So Your Novel Isn't Selling ? Could I Be So Bold As To Suggest A Decent Book Burning?

These days I find myself with more and more time on my hands and I use this time productively to do what I do best, procrastinate. This very morning I was trawling through that ultimate treasure trove of procrastination, You Tube, when I came upon a press conference held at the Sydney Opera House to launch a comedy festival in that fair city a couple of years ago.

It seemed from the footage that the event was a PR person’s worst nightmare given the inability of any the microphones to do their assigned job.

The interviewees, John Cleese, Martin Short and Howard Russell however carried the disaster off with professional aplomb with the ad libbing making for better fodder than the journalists could stump up with by asking an intelligent question.

Julia Morris (the host of the event) attempts to rescue the situation by thrusting her ample breasts into John Cleese’s face so he could use her throat mike, fell embarrassingly flat. At this point I almost moved on but I persevered and I’m glad I did, as it wasn’t so much the press conference that captured my attention but a comment put out by Russell Howard. 

His quip on a spate of riots at the time in Clapham Junction, London contained this little gem,“ You know, every single shop in the Clapham High Street was smashed, looted and then set ablaze, except a book shop!"

As an author, this comment sent a shudder through my body, as it would now appear that books are no longer worthy of looting and pillage. I was a more than a little pissed off, as I do believe that my book, even if no one buys it would be OK to nick. That seemed not to be the case as the bookstore in question was left entirely in place without so much as a brick being thrown through the plate glass window!

This set me to pondering and so I turned my attention to Mr. Zuckerberg’s ultimate procrastination tool, the trusty Facebook to search out a survey that was done a while ago. The survey listed 100 of some of the finest books ever written and recipients were asked how many they had read.

The answers came back with an average of FOUR!!  Armed with this information I rushed to Amazon analytics to see whether I had perhaps knocked the some of the great authors of all time off their lofty perch.  Depressingly I discovered that I had risen to the dizzying heights of 2,000th on their all time best- sellers list. My initial euphoria dissipated when I realized that I have a fair way to go if I want to garner a coveted spot in the top 100! 

In Australia and elsewhere around the world over the past few years we have seen the likes of Borders, Angus & Robertson and Dymocks and a horde of others shutter stores, fire their staff and slope away to, God knows where, their unsold stock consigned to bargain bins in discount stores and stalls at school fetes next to the cake stand.

Are books dead? 

If so, why are so many aspiring writers still continuing to publish, dreaming of one day being another, Proulx, Seth or even a Hemingway. Is it simply blind optimism that drives us to think that the pleasure of reading is still with us and in turn keeps author's writing? When looters ignore a bookshop, opting instead for the Reebok trainers or the PlayStation 3 in the stores next door, perhaps we are a little delusional in this regard.

Over centuries book burning became a celebration of sorts signaling the end of one era and ushering in the new by wiping out previous thinking. It was the likes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao, who followed the trend of other misguided zealots in the early 13th century who burnt the limited supply of books prior to the world entering ‘ The Dark Ages.’ However perhaps if this trend was re –introduced, emerging writers could perhaps gain a foothold on the Amazon best selling list!

Finally I make this plea to all potential looters and fire bugs out there, please don’t leave us out when next you are on a rampage; pillage a few novels from the local bookstore, read them and then pass them onto your fellow looters. By doing this you will be helping with circulation as quite frankly, by not setting the bookstore alight and lifting a bit of stock quite frankly smacks of discrimination.