New ways with old dead things - Anne Rooney

 

Card index and cake — back to the 90s!

The very best stage of a new book is when the idea arrives, flaunting its pretty possibilities. It's full of shiny promise that hasn't yet been tarnished by reality. And then as you start to work it up, it's still exciting and you keep thinking 'and I'll add this; and this!' piling on more insights and tricks until the idea truly sparkles.

And then you get down to work. You bump into reality. The book as you exactly want it comes to a number of pages that can't be accommodated, like 77 or 109. Do you pad it out to 96 or 128 or cut it down to 64 or 96? And your book is a new concept. Publishers prefer things which are a familiar concept even though they say they are looking for the next new thing. They're really looking for the next new take on an old thing. How are you going to explain it without rambling on for longer than their attention span? I'm obviously getting old and jaded as these issues occur to me earlier in the process than is healthy. I don't want them to kill my enthusiasm for the shiny new thing. I try to ignore them and hope the page extent will somehow fix itself further down the line and I will suddenly be blessed with astonishing explanatory and marketing skills.

Wiwaxia, 520 million years ago, stained glass 2026

This is actually my second time with this New Thing. No sooner had I started it in spring when I had a couple of new commissions which took over that bit of time and headspace. But now I'm back with my old dead things, and my book that spans 500 million years. And back with my paper database that is part of the I-didn't-use-AI paper trail, should it be necessary to show that [sigh]. Autumn is a good time for a new project.  The black squirrels squabble outside, and often on top of, my garden office, the rain (at last!) drums on the roof, and escaping to the house would mean getting wet so I'll stay a bit longer. The light filters through the trees and then through the stained glass hanging in the windows, and as the stained glass is all of extinct animals it's just further encouragement. Give these old dead guys their moment in the sun again. Or the rain. I add 'rain' to the artwork notes. 

 

Anne Rooney

website
bluesky

Out now: Science Museum 2027 Space Annual

 

Do art, stay young - Anne Rooney

Most recent piece: medieval
fish

Looking back through some ABBA posts, I'm struck by how many of us not only write or illustrate but also make other things, whether knitting, collage, or gardens, and spend time viewing art in galleries, museums, theatres and concerts. It's not surprising, perhaps, that those who create for a living also enjoy other creative endeavours, but now it seems it's really good for us. 

A study which has gained some publicity this week reveals that engaging in artistic activity at least once a week slows the ageing process up to four per cent compared with people who don't engage with the arts. That's as much as the benefit of exercise and, in one of the ways of measuring, twice as good as exercise. You could gain both benefits by running to an art gallery, I suppose. I could stop getting the bus to my stained glass classes and cycle. (I would if it weren't for the dangerous potholes, but currently cycling seems more likely to shorten my healthy life.)

With this added benefit of enjoying the arts, there should be even more pressure on schools to make sure art, drama, and music lessons are given the support and funding they need. Yes, it's a long time before today's kids will reap this particular benefit of the arts. (It's most noticeable over 40, when age-related decay starts to set in.) But we need them to grow up to be arts practitioners so that the rest of us can gain this extra bit of happy life, seeing new art and drama and listening to new music. 

This isn't about adding years to your lifespan but to your healthspan — the time when you are in good health. So encouraging engagement with the arts from a young age, and careers in the arts, will save the health service money and us all the pain and despondency of age-related decline. All good, surely? And the kids will likely enjoy it. It's a win-win situation.

Work in progress: Ediacaran
animals

All that said, I'm likely decreasing my healthspan with all that exposure to lead and sharp glass. But no matter, it makes me happy!

  

Anne Rooney
website

Coming soon: How Big Is the Universe, Arcturus, September 2026; illustrated by Darcie Olley

  

  

Back to basics (1): I am not a robot — Anne Rooney

 

Last month, Hachette pulled Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, the first case of a major publisher cancelling a book because the author used gernerative AI in its creation. Last month, also, the Society of Authors launched its Human Authored initiative, a scheme to allow authors and publishers to declare that a book has a human author.* There are other marks and schemes that also aim to protect and recognise the value of human creativity. It's very sad that this is needed, and that we can't instead get AI-generated content labelled as such, but that's the world we are in right now and this is better than nothing.

Most contracts that an author signs with a respectable publisher  require a declaration that AI hasn't been used to produce the book. There is a huge debate to be had about what constitutes using AI to produce a book, with some people saying they 'only' use it for plot problems, suggesting names or places, correcting grammar, or any other isolated (or not so isolated) task in the whole process. My view is that you shouldn't be using it for anything. If you can't work out a plot and write grammatically, you're not up to being a professional writer yet, so go learn. But there are a wide range of views, and I'm not here to argue the case. The point here is that if you have signed a contract that says you won't use AI, or even adopted a mark that claims you haven't used AI, what happens if you are asked to prove you wrote the whole thing yourself? What if Mia Ballard were wrongly accused? (I'm not suggesting she was, by the way.) How do writers protect themselves from the accusation that because they use em dashes or triplets or some other spurious bit of 'proof', that they 'obviously' used AI to write their books? It's a question that has been clogging up writers' spaces on the web for a while now. 

Drafts — you worked to improve it!

