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Last month, I talked to the school librarians of Hampshire at their annual conference in Winchester.  One of the things they had especially asked me to talk about was why children should use books for research rather than the web. As more teachers expect children to do their homework from online sources, it is harder for libraries to make the benefits of books clear. It was good to be asked that, as it's something that's central to a lot of what I do. It's a question I'd not tried to answer before for other people - I just had a vague sense that there were very good reasons. Working out what they are was a really useful exercise.

There are some obvious reasons, such as the availability of books to be read even by students who don't have broadband at home. It's easy to think everyone can be online all the time, but in 2013, only 42% of UK households had broadband, and 17% had no internet at all.

But there are better reasons to make books available to young people in school libraries, and to encourage their use.

You need to know what you want to know
It's easy to find out something (a specific fact, such as the dates of the Civil War or how to make risotto), but quite hard to find out about something. Suppose a young person wanted to find out about dinosaurs. Search for 'dinosaur' on Google and you get 78.8 million hits. Hardly anyone will look beyond the first page.

The web is not written for young people
The first hit is wikipedia (of course), 17,000 words starting, "Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, 231.4 million years ago, and were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, from the beginning of the Jurassic (about 201 million years ago) until the end of the Cretaceous (66 million years ago), when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of most dinosaur groups at the close of the Mesozoic Era. Not child-friendly.


How about the Natural History Museum? It has good info but is not organised in a way that makes it easy for a young student to find what they want. Behind the first, child-friendly, page it goes to a database of dinosaurs that can be sorted in  different ways. The information is presented in a dry and relatively unengaging way and if you don't know what you are looking for, it's hard to find what you need.

We could go on.

But let's try something different. Search Amazon (just to look, not to buy anything!) for children's books about dinosaurs and the first hit is  National Geographic's First Book of Dinosaurs. Here's the contents page. Which would you rather look at if you were, say, 9? This or the NHM database?

The web has no gatekeepers or guidance
The information in a book is generally accurate and unbiased. If a book is about an issue of fact, the facts are on the whole correct. If it is about an issue of opinion, all sides of an argument are presented, equipping the reader to make up his or her mind in an informed way.

My book on evolution came out last year, so I looked to see what a young reader might find online about evolution.This was the fifth hit - looks quite accessble. But all is not as it seems:

“Dinosaurs could not have gone extinct millions of years ago because Earth isn’t that old!”

“Dinosaurs, reptiles that are very different from birds, did not change into birds. God specially created birds on Day Five and dinosaurs on Day Six!”

A child growing up in a Creationist environment (family/school/USA) might encounter this view, but a child in a school library should be safe from minority views being peddled as undisputed fact. That's what homes are for.

Not all facts are true (see above)
Some websites look authoritative but have an agenda (not just the Creationist agenda). If you were researching sugar, you might think sugar.org looks like a good start. It is, of course, a sort of sugar-marketing board and would give a vulnerable young reader a completely distorted view of the value of sugar in the diet. And some 'facts' are just wrong, such as this one, widely cited: “According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003.” It's true that Eric Schmidt said it, but that's all. Go back to the sources, and the real fact is that as much information was published, recorded or shared every two days in 2010 as in all of 2002. (And most of it was probably videos of kittens and pictures of people doing something stupid - not useful information.)

The web is a false form of laziness
It might look as though it's easier for a child to look online than find a book in the library. But it's laziness that backfires.
 
The web is full of accurate, fascinating information. It's also full of inaccurate, dull garbage. The web is not bad - but using it properly takes time and skill. A book written specifically for children could be based entirely on online research - but the author will have done the hard things:

• finding the right information
• checking the information
• selecting the relevant and interesting information
• presenting the information in an accessible, appropriate way for young readers.

If a young reader goes straight to Google, they have to do all this - and usually they don't, of course. They copy and paste the first thing they come across and learn nothing. Learning to use the web is a vital skill, but learning subject content should not be jeopardised by expecting children to depend on their nascent web skills.

I ended my talk with this chart. I could just have given you the chart and shut up, I suppose. This is why kids learn more from a well-chosen book than a Google search:

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Last month, I was one of the judges of the ALCS award for educational writing for children. There are not many big prizes for children's non-fiction, so it's a very important award. The eligible books were those written for secondary-age children,  published in English during 2012 or 2013. The age groups alternate every year, so next year it will be for books intended for readers of 5-11. Publishers - take note! Entries have to be in in June of this year. Contact ALCS or the Society of Authors to find out more.

The prize-giving was in the House of Commons on 2nd December. I spoke about the shortlist and why we had chosen those books. And Tristram Hunt talked about Lauren Child, which was entirely irrelevant as she doesn't write non-fiction. 

