There is an article in the Atlantic magazine on 19 September about how the publishing industry views AI. It is written by Boris Kachka, Senior Editor of the Atlantic. He titles the article ‘Publishing’s New Microgenre’
Boris Kachka
“Book publishing has, let’s say, a complicated relationship with artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Anthropic settled a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion after training its chatbot, Claude, on pirated text; hundreds of such copyright lawsuits against data-scraping tech companies are still making their way through the courts. Many in the culture industries see AI as not just a thief but an existential competitor, ready to replace human writers at every turn. Yet publishers are also fascinated by the technology (and not only because they use it for marketing and other tasks). The major imprints have been churning out a robust collection of books (more than 20 this year, by my count) that explain, extol, deride, fictionalize, and occasionally incorporate AI.
Among these recent releases, one overarching theme is a debate occurring between so-called accelerationists and doomers—those who think superintelligence will hugely benefit humanity and those who suspect it will kill us all. Adam Becker, a journalist and former astrophysicist, disagrees with both groups. Becker, the author of the recent anti-utopian critique More Everything Forever, wrote about his problems with a new dystopian manifesto, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.
Becker’s main objection to both sides is that they overhype the long-term, world-altering effects of superintelligence while downplaying the “much more immediate and well-founded concerns about the dangers of thoughtlessly deployed technology,” he writes. The kinds of ongoing changes that he would prefer to focus on are well accounted for in 2025’s AI book haul. Readers can find out more about how AI’s processes resemble the workings of our brains (or don’t); how the technology is changing medicine, warfare, education, business, and politics; how it has already profoundly altered society. But to me, the most interesting of the crop (or maybe just the most fun) are the works that explore our individual relationships with AI, through fiction or memoir.
Novels such as Amy Shearn’s Animal Instinct and Jayson Greene’s UnWorld imagine chatbots standing in for boyfriends or dead loved ones; politician-author Stacey Abrams invents a rogue medical-AI company in her latest legal thriller, Coded Justice. Hamid Ismailov’s wildly experimental novel We Computers, translated from Uzbek and longlisted for a 2025 National Book Award, creates an alternate history in which a 1980s computer intelligently generates a new kind of mind-expanding, transnational literature.
Occupying a category all its own is Searches, a fragmented memoir in which Vauhini Vara works through her complex feelings about technology. Vara interweaves the story of the rise of the internet with the narrative of her life and work as a tech reporter. She also includes strange interludes: prose-poetic lists of her Google searches; a collection of her Amazon-purchase reviews; and, most strikingly, a series of long interactions with ChatGPT-3 as she works to revise an essay about a sister who died years ago. As Matteo Wong noted in his Atlantic article about the book, the large language model produced what Vara considered to be the essay’s best lines while also inserting plenty of lies. She wound up employing the bot not to think for her, but to prod her into a different kind of thinking; it forced her, she writes, “to assert my own consciousness by writing against the falsehoods.” I enjoyed the book in part because it was less about what technology is doing to us than what we are doing in response.”
Tara Deal has an article on the Writer’s Digest website, dated December 9, 2024 in which she talks about the’Allure’ of the novella for both readers and writers.
Tara Deal is the author of the award-winning novellas That Night Alive (Miami University Press) and Palms Are Not Trees After All (Texas Review Press). Her most recent novel, Life/Insurance, is the winner of the Fugere Prize from Regal House Publishing. She lives in New York City.
Tara Deal
Tara says, “Everyone talks about novellas getting a lot of attention these days because everyone’s attention span is shrinking (a novella is somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 words), but short books have always been around, enduring, durable, made of quality materials. Stealth Wealth. Novellas are versatile, subtle, changing to suit the times. Metamorphosis. Because think of what a novella represents. The good life!(“Instagram’s Hottest Trend? Flexing Your Favorite Paperback,” according to Nylon magazine.)
Imagine spotting someone reading a novella from afar, the flash of a bright blue dust jacket across the subway platform, the park, the plaza, or the palazzo. And even though it does take a bit of effort to read a novella, it’s not too much.
But what if you’re a writer rather than a reader? What if you’re at home, with a computer, rather than out buying paperbacks with abandon, traveling around the world, and enjoying life at night? Is it really worth the effort to invest your time and money and short attention span into crafting a beautifully made, eternally desirable novella? Yes!
Imagine the exhilaration and accomplishment! Mild Vertigo. But how are you going to do it? With something so slim, almost fragile, approaching evanescence, you don’t want any shoddy workmanship to slip in.
How are you going to get a handle on it? I don’t know, but I’ve been working for years on novellas, trying to get it right. Working for years, sometimes giving up and escaping, packing too much into too many suitcases, heavy books for long flights, but always coming home to strip down, pare back, refresh, and rewrite. Back to trying to write a novella that will stand out from the crowd. How?
You want to make a good first impression, ideally on the first page. Your hook doesn’t have to be flashy, but it should be substantial, weighty. Quality at a Glance. Sopick out a few essentials that work together, that you can repeat (if necessary), that you can recombine as your write.
If you focus on one or two characters (rather than a crowd) and one strong story line (rather than trailing subplots), then you need to insert only a scattering of telling details (objects, phrases, names? Who can say.). But it’s always smart to invest in those evocative (provocative?) items that can go from day to evening.
And this is no time to be frugal. Go all out on a few well-chosen items, as if you’re in Paris. Pretend there’s Never Any End to Paris. But it doesn’t matter where you are, in a city or on an island, in an apartment, An Apartment in Athens or New York, either way, wherever. Make room for what matters.
