I realised at lunch time that I had made no posts here for a month. That isn’t because I don’t look in on the site – there is the daily behind-the-scenes task of cleaning out the pornbots that attempt to post in the comments; thankfully, they get caught in spam traps making deletion easier but they are a continual pest.

The main reason I haven’t posted is indolence and, to be fair, the distractions of writing.

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I have dipped in and out of the Covid Enquiry livestream on YouTube. It has been interesting for many reasons, but one struck me the other day as I was walking through a packed shopping mall near us, and that is the contrast between the calm, almost abstract questioning of witnesses on the one hand, and the behaviour of people in shopping malls on the other. What I noticed was that a stranger, who’d been away in isolation for a few years and went shopping, would probably not notice anything at all had happened in the interim and wonder what the enquiry was about.

The stranger might note the vaccination centre in an empty shopping unit, but that could, on the surface at least, be attributed to seasonal flu vaccinations. They might also note that one person – and I only saw one – was wearing a face covering. It’s as though we’ve forgotten. It’s rather like the general forgetting of the great flu outbreaks after WW1 unless one ran across a stray reference in a novel from the 1920s or followed up an a death certificate when searching a family tree.

It hasn’t gone, of course. Poke at memories and they are all there, but the signifiers of it have either disappeared or are disappearing – unlike the virus. Vaccination was and is a wonderful thing.

***

As well as writing, I’ve taken the opportunity to put in place some Amazon ads for my books in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Experience has taught me that they are more of a cost than a benefit, but it’s worth the effort I suppose. I’ll disable the ads in early January when people have spent their Christmas money.

Amazon puts books into genre categories, partly by design of the author and partly by its own inscrutable operations. My creation of the ads largely involved looking at the categories my books are in, checking the current charts in the UK and US for those categories, and then attempting to ensure that someone searching for those books will see an ad for mine. This is a competitive process so one also has to decide how much one is willing to bid for each time someone clicks on a link to my book.

Two things struck me looking at the charts. Firstly, a lot of the covers were clearly AI generated – I mean a lot. Since the books are obviously selling or being read, it follows that an AI generated cover is not in itself something that will turn readers off in a mass market. The second was that most books appeared to have been self-published. Of course the likes of Stephen King and others had a strong presence, but the big publishers do not have it all their own way. I think this is a good thing.

I have had some contacts with the professional publishing world and, to quote Shania Twain, it don’t impress me much. I tend not to write anything specific on the subject in public forums because that is a form of shooting oneself in the foot, but I have views. Consolidation and conglomeration of the big publishers means that most of the interesting action in the professional publishing world is coming from small presses. A major shakeout is necessary, I think, and will come when the big publishers hit the limits to their growth, if they have not already done so.

On a separate tack, I thought the following article in the Guardian was interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/27/the-big-idea-should-we-abolish-literary-genres

It struck home with me because I find myself getting frustrated when trying to describe my own writing by reference to genre, as received wisdom deems de rigueur. I don’t think in genre terms when I write and I find shoehorning things into genre categories to be restrictive, reductive and false. And yet all the advice given to writers these days is to choose your genre and stay in your lane. While I can see a point to this if writing purely commercial fiction for a specific market (the modern equivalent of the old pulps), it tends towards a ‘writing by numbers’ approach that produces stuff that I don’t especially want to read. And if I don’t want to read it, why would I write it?