The Loneliness Of A Long Distance Author - the Complaints of Anakana Schofield

I was very irritated by an article I read in 'The Guardian' of 27th July 2013.  It was entitled 'How to publicise a novel' and was written by Anakana Schofield.  She has had first novel, 'Malarky' published and received Can$1000 (£625) and then a further £6500 for it, from the publishers; not a share of sales.  In her article she whines about the burdens of publicising her novel.  She compares her travelling around the country being interviewed about her book and meeting with the public to compelling a train driver to go to Scotland to show people the train he drives.  The analogy is very poor; perhaps someone who designed or built the train showing it off would be more accurate; if she was equivalent to the train driver she would work in a bookshop being compelled to sell 'Malarky'.

Schofield misses entirely that she is an artist.  Painters, sculptors, even actors (and certainly directors), have to go around publicising their work, often at their own expense. Think of how many bands and singers have to tour around the country trying to get people to listen to them and buy their music off i-tunes or even a CD that they have paid to have made.  This can be a long and soul-destroying job with no guarantee of success.  Schofield needs to realise she is in the same category.  Sports people often travel far and wide and stay in appalling conditions just to carry out the sport, sometimes they have to pay for the pleasure of doing so.  I used to know a national level badminton player who, because badminton does not have the prize money of tennis, had to hold down an ordinary job and spend her weekends driving herself to events and putting herself up.  I have known black belt Aikido instructors with international reputations sleeping in dojos when training away from home.  These are the equivalent to an author.  If you choose this life you have to put up with what comes with it.  She should speak to painters who have to lug all their paintings from event to event in the hope of selling one.

This is nothing new for authors.  Even the most successful have had to get on the road to publicise their work and do innumerable book signings.  The author and journalist, Richard Meredith whose ‘One Way Or Another' which I read and reviewed in June, self-published in the period before e-books made this so much easier.  He did not even have a publisher to distribute his book and would drive around with boxes of them in his car, trying to persuade local bookshop managers to take a few to sell and going back to collect the money later.  Schofield does not have that problem, with online sales dominating, people can get her book even if the author on tour comes nowhere near them.  Despite her whining publicising her book has actually got a lot easier than it was a decade or two ago.

Schofield complains about writing 'endless unpaid blogs', clearly unaware that any sensible author does that before they have even begun writing the book.  I know some people earn money from their blog, but who really expects to get an income from spouting their own views of the world, bar a handful of lucky columnists and they are far more constrained than a blogger.  She complains about having to write responses to newspapers and 'random people creating things in basements'.  This amounts to snobbery as she was no different when writing the novel.  Schofield seems to categorise society and feels that she as an author should receive different considerations.  Again, she seems to be living in the past, perhaps the 1950s, not even the 1970s.  Where did she get the idea that publishing houses did all the publicity for their authors?

While she sees herself as a person who deserves privileges, she also sickeningly tries to draw parallels between her 'predicament' and that of ordinary people: the 'security guard who is not allowed to tweet, but must also do the cleaning.  Or the hospital cleaner who is forced to reapply for his own job but on lower pay'.  She does not see she is nothing like these people, she is getting paid to do what she loves, talk about what she loves to all and sundry and even get a newspaper to cover her whining about how hard this is.

Schofield also highlight the personal questions she gets asked and especially about her own sexuality given the sexual content of the novel.  Again, I am surprised that she is surprised by this.  Has she not read reviews of books or other works of art before?  Has she not seen how reviewers probe motivations that may stem from the artist's personal life?  Schofield seems amazingly cut off from how contemporary society behaves.  She has clearly never read a tabloid newspaper or indeed even watched some of the output from more respectable news broadcasters like the BBC.  People are obsessed with other people in their own right, not necessarily for what they do but simply for who they are.  Schofield clearly needed lessons in this and the easiest way was to review some of the many thousands perhaps millions of words written about J.K. Rowling, or possibly given Schofield's own writing, E.L. James.