One obvious thing you can do is to keep drafts. These are dated and show the slow build-up of your book over time. Another is to note all your sources. My drafts are heavily footnoted with sources for everything that isn't such common knowledge that it doesn't need to be verified. 

I usually write non-fiction, but when I write fiction I also footnote anything that comes from research. Originally, this was so that I could check facts, or deal with queries from editors and translators (and sometimes readers), but now it serves a useful additional purpose in proving I did actually do the research and the sources do exist, unlike those invented by ChatGPT and other LLMs. 

Books — show where you got the info

 

 Sources are often books, with page numbers included in the reference; I don't see LLMs being able to do that accurately, even if they tried. If it's a book I have, I don't include edition details. If it's a book in the library, the footnote includes the library classmark so I can get the same copy back if necessary. All these footnotes are deleted when I send the MS to the publisher, but I have them if I need them.

 

Cards — very analogue, very niche

Another thing I've started doing recently is making more handwritten notes and plans. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book on extinct animals and, after many years of duplicating the same research, I've decided I need my own card index (not a database on the computer — a physical object) of organisms through time. It will have everything I need for the animals that might be in this book and I can add to it later for other books. It's on the computer as well, but I print out the entries and stick them to cards. They're easy to shuffle, sort, annotate and pick out for different purposes. 

I keep too many notebooks, so scraps for different books tend to be spread around, but I'm going to start at least colour-coding them so I can hook them out if needed. I have a proper paper trail, in the original sense of the term. I'm also occasionally posting to Bluesky and Instagram photos of ongoing work and commenting on where I've got to with things. This, too, will be evidence that I didn't knock up a book with a few crafty prompts one rainy afternoon.

I hope none of this will ever be needed, but if it is, it's there and hard to contest. I suppose I could have gone to the trouble of getting AI to do all this and then cutting it up or writing it out by hand and doing all this over a period of many months, but it would be more work than just writing the book (and would produce a rubbish book). I hope other writers, worried about this, are doing similar things. Please share your tips in the comments. And it's honestly nice to return to a less digital way of doing things. Cut and paste with scissors and a glue stick, just like the old days. (Though it was Spraymount and a scalpel when I was last being paid to do cut-and-paste, back in the dark ages.)

 

* The SoA scheme does allow limited use of AI in preparatory work, but not in generation of the text or images, following the precedent set by the Writers' Guild

Anne Rooney

Website
Bluesky
Instagram

Out now:

 

For adults; Arcturus, December 2025

 

 

For children; The Magnificent Book of Microscopic Creatures, February 2025 (I like the French cover better than the UK/US cover, but you can also get it in English! 

The Rock From the Sky, by Jon Klassen (Anne Rooney)

This is perhaps a bit of a cheat but instead of waffling on to you today I'd like to direct you to this interview with Jon Klassen from 2021 about his book The Rock From the Sky. There are three things that make it particularly interesting. One is Klassen's stated desire to write a quiet book, and his explanation of the static images. I often hear authors complain that agents and editors turn down their books because they are too quiet; it's great to see this defence and explanation of quiet-done-properly. Second, Klassen cites his influences as including Samuel Becket and Stanley Kubrick. I love this. It never occurs to people outside the sphere of children's books that children's authors are influeced by (or even read/view) work by serious intellectuals whose work is intended for adults. (A book I'm currently working on is influenced by Kant and J.S.Mill, among others.) Finally, and most importantly, I love Klassen's account of how he likes to challenge the picture book format and how some of his books have been spawned by anger yet spin that anger into gold. This brilliant challenge to the dreary, oven-ready 'show don't tell' advice, for example:

"I want boring pictures that have something exciting as their context. So usually that’s emotional. If you tell the audience that this character is having a horrible day or that something’s really wrong, but you don’t draw that, then they get to load that drawing with emotion."

See read this interview on Tyger Tale instead of waiting for me to say something insightful.

Anne Rooney

Out now, Dec 2025, Arcturus publishing:

The Essential Book of AI

 

 

 

Doing nothing is doing something (Anne Rooney)

 

Back to Cambridge University Library

Penny Dolan posted about procrastination a few days ago. This is not quite an apologia for procrastination, but more a plea to be easy on yourself if you're not doing enough. I've not been writing full time (as in, 35 hours a week) since before the pandemic. A string of deaths and other disasters/disrupters, plus turmoil in the publishing industry, have made it pretty much impossible. 

 I thought I'd get back to it this autumn, but I'm honestly not sure I even want to. Publishing is still turmoily, AI is wreaking havoc, and the three book projects I have in prospect are, as often happens, waiting on design decisions. They will then turn into a panicked rush to get samples together in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October (which is not very far away). 

While waiting for publishers to get their act together, I've returned to a book I started before the pandemic and then had to give up as it was based on material in the British Library which was inaccessible . It's fun poking around at it, though I'm still not sure what shape it will eventually take, if any. I've also decided to learn some new skills, nothing to do with writing. And although this looks like 'doing nothing', it's already throwing up new ideas. Even the doing nothing that is gardening or walking around the fields looking for sloes lets some slow mental composting go on, and that all feeds into work when work happens. At least, that's what I'm telling myself...

