Speed Writing

You need serious speed writing skills for this kind of sensation publishing...

If you thought Nora Roberts and James Patterson were productive writers (they both publish over four new books every year (granted, Patterson doesn’t really write them himself, but still)), think again. Following two events last weekend that grabbed the world’s attention — the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) on Friday, and the assassination of Osama bin Laden by the US military on Sunday — books related to these events are now being published in record time.

The book about the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden is actually more of a lucky opportunity for the author and publisher than a planned commercial tactic. The book, SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper, by Howard E. Wasdin, was scheduled for publication at the end of may. Following the death of Osama bin Laden, Publishers Weekly announced on Monday that the book’s publication would be rushed and should be widely available in the US by the middle of next week. Of course, the book won’t deal directly with the assassination that has spurred such interest in the special counter-terrorism unit, but it should give an interesting insight to those who are interested about life as a SEAL Team Six sailor. The media attention that focused on Bin Laden’s assassination was not always of very good taste, but it was a godsend for the publishers of this memoir. I don’t think many of us realized what “SEAL Team Six” was before we read about it Monday morning. According to The Guardian, the book moved up to 29th place on Amazon’s sales chart on Tuesday, from bellow 4,000 before bin Laden’s death was announced.

The cover for SEAL Team Six employs the bright, block-lettered patriotism common to books on the US military.

Royal wedding enthusiasts have had an even shorter wait for a book about Will & Kate tying the knot. In fact, there was a book published about the wedding in record time: 72 hours after the event. The man behind it is Andrew Morton, also Diana’s biographer, who, according to The Guardian, “picked the photograph for the jacket 100 minutes after the couple kissed, completing the text for the book’s final chapter on the day of the wedding.” Copies of the book, printed in Italy, were delivered to Waterstone’s Charing Cross on Monday afternoon. Obviously, over three quarters of the book was already written before Friday. The only thing the author had to add some details about the wedding day itself, as well as some photographs. The book will therefore only be repeating stuff we saw over the news and online all weekend. Michael O’Mara, the publisher of William and Kate: Their Lives, Their Wedding, has applied to the Guinness World Records for an official record.

On sale only 72 hours after the royal wedding. The first book to come out, but certainly not the last.

This kind of commercial, rapid-publishing phenomenon has been seen before. Shortly after Michael Jackson’s death, in 2009, several writers and publishers had tried to cash-in on the icon’s death, resulting in a tsunami of Jackson biographies, which ranged from the well-researched to the merely gossipy. The phenomenon is bound to get only worse. The growing popularity of e-books and the easy access to live information on web-based platforms means that if a subject is hot, a book can reach the readership hours after the writer has punched in the final period, because publishers can skip the lengthy operation of getting the thing printed and shipped. Naturally, when it comes to making books, rushing it always means botching it. But then, in the market for celebrity bios and sensationalism, no one really cares about quality. The only thing that matters is timeliness.

Time is of the essence — the quicker you get the books on the shelves, the more you'll sell it before the subject is out of fashion.

The Best Online Book Coverage, Made Better

"A new chapter for guardian.co.uk/books"

The biggest piece of book-related news this week was the publication of the late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King. I’ve already discussed the first sentence, which had been published online, so I won’t talk about the book any more. Suffice to say that it received what appears to be generally positive reviews, considering the difficulty of both criticizing an unfinished book and untangling the fiction from Wallace’s personal life, which has been much discussed since his death. The best review I read was by Emily Cooke, published in The Millions, entitled “The Burden of Meaningfulness”.

But what really attracted my attention this week in the book world was not, in fact, any book in particular, but rather a new step in the evolution of how books are discussed online. The Guardian’s Books website, in my opinion already the best books website out there, has just renewed itself with a new “incarnation”. The change in appearance is very subtle: the same handy purple toolbar is at the top to access the various sections of the website, but the top stories are now given more attention, with a large section, freed from the rest of the page’s content, and a bigger image (this has always been one thing Guardian Books has always done very well: assigning various images to all of their articles, and not only images of books, making their articles shine individually). A clickable arrow allows you to scroll to other top stories, allowing each article its own space to breath and more time to last on the front page, which is important because the website has a lot of new content every day. The rest of the organization of the front page has remained unchanged — latest news, Guardian Bookshop, Most Viewed articles, latest blogposts, etc. — except for a central rubric entitled “Talking Points” with four sections marked with new symbols: “Hot Topics”, “Comment & debate”, “Tips, links, & suggestions”, “Search, star-rate, & review”.

That’s where you’ll find the website’s most significant (and groundbreaking?) change: Guardian Books is now hooked up with a database of 8 million books published in English. This means you can search for virtually any book you like and see everything The Guardian has written about it. You can also rate the books, write your own review, add it to a favourite’s list, or suggest the book to the editors so they can cover it. The only issue I have found is that the database provides individual publications, like searching through a giant bookstore catalogue, which means searching a classic gives you multiple results, one for each edition. This is problematic insofar as the content on the website is not usually specific to a book’s edition, but to the book itself, no matter what incarnation. So it might be a little bit frustrating to find out what’s been written on The Master and Margarita, because you get five pages of results, and all of them are the same book.

Guardian Books is no longer just a newspaper website with good content, it has become a community for book lovers. To a degree, that’s what it already was, although I don’t think they had planned it that way. The website has a lot of very active readers, who comment with much caustic verve and wit on nearly everything on the website, providing hours of unexpected pleasure for anyone who happens to scroll down past an article and into the “comments” section. Indeed, the most popular articles can muster over a hundred of them in very little time. The Guardian has recently proved how this potentially annoying participation — comments on YouTube, for instance, seem to be increasingly idiotic and exasperating — can be turned into a strength when they asked readers to suggest the best books of continental European countries in a series entitled “World literature tour”. Now they have definitely maximized the potential of their readership by tapping directly into its knowledge base, asking readers what they should be reading and covering, and allowing them to express themselves more freely on a topic they take so seriously: books.

The editors of Guardian Books, I think, are therefore really helping literature to exist and develop online, because they’re making a creative space for readers to share and discuss their opinions and insights. The internet has often been described as lethal to books — replacing ink and paper with screens, shortening your attention span, shifting the reader’s attention away from the book itself to the merely book-related —; but it’s clear that the Web 2.0 can inject a good deal of vitality into the book world by allowing readers to come together, and giving books — new and old, good and bad — the space and time to thrive outside of the reading per se.