The books were great. Here's the shortlist:

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Keep Your Cool: How to Deal with Life's Worries and Stress, by Aaron Balick and Clotilde Szymanski (Franklin Watts)
Lots of books address the problems that plague young people. But this book goes further, in tackling the festering worry that makes everything even worse. It doesn’t just say ‘don’t worry’, but – much more importantly - tells you how to ‘not worry’. The illustrations feature a great ‘self-talk monster’ that speaks all those horrid things we say to ourselves – ‘you’re too fat/ugly/stupid/boring’, and so on. But it’s your monster –  you can challenge or ignore it.



The Danger Zone: Avoid Being Sir Isaac Newton!, by Ian Graham and David Antram (Book House)

This really humanises an iconic figure, looking behind Newton’s famous achievements to show him as a person – and rather an odd one at that. Born prematurely, he almost died infancy. Life didn’t get much easier, and some of his problems were his own fault: he was stroppy, prone to tantrums, antisocial, and arrogant. If he was alive today, he’d be shut in his bedroom playing World of Warcraft. If you look carefully, you’ll see that on nearly every page Newton looks miserable or annoyed.


The world in infographics: Animal Kingdom,  by Jon Richards & Ed Simkins (Wayland)

This is an amazing fusion of text, images and design. It’s a book with great ‘Oh wow!’-potential, crammed with really useful facts – such as that a blue whale eats the weight of three cars in krill each day, or that that you couldn’t outrun a squid, which can speed along at 40 km/hr. This book is especially good as it’s accessible to readers of all levels of competence and confidence. A struggling reader can dip into it, and just a few words will reward their effort. A keen reader will devour it.



Mission: Explore Food, by the Geography Collective and illustrated by Tom Morgan-Jones (Can of Worms)

Food is let out of the cupboard and runs riot over the page in a series of ‘missions’ that range from getting an onion to escape from a maze to making cheese. It covers how food is grown and produced, cooked, eaten, processed by the body (that’s a good yukky bit) and finally decomposes and is recycled to grow more food. Some of the missions produce tasty outcomes, and some produce a right mess. Some pages are packed, with lots to explore; others give illustrated instructions; and some are largely blank, templates for recording discoveries.


They are all great books and the winner - Animal Kingdom - especially so. So let's sing their praises and encourage young people to read them.

But there are a few problems.

One of the shortlisted writers told me he had been to both Waterstone's and Foyles when the shortlist was announced to take a look at the other titles. Neither shop had any of the shortlisted books.

But why?  Forty per cent of all 8-11 year olds who read outside school each day read non-fiction, and sales of children’s non-fiction have risen by 36% since last year.The kids clearly know a good thing when they see it.

The shortlisted books are all brilliant. They look lovely; they use innovative design and all are illustrated with real, commissioned pictures, not just the usual photo-library munge we've seen a hundred times before. Why are these books not in bookshops? Why are books that are liked by 40% of children given only about 10% of the shelf-space? Children enjoy reading - and should be encouraged to read - both fiction and non-fiction books.Let's give the chance to do so.






Anne Rooney
Latest book:
Space Record Breakers
Carlton Books
November 2014

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"You're lucky - you know what it was like before."

Ex-Bint Boy, who is 20, said that the other day. We'd been talking about some aspect of technology, as I'm writing yet another book about the internet.

When we discussed exactly how 'before' it all was, he was quite astounded. He can remember a time before Facebook and YouTube, of course. But he didn't realise that it wasn't only the web I didn't have as a child.

My own Bints are well aware of the strictures of my early life because I used to impose sporadic '1960s days' on them when they were not allowed to use anything that wasn't available to me in the 1960s. It was actually a game, and although I tried to get them to do the whole day, the Smaller Bint rarely made it beyond 11 am before cracking.

So, if you'd like to try your own 1960s day, this is what you have to do:

No internet, including email.
No computers, games consoles, tablets, mobile phones of any type.
No wireless anything (including landline phones).
Probably, no landline phone.
No CDs, DVDs, videos.

No digital tv or radio - indeed the only TV you are allowed is BBC1, BBC2 and ITV and you have to watch them set to black and white. You can only watch TV at times when children's programmes were broadcast: Watch With Mother at lunchtime, then from about 3:30 onwards - until Magic Roundabout before the 6 o'clock news.You can listen to Listen With Mother on the radio.


If you want to take a picture, you'll need a film camera and you'll have to take the film to a chemist to be developed and pay for the pictures. Yes, really. And it might well be transparencies, that you can only view with a projector and a bunch of bored neighbours.