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Dinosaur Facts, illustrated by Ro Ledesma, Arcurus 2025

 

 

Dinosaur in a tutu? Anne Rooney

Spinosaurus by Adobe stock, 2025

I've been wondering again if I will have to give up this job of writing children's books and do something entirely different (and AI-proof). Having just got used to the idea that my job now consists of writing in a way as unlike AI as possible so that I can't be easily replaced by publishers cutting corners, I've stumbled into the next challenge. And I'm not sure there's a way around this one. 

Spinosaurus by Nobu Tamura, 2024

 

  See that dinosaur above? It's supposed to be a Spinosaurus. Spinosaurus, as any 6-year-old can tell you, had a sail along its back. Along, not across, like a skirt.  This is what a Spinosaurus looks like (see right). Adobe have the audacity to label their rendering 'Realistic portrayal of a Spinosaurus'. Not realistic, not even biologically possible.

A significant part of my work involves finding reference images from which an illustrator can work to produce the art we need in the book. The reference images are important, as otherwise the illustrator or picture researcher (who might not know much about the subject) is likely to go online and find pictures that are out of date, wrong, or — a new threat — ridiculous AI slop. So my job is to provide them with pictures that are NOT like the 'realistic' Spinosaurus Adobe will dish up. Adobe, once upon a time, would have been considered a reasonably reliable source. 

Nothing like a Stegosaurus

Here's another. I needed a picture of a Stegosaurus skeleton. This, or something like it, is offered all over the place. I hope I don't have to tell you it is nothing like a Stegosaurus skeleton. Stegosaurus is the one with plates all along its back, a herbvivore with a small head, and no fierce, meat-eating teeth. There's a proper Stegosaurus skeleton for comparison below this travesty.

Fortunately, I know what a Stegosaurus looks like, so I can tell this is rubbish. But there are now more ridiculously wrong images than there are correct images, so it's taking me much longer to find good reference images. 

Actual Stegosaurus skeleton

And I don't only write about dinosaurs. I've been preparing the first bits of a book on machinery, and although I know broadly what the workings of the machines look like, I don't know in sufficient detail to be able to spot errors in an AI rendering of the inside of an engine. I've found a few that I know are wrong. But there are others that could certainly slip through. Now, I recognise some of the sites or picture agencies that are mostly or entirely using AI and I don't go near them. But it's cutting down the options and slowing down the process. The AI generated slop is proliferating so quickly that I have to scroll through screens of it looking for something that might be correct. 

For textual material, I can go back to books. But some of the things I need images for aren't in any books that I know of. Even if they are it's much slower to find an image in a book and scan/photograph it and record its provenance than to grab an image from a web page and its URL. The time consideration aside, though, if I can't provide reference images, the books won't happen. Some books will still happen, but a lot won't be possible. And how long will it be before people en masse begin to think that Spinosaurus had a skirt or Stegosaurus looked like the demon child of Edmontosaurus and T rex?

Anne Rooney

Out now (Jan 2025) from Arcturus, illustrated by Ro Ledesma: Weird and Wonderful Dinosaur Facts
 

 

 

There's an owl under my seat (Anne Rooney)

This isn't about books, though it might feed into a book one day. I was going to write about AI, but it's a Sunday and I think we could do with something more cheering. So I give you owls.

My parents used to collect owl figurines. When my dad died, the second to go, my brother and I were left with about 80 owls of different sizes. It's hard to know what to do with 80 owls if you don't share the previous owner's passion regard for them. I don't have space in my house for a collection of owls, either. What to do with the owls was a tricky question. I took a couple (one is an outdoor owl and sits in my garden), and my brother took one or two. We gave most to charity shops. But some were smuggled. 

Whenever someone who had known my parents visited the house, my nephew or neice took a small owl from the stockpile and hid it somewhere in the visitor's. I found two owls unstolen into my car. One still lives in the glovebox, one in the door compartment. 

And yesterday I found a third, jammed under the seat. It's been there more than year, waiting quietly among the dropped sweet wrappers and baby socks. What a wonderful moment of discovery! A quick flash reminder, not only of my dad but of my nephew's funny, thoughtful kindness in those difficult days of sorting through two lives. 

Anne Rooney 

Out now, Weird and Wonderful Dinosaur Facts, illustrated by Ro Ledsema, Arcturus 2025

 

Not all sports, please - Anne Rooney

 This something of a follow-up to Lynda Waterhouse's post about children's writing. I'm a bit late with this today as I had to go out to MB's sports' day this morning when I was expecting to write my post. It was very much last minute as she'd forgotten to tell us when it was and I was the only person even slightly free to go. It occurred to me as I sat in the scorching sun watching children who didn't really want to be running around, that each summer there is a sports' day, and there is some kind of dramatic performance, but that's it. There is no art exhibition or celebration of children's writing. This is a shame, as writing gets dumped in the bin of academic accomplishments and is never celebrated for itself, as a creative endeavour for the child's pleasure and enrichment. 

 MB moves up to secondary school in September, so it's a bit late to try to persuade her current school to do anything about it. But I will be looking out for what the secondary school does. How about a pupils' literary festival and art exhibition? Does any school do this? I can't say I've ever come across it. Maybe it happens in the private sector. There are concerts for the musical pupils, and drama, and a ton of sports (of course). 

