Books are terribly labor-intensive. My recent one took literally years to write — 20 years to “live” and two years to type up — then months more to be edited, copy-edited, designed, printed, bound and finished. It is a journey that began, effectively, in 1988.
So, you can imagine my delight when I opened the newspaper the other day to read that “the death knell” would soon sound “for the traditional book.”
Oh good. I wondered what that noise was as I reached for the first shiny copy of my meisterwerk. Of course! It was a party of campanologists tuning up for the death knell.
The Kindle (a hand-held computer reading-screen book-replacement thing) has gone on sale outside the US. Marvellous. I am an overnight anachronism, the doggerel performance poet who perfected the last flourish of her open-air routine just as William Caxton heaved over the border with a big box.
Since I don’t really understand what the Kindle is, I naturally fear and despise it. I was the same way with the CD player, the DVD and the new people next door. (I say “was,” but I still am. I particularly hate the neighbors.)
The media’s response to this device will be negative. We will hear a lot over the next few weeks about the soullessness of reading on screen compared with turning pages. If I promised you a pound for every time you are told by a columnist this month that “you can’t read a Kindle in the bath,” I would be skint by Christmas.
In the newspapers, on TV arts shows, on the radio, around us at social occasions, we will see and hear mournful disquisitions on the beauty of the old-fashioned papery book and what a tragedy it would be if people stopped buying them.
But you know what? Nobody buys books anyway. Nobody.
If you have a friend who has written a book, ask how many copies it sold. The answer will probably be 12, or none — that is, unless you happen to be friendly with J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown. Their books fly from the shelves.
I have whored my book around, don’t worry about that. Interviews here, articles there. Since I write for the papers already, do a bit of TV and have written a “true-life confession” with celebrities, gambling, sex and death in it, I probably got about 9,000 percent more attention than the first-time writer of a serious literary novel. And do you know how many copies have been sold? About 1,000.
There are 1,000 people living within five streets of my house. I could have saved two years of sweat by going round to visit them all personally and telling them: “I was fat and shy, I started playing poker, I lost some weight, won some money, the end.”
Yet everyone tells me the book is a tremendous success. A thousand copies already! Meanwhile, a serious newspaper like the Observer sells nearly half-a-million copies a week and everybody says newspapers are “ailing and cannot survive.”
By that logic, books are dead, buried, maggot-eaten, moldering skeletons without even a desperate scratch on the coffin lid from a single twitching finger.
But I understand why you would not buy my book. It costs £16.99 (US$27.80) for a great heavy clunk of a thing that would take days to read and you probably wouldn’t even like.
Meanwhile, the Observer is only £2 and has crosswords and personal problem advice. It’s better than a book for about a hundred reasons.
Are you one of those people who dream of writing their life story? Don’t. It is a miserable, lonely, terrifying yet monotonous grind, followed by three seconds of excitement and a vast anti-climax. And then you have to have a party. I read in the paper last week that TV presenter Simon Cowell’s birthday party was “tacky, embarrassing and vulgar.” But all parties are tacky, embarrassing and vulgar. You are inviting people along to celebrate something you’ve done — gotten older or married, or finished a project.
“Come along and raise a glass to me,” you are shouting eagerly at the world. “Come and look at my fat successful face! I’ll stand in the middle grinning while you all wave and clap!”
Once you are doing something so outrageously tawdry and humiliating, frankly, you might as well pipe your name over the canapes in mashed potato and ask Kate Moss to sing.
In the case of a book launch, all you are celebrating is the draining years you have spent writing something that probably won’t be visible in bookshops but may one day be sold for sixpence to someone who pops into a charity shop looking for a solution to a wonky table in the cafe next door.
You might get some very nice letters, but you could get that same warm glow by taking gifts to a children’s home or spending the winter looking after old neighbors. If there are any you don’t hate. Relatively speaking, all publishing is vanity publishing.
Besides, most books are pointless, unoriginal, overpriced and overlong — and I can’t promise mine isn’t one of them. So, hurray for the death of the book and its final replacement by another computer game for people to enjoy. The enormous plus of nobody reading any more books is that nobody will write any more books.
Oh, and by the way: When columnists start moaning that you can’t read a Kindle in the bath, ask yourself what kind of books they buy normally. Rubber ones? Drop a proper book in water and it bloody ruins it. Or, depending on your point of view, improves it immeasurably.
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