You'll have no clothes with velcro; no lycra or indeed any artificial fibres except rather nasty nylon, polyester and crimplene. No trainers. No backpacks. No leggings. No sweatshirts/hoodies. No t-shirts. Your knickers and tights will be saggy because there is no elastic in the fabric.
If you are a girl, you will have to wear a skirt. If you are a boy under 11, you will have to wear shorts. Your legs must be cold - there is a gap between your socks (which fall down) and your skirt/shorts.

If you want to do some writing, you'll need a dip pen and an ink pot (if you're at school), unless you're going to use a pencil. (Eventually, my school relented and allowed biros, but not until 1969.)
Colouring-in will be done with crayons, not felt-tips. No gel pens. No highlighters. No post-it notes.
You probably can't go anywhere in the car, because even if your family had a car, it would have been taken to work by your dad.

Crisps are plain and have a little pack of salt - you have to sprinkle it yourself. (You can still get these, as a novelty.) That's why salted crisps are called 'ready salted' - because the salt is already on them.
There's no microwave oven, no freezer (for most people). You might have a fridge, but there won't be any ready-meals in it.
You have to cook with ingredients.
You probably have sandwiches as your evening meal and you have them at about 5 or 6 pm.
There is some fun to be had making 1960s meals, actually - you might not realise it, but you can still buy Vesta curries, Bird's custard and Angel Delight. I'm not sure whether you can still make school-issue Spam fritters or whether the space-time continuum has somehow made that impossible.

Even your ingredients are restricted - no courgettes, peppers, aubergines, brocolli, pineapples, kiwi fruit, out-of-season soft fruit, exotic fruit and veg of any type. Potatoes are white and muddy (no fancy purple or red potatoes and certainly not black ones unless you have let them go off). Carrots are muddy. Cabbages might have caterpillars on them. Raspberries have maggots in, but it's OK as they float out in the evaporated milk.
Nuts come in shells and need cracking. Except peanuts, which you can open with your fingers.
Fruit and veg come in paper bags, never trays or plastic bags. You will have to find a market or greengrocer if you are going to do it properly, but as long as you buy things that were available, you're let off sourcing it properly (because you don't have a car, remember?)
You most certainly cannot have your shopping delivered by the supermarket. For one thing, there isn't a supermarket. But you might buy food from door-to-door butchers, fish mongers, veg sellers, bakers. Meat is bought in chunks and wrapped, bleeding, in brown paper. Ditto fish, but leaking salt water rather than blood.
You will eat a lot of mashed potato. It is made from muddy potatoes that are peeled, cooked and then mashed - it doesn't come in  a tray from Waitrose. But it might be Smash....

There are no wheelie bins: your dustbin is made of metal and is smelly.
If you have some large items to get rid of, you can't order a skip. You will have to wait for the rag-and-bone man to come with his horse and cart.
Your milk is delivered in glass bottles every morning. In the winter, birds drink it, pecking through the metal top. Try to put some bird-spit (and salmonella) in your milk for that authentic 1960s taste.


You're going to have to go to school by bus or on foot. Or cycle.
You will have to drink a disgusting bottle of tepid milk at break time - or try to use your body-heat to melt a frozen-solid bottle of milk if it's winter.
If it is winter, you will also need to wear your coat in the classroom until it warms up. You will need to crack the ice in your ink-well before you can do any work.
Your school lunch will be beyond horrid and children in Biafra would be glad of it.

(Our blankets were never this good)

You might spend the afternoon knitting brightly-coloured squares that will be sent to those same unfortunate children in Biafra. Your granny might suggest you use 'day-glo' colours because they show up so nicely against their dark skin, dear.

If you have poor eyesight, you can't wear your contact lenses. You will have to wear glasses - probably extremely ugly plastic NHS glasses.

With your glasses on, you will see endless coverage of the Vietnam War, in which the US dropped more tonnage of bombs on a small Asian country than were dropped on the whole of Europe during the Second World War.
You can listen to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Sandy Shaw, Petula Clark... but only on your record player, or when they happen to come on the radio/TV.
If you go to the cinema, there will be only one screen, so you have to see the film that is showing (no choice). There will be an interval when you can buy a choc-ice if your parents let you, but it's quite expensive so they probably won't.

You will have to use old money - 12d = 1s, s0s = £1. (OK, I only showed my Bints the money. We didn't actually try to spend it.)
If you have a dog, you will need a licence for it, even if it's not a killer pit-bull.