Strip away things from your text, as if you are a devoted minimalist committed to black and white. You can cut more than you think: description, dialogue, digressions. Think of Chanel, who said to always remove something from your outfit. Think of Hemingway and his iceberg. You need see only a little to imagine the depths. The Torrents of Spring. In a novella, everything is washed away to reveal a vein of gold. Or a vein of blood, depending.
As if you’re running for a plane about to leave for somewhere glamorous (Fez, Lisbon, Osaka? I don’t know. You have your own itinerary.). Keep checking your watch to make sure things are on schedule. Keep checking your novella, rereading as fast as possible, looking for any snags in the fabric. Time is running out. You are losing hours as you travel. Flatland.
Are there any rough edges in your reading like burrs in the desert that make you look up and think of going somewhere else? Or are you lost in a dream? Does your novella feel like an enduring design that can’t be improved upon? The Time Machine.
Like the clasp on a necklace, with a satisfying click, the end of the story feels solid, satisfying. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. You’ve strung along some scenes, some thoughts, and although they might have seem unbalanced to the casual reader, a window shopper who wasn’t committed, now everything hangs together, tight or loose, depending on your style. A gift. The Pearl.
Afterward, a moment of luxuriating. Self-Care. Whether you’re a reader or a writer. The Lover. Has the novella transported you? What do you remember? What will you tell people at dinner? Nothing. Quiet Luxury. You’re happy to have avoided the packaged tour through a bloated book that feels like a typical tourist’s itinerary with too much time wasted while waiting for those bits that are tender and delightful.
With a novella, you always go straight to the heart of the matter, the marrow, the best parts, presented on a platter. As if on a terrace in Venice or looking out over Bangkok. The Stranger. The suburbs are far behind you, beyond you. The night turns purple. Do Not Disturb. Dream Story.“
Beth Kander is interviewed by Robert Lee Brewer Writer’s Digest (published 12 December 2024) on how she entered a competition at the last minute.
Beth Kander is a novelist and playwright with tangled roots in the Midwest and Deep South. The granddaughter of immigrants, her writing explores how worlds old and new intertwine—or collide. Her work has been described as “riveting,” “emotional,” “expertly crafted,” and “habit-forming.” Expect twists, turns, and secrets, with surprising heart and humor. Beth has too many degrees and drinks too much coffee. Her favorite characters are her dashing husband and their two lovely kids.
Beth Kander
What prompted you to write this book?
This book definitely has a non-traditional origin. I was knee deep in another project when a friend texted to let me know that the pop culture site Hey Alma was having a Hanukkah movie pitch competition. Eager to procrastinate on my existing project, I checked the pitch competition deadline—and found out it was the very next day. Long story short (literally), I threw together a pitch for I Made It Out Of Clay, a quirky romcom-with-a-golem concept, submitted it at the 11th hour, and ultimately won the competition.
Industry folks started reaching out to me to inquire about film rights. My literary agent, Alli, passed along some great advice from a film agent colleague: “Write the book first, not the movie.” So, I set aside my other book projects and prioritized writing this novel. The story immediately provided myriad unconventional opportunities to explore big topics: grief and family dynamics and identity and adult friendships and turning 40 … I got to write about these heavy things while laughing and making monsters. What a gift.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I won the pitch competition in December 2022. I was so inspired, I drafted the novel in two blurry months. My agent took it out on sub in February 2023. It sold at auction in March 2023, and publication was set for December 2024. So all told, a two-year-process from idea to publication. That’s fast—often, the writing alone can take longer than that! I’m grateful that although the acquisition happened fast, I had a great editor and plenty of time to revise the book, several times over. I loved spending the time really developing the story and connecting with each character.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I’ve learned so much in the process of publishing this book that it’s honestly hard to even know where to begin, and there have been plenty of surprises along the way. But if I had to pull out the biggest lesson, it’s this: You just never know.
You can spend years working on a story you really believe in, only to have it languish and eventually fade away. You can have an overnight idea that becomes the story everyone’s eager to read. You can’t trust trends or tricks. You just have to keep trying. I think a lot about this two-panel meme, where the first panel is labeled “what people think success looks like” and shows an arrow moving steadily forward and up, and the second panel is labeled “what success actually looks like” and it shows a tangled mess that a forward-facing arrow finally re-emerges from… which feels relevant to the publishing process. But I’ve been over-the-top lucky to work with my agent, Alli, to navigate every detour along the way. And working on I Made It Out Of Clay with my editor, April, and the team at Mira/HarperCollins, has been a delight. Sometimes, gracefully and gratefully, the puzzle pieces slide into place.
You just never know.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
This was the fastest writing process I’ve ever undertaken. To go from a paragraph-long idea to a 90,000-word novel in two months is… well, not something I’d necessarily recommend, honestly. Thank God for coffee.
But what I realized is that I didn’t speed-write this book in a vacuum; it wasn’t an anomaly, or a fluke. It was a culmination. All those years, all those other stories; that was my training for this manuscript-marathon. I doubt I’ll keep that pace up with many subsequent projects, but I’m definitely holding fast to the lesson that even the projects that don’t pan out help shape the ones that will fly.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
There’s so much I hope that readers will get out of this book—catharsis, cackling-laughter, genuine enjoyment, a sense of release. There’s some strange stuff in the story (an actual monster!) but it’s really rooted in characters that I hope are relatable in all their imperfections and deep desires for something better. Most of all, I hope this book gives readers permission to laugh in the midst of sorrow or acknowledge sadness even as they dance for joy; to let complicated, conflicting emotions exist alongside each other on the page and in our lives. The publication of this book intersected with a profound loss in my own life, and I’ve become so grateful for anyone and anything that acknowledges that we can feel many things at once. If readers come away with that affirmation, I’ll be thrilled.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Write the book you want to rewrite—because most of writing is revising! Don’t agonize over every word in a first draft; that will only slow you down. Just write the story. Get it onto the page. Drafting is the stage where you capture the idea. Revising is where you figure out how to really tell the story well.
