parties that they want to write one. There’s the
satisfaction in expressing yourself more fully than you ever could in your day
job: your book may not be the best that mankind has thought and said, but it’s
quite probably the best you will think or say.
And
then there’s the tiny hope, as with buying a lottery ticket, that the book will
“make a million for you overnight”, or give someone somewhere the thrill that
only a very good book can. Your ideal reader is probably aged under 20, and
therefore ready to be marked for life. I’ll never forget encountering Catch-22 as
a teenager. Today, I watch my children, their noses stuck in comic books,
surrender in the same way to the text.
But
most books won’t achieve that. Writing is increasingly a private satisfaction.
The effort invested is almost always out of proportion to the impact. Having
accepted that in advance, I am writing anyway.
_____
De FINANCIAL TIMES, 16-17/01/2016
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