If your paternity is in dispute, you will just have to argue it out with your parents as there's no DNA testing.
If you get pregnant at 14, woe betide you. (But if you manage this in only one day of 1960s, you're not playing the game properly.)
You have to call adults Mr and Mrs and Miss - or, if they are friends of your parents or neighbours, you might be allowed to call them Auntie and Uncle.They will all feel free to tickle, tease, touch, bully and antagonise you in whatever way they like and no one will take any notice of your objections.

If you are a woman, you will be slapped, pinched, subjected to sexist banter, unwanted attention, discrimination at work and elsewhere and will be badly paid.
You will be scorned if you work at all if you have children. Why aren't you at home cleaning the house and cooking your husband's dinner?

If you are not white, don't even bother going to the 1960s. Ditto if you have a disability or any mental illness.
Don't forget to get your newly-introduced vaccinations so that you don't end up in an iron lung. Or dead.
Some of your friends or neighbours won't have the usual configuration of limbs. You might not, if your mother took thalidomide while pregnant.

There are children with Downs syndrome and they are quite common - no one can scan or test their unborn baby and decide whether to keep them if they are not 100% 'normal' ('normal' was big in the 60s).
Everyone, everywhere will be smoking, with no regard for your presence as a child (we can't emulate that one).

You can play boardgames and with things like Lego (but only bricks and windows, not special shapes) - no electronic or battery-operated toys of any kind and relatively few plastic toys. Most things require some effort/imagination.
If you are bored, you can go to the park. Don't accept lifts or sweets from strangers.
Look out for the local policeman on his bicycle. You can ask him directions to somewhere, or what time it is. He won't have a gun, won't assume you have drugs in your pockets and might pat you on the head. You can't lodge a complaint about inappropriate touching if he does. He isn't a woman, ever.

If it is your birthday, you might have a party. It will be at home. There will be sausages, crisps (just plain, salted), home-made cakes, jelly and ice cream. If you have a party bag, it will have a sweet and a balloon in it (but you probably won't have one at all). You will get cards with your age on and, if someone is generous, one will have a badge with it.
You will get perhaps 1s or 2s pocket money (5p or 10p). If you spend it on sweets, you can't eat them all at once. No one will ever have eaten an entire (smaller-than-now) Mars bar in one go.
Your meals will be smaller, and on a smaller plate.

No one will care if you eat lots of butter, full-fat milk, fatty meat or sugary cakes and biscuits. You will not be encouraged to eat five fruit and veg as they are expensive and pointless (except for the 'fibre' that keeps you regular).
Someone will always be talking about the War - the Second World War if it's your parents, the First World War if it's anyone older. (Actually, that bit's quite easy this year.) They have seen and endured things you can't imagine - and you don't have the internet or a load of videos to help you imagine it, so you really don't know, except what they tell you.
Oh - and remember most of the world was black-and-white in those days.

The black-and-white world might end at any moment. You live in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis and imminent nuclear destruction, the bomb about to be dropped by the USSR.
You know that you have to get under the table if there is a nuclear attack.
You can't travel to Eastern Europe.
There is no euro, or eurozone.
If you go abroad (you won't) you have to take travellers' cheques.
There are no charter flights. You will probably go on the ferry.
Britain has bits of an empire left. Zimbabwe is still called Rhodesia. Hong Kong is still a British territory. Your school atlas might be so old that it shows India as part of the Empire (mine was - only 20 years old).

Men go into space and will land on the moon. This is considered the most significant event in the history of the world.

There's a school holiday coming up - why not go back to the 1960s for a day? It's fun and educational.

I don't think ex-Bint-Boy realised just how very different it was. And it's only 50 years ago. Anyone over 30 or so has lived through the fastest changes the world has ever seen; perhaps it is a privilege after all.

I wonder whether my grand-daughter (Micro-Bint) will be subjected to 1990s days...

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Today is both Remembrance Day and the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 11th November - 'real' Remembrance Day, would also have been the 116th birthday of my granny, who died in 1970. War and the wall were defining icons of my childhood, and she was my favourite relative.

I was born closer to the First World War than my children were to the Second, though of course it was the Second that people talked about most. My parents' characters were forged by the Second World War - by rationing and evacuation and air raids and watching the planes fly over.

Imperial War Museum

But my mother was born eight years after the end of the First World War and that also shaped her childhood. It also produced that generation of women teachers who had never married, or had been early widowed. The First World War was in my classroom. I knew nothing about my father's family in the First World War - it was never mentioned. My mother's father, an ARP warden in the Second World War, was in the merchant navy in the First and so had an easier time than most. He had three brothers, and I think one was in the 'proper' navy, and one was too young to serve. No one died.


