Art versus Commercialism Part I - Rowena House

The title Art versus Commercialism Part 1 is a declaration of intent.

Next year, I’m going to work out something worthwhile to say on the subject. I’d wavered about whether to have a go at starting on it today – it’s such a massive (tired?) topic – but then I read this by Lynda Waterhouse in her Art Matters post here on ABBA on Dec 12:

“I also encourage ‘slow looking’ at art; an almost meditative process of paying attention and noticing. We are bombarded by so many images that we are in danger of not really taking the time to look around us.”

And I felt that this was so true it seemed serendipitous, a prod to begin my journey of slow looking at writing as art at a time when life – real and online – seems overwhelmingly commercial and the craft of storytelling a conveyor belt supplying an increasingly homogenised product.

Lynda’s words fell on fertile ground since I’d been primed to think about Art with a big A by several things I read this week, including advice by Sol Stein in his (rather dated) guide, Stein on Writing, that the entire point of fiction is to elicit an emotional response from readers.

Frankly, it was the last thing I needed to hear since these days, for most of us, readers will only be found via the tortuous time-suck of self-marketing whether we are trad or self-published. As I’m still leaning towards trad for the C17th witchy WIP, finding readers will also mean the stress of enticing another agent to represent me (the lovely Jane Willis having retired from United Agents this year) and then finding an editor who shares the agent’s opinion about the commercial viability of my work, a sales team who’ll back the editor’s judgment, and a publishing director who’ll agree with the sales people, and then, if I’m tremendously lucky, a contract – with or without an advance – and, fingers crossed, something akin to a marketing budget.

I mean, what has any of that got to do with writing, let alone art? TBH, I’d rather put the manuscript on a thumb drive and send it out to sea in a bottle, AKA the Devon version of Kindle self-publishing.

But enough of cynicism. Sol Stein was an editor first and foremost and therefore represents a corner of the book industry. Writing is about more than raw material for publishers. It is a gift and a privilege. We should cherish gifts and be conscious of privilege.

Perhaps, then, this is the debate I’m having with myself – and hopefully also here on ABBA: why be a writers if our readership is likely to be limited to a few hundred people? Is one reader enough? Fifty? And what other outcomes might justify years of research, thought, practice, experiment, experience, and the application of imagination?

So, yeah, what is the point of it all?

I’m aware this question strays into the old art for art’s sake debate: does a work needs any purpose beyond itself? And I don’t want to go down the purely personal psychological route either, as that seems too self-referential. Yes, creativity is self-enriching – or self-escaping – but that’s equally true of cross-stich or photography, and I’d like to consider writing as something unique.

Part II of Art versus Commercialism will therefore need to define parameters for these posts and set out a less dull question than ‘what’s the point?' I hope the answers might spiral off wildly and bounce around and return to beginnings like stories used to be able to do before ‘they’ told us the right way to do it.

It may be a huge waste of time, of course, and as purposeless a fiction writing, but hey, I’ve got a creative writing PhD thesis to write next year. All contributions welcome.

Happy Christmas. 

Rowena House Author on FB

@HouseRowena on Musk’s hellhole

rowenahouse.wordpress.com for lots about The Goose Road

France's Zoella - Clementine Beauvais

France has its very own Zoe Sugg: she's called Marie Lopez but goes by the name of Enjoy Phoenix, and she's a beauty, make-up and life vlogger. Like Zoe Sugg, she's written a book, which was published a few days ago and is called #EnjoyMarie (the title sounds only slightly less weird in French). I wasn't the only 'old person' to discover her works on that occasion, but she's been fabulously popular online for a while.

Hardly had #EnjoyMarie been published that the press started mocking the book, with the trendy magazine Les Inrocks devoting an article to 'The 27 sentences that will make you think Enjoy Phoenix is the new Flaubert'. Each sentence is escorted by a sarcastic comment:

3. "We are a generation of words created by an ever-sharper technology and, without noticing, we're living under the attractive power of the webs of the Internet." EnjoyPhoenix > Edward Snowden.

