Guest post: On Digital Books and Reader Expectations by Leigh Russell

The first Geraldine Steel murder mystery, Cut Short, came out in print in the UK in 2009. In one of the first US reviews, which appeared in the Compulsive Reader, it was described as a 'fine police procedural, with a convincing if disconcerting feel of contemporary Britain.' I remember the thrill of reading a review on an American website, never dreaming that one day my books would find a US publisher.

A fellow author suggested my publisher bring it out as a digital book. It seems strange to recall that just four years ago I wasn't really sure what that meant. Nevertheless I sent a polite request to my publisher to bring my debut out as an ebook. No one thought it was important, but six months later the digital version duly came out. 'Of course your books don't sell on kindle,' someone in the know told me. As for me, I still had only a vague notion what a kindle was. Exactly the same happened with Road Closed in 2010.

But reading habits were changing. When Dead End came out in 2011, the digital and print books were published on the same day. By the time Death Bed appeared in print in 2012, the digital book had already  been available for six months. This pattern has been repeated in 2013, with digital versions of Stop Dead and Cold Sacrifice available for download six months in advance of  print books. 

Nowadays, no one says my titles 'don't sell on kindle'. Not only have the print books reached bestseller lists in the UK bookstore chains and on amazon, but the ebooks have reached Number 1 on kindle.

Every British author aspires to be published in the US, so I was very excited when, following the series' success in the UK, all of the Geraldine Steel books were acquired by a US publisher. They are also publishing my new spin off series for Geraldine's sergeant, Ian Peterson.

Harper Collins US are publishing my books at a rate of one a month, starting with Cut Short in November 2013. It is exciting, but times have changed since Cut Short was first published. Harper Collins are publishing my titles as ebooks first. I doubt if I anyone will suggest I send my US publisher a polite request to bring my books out in print. How times have changed!

Find out more about Leigh and her work at: http://leighrussell.co.uk/

Compulsive Reader Newsletter

Hello all you fine readers. I've been a little snowed under at the moment, but just a quickie to let you know that if you don't subscribe to The Compulsive Reader's Newsletter, you've just missed our November newsletter featuring three (yes 3) separate book giveaways, ten fresh reviews, a roundup of literary news including the latest on the Man Booker, the Forward Prize for poetry, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Scotiabank Giller, and lots more.  If you would like to remedy this situation just let your fingers walk you over to: http://www.compulsivereader.com/ and sign up for free on the front page. If you are already a subscriber, watch your mailbox for the latest issue which has just been dispatched.

Grammowrimo

Are you thinking of writing a novel? Everyone's getting in on the act it seems, especially in November for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Grammar checking software company Grammarly has decided to devote the month to coordinating a community novel. They're accepting submissions through October 25, 2013 from writers at all levels. Signing up with your email address will add you to the queue of authors planning to help write the novel, and Grammarly will notify you when it is your turn to contribute up to 800 words to your assigned chapter. At the end of NaNoWriMo, Grammarly is aiming to publish a book that boasts the largest number of authors of any novel ever written.

If you want to join in the fun, just drop by http://www.grammarly.com/grammowrimo/ and enter your email address. You can even help choose the plot, and enter contests to design the cover and name the book.  If you've been wanting to join in NaNoWriMo but don't have the wherewithall (or ability to drop out of your life for a complete month), then this is the perfect option to get your creative juices flowing. I'll be looking forward to checking out the result.

Poetry Monday: Rochelle Owens

Rochelle Owen is a poet, playwright, translator and video artist who has published, among many other things, eighteen books of poetry, the latest of which is Out of Ur just released by Shearsman Books. 

Out of Ur is an extraordinary collection of new work and older work taken from the period between 1961 and 2012. The poems meld classicism with a post-modern sharpness. The work is simultaneously lyrical and starkly confronting.  The poems, which I'm still in the process of reading, take the reader in multiple directions, sometimes at the same time - moving outward to places like the streets of Marrakech, and inward into the brain or the makings of the creative process. Observation and realism mingle with meta-poeticism. It's dense and satisfying work that I'm looking forward to spending more time with.

The PennSound page on Rochelle Owens is a treasure trove of MP3s, videos and text collected from a variety of readings, which will no doubt be augmented by the upcoming reading by Rochelle and her equally illustrious husband George Economou at the Kelly Writers House in Pennsylvania on Thurs the 17th of Oct at 6pm (Arts Cafe if you're in the area).  The following little excerpt is from the poem "The Glacier" which is published in its entirety in Out of Ur:

‘Green the gardens of Tuscany’
the word ‘avore’ tattood on her forehead snow forming ice
the glacier expanding outward outward moving slowly slowly
lumps of ice tilting twisting rows of words order of words

‘Green the gardens of Tuscany’
parts of words
the word ‘abandon’ stuck in her throat lovely the letters like roots
spirals of roots multicellular
slender pliant twigs
lovely the letters like arteries

Happy Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week this week.  The annual celebration runs from Sept 22-28 and was launched in 1982 to try and counter the growing trend for challenging/banning books. According to the American Booksellers Association, who runs the event, more than 11,300 have been challenged since 1982, including, last year, Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. 

