Last Wednesday found your digital correspondent in Exeter, sitting in the garden of a German friend. He complimented me on the prose style of my second novel, Flashback – lovely – before dropping this bombshell: “Of course, there are…well, a few typos in the German phrases.”

“Oh? Man with one ‘n’, that kind of thing?”

My friend made a wounded, apologetic sound.

I gagged on my Campari.

It turns out that the German phrases in Flashback are not the nuanced, native- checked wonders that I had remembered putting the book. They are, in fact, monstrosities spawned of the half-remembered, vestigial foreign-language centres of Hocking’s brain. During drafting, stage one was the “shoot German from the hip” method. This produced sentences like the following (spoken by a man after a life-or-death struggle):

“Ist er Todt?”

Stage two – which would have involved checking this with a native German speaker, such as the one I regularly have breakfast with – never happened. I must have been re-routed before I got to that bit of the flowchart. Stage two would have corrected the above to:

“Ist er tot?”

In other words, the character would have gasped “Is he dead?” instead of “Is he called Todt?”

I will not deny that the original, incorrect version seriously weakened the dramatic tone of that scene for readers who understand German.

Possibly apropos of this, sales for Flashback in the German Kindle store have been disappointingly flat.

Now, reader, there was a time when I could speak foreign tolerably – the twenty minutes or so of my GCSE French aural exam. Immediately afterwards, this information was jettisoned with a little ‘pfft’ sound similar to that accompanying the release of waste matter from a spaceship. In my defence, I have picked up some German over a series of somewhat cryptic Christmases in Bavaria; however, the greater part of my conversations involved me repeating Monty Python jokes or lines from Dinner For One.

I do like foreign words; and I just came across this Guardian article, Say ‘non’ to phrasebook foreign language in fiction, by Daniel Kalder. Here’s a quote:

On the whole though the practice of leaving foreign words untranslated in a text is symptomatic of poor writing- shoddy; lazy; it’s a cheap bus ticket to bogus exoticism. It signals to the reader that the author does not know the culture he is describing very well, or otherwise completely ordinary words would not rattle around in his consciousness demanding to be inscribed in italics so they really stand out. “Look, look at me! Look at me now! I know the German word for attention is achtung! See how profound my grip of German culture is?”

Putting my academic hat on for a moment (it’s suede with leather patches), the distinction between English and foreign words is a difficult and perhaps pointless one to make. The English language is rather like a portly child released in the direction of a buffet following a period of food deprivation and exposure to Saturday morning TV adverts for sugary snacks. The portly child tastes everything; and the things he hasn’t tasted will be fingered to such an extent that other, svelter languages will smile politely and say they’ve already eaten.

Shoddy, Mr Kalder? Lazy? Dogmatic bollocks, sir. Hemingway dropped foreign speak into his prose a great deal. So does Cormac McCarthy. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for moi.

Brace yourself for an illustrative quote from Flashback (note that the original italics aren’t rendered here):

As the bus came parallel to the Lancastrian, Cory saw sunlight flicker down each of her twenty-five silver yards. Her engines were loud and blaring. Just fore of the cockpit were the words ‘Star Dust’. Her raised nose was open. A ramp led to the gap, through which ground staff passed sacks of mail. There was a crewman visible inside the cockpit. He waved to the man in charge of the chock cable. The man waved back, then indicated the approaching bus with a tick of the head. Cory watched this exchange and envied its camaraderie. Never more intense was the feeling of being shanghaied. He was isolated from the good people at Project Deja Vu, among whom he had been a favoured son.

Miss Evans parked upwind of the idling engines. She slipped from the vehicle to station herself by the wing. The passenger door was a rounded rectangle in the fuselage covered by the G of the aircraft’s huge registration code, G-AGWH. The door opened and a uniformed officer emerged.

‘Please approach First Officer Cook directly, ladies and gentlemen,’ called Miss Evans.

‘Zu viele Koche,’ muttered Harald Pagh, elbowing Cory. ‘Sie verderben die Suppe. Mr Atalah, don’t you agree that too many Cooks spoil the broth? You have a similar idiom in Arabic, of course.’

‘I am Chilean, Mr Pagh,’ said Atalah. His coat whipped in the propeller draught and he fussed with the hem. ‘We do have a proverb about cooking, however. Nunca defeque mas de lo que come.’

Pagh looked at Cory. ‘What did he say?’

”Never shit more than you eat’.’

