Gregor Dallas Frontiers

SoA Constitution: forum for debate

Gregor Dallas — 2012-07-31T14:25:38Z

The purpose of this forum is to provide space for members of the SoA who want to continue the debate opened in the Members page of the SoA's website in early summer 2012. All opinions are welcome.

To contribute to the forum simply press 'Reply to this article' at the foot of the page.

Constitution 2012

Gregor Dallas — 2012-01-16T19:33:45Z

Editorial comments in italics To comment press button at the bottom of the Constitution, 'Reply to this article'.

The final draft should be preceded by an INTERPRETATION OF TERMS USED.

The Aims

Art. 1. The Society of Authors exists, first and foremost, as a defender of the high quality of books of fiction and non-fiction written in the English language anywhere in the world.

(The emphasis on quality publishing changes the entire tenor of author defence from issues of minor, individual detail — PLR, short stories, etc — to the major problems to campaign about — company mergers, publishing monopolies, decline of editorial authority, aggressive Marketing & Sales, etc — that have been dogging authors since at least the 1960s.)

(Critics, while applauding the emphasis on quality publishing, have argued that this is placing ‘the cart before the horse.' But if the main problem faced by Authors in the last fifty years has been mergers in the publishing industry, the development of monopolistic publishing corporations, their demand for high returns (15 to 20 per cent p.a) and the subsequent decline in quality publishing then it is surely the other way round: the defence of quality pulls everything else along with it. To fail to place it at the top of the Society's is like failing to place the purpose of an alliance at the head of an alliance treaty — of which the only example in history is NATO.)

Art.2. The Society of Authors thus must protect the authors of books whose professional lives are increasingly endangered by the growth of monopolistic corporate publishers that marginalize the interests of authors. The Society's traditional ‘objects', enumerated here, need to be understood within this context:

a. ... (A revised list of the 14 ‘objects' listed in Article III of the 1884 Memorandum. The revision of this list must be discussed in the CoM. Notable are the absence of electronic rights. Copyright requires serious review. Is the ‘depositee' of manuscripts and the like still needed? This is surely covered by recent world copyright laws. Etc.)

Art. 3. The main development over the last half century has been a change in the structure of the publishing industry, most notably in favour of Marketing and Sales Department to the detriment of the former authority of Editorial Departments. a. The relationship between the author and the editor is at the heart of the creative process. It is a rule, universal in its extent, that great authors have tended to be cultivated by great editors. Recognizing the crucial role of the relationship between author and editor in the creation of high quality books the Society will employ every influence to advance the authority of the editor in the face of corporate commercial forces. b. To further this relationship, the Society, every year at its awards ceremony, will honour a selection of ‘Best Editors of the Year'. c. Regular events bringing authors and editors together will also enrich their relationship.

Art. 4. The Society, through its authors, acts as an arbiter in the quality of book production in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Periodically and regularly (every two? three? five? years) the Society will be responsible for the setting up of a Board of twelve Judges, to rank British publishers by the quality of their production. So as to avoid corruption from the powers that be:

(This seems to be quite a popular idea. It has been suggested that this be extended to literary agents and even book distributors, who some consider to be the source of the problem in the ‘book trade'. But for the moment we recommend we limit ourselves to the ranking of publishers.)

a. Six will be nominated from full members by the Committee of Management; b. And six will be selected from full members by popular election by the full members. c. The rank order of publishers by quality will be announced at the Society's Annual Awards Ceremony in the year that the judgement is due; d. And it will be published in the Summer Issue of that year's Author.

Art 5. Since the 1978 the Society of Authors has acted as a Trade Union for authors, inasmuch as the Society unites members exercising a common trade, writing.

(If the Society is a Registered Company — not a popular idea among members — rather than a Trade Union, this is the place to note it. Can the Society be both a Registered Company and a Trade Union? It would be complicated, and probably not possible.)

(The definition of the Society as a Trade Union was controversial in the 1960s. Rather than restarting from scratch the same controversy it is recommended that the documentation of this period be consulted and the conclusions be adopted here insofar as this is possible.)

a. The Society, however, is not a member of the Trade Union Congress or of any international trade unions. Authors are self-employed and their association cannot therefore fit the standard definition, current the nineteenth century, of a trade union as ‘a continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment.' (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of Trade Unionism,1894)

(Given the enormous growth of the self-employed sector, perhaps the question of membership of the TUC should be reconsidered.)

b. While this obviates collective bargaining between employer and employee, the Society, as a union, has a duty to negotiate with publishers collectively on behalf of authors conditions ‘for the purpose of maintaining or improving' authors' material livelihood. c. The Society also has a commitment to those traditional social provisions of trade unions such as aid in ill health, old age, advice on professional training and legal advice.

Art. 6. The Society of Authors is a democratic association.

a. The base of all authority in the Society is in the full members. b. Through modern technology, the Society will promote an ever-growing participation of its members in its professional life.

(The Society, as ‘defined' in the Victorian Memorandum & Articles, is clearly not a democratic association.)

The Constitution

Art. 7 7. The Members. The author members are the fount of all legitimate authority in the Society, the protection of the quality of their books is the reason for the Society's existence and material wellbeing of authors is consequently the Society's principal concern. There are two forms of membership: associate members and full members.

a. Associate members are beginners in the trade of authorship: they have not, as yet, written any books, a fact which prevents them from seeking full membership of the Society. Though generally young, one can be a beginner in the writing business — hence an associate — at the age of eighty. It is with one's first book that one is most in need of advice. Hitherto, the Society has excluded these apprentices from membership. Henceforward the Society welcomes them with open arms. i. Associates pay a subscription fee of exactly half the amount of the full members. ii. They have no voting rights. iii. Associates, given the difficulties of publishing, can maintain this status for an unlimited amount of time. But they must continue to pay their half-subscription fees and the have no voting rights. iv. Once a full member, with a book, they cannot revert to being associate members.

b. Full members are at the heart and they are the reason for the Society. i. But in the last half century they have been the subject to increasing marginalization which threatens their livelihood and their works of creation. The Society shall combat this. ii. Full members must have written at least one book of 60,000 words or more that is of quality recognizable to the Committee of Management.

Art. 8. The Committee of Management. The Committee of Management is directly answerable to the full members. a. The Committee is made up of fifteen members. Members of the Committee must be full members. b. The role and the powers of the Committee of Management are… (these are then enumerated by Roman numeral — details to be discussed by the Committee) c. Members of the Committee are elected directly by popular ballot, among the full members, for a term of five years. At the end of his term a Committee member may present himself again for one five-year term only, after which he will not be eligible for re-election until at least five years have passed.

(Terms of five years? Three years? Or less? We favour five years, renewable, because, in the first place, it often takes three years to acquire the experience of sound administration. Organizations such as national political parties and corporations indeed use the three-year term to limit the power of local or subsidiary officers — which is not what we are seeking. Secondly, five years is a sign of solid commitment from the elected member of the Committee. Most of my advisers are in favour of the five-year, renewable term and we would argue that it is actually more democratic than the shorter terms.)

d. One fifth of the Committee will retire every year, after the Society's Annual General Meeting in September. e. To determine who retires, during the initial five years of this new five-year regime, a lottery will be taken. f. Elections and retirements to and from the Committee of Management are announced in the Annual General Meeting.

Art. 9. The Chairman of the Committee of Management is elected by the Committee of Management by the standard parliamentary procedure of nomination and seconding, followed by a thorough debate of the candidate(s)' suitability for the post, and then a vote of the Ays, Nays and Abstentions. (Erskine May, The Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usages of Parliament from Britain; Robert's Rules of Order; House of Commons Procedure and Practice, etc.)

a. The Chairman of the Committee of Management is the most important of the administrative officers of the Society, which is why his, or her, selection must be taken in such serious consideration by the Committee. b. The Chairman ‘embodies' the policy and the ethics of the Society and will act in private and in public as the Society's representative and envoy. c. The Chairman will prepare an annual report on the Society's activities of the previous year, to be presented at the Annual General Meeting in September. d. Other than these duties, the role and the powers of the Chairman of the Committee of Management are… (these are then enumerated by Roman numeral — details to be discussed by the Committee) e. The Chairman will be elected for an initial term of five years. i. He is eligible for second five-year term only. ii. He will remain member of the Committee of Management for the length of his elected tenure of office as Chairman. This will include a second term of office, if so elected. iii. He shall be eligible further five-year term as member of the Committee of Management so as to offer his advice, expertise and experience to the other members of the Committee. f. In the case of unsatisfactory performance, two initial written warnings by the Committee of Management shall be followed by termination, with three months' notice, made by a two-thirds vote of the Committee of Management. The Chairman would still have a right of appeal to a Special General Meeting of full members, whose decision would be final.

Art. 10. The Council is a body nominated by Committee of Management of members who have earned high literary success and are recognized nationally and internationally as major figures in their field. It is an honorary body.

(There are a lot of queries about the exact role of the Council. The ‘Great and the Good'? An Académie britannique?)

a. All members of the Council must be full members prior to their nomination. b. The total number of the Council shall not exceed 60. c. The role and the powers of the Council are… (these are then enumerated by Roman numeral — details to be discussed by the Committee) d. The Council shall elect its own President for a term of five years, renewable only once. e. Members of the Council shall hold their respective offices for a maximum of fifteen years. f. On the expiration of his term, the death or retirement of the President, the Committee of Management shall call a meeting of the Council, and the Council shall thereupon proceed to elect a new President. g. Meetings of the Council may be convened at any time by order of the Committee of Management, but at least two meetings of the Council shall be summoned in each calendar year, at such time and place as the Committee of Management may determine. Seven members of the Council present at a meeting shall be a quorum for all purposes of that meeting.

Art. 11. 11. The Author is a quarterly magazine of news, information and debate that the Committee of Management administers on behalf of the full members.

(This problem of The Author's editorial procedure is the most emotive issue among members today, with many members wanting to abolish the magazine entirely. To avoid this destructive spirit among members it is strongly advised to adopt, within the permanent context of the Constitution, the reforms presented here.)

a. All members can submit articles for publication in The Author. Their submissions are to be given priority over other contributions. b. An Editorial Board, all full members of the Society, is elected by the Committee of Management, each member for a period of five years. c. The Editor-in-Chief, being a figure of national prominence, is elected for a term of five years — once renewable — by popular ballot among the full members. d. The editor-in-chief and the editorial board are responsible for all submissions to The Author. e. The Committee of Management will review the work of the editorial board twice a year. It will pay particular attention that a policy of balance between all opinions of the Society's members is being adhered to. f. All elections to administrative officers of the Society are to be covered in The Author. These will receive prominent coverage and will include profiles, the opinions and electoral programmes of all candidates in a balanced fashion.

Art. 12. The Staff, attached to the Society of Authors, has changed significantly in number and in structure since the Society's foundation in 1884 when the Committee of Management was granted, in the initial Articles of Association, the freedom to ‘appoint and remove local Committees abroad, and in any place,' and to ‘appoint any person to be the agent or representative of the Society in any country or place upon such terms and with such remuneration as the Committee of Management shall think fit…' (Articles of Association, 20 June 1884, arts. 18 and 19.) Most notably, a permanent Staff has developed that (i) speaks regularly to the press on matters relating to Society policies, (ii) negotiates with publishers and other agencies in the book trade as representative of the Society and, ultimately, of the Society's members, and (iii) sits permanently on the Committee of Management and participates in its deliberations.