It's easy to think that everyone who went to war was slaughtered, but in fact 90% came back. Fairly obviously, most of us are not descended from those who died, or even who were horribly wounded or traumatised. Those young men were not the ones to marry and have families. They were people like the old man who ran the shop at the end of the lane where I grew up: partly blind, scarily angrily for no apparent reason (not apparent if you're six and just wanted to buy sweets), living alone with a dog and a limp. We remember those who died, but we should also remember those who survived, as it wasn't always the better alternative. And, of course, the families who survived, their lives rent apart by loss or by the return of destroyed young men. We should remember them.

'Lyricmac', 1982 - creative commons licence

The Wall existed from soon after I was born until the time I was pregnant with my own first child. As my father made frequent trips to Germany on business, the East/West split was something I was aware of in a shadowy way. When I began to travel in Eastern Europe as a teenager, it was unpopular - seen as fraternising with the enemy. But it was more a keen desire to understand what this 'other' was like that was presented as the enemy.

I was in Budapest when the Wall fell. I went to the railway station to get a ticket to Berlin. It was packed. I realised it wasn't my fight. The people around me wanted to go to Berlin to reach the West. I couldn't take their seat, so went back to the hotel and watched it on TV instead. I would have loved to have been there, but in the end it was better not to be.

My granny didn't kill anyone and was killed by a heart attack, so although I will remember her fondly, she doesn't need much of a paragraph here. Just a loving hello across the lost years. 

Mostly, today is about the First World War. The poppies at the Tower of London are an impressive and moving memorial. There will be 888,246 poppies - one for every British soldier who died. Not that there is a definite number of known casualties, but hey, you can't make an approximate number of ceramic poppies. Perhaps there could have been some way to show, though, that we don't even know how many people died. (The figure of 888,246 is the number reported by the War Graves Commission in 2010-2011 and includes names from war memorials and all named burials.) Non-British soldiers who fought for the Empire are not remembered at the Tower, even though The Mirror erroneously stated that the poppies commemorate the '888,246 British and Commonwealth servicemen' killed. The German memorial exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum simply says that 15 million died, without singling out German soldiers for special note (and around twice as many German troops died as British).

It all looks more real in colour - French troops

Britain got off lightly in the First World War by comparison with some other parts of Europe. Approximately 10% of British (and Empire) troops died and a further 20+% were injured. The British (and Empire) death/casualty/missing rate was about 35% of troops mobilised. That's truly terrible. But the death/casualty/missing rate for Romania and France was over 70%, and for Russia it was 76%. A British soldier had a better-than-evens chance of surviving intact (or what passed for intact) - a Russian soldier had only a one-in-four chance. But wait: in Germany, 65% of soldiers were killed , missing or injured. In Austro-Hungary, it was 90%. Yes, 90%. OK, they started it. But not the individual young men dying on the battlefields. They didn't start it. Let's remember them all - not just the notional 888,246 who warrant a ceramic poppy. Four million people will have visited the Tower exhibition. Just look at the crowds in any photo. Imagine wiping them all out at a stroke - probably several thousand in any picture, but it would only be a tiny fraction of those represented by the poppies, and the poppies only represent a tiny fraction of those who died. It makes you think. The poppies make you think in ways that just numbers on a page don't.

Edna Gertrude Urwin

The best writing I know about the the First World War is Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (German) and Wilfred Owen's poetry (English). Perhaps some of you know of equally good writing in French or Russian or Greek or Romanian. There must be some. Maybe a good way to spend the day is in reading, remembering all the men on both sides - and the 4.5-5 million men, women and children who died of malnutrition and disease as a result of the War. And let's remember, too, the 200 or so who died trying to escape East Berlin and the millions whose lives the Iron Curtain ruined. That's a lot of remembering to do. And I'll add my granny, too.

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)
Latest book: Space Record Breakers, Carlton, 6 Nov 2014

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"So long as children are gay and innocent and heartless."

Those are the closing words of Peter Pan. It's interesting that 'heartless' is the very last word, as that's the word that has been unspoken throughout the book and is uncomfortably central to it. Children will have dangerous adventures. Children will grow up and leave. They must. Peter Pan is a freak, and real children aren't like that. They are, instead, like Wendy and John and Michael. They will torture their parents by going off and doing stupid things with no thought for their parents' suffering, putting themselves in danger and just thinking it's jolly good fun. And - worst for parents - that's how it should be. Because children are 'gay and innocent and heartless.' And it's both delightful and unbearable.

