TEMPTING THE PUBLISHERS?

Mel Sherratt is a talented debut British writer, who's just published exactly the kind of highly commercial, first-in-a-series, gritty detective crime novel a lot of mainstream publishers and editors constantly claim they're crying out for. Only Mel has published it herself.

TAUNTING THE DEAD is currently riding high at Number 37 on the Amazon UK Kindle chart and is receiving plenty of positive reviews. I should know, I've just given it one myself (see below). Not because I know Mel, but because her novel is really good.

I've since found out that Mel is lucky enough to be represented by a very good agent at super-agency Curtis Brown, who's been knocking on all the right doors. The trouble is that in a risk-averse publishing climate such as we're suffering right now, it's often easier for editors to not buy (ie keep their heads down and stick with marketing the talent already on their books) than take a chance on someone new.

What I'm interested to see now is what effects Mel's continuing high sales rank will have. One imagines that any editor worth their salt will keep a keen eye on the charts (ebook as well as paper). In an ideal world, her agent will have already had a few calls from publishers interested in taking Mel and her series on.

I'm hoping there's a good editor out there for Mel. It would be good to know that writers such as her, who've got the talent and ambition to push their books solo, can also be given the full and proper commercial chance they deserve. It would certainly make for a more interesting and diverse crime writing community if this were so.

Anyway, here's my review:

"A really enjoyable debut, introducing DS Allie Shenton. The plot races along smartly, with the victims piling up, before culminating in a series of twists that hit you like body blows. DS Shenton feels real and ends up balancing all kinds of conflicting desires as the murder investigation progresses. A terrific cast of villains. The Stoke underworld depicted here, in all its viciousness, smacks of authenticity. Fans of Martina Cole will devour this is one sitting. I'm already looking forward to reading DS Shenton's continued exploits."


Emlyn Rees is the author of Hunted, out now in hardback and ebook.

Booktrack - what a yawn.

Booktrack, the iPad app that matches soundtracks and sound effects to the ebook you’re reading is now here. Meaning you can read Sherlock Holmes complete with crackling fires, creaking doors, and continuous ‘foreboding’ muzak, all neatly synched to every turn of your virtual page.

“It’s difficult to imagine a movie with no soundtrack,” Paul Cameron, Booktrack’s CEO said. “Yet, until today, the technology did not exist to synchronize music and sound within an e-book”.

Apart from pointing out to Mr Cameron that he clearly hasn’t heard of the Dogme film movement, which regards soundtracks as superfluous distractions which most modern films could entirely do without, I’d reply - tongue firmly in cheek - that, ‘Sure, Paul, but why stop at Conan Doyle? What about a soundtrack to go with The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot? Maybe even spice it up with a bit of rap: 'My name is M.C.Eliot, my rhythms and rhymes are really hot.'

Because, I mean, in this modern day, why should we have to put up with those tedious subtleties and rhythms of Eliot’s carefully chosen words, when our whole reading/listening experience could be enhanced by having some engineer synch in a bunch of clanky out-takes from the BBC Radio Sound Effects Department instead?

And why put up with a merely brilliantly timed and cadenced cliffhanger at the end of a Stieg Larsson chapter, when its dramatic impact could be so much better emphasised by concluding each chapter with an Eastenders-style, ‘Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-der-derrrr’?

In fact, why not move beyond simple musical and sound effect enhancements? Hell, why should we trust plain old poets and authors to trigger any of our other senses at all, when technology could surely do a much better job?

Why rely on Nigel Slater to titiliate our tastebuds with descriptions of his recipes? Much better, surely, to have ‘lickable’ books, where the real taste comes straight through without all those unnecessarily cumbersome words? They could even be printed on rice paper. Mmm. Yum, yum. A tasty read indeed.

Equally, why have Patrick Suskind waste our time with those exhausting descriptive passages conjuring up a myriad of olfactory sensations in Perfume, when instead we could simply have ‘scratch ‘n’ sniff' patches attached to the bottom of the pages instead?

Actually, maybe the best thing of all would be not to bother with books at all. I mean, all that bothersome reading...it’s just such a drag, isn’t it?

Perhaps Mr Cameron could come up with a way to save us all that hassle completely? Like, I don’t know, how about just getting rid of all the words? Maybe just having pictures instead? Or even moving pictures and spoken words and music. You know, like one of those - watchoocallems? - movies, oh, yeah, that’s already been done.

I don’t know...maybe I’m missing the point...but why can’t a book just be that? I’m well up for movies, or narrative-based computer games, or for whatever else the future might bring...but sticking a soundtrack on a printed work isn’t the future...it’s just tacky...and distracting...and, frankly, something I think we can all do without.