The same is true of the holiday club activities available. There are summer camps that offer arts and crafts, drama, music, sports, bushcraft and survival, but not writing. Perhaps it's not just that writing isn't highlighted as enjoyable in school, but there's not much support outside school hours/days, either. It's quite telling that a lot of professional children's writers haven't heard of National Writing Day, organised by the Literarcy Trust. I certainly hadn't. (25th June 2025, if you're in the UK.) The Literacy Trust also has lots of ideas and resources to help schools develop writing for enjoyment. None, that I can see, mention fanfic, which is one way kids find their way into writing. Maybe I should start up a fanfic summer school....

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Dinosaur Facts, Arcturus 2025, illustrated by Ro Ledesma

 

 

 

Build a library, build a reader - Anne Rooney

Peck, Peck, Peck — a favourite in Berlin

  I have a grandchild in Berlin who will be one year old next month. When he was born, I struggled to think of a new-baby present that would have more enduring value than the usual (but essential) baby items. And suddenly it became obvious: books. I will buy him a book a month until — well, until he doesn't want them. Or until 18. The books will grow with him, so his first books are baby books, but they will change as he changes.

It took a while to settle on this plan, so he got six books the first time. If I see him in a month, I give him a book directly. If I'm not in Berlin, or he's not here, I buy the book from Curious Fox, an English language bookshop in Berlin and they deliver it to him. (I did try buying the books here and posting them, but the postage cost more than the books and they took forever to arrive. And I don't use Amazon.) I am buying him books in English, though not necessarily English books. This month's book is by a Brazilian writer and was first published in Portuguese (see Penny Dolan's post yesterday on Guilherme Karsten's Are You a Monster?) Instructions from his kita are to use English at home and German at kita/school to build a bilingual child. 

He's not obliged to keep the books. He/his parents can pass them on to younger children if he outgrows them, though it will be nice if he does keep them. I might have a stamp made up so that they can stamp each incoming book.

These are some of the books from his first twelve months. They include some favourites from my daughter's childhood that she specifically asked for, I'm not being unimaginative!

Clive Penguin, Huw Lewis Jones and Ben Sanders, Little Tiger, 2024

A Boy Wants a Dinosaur, Hiawyn Oram and Satoshi Kitamura,  Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1990

Where's Mr Puffin? Ingela P Arrhenius, Nosy Crow, 2022

Peepo! Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Puffin, 1997

Funnybones,  Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Puffin, 1999

Hoot Owl, Master of Disguise,  Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien, 2016

Shh! We Have a Plan, Chris Haughton, Walker Books, 2016

Peck, Peck, Peck, Lucy Cousins, Walker Books, 2013

Are You A Monster?  Guilherme Karsten, Quarto, 2023

Next month's book will be How Long Is That Dog by John Bond, HarperCollins, 2025.

Authors (and illustrators, and musicians) v. AI bros — Anne Rooney

 The UK government is holding an open consultation on copyright and AI. This might seem an esoteric bit of government faffing that most people don't need to pay attention to, but it's far more than that. It's potentially a fight to the death between British creative industries and the techbros who are currently tearing the US state machinery apart in defiance of US law and the constitution. Do they look like people we can trust?

This is the issue: creative work is protected by copyright laws. This makes it illegal for one person to copy the work of another without their permission and distribute it or make a profit from selling or licensing it. The livelihood of the creative industries and individual creators relies on this. You can't steal creative work in the same way that you can't steal beans from the supermarket. It's simple. But the AI bros say they want an exception so that they can 'scrape' high quality creative works to train their AIs. And for some utterly bizarre reason, the government is up for this. The creative industries are worth £126 billion and employ 2.4 million people in the UK. Latest UK government figures show AI generated only £14 billion and employed 64,500 people. But the government sees potential for growth (even at the cost of die-back in the creative industries).

The argument the AI bros make is that they are not really copying anything. They are scraping the works and generating new works from patterns they have identified in them. Yet if you tried to publish a 'new' Harry Potter story, you would find Bloomsbury and Warner Bros suing you within seconds. If you copied all Disney's 101 Dalmatians and made a new cartoon in which they did something else, you would be sued. So where's the difference? If AI has been trained on, say, the works of an illustrator, someone can ask it to produce a particular image in the style of that illustrator and then they don't have to pay the illustrator, even though the new image would not exist if it were not for their years of training and practising and developing their style.

The government and the AI bros are trying to get away with this by ignoring the distinction between generative AI (like ChatGPT or, more recently DeepSeek) and the more useful (for humankind) AI that will help develop new medications, identify cancer cells, decode degraded documents, and so on. Yes, we can benefit from AI's input in many fields. No, we don't need AI writing poor quality stories, or copying the artwork or musical styles of talented professionals. AI needs to be trained to recognise cancerous cells by looking at cancerous and non-cancerous cells, not by scanning images by illustrators or literary novels. It works out new protein structures by looking at the molecular configuration of known proteins, not by listening to all the work of Mick Jagger or scanning photos from a picture library. The point of training AI on high quality creative work is ONLY to replace those creators and their livelihoods. ChatGPT can already write coherent sentences, so if someone wants to use it to write their in-house reports, marketing documents, etc, it can do that now. It won't be improved by having scanned the latest prize-winning novel.