I read a very interesting blog post by Clementine Beauvais last week which was really about open-access academic articles, but it described an article she had written some time ago (not much time ago, as she's very young for someone so accomplished!) The article discusses the power children have or don't have in literature, and how children have a particular type of power because they have more potential than adults: they have more life ahead of them, can do more stuff than we will be able to, and will be around after we are dead (in the usual run of things). She is clearly right - this is an extremely important part of the power dynamic between adults and children. I'm not sure it's one that finds much expression in children's books, though - but perhaps Clem can point me in the right direction. It's rather undermined in the dead-kids genre currently in vogue.

Another important source of the child's power is that they can destroy the adult's life at a stroke, just by choking on a peanut, falling under a bus, getting diphtheria or walking through a wardrobe into a non-existent land. Adults are scared of their children because the children hold ALL the important power. And children are at least subliminally aware of it. Children's literature plays with that dynamic to a greater or lesser degree depending on the perspicacity and courage of the writer.

In the nineteenth century, children's books (and children in adult books) generally end up being absorbed into 'normal' (thank you, Clementine) adult society - what would we could call an aetonormative resolution if we wanted to be jargonish about it (thank you, Maria Nikolajeva for that word). But today we tend to write books that leave the future more open for children, perhaps because the real future looks so uncertain (although futures have always been uncertain). Or perhaps because we don't like to endorse a 'normal'.

When we, as writers, exclude parents from the picture - sending them to work, killing them off, making them neglectful, leaving them asleep in the cave, or whatever - we give the stage to the child characters. I think most of us do it, if we think about it, to free the child to act. In Arthur Ransom's day, it was fine to give your kids some sandwiches and stick them in a leaky boat, not expecting to see them for a few days. Now it's not. To do so (in a book) would be to make an issue of irresponsible parenting. So we need another way to give children the freedom to have adventures. But why ever we might think we do it, one of the undeniable results is that the parents, once out of sight, are out of mind. And not just the reader's mind. I'm writing something set in the late 19th century at the moment. The hero is an orphan, with an abusive guardian. No one cares what he does. But, perhaps more importantly for me as writer, whatever he does can't harm anyone who loves him. I can have him chased by a murderous villain, threatened with drowning, cut to ribbons by a slasher robot, and not have to worry about a grieving or angst-ridden parent behind the scenes.

I'm struggling to think of a children's book in which loving parents are present and respond realistically to the dangerous exploits of their children. Children don't want to see that, of course - it's either not interesting to them, or would detract from the joy of the story, depending on the child. But neither do we want to write it. We don't want to think about it. There's a terrible tension at the centre of exciting children's books, as in real-life parenting, between wanting the child to have exciting adventures and not wanting them to die. Every parent draws their own line of acceptable/unacceptable risk. Every story-teller pushes the risk and harm as far as they can/want and usually stops just short of death (if we exclude Edward Gorey from the mix). And they are freest to  remain gay and innocent and heartless if we don't have to think too much about their parents as we write.



Anne Rooney
Stroppy Author
Latest book - Evolution, Octopus, September 2014

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"What is the difference between a good story and an outstanding one?"
That's a question one of my students asked a couple of weeks ago. We all talked about the question and after 10 minutes or so one of them remarked that from what we had said, it clearly isn't the plot that's the really crucial point. And that's true. Although plots might look original - and even be original in their details - we all know there's only a fairly small number of basic plots that are reworked again and again in different settings and with different characters. What can make one of these plots structures work, and appear fresh, is the marriage of plot and character. Or perhaps the menage à trois of plot, character and situation.

In writing a story, what we strive for is inevitability. Once the ball starts to roll, the nature of the characters must mean that there can be only one possible outcome. It must be inevitable. But - and here's the tricky bit - it must not be predictable. It can be predictable in retrospect - indeed, it must be predictable in retrospect as that's pretty much the definition of inevitability. So when you look back, from the end of the story, you see that it couldn't have been any other way, but while you are working your way through the story, everything must come as a surprise. It's a tall order.

Take Hamlet: if he had the character of Macbeth, he'd just have challenged Claudius and brought the whole thing to a crisis, probably have killed him and taken over as king. A one-act non-tragedy. And if Hamlet were given Macbeth's situation, he would have done nothing and waited for fate to bring him the crown of Scotland in its own good time. A many-act non-tragedy. But the characters of Hamlet and Macbeth are such that, in the situations they are given, their tragedies are inevitable. That's what we need to achieve.


Anne Rooney
Stroppy Author
Latest book - Evolution, Octopus, September 2014

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This post was going to be called "Gargoyle blindness", but you'll have to wait for that one, because I left my camera in my college office with all the photos on it. Instead, I'm picking up on Keren David's excellent and thought-provoking post of yesterday.

