A friend of mine kindly forwarded an e-mail from a well-known book promoter offering a free telephone seminar featuring an interview with the author of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. This reminded me of something I thought when that book and its numerous follow-ups first appeared - has there been a worse book title in the whole of human history?! Yes, yes, I know the books have sold gazillions and I am sure that the title played its part in contributing to that commercial success, but it’s still mind-bendingly, buttock-clenchingly awful. 

For a start, the metaphor doesn’t even work - I get that “chicken soup” is intended here to mean something soothing that will make you feel better - but I can’t stand chicken soup and I doubt I’m the only one. Surely “nice cup of tea” (for the British edition at least) or “foot massage” would work better? The quality of the metaphor aside, the meaning - this book will provide something comforting for your “soul” - is unspeakably appalling. Why not drop the metaphors entirely and just call it “A Bunch of Sentimental Dross”? Other books have made me want to hurl them across the room, but usually only after I have read at least part of them.

But wait! I could be being unfair, since the title has prevented me from going within so much as ten yards of a copy. So as part of my extensive research for this blog I read online the first story in the first of the books...and it was worse than I could have imagined. Unthinking, unquestioning, cheap emotion of dubious authenticity. I struggled to get to the end and the story isn't half a page long.

So maybe the “chicken soup” metaphor works after all? The books are something you would only imbibe if someone had a gun to your head or you were in need of an emetic...

In the previous blog post I discussed the down side of trying to get published via the traditional route, by which I mean finding yourself an agent and then getting a book deal with a traditional publishing house. This is both very difficult and also a frustrating, time-consuming process. So to move to the positive case for self-publishing: in my limited experience so far, it is light on frustration, switching between Apple- and Word-formatted documents aside, and while also time-consuming if feels like the time taken is being consumed for a positive purpose, rather than at best squandered or at worst spent accumulating rejection.

One of the questions asked when you put your book out yourself as I have done is “Why didn’t you keep trying to get it published conventionally?” While one or two established authors have apparently chosen to self-publish electronically their new works, it’s highly unlikely that any new author has opted for the self-publishing route over a deal with a publishing company. Indeed, I can exclusively reveal here that I did not turn down any multi-book multi-million dollar deals before releasing “Milligan” through Amazon. So let’s not kid ourselves: the conventional route with a bricks and mortar publisher is still the preferred option for (almost) all writers.

Trying to get a publisher means sending your manuscript off to agents (since most publishing houses don’t accept submissions directly from authors), with each agent having their own preferences for how the book should be submitted: electronically or hard copy; synopsis or not; one chapter, three chapters, five chapters or some other length, and so on. You have to trawl around to find agents who might be appropriate for your book, then tailor each submission to their needs, then wait for ages for a reply, which is usually negative or non-existent, and the advice is you need to do this up to two or three hundred times before you’ve reached the end of the road. As you may imagine, it’s a massively time-consuming and dispiriting experience and unless you get an early positive reply - and remember that the agent is only the first step; the publisher is still unlikely to take you on, particularly given that the whole industry is in crisis - you could have been doing something more productive and enjoyable, like writing another book or banging your head against a wall. So despite one or two encouraging comments I stopped after about twenty submissions to agents.

Ultimately it comes down to what the author wants. Nobody would say no to fame and fortune, and if that is over 90 per cent of the reason you wrote your book then it’s probably best to keep pounding away at the doors of recognised agents and publishers. However, if you wrote your book in large part for fun and just want to get it out there, the digital revolution has made this much easier and also more enjoyable. So one part of the answer is a negative with regard to the orthodox publishing route. Next blog post I will explore the positive case for self-publishing.

The Guardian published an article earlier this week called “How to become an e-book superstar”, a classic case of the Guardian sub-editors overly sexing up an article title. I guess they needed new employment after that Iraq dossier scandal. The article would more accurately have been called “Random and occasionally self-contradictory advice on e-publishing”. Quoting a successful self-published e-book writer’s sensible comment that you should "Write for the right reasons – i.e. yourself", the article immediately went on to say that only books in popular genres are likely to succeed and that you should pick your title according to what will come up often in online searches. “To thine own self be true, as long as thine own self wants to write teenage vampire fiction”, as Hamlet almost said.

But there was some worthwhile stuff in there as well, including advice to have your own website (already there on that one), to take some risks to get the word out (looking to send free copies of the paperback to editors of several publications once it’s ready), and to give your e-book away for free for a fixed time (looking into this as an option under the Amazon direct publishing package). I’ve heard the advice before to “Talk, don’t spam” but it bears reiteration. OK then! I promise I will put my effort into making these blog posts as interesting as I can, rather than inundating others with plugs.

In contrast to the implication of its headline, the article itself concludes by saying that the chances are e-book authors will make very little money from this. That seems to me to be a case for doing this for reasons other than fortune and glory, but to accept e-book superstardom with good grace if it should happen to come along! I won’t be holding my breath...

With novels there is no such thing as an immaculate conception. All stories are to some extent derived from or influenced by other narratives, whether they be real-life experiences or other forms of fictive tale. This truism gives rise to two frequently asked questions of any author: “How autobiographical is your book?”, and “What are your influences?” Here I’d like to address the second.

Jonathan Franzen, in a recent interview well worth reading, said correctly in my opinion that “almost everything a writer has ever read leaves some kind of mark”. Quite right, as was his recognition of the importance of negative influence. Were I in a flippant frame of mind I would answer the “influence” question with reference to James Clavell. He showed that you could sell millions by writing bad historical novels about Japan: eight hundred page tomes without a single well-crafted sentence in them! Other influences of that ilk came from Dan Brown, Jeffrey Archer and a host of other bad writers – “Good God, I must be able to do better than that!” And yes, I know I'll never sell a fraction of what they have.

At the other extreme are the writers who show you the awesome power of the written word, the capacity of paper and ink (and now e-ink too) to expand your capacity to understand what it means to be human. So Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Hardy and others are influences, but not in the sense that the questioner usually means. One of the influences of these greats is to make mortals realise their own limitations. The best you can hope for as a writer is that the quality of your prose has been improved by your exposure to genius.

So to come to what I think the questioner usually means – which books and writers have most directly and positively influenced your own work – the simple answer in my case is George McDonald Fraser, particularly his “Flashman” series of novels. Fraser showed that you could write funny, intelligent, informative fiction about the past. He demonstrated that not every historical novel had to be so bleedin’ po-faced. In fact, some of the challenge in writing my novel was not to be too influenced by the Flashman books. I hope I have avoided the risk of carrying influence too far into imitation: partly through the Japanese setting and partly because Milligan is “lad” to Flashman’s “cad”, a possessor of human failings in relatively normal quantity rather than the extremes of the bully of Tom Brown.