Here's a suggestion. The government could licence for AI scraping any text written at the expense of the tax-payer. So any government documents, anything published by people who are paid for their work in the civil service, research papers from research funded by the state, and so on. And they can leave the rest of us alone. If a particular organisation wants to use AI to write their reports or whatever, they can get an LLM and train it on all their previous in-house work — that is, the text they own.

As for those people who would like to write a novel but don't have the skill — just don't. There are lots of people who would like to be professional footballers but don't have the skill. They can't do it. That's life.

And finally... While this consultation has been ongoing, DeepSeek has stolen OpenAI's work to make its own cheaper and better model. Those of us whose work has been stolen think this is pretty hilarious. It also means the UK consultation is probably a complete waste of time as the baton has already passed to China and no one is going to invest confidently in UK-based AI anyway. But please, if you want actual writers and illustrators to survive, tell the government we don't want the AI bros to have access to our work. And make sure you don't buy or endorse materials based on IPR theft.

If you want to respond to the government consultation, you can write to your MP or respond individually until 25 Feb. The consultation document is here. It includes specific question you can respond to. It's long. Of course. To discourage you. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

Anne Rooney

website

Coming later this year: The Essential Book of AI, Arcturus Publishing, November 2025

'Prove you are not a robot' - Anne Rooney

 

My whole working life now is a giant CAPTCHA.

Publishing contracts generally now have a clause requiring that you don't use AI in preparing a book. I usually try to get the publisher to add an equivalent clause, that they won't use AI in preparing it either — not in editing, proofreading, indexing, illustrating or translating it. This last bit is to protect the jobs of other real people and to protect the quality of the book I've written but it does nothing much to deter them from using AI to write the book entirely and never let me near a contract. That is the real (personal) threat. I know illustrators and translators are ahead of me on death row, but as I write mostly non-fiction I'm not far down the list. It's easy to get AI to write non-fiction as long as you don't mind it being rubbish — or at best dull.

AI is good at dull. What it's not good at is innovation, humour, and finding/making unexpected links. It's not good at seeing a new angle. It's not good at knowing what is interesting, particularly to a child. It's not good at using language a child will enjoy, rather than just understand. It can write a book, but the book will not be fun to read. 

Occasionally, when I have completely finished a book, I will ask AI to write an outline for the book, just from a brief description of it, such as '50 interesting questions about astronomy for nine-year-olds'. So far, it has never come up with anything remotely interesting. It is a triumph of banality. I even got it to write a list of chapters to include in a book on AI  which I finished at the end of 2024. Although there was some obvious overlap (you do have to explain what AI is), it didn't even know what was interesting about AI. 

So now my working life consists of writing as unlike AI as possible so publishers still want me to write something. Maybe it's not just life as CAPTCHA. Maybe it's life as the wicked queen in Snow White. So far I'm still the fairest, but for how long? The more of my own books AI reads, the better it will become at copying me. This is why we don't want AI trained on our books. 

At the moment, keeping one step ahead makes me write better books. They have to be more imaginative, they have to be more up-to-date (ChatGPT's training ended a couple of years ago so I'm the only one with access to scientific discoveries that happened last year).  I think I can keep ahead for a while at least. But only as long as the public and publishers continue to value originality and quality and wouldn't rather just have something cheap and mediocre. 

Mirror, mirror, on the wall...

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts
illustrated by Ro Ledesma, Arcturus 2024

 

Jumping on the banned wagon — Anne Rooney

 

It's hard to know how to start this. I've had books banned in the USA in the past because people with fragile sensibilities don't want their children exposed to facts that conflict with religious beliefs. This book on democracy, written in response to the events of Jan 2020, might be next to be banned in certain (additional) territories. I'm writing a book at the moment that I know can't be sold into China, and indeed can't even be printed in China. Markets are shrinking. But it's not the financial aspect that's the worry.

I'm not expecting the coming new regime in the USA to welcome my books, which are mostly about science. My books don't endorse or even respect the views of many of those who will be making policy, or pushing local-level reshaping of communities and education. The coming years might be a hard time for publishing about science, and a harder time for children who want to read about science. And the decades after will be a hard time for American science and technology if that's the case. I want to talk about two concerns here. They are not party political. You will find nothing intended to offend you if you are right-leaning, but I hope you will consider them because I'm concerned about children, knowledge, the fate of humanity, and truth.

One is fragility and openness. Suppose you sincerely believe that evolution is a lie, climate change a hoax, the Moon landings were faked, Covid was deliberattely engineered or non-existent and/or that vaccines do untold harm, and you want your children to believe that too. My books will not be on your preferred reading list. Not for yourself, not for your children, and not for your school. But they should be, in particular for your school. Books should be available for children to choose, and books you or they disagree with are as important, or more important, than books that reinforce your views.

A child might choose a book about evolution, or they might choose a book about Noah. I wouldn't ban books about Noah as I don't find it threatening, and knowledge of many types is useful. I consider the story of the Flood a myth. As the story appears in different forms around the world, it quite possibly has some roots in a long-ago tsunami or similar event. Aside from potential geological connections, it is important to know this story because the Abrahamic religions permeate Western and Middle Eastern culture. We can't understand the art that surrounds us if we don't know the stories our culture is rooted in. We can't understand the people who surround us if we make no attempt to know the culture they come from and what they might believe.