Keren said that she felt unrepresented in books when she was a child because there were no Jewish characters. I wholly respect that position, and don't want to excuse the publishing industry, the non-Jewish community, or anyone else. But I want to make a slightly different point - don't all children feel isolated and alienated? And isn't that one of the reasons we read? Reading helps us to find a community of made-up people we can feel like, that make us say, 'oh, yes, it's just like that!'

I was not black, or gay or Jewish or disabled or a member of any other group that is/has been under-represented in children's books. But children will always find something to pick on in others (and themselves). I was bullied for - I don't even know what. Being different. But we're all different. We just don't all have a nameable 'different' group. I suppose I could say that I did see children like me in books because there are books about children who feel different. There are a lot of them. Which might give us a clue: all (almost all?) children feel different, excluded, isolated, not like everyone else. Of course, if you also belong to an ethnic minority or under-represented group, you probably feel even more different, as you have the Keren-flavour of difference as well as the universal, existential difference.

Perhaps there are two distinct kinds of children's books. (OK, there are lots of kinds - but this is one way of dividing them.) There are books about a single protagonist and how they are different and suffer/triumph as a result. These are books like Peter Rabbit and Eleanor and Park, Twocan Toucan and The Little Princess, Heidi, Elmer and The Bunker Diaries. (There's a good exam question in that - how are Elmer and The Bunker Diaries alike?) Then there are the stories that offer a gallery of characters and invite readers to identify with one of them. A gazillion Enid Blyton books, and any number of multi-authored My Little Alien Unicorn Space Fighter series are the most obvious examples. But there are more thoughtful books, too - The Silver Sword, for one. And there are books that pretend to be the second and are actually the first, like Little Women - because is there anyone who preferred another character over Jo? (Doesn't just choosing to read the book align you with her?) Or Harry Potter, which pretends to be the first type but over the course of the series becomes the second type.

The different functions and appeals of the two types are too complex to consider here, but the first deals most thoroughly with the feeling of being different and becoming comfortable with it, discovering one's own strengths and weaknesses. The second is more concerned with fitting in - with seeing there are other people like you that fit comfortably into a group, and little differences are not a barrier to acceptance. I think, perhaps, it's the second type that in particular needs to be careful to represent as many different types of child as possible as they are the books that invite children to pick the character like them to follow through the story.

Is there a division between children along these lines - preferring one type of book over the other? I'd be interested to hear in the comments which you preferred. I overwhelmingly preferred (and prefer) the first. I had no time for Famous Five, Malory Towers or any of that. The Little Unicorn, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Mrs Pepperpot and Dr Dolittle were my favourites.

Confession time. My favourite book, when I was five, was Little Black Sambo. That's an unacceptable book now, of course. But I didn't know it was unacceptable (and indeed it wasn't in the 1960s), and I can remember why I liked it. The boy was so cool. He could outwit tigers! I can remember the first reading, when I was so upset that he lost his colourful clothes - and then it was all OK. He had the life I wanted (including good weather and blue trousers) - he defeated the bullies and, in true fairytale style, ate them so that they were definitely gone.

How was Sambo different? Because he wasn't a tiger, and tigers were in charge. Not because he was black. How was he like me? He was bullied by people who weren't like him (people who were tigers, but hey, it counts).

There were no black children in my school until a year or so later (this was rural Hampshire), but I can remember that him being black didn't affect my identification with him - he just lived in a country where people were black. (Sri Lanka, as it happens - Little Black Sambo is Tamil.) Now, the Mumbo/Jumbo thing bothered me, but not because I had heard of mumbo-jumbo as I hadn't. But I thought if his mum was called Mum[bo] his dad should be called Dad[bo] or something similar. And Jumbo was the name of an elephant, which his dad clearly wasn't. I rationalised that the local word for 'Dad' must be 'Jum'. And then that was OK. (I was familiar with different languages as my parents spoke in French when they didn't want me to understand what they were saying.)

No chance: I had to wear Hansel-and-Gretel shoes - those shoes that show kids being abandoned in the forest on the poster. Great. That makes you keen to go shoe-shopping.

The point was that I could empathise with Sambo because he was a child in a spot of bother. Quite a big spot of bother, actually, with those predatory tigers. It was *just* like being bullied at my primary school. 'If you don't give me your apple/pencil/scarf...' Little Black Sambo was a child like me. Except that he lived somewhere warm and got to eat butter made out of melted tigers. How amazing was that? And those shoes! I wanted shoes like his.