Schofield ends by complaining about the fact that there has been a shift from a culture in which people read to one in which they write.  This is probably not as great a shift as she believes, it is simply that whereas in the past people's writing would be confined to something they typed, shared with friends and sent to be rejected by publishers, now it is visible to all via blogs and through self-publication of e-books.  I am a classic example.  I was doing this thirty years ago, but the technology then was missing to allow me to expose my work to the entire planet.  Again her view of this apparent shift suggests Schofield is pretty much out of touch with contemporary society.  In fact with the availability of online writing and of the explosion of book clubs, there is probably more reading going on than back in the 1980s, especially among people over 30.  It is the equivalent to the numerous talent shows on television.  There have always been millions of people who have assumed they can perform on stage, but only with such thorough access, as in fact was the case back in the 1970s, does the general population, as opposed to friends and neighbours, become aware of simply how many people believe this way.  The pool of people going into these things has not changed; the visibility of them has, however, increased substantially.

It seems ironic that Schofield attacks courses on how to write so strongly, given that 'The Guardian' probably runs more such courses than any other body at the moment.  In many ways they have become a kind of qualification that writers need to pass in order to move to the next stage.  If you look at winners of the Bridport Prize, an annual competition I have entered a couple of times, almost every single winner has taken a degree in creative writing.  Similarly many authors these days, such as those who get contracts from HarperCollins for appearing on Authonomy, have to have sold their e-book before the publisher considers taking them on.  Schofield has been spared these stages of advancing her career so feels free to disparage them.

Schofield seems to want to reduce the competition and increase the potential market for her book.  If she truly believes that '[i]t's a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one'.  If that is the case, then why did she even bother becoming an author?  It is good to read and of course the bulk of writers are also very active readers too, the two are very compatible, not exclusive as Schofield portrays them.  Overall, this article proves to be a rant from a woman who wants it all.  She is very fortunate to have had her novel published, but needs to realise that that privilege comes at a cost and she has now to support her book vigorously, no-one else is going to do it for her.  She clearly wants to pull up the ladder after her and encourage people not to enter into competition with her.  This is simply selfish.  Writing has always been a leading hobby in Britain, it is one, like cycling and running, which is now far more visible than ever before.  What Schofield needs to do is actually stop and look around her about how society works in the 2010s.  This is not 1973 or 1953.  None of us are surprised at what she has apparently only recently 'discovered' and it is of concern that an author of a contemporary set novel is so disconnected from society in the here and now.  What is sickening is how she tries to equate her position, privileged as it is, with the challenges facing ordinary working people.

Books I Read In June

Fiction

‘The Foresight War’ by Anthony G. Williams

This is a well rated alternate history book which envisages what would have happened if two military historians one from Britain, called Dr Erlang who seems to be a version of the author and one from the former East Germany were transported back to 1934.  The two men are soon advising their respective leaders, Dr. Herman, the German historian, seeking to at least hold back the Soviets so that East Germany is not created which his son died trying to escape from.  The book is very technically focused which is probably unsurprising given the focus of Williams’s non-fiction books.  There is much discussion of calibres of guns and the engines of aircraft.  Both men successfully advance technology so that fruitless projects are abandoned and developments that only appeared at the end of the war in our world are in place by the outbreak of war in this. 

There are political changes too.  The British are persuaded not to give up their naval bases in the Irish Free State and not to make any commitment to supporting Poland.  No British Expeditionary Force is sent to France and instead Norway is successfully taken over by the British.  Later there is no invasion of Italy.  In the Far East, Hong Kong is abandoned but Malaya and Singapore successfully defended.  The war ends in 1943 when with the Allies having invaded northern France through western Normandy, Herman kills Hitler with a suicide bomb. 