If you want someone to believe something, you need to be able to defend your position. You need to be able to say why you are right and other people are wrong. If you shield children from counter-arguments, you don't give them the resources they need to defend their view, either to themselves or to others. Why would you ban books? Don't you trust children to weigh up arguments and make a choice? Don't you think your view *can* be rigorously defended? (in which case you might like to reconsider it.) Why do you think your views and your children are so fragile? This is not an assualt; it's an invitation to learn how to strengthen your position if it is genuinely viable.

If our ideas are good and strong and well-founded, they can be tested against dissent and will stand up to the challenge. I can defend the science of climate change and of evolution precisely because I can counter the claims against it. Listening to arguments and considering if a position remains valid makes that position stronger, not weaker. It's not, ultimately, about teaching your child that either Noah or evolution is true. It's about teaching your child to work with evidence, to learn how to think, to come to the right conclusion, whatever that is. 

When I was a student, I went with some friends to a rally by the evangelist Billy Graham. None of us was Christian, or certainly not of the BG persuasion. We went because we wanted to hear how he made his case, to see whether it would persuade us. We were open to challenge. It also showed us in action a methodology of persuasion that was new to us, and therefore interesting in itself. We were not persuaded; it was impressive in its way.

 About five years ago, I was at a college dinner (this is in Cambridge, UK). Some students cornered the head of the college and protested that he was allowing a visitor they disagreed with to speak to students. I no longer remember what the topic or objection was, only that it was a speaker whose views I personally disagreed with, but it was an issue of politics and not about personal offence. It would now be couched in terms of de-platforming. The head of the college told them the visitor held legal views that he was free to express and students were free to listen or not listen as they chose. Were they so insecure or so incapable of rational thought that they couldn't countenance challenge? He made it clear that their perception of their own weakness, or the weakness of their view, was not a reason for expecting people with different convictions or opinons to be silenced. I agreed with him. We need to hear dissenting views and respond to the challenge, even if only internally. Children need to learn to do this. It is a crucial life skill. It is ironic that it is the right wing that loudly proclaims the value of freedom of expression, yet is most eager to ban books that offer different views of the world.

The second point I want to make is about the future of the USA and its world-leading science. There is massive cognitive dissonance at the heart of a regime that denies and limits scientific education and information on the one hand, yet hopes to succeed in a world that is increasingly dependent on science and technology. And in an administration that attempts a forced marriage between science-deniers and technocrats in office. I have no respect for Elon Musk, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't think Earth was created in six days or the Moon landings were faked. 

If you want to support the economics of fossil fuel use, of course you deny climate change. But where will future American scienists come from if they aren't taught science or if an inquisitive and exploratory pattern of mind isn't encouraged in young people? Decent scientists aren't going to move into the USA under the conditions that are coming. I know several scientists who have moved out of the USA in recent years because, whatever the funding opportunities for research (about to go down), they don't want to bring their children up there. They don't want to have only six weeks off work when their babies are born. They don't want to send them to schools where they have to consider the possibility of a shooter. They are human beings before they are scientists. So if America wants a future generation of Elon Musks and their ilk, they will have to be home-grown, and that means teaching some science.

Who says science is scary?

A few years ago, the Chinese Communist Party realised that Chinese scientists were not innovative. They were good at copying and even perfecting things thought of in the West, but they were not good at coming up with new ideas. One reason, it appeared, was because Western scientists had grown up reading science fiction. Science fiction plays with possibilities, it encourages dreaming in scientific and technological landscapes. A very large number of the technologies we enjoy now had their genesis in fiction and were later realised by readers who had grown up wanting the stuff in the stories they had read and the movies and TV shows they had seen. So it's not even just books about actual science that children need access to. They need books that spark their imagination and desires, books (or movies, or computer games) that raise possibilities.

Finally: when Copernicus published his model of Earth going around the Sun in 1543, he left it until he was dying because he anticipated trouble from the Church. (Plus ça change...) But the Church did not ban the heliocentric model of the solar system then. They allowed and even used it because it was a helpful mathematical model that gave results no worse than those they already had. It might not be true (they still thought the Sun went around Earth), but it was mathematically valid. Could America at least do this with science? Use the models that show us how to limit climate damage, improve food supplies, combat diseases, even if you see them as imperfect representations of how the world actually is? (Science is likely always going to be such an imperfect representation — all we disagree about is precisely how imperfect.) Then American children can operate within a framework that the rest of the world recognises and uses, they can grow up to continue to make scientific discoveries that will improve lives, the USA will not slump to the bottom of the world league in a mire of science-denial and fear. Banning useful things because of ideology never leads to a good place. Seeking to understand them gives you power, even if you take the view of "knowing your enemy". Science doesn't care if you believe in it. It will get you anyway, so you might as well see what's coming. You might as well be equipped to partake in the future.

Anne Rooney

Out now: Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts, Arcturus, September 2024; illustrated by Ro Ledesma

Negotiating winter (Anne Rooney)

This morning there's a slug inside the door and a lot of water outside it. A bit of a brown tinge to the tree over the road. Still not properly light at 6am. We have to face it, summer is over and winter is just around the corner. 