(The definition, nomination and role of the Staff are among the most confusing and worst written articles of the initial Victorian documents. It is absolutely essential that clear definitions of the role and functions of the Staff — essential to the life of the Society — be laid down in plain, comprehensible English, in the Modern Constitution.)

a. The Staff, in all these activities, is paid to serve and execute the will and the policy of the Committee of Management. b. For the Staff — as for everyone else in the Society — ultimate authority resides in the full members. c. In the last decades, considerable professional expertise has built up within the ranks of the Society's Staff, and every effort must be made to preserve it. But, as in the case of any salaried public civil service: i. Matters of policy cannot originate and be proposed by any member of the Staff. In practice the border between policy-making and execution will always be murky. But the line of authority must be present and judiciously maintained: full members first, Committee of Management second, Staff as executors, not policy-makers. ii. Policy decisions are made by the Committee of Management, not the Staff. iii. The principal spokesman on matters of policy is the elected head of the Committee of Management, the Chairman, an author, and not the head of the Staff, the Secretary. iv. The Secretary and his, or her, Staff act only under the direction and instructions of the Committee of Management.

Art. 13. The Secretary is the head of the staff of the Society of Authors.

(It does seem that the correct, constitutional name of the head of the Staff is ‘Secretary', mentioned in the Victorian Memorandum, and not ‘General Secretary'. When was the title changed and under what legitimate authority? Perhaps this is linked to the definition of the Society as a Trade Union in the 1960s. But we have so far seen nothing to document this. Given the way the post functions, this officer does not work as a ‘General Secretary' of a Trade Union. We find that both historically — in reference to the initial Memorandum — and in the way this post ought to function, the term ‘Secretary' fits the office best.) a. The Secretary's job description, as published The Bookseller, The Lawyer, The Guardian and, eventually, in The Author, is recognized, save the title 'General Secretary':

‘Members and Staff look to the General Secretary for leadership on book trade issues and advice on the business aspects of the profession. The job involves all aspects of running a membership organisation, including managing the finances of the Society and its charitable trusts, overseeing the services offered to members by the staff… (the description adds ‘of 14', but we recommend that the number be left open by means of an ellipsis), advising members on professional issues, lobbying ministers, promoting the Society in the media and supervising the administration of prizes and grants. The role requires: broad knowledge of publishing and/or intellectual property, preferably with legal experience; demonstrable ability to run a small/medium sized organization; empathy with writers and enthusiasm for campaigning on their behalf; proven ability to negotiate and mediate, dealing with people at all levels.'

b. This is nevertheless an incomplete job description, its priorities are wrong, and its almost exclusive focus on ‘book trade issues' and ‘advice on the business aspects of the profession' would actually lead the Secretary to compromise with the aggressive corporatism, which dominates all aspects of the ‘book trade' today. ‘Book trade' interests are not authors' interests. The following two functions are in fact the priorities for a Secretary of the Society of Authors: i. Campaigning for an improvement of the quality of books, which corporate publishers have allowed to decline precipitously in the last decades; and ii. Protection of the interests of the authors of these works, in the face of an increasingly aggressive corporate marketing culture. c. The Secretary is appointed by the Committee of Management for an initial term of five years, renewable only once for a second term of five years. d. The Secretary attends the meetings of the Committee of Management and may contribute to discussions. The Secretary may delegate the right to speak to another member of the Staff with expertise on a particular question with the consent of the Chairman of the Committee. However, the Secretary and any other member of the Staff present shall withdraw from the Meeting of the Committee of Management if requested to do so by the Chairman. Such would be the case, for example, when their terms of employment or their job performance are about to be discussed. e. In the case of unsatisfactory performance, two initial written warnings by the Committee of Management, may be followed by termination with three months' notice through a two-thirds vote of the Committee of Management, with the right of the Secretary to appeal to a Special General Meeting of members. If the Secretary still considers termination unfair, he or she may take his case to an employment tribunal.

Art. 14. Instruments of Amendment. a. The Annual General Meeting of September can amend any part of this Constitution by a simple two-thirds majority vote of those present. These amendments can originate from the floor of the Meeting. b. Full details of any proposed changes, other than those originating in the Annual General Meeting, must be reported in the Summer Issue of The Author, which shall be distributed at least 28 days in advance of the Meeting. c. Any full member can present to the Committee of Management a petition for amendment to the Constitution, with the support of 100 signatures. Provided the requirement of 100 signatures is met, the Committee of Management shall then automatically present, in the exact wording of the petition, the proposed changes to the Constitution. d. Every five years, as of the date of its adoption, the Committee of Management will review all the terms of this Constitution. If it perceives the need for changes in the Constitution, it shall recommend — but not rule — that the changes be made to the Annual General Meeting, via an announcement in the Summer Issue of The Author, which shall be distributed at least 28 days in advance of the Meeting.

(Paragraph d would apparently not be possible under terms of the Companies Act of 2006. This would be a reason for not making the Society a Registered Company and, rather, for maintaining its status as a Trade Union. The National Union of Journalists, for example, revises its Rules every year, which is surely what a Modern Society of Authors should aspire to do. The publishing industry is fast evolving. The Constitution must reflect that fact.)

Meeting the SoA's General Secretary

Gregor Dallas — 2011-08-26T07:04:02Z

Last week I had an appointment with the General Secretary of the Society of Authors. I took the Eurostar from Paris to London on what was certainly one of the most depressing days in recent English history, Thursday, 11 August 2011. England had just gone through five days of arson, looting and mugging that left the country baffled for a reason. It wasn't the cuts, it wasn't politics, it wasn't race and it seemed totally unrelated to the police shooting in Tottenham on 4 August of a twenty-nine year old black gun-runner, Mark Duggan.

The riots

The riots reminded me of the troubles that had spread across France in November 2005. I had witnessed them close at hand in my home-town of Dreux on the borders of Normandy. In that case they had started when two Arab kids in a poor Paris suburb — running from the police — were electrocuted in the transformer which they had the misfortune to pick as their hiding-place. There was a spread of senseless violence throughout the country, the same arson and the same style of looting as in England this August. Cameron, instead of taking advice from an American police chief brought up in gangland Los Angeles and New York, should have a word or two with the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior. Mais parler avec un européen, quel horreur! One contrast I noted in making the cross-Channel comparison: France was much better policed than amateurish England. Inexperienced Cameron really ought to sit down for a minute with Sarko, who has been policing the French since youth.

But this is no hour for recriminations. What was behind all this? ‘It wasn't about social issues,' explained a Labour Councillor from Lambeth; ‘it was an opportunity to go on the rob.' The Conservative Prime Minister said much the same thing: these were just a bunch of criminals. And he was unconsciously echoing Sarkozy, who had raised eyebrows of the politically correct French establishment by calling the French rioters, ‘la racaille'. None of these people were wrong.

But sooner or later deeper analysis will follow in England, as it did in France. At the Gare du Nord I picked up a copy of The Guardian to read on the train. One columnist, looking beyond immediate causes, wrote that there was not much difference between bankers who ‘have publicly looted the country's wealth' and poor teenagers who ‘think they were entitled to help themselves to a mobile phone.' I think he is right. We have gone consumer mad. As the good Bishop of Manchester put it in a sermon broadcast the Sunday after the riots, ‘Objects are now more important than human beings.'

That's where books come in and the deplorable state of our publishing industry. This insane consumerism seeps into everything we touch and do, it pongs in every space like liquid manure that spreads under the tightest locked doors. It is suppressing golden thought. It advances over every manifestation of human life. The opportunity to make a quick gain, build up one's material wealth and step on one's neighbour's toe now governs every corner of society. Ideas are squashed underfoot for the sake of that quick buck. Those teenagers in Clapham, Croydon, East Ham, Hackney, Waltham Forest, Leicester, Wolverhamton, the Wirral, Salford, Manchester and the rest are simply imitating our brothers and friends in the City: getting what they can. These are our children. It is all about authority according to a BBC reporter who, cornering a couple of masked girls, was told ‘We are showing the rich people we can go where we want and do what we want, when we want.' It sounds like a motto for deregulated banking.

Princes

The order of things is baffled; the idea of service is overturned. Think of this in terms of publishing. Did you know that the word ‘author' is derived from the Latin auctoritas, about which a great deal of medieval church theology was written? It refers to the ‘person who originates or creates anything', it goes back to the ‘principal idea' and the ‘thing in itself' and, by that, is related to the Latin notion of ‘prince'. Authors were thus princes. Publishers served these princely authors by finding them a public. Similarly, literary agents were at the service of authors, seeking publishers.

Say that today! All the authority of the author is gone. All idea of service to the ‘author' has disappeared. Armies of professionals have moved into the publishing sector, not to serve but to grab, like our brothers and sisters in the City, like our children in Wolverhampton last week. Today everything is reversed. Authors are at the service of these armies in the consumer world. Authors cannot even create anymore. It is these armies that set the publishers' agenda, not the authors. Authors are not simply their servants; they are their unpaid slaves.

Publishers do not write books. Nor do literary agents. Not to speak of the marketeers, who do not even read books. A few of them have tried to compose, along the way, a slim tome but they are not usually very good; some of them, like Victor Gollancz, have even admitted that they never before realized the torture an author must go through to write a book. Writing a book, even a bad book, requires a staying power, a resistance to solitude and a kind of discipline that one rarely encounters today. That quality should be respected. But it is not.

In four days of looting, sportswear, televisions, computers, radios and mobile telephones were carted off by the sackful. But no books were stolen. The bookshops were untouched. The consumer society is not interested in books. Yet books provide the ideas. There's the rub. They have the solutions to our problems. Society is paralysed without books. Democracy is dead.

Drayton Gardens

I know I sound like Job — ‘man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.' I felt a bit like him as I walked down Drayton Gardens, off Old Brompton Road, beneath the gloomy skies of riot-torn London. It was positively cold. Past the gate you find a little sign by the front door announcing ‘The Society of Authors'. It is the sort of London house people of our parents' and grandparents' generations would live in, but you would have to be a millionaire today to afford it. The SoA owns the place, so that represents a considerable asset. Nicola Solomon was nominated General Secretary this last winter, following in the footsteps of Mark Le Fanu who had held the office for 29 years — a period that had seen quite the worst decline in authors' fortunes in the history of publishing. The consumer society came into its own during this generation and authors became increasingly dependent on the crumbs thrown out by the corporate publishers; the quality of books had gone into precipitous decline.

These are all processes I have outlined in the nine articles of my electoral programme and elsewhere on this site and on SOAF's site ( www.writersinfrance.net ). What authors object to — particularly those of the French section I chair — is that none of the people who run the Society, either administrators or members of the Management Committee, are elected; the authors feel sidelined, and that is why I was elected to the Committee. We have, so far, found no evidence of a contested election in the last thirty years., save my own in June. Authors feel that nominated officials have been bending too much to the demands of publishers. What pushed me through that front door on that cloudy Thursday was a desire to make authors princes again, at least in their own Society, but ultimately at large. Good authors, commanding respect and authority, could help a consumer society think — something it has not done in a while.

