Are we losing the plot?

I'd like to take a moment to welcome our newest member to the Type M for Murder family, Marianne Wheelaghan. A brief bio is in the right-hand column a bit of the way down and it would be a good idea to read it. You should also purchase one of her novels for an even better introduction!

And so without further blather, take it away Marianne! —Rick

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The other day, I heard best selling author Robert Harris being interviewed on the radio. He questioned whether the novel had a future in the face of a perceived declining attention span in readers, arguing that stuff like online streaming and box sets are offering more dynamic alternatives to novels. “A box set takes 10 or 12 hours to view, and that’s the same length of time it takes to read a novel … my impression and certainly my own habit is that these series are pretty sophisticated, a lot of them are, it seems to me, in many ways, our modern novel and they’re more central in our culture.” Yikes! If Mr Harris is right, where does that leave us novel writers? Out of a job, that's where. I needed to know more and turned to the internet.

Within minutes I'd found a bunch of articles all echoing the same one damning thing: our increasingly digital lifestyle was leading to a dramatic decrease in our attention span. The headline grabbing accounts were all based on the one Microsoft report. In a nutshell, ten years ago our average attention span was 12 seconds, today it is a mere eight seconds. This is a whole one second less than a goldfish. Yes, I said a goldfish. It looks as if we are all, readers and writers alike, slowly but surely losing the plot. Digging a bit deeper, however, I was relieved to discover that not everyone agrees with the idea that our attention is declining. For example, Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University, suggests that the concept of an “average attention span” which increases or decreases is misguided. “Attention span is very much task-dependent and how much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is."

In order to process the myriad of information digitally delivered to us on a daily basis, it seems we've become very discerning about what to pay heed to, sort of super multi-taskers. Out of necessity, we have learned to quickly distinguish between information that is of importance to us and that which is not. So, while we may well be allocating our attention in a different way, we are no less attentive when it comes to focussing on the stuff we like, such as reading a novel or watching a box set. Certainly, when I watched the boxset of The Killing, I paid as much attention to it as I did to reading Hilary Mantel's (lengthy) Wolf Hall, enjoying both equally. And this is where I take issue with Mr Harris and his suggestion that watching a box set is fast becoming an alternative to reading a novel. The two activities don't have to be mutually exclusive. Far from it. So, I will have to disagree with the best selling author for now. I believe the novel does have a future. Will it remain central to our culture? That is up to us writers, surely? But it is worth noting that figures released by the Publishers Association for 2015 showed the UK publishing industry was in good health with total sales or book and journal publishing up to £4.4bn. The figures also reveal for the first time since the invention of the ebook, overall physical book sales increased while digital sales decreased. Vive le novel!

Blowing My Own Trumpet

Aline here. I'm delighted to introduce you today to Marianne Wheelaghan. She's another Scottish writer, but having spent some time in the South Seas (the background for some of her books) she seems to have picked up some of the sunshine to bring back with her to grey Edinburgh. She's always warm, funny and very engaging and I know you'll enjoy meeting her here.

Marianne:

When I was growing up there was no greater crime than blowing your own trumpet. It was considered attention seeking and self obsessed, deceitful and shallow. Imagine then my dilemma when I discovered that for us writers to succeed it is not enough to write a good story, we must also be good self promoters.

 Regardless of whether we are speaking at an author event or being interviewed on social media, or writing an article for a magazine or blog, the book marketeers tell us we must “big” ourselves up. If we don't put the best possible spin on what we say, we run the risk of appearing uninteresting, dull even, and by default suggest our books are also dull.

But while I fully understand that in a world where everyone is clamouring to be centre stage we writers cannot afford to be shrinking violets, “bigging” myself up smacks of deceit and blatant self promotion. It seems to directly contradict my integrity as a writer.

Then, not so long ago, I discovered that some of the very best writers were shameless self promoters. I changed my mind – if it was okay for the great and the good to blow their own trumpet, it was okay for me.

Who were these charlatans? Let me tell you about just a few. In 1927 Georges Simenon, author of the Maigret novels, agreed to write a novel while suspended in a cage outside the Moulin Rouge nightclub for 72 hours – all for the handsome amount of 100,000 francs. While George wrote, the public could shout out themes and names for characters. They could even offer suggestions for a title for the novel. It was promoted as a “record novel: record speed, record endurance and record talent”. It didn’t happen in the end but that didn’t stop people from talking about it as if it had.

Who else? Nobel Prize winning Ernest Hemingway appeared in adverts for Ballantine Ale, as did John Steinbeck and CS Forester (of African Queen fame). Mark Twain advertised Campbell’s tinned tomato soup (I kid you not!) and Perry Mason author Erle Stanley Gardner promoted headache powders.

Virginia Woolf, despite stating she wasn’t interested in her appearance, went on a “Beautiful Woman” style shopping expedition with London Vogue’s fashion editor in order to help improve her image. As she became more famous she took more care over her appearance and developed the term “frock-consciousness”. Furthermore, when one Logan C Pearsall Smith criticised Woolf for writing for a low brow magazine like Vogue for money, she defended her actions in a letter to a friend saying, “Ladies’ clothes and aristocrats playing golf don’t affect my style; What Logan wants is prestige: what I want is money …Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.”

One of the oldest records of self-promotion dates as far back as 440 BC when the writer Herodotus paid for one of his own book tours around the Aegean. In the 12th century a certain Gerald of Wales invited people to his house for a meal and forced them to listen to him read from his latest work for three days!  Even the wonderful, great American poet Walt Whitman felt the need to write anonymous reviews about himself: “An American bard at last! Large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded."

Walt, however, was an amateur compared to our very own John Creasey, who, when starting out, wrote hundreds of his own reviews under different names. The best self-promoter, however, has to be 18th century writer Grimod de la Reyniere, who invited his friends to a ‘funeral supper’ that he held to promote his new book Reflections On Pleasure. When the friends got to his house, he locked them in a room and hurled abuse at them while others watched from a balcony above. When the visitors were finally released they ran around telling everyone that La Reyniere was mad and everyone promptly bought his book.

So, regardless of what you call it, self-promotion, building an author platform, branding, bigging ourselves up, making waves or ripples, when push comes to shove all is fair in love and war and writing. As author Stendhal said in his biography Memoirs of an Egotist: “Great success is not possible without a certain amount of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.”

And while I’m not looking for great success let me shamelessly tell you that the ebook of my latest crime novel, The Shoeshine Killer, is available on Amazon.com. A snip at $2.99, it is the only book you'll read this year which features line-dancing policemen in Fiji!