Winter and I have never been friends. I spent my whole childhood with chapped and bleeding knuckles from being out in the cold winds. I remember once dropping a mitten at school, and then about six inches of snow fell. I spent ages hunting (fruitlessly) for it on the playing field. Of course it was fruitless; why didn't anyone tell me that I wouldn't be able to see a mitten under six inches of snow? Now a five-year-old would NOT be allowed to roam a snow-covered field for 20 minutes unsupervised, but that was then...

As this winter sneaks up, I find myself trying to plan whether to carry on working in my garden office, which is warm enough if I turn the heating on before I take MB to school, and cheap enough if I then turn it off and snuggle under a heated throw all day, or whether to go to the University Library which is heated for free but is a cold 5-km cycle ride away and where the coffee is not free. 

Most writers are entirely used to working wrapped in blankets, wearing fingerless gloves and a hat, or sometimes waddling around in a sleeping bag with holes cut for the feet. It's not something we look forward to, though.

 

But this is the year I thought I'd made friends with the cold. I spent part of July in Greenland, exploring pack ice, glaciers, icebergs and the ice sheet in perpetual daylight. In February I hope to go to northern Norway and explore the ice in perpetual darkness (not sure how much exploring will be possible in the dark, though). So why am I now glowering at the thermometer as I shake moths out of my jumpers? 

It puts me in mind of my neighbour, Keith. His wife is very fond of holidays, and books about six a year going to places like the Canary Isles and Portugal — not known for being cold. He says  he has a great time. But if I see him here when it's 28 °C he grumbles that it's too hot, just as I will grumble that a British winter is too cold. 

So perhaps it's down to choice. If I choose to go where the ice is kilometres thick, the cold is part of the deal. If Keith chooses to roast on a beach, it's good that it's hot. 

 

Maybe I need to convince myself I've chosen the cold. I could (in theory) go somewhere warm for the winter months. (OK, I couldn't, but let's pretend Brexit didn't happen and I have endless funds and no school run.) I will choose to think of it as snuggling inside a blankety coccoon. And when I come back from Norway it will seem warm, surely?

For now, I've thrown the slug outside. It can do its own negotiation with winter.

 

 

 

 

 

(Top three photos taken in Ilulissat, Greenland; bottom photo taken in a fjord near Nuuk)

Anne Rooney

website

Out 30th September:  Weird and Wonderful Animal Facts, illustrated, by Ro Ledesma, Arcturus

How can it ever work? (Anne Rooney)

 There has been some debate this week (as so often) among the members of the SAS who bring you this blog about why authors earn so little, and what can be done about it. I can answer the first bit, but not the second. It has to do with how little people pay for books, and the small proportion of that little that gets to authors and illustrators. 

Imagine you have written a picture book that sells for £10 at full price. You will receive 5% of the money the publisher gets for the book, and the illustrator will also receive 5%. This is called a royalty. The publisher will very rarely get £10 for a copy of the book — only if they sell it from their own website, really. Most of the time they will get about £5 (if they are lucky) after the distributor and shop/Amazon have taken their share. So now, as author, you can claim your 5% of £5. That's 25p per copy. But wait — lots of copies will be sold at *huge* discounts and you will be lucky to get 2p a copy. No, ignore that. Let's see what you could get if everyone played fair. You get 25p. Of course, if you have an agent, you will lose 20% of that 25p, so now you have only 20p per copy.

How many 25ps do you need to live on? To make the numbers easy, let's say you want £25,000 — though that is turnover not profit and is not enough to live on. To get £25,000, you would need the publisher to sell 100,000 copies of your book. I have been writing for 25 years and have only ever written two books that have sold more than 100,000 copies. Most books sell fewer than 10,000 copies. And those sales are over its whole life, not in one year. Let's pretend your book will sell 10,000 copies over four years. That's 2,500 copies a year (though it won't be that even). You will get £625 a year. To have an inadequate turnover of £25,000, you will need 40 books earning for you, each selling 2,500 copies a year, every year. If we assume the earning lifespan of a book is four years, you need to publish (not just write — some will be rejected) 10 books a year.

(Let's pause to use better figures: 20p a copy (you have an agent) and you need a turnover of £40,000 because remember authors get no sick pay, no holiday, no employer's pension contributions [pension? what pension?] and have to pay all their own running expenses. At 20p a book, you need to sell 200,000 copies. Every year. At 10,000 copies, over four years, you will have only £500 a year. So you will need 80 books that are earning you royalties every year, publishing 20 a year.)

I've simplified this. Most books are sold for an advance against royalties, which is paid up front by the publisher, usually in three chunks. The advance has to be earned back before you get any royalties. So if you have an advance of £3000, and you are making 20p per book, the publisher will have to sell 15,000 copies before you get any extra money, above the £3000. Most books never earn out — they don't sell enough to generate any royalties. So most authors are living on advances, which at least don't take four years to get (though they can: the staged payments can be years apart). The earning-out problem is massively hindered by discounted sales. If your book is sold to a discount outfit like Book People in large numbers, you might be earning only 2p a copy (or less). It takes far more sales to earn out the advance, and as a lot of people buy the book cheaply, there are fewer readers who want it who will be paying full price.