But I was not looking for an argument. I wanted solutions which worked. The new General Secretary came straight out to meet me. She is a very handsome woman, much more attractive than her terrible photographs would suggest. And she has a very pleasant, clear manner of talking. She had my confidence from the start.

Assessment

We began by a statement of positions. She said that she was very glad I had been elected and outlined briefly how the Committee functioned. I stated I had no fixed policy; this was the ‘authors' election' and we do not yet have the authors' voice. But I have the electoral programme: pushing for a better quality of books published; and much greater author/membership participation.

We were both new here and I do honestly believe Nicola Solomon could commit herself to change. She spoke of her work as a lawyer in intellectual property, which I thought was going to be very useful in the struggles ahead. We mentioned the example of the BBC. I was not going to sign the current petition on short stories. They have 5,000 authors' signatures already. In terms of money and authors' income short stories were a small issue compared to the way the BBC negotiates its contracts: the Beeb has a worse reputation than Hollywood.

Authors send in their projects and, in most cases, they get a rejection. Two years later the same authors are appalled to see their creation up on the screen. This is an old Hollywood trick. Unfortunately, it is an old BBC trick, too. Short stories deserve support, yes. But, come off it, the real business is in contracts; this foul behaviour has got to stop. Furthermore, like everywhere else, the marketeers are now exerting an influence on the BBC and quality, as a result, is notably declining. Nicola's qualifications in this whole domain should prove extremely useful.

OK, but how would I persuade publishers to improve quality? They say the market is not there for it and they are, after all, businesses. Well, actually there is a quality market in Britain, but the publishers are not looking for it; they are geared for the big sale. But do not underestimate the wonderful quality of the British population. We have actually seen it reacting in Manchester and in London. That old Blitz fortitude is in fact still there. Quality and decency have to be cultivated. The press is important. One can imagine a press campaign on quality. If nine thousand authors speak out, people will listen. And so will the National Union of Journalists, which has all its principal officers elected. Journalists and authors have essentially the same interests. If the NUJ and the SoA coordinated on the issue of quality — especially in the current context of the riots, so indicative of the malaise created by a consumer society gone wild — they could bring the country to its senses. In fact, I think those senses are already there. But they have to be articulated, given a collective voice.

I admitted that a collective voice from authors is very difficult to achieve, and it is not common in history. I told Nicola that there were two periods in history that I often thought about: the silence of authors in France during the German occupation of the Second World War, and the terrible position of intellectuals in Communist Russia, when whole works were suppressed, killed off and literally buried in gardens. That, I am afraid, is going on in England today. Or something akin to it.

Alley cats

I told her a word the economic columnist, Angus Sibley, had whispered to me at an NUJ meeting a fortnight ago in Paris, where I was talking about authors: ‘Organizing authors is like herding together a bunch of wild alley cats.' Good Christian that Angus is, his comment was not terribly kind. We are such a deeply jealous people. Rivalry among authors knows no bounds. One best seller in a lifetime can destroy your most precious friends. Nicola pleaded for an effort at unity in the SoA for ‘we have so many outside challenges.' The Society of Poets, who you can imagine are much worse than authors, had so torn itself apart that it was paralysed. That we must certainly avoid, I completely agreed . I had closely studied the qualifications of the other eleven Committee members; they were all plunged in the most Anglo-English subjects, which I thought a bit regrettable for an association that speaks for English-speaking writers throughout the world, but I admired every one of them.

Coûte que coûte, we've got to organize the alley cats in the face of the current crisis. All 9,000 of them. I would go out and talk to them, face to face. Nicola puts a lot of faith in the web. I don't. People do not read websites. That's been my bitter experience both with SOAF and the NUJ. You have to go out there and listen. I suggested a double-pronged approach: the special interest groups, such as child fiction, and the regional groups. Nicola, I found, was a little defensive on the latter. I should imagine there is quite a bit of organizing to be done at that level, as my experience with the dispersed French section confirms.

But that is the way to increase participation, so essential to a campaign on quality. In the end, I hope we will be having regular elections inside the Society of Authors. I would be happy, I said, if we could arrive at, for the moment, a composition of 50% elected members of the Management Committee. But it is going to be hard work.

Our time was up. We shook hands at the front door with a promise to cooperate. I left England that evening on the train with the sun managing to shine its orange beams through low shreds of storm cloud, creating a scene over that troubled country that was Gothic in ambiance.

But I left England also with the hope that in that handshake we could together make authors princes again.

GD, Le Vieil Estrée 20 August 2011

The demand for quality writing

Gregor Dallas — 2011-08-09T05:01:35Z

To those who lament the woeful state of book publishing in Britain, where cookbooks, ghosted celebrities and failed politicians' memoirs secure the largest advances, I say there is strong public demand for high quality writing.

The catch is that the excellent exploratory fiction is to be found on American cable television, where programmes such as The Wire, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Mad Men, The West Wing and others won devoted viewers with their psychological depth, complex plots, and sizzling dialogue.

What French critics have noted is that the best creative talent fled Hollywood and feature films because of the sterile regime of pointless remakes, the Nth franchise sequel and flicks aimed at the popcorn guzzling 15-to-25 year old audience.

Hollywood's loss was television's gain, and the popularity of those series shows the public can spot — and enjoy — a well crafted piece of cultural production when one comes along.

So quality writing does count, is popular and finds a mass media outlet, despite the suits pursuing sales targets imposed by conglomerate owners.

The pity is that British publishing has not recognized that there is a real appetite for a greater diversity and a richness in reading matter, one that extends beyond My10 Best Omelette Recipes — Gorgeous TV Reality Star.

It is not too late for publishers to wake up to that lucrative demand for quality writing.

If good writing can make money for the likes of HBO and Showtime cable companies, why not for British publishers? Or is that too great a stretch of the corporate imagination?

Pierre Tran, Paris, 8 August 2011

Putting words into effect

Gregor Dallas — 2011-08-08T19:00:40Z

On 20 July 2011 we were elected for a three-year term to a seat on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. We deliberately use the pronoun ‘we' because this is not my election, it is your election, the authors' election.

One of the chief aims in our electoral programme was increased author participation in the life of the Society.

The other major aim was to work for an improvement in the quality of books published, hence our new slogan ‘Better Books!' I had originally proposed ‘Better Books for Britain'. But at a meeting of a few authors and journalists on 7 August we decided that this was far too nationalistic and narrow-minded: the Society caters for English-speaking writers around the world.

We all agreed that an effective campaign to improve books compels author participation — and, as Pierre Tran's opening article suggests, we have in mind all arts media, and all subjects. Without participation there can be no campaign. Without this necessary campaign for improvement there will be no books worth reading, no thought, no vivid debate, no creation worth speaking of, no genuine democracy, no example for future generations to follow — no authors. All we will have is what the current ‘book industry' now offers us: a wasteland of transient ‘titles', chosen on the basis of the Nielsen Bookscan data, without regard to content, and pushed by an army of marketing and sales people. There is no room here for authors. In an age of economic crisis and unmanageable debt, with the West teetering towards violence, we are obliged to force publishers to publish civilized thought. Otherwise human hope will gradually disappear.

The task before us is immense. But it has to be done. The election is behind us. We now have to make every effort to realize our goals. We are remodelling this section of our website accordingly. We are giving it a new title, ‘Manifest 2011'. And we are dividing it into two sub-sections: (A) Electoral Programme, and (B) The Enactment. The first is made up of the articles written during the campaign of May through to July 2011. Not every author will agree with these articles. A journalist friend of mine whispered, during an NUJ-Paris meeting I recently attended, ‘Organizing authors is like herding together a collection of wild alley cats.' But I knew what he meant: historically it has always been so. But we don't have to agree. We simply work towards the same two grand goals, increased participation in the life of the Society and a general campaign for the improvement of the quality of books: ‘Better Books!'

Now we have got three years to work towards what we set out to do. The second sub-section will be an on-line record of the difficult bit: our achievements.

GD, Le Vieil Estrée, 8 August 2011

We won!

Gregor Dallas — 2011-07-22T05:23:22Z

The ballots were counted on 20 July, and I came second, thanks to your support. There were 1,458 votes, which is far too low for a Society of 8,000 members. We have got to work on that. Four votes were invalid.

The results were:

CROFTS, Andrew/ 811; DALLAS, Gregor / 959 / Elected; GARDINER, Juliet/1100 /Elected; GROSS, Philip/944 /Elected; RUNCIE, James/909 /Elected

Now the real work begins. My candidature was based on a full and articulate programme. Essentially, it called for an improvement in the quality of publishing, and it outlined the means to achieve this. One essential condition is a major improvement in author participation in the affairs of the Society. This requires more posts elected by members, less posts nominated.

To aid in this process we are going to keep this site open and report on our progress. We will call this special section of the site MANIFESTO 2011! The life of the SOA is going to change, because YOU ARE NOW IN CHARGE OF IT.

Help us succeed in this task. Get yourself involved. Be democratic. We are coming to you now, to ask you what we can do to help you.

GD, Le Vieil Estrée, 22 July 2011

Technology, publishers and authors

Gregor Dallas — 2011-07-19T18:35:07Z

The technological myth

Technology, in the publishing world, is an excuse for inaction and conformity.

Politicians will say that the cause of the plight of authors is technology and that nothing can halt the progress of technology. Publishers repeat that the reason why authors have to fall in with their boring, unimaginative lists is because these lists are fine-tuned to a fast-moving technological world. Technology has changed the reading habits of the world. Join the fine-tuners or get out. You even hear authors arguing along these lines.

Politicians who cannot do anything should not hold political office. Publishers who publish unimaginative lists should think about another profession, say jobbing in the stock market or trading in one of our major banks. Authors who repeat these legends about technology will be paralysed in their actions and, without understanding what technology genuinely contributes to society, will not be able to advance in their careers.

It was as if technology were some great white-haired God out there, an alien being, who had suddenly descended on this planet and ordered all men and women to toe the line and comply with his great commands. For true believers, he is a benevolent God. For the rest of us, technology is an uncomfortable bedfellow who wakes us in the wrong hours of early morning. But if one truly recognized what technology has got to give us it could become a very useful tool in the daily business of living.

The real issue is how to place technology in a proper perspective, without these quasi-religious enthusiasms getting in the way of our view. Zealotry has marred the thinking of politicians, publishers and even ourselves.

Let me first review the mythology before I go on to outline what I think is actually happening.

The Gospel according to Saint Bill

Saint Bill Gates is the religious fanatic's representative on earth. The original Gospel according to Saint Bill was published in 1995, and that's when I first read it. It is frankly a bit of a bore. The best way to read the abominably written Road Ahead I found was to attack it in French; I don't know why, but La Route du futur had a slightly more poetic ring to it — although even then it had three authors and four translators. The book itself was something of a fantasy, a collective job; I don't think the man Bill Gates had much to do with it.

