Mal Peet

Is this familiar at all? You’re alone in a very foreign country and have come unstuck somehow. You’ve no grasp of the language and all you know of the geography is you’re miles from anywhere with an hour of daylight left. You panic, naturally; but slowly this modulates into a sort of liberation. You are pervaded by an inner grace and surrender to the whims of providence. In short, you give up. Let go, as drowners do, apparently.

I get this feeling, this urge to succumb, increasingly frequently. A while back, I was brooding over the fact that of the 24,000 literary festivals in the UK this year I had been invited to just one. Uno. Fortunately, it was Edinburgh. I love Edinburgh. The duckboards are just that crucial bit nearer the surface of the mire than at Hay. In fact, I love festivals per se. Deigning to wear one of those dangly things with AUTHOR on it. Pretending to think China Mieville is working for yurt security. Playing Knock Up Ginger on the door of the writers’ portaloo when you know Ian McEwan is in there. As already confessed, I don’t get out much.

I rang the Goddess of Publicity to find out why. Was it anything to do with that near-fatality in my audience at Budleigh Salterton last year?

“Not really,” she said. “It’s more that we are re-evaluating festivals. Let’s face it, Mal. We shell out for your first-class train fare, put you up at an overpriced hotel where you loot the minibar for three nights, take you out to overpriced dinners…”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s what I…”

“And for what? So you can preen in front of 20 people in a tent.”

“More like 30, actually.”

“And it’s always the same audience. Well, not the same people, obviously. They’re not like itinerant fruit-pickers. But the same kind of people. Whereas what we want to do is expand your readership. And to be frank, the internet is a better platform for that. And cheaper. When did you last update your Facebook page, by the way?”

Worker bees
I put the phone down with a shaking hand. I turned on the radio, and blow me if the first voice I heard wasn’t that of superagent Andrew Wylie. (Why do they call him The Jackal? His name’s Wylie, for God’s sake, so it should be Coyote. Duh.) His gist was that Amazon will destroy publishing. Just as it drove HMV (long-time owners, not incidentally, of Waterstone’s) from the High Street, Amazon will raze bookshops. Kindle sales are already overhauling book sales. Ergo, Amazon will become sole trader in literature and this will be a Bad Thing. Publishing houses, reduced to feeding the great succubus, will sicken and die. Authors will become worker bees, carrying their precious pollen back to the throbbing Amazonian hive and get none of the honey.

Now, considering that Wylie had but recently stitched a deal giving Amazon exclusivity on his own digital-only imprint Odyssey (named after a tale of remarkably poor navigation), this diatribe might seem a tad inconsistent. But it’s possible to learn a thing or two from the sound of a coyote biting the hand that feeds it. Wylie noted that downloads – legal or otherwise – have redounded, sometimes, to the benefit of musicians in that they attract large audiences to live performances for which musicians are – again sometimes – paid handsomely. In the future, Wylie opined, writers will have to do something similar. We’ll have to go on The Road – schlepp from bookfest to bookfest begging people in tents to download us onto their Kindles for £1.49 a pop. Oh.

I took refuge in the lavatory where I found a back copy of the Observer containing a piece by Robert McCrum. He’d heard “a low grumble of discontent in the literary undergrowth”! Authors are paid nothing or peanuts for appearing at festivals (gosh, I’d forgotten that) and are getting fed up. He cites a ‘well-known diarist’ (I could only think of dead ones, but soldiered on) whose event attracted eighteen thousand quid’s worth of ticket sales with every last penny going to the organisers. McCrum quotes another festive dissident: “Bugger all is not a percentage I can live with as a professional writer.” Down with festivals, then!

I went back to my computer. Amazon is flogging my latest book for less than half price. Email from my agent, informing me that the company has employed a lovely person whose job spec is to get me gigs. Dubai is already in the bag.

I fall to my knees, lost on the steppes of my mental Bazukistan, and give up. Then in the distance I see a hand-lettered sign. It reads: ‘Bazukistan Literary Festival This Way’. I get up and stagger onward.

Mal Peet is the author of several novels for young adults, including Tamar, winner of the 2005 CILIP Carnegie Medal, and Exposure, which won the 2009 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. His latest novel is Life: An Exploded Diagram.

© Mal Peet

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