The Racoon in the Room Full of Rocking Chairs

Anthony Horowitz quotes an inter­view with Giles Foden, author and pro­fessor of cre­at­ive writ­ing at the University of East Anglia.

At any event, he was asked—broadly—about the place of lit­er­ary books in the new world and he replied: “It’s hard to estab­lish what is good and what is not. Barnes, Amis and McEwan were the last people through the door and then the door closed and the build­ing fell down.”

I don’t think the situ­ation is get­ting worse for lit­er­ary writers. Yes, lit­er­ary fic­tion com­prises a small por­tion of the mar­ket, but this has been the case for dec­ades, per­haps longer. And while the chefs’ books and celebrity mem­oirs are pop­u­lar dur­ing their mar­ket­ing win­dow, they don’t last. Literary fic­tion — and good fic­tion in gen­eral — has a long tail.

► Falling down | theBookseller.com

Twits Books | guardian.co.uk

Well, this looks like huge fun. Apparently, some agents on Twitter have been tweet­ing about bad quer­ies (tag #query­fail). And now the writers strike back:

It was bound to hap­pen – the only sur­prise is that it’s taken a whole month. Writers were angry and wounded by March’s “Queryfail” on Twitter, which saw a group of agents tweet­ing about the worst sub­mis­sions they’ve received from would-be pub­lished authors.

► Writers hit back at agents over query­fail | Books | guardian.co.uk

★ One Thousand Number One Fans

At The Literature Network, the writer James Burt won­ders how many fans a writer needs.

Kevin Kelly, editor of wired magazine, gave an inter­est­ing eco­nomic answer. He sug­ges­ted that artists could build a suc­cess­ful career with “1000 true fans“, will­ing to buy any­thing they pro­duced. So, assum­ing an aver­age UK wage of around £24,000, Kelly would sug­gest an artist could make a liv­ing from 2000 people pay­ing them £12 a year, after costs.

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