‘Depuis vingt ans, je vis une aventure incroyable…' Well, all right, it is not exactly Madame Bovary, but you can at least imagine you are bouncing around in a Citroën C8 on a Norman stretch of autoroute south of Rouen. That's one of the problems I have with the original Bill Gates: he has absolutely no sense of place; he has created a fantasy world without frontiers. His acolytes — and there are today millions of them — are fantasy people who don't touch ground.

Many of the gospel's prophesies were supposed to take place within a decade of writing, so it is interesting to have a look at it sixteen years later to see just what has actually happened. And you have to re-read it anyway because in these pages there is an early articulation — is that the right word? — of a techno-ideology which is now fairly widespread, including publishers, and not a few authors as well.

Central to the book is the idea of networks, the ‘autoroutes d'information'. It starts with the dust-jacket, which has a photograph of a road, though I don't think it is in Normandy. It is surfaced with black macadam with an orange median — so I would guess it is somewhere in the USA — leading straight out into an empty desert. That sets the mood of all Gates's networks; they are assembled in blank, unoccupied, neutral zones, without a living thing visible. On the cover the young Bill Gates is standing in neat informal attire on the surface of the autoroute — only he is obviously not standing on the road, it is more like outer space, since he appears weightless. The portrait was probably taken in a studio, miles away from the road.

That cover, in fact, is very true to the way Gates's world wide web— that fantasy word, what he calls ‘La réalité virtuelle' — permeates this book and ultimately the mythology of high technology today.

Virtual reality

It started for Bill with toys and progressed to a ‘program' — that's the formal term, not ‘programme' — in Basic that simulated a game of Monopoly. ‘J'ai l'impression,' continues the conjuring saint, ‘d'appartenir à une generation qui, en grandissant, n'a pas su se séparer de son jouet favori…' That's it: they did not let go of their favourite toys, these technicians. Like Peter Pan, they never grew up. Young Bill, who looks amazingly like Harry Potter, was always playing with his fabulous toys and creating his unreal worlds: exploring the surface of Mars, changing the end of a novel, reviving dinosaurs and the dead Elvis Presley, or simulating a make-believe battle in Never-Never Land. It caught the imagination of children and what has become our world today, an unreal world. I am afraid some publishers' lists have taken on that look of ‘réalité virtuelle'. It is now a part of our culture.

Publishers today, you may have noted, have, over the last fifteen years, adopted this fantasy child's world. Whether they are publishing fiction or non-fiction their lists are made up of this Tolkien-like ‘réalité virtuelle', with accompanying dust-jackets that all seem lifted from science fiction, passionate science fiction populated by passionate men and women of the Linda Crofts variety. So the techno-ideology has infiltrated popular culture in those sixteen years since Saint Bill composed the Gospel.

In his fabulously technological world, virtual reality is accompanied by virtual economics. Many, from all streams of life, have also adopted this vision over the last decade and a half. The mechanics behind this is achieved through the multimedia links — television, telephone, camera, constant music, and downloaded articles and books — that create a world-wide market incorporating everyone and everything. There are no frontiers, we have noted, in the world of Bill Gates. ‘Nous ne sommes plus très loin d'assister à l'avènement du marché idéal décrit par l'économiste britannique Adam Smith, au XVIIIe siecles, dans son traité Recherche sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations.' Adam Smith! The free market! Open trade! Every follower of the Gospel of High Technology is an advocate of free market economics… But, in actual fact, there is not much that is either free or open in the economics of hi-tech.

The Saint forecasts studying, exploring the world, watching any kind of spectacle, doing the shopping in the neighbourhood, showing photographs to parents in the provinces and many other wonderful activities will be available — ‘sans quitter votre bureau ou votre fauteuil.' Just sit in your armchair and switch on your computer — and see what a world is opened to you. You will have, he prophesies, the ‘ultimate market,' the ‘planetary market'. Many a corporate firm now subscribes to this view of ‘globalization', so do the economists, and so of course do the large combined publishing companies — they have lists that look the same throughout the world. You cannot run against the forces of ‘globalization', we are told.

The prophesies: ignoring human nature

I am not sure one would want to run against them. But there are some quite important details in these prophesies that, sixteen years later, hardly worked out the way they were supposed to. Far from opening up our horizons, they appear to have closed them.

Start with the paperless world, and particularly the paperless office. Saint Bill argues that technology has changed the nature of the ‘document'. For five hundred years everything was recorded on paper. Now, with the advent of the computer, information as varied as a television programme, an interactive video-game or an animated cartoon could be an integrated part of a ‘document', memorized and charged up on those ‘autoroutes d'information'. So there is no need for paper!

Well, you may have all this information charged up on your hard disk, but it is not actually very useful there until it is consulted by the human brain, and that brain often still requires paper. Go into one of these ‘paperless' offices and, inevitably, you will find, not far from that pristine empty desk, cupboards and drawers stuffed with… stacks of paper. What the computer revolution has in fact done is speed up the exchange of information, which has in fact led to a vast increase in the consumption of paper. Far from leading to a ‘paperless' world, we are now inundated with the stuff.

One of the large corporations — and it seems it is particularly the large corporations — that caught the Bill Gates dream of a paperless office was the BBC. In two moves in the last couple of years from London to Pacific Quay in Glasgow, and from Bush House and White City to Broadcasting House the BBC, in an effort to create a paperless production process, has spent nearly £160 million on space that is still not available for use. It has been estimated that this sum is the equivalent to the cost of running both Radio 3 and Radio 4 for an entire year — all those authors who might have been usefully employed! Paperless offices are a false dream and can prove to be very expensive.

In fact, like all announced revolutions, the current breakthroughs in technology are not causing nearly as many changes in society as their enthusiasts would have you to believe.

Human beings are adaptable, and they lust after novelty, a new world. I would say that the poets have more to say on this than the techno-believers. ‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!' said Shakespeare's enigmatic Hamlet. He lusts after novelty, yes. But he is never consistent in this. That strange thing in him called human nature will cause him to hold things back, as much as he initiates change. Man is essentially a conservative animal.

The historians will confirm this. The revolutions, started amid so much enthusiasm, never, ever happen. Or, rather, they are just that, revolutions — they just go round and round in circles. One enjoys a generation of passion and whole-scale destruction, one stares out, dazed, at the nothingness, and then one returns to the tried and true ways civilization. One always, in the end, finds oneself back where one started: back in 1789 with its aristocrats and its peasants, in the ancien régime; after the battle the soldiers go back to the fields; Old Russia makes her come-back after the Communists have cleared off — just as old-fashioned books and their authors will undoubtedly make their return after the technocrats have packed up.

In the end the revolutionaries and the technocrats have nothing to say. It is the editors who will tell us what is worth reading; and the authors who will write those things worth reading. Yes, it is different all right; the aristocrats no longer wear powdered wigs and the peasants are working in the fields in trim trousers instead of smocks; but, you look around and remark, ‘Gosh, this is very much the same society as before.'

That is what really happens in the world. We don't change that much. And it is only too human that it be like that. Both publishers and authors should bear that in mind.

The failure of ‘interactivity', the rise of monopoly and the threat to freedom

One area much trumpeted in Bill Gates's book of sixteen years ago was ‘interactivity'. ‘Interactivity' was supposed to happen when all these happy participants on the ‘autoroutes d'information', while sitting in their armchairs in a state of ‘réalité virtuelle', started talking to one another. It is Marshall McLuhan's fantastic ‘global village', Adam Smith's ‘marché idéal', a utopia, nowhere. Yes, nowhere. It didn't happen anywhere.

Blogs, websites, Twitter and Facebook are the closest we have come, in sixteen years, to this fantasy's realization. Now some blogs are consulted. Several websites are read, usually with some specific, narrow end in mind. Facebook allows you space enough for a thousand-character — not word — comment. The BBC and a few of the national papers achieve substantial public comments, though the comments even here quickly drop off into nonsense. Most websites are not consulted. The Society of Authors' own website is a desert. I have been involved myself in the administration of national websites; they are the despair of their ‘webmasters' and we discuss the impossible ways of improving involvement.

The truth is that human nature does not encourage forays into foreign websites — apart from bored husbands and idle teenage boys, who show a curiosity for things that are not always enlightening. Far from increasing social communication, psychologists have recently sounded the alarm bells about the ‘internet' spreading isolation and solitude. Fantasy ‘role games' are destroying healthy links between young men and women. All that has happened in the last sixteen years.

I am not taking an anti-techno line here. I think, in fact, that technology can bring considerable benefits to authors. I am just stating the facts. In the technological revolution, all is not what seems. We are missing the role of human nature in this complicated story. We are on virgin territory here.

Authors, books, and the emergence of a Caesarean monopoly

Saint Bill had a considerable amount to say about authors and books. He thought the book would change. Already in 1995 he regarded the e-book as a fait accompli, which was far from the case. An enormous number of prototypes were tried out. They all failed, not because of the technology but — and this is the essential point — because of market organization. High technologies, because they demand such colossal investments, only thrive in an environment of monopoly. Well may Bill bow to the eighteenth-century free market theories of Adam Smith; in fact, hi-tech takes off into outer space only in the ‘Bread-and-Circuses' environment of the Emperor Nero.

Saint Bill's own company, Microsoft, suffered at least a decade of struggle and loss before, through monopoly, it could impose its empire of software — which is not actually very user-friendly — on everybody else. Google only worked once it had a monopoly. Amazon became the leading on-line bookseller after well over a decade of stupendous losses. Now it is a secretive monopolist, it can impose its ideas on the rest of the world. Among those ‘new' ideas is the e-book, which is only just now beginning to make a tiny edge in the market.

This is true of technological breakthroughs in earlier ages. The railway, the oil industry, the big ocean liners … they were, all of them, monopolies or oligopolies. But the hi-techies beat them all in terms of money, power and world spread. And that is because they are so greedy in their capital needs.

If monopoly is the chief game of technology then what does this suggest about technology and freedom? Unfortunately the relationship does not seem to be a healthy one. Technology develops in an environment that is the very opposite of free: it is controlled, centralized and arrogant. The directors of the hi-tech industries, in particular, do not allow debate; they are irreconciled to the intellectual freedoms. So the mix of hi-tech and publishing — which should be the flower of our freedoms — is going to be necessarily an unhappy one.

It already is. A problem for democracy is developing here.

The death of the author

Saint Bill's revolutionary scriptures foresee a new kind of ‘author' and ‘editor' arising out of ‘interactivity' over the net. Harking back to the theme that the electronic document is the most revolutionary form of record since Gutenberg he guessed that the ‘author' and ‘editor' would have to be redefined.

There has certainly been an attempt to redefine these roles, mainly degrading both of them. This dates back to the 'death of the author' movement among literary critics in the 1960s and 70s. Indeed, the critics were, in a sense, the Old Testament prophets to Gates's techno-ideology of the 1990s. Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and a host of followers in the English-speaking world, most famously Terry Eagleton of Oxford, used a form of ‘interactivity' to explain away the importance of the elitist author in relation to the reader. It began as a theory pour épater les bourgeois in the radical 1960s and to undermine the authority of the elderly professors at the Sorbonne. It had the most sinister undertones.