There is an article on the New York Times website by Emma Goldberg, dated 25 May 2025, which is interesting in that it reports on the methods of a high level, successful professor at a prestige university.
Sam Freedman has taught for thirty-five years at Columbia. His students have obtained 113 deals for 95 books.
Emma Goldberg is a business features writer for The New York Times. She reports on cultural, societal and economic change.
Sam Freedman leading the course on book writing that he taught for the last time this spring. “This is a big part of my life’s work,” he said.
Ms Goldberg says: “The night before the start of his final semester teaching, after 35 years, Sam Freedman had a dream that he was going to miss class. He woke up with a strange jolt of relief. What comfort, he thought, to know that after three decades he still couldn’t shake his pre-semester agita.
The most difficult work, he has always believed, ought to evoke fear.
“All these years later I’m still anxious the night before, still concerned about getting here at 7:15 in the morning to be ready for all of you,” he said, facing his students on a Monday morning in January, wearing the same dark suit that he purchased in 1989 at Rothmans when he was first starting to teach and realized he needed formal professional attire.
The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.
This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time. He didn’t want to become one of those fading professors he remembers from college, the types who used laminated notes and made students wish they’d been around to take the class in its glory years. The journalism school does not have plans to continue the class in the same form after his departure.
“The course is an institution in itself and you could almost say that about Sam — his retirement is certainly the end of an era,” said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, who regularly meets with Freedman at an Upper West Side diner to trade ideas about books and teaching.
Freedman began his career as a reporter at the Courier-News in Bridgewater, N.J., and later worked on the culture and metro desks at The New York Times. He went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him.
“This is a big part of my life’s work,” he told the class on their first day of the semester. “Teaching this class, it feels like it’s OK for me to keel over.”
The day had echoes of a religious induction, as Freedman told his students to be “worthy of the ancestors,” his term for class alumni. He projected onto the whiteboard at the front of the room a photo of his office “shelf of honor,” crammed with most of the 95 books that came out of the class. Midway through that first day, four ancestors came to speak.
“If he believes you have a book in you,” said Grace Williams, the author of a 2024 history of a women-owned bank, glancing around the classroom, “you definitely have a book in you.”
The relationship between books and authors is obvious and glorified, but the relationship between books and teachers is less clear. The teachers behind books are often invisible, not the hand stirring the ladle to make the stew but the hand that once wrote the recipe down on some well-worn index card.
When I wrote a book in 2020, about young doctors graduating from medical school early in the pandemic, I reached out for guidance to Freedman, the father of a childhood friend, because I’d heard about his Columbia course. He shared audio clips and met with me, over Zoom, to explain his approach to narrative writing.
What struck me then was the exactitude with which he approached the craft, the lessons he pulled from his own career and then passed around the room: that the reader should never know more than the character, that authors should master methods before trying to subvert them, that narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T).
“Nothing in the class is contingent on having a gift, or having the muse speak to you,” said Leah Hager Cohen, who studied with Freedman in 1991, which led her to write Train Go Sorry, about a school for the deaf.
Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won’t always lead to representation.
“He’s been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,” said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.
Over the decades that Freedman has taught, the publishing industry has gotten far more corporate. And other mentors who work with aspiring authors noted a recent increase in programs that support young book writers outside of journalism school, which can be costly to attend.
What has stayed consistent, Freedman insists, is the need for an obsessive work ethic, and many of his lectures are paeans to just that.
He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer’s block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that’s getting in the way of putting words on the page. He closes the classroom door at 9 a.m. and those who are late have to wait outside until the first break, at least an hour later. (“Latecomers will be seated at intermission,” read the sign he used to post on the door.) He tracks every grammatical error a student makes, with the expectation it will never be repeated.
Kelly McMasters, who took the class in 2003 and went on to co-teach with Freedman, recalled that when she was his student, he got so fed up with her use of parentheses that he drew her a picture of parentheses, curling up like an old pet near a rug and a bowl of food, and showed it to the whole class. “Your parentheses are fine,” she recalled him saying. “Here’s the rug they can lie down on, here’s their food bowl. You may never use parentheses again.”
“I was so mad and hurt,” McMasters said. “But you know what? He was one hundred percent right.”
If Freedman enters his classroom a bundle of nerves, his students do far more so. One current student, Ally Markovich, 29, was so intent on getting into the class that she flew to Ukraine last summer to begin reporting her book proposal even before she had applied. Another, Carl David Goette-Luciak, 33, made a ritual of meeting his girlfriend for cheap pizza every Monday night so he could share with her the notes he took during Freedman’s lectures. “You can’t go to the bookstore to tell the reader what you meant,” one of them read.
What a great experience to have had a professor like Freedman!
In response to the article mentioned in my last post about the AI-powered service available from the BBC consisting of digital tutorials by famous writers like Agatha Christie, there is the article below which thoroughly trashes the idea. This article was published on the 3rd of May in the Telegraph and was written by Ruth Dudley Edwards.
Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944) is an Irish Unionist historian and writer, with published work in the fields of history, biography and crime fiction, and a number of awards won. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she has lived in England since 1965, and describes herself as British-Irish. Her revisionist approach to Irish history and her views have sometimes generated controversy or ridicule. She has been a columnist with the Irish Sunday Independent, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and The News Letter.
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Ms Edwards said, “I try to be positive, so in my frequent Luddite moments I call upon my inner Pollyanna and remind myself of the many blessings of technology. Yet the news that the BBC has added to Maestro, its educational streaming platform, a course of 11 short online videos in which a recreated Agatha Christie tells you how to write crime fiction made me feel appropriately murderous.
Indeed, it’s given me inspiration for another short story deriding and killing publishers. But I won’t be asking AI for help. It’s likely to be the nuclear weapon employed by Big Brother to destroy original thought.
Yes, James Pritchard – who through Agatha Christie Ltd is the custodian of her legacy – has insisted that all writing advice given in 11 videos by his great-grandmother’s recreated voice and face be drawn wholly from her own words.
But after a lifetime of reading crime novels and more than four decades writing them, I think the whole idea of a disembodied voice mouthing the words selected by a team of academics is a horrid and dangerous way to go.
Agatha – which as a fellow member of the Detection Club I feel entitled to call her even though she died 20 years before I was elected – was a genius. She became the world’s best selling author because of her innate gifts when it came to plotting and her rare, unsentimental understanding of human nature and good and evil.
I read all her books in my youth, sneered at her writing in my pretentious years at university and during a bad bout of flu in my early 30s reread her and repented. I imbibed from her and others of her contemporaries like G K Chesterton and Edmund Crispin a love of the genre, especially when humour was added to the pot.
And then, unexpectedly, I was invited to write a crime novel, joined the Crime Writers’ Association and discovered a world of fun and friendship and very varied lives, for our members included cops and ex-convicts, doctors and nurses, musicians, bureaucrats and publicans. We would swap stories of how an episode in our lives had inspired us to have a go at telling a story from an improbable viewpoint. No subject was off-limits.
I’ve had several occupations, including in academia, public service and journalism, and have never come across such a congenial and sociable bunch as crime writers and readers. There’s a humility about them that I love and found rarely among academics and the literati. You couldn’t get from an algorithm or from lectures what I’ve learnt from my lovely, irreverent, self-deprecating and sometimes mad companions in that world.
You learn how to write primarily through reading. I don’t believe it can be taught, though I admit some people benefit from good editing, and there’s nothing wrong with handy hints. Indeed, I was a contributor to the highly entertaining Howdunit – published in honour of the 90th anniversary of the Detection Club – in which 90 of the living and some dead members muse on our trade. We collaborate on books occasionally, our planning meetings are hilarious and we donate the proceeds toward subsidising the next communal dinner.
My passion is free speech, and my blood freezes at the thought of how AI will be used by Big Brother. I bet all the casual racism and other kinds of wrongthink expressed in throwaway lines in the work of Agatha and her generation will not survive the first algorithmic sanitising.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell taught us.
AI can see off originality, courage, and truth in no time.”
Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers sent an email today about how writers are vulnerable to Imposter Syndrome.
Imposter Syndrome
He says: “Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.
That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.
If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, ‘Yes, I just built that.’
If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)
And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:
Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.
So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)
And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.
The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.
The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.
The ladder from rubbish to excellent is editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a professional manuscript assessment – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments. So. Write, Edit, Publish, Repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.”
T S Eliot said, “The first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” That is a fulsome recommendation of The Moonstone. Edgar Allen Poe wrote several mysteries as short stories in the early 1840’s, but in 1868, Wilkie Collins pioneered the following features of The Moonstone:
an English country house robbery
an “inside job”
red herrings
a celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
a bungling local constabulary
detective enquiries
a large number of false suspects
the “least likely suspect”
a reconstruction of the crime
a final twist in the plot
which became became classic attributes of the twentieth-century detective story in novel form. At 436 pages The Moonstone is quite long.
William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English writer and the son of an English painter. He published his first story in 1843. He wrote his first novel, Tahiti as It Was, in 1844, but it was rejected in 1845 and remained unpublished during his lifetime. He was introduced to Charles Dickens in 1851 and they became fast friends. In 1852 his novel, Basil, was published. In 1853 while writing Hide and Seek, he suffered his first bout of gout, from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. The novels Collins published in the 1860s are the best and most enduring of his career. The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale and The Moonstone were written in less than a decade. They sold in large numbers and made him a wealthy man. The inconsistent quality of Collins’s dramatic and fictional works in the last decade of his life was accompanied by a general decline in his health, including diminished eyesight. He was often unable to leave home and had difficulty writing. During these last years, he focused on mentoring younger writers. In 1858, Collins had begun living with Caroline Graves and her daughter Harriet. Collins disliked the institution of marriage, but remained dedicated to Caroline and Harriet, considering them to be his family. In 1868, Collins met Martha Rudd in Norfolk, and the two began a liaison. She was 19 years old and from a large, poor family. A few years later, she moved to London to be closer to him. Their daughter Marian was born in 1869; their second daughter, Harriet Constance, in 1871; and their son, William Charles, in 1874. When he was with Martha, Collins assumed the name William Dawson, and she and their children used the last name of Dawson themselves. For the last 20 years of his life Collins divided his time between Caroline, who lived with him at his home in Gloucester Place, and Martha, who was nearby.