The book is very interesting on these grounds and has substantial appendices to outline the differences from our world.  However, it is clear that Williams is a historian and not a novelist.  The main characters are not developed a great deal, despite the fact that Erlang has a relationship with the woman assigned to oversee him and they marry and have a child who is called Hope, which seems anachronistic for Britain; she might have been Faith or Hester.  I am content, unlike some readers for there to be no explanation of why the two men went back in time.  However, to be a novel rather than a technical book, these men have to be developed more.  One technique that Williams uses that is commendable is dropping in on particular commanders and their troops or civilians mixed up in specific conflicts.  This might seem to lead to fragmentation, but it allows him to look at the differences that the changes are making whilst avoiding lengthy exposition and I would suggest other alternate history authors look at this approach for their own work. 

I understand that Erlang and Herman are able to overcome official suspicion, but they also seem to be able to push against official resistance to innovation.  Notably Erlang is able to stop the RAF obsessing about strategic bombing and to focus instead in protecting convoys across the Atlantic.  He is able to overcome Churchill’s obsession with the Mediterranean and the British under-estimation of Japanese abilities in particular in terms of defending attacks on Singapore from the land.  He is also able to break the British concern for defending France.  I think he is too successful too often and more resistance to his ideas would have seemed credible.  Herman experiences this much more especially his failure to get the German forces to encourage states in the western USSR to break away and ally with the Germans.  He is able to temper Hitler’s enthusiasm for exotic vehicles and have a focus on creating jet fighters sooner. 

Overall, this novel feels like a first draft that needs work to be a proper novel.  It is not a long book and unlike many would have benefited from being longer.  As some reviewers have noted there is minimal tension; Erlang and Herman face too little resistance to their ideas.  In addition, once Hitler is dead the book stops abruptly as if Williams has lost interest.  However, handling a post-Hitler Germany in 1943 even with the Allies not having insisted on unconditional surrender is an interesting aspect.  Would a civil war have broken out in the way the SS was preparing for?  The book has many fine and interesting ideas, but it would have been better, given his ‘trainspotter’ approach to weaponry if Williams had gone down the Tsouras path and gave a kind of ‘battle report’ style approach.  If he had favoured the Turtledove approach of an actual story with developing characters then he needed to put in more work.  The Authors publishing company seems to be a low budget outfit that seem to lack editors and this again will have had an impact.  Williams has a website on which he lists numerous reviews of his books and refutes some of them. 

This book is interesting for anyone into alternate history.  However, it is more like the raw materials for an alternate history novel rather than being a novel in its own right.  I have not read subsequent books by Williams but I hope his fiction writing skills have developed.

Non-Fiction

‘One Way Or Another’ by Richard Meredith

I bought my copy of this book from the author himself.  It was self-published and he travelled the country marketing it.  I admire him for that.  It is also clear that he is a modern day adventurer.  This book published in 2002 was about him as the ‘balding backpacker’ travelling around the world becoming involved in a range of adventures including anti-capitalism riots in Canada, the US Presidential election and an attempted coup d’etat in Fiji.  Meredith is a former journalist and the style of this book is really like a collection of articles and there is an appendix of articles he wrote during his travels.  He has subsequently driven right across Asia in an Aston Martin. 

The book is witty and gives an interesting perspective.  However, I found it very fragmented.  He covers the stories almost in reverse chronology.  There are large chunks of his journey that only are mentioned in passing, so you have little sense of the year-long adventure as whole.  It would really have helped if there was linking text to contextualise where every component fitted into the broader story.  Something along the lines of ‘having spent three weeks travelling from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast of Canada, I headed South into the USA where this next big thing happened to me’ or ‘by this time it was May and I decided to head into Egypt where I encountered …’  There is no conclusion to the book about how he got back home or how he reflected on what he had experienced.  As a result you feel this was put together to make money rather than as a result of capturing personal experiences. 

This was an interesting read which would have been better for me to reach nearer the time it was written but I am currently on a decade-long lag in my reading.  It shows that shifting from being a journalist to being an author is not always straight forward.  Articles can be chapters but the book needs to be more than a sum of its parts.  This was another book that would have benefited from being longer and having much more ‘mortar’ between the different chapters.