Keeper of the flame, by Catriona

How do you think the publishing industry is adapting to the "attention economy," and how do you feel about those shifts? Are books an antidote to shortening attention spans?

Okayyyyyyyy.

Last question: yes, books are an antidote to shortening attention spans. Like Gabriel said on Tuesday, sitting down and pointing your brain at a novel for a sustained period is cleansing and restorative to the soul. Does anyone ever feel worse after reading for an hour? Does anyone ever feel better after scrolling for an hour? 

First question: I have no idea about anything very much publishing is doing. I'm not proud of that but I'm not ashamed either. It's not that I'm uninterested; more that I'm tapped out with the writing bit and trusting the people who do the rest feels like a good plan.   

I hope what the publishing industry is doing is holding the line. If Broadway and the West End are still putting on plays, despite cinema . . . If cinemas are still opening films, despite television . . .  If television networks and streamers are still commissioning shows despite YouTube . . . I hope publishing can keep doing what they do and not freak out over the flux and disruption of some people currently being beguiled by the torrent of 90 or 45 or 10 second videos in their pockets. Because books aren't going anywhere. 

I'm tremendously heartened by the news that more new bookshops are opening than closing, that paper books are holding steady, that romantasy book groups' average age is . . . just old enough to be reading romantasy. All in all, I'm a convert to the ebullient attituide of English children's author Katherine Rundell, who said recently on this topic, "Pessimism is a luxury for other times; it's bad meat and it nourishes no one." Hell, yeah!

I'm going to lurch off-topic now, but not far. The rest of this post is cheerleading, plain and simple. 

It's a big year for the novel this year. Next month is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth. Two hundred and fifty years! I know, I know, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe but stick with me anyway. 

It's fashionable in pessimistic circles to say that Austen couldn't get published today, but I disagree (Rundell-style). I think if someone was editing Thomas Hardy in 2025 London or New York, they might gently suggest that we don't need to start with the geology of the county, and Marketing might take a long look at some of the subplots in George Eliot, but our girl Jane? 

Look at her first sentences:

"Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage."

"About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income."

"The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex."

"It is a sentence so universally familiar that a single blog in the business of a good through line must really try to resist."

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine."

(Which sentence opens which novel, gentle readers?)

They're variously gossipy, foreboding, ironic, satirical and more, but every one of them is a promissory note binding her to deliver a big fat feast of a story. And she does. 

When I think of what she went through with her publishers (hint: Georgian England wasn't a great place and time to be a woman) and reflect that she kept on writing and died with quarter of a first draft on her little round table, I think I can deal with whatever comes my way from this business.

More than that, I want to carry the torch. She was a genius; I'm not. If she wrote on two inches of ivory, I write on half a grain of rice. And no one's going to be reading me 250 years after I was born. All this I know. But I want to do my bit. There's been a quarter millennium of funny, sharp, sweet, plotty, scary, lyrical, exciting, heartbreaking tales of good and bad and love and hate and loss and courage and redemption since she dared to do what she did. TikTok's not putting the lights out, okay?

Cx