The Plot: Rachel Verinder, a young English woman, inherits a large Indian diamond on her eighteenth birthday. It is a legacy from her uncle, a corrupt British army officer who seized it in India. The diamond is of great religious significance and extremely valuable, and three Hindu jugglers/priests have dedicated their lives to recovering it. She wears the diamond at her birthday, but it has disappeared the next day. Superintendent Seegrave, an incompetent local policeman, investigates the Indians and Rosanna Spearman, a housemaid, without success. During the ensuing year there are hints that the diamond was removed from the house and may be in a London bank vault, having been pledged as surety to a moneylender. The Indian jugglers are still nearby, watching and waiting. Franklin Blake, a cousin and suitor of Rachel’s, and who attended her 18th party, returns from overseas and resolves to solve mystery left unsolved by Sergeant Cuff, the famous English detective. Franklin learns that he was given laudanum (an opiate) by Dr Candy, the family doctor, because of his anxiety about Rachel and the diamond. Rachel herself tells Franklin that she saw him take the diamond, but she has not revealed the theft because of the consequences for him. Franklin tracks down the holder of the diamond when he redeems it from the bank at an appointed time. That man turns out to be Godfrey Ablewhite, who has embezzled a large sum and wanted the diamond to repay his debt. He, too, is a suitor of Rachel, and he had convinced Franklin, in his drugged stupor to give him the diamond to place it in safe keeping. After recovering the diamond from the bank, Godfrey is murdered by the Indians, who escape to India. Rachel and Franklin marry and a noted adventurer, Mr Murthwaite, explains that he has followed the Indians and seen the diamond returned to its proper place: in the forehead of a statue of an Indian god.
The story is quite a bit more complicated than that with a dozen more characters, and considerably more involvement. There are also multiple narrators of the story. The characters are all unique, with their defects and attractions, and their motives are clear, even if not well reasoned. It is difficult to put the book aside, in spite of its length. A modern editor would have abbreviated it by at least 100 pages by cutting the passages where the characters review in detail what has happened after each event. Still, it is an enchanting story of a Victorian crime in a Victorian setting.
There is an article in the February 6 issue of the Telegraph by Jake Kerridge which exposes a publishing process which is not well known and could mean ‘the end of original thought’.
Jake Kerridge is a UK-based journalist who specializes in writing about books and literature. With a keen eye for detail and a passion for storytelling, he has established himself as one of the leading books journalists in the country. As a regular contributor to The Telegraph, Kerridge’s work reaches a wide audience of book enthusiasts and industry professionals alike, making him a go-to source for the latest news, reviews, and insights into the world of literature.
Jake Kerridge
Jake says, “Reader demand for the world-conquering genre of “romantasy” (romance/fantasy) has grown so voracious that publishers are struggling to keep up the supply. That’s the conclusion I drew recently when I stumbled on an advert asking for “unpublished Young-Adult fantasy romance authors to audition for the chance to write a YA novel”.
One burden the successful applicant would be relieved of was thinking of a plot: this was already outlined in the advert. “Trapped on an enchanted cross-kingdom train to her wedding, a fiery princess works alongside her infuriatingly attractive new bodyguard to expose a killer onboard.”
Working Partners, the company that placed the advert, describes itself not as a publisher but as a “book packager”. The phrase might conjure up visions of people wielding bubble wrap in a warehouse, but for some decades now these organisations have played a vital role in the publishing ecosystem – though they tend to stay out of the limelight.
Book packaging companies vary in scale from conglomerate to cottage industry, but they usually comprise a permanent editorial staff and various freelance writers. The majority of them deal in fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, and they are collaborative affairs, with the writers fleshing out ideas given to them.
There are generally two ways for a packaging company to become successful at placing books with publishers: produce, through the alchemy of collaboration, brilliant ideas; or get your staff to churn out books far more quickly than the publishers could do themselves in-house. If it sounds like literature on the factory farm model, packagers seem reluctant to dispel such ideas by shedding light on themselves.
“I think part of the reason book packagers get a bad rap is that there is a secrecy around the process, so it feels all a bit smoke and mirrors,” says Jasmine Richards, who founded the packager Storymix in 2019. “For example, celebrity fiction titles are often produced by packagers and traditionally that’s not been publicly acknowledged, although publishers are now getting better at crediting ghostwriters.
The Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry is one of Storymix’s big successes
“Personally I’m really proud to be a packager and to say out loud that we find talent and support it. So many writers get their first break with a book packager: you come and get paid to work on a project, build up your writing muscle and learn about the industry. Then maybe go on to sell your own project.”
Nevertheless, publishers remain wary of being publicly associated with the packaging model. In the US the romantasy community has been rocked this month by a lawsuit alleging plagiarism against Tracy Wolff, author of top-selling girl-meets-vampire yarns such as Crave.
In mounting her defence, Wolff’s lawyer revealed that her publisher, Liz Pelletier, was heavily involved in the writing of Crave, “a collaborative project with Pelletier providing to Wolff … the main plot, location, characters, and scenes, and actively participating in the editing and writing process.”
Pelletier, who runs the publishing company Entangled, has told The New Yorkerthat she commissioned Wolff to write Crave – “the fastest writer I’ve ever worked with” –to fill a gap in her publishing schedule when another author failed to deliver a book. Wolff produced the first draft in two months.