Pagh gasped, then erupted in laughter that rivalled the Lancastrian’s engines for volume. ‘Is that so, Mr Atalah?’

‘You had that coming,’ said Jack Gooderham.

‘A pen, Jack! It might prove profitable.’

I’d argue for legitimate use in this excerpt. I’m not showing off (any more than writing is already a showing off) but using foreign malarkey to create tone, communicate something to the reader, and ultimately engage them.

Arguing against ‘a bit of the foreign’ reminds me of those readers who suffer brain infarctions when they see a verb other than ‘said’ use to indicate that someone has spoken. ‘Replied’, ‘responded’, ‘scoffed’ et al. are verboten.

Another interesting piece in The Guardian about self publishing (this is the term they’re applying to independent ebook publication) by Alison Flood.

This caught my eye:

“Publishing has always been a quasi-monopoly built on the lock publishers had on paper distribution. Digital distribution has broken that lock, but legacy publishers are still behaving as though they have monopoly power,” believes Eisler. “They’re running their business with two general imperatives in mind: (i) maintain the primacy of paper (in significant part, by delaying the release of digital books and pricing them too high); and (ii) offer punitive financial, creative, and other terms to authors. Or, to put it another way, publishers are currently running their business in a way that punishes both their end-user customers (readers) and their providers (authors). This was sustainable when publishers faced no meaningful competition. They do now, and will have to adapt or die, because yes, more and more authors are eschewing the legacy model in favour of self-publishing and in favour of the emerging Amazon hybrid model.”

I, and many others, have commented on the article. Brace yourself for the somewhat arrogant mode, but I’m responding to some counter-independent comments. It runs:

Interesting article. I like the data (indeed, I’ve blogged on Scott Pack’s blog ‘Me and My Big Mouth’ a couple of times about my own ebook publishing experiences, where I’ve tried to be transparent about my sales).

Whether ebooks will be good for the publishing industry is a moot point. It is certainly good for me. In my case, my first book was published by a small press and went nowhere because, back then (in 2005!), you had to get your book into a highstreet bookseller or otherwise die on your arse. Over the years since then, I’ve had countless agents and publishers rave about my work and then mutter something about marketing/categorisation/effort and not publish it. Clearly they thought it was not the bother. I disagree, and I’ve now sold more than three thousand copies since March.

Again, it’s a moot point whether this is good for publishing. I will be forever indebted to Amazon, who manufactured and pushed the Kindle when everyone (including me, at first) was pouring scorn on it. They’ve given me the chance to have people read my work. That was never going to happen with UK publishers.

Are my self published books crap? Quite possibly, but I don’t think so. Both were professionally edited and both have good covers (the first my own, the second produced by a professional). Both books have mean ratings greater than 4 on Amazon. But, more than this, dozens of people a day are downloading my books; a large percentage of them will be reading them.

That’s the revolution: being able, as an artist, to reach the end point of the creative process.

Up the workers.

Among other things, Scott writes:

Less than a decade ago it would have been possible to walk into a branch of Waterstone’s, especially some of the London shops, and ask for the bestselling book in the country only to discover that they didn’t stock it because ‘it wasn’t our sort of thing’. I remember an occasion when one branch refused to unpack a science fiction promotion because ‘our customers don’t like sci fi’. The same shop would complain whenever we ran a Jacqueline Wilson offer as ‘she’s a terrible writer and our customers can’t stand her’. I am not making any of this up. Is this what Jeffries wants? Really?

I’m not entirely convinced that this is a bad thing. When – years ago now – I was hawking my own book around branches of Waterstone’s, I had assumed (along with the public, I think) that such bookshops are essentially autonomous. However, on every occasion, I was told that the manager/manageress lacked the power to make buying decisions (or was too worried to exercise it), even when the decision centred on four or five books of a local author. So if there was a time when the managers of Waterstone’s branches were less timid, I’d say winding the clock back would be no bad thing.

He goes on to say:

Waterstone’s has branches in towns across the land. In some of these places a new Andy McNab novel will sell 20 or 30 times more than a new Martin Amis. The stock and merchandising of the shop should reflect that.

Which I agree with. I can’t stand Martin Amis and thoroughly enjoyed Bravo Two Zero when I was a teenager.

There is an interesting question at the heart of this debate. What do you or I want in a bookshop? Personally, I don’t really want bookshops at all. I want the recommendations of my friends and a web browser that gets me to Amazon.

Literature and the shops that sell it are two dissociable entities. As are, I think, words and books themselves.

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