And that is true of the New Testament version, this whole techno-ideology concerning editors and authors. The Nielsen BookScan gives the marketing people the pretension of interpreting ‘reader power' at the expense of old authorial authority — auctoritas, ‘from the principal itself' — and also at the expense of old fashioned editorial literary taste. The aim has been to push editorial decisions down now to the level of the 'common reader'. But in fact this has nothing to do with the common reader. It is a marketing technique, made in the name of technology, democracy and the 'free market, to increase the number of readers. Nobody has actually proven that it works.

The Nielsen BookScan has been invented, like the new criticism of the 1960s pour épater les bourgeois — to humble those elitist authors and editors and to force them to face the new reality, 'la réalité virtuelle'.

Is this method actually more democratic? Not if it suppresses knowledge and debate. The BookScan seeks consumers, not citizens, sales points, not book content and ideas. It has very little to do with common readers. And it is absolutely undemocratic. It suppresses thought for the benefit of numbers and measurement. It sounds modern and technological. It is repressive and its results are monotonously uniform: the effect is that all publishers' lists are the same.

Gates's view of a distinction between paper-supported information and the new style multi-dimensional electronic document is both simplistic and wrong. Most sophisticated forms of literature embrace several dimensions of narrative at the same time; it is a technique as old as the Bible, indeed as old as the human mind.

An elementary example of this can be found in Norman Davis's Europe (Oxford University Press, 1996), where the main narrative of his European story is broken by a number of ‘capsules' outlining particular areas of interest. But multi-dimensional documents go back much further than that. In the Gospels of the New Testament there are the parables, which are aspects of Christ's teaching inserted in the story of his life. Tolstoy also made an art of this multi-dimensional story-telling, combining in his War and Peace, for example, descriptions of the eternal Russian landscape, with the movement of the seasons, with the human drama of war, and the individual drama of his characters.

Some authors are better at doing this than others. The Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, in several of his works, shifts constantly between historical eras, creating a most magical effect.

Human creativity not influenced by technology

Whether these shifts take place solely with print, between film fragments and print, or within a handwritten love letter, the shift is in fact within the human mind, not the medium. It is a creative move and can be either glorious, as when Shakespeare introduces the news of Ophelia's death, or it can be the sign of a badly, ill-organized novel or an incompetently written history text.

A shift in key and rhythm achieves the same effect in music. The effect is as great, or diminutive, as its creator. Contrary to Marshall McLuhan — another of those Old Testament prophets — the message is not in the medium. It comes to you from its creator. And has done so since the days of Homer, and before.

Technology has little effect on the actual process of creation. When I was writing forty years ago I employed yellow legal paper, because I could fit more words on a page and I thought, perhaps like French drivers at the time, that yellow was better for the eyes. I quickly progressed to a typewriter, because I discovered I could write faster and more fluently. The electric typewriter improved this, though my style and my thoughts hardly changed. In 1994 I acquired my first Macintosh. Then I went through a series of PCs, and now I am back to Macintosh, because it is user-friendly.

Editing is now much easier. I am even tempted to say that it is too easy. I found that I was altering words too frequently; one can over-edit and become verbose. But I got that under control. My most basic style and thinking, as far as my writing is concerned, has not changed much since I was an adolescent apprentice in the trade during my teens. Naturally, what I actually write about has developed, but that is due to maturity and not technology.

I could reverse to yellow legal paper tomorrow. I write to music more frequently nowadays to ‘keep the parasites away' as I say — I don't think this has much to do with technology, though I realize that in the eighteenth century I would not have been able to pay a chamber orchestra to perform in my study. I suppose it is conceivable that, in this worsening, censorious environment, I could end up in gaol; in which case I may have to resort, like prisoners of old, to writing on toilet paper. I am convinced I could do that, too.

In fact, technology has little affect on any of our basic functions of human thinking.

This is even true of business. The basic process of trading has not changed much since the Sumerians. The ‘dot.com' bubble burst in the year 2000 because people were convinced that the rules of business had changed. In fact they had not and, as a result, a lot of people got their fingers burned. Interest rates were reduced, especially in the United States, to inflate artificially an economy depressed by the technology boom. That led to easy credit. It was technology again that sped up the rates of dealing, so much so that nobody noticed what was going on; people were managing to sell debt as credit. But the old rules of business did not change: in the end debt has to be paid. So the financial world, enamoured of technology and new trading instruments, went bankrupt and the taxpayer was landed with the bills. The result was the worst trading crisis since the Great Depression.

The religious legend of high technology has a lot to blame for that.

Technological boom and bust

And in 2011 we are at it again! In the very same places as before! The corporate directors are once more in demand in Silicon Valley, California, office rents are soaring and fabulous salaries are on offer for trendy fields like data science while the state — and even the mighty United States itself — is threatening a massive default on debts.

Facebook is not listed on the stock exchange but it is said to be valued at around $76 billion, which is more than Boeing or Ford. Twitter is said to be worth about $7.7 billion. LinkedIn, the professional network, hopes to raise $3.3 billion in an initial public offering.

These enormous sums are more than a little worrying. For with the big names come the little names of fledgling firms with ‘services' that have not even been tested. Venture capitalists are competing with private-equity companies and those dear old bank funds, their agents and dealers — so loved by the public, real common readers — are still chasing up profits that seem to have dried up elsewhere. There are the ‘angel' investors who made their fortunes with the web start-up companies in the boom of the 1990s and are trying their luck again. All these groups of transient wealth are caught up in a great binge of hi-tech mythology that could very soon spin out of control.

Anything to do with China, as the ‘newly wired market', is attractive to these investors. Indeed, Chinese investors themselves add to the hot air.

Where do these funds come from? Where are they going? It would be a rash man who attempted to map it all out. These money movements are made at the speed of light, at the press of a button, and typify the make-believe, frontierless world that Saint Bill Gates has created for us. It is conceivable that some sort of panic in China will lead to the burst of the next bubble.

In search of the creative ‘genius'

What is certain is that if such a disastrous scenario is allowed to happen we will, like the last time — authors, publishers, agents and booksellers — be brought down with it. Once more the most creative elements of society will be made to suffer and, once more, they will be told by the marketing gurus that this is because these creative people ‘failed to keep up with the fast pace of technological progress.'

But I am not sure, by that time, whether there will be any creative people left. There are not so many around today. The next decade, announced the Saint in 1995, ‘nous amènera-t-elle les Griffith et les Eisenstein du multimedia?' One and a half decades have gone by and there is still total silence. ‘Combien posséderont l'inventivité d'un Steven Spielberg, d'une Jane Austen ou d'un Albert Einstein? Ces trois personnages hors du commun ont existé; mais nous n'aurons peut-être droit qu'à un seul genie.'

Silence. Total silence. These past sixteen years have seen no genius creator emerge from Bill Gates's make-believe multi-media world. And one must wonder seriously whether we will see this in the next sixteen years.

The historian, Simon Winder, published an article in the Author this last winter, ‘Historical Settings'. It was a view from inside Penguin, where he works. The corporate culture has got to him. He adopts the corporate ideology of ‘displacement' in the context of history. Thus he states that ‘history is a cruel genre, since the purpose of new history titles… is to displace older books.' And he goes on to observe that there are no ‘classics' in history. Well that is a new one to me. What about Gibbon to start with? Macaulay? Trevelyan? A.J.P. Taylor is still read. And Barbara Tuchman surely ranks somewhere up there. I suppose Schama makes a mark, though I have a hunch that the real classics of our own marketing governed times are not even being noticed.

‘History writing really does date with frightening speed,' Winders, quite a competent German specialist himself, goes on. This has nothing to do with the way one generation tends to replace another because of the movement of ideas. It has everything to do with the kind of marketing you find at Penguin and most publishers today: this week's Mary, Queen of Scots has got to displace last week's; it is all about novelty and keeping stock moving on the shelves — it is like strawberries on the supermarket shelves. Indeed, the new breed of publisher is now aiming at supermarket shelves.

Ideas and book content are of no concern to a publisher whose decisions are made on the basis of the Nielsen BookScan. That is why publishers and traders now speak of ‘titles' rather than ‘books', a term with old-world, pre-hi-tech connotations that ideas may actually hide behind the title. Come on! This week's Mary, Queen of Scots is the same as last week's. And let's admit it, it is. But BookScan tells us that Mary, Queen of Scots is a subject that sells. So it will be on the shelf until the new author arrives next week with his ‘latest research' (the Queen's letters have been read in a different order).

Now if that highly original work on The Drains of Edinburgh by the same author were to arrive at the same time on the editor's desk, the editor — finding a well-written description of sixteenth-century lavatories in Holyrood Palace — might suddenly realize that David Rizzio may have slipped on the watery tiling whilst in private conference with the pregnant queen, thus giving himself away; Lord Darnley, the husband, now apprised, slips in with his pals and murders his rival in front of the queen, thus changing the course of history.

‘I must publish The Drains of Edinburgh!' exclaims the editor to his Acquisitions Committee. But he is outvoted by Marketing and Sales who tell him that BookScan reveals there is no market for ‘drains'. A great work of history is thereby suppressed.

Here is the reason why Bill Gates's multi-media world boasts of no creative ‘genius' now or in the near future. It has got nothing to do with technology; it has everything to do with marketing. What pushed these marketing forces to the fore was the evolution of corporate structures in the last forty or so years: consolidation, mergers, the gluttonous interest rates charged by the capital-raising agencies and the marketing ‘sciences' used for gaining ever higher rates of return.

This happened long before hi-tech ever appeared on the horizon. Indeed, many of the new technologies appeared because of the marketing needs of the large corporations. They earn their money through the mergers and complicated financial instruments, not by selling books. Technology is the by-product of corporate growth, not the cause.

Book content: the need for good editors

As for the evasive factor of creative ‘genius', there is no way it will be fostered through the mechanical number-crunching of Nielsen's BookScan. There could be genius in The Drains of Edinburgh, but BookScan, which will miss all those wonderful descriptions of Holyrood Palace, will never pick it up. Only discerning editors will be able to do that, and their authority has been drastically reduced in corporate re-stucturation made in the interests of Mammon, not genius. It is a total myth that the ‘independents' will pick up what the big corporations miss: the ‘independents' use the same Nielsen ratings as the corporations, so that publishers' lists are now identical, one to the other. The author of Drains will never find an alternative.

Again, beyond the mechanical collection of Nielsen's BookScan, technology has very little to do with this. It is an aggressive marketing within the context of monopoly and oligopoly that is the cause of Drains' misfortunes.

Well may Saint Bill Gates sing the praises of Adam Smith and the free market. But the corporate structure is the very opposite of a free market and an open, democratic society. It is a closed monopoly that is dictatorial in its ideology. As technology picks up within such a closed environment the monopolistic pressures can only get worse, and the suppression of creation will only become more evident.

Just how limited is the effect of technology?

From the point of view of the creator, technology is also limited in what it can achieve. The actual idea of a ‘multi-media world' is as old as the Bible, and there is room for genius in it. But not in the marketing governed world of corporate monopoly.

Does, in fact, technology have any role to play at all, apart from being a tool for the powers that be? In the 1990s, in the midst of all the marketing hype of the hi-tech boom, before the dot.com bubble burst, economists argued, on the basis of a misreading of the Austrian economist, Josef Schumpeter, that computers were performing the same dynamic role of ‘creative destruction' in the world economy as railways had played in the nineteenth century, sweeping the old aside and bringing in the new. They were destroying all right. But they did not bring in anything creative. No ‘geniuses' appeared. Mergers and the financial instruments kept the money pouring in for a while. But that dried up during the recent financial crisis.