Commentators have dubbed Entangled a book packager in all but name, something Pelletier has denied almost as strenuously as the plagiarism accusations. If a conventional publisher gets a reputation for following the packager model in-house, they may struggle ever to woo big-name authors to their stable.
However, the romantasy genre does perhaps seem more suited to the packager model than to authors who want to express themselves artistically or come up with original ideas. Romantasy novels repeat tropes ad infinitum – love across class (or species) divides, love triangles, enemies becoming lovers – and the sales figures suggest that the more formulaic the book, the better romantasy readers like it.
With publishers able to see what tropes are trending on BookTok – #morallygreymen and #daggertothethroat are popular hashtags for romantasy readers – they are reportedly shaping books accordingly. (The New Yorker reports that Pelletier told another author: “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. Pelletier has said that she does not recall this conversation.)
As one fantasy novelist (who asked not to be named) put it to me, publishers do seem to be following the packager model more. “It is expensive to build up an author’s career over time, especially if you invest in them and then they turn out to be, say, Neil Gaiman. There’s a sense among publishers that the TikTok generation responds more to individual books than authors.
“It’s cheaper for publishers to hire packagers, or work like packagers, and tailor a book to its potential readership. One outcome of that is books become not just formulaic – they’re indistinguishable.” (I asked the big five UK publishers whether they were increasingly using packaging companies when it came to fiction; none responded to my request for comment).
If it’s easy to see why publishers commission work from packagers, what’s in it for the writers who toil away for them? Certainly not the money, says Honor Head, a veteran writer of children’s non-fiction for numerous book packagers. “It’s really badly paid. Usually if you work in packaging you don’t get a royalty, you get a flat fee. And if the publisher comes back and says ‘I don’t like what you’ve written’, you don’t get any more money for doing it again. But I love writing for children, and I’ve got to a stage of my life now where I don’t need to make as much money.”
There is a suggestion of the salt mines about working for book packagers. In 2010 the packager Full Fathom Five, founded by the author James Frey, was denounced by the New York Times as a “fiction factory”, with creative writing students or graduates writing up Frey’s story concepts for the unprincely sum of $250 per novel.
In China, the phenomenal popularity of wuxianwen, a type of serial fiction published straight to smartphones and tablets, is maintained by the equivalent of packagers: editors map out story arcs and farm various portions of the story out to different writers, each of whom is expected to produce 10,000 words daily.
Head recalls that when she started her own packager some years ago, she and her partner “were working dawn to dusk seven days a week”. Life is more relaxed now she freelances writing children’s non-fiction for other packagers, although her rate is impressive: “I would say the longest I’ve spent on a single book – researching, writing, and then doing any checks – would be a week. It depends on the age group, but I can get a book done in half a day.” She enjoys the discipline of writing to guidelines, although it can be frustrating working on, say, a book on dinosaurs for the US market and being obliged not to write anything that contradicts creationist theory.
Storymix founder Jasmine Richards favours an organic approach to packaging, devising ideas for YA and children’s fiction with her writers and then approaching publishers rather than being commissioned. Her aim is “to put kids and teens of colour at the heart of the action”.
“When my son was about five we were in the bookshop and I couldn’t find a single book on the shelf that featured a character that looked like him. As an editor and author I thought: what’s the best way to change the look of that shelf as quickly as possible? As an author I can write one book a year, but if I start my own book packager I could get several books on that shelf.”
Among Storymix’s big successes is the Carnegie-nominated Fablehouse by EL Norry, which was sold by Richards to Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury.
“My job is often to matchmake the right idea with the right writer,” says Richards. “I had thought about a fantasy novel with a setting based on Holnicote House, which in the 1940s and ’50s took care of the children who came from relationships between African-American GIs and white British women. I knew exactly the writer I’d love to work on this project: Emma Norry, because I knew she had grown up in care and was of mixed-race heritage. I gave her a storyline, and I remember when she sent me the first chapter, I let the dinner burn in the oven while I read it. That’s a good example of how this method can unlock something amazing.”
Factories undermining the traditional autonomy of the author, or crucibles of collaborative magic? Whichever way you look at them, it’s clear that, despite most of us being unaware of their existence, without packagers the publishing landscape would look very different.”
This is a segment of the publishing market in which most of us would have no interest, either as writers or readers, but it clearly exists to serve the interests of some (perhaps a large group) of readers.
There is an article in today’s Telegraph, by Claire Allfree that explains how Waterstones became a high street success in the face of on-line giants like Amazon. The article focuses on James Daunt, Waterstones CEO. Excerpts are below.
James Daunt
“James Daunt is running between meetings and apologies for having to dash off for a minute before we can begin our chat. While he is gone I squint at the books in his New York office, but alas the Zoom screen is such that I can make out only one title – a biography of the artist Andy Warhol. Quite what a bookshelf would tell you about Daunt though is a moot point: he reads anything and everything.
“I try to knock through a non-fiction book once a week. I’ve just finished The Quiet Coup by Mehrsa Baradaran [about the market failures of American neoliberalism]. I’m reading a book on inflation. Although I’m having a tough time with novels at the moment. I haven’t hit upon something that’s made me feel ‘wow’.”
On second thoughts, perhaps you can deduce from this that Daunt cares very much about the health of new fiction, and that he is deeply concerned about the economy. Neither should be a surprise: Daunt is, after all, the most powerful man in Western bookselling. His footprint has been all over the books we buy and where we buy them ever since he founded the six-store Daunt Books chain, opening its first location on Marylebone High Street in London in 1990 at the age of 26.
Daunt Books’ Marylebone location is one of London’s most famous (and photographed) independent bookshops
In 2011, he was appointed managing director of Waterstones at a time when the chain was in a seeming death loop of forced branch closures and collapsing profits; by 2024 sales had reached £528.4 million, up 17 per cent on the year before, with profits for the same year soaring by £20 million to hit £32.8 million.
In 2019, he became the chief executive of the then floundering US book chain Barnes and Noble (he splits his time between New York and the four-storey Hampstead home he shares with his wife Katy Steward, who works in health care; the couple have two adult daughters) and has overseen an aggressive reboot and expansion, opening 50 stores last year and with another 50 planned for this.
So successful have both companies become that rumours are circulating that Elliott Management, the private equity firm that owns them, plan to float them on the stock exchange. Daunt, though, 61, dismisses such corporate gossip as though it were a bad smell. “These are not my plans at all,” he says, reluctant to disclose any further details for both companies beyond their steady and remorseless growth. “Much of it is pure speculation: one sees that a private equity firm buys a business and assumes that five years on, if the business is doing well, they will sell it. To be honest I lack the imagination to see why one would do things any differently to how we do it now.”
Indeed. The success of Waterstones in the UK is a rare, possibly unique bright spot in a retail market otherwise dominated by the collapse into administration of big brands (Ted Baker is among the latest to be plunged into crisis) and declining profits (Asda announced their worst Christmas since 2015, with sales slumping by more than 5 per cent over the festive period).
“What makes us different is that we stubbornly and tenaciously held on in places where other people have left, so you’ll find us in Grimsby and Middlesborough long after M&S have abandoned these places,” says Daunt. The Waterstones vision is as much ideological as financial. “We have a bookshop in Ayr because it matters that we are there.”
So why is Waterstones soaring and everywhere else floundering? Covid helped: sales rose 73 per cent in 2021-2022 as half of adults doubled their reading time during lockdown and an artfully curated bookshelf became a Zoom must-have accessory. “Most retailers appeal to a relatively small demographic – teenagers, or older men and so forth. We sell to everyone.”
“We have huge advantages,” he argues. “What we sell has a fixed price that we don’t set [book prices are set by the publishers]. So we are remarkably well protected from the consequences of excessive inflation.” Fair enough, but that fixed price is creeping up – it’s now common for literary hardbacks to sell at £22.
“But inflation has been remarkably modest in the UK book market, much less than it is in any other. When I first started selling books in 1990, a paperback was £6. Nor do we sell items that go out of date. Also we are aspirational. Our reach goes beyond the middle class bracket. Many parents want their children to read.”
Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.
“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”
“I was a nice middle-class child who was taken down to Caledonian Road library to pick out my books from a very early age and had my nose in a book from the moment I could read,” he says. “Clearly if one is privileged enough to grow up, in my case with library books, it helps foster a love for reading. We were a nuclear family, although because of my father’s job I was sent to boarding school [Sherborne, in Dorset] which is a way of being educated I suppose. I certainly haven’t subjected my own children [Molly, who works for a security and counter terrorism think tank and is also completing a masters in Middle Eastern Studies at SOAS university, and Eliza, who is studying history at Yale] to that.”
Daunt’s argument is for a system whereby some communities are taxed more than others. “Sensible structures should be put in place so that Marylebone High Street, which is never going to struggle for occupancy, doesn’t benefit in the way Barrow-in-Furness should.” He doesn’t agree that one answer might be for shops to follow the Waterstones model, which places huge emphasis on the social and aesthetic experience of shopping and targets each shop directly at the needs of its local community.
“The problem is not the shop keeper or the environment. You need to provide an environment that allows them to thrive. And if you give an online retailer a massive incentive to open a huge warehouse, then you are stripping employment from local high streets, which is of huge social and cultural benefit. So don’t shout at the retailer, shout at the warehouse, and this has to be something that starts in Westminster.”
In person, Daunt has an air of careful affability. He was born in Islington in 1963. His father, who died in 2023, was the diplomat Timothy Daunt, while his mother, Patricia, brought up James and his two younger sisters – Eleanor, who works for a fragrance company, and Alice, who runs Daunt Travel, a high-end travel business. The house was bookish and he remembers school holidays as being “very intellectual”.
Daunt read history at Cambridge and on leaving joined JP Morgan in 1985, until Katy, at that point his girlfriend, suggested that perhaps he might want to do something else with his life. He set up his first Daunt shop in 1990, taking over an antiquarian bookstore on Marylebone High Street. “Running a business is not at all the tradition of the Daunt family,” he says. “Daunts tend to be either school teachers or public servants, and if you are neither of those things, you tend to join the church.”
There is a vaguely ecclesiastical beauty about the original Daunt shop, with its gorgeous Edwardian gallery and lofty calm. It set the image for the subsequent five Daunt stores that followed, which, given their locations (Holland Park, Hampstead, Belsize Park), retain an air of monied exclusivity, something of which Daunt is well aware.
“There has always been the accusations [with Daunt Books] of being leafy or snobby, and it’s a type that we undoubtedly are: you only have to listen to my accent to hear who I am. But the customer I could always identify was the taxi driver. They are and remain a really good customer base for us because they keep lots of books.”
When he was asked to take over Waterstones by its new owner, the Russian oligarch Alexander Mamut, no one thought he could do it. Amazon was selling books online at aggressive discounts, and there were apocalyptic warnings about the rise of the ebook.