Many of the books on the banned list are amongst my all-time favourite books.  I try each year to celebrate the event by revisiting a classic banned book.  This year, the book I revisited was Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.  When I was around 17 (over a hundred years ago, as my kids would say), I attempted, along with some of my friends, to memorise the first chapter.  We did pretty well with it and I'm afraid that, all these years later, I'm still able to recite the first two paragraphs ("What's it going to be then, eh?"). The appeal of A Clockwork Orange for me was partly due to the disturbing, risque nature of the work. I was, after all, a rebellious teen. The questions that the book raises about morality and free will are as disturbing and relevant today as they were when it was written in 1962. Pondering those questions and discussing them with my pals was part of the pleasure and the educational value that we got from the book.  I was also attracted to Burgess' innovative use of language. Every word is understandable, yet much of it is linguistically inventive, and in spite of the disturbing nature of the words, kind of thrilling to read. You can check out a glossary here: http://www.artofeurope.com/kubrick/nadsat.htm

Finally, I think that A Clockwork Orange is probably one of the few really exceptional books that translated into an exceptional film. It's hard to think of Little Alex in any other way than as he was portrayed by Malcolm McDowell.

You can find out more about Banned Books Week here: http://bannedbooksweek.org/ and join in with your own tweets, readings, and reflections (feel free to put some of those in the comments below as well).  You can even 'hang-out' with banned writers like Erica Jong and Lauren Oliver.

Homage or Theft: Why Serial Plagiarism is Just Wrong

I awoke this morning to a story in today's Newcastle Herald which shocked me. There were several reasons for my astonishment. The first was that it implicated two of the "rising stars" of the Australian poetry world Andrew Slattery and Graham Nunn as being serial plagiarists.  I considered both of them colleagues and held a great deal of respect for them.  I was well aware of the increasing rise of serial plagiarism among poets due to some recent literary scandals, including the case in 2011 where "poet" Christian Ward was caught, after winning the Exmoor Society's Hope Bourne prize for his submission, using Helen Mort's poem "The Deer".  Ward changed little beyond the title (and even that was pretty close).  Ward later turned out to be a serial plagiarist, stealing from may other poets including Sandra Beasley.  Somewhat ironically (and inexplicably), Slattery has posted Sandra Beasley's touching piece about what it feels like to have your work stolen and credited to someone else on his Facebook page.

Slattery has defended himself by saying that his work was meant to be a "cynical hoax", and also that it was really done in the Cento form, a work composed of verses taken from other authors but reworked into a new form. Of course there is no attempt, as is critical in Cento, to credit the original authors, many of whom are still writing work that is under copyright.  It may be the case that both Slattery and Nunn have been attending classes by Kenneth Goldsmith, who is a strong proponent of "Uncreative Writing". Goldsmith teaches his students that "How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."  In other words, you can and should 'help yourself' and work with what's already out there.

Repurposing is all fine and well and there have been some wonderful, startlingly original works of art that have come from the sampling process (some of it is Goldsmith's), but taking someone else's original, carefully wrought words and presenting them, sometimes to contest judges, as your own carefully wrought words, with no credit, no permission, and no indication that this is what you're doing is just theft, pure and simple.  There's no euphemism or explanation that can make this kind of theft okay.  All writers have felt a hint of jealousy when reading something that is so perfectly written that we wish we'd written it ourselves. It doesn't honour other writers to pretend that, nor does it do yourself any justice - since I'm sure both Slattery and Nunn are fully capable of writing their own exquitely unique verses - unique because it comes from their own unique perspective and talent.  What this kind of serial plagiarism does is to denegrate writers everywhere by diminishing and devaluing the hours and hours of hard work and personal internal mining that is an integral part of the writing process.  By all means, borrow, repurpose, re-create, but do it with credit, permission, and above all, with honesty and honour.  Otherwise it's wrong, pure and simple.

Poetry Monday: ModPo is Back

If you missed ModPo last time around (and even if you didn't - lots of people are doing it again - it's that good).  There are currently over 30,000 people enrolled in ModPo II and although the first lot of course material is already available I'm pretty sure that enrollment remains open (but not for long).  It's completely free, and even though there are loads of attendees, the super-engaged involvement of Professor Al Filreis and his wonderful Teaching Assistants (and about 26 Community TAs too) makes this a very personal, very supported course full of insight and poetic pleasure.  There are no prerequisites, and you can work at your own pace, doing a lot or a little; interacting or keeping a low-profile.  If you missed my gushing regular blogposts last time around (you can search this blog for many posts on the topic), the brief overview is that ModPo stands for Modern and Contemporary Poetry and runs as a structured, university level class that encourages close, deep readings of poets beginning with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman (who thread their way through everything that follows), through to Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Allan Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Cid Corman, and current poets like Tracie Morris, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, Carolyn Bergvall, many of whom actually joined in the discussion last time. There's no pressure to complete assignments, but of course that's all part of the learning experience (you do get a certificate if you complete everything), and no grades, though there's plenty of feedback, interaction, and above all camaraderie (and a few bonuses too) that lasts long after the course is done. I've done a lot of English Lit study and a degree in it too, but I honestly have never had such a powerful learning experience as ModPo. Don't miss it - just go, sign up, and participate at whatever level you can manage. You absolutely won't regret it:
https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry