From the pulpit
After the initial introductions, Gregor then explained to the meeting why he, as a British author living in France, had called the meeting and provided his personal view of the current situation in publishing.
Essentially, Gregor has the impression that readership is in decline and that this has created both cultural and material problems which authors have to face. He also suggested that living outside the UK, while an advantage in many ways, also presented certain dangers for authors.
These are Gregor’s own notes for his introductory remarks, though he warns that what he actually said did not perfectly correspond to what he had in his notes:
FROM THE PULPIT
by Gregor Dallas
Let me start, from the Pulpit, by tossing you a few statistics. ‘There are statistics, and there are statistics,’ Mark Twain said a long time ago.
-- The official number of Brits now living in France is 400,000 [in fact, 550,000 (24/10/06)]. The true figure could well be over double that -- so there could be close on a million of us Brits residing permanently in the hexagon, as the Cartesian French like to call their country.
-- Now I thought I had better confirm this this with the British Embassy. The British Embassy put me through to the British Council... So I haven’t been able to confirm these figures at the Embassy.
-- But what I do know for sure is that there are
-- 131 members of the Society of Authors living in France
-- and -- what I discovered only a fortnight ago -- only 74 of them can receive e-mail… So I haven’t been able to get in touch with almost half the total… Which is a Very Sad Thing.
I am sure that there are well over 200 British authors living in France. Perhaps something like a thousand or more.
Whether 200 or a thousand, what a history we have! With DH Lawrence, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and others as our forebears we have a pretty fine pedigree, don’t we. And as British authors living abroad we can even lay claim to be the driving force in British literature -- the contemporary equivalents of Heinrich Heine in German literature.
So it is a pity we are not yet all in touch because I have a hunch we have a number of stimulating things in common that we can most usefully discuss together.
And problems we also have. I do believe we are facing today a kind of material as well as cultural crisis in writing and publishing that hasn’t been known since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible.
And the problem is this: a precipitous decline in readership since about the 1980s. I think we’ve got to remember that all the particular problems that we are about to cover come back to that single fact -- the decline in readership. Ultimately, the problems we have with agents, with publishers, book distributors, even the tie-in TV people and the movie makers are due to that one problem -- the decline in readership.
The material problems created by this decline are basically the issues that we’re going to cover in this agenda. But I think it is worth keeping in the back of our minds -- as we talk -- cultural problems that I imagine worry quite a lot of us as authors -- and I’ll just give you two recent examples which illustrate what I am thinking about:
1) The first example of the cultural problem is this speech, which I am sure you have all heard about, that the Pope made last month in Regensburg, Germany. It was a speech that addressed an issue that has been discussed in many church circles (and not just Roman Catholic) -- the issue of faith and reason. And it is interesting that the Pope, in this speech, was advocating reason founded on a wide, philosophical base and not on the narrower empirical, purely scientific kind. You know, the speech reminded me, most irreverently, of Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind -- which dominated cocktail party talk in the 1980s -- and which focused on the development in the States of a singular, one-dimensional way of thinking and a sort of spiritual rootlessness that had grown out of a narrow reading of books, or no reading at all.
So what happens? The media, when presented with the Pope’s speech, hooks on to a two-line quotation from a learned 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II (Paleologus), who was tackling the problem of faith based not on reason but on violence -- and specifically the problem of the violence of Muslim forces surrounding Constantinople in the 1390s. [Ref.: Professor Theodore Khoury of Münster]
The current Muslim populations, we’ve seen, rise up with incredible violence on the basis of hearsay revolving around this two-line quote.
But what troubled me here was not so much the Muslim reaction (I haven’t read the Muslim press), but rather the reactions of our own media in the West… the majority of which obviously had not read the speech. It’s as if the text of the speech were an total irrelevance.
There was one commentator on the French radio I heard who said that the Pope’s error was that he was out of touch with his times, that his learned talk was based on a civilisation of the text, whereas we live today in a new civilisation of the image and the symbol. I should imagine that most of you British authors here this evening are men and women of the civilisation of the text, and not of the symbol -- whatever that civilisation may be.
What is really worrying is that the French commentator may be right: perhaps a new kind of functionally illiterate civilisation is underfoot.
2) My second example of the kind of cultural problems we are facing today is a report that has just been released in London concerning map-reading skills. Over a third of British adults under the age of 35 cannot read a map. The study gives the example of the M-4 motorway being mistaken for the River Avon by a large proportion of those being tested.
I’m a historian, as I said. History is based on maps. You can’t talk about wars, or systems of peace, or international, or even national relations without studying the maps. History makes no sense without maps. So we may conclude that for a third of British adults under 35 history makes no sense: I am ready to believe that -- it’s reflected in the book sales, isn’t it.
And here we are not even dealing with the reading of texts, but the reading of symbols -- source of this new apparent civilisation.
Those two examples -- the selection of a two-line quote from a speech that has not been read, and the widespread inability to read maps -- epitomise for me the kind of cultural problems that have arisen out of this precipitous decline in reading over the last twenty or thirty years.
That’s all I’ll say for now on these important cultural problems. What about the material problems?
Let me just suggest by way of an introduction -- before we open up to the floor and the discussion -- that it seems to me that each professional sector of what we call the book trade is closing into itself as this crisis deepens -- the agents, the editors, the marketeers, the book distributors and somewhere out at the end of the line, the authors. Each one of these sectors seem to me to be retreating into its shell, despite loud professions to the contrary. The proof of this comes in particular from the distribution sector, which is now openly stating that they stand for profit and don’t owe the author anything.
There is a lot of finger-pointing going on at the moment -- with the author generally having the finger pointed at him (or her).
-- ‘Go and get a day job,’ say the professionals from the other sectors of the trade -- though their own day jobs rely entirely on authors.
There is much blame spreading around -- with the author being blamed most of all.
The irony of the situation is that as readership declines the number of books published increases… 130 or 140,000 new books were published in Britain last year -- one new book every forty-five minutes; we now have the technology for ‘print on demand’: you know, a dozen sales for each ‘title’ (they’re not known as ‘books’ anymore in the trade).
A struggling Ottakars bookstore chain has been absorbed by a struggling Waterstones book chain: we now be-knighted a struggling monopoly in the distribution of books. And that could well bring about a decline in the number of books published… Perhaps that is a Good Thing. But who is going to do the selection? If you think things are vicious today, just wait for tomorrow.
*****
Those few comments, I hope, give you an idea of why I called this meeting. For I fear that in living outside Britain we could be making ourselves vulnerable to certain unfair practices within a suffering British book trade.
I don’t mean to sound unnecessarily alarmist, for I think there are a number of things that authors can do. And we’re, after all, the ones with the real talent: I’ve already seen from your e-mails that there is a lot of talent in this room.
But it’s terribly important that we know where we can get aid, how we choose our agents, how we can best communicate with our publishers (on the other side of the Channel), and how to make sure that our works are distributed to the people who are interested in them.
There was some disagreement over Gregor’s analysis of readership and a general feeling that the electronic age provided many more content platforms to write for; one member noted that the electronic arena was essentially a text based medium.
As for living in France, most opinion was of the view that living in France was perhaps an advantage rather than a disadvantage, provided one had a good UK agent.
Members noted that the days of long lunches with editors and publishers were pretty much over; that communications between these disinter mediation were brief and often electronic anyway; that a call from sunny France or gay Paris was a more door-opening and engaging conversation than calls from the vast majority of their UK clients.
Geographically one Scottish member pointed out the challenges (or rather non-challenges) for members in France were no different to those in Scotland or the West Country. Indeed, another member reminded us that should meetings be required in an industry now no longer known for its love of meetings with writers, that now more than ever the difficulty, speed and cost of coming to the UK are lower than ever.
There seemed to be a strong general consensus that living in France offered more opportunities than challenges, and that the same could be said of the multi-platform electronic age we have arrived in.
Gregor broadly agrees with the idea that living in France brings many advantages to an author. But on the issue of readership the statistics say many things. He maintains that the cultural problems he raised are real enough, notwithstanding the opportunities created by new technologies. He is planning to write an article on the subject which will be posted on this blog.
Question: How do you react to Gregor’s introductory comments and the discussion that followed? What information do you have on readership? Do you think it is an advantage or a disadvantage to live in France? Are the reactions expressed here only valid for those who live close to an airport or to Eurostar?
Essentially, Gregor has the impression that readership is in decline and that this has created both cultural and material problems which authors have to face. He also suggested that living outside the UK, while an advantage in many ways, also presented certain dangers for authors.
These are Gregor’s own notes for his introductory remarks, though he warns that what he actually said did not perfectly correspond to what he had in his notes:
FROM THE PULPIT
by Gregor Dallas
Let me start, from the Pulpit, by tossing you a few statistics. ‘There are statistics, and there are statistics,’ Mark Twain said a long time ago.
-- The official number of Brits now living in France is 400,000 [in fact, 550,000 (24/10/06)]. The true figure could well be over double that -- so there could be close on a million of us Brits residing permanently in the hexagon, as the Cartesian French like to call their country.
-- Now I thought I had better confirm this this with the British Embassy. The British Embassy put me through to the British Council... So I haven’t been able to confirm these figures at the Embassy.
-- But what I do know for sure is that there are
-- 131 members of the Society of Authors living in France
-- and -- what I discovered only a fortnight ago -- only 74 of them can receive e-mail… So I haven’t been able to get in touch with almost half the total… Which is a Very Sad Thing.
I am sure that there are well over 200 British authors living in France. Perhaps something like a thousand or more.
Whether 200 or a thousand, what a history we have! With DH Lawrence, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and others as our forebears we have a pretty fine pedigree, don’t we. And as British authors living abroad we can even lay claim to be the driving force in British literature -- the contemporary equivalents of Heinrich Heine in German literature.
So it is a pity we are not yet all in touch because I have a hunch we have a number of stimulating things in common that we can most usefully discuss together.
And problems we also have. I do believe we are facing today a kind of material as well as cultural crisis in writing and publishing that hasn’t been known since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible.
And the problem is this: a precipitous decline in readership since about the 1980s. I think we’ve got to remember that all the particular problems that we are about to cover come back to that single fact -- the decline in readership. Ultimately, the problems we have with agents, with publishers, book distributors, even the tie-in TV people and the movie makers are due to that one problem -- the decline in readership.
The material problems created by this decline are basically the issues that we’re going to cover in this agenda. But I think it is worth keeping in the back of our minds -- as we talk -- cultural problems that I imagine worry quite a lot of us as authors -- and I’ll just give you two recent examples which illustrate what I am thinking about:
1) The first example of the cultural problem is this speech, which I am sure you have all heard about, that the Pope made last month in Regensburg, Germany. It was a speech that addressed an issue that has been discussed in many church circles (and not just Roman Catholic) -- the issue of faith and reason. And it is interesting that the Pope, in this speech, was advocating reason founded on a wide, philosophical base and not on the narrower empirical, purely scientific kind. You know, the speech reminded me, most irreverently, of Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind -- which dominated cocktail party talk in the 1980s -- and which focused on the development in the States of a singular, one-dimensional way of thinking and a sort of spiritual rootlessness that had grown out of a narrow reading of books, or no reading at all.
So what happens? The media, when presented with the Pope’s speech, hooks on to a two-line quotation from a learned 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II (Paleologus), who was tackling the problem of faith based not on reason but on violence -- and specifically the problem of the violence of Muslim forces surrounding Constantinople in the 1390s. [Ref.: Professor Theodore Khoury of Münster]
The current Muslim populations, we’ve seen, rise up with incredible violence on the basis of hearsay revolving around this two-line quote.
But what troubled me here was not so much the Muslim reaction (I haven’t read the Muslim press), but rather the reactions of our own media in the West… the majority of which obviously had not read the speech. It’s as if the text of the speech were an total irrelevance.
There was one commentator on the French radio I heard who said that the Pope’s error was that he was out of touch with his times, that his learned talk was based on a civilisation of the text, whereas we live today in a new civilisation of the image and the symbol. I should imagine that most of you British authors here this evening are men and women of the civilisation of the text, and not of the symbol -- whatever that civilisation may be.
What is really worrying is that the French commentator may be right: perhaps a new kind of functionally illiterate civilisation is underfoot.
2) My second example of the kind of cultural problems we are facing today is a report that has just been released in London concerning map-reading skills. Over a third of British adults under the age of 35 cannot read a map. The study gives the example of the M-4 motorway being mistaken for the River Avon by a large proportion of those being tested.
I’m a historian, as I said. History is based on maps. You can’t talk about wars, or systems of peace, or international, or even national relations without studying the maps. History makes no sense without maps. So we may conclude that for a third of British adults under 35 history makes no sense: I am ready to believe that -- it’s reflected in the book sales, isn’t it.
And here we are not even dealing with the reading of texts, but the reading of symbols -- source of this new apparent civilisation.
Those two examples -- the selection of a two-line quote from a speech that has not been read, and the widespread inability to read maps -- epitomise for me the kind of cultural problems that have arisen out of this precipitous decline in reading over the last twenty or thirty years.
That’s all I’ll say for now on these important cultural problems. What about the material problems?
Let me just suggest by way of an introduction -- before we open up to the floor and the discussion -- that it seems to me that each professional sector of what we call the book trade is closing into itself as this crisis deepens -- the agents, the editors, the marketeers, the book distributors and somewhere out at the end of the line, the authors. Each one of these sectors seem to me to be retreating into its shell, despite loud professions to the contrary. The proof of this comes in particular from the distribution sector, which is now openly stating that they stand for profit and don’t owe the author anything.
There is a lot of finger-pointing going on at the moment -- with the author generally having the finger pointed at him (or her).
-- ‘Go and get a day job,’ say the professionals from the other sectors of the trade -- though their own day jobs rely entirely on authors.
There is much blame spreading around -- with the author being blamed most of all.
The irony of the situation is that as readership declines the number of books published increases… 130 or 140,000 new books were published in Britain last year -- one new book every forty-five minutes; we now have the technology for ‘print on demand’: you know, a dozen sales for each ‘title’ (they’re not known as ‘books’ anymore in the trade).
A struggling Ottakars bookstore chain has been absorbed by a struggling Waterstones book chain: we now be-knighted a struggling monopoly in the distribution of books. And that could well bring about a decline in the number of books published… Perhaps that is a Good Thing. But who is going to do the selection? If you think things are vicious today, just wait for tomorrow.
*****
Those few comments, I hope, give you an idea of why I called this meeting. For I fear that in living outside Britain we could be making ourselves vulnerable to certain unfair practices within a suffering British book trade.
I don’t mean to sound unnecessarily alarmist, for I think there are a number of things that authors can do. And we’re, after all, the ones with the real talent: I’ve already seen from your e-mails that there is a lot of talent in this room.
But it’s terribly important that we know where we can get aid, how we choose our agents, how we can best communicate with our publishers (on the other side of the Channel), and how to make sure that our works are distributed to the people who are interested in them.
There was some disagreement over Gregor’s analysis of readership and a general feeling that the electronic age provided many more content platforms to write for; one member noted that the electronic arena was essentially a text based medium.
As for living in France, most opinion was of the view that living in France was perhaps an advantage rather than a disadvantage, provided one had a good UK agent.
Members noted that the days of long lunches with editors and publishers were pretty much over; that communications between these disinter mediation were brief and often electronic anyway; that a call from sunny France or gay Paris was a more door-opening and engaging conversation than calls from the vast majority of their UK clients.
Geographically one Scottish member pointed out the challenges (or rather non-challenges) for members in France were no different to those in Scotland or the West Country. Indeed, another member reminded us that should meetings be required in an industry now no longer known for its love of meetings with writers, that now more than ever the difficulty, speed and cost of coming to the UK are lower than ever.
There seemed to be a strong general consensus that living in France offered more opportunities than challenges, and that the same could be said of the multi-platform electronic age we have arrived in.
Gregor broadly agrees with the idea that living in France brings many advantages to an author. But on the issue of readership the statistics say many things. He maintains that the cultural problems he raised are real enough, notwithstanding the opportunities created by new technologies. He is planning to write an article on the subject which will be posted on this blog.
Question: How do you react to Gregor’s introductory comments and the discussion that followed? What information do you have on readership? Do you think it is an advantage or a disadvantage to live in France? Are the reactions expressed here only valid for those who live close to an airport or to Eurostar?
posted by SOAF Chairman at 8:16 AM
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