Instead, Daunt set about applying the independent Daunt ethos to Waterstones and, in what seemed a particularly kamikaze move at the time, severing its relationship with publishers. No more in-store promotion displays paid for by publishing houses, a revenue stream that had brought in £27 million a year. And no more three for two discount tables either. He cleared out the management at a loss of 200 jobs and handed buying power to individual stores. “I hate homogeneity,” he says. “The idea is that each time you are creating a bookshop for the local community.”
He has his critics. Some accuse him of being ruthless, an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove. Is he? “I don’t know if I’m ruthless but I am single-minded as to what a good book shop is. And I don’t compromise on that and I never change my notion of what that is. I will never let people be useless. The key to that, and the bit people have found a bit ruthless, is that I require my bookshops to be run by booksellers. And if you are not interested in books and you don’t read and you don’t care then work somewhere else.”
With such reach and influence can come accusations of excessive curating, even censorship. Daunt bats them away. “We get accused periodically of going all woke, it’s nonsense. Or you get a bit of outrage from some author who says we are no longer stocking their book. And over the years I’ve been accused of not stocking almost every sort of book.”
All the same, does he agree the book industry is increasingly convulsed by the subject of what can and cannot be published? As leading publishers shy away from books with a gender critical perspective, or books with a pro-Israel stance.
“I don’t recognise that. Of course publishers make missteps. They go and clean up Roald Dahl and it’s just absurd. It was a bit of a stupid thing to do. But publishing is such a vigorous landscape that these missteps are soon corrected.”
Do these “missteps” affect what Waterstones select to buy? “Our job is to curate a sensible array of books. And when it comes to books about the Israel and Gaza conflict, we’ve had some real bestsellers such as The Genius of Israel [by Saul Singer and Dan Senor, about Israel’s strength as a nation]. Admittedly, this has been in areas with strong Jewish communities but it was ever thus. We are not dictating to anyone.”
“Yes, sometimes we make mistakes. We made a mistake with Hannah Barnes’ book about the Tavistock Clinic [Time to Think, an exposé of the Tavistock NHS gender clinics which multiple publishers refused to publish; it was eventually published by Swift in 2023] by underestimating how many copies we would need [when it was first published]. So when it sold out, we had to go back to Swift and ask for more copies. It’s a problem for about 10 days. People say ‘you are boycotting it’. We are not boycotting it; we’ve just sold out our initial order.””
The Daily Telegraph has an article in its 29 December 2024 issue which I find distressing. (I could not find an author attribution.)
Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey classics
The article says, “Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey have been hit with trigger warnings by a university for “distressing” content.
The University of Exeter has come under fire after telling undergraduates they may “encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable” in their Greek mythology studies.
In what has been branded as a “parody” and “bonkers”, students enroled on the Women in Homer module are told material could be “challenging”.
With references to sexual violence, rape and infant mortality, undergraduates are also advised they should “feel free to deal with it in ways that help (eg to leave the classroom, contact Wellbeing, and of course talk to the lecturer)” if content is “causing distress”.
However, the advice, which was obtained by the Mail on Sunday via Freedom of Information laws, has been ridiculed by both classics-loving Boris Johnson and experts alike.
The Iliad depicts the final weeks of the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by Greek city-states, while The Odyssey describes Odysseus’s successful journey back to Ithaca, set over multiple locations, timelines and alternative homelands.
Mr Johnson, who read classics at the University of Oxford and is a fan of Homer, said the ancient works provided the “foundation of Western literature”.
Reacting to news of the university’s warning, the former prime minister described the policy as “bonkers”, telling the paper: “Exeter University should withdraw its absurd warnings. Are they really saying that their students are so wet, so feeble-minded and so generally namby-pamby that they can’t enjoy Homer?
“Is the faculty of Exeter University really saying that its students are the most quivering and pathetic in the entire 28 centuries of Homeric studies?”
Historian Lord Andrew Roberts said students shouldn’t be “wrapped in cotton wool and essentially warned against ancient but central texts of the Western canon”.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, added: “A university that decides to put a trigger warning on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has become morally disoriented to the point that it has lost the plot.”
Jeremy Black, the author of A Short History Of War, said the measure “can surely only be a parody”.
A spokesman from the University of Exeter told The Telegraph: “The University strongly supports both academic freedom and freedom of speech, and accepts that this means students may encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable during their studies.
“Academics may choose to include a content warning on specific modules if they feel some students may find some of the material challenging or distressing.
“Any decision made to include a content warning is made by the academics involved in delivering the modules, and these help ensure students who may be affected by specific issues are not subjected to any potential unnecessary distress.”
The warnings on Homer’s work come amid an increasing number of works being slapped with trigger warnings.
Last week, it emerged that John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men was removed from the Welsh GCSE curriculum for the “psychological and emotional” harm caused by its racial slurs.
In October, the University of Nottingham received similar criticism for warning students of The Canterbury Tales’ “expressions of Christian faith”.
Earlier this year, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland were amongst a collection of children’s stories that were handed trigger warnings for “white supremacy” at York St John University.
In 2023, a disclaimer was added to the republishing of Nobel Prize-winning Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Whilst deciding not to censor the book, publisher Penguin Random House’s note made clear the reissue did not constitute an “endorsement” of Hemingway’s original text.”
I remember that as a child my mother reading both the Iliad and the Odyssey to me and that I particularly enjoyed them, knowing that they had been written 2,800 years ago.. Are today’s young adults really so vulnerable to distress? If so, trigger warnings are necessary for 90% of the current news!
William Peace Blog 