I'll leave the last word to Mr Cameron, though. He sums up his true passion for books better than I ever could, as well as the true appeal to book retailers of the Booktrack app: "What they like about it is its ability to upsell—which you can’t really do with books at the moment. Other products you can—when Amazon sells shoes they can ask: ‘Would you like polish with that?’

Shoes? Books? He's right, of course: there's no bloody difference at all.

* Interesting to note also that Salman Rushdie was at Booktrack's launch party. I wonder what soundtrack they'd give his books. I know, maybe they could kill two birds with one stone, by soundtracking THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH and MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN with one great big, gassy yawn.

You can contact Emlyn Rees via his website http://www.emlynrees.com

TEXT ON THE BEACH

by Emlyn Rees


For authors, the beach is a prime spot for spying who's reading your book. But the Kindle makes it more tricky...

So, I’ve just got back from a holiday with my family in Mallorca. Ice creams. Sangria. Pedloes. It should have been a complete break, in other words, from thinking about what weapons and devious plot devices I should use in the sequel to my new thriller HUNTED.

Only as a writer, of course, you’re never really that far away from work. Partly because the old grey matter keeps on chewing over potential storylines. But also because, no matter where you are, you’re never that far from a book.

Nowhere is this more true than on holidays. Books and beaches go together. Like fish and chips. Or buckets and spades.

Even more fascinating for any writer is that on beaches the books aren’t just sitting on shelves, they’re right there in the hands of real live readers.

Apart from being generally nosey, and seeing what kind of person reads what, the narcissistic temptation is always there to see if anyone’s reading one of your own novels. And if so, who? What exactly do your readers look like? Are they men or women? Are they young or old? And, most important of all, are they enjoying the read? Are they furiously turning those pages? Or instead using them to mop up spilt beer?

Only this year my annual bout of book voyeurism never really got off the ground. For one thing, HUNTED was only out as a Kindle edition until September, when it finally hits the shops in the UK. Meaning that, short of peering over people’s shoulders to see what they’re reading on their Kindle, I have no way of knowing whether any of them are reading HUNTED at all.

Another, far stranger discovery is the astonishing lack of electronic reading devices on beaches at all. One. That’s all I saw in seven days. One lonely Kindle. A tiny black spot on a huge domino of white sand.

In the UK, I’m up and down on the Brighton to London train line a lot and have witnessed the proliferation of e-reading devices over the last six months. The e-Book revolution hasn’t only begun, it’s gripped commuterland by its collective short and curlies and shows no sign of letting go.

In the space of six months, the demographic lovingly nuzzling their iPads and Kindles has exponentially expanded from the hip early adopters, to include everyone from school kids catching up on their Lord of the Flies assignments to sprightly sixty-somethings getting to grips with how Freakonomics might affect their final salary pension plans.

So how come I only saw one Kindle on the beach? Amazon and Mac certainly aren’t to blame. iPad and Kindle sales have been rocketing. Amazon has also been busily promoting Kindle summer beach reads for the last month.

But if the Kindles and iPads aren’t on the beaches, then where are they? Left back home in the UK? It seems unlikely, given what great devices they are for getting out of paying for all that extra weight that a similar amount of new hardbacks would cost you on Easyjet.

More likely, then, is that people are leaving them in their holiday apartments. On the grounds, I suspect, that while we don’t mind smearing ice cream or wet sand on our paperbacks, we consider our electronic devices altogether too fragile and sacrosanct for such slipshod treatment.


Interestingly, the one person I did see reading a Kindle on the beach covered it with a towel to protect it from the sand and his children, before rolling over onto his side for a nap. Also interesting is the fact that some friends have said that they've seen plenty of Kindles on pebbly beaches, where there's no sand to worry about.

But I think there’s another reason too why we’re not yet proudly parading our Kindles on the beach. And it’s all about display and the fact that, apart from our swimming costumes and shades, the chief way we choose to advertise ourselves - who we actually are - on holiday is by showing people what we read.

And that’s the one true drawback with Kindles and iPads in their current incarnation. They’ve not got covers. They’re bland to look at. Chunks of IBM-esque hardware, nothing more. Meaning the reason I think we’re not seeing more of them on the beaches this year is the same reason why we’re not seeing more bland grey bikinis, or bland grey beach towels and shades. It’s because they look boring. And that risks making us look boring. And that’s a chance which few of us seem prepared yet to take.

You can contact Emlyn Rees via his website http://www.emlynrees.com