The Future of the Book

was the title of a recent radio interview with Ursula Mackenzie, CEO of Little, Brown Book Group. The later part of the interview fits the title more than the earlier; that's when Mackenzie talked about e-books and where she sees them fitting in the world of publishing. She speculated that publishers might test the water with a new book by releasing it first as an e-book, and only if sales warranted it then producing a print run, which is an expensive business.

The interview can be heard by clicking here, then selecting "Future of the Book".

Sympathy for the villain

Yesterday I had an e-mail from a reader who'd just finished the final volume of "Promises to Keep". Her comments were warm and enthusiastic, and she's making her enthusiasm tangible by buying a copy of "A Second Chance", which she wants me to autograph it for her.

All of this is wonderful, but what I was perhaps most pleased about was her attitude to a particular character. He's not a likable character (to put it mildly), and earlier in the book this same reader was wishing him dead. But thoroughly evil characters are mercifully rare in real life, and I don't generally find them interesting in literature. I certainly have no desire to write one. Characters grow, and the reader grows in understanding of them. My correspondent told me almost apologetically that by the end she had tears in her eyes for this man.

It felt good.

---

The people at Lulu have adjusted their agreement with Amazon so that there's no longer an extra charge to buy my books via Amazon. This seems a good thing.

As listed on Amazon

Lulu has done a deal with Amazon, which means that three of my books now appear in the Amazon marketplace. I was more chuffed by this than cool logic should suggest. The books are substantially cheaper on Lulu, but there's a certain thrill in having my work appear in the catalogue of such a high-profile retailer.

Reading aloud

Of all the editing techniques I've read of, stumbled across or worked out for myself over the years, the single most useful one is reading aloud; ideally to an interested (or at least tolerant) audience. A passage can be one I've looked at a dozen times before, but when read aloud it leaps off the page and demands to be improved in some way.

At the simplest level, reading aloud reveals typos that have resisted any amount of proof-reading. And it's particularly effective for finding words that are repeated in uncomfortably close succession. The eye can be determined in seeing just what it wants to see, but when the text is slowed down to the level of the spoken voice, many such hidden flaws are revealed.

It's particularly unforgiving, and particularly useful at detecting, what I give the editing abbreviation of "lw" to: long-windedness. Again, the eye can skip over such passages, but when said aloud they're revealed in all their tedium. And they get cut in the very next editing phase.

I like my prose to have a certain rhythm, and reading aloud is a good way of checking this. Even though most of us have gone beyond sounding out the words as we read, dialogue in particular does flow better if it's in a form that it's actually possible to speak. It's an effective way, too, of checking that the various speech patterns of the different characters are consistent.

What's in a name?

The name is usually one of the first things we learn about a character.

Like it or not, readers are inclined to react differently to a character called Chloe or Saffron than to a Mildred or Ethel. First impressions, in fiction as in real life, can be startlingly accurate or blisteringly unfair. They're also inclined to be hard to shift. So characters' names need to be chosen with some care.

I want my characters to have names that suit them; a part of the word picture that paints them. I'm also constrained by the times in which I set my works. I don't believe there were many Chantelles, or Tiffannie-Krystals, in Victorian New Zealand.

Quite a few names from Victorian times are still in current or near-current use, and I've tended to choose from those for my younger characters. Names that sound old-fashioned (at least in 21st century New Zealand) are fine for older characters.

On checking the most popular names given to babies in New Zealand in 2008, I find I've used five out of the top ten names for girls, and seven of the top ten boys' names. Boys' names tend to keep to the traditional a little more, but babies of both sexes are given more of those traditional names than was the case in the 1950s-60s.

The lists, with the ones I've used marked by an asterisk:

Girls - *Sophie, Olivia, Ella, Isabella, *Charlotte, *Lily, *Emma, *Emily, Jessica, Grace.
Boys - *Jack, *James, *William, *Samuel, Joshua, Riley, *Liam, Oliver, *Benjamin, *Daniel.

The Beginning

The longest novel begins with a single word. That word is followed by another, and soon we have a whole sentence. Sentences grow into paragraphs, and after a mere few years of mental anguish, a novel appears.

The books I write are historical novels set in New Zealand, with a strong character focus. New Zealand is a place that's exotic to most of my readers. I want them to be able to picture the settings, and picture my characters within those settings. I like to start with a word picture of the scene, and it's never long before the main character makes her appearance.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the first book, "Sentence of Marriage". The year is 1881.

Beyond the farmhouse the ground fell gradually in a series of low hills and flat paddocks, bright green where they had been planted in grass and darker green where the bush remained. The Waituhi creek wound along the valley floor before it disappeared from sight behind a steep bluff. Amy reached the top of a hill and paused, caught as she always was by the beauty of the view.

And beyond the mouth of the valley was the sea. The wide sweep of the Bay of Plenty stretched to the edge of Amy’s sight in either direction, and straight in front of her ocean met sky all along the horizon, broken only by White Island with its constant puff of smoke. Today she could see the island quite clearly through the crisp winter air. The ocean looked blue and mild. Some days it was grey and threatening; but always to Amy it was fascinating. To her it meant the world outside her valley; it meant excitement and adventure, and the lure of the unknown.