There are a few extra chunks of money. You should earn money from library loans (PLR, Public Lending Rights) and photocopying of your books (ALCS, Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society). Let's be optimistic and say you earn £5,000 a year from these. Now you need to earn only £20,000 (or £35,000) from royalties/advances, so you only need to sell 80,000 (or 175,000) copies a year, so you only need to be publishing 8 (or 17.5) books a year. 

Of course, out of your £25,000 or £40,000 you have to pay tax, and for all your computer equipment, software licences, broadband, travel for research/meetings/conferences and any other expenses. There will be days, if not weeks, wasted while publishers don't get back to you with information you need. There will be book proposals that initially look as though they are being accepted and are then rejected further down the line. Occasionally, a publisher will go bust and never pay you. 

Could it ever work out well? Suppose you got a digital-first deal of 25% on a genre novel that might sell 100,000 copies. (But digital-first sells for £3 or so at most, and isn't an option for children's writers.) Even so, 25% of half of £300,000 is still only £37,500. A full-length novel every year, every one of them successful, and you could just about survive. Yes, self-publishing. Do you really think you can shift 100,000 copies without a marketing department? A few people can — they either got in early or they already have a name through traditional publishing (or being a celebrity). Most people can't. Most people who want to be writers want to write, not market stuff.

The average income for a professional writer is £7,000. This is why: maths.

Anne Rooney

Out now: 81 Mind-Blowing Biology Facts, 1 April 2024, Arcturus

 

"These bits don't matter" (Anne Rooney)

 I loved Keren's post yesterday on making collage and how it reflects aspects of her narrative-making. I don't make actual collages (though I would love to, if it were safe to leave scissors, glue and cut up things around in a house with a toddler). Instead I make cartoons in PhotoShop based on old images and transposing my current problems and issues into them. This week I have a problem with the window installers, and spent most of Friday morning committing it to PhotoShop. (I've doctored this one to de-identify the company involved to avoid legal problems. It's just a van from the Internet, so please if anyone owns this van, it's not aimed at you!)

I use medieval images a lot for this as I was originally a medievalist and find it comforting to slip back a few decades/centuries. It puts things in perspective, somehow. These problems that trouble me now have troubled people in a different form just about forever. Will my house fall down? Probably not. People have occupied far worse-maintained houses than mine over the centuries. Is a problem with workmen new? Absolutely not. There were probably similar disputes over pyramid-building 'You've left a gap big enough for cockroaches to get in and eat all the grain he will need in the afterlife!' It's all the same-old same-old.

Like Keren, I can see how this uses the same kind of techniques as my writing, which is largely non-fiction. I find things people have already discovered and repurpose them, making them appropriate for a new audience, adding a light touch or humour, getting readers to see them in a new way, making unexpected connections and juxtapositions.

It's much more satisfying and relaxing than ranting about frustrations. And if it all goes horribly wrong and my house falls down, I can post the undoctored cartoon on TwiX.

 

Anne Rooney

website 

Out now: Story of Science, November 2023; illustrated by Paula Zamudio

 

Hey, look at me! (Pease don't) - Anne Rooney

Not a performing monkey

Self-promotion. Some people are good at it, some people love it, some people are bad at it and some people hate it. Yet publishers seem to think writers should do it, like it and be good at it. Or do they? And are they right?

Articles like this suggest all creatives — and it seems, even accountants and bus drivers — now need a personal brand if they are to succeed and that everyone (especially publishers and record labels) expects it. For a publisher, if you have an active TikTok presence, they can rely on that to bring in sales of your book, or so the argument goes. They can piggyback off your own publicity work instead of doing theirs. For some types of book, this might be true, but certainly not for all. No one is on TikTok looking for engineering textbooks. Or are they?

If you have a large following on TikTok for something you already do, it might help you sell books. If you go onto TikTok (or whatever platform your publisher currently likes) in order to sell books, I doubt it will work. Think about how you respond to people self-promoting. I unfollow or silence them. It's just advertising. (I don't mean people excitedly announcing they have a new book. I mean people going on and on and on about their one new book for weeks.) We are not all performers. When it was just 'write a blog post', that was OKish as it's just more words. I can do words. But performing monkey with an iPhone? No thanks. A lot of us became writers precisely because we want to sit in our shed/office/bedroom hiding from the world and talking to ourselves or imaginary beings. Indeed, I suspect if I did a load of self-promotion videos it would reduce sales rather than increase them. Perhaps this is, after all, a use for AI and deep fake. I could deep fake myself for TikTok and rely on its not being very good to cancel out my own not being very good, two negatives making a positive. But I really don't think it makes any difference anyway and none of my publishers has ever pressured me to do this. (I can't speak for all publishers/writers/books, obviously.)

The thing about pressure to do something is that it's usually a bad idea to fall into line. There doesn't need to be any pressure to do something that's good for you or you want to do. 'Peer pressure' is generally seen as a bad thing that drives young people to smoke, wear trousers that are too baggy, or other things their elders disapprove of. Pressure from an employer to answer your emails out of hours is seen as exploitative. Pressure from a publisher to do their job of promoting your books works only to their benefit unless you are that rare creature who actually enjoys it. Really, do what you enjoy. If that's TikTok, brilliant. If it's writing stuff online, brilliant. If it's lying on a branch doing nothing — just don't roll off!

Anne Rooney

website 

Out now from OUP