It was that parallel with nineteenth-century railways that was to prove particularly pertinent. Thirty years earlier another economist, Robert Fogel — he went on to win the Nobel Prize — demonstrated in a remarkable piece of statistical counterfactual analysis that American economic growth would have been just as dynamic without railways. Railroads and Economic Growth (Baltimore, 1964), which is another of my candidates for a historical classic that are not supposed to exist, projected, with a cost analysis, a whole network of water canals across the United States, along with calculations of accompanying economic growth. The United States without railways did very well!

The obvious parallel is to suppose a good economic performance in the world at the turn of this century without computers, and without the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000, the ultimate cause of the current economic recession.

But one does not have to go so far to conclude that technology is much more limited in its effects on society and the economy than its enthusiasts would suppose. It has no effect on the creativity of man. As a vehicle of economic growth it is marginal at best, destructive at worst.

The structure of enterprise, the disorganization of authors

Far more dynamic is the organization of enterprise. Far more destructive, in the publishing world, is the development of huge corporate monopolies and the imposition of marketing models that have spread throughout the entire industry.

One can see how dangerous the situation is becoming for the freedom of expression and of ideas through the developments over the last few weeks at Google and Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. In the face of these evident threats to their liberty, authors show no sign of being better organized. Participation so far in the affairs of the Society of Authors has been appallingly low and the Society, as a result, has tremendous difficulty formulating an effective, society-wide policy of defence.

That is the situation today on the eve of this election. If it is a deeply worrying position for authors to find themselves in, it is an alarming one for Britain.

GD, Le Vieil Estrée, 19 July 2011

The News of the World and Google

Gregor Dallas — 2011-07-11T19:47:33Z

Two scandals broke this weekend that have implications for the publishing industry and occur just ten days before SOA election ballots are due. One is the dramatic collapse of the News of the World over telephone hacking, the other is the British Government's involvement with the manipulations of Google. Both confirm the danger of the monopolies that have developed in the world of writing, as well as a general spirit of complacency that has grown up among authorities that are supposed to protect us. The lesson is that if people do not speak up, this is the sort of thing that happens. That's why this current election is important. Let your voice be heard! Don't let central authorities nominate themselves. This will inevitably lead to abuse.

The demise of the News of the World, the ‘News of Screws' as we used to say, has led some enlightened circles to complain that British democratic freedoms are now under threat. I, as an author, have to say that I feel quite the opposite. Perhaps in the old Chartist days of 1843, when the NoW was founded and working-class literacy was growing, it was a vehicle to freedom. That was the year Carlyle published his Past and Present, which had an enormous unforeseen impact on the language and thinking of Messrs Marx and Engels. But that was a long time ago, and even at that time there was a demagogic element present. Closer to our own times, did all those salacious tales about Christine Keeler and David Profumo in the early 1960s really open paths to freedom? I frankly don't see how.

When the press becomes a moralizing force, it is said in France, the way is opened to tyranny. I suppose some real sexual abuses were revealed by the NoW. Alan Clark was shown in the 1990s to have a pretty sick attitude towards women; but then he did write a glorious political diary. As for the political destruction of David Mellor, David Blunkett and Robin Cook it was purely vindictive stuff; it debased the quality of political debate in the country and caused unnecessary pain for all the men and women concerned. Perhaps the French, as the recent story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn demonstrates, are too silent on the sexual crimes of the powerful. But this prurient obsession with minor sexual offences is hardly the most endearing national feature of the British either. The News of the World bears a major responsibility for this.

The News of the World, up until yesterday the bestselling Sunday paper in Britain, showed just how low genuine morality in newspaper reporting, supported by great coffers of money, has sunk. Yes, it is a business all right. Prostitution is also a business. Drug trafficking is a business. And bad publishing is… a business. Following on the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a crisis that is itself a product of financial greed and dissimulation, the collapse of the News of the World reminds us that utterly immoral business ends in tears.

That is what we are saying to publishers in this authors' campaign: clean up your act, improve your quality, or there is going to be trouble. It won't come from us. It will be internal, as with the News of the World. But as authors we can help put things right — provided we speak up through our associations.

For authors, the lessons of this weekend's drama go further. This is a story of monopoly and how monopoly leads to the most terrible abuses of power. We have noted how these problems developed in corporate structure. Some of my detractors have tried to argue that the ‘independent press' provides an alternative to the corporations. In the first place, the independent presses comprise only an insignificant part of the market. And, secondly, they are not really independent. A uniformity, of low quality, has spread from the corporations throughout the newspaper presses and the publishing companies. That process of consolidation and restructuration began with the newspapers — in fact, back in the nineteenth century. But the kind of difficulties we face as authors today — low quality and diminishing range of subjects covered — has its origins in the 1960s, and particularly the Rupert Murdoch empire which began to expand with his purchase of the News of the World in 1969. He was only 37 at the time.

In the late 1980s he moved into publishing seriously with the purchase, in the United States, of Harper and Row and then Collins in Britain. By the 1990s HarperCollins authors were getting worried. Chris Patten's book on Hong Kong was blocked. A biography of Murdoch himself was stopped. Peter Hennessey, a political historian, commented ominously in March 1998, ‘We all understand within our bones what the publishing arm of an open society has got to be. It's an absolutely indispensible buttress on an inquisitive, open society. And HarperCollins, quite simply, has ceased to be a member of our open society.' A further sign of this was the destruction of Flamingo Books, an up-market imprint, and the firing of its editor.

Is the sudden collapse of the News of the World the beginning of the undoing of News Corporation, Murdoch's empire? It would be very premature to say that. But if you haven't yet cast your ballot, think about this drama. It has all sorts of implications in the world of publishing. And it will affect your lives as authors.

The other major story of this weekend concerns revelations about the preferential treatment the internet search giant, Google, has been receiving from the British Government. Since entering office last year the company has met or had dealings with leading ministers, including the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the Chancellor, George Osborne.

So the Government's policy regarding Google can hardly be considered innocent. Commenting on the Government's latest review of intellectual property the Prime Minister stated: ‘The founders of Google have said they could never have started their company in Britain.' He then praised the far more flexible copyright regime that the United States follows in contrast to Britain and other members of the European Union. In Dickens' day the United States did not even recognize copyright. Since then it has always leaned in the direction of ‘innovative' business rather than the creator.

This is admittedly a complicated issue. But again it is one that authors should try to understand and not simply bow to what nominated administrators tell them to follow. The Government seems set on a course of ‘not penalizing the innovators,' that is, Google. I myself believe we have to give this Government a loud refusal and cooperate with the much stronger legislation on intellectual property proposed by the EU.

Do please think about this before you send in that ballot. Do you want nominated members of your Management Committee, who have not expressed a single word of their policy to you? Or do you want the independent candidate, who has?

SOA London: democrats or apparatchiks?

Gregor Dallas — 2011-07-02T17:04:06Z

A letter from Tom

These last seven days have been marked by a curious little polemic over whether the self-nominated members of the Management Committee are democrats or apparatchiks.

Tom Holland — Chairman of the Management Committee, who should be the most important man in the Society — finally got around to answering the campaign that forced this election. But he did not answer by writing to this Electoral Section on GD-Frontiers (the formally announced forum for the campaign), but instead chose SOAF's novel website, www.writersinfrance.net . Now, I have deliberately avoided entering political comments on this site because this could compromise my role as Chairman of SOAF. Also, one should note that we still have some quite serious teething problems with this site.

But Tom, who must have been trawling the net instead of using formal campaign information, did insist on this small new site. He thus avoided all contact with me. In it he found a short article by SOAF's Secretary, Pamela Lake. It was under a section entitled ‘Gregor's election bid'.

Pamela's article claims that the Management Committee's system of self-nomination ‘reminds one of elections in the Soviet Union where the voter had no choice — a put up job in fact.' She did not, in fact, mention a polemical word about 'apparatchiks'.

It was Tom who did that. In his answer he assured that ‘elections for the Management Committee (have) been contested before.' He further promised that the ‘system is entirely open and transparent.' And there was nothing nasty about it: ‘far from this being some sinister shuffling of apparatchiks around a Politburo, the names of those nominated are posted in the Author, together with an invitation to other members to apply…'

Now, I don't know if Tom is aware of this or not, but the term ‘apparatchik' is not actually new to this campaign. As a matter of fact, I have used it in some of my own writings about the Society. And I have used it because some of the members of SOAF, angered at being sidelined by Central Office, have employed the same term in the past.

I did reply to Tom, asking him to provide us with a list of open elections to the Management Committee over the last twenty years. None of the members I know can remember any. And I further asked him what his and his nominated colleagues' policy was with regards to the deteriorating situation in publishing — ‘or are we still faced, just one month before the votes are due, with the silence of apparatchiks?'

Tom, so far, has not answered. Nor have the four nominated candidates. All we have on policy is that of the one independent candidate. It is the independent candidate who forced the election. For the correspondence, see http://www.writersinfrance.net/greg....

The summer '11 issue of the Author

This is actually no minor matter, for it is in the Management Committee that the decisions are made, or should be made, on how to combat the scandalously bad publishing that is currently going on in Britain — and elsewhere. Publishers can hide a lot. But they can't hide the rot that they publish.

What is the Society of Authors doing about this? Precious little. And the main reason is that author-members are not participating in the way their Society is run. There is no pressure on the Society to do anything. So they don't do much, save ‘quiet negotiations', behind the scenes. We don't actually know what those 'quiet negotiations' are. What we do know is that they will never directly take on ‘the powers that be,' the corporate publishers; so they will never confront the big issues.

What do you expect but apparatchiks? I don't think there is any sinister conspiracy here. It is simply what happens when you rely on nominated administrators and have no democracy. That is the situation we are in today.

The point was brought home to me later in the week when the summer issue of the Author arrived on my breakfast table. I was quite shocked at the way the apparatchiks had so blatantly taken over the magazine. Here we are in the midst of an election and yet there is virtually no mention of it in the official organ of the SOA!

This summer issue shows the emptiness of Tom's claim that the ‘system is entirely open and transparent.' In the first place, it is the very opposite of open. Nobody, who did not know that an election was in course, could guess that an election is going on. True, if you are living in Britain, ballot papers are included. But not if you are in France, or anywhere else in the world. Shouldn't there anyway be a mention of this 'open' election in the main body of the magazine, like on page 1? Sorry, the SOA is not being open!

Secondly, it is hardly transparent, either in the way this election is being run, or, over the longer term, in the secret manner in which policy is eventually executed. Whatever happens in this election, the majority of the Management Committee will still consist of nominated members, who have told us nothing.

Doesn't any one of these nominated people have an idea in their heads? They are all writers. Surely — at some moment 'twixt midnight and dawn in a witching time of light slumber — some thought emerges about what eventually happens to just their writings? Well, as members of an executive committee, they have a duty to say to the rest of us authors what those thoughts are. Or do they, like apparatchiks, sit passively under the orders of some higher authority? If this be the case, we have, as members, a right to know who this is and how these orders are made. Whatever, all this is the very opposite of transparency!