17. "I shudder as I imagine drinking my first glass of alcohol... I hope there will be some." Spoiler alert: there was.

Etc. It's funny in some ways, but it's also a bit facile to mock a 19-year-old who started a blog five years ago as a means of dealing with school bullying, and who picked the phoenix as her animal of choice to express her desire to be born again and different. But then French adults are always cruel to teenagers, as I well remember.

Lopez's book is in many ways a bizarre phenomenon in a country which is far from having a literary landscape as cluttered by author 'brands' and celebrity books as the Anglo-Saxon market, even in children's and teenage literature. As the title of the Inrocks article indicates through the direct and snarky comparison with Flaubert, there is something distinctly disasteful, for the French mindset, about a book so obviously commercial.

It's worth saying here that Les Inrocks is in many ways culturally snobbish, but as regards edgy pop culture - they're not at all protective of highbrow culture; you would never find an article on Flaubert in there, so the reference sounds a little bit out of place. But even they, faced with walls of fuschia pink #EnjoyMarie books in each Fnac (the French franchise of cultural supermarkets), felt defensive enough to remind their readers of our literary canon, which in France would be packaged between white or cream covers. (Judging a book by its colour is very much a thing in my country.)

L'Express, meanwhile, has decided to compare the sales of #EnjoyMarie to those of the other best-selling non-fiction books of the moment, which are: a sociological study of the Charlie Hebdo demonstrators by an academic; a political study of Germany by a politician; an apology of blasphemy post-Charlie-Hebdo-massacre by a feminist intellectual; and a book on health and nutrition by some doctor. 'Enjoy Phoenix sells more books than all those people!!!!!' L'Express marvels.

And provides a diagram to prove this astonishing fact:

INCREDIBEUL! ZE POLITICAL ESSAYS ZEY ARE NOT AS MUCH SELL AS ZE BOOK ABOUT ZE MAKE-UP!


My French writer and illustrator friends are watching all of this with some amusement and not much anxiety. But some are mildly incredulous too, in part because of the unashamed money-making dimension of the enterprise. As I've written about before, the French market is much less commercially-oriented and there's much less money to be made; books cannot be discounted, and they are generally quite expensive (my latest YA novel retails at 15,99€).  

In a publishing world where advances for teenage novels are generally between 500 and 2000 euros, and there are never any announcements along the lines of 'NEW AUTHOR GETS FIVE BOOK DEAL FOR AN UNDISCLOSED SIX FIGURE SUM', #EnjoyMarie feels like an odd import from Britain or the US - it's no coincidence that the name sounds English. Interviewers and journalists spend a lot of time telling their readers about Marie Lopez's supposed salary.

Another interesting thing is that, as far as I can tell - I might be wrong! - Marie Lopez probably wrote her own book mostly on her own; unlike, as everyone here remembers, Zoe Sugg. Keren David wrote a great blog post on the matter a while back. Keren was annoyed "that no one from Zoella’s management team or publishers -  let alone Zoella herself -  wanted to give the ghostwriter a co-writing credit, or admit up front that Zoella needed a hand to get her ideas down in print." Like Keren, I think it would be far healthier if the world was actually told that writing is a proper job, which not everyone famous is always necessarily qualified to do.

It's time to confess that I haven't actually read Zoella's book (sorry), but it sounds to me like it was well-received by her fans. By contrast, Lopez's book is getting mixed reviews, including from its target audience. I think this is the first time a French publishing company has given a book deal to a teenage celebrity in this way, and I wonder if they underestimated the need to hire professional help to bulk up the content of the book.

Is this the beginning in the French publishing world of a more Anglo-Saxon way of doing things? Well, you can tell from the way in which people are reacting that it isn't something they're close to getting used to. But after all, ex-First Girlfriend Valérie Trierweiler's memoir on François Hollande sold hundreds of thousands of copies earlier this year. Maybe France is slowly edging towards this brave new world after all.
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Clémentine Beauvais writes children's books in French and in English. She blogs here about children's literature, academia and other things.