In some of my other favourite books, the characters weren't even human. I could empathise with Moomins - no problem there. Or animals. I could read those stupid stories set in boarding schools, even though I knew no one who had ever been to a boarding school, even though I didn't really like them. I read books about boys. None of it mattered, because I was reading books for the bits that are the same no matter who you are, the bits that are part of the human condition - and that included the existential angst of realising that no one is like you. But on the other hand people (or moomins) can look very different and be just like you.

I read books about people who were not superficially like me and found comfort in the characters being like me at a deeper level. Which is not to say we don't need more diversity in children's books, or that we shouldn't endeavour to show children of all types. But what I think is most iniquitous is when books show children (or adults) of a particular group or type in a consistently bad light (or only one type - white, pretty, athletic - in good positions). When all the Jewish characters are like Fagin, or all the fat girls in boarding school stories are stupid, or all the ginger kids are freaks, that's bad. Because we see past superficial differences unless they come to stand for something. So while in one way there were no children like me in the books I read, in another way there were a lot of children like me because they were humans (well, living beings) and they were individuals.

But I couldn't outwit tigers.




Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Latest book (probably) A Bird in the Hand, Readzone, 2014

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This post was going to be a report from yesterday's important debate at the House of Commons, hosted by ALCS, on how authors can be fairly rewarded for their work. But my train was cancelled in the middle of nowhere and so I didn't actually get to the debate. Well done, railways.

The subject of the debate was outlined in an article in yesterday's Guardian: Authors' incomes collapse to 'abject' levels. There are several things wrong with the article, not least its concentration entirely on literary fiction as though that represents all, or even most, books. Most books are non-fiction. Most novels are not literary. But never mind. The survey behind the article actually asked writers of all types of books, even if the Guardian didn't. If you want to read the non-journalised account of the research, it's on the ALCS website.

The Poor Poet, Carl Spitzweg, 1839

The gist of it is that writers are a lot poorer than they used to be. As most people seem to think writers earn a lot ("look at JK Rowling") they don't imagine that matters. But they don't and it does. The median income of professional writers, the survey found, is £11,000. That's less in actual numbers, not just in real terms, than 2005 when it was £12,330. If the 2005 figure is adusted to 2014 prices, the drop is from £15,450 to £11,000: a drop of nearly a third in ten years, from poor to poorer. (I checked my own figures - down 25% over the same period.) Few people realise that most of the books their children read in school were written by someone paid between £1,000 and £2,000 for the book and sometimes less (that's before expenses, never mind tax). How long do you think they could afford to spend working on it? The amount I get for a book now is roughly half the amount I would get for a directly comparable book in 2000 (not adjusted for inflation - just bare numbers). Would *you* do your job for less than half the pay you had a decade and a half ago? That's why many writers are giving up writing full time.

The survey gives results for professional writers, which it defines as those who spend most of their earning time writing. That's a useful distinction because if the figures were distorted by people who wrote one book five years ago, it wouldn't be very helpful. But it also points out that the proportion of professional writers who can earn a living from writing alone has fallen from 40% to just 11.5% - most of us have to take on another job, or other freelance work. It wasn't clear whether 'income' meant 'turnover' or earnings after expenses have been subtracted (but before tax has been subtracted). To compare with people in employment, it should be the latter. Most people don't have to pay from their own pocket for the electricity they use in the office, the computer and software they use, and their office phone bill. If it's turnover, the situation is even worse as the cost of the items we have to pay for to do the job has gone up as our income as gone down, so they represent a greater proportion of turnover. - there's less left after paying for them.

There is little general sympathy for writers because we do a job we like and other people believe they would like to do. (It's odd that the same doesn't apply to other people who like their jobs, such as surgeons and landscape gardeners.) Those unsympathetic people probably imagine sitting at a desk in Tuscany for an hour or two each day 'penning' great stories when inspiration strikes. Yeah, right. Dream on. I work a standard 35-40 hour week and none of it is in Tuscany.


I'm principally a children's writer and this blog is about children's writing, so I'll focus on that. It's not a matter of simple market forces. We are not makers of slide rules crying because the world has moved on to calculators. Nor are we writing books people don't want to buy. That sometimes happens - it's an occupational hazard. We spend a long time developing a book and a publisher doesn't want it. Fine - if I've written an unsaleable book, I don't expect to be paid for it. The crux of the matter is that we write books that publishers do want, that do sell, and we are the only link in the chain that doesn't earn enough to live on. Printers and in-house editors haven't seen their income drop. The ALCS report found that professional writers earn only two-thirds of the amount considered to be a living wage. We can't live on the money we earn from the books we