The Noticeboard

‘Far from this being some sinister shuffling of apparatchiks around a Politburo, the names of those nominated are posted in the Author, together with an invitation to other members to apply.' Have you ever found those postings?

Effectively, if you look at last spring's issue of the Author you will find, on page 34 out of 36 pages, a ‘Noticeboard', in which the first item is ‘The Society'. There is no mention of the word ‘election', either in the headings or anywhere else. But this is where the famous announcement is made of the four new nominees. On what basis are these nominations made? Nothing is said. Are minutes kept of the meetings? If they are, they are not made public. So there we are, the nominees are posted at the back of the magazine, where nobody will notice them. And that is all we get.

And, of course, there is the invitation to members to present an application, in which case we are promised a ‘ballot', not an election... Hold your breath, and let's hope nobody presents himself!

But this time somebody did. And that was yours truly.

In the April issue, the four nominees are listed by name and biographical pedigree. I supposed you are supposed to think that these people are so good that an ordinary member couldn't possible compete. Let them dare!

Well, I'm sorry, this sort of thing doesn't impress me in the slightest, nor should I imagine it impresses many members. One good book is worth eighty bad ones, and I've no idea what most of these books are about. I do know the books that are getting published these days are not very good.

What members want to know is what are the nominees going to do on the Committee? What is their attitude before the current publishing crisis? What is their programme?

As an outside candidate I was allowed 75 words for a Profile. I turned to one of the active members of SOAF, who is also a very accomplished journalist, who knows how to précis, to write this. I did not compose it myself, which, as it turned out, was an important point. At SOAF, we discussed my possible candidature over a couple of ‘First Tuesdays' — as SOAF's monthly meetings are known. There were also a number of emails that passed between us. That was also an important point: the decision to run was a collective decision.

The text of the profile appears on the front page of this Electoral Section of my website. It is also reproduced on the ballot sheet. I kept all electoral statements away from SOAF's website for reasons that I have explained.

The general idea of the profile was to minimize professional qualifications — though I certainly have them — and maximize intention and programme, which I would then follow up with a series of articles appearing on this website. They are in the process of being written. Anybody going to my website thus has a clear idea of what I, and many members of SOAF, stand for. Surely, that is what members of the Society expect of a genuine, open candidature.

Then comes this summer's ‘Noticeboard', less than a month before the ballots are due (20 July). As in spring, there is no mention of an election. The four official nominees are again listed, this time without bibliographies. Then, in the second paragraph, there is the first, and presumably last, mention of me in the Author's very brief account of this whole campaign.

I must say, I have been receiving calls and emails from people outraged.

The anonymous person who wrote this ‘Noticeboard' obviously does not feel too comfortable about my candidature. He or she completely turns round the sense of my Profile by making me sound like an embittered writer sitting in a garret trying to advance his amateurish scribblings. As ‘Noticeboard' sees it: ‘Gregor Dallas, who describes himself as “a well-know historian whose work, as with the other four candidates, speaks for itself.”

Now isn't that clever? The implication is, obviously, that he is not a well-known historian and his work does not speak for itself. I do not think my colleague at SOAF did a bad job on that Profile, given the stingy amount of space made available. The problem is in the malice of ‘Noticeboard'.

How must we react?

There is no way one can describe this system as ‘entirely open and transparent'. When an independent candidate presents himself he is given 75 words for a profile and then just mentioned once, less than a month before the ballots are due.

I have presented an entire programme and policy in these essays, but the chances are nobody will read them because the website is only mentioned on the ballot, by which time the members have probably decided on who they will vote for.

Nowhere is it mentioned that I am, and have been since 2006, Chairman of the Society of Authors, France. That gives me experience — and an understanding of problems — that I do not think the nominated candidates have. The omission also shows a terrible contempt for the regional groups of members.

Is this deliberate? ‘Noticeboard' does not show much consideration, or understanding of what is going on. I doubt that there is a general conspiracy to keep members sidelined from the main issues at play. But that is no doubt what is happening. No doubt, the authors are partly to blame; they work usually at home and their main concern is their writing.

I do ask myself why am I the only independent candidate to present myself, the only independent candidate for many years at least. I would be delighted if there were more.

Authors have to speak up more, behave more collectively, and especially use those regional groupings to make their voices heard. Otherwise all that will be left are the apparatchiks at the centre, who will kowtow to the powers that be when times get bad.

‘Will'? That is the situation we face right now.

The inexorable world of André Schiffrin

Gregor Dallas — 2011-06-01T13:51:15Z

Half a century of publishing

A voice in the wilderness, a man of courage, has for many years led a lonely battle against the abuses of the corporate publishers and the cultural trail of ruin that they leave behind them. One would think that the associations that represent authors would say something. They don't. Across the Western world most authors' associations confine themselves to arcane legal matters or rights such as photocopying, which have little or no effect on an author's income but they don't take on those publishers who earn billions in profits. You might have thought the authors themselves would show more concern for their interests, but their silence is deafening; the better known ones hide behind their successes, grateful that the world, imperfect as it is, has provided them with a platform; the rest are too worried that their own self-perceived failures will be exposed if they speak up in public. This peculiar self-destructive psychology of authors is what makes collective action by writers so difficult — and the publishers know it.

André Schiffrin, this exceptional solitary warrior, opposed to a hostile corporate publishing world, is now a man in his late seventies. He is a genuine editor, part of a dwindling breed, has his own ‘non-profit' publishing company and he has lived through all the upheavals in both French and American publishing since the 1950s. That is a significant element in the tale: Schiffrin can describe over fifty years of international publishing history whereas most accounts that we have are confined to a very recent time perspective and are usually limited to one country. It is thanks to Schiffrin that we can see, for instance, that the effects of technology have been overrated; the problem seems rather in the developments in the structure of publishing over the last half century.

War and postwar: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

His father, Jacques Schiffrin, was a Russian Jew, who left the anti-Semitic world of Stalin's Soviet Union to set himself up in Paris where he eventually founded what, by the 1950s, was to be the most prestigious publishing house in France, the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. But Jacques Schiffrin was by then no longer part of it: in the late 1930s the family publishing house of Gallimard bought up Le Pléiade and then the anti-Jewish laws of Vichy forced him to resign. Jacques Schiffrin and his family fled to New York. It is not hard to guess how that combative spirit was born in his son, André.

He was politically active, as a student, on the extreme left, co-founding the Students for a Democratic Society (the SDS). The SDS was a pretty crackpot American student organization of the 1960s operating out of a ‘national office' in New York City that had a few desks, broken chairs, a couple of filing cabinets and a few old typewriters. It none the less commandeered the ‘student movement' of that era and it defended ideas that would mark Schiffrin's world for the decades ahead. One was the idea of a grassroots, ‘participatory democracy', born out of the Southern civil rights movement which, in those days, united young American Jews with the passions of blacks who, a hundred years after the Civil War, had never yet established their equality in the great American Republic. The SDS had a hatred of big business. And they thought that all problems in every area were linked to each other and they therefore refused to support single issue campaigns but preferred to get involved in one large struggle for justice on all fronts at the same time. This is still characteristic of Schiffrin's thought today.

Schiffrin claims he was never a Communist. Actually, one of the things that marked this ‘New Left' SDS from the old American left — from people like Michael Harrington — was their absolute rejection of ‘anti-Communism' and their unhealthy tolerance of the Soviet Union and of authoritarian socialist regimes in general. The SDS recruited ‘Progressive Communists' and Maoists; in the summer of 1969, at the SDS national convention in Chicago, every delegate was given the newspaper New Left Notes, which contained the manifesto, ‘You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows,' lifted from a Bob Dylan song. The Weatherman Faction of the SDS was the source of terrible political violence in the 1970s. Communist or not, the SDS was flirting with fire.

That uncomfortable thought needs to be born in mind, even when we are talking about publishing.

Quality publishing and subsequent mergers

Schiffrin moved into his father's field, the publishing world. As director of Pantheon Books he introduced to the American public a series of important authors, largely French, such as Sartre, Camus and Foucault, most of them of the left and a product of the ‘spirit of 1944', which had abolished the collaborationist newspapers and limited even the power of the publishing houses by placing them under the control of the unions, like the syndicat du livre. In those days, that meant the French Communist Party. Liberal voices have expressed the view that French publishing under the control of the unions was as oppressive as corporate publishing today, though there was admittedly a far greater diversity in publishing in the 1950s than one now finds because publishing houses were smaller. One of Schiffrin's greatest coups at Pantheon was to introduce to Americans the great Russian dissident, Boris Pasternak.

Then the takeovers began in earnest and that involved, in the name of ‘profitability', the firing of a large number of competent American editors in the early 1990s and among them André Schiffrin of Pantheon Books. It was the beginning of a general offensive against editors and the advance of the Marketing and Sales people. Schiffrin went on to found his own non-profit, public interest publishing company, The New Press. More interesting still, he began writing about his experience and what he saw going on in publishing in the United States and Western Europe.

In a series of short, incisive books published over the last two decades Schiffrin presented an analysis of the situation that is as impeccable as it is devastating.

The corporate structural process

The first phenomenon he noted was the concentration mergers in the business. ‘The process of concentration is unending,' he wrote. ‘Since so many houses have now been swallowed up, one is reduced to seeing groups which have already bought up the smaller publishers being eaten in their turn.' One country that even in the 1990s expected to be immune to the process was France, where publishing is basically limited now to two groups, Hachette and Le Seuil. The two groups, by the turn of the century, were buying up overseas, notably in Great Britain.

The immediate effect of the mergers was an increased demand for ‘profitability' accompanied by a decline of editorial power and the appearance of what he called in French, l'édition sans éditeurs, publishers without editors. This is when the Sales and Marketing departments came to the fore.

Schiffrin devotes considerable space to the firing in 2003 of the prestigious editorial director Ann Godoff by Peter Olson when Random House was taken over by the Bertelsmann Group. Bertelsmann, in a letter of information, announced that every one of its affiliates was expected to attain profit at a level of 15 per cent per annum — an impossible figure for a quality publisher to attain. In the offensive against the editorial departments, it was not just the big editors that were fired. Whole editorial teams were decimated; the survivors got the clear message that they either conform to management's expectations or quit. The editorial departments were henceforth filled with a lot of ‘yes-men'.

International venture capital

This was occurring right through the corporate world. It was as true in Britain as in America. Rupert Murdoch took over Harper Collins and immediately stopped the activities of Flamingo Books. The venerable old house of John Murrays, one of the most famous non-fiction publishers, was gobbled up by Hodder Headline and within two years it was putting out a list of popular fiction and ‘faction'; Hodder Headline in turn were eaten up by Hachette.

It is remarkable how the two main groups in France were controlled by an arms-dealer and an aircraft manufacturer, Dassault and Lagardère. Schiffrin explained this was due to the dependence of France's large financial groups on orders of the state — a fact that created an unhealthy relationship of political power with economic power.

A twist in the story of international mergers, which went beyond the greed of the main players, was the way these large corporations relied on venture capital to fund their huge enterprises. Venture capital was raised at rates in excess of 15 per cent. As Michael Sissons, the literary agent, explained to the Bookseller in the 1980s, quality publishers must learn to survive on an annual income of 2 per cent of company capital. Thus quality had to be sacrificed.

