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.

Zoella and the Zeitgeist. By Keren David.

So, Zoella. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know all about the guinea-pig owning ,

Zoella the record-breaker

mascara-wielding vlogger from Brighton, otherwise known as Zoe Sugg. Zoella’s novel, Girl Online was published last week and has hardly been out of the news since. First,  it broke all records by selling 78,000 copies on its first day. Then, yesterday, there was a backlash as papers revealed that Zoella had needed the help of a ghostwriter to produce Girl Online, a ghostwriter who was unlikely to be sharing in any of the royalties from the book’s enormous sales.

Now, one might say, that is fair enough. After all the ghost agreed to the deal. And the sales are nothing to do with the prose, and everything to do with the platform that Zoella has worked hard to create  in her years of blogging, vlogging and  other activities which skilfully inflated her profile and turned her from an ordinary girl into a brand. Zoella’s story is a fairytale for our times, and those who quibble that she missed out the hard graft of actually writing a novel, should consider whether they would want to put in the considerable effort of producing a vlog that so chimes with the interests of teenage girls. And please don’t knock those interests. Teenage girls face so much hostility about their actual likes (Twilight? Pah! Make up? Piffle! The Hunger Games? Narcissism!)  that there is something quite wonderful about someone breaking all records by being exceptionally good at reflecting the taste and concern of actual girls.

 I also like Zoella a lot for talking about her own struggles with anxiety, a problem which is a raging epidemic among teenagers today, particularly those unfortunate enough to be educated in the Age of Gove.   

There are a few things though that do bother me about Zoella’s story. First, that a clearly talented ghostwriter could accept a deal paying her  a modest fee (reportedly in the region of £7k) without the tiniest percentage of royalties for writing 80,000 words in six weeks.  What does that say about the income of writers nowadays?

 Secondly, 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. As Zoella herself admitted yesterday: ‘Everyone needs help when they try something new.’  Bring honest wouldn’t have dented her sales one little bit. Today's embarrassment was completely avoidable, and  carries an unpleasant whiff of big business trying to mislead young consumers. I’d like to see more openness about the use of ‘helpers’ in celebrity publishing, more light shed on the process, so that young writers don’t feel hopelessly inadequate when they try and emulate their idols. Also, when celebrities scoop up sales and awards, this would ensure that we’re all clear about who is actually being honoured. Not all celebrities need as much help as Zoella, after all, and a few do all the work themselves. 

And last, I'm concerned that brand, not quality is increasingly valued in children’s and young adult literature. Do all debut authors need millions of vlog followers nowadays? (John Green, after all, gathered fame as a vlogger  -  except I'm pretty sure he writes his books unaided) Or a career as an actor or comedian? Are publishers willing to take a chance on an unknown author - particularly one who isn’t especially glamorous?  How many authors have a chance to build their careers nowadays? It sometimes can feel that people have only a few months to prove their worth.

This was also the week that the shortlist was announced for a new prize for YA from the UK and Ireland. I have a particular interest because my book, Salvage is on the shortlist (short break here, while I dance for joy), but even if it were not I would be applauding the way that this prize celebrates the quality and diversity of books for teenagers being produced in this country. It’s not all about big American bestsellers, it’s not all about the YouTubers, we have a lot of wonderful authors writing excellent books,  that deserve a lot more attention than they get. A big thank you to The Bookseller for spotting this gap and doing something about it.

In a perfect world, Zoella’s triumphant entrance into the world of YA books will spark her interest in the work of other YA authors. She’ll start to read and review books on her vlog. She’ll champion books by people like Anne Cassidy, Sally Nicholls, Lydia Syson, Cat Clarke, Tom Easton, Patrick Ness, Bali Rai  and Zoe Marriott. Rachel Ward, Clare Furniss, Sheena Wilkinson, Meg Rosoff, Joanna Nadin, Emma Pass, Emma Haughton, Marcus Sedgwick, Ruth Warburton, CJ Daugherty, Sarra Manning, Malorie Blackman, Gillian Philip, CJ Skuse, CJ Harper, Helen Grant, Keris Stainton, Tanya Landman, Tanya Byrne, Susie Day  and Sara Grant. Not forgetting Candy Gourlay, Dave Cousins, Bryony Pearce, Kim Curran, Sharon Jones, Rae Earl, Catherine Johnson, Caroline Green, James Dawson, Non Pratt, Katy Moran, Moira Young, Hilary Freeman, Miriam Halahmy, Lee Weatherly, Sophia Bennett, Phil Earle, Luisa Plaja, Gina Blaxill, Liz de Jager, Holly Smale  and Holly Bourne. And more. So many more.

 In 2015 she’ll seek out debut books from the likes of  Eve Ainsworth, Lisa Williamson and Nicole Burstein.  She'll read Liz Kessler's first YA book. She’ll use the hashtag #UKYA, she’ll take part in the regular UKYA chats on twitter, she'll campaign against library closures and she’ll start following some of the UK’s  fabulous book bloggers I may well send her a copy of my 2015 book This is Not a Love Story which features a girl vlogger who loves glimmering tealights, vintage teacups and makeovers. Call it zeitgeist, Zoella.

Most of all, I look forward to Zoella shouting about the books written under her rumoured ghost’s real name: Siobhan Curham. Siobhan has written many wonderful YA books, and she scooped a national award for her novel Dear Dylan, which she self-published with no help from anyone.   

Wouldn’t that be great? Zoella?