Quality fiction and non-fiction could not survive in a corporate world with such brutal demands. It was the structure of the corporate companies, not the new technologies, that was pushing quality publishing steadily downwards. In the last ten years that movement downwards became precipitous.

A law of silence

The most terrible feature of Shiffrin's story is the silence it imposes — not so much on those who run these organizations, though they have their own rules of muted governance, making life pretty intolerable for those that have to live under them. Marcel Dassault's heavy handed interventions in the pages of the Figaro, including articles written by himself, and his public commentaries on what constituted a good newspaper, led some of the staff to murmur that the paper was becoming a ‘parish newsletter'. No one had great hopes of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers ever writing positive remarks about the European Union. European books became rare in Harper Collins once his empire took control of that publishing house; one of its first actions was to suppress a biography of Murdoch in progress that promised to be critical of its subject. Another corporate executive famous for his interventions was the flamboyant Jean-Marie Messier, chairman of the Vivendi Universal Group, who lived in a magnificent flat on New York's Fifth Avenue, gave extravagant gifts to the Metropolitan Museum and was a favourite in the society pages of the New York Times — until he went bankrupt in 2002. The collapse led to a takeover by Jean-Luc Lagardère, Kaiser of the Hachette empire. That merger, in one stroke, turned France into the most concentrated, monopolistic publishing nation in the world.

But what was striking was that, when all these mergers were occurring, there was barely a word of protest anywhere in the West. Authors' associations said nothing. Authors themselves were totally silent. Bernard-Henri Levy, the philosopher published by Grasset, might have been quick to denounce every injustice in the world; but he was very meek and mild when writing of Hachette, which reigned over his own Grasset. In 2003 he quoted in Le Monde a load of misleading figures that gave the impression that concentration in France was no more pronounced than in any other European country. It was quite evidently not true. Maurice Druon of the Académie française and former Minister of Culture also argued the same thing in this series of articles in Le Monde. France, he claimed, was no more monopolistic than the other countries of Europe. Yet the facts were that 98 per cent of the dictionaries in France, 82 per cent of the school books, and 45 per cent of general literature were under the control of Hachette. Furthermore, 65 per cent of book distribution was controlled by Hachette. The fall of Vivendi and the rise of Hachette brought about a degree of national concentration that had no precedent anywhere in the world. That was the moment when Hachette began to extend its domain in Britain.

Again, there was virtually no complaint. Not a word from the authors. Not an ounce of public debate. There was almost celebration when Hodder-Headline, later to be absorbed by the mighty Hachette, took over John Murray's in May 2002. Tim Hely-Hutchinson, chief executive of Headline, was announced as the ‘friend of authors' and the pages of the SOA's The Author were opened to him. There were no complaints in public or, as far as one could tell, in private. Part of this was due to the secretive way in which the deal was hammered out. It was, as it was said at the time, an ‘exclusive approach'; no competitors were even considered, and the value of the sale was never announced. Hely-Hutchinson divulged that ‘he wanted to maintain links with Murray's elegant Georgian office in Albermarle Street,' but exactly what those links with this fabulous piece of real estate in the middle of London were was never revealed. Within a few months the staff were moved to a high floor within a skyscraper on Euston Road which looked like a public lavatory turned inside out. Murray's, said Chairman Tim, was going to be ‘an upmarket complement to the Hodder and Headline lists.' Within a few years it was producing exactly the same kind of downmarket lists of humorous books and pap fiction as Hodder Headline. Shhh! not a word!

Why the silence? There was a general acceptance in those years that people with business acumen knew what they were doing and genuinely had no desire to destroy the treasures of a national culture. The authors believed them. Anyway, they were certainly not going to expose themselves individually to commercial retaliation by their all-powerful masters. It was the same with the agents, though the mergers were radically reducing their choice for begging among the corporate publishers. But destroy these captains of industry did.

Moreover, there was that corporative ideology which authors, and public opinion generally, accepted as a sort of God-given truth. As Peter Olson — the American spokesman for the German giant, Bertelsmann (then busy taking over Random House) — put it to the New York Post: ‘there is no contradiction between literary quality and financial results.' Could there be any contradiction? Perish the thought! Yet, within months of the takeover, Olson had fired Ann Godoff, one of the best editors in New York, and placed all of Random House under the control of Ballantine Books, a downmarket, entirely commercially oriented group within Random.

The facts are there for anyone with eyes to view in broad daylight. The recent history of publishing mergers in the United States and Europe again and again demonstrates that literary quality and financial results are utterly incompatible. The incompatibility is mechanical. A literary house cannot grow faster than 2 per cent per annum. Venture capital demands growth rates of at least 15 per cent. That is a fundamental, unavoidable incompatibility.

The accompanying silence is worrying. Thought is suppressed. Philosophy disappears. Beauty and elegance disappear from our shelves. And, hush! political debate is being stifled.

At the time of the outbreak of the Second Gulf War in 2002 and the year that followed, no book was published in the United States critical of the government's actions. Similarly, it is impossible in Britain today to publish in the trade press a book that is even vaguely enthusiastic about the European Union. No general, objective account of the MPs ‘expenses scandal' of 2009, which determined the results of Britain's last general election, has appeared. When one starts analysing the lists in history and non-fiction in general the results are so deeply troubling that one now wonders whether a free election is possible on that side of the English Channel. In Britain, at least, there no longer exists freedom of expression. That is no exaggeration.

The solution: a necessary compromise

Something has to be done. You can't abolish history without payng the price in terms of freedom. You can't cancel out whole realms of non-fiction without dragging down the quality of literature in general. But, this said, the solution is not a simple one.

Schiffrin himself looks backwards over time, hoping to find some answer there. But while it is worth joining him, we should do so with caution. Schiffrin starts by comparing the bestseller lists of the 1940s and 50s, the time of his youth, with those of today. In the postwar years names like Faulkner, Capote, Thomas Mann, Camus and Sartre were up there; and there was also a happy band of serious historians. You don't get anything like that today. But those days are gone and are unlikely to be repeated.

To be sure, the talented writers are still there. And so are the discerning readers. The trick, surely, is in identifying them. There is no way that the Nielsen Bookscan will do this, because Nielsen relies exclusively on 'titles', not book content. We have to change our methods. In the end, I think it must be done through competent, authoritative editors.

Schiffrin himself wants to go back to the Europe of the late 1940s. I somewhat simplify his approach, but this broadly reflects his views. What is important to note is that publishing in the immediate postwar years was reactive. It was designed to prevent a situation that had produced the horrors of Hitler. The press that had developed in the 1920s and 30s was controlled by industrial cartels — many were nationalist, fascist and Nazi and by the time of the war were almost universally collaborationist with Hitler's regime. (One cannot help detecting some uncanny parallels between the publishng world of the 1920s and 30s and the restrictions placed on opinion by the current narrow corporate world.) In France, in the autumn of 1944, after the Liberation, the existing papers were nearly all abolished. There was a similar hour of reckoning with French publishers. To guarantee independence from the forces of money a system of control by the contributors to the press was established, run by the unions. That is, very basically, what Schiffrin would like to see restored: a system of ‘autonomy', guaranteed by the state. A similar system, the Mitbestimmungsrecht, was created by the occupying powers in post-Nazi Germany.

The problem was Communist control of the unions. This created a world of ‘opinion' in the ruling republic of letters that populated the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the jazz clubs of the rues Jacob and Huchette that was basically Marxist. Thought was not free there, as ample witnesses of that era now testify. This was something that SDS-influenced Schiffrin tended to ignore. And he still does.

Here I have to make a personal confession. As a British student, in my late teens, at the University of California at Berkeley, I became a member of the SDS in 1968. I was absolutely enamoured with the idea of a ‘participatory democracy' and a locally developed political consciousness. As a young historian I was attracted to the way the SDS avoided single issues and rather linked all the social questions together. I met people like Eldridge Cleever and Bobby Seele, who then lived in nearby Oakland, and I found their Black Power Movement something to be admired: blacks in America were told that they should no longer accept their position of second-class citizens. Of all the movements to emerge in the 1960s — flower power, sexual liberation, drugs, experimental religions, anti-war protest and the rest, I would say that this Black Power movement was the one movement that had a massive, permanent effect on our Western culture: civil rights and the aspiration to freedom among minorities. It had a profound effect on the decolonizing world. The current President of the United States, Barack Obama, is a product of the Black Power movement; and politics in the United States will never be the same after his election.

I remember driving over the bridges of the fabulous Bay Area to join my radical political friends in San Francisco and Marin County. But I also, curiously to some of my friends, happened to be a British Conservative. I was particularly influenced by the commitment to the European idea by Heath's Conservatives — it fitted that broad perspective of 'linkages' which I was developing as a historian. My comrades mocked me, but I myself found no contradiction between the participatory emphasis of the SDS, as well as its championship of local identity, and the individualism then expressed among most Conservatives of the time. Essentially, this determined my formative thought then — and it is still in me today.

Those youthful passions are so important. I compare the youth of André Schiffrin — several years my senior — with my own and I find in there the roots of my sympathy, and our differences. If our solutions to the current publishing malaise are not the same, I am sure part of this is due to that different experience in youth.

I separated from the SDS when I was a post-graduate. They were too sympathetic to the Communists. They were too tolerant of oppressive regimes of the Left. Che Guevara may have been their hero but the Che was responsible for a genocide in Angola — and nobody spoke about these horrors. Both the SDS and Black Power turned violent. I had no sympathy for Angela Davis, then down in Los Angeles; she was an apologist for both the massacres in Africa and the oppressive Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. I remained a Conservative individualist.

In the end, we have to keep politics out of publishing. We heard too much from the Left in the early postwar years. We hear too much from the Right today. Both are dangerous developments.

What we need, first of all, is a public debate about what is going on in publishing. I think, and hope, that what will emerge is a mixed system where the state will have to intervene to support quality, but where commercial publishing still operates according to its own logic. Quality publishing is essential to our liberties. But commercial freedom must be a part of our world, too. There is, in fact, no way around this. The twentieth century is a sad tale of how one attempted either to impose quality over commerce, or commerce over quality. Such perfect utopian models, when forced upon reality, have always ended in tears.

Commerce and quality — entirely incompatible — have to learn to live together, like unhappy spouses, for the sake of future generations. That is the way it has essentially been in the West since at least the Renaissance. It is the way it must be in the future: a truly balanced, and thus difficult, challenging compromise forged by intelligent, articulate, outspoken people. It is the only solution.

But first the debate! We have to learn to speak up and break this monotonous, oppressive law of silence. Silence is our greatest enemy. That is what our campaign is all about.

André Schiffrin writes in English. But I find his books in English are very difficult to obtain — which perhaps says something about what I have called ‘commercial censorship'. In French I get, over the net, his books within 48 hours: L'Edition sans éditeur (1999), Le Contrôle de la parole (2005), and L'Argent et les mots (2010), which are all published by La Fabrique in Paris.

Coming up: articles on ‘Technology and Publishing' and ‘The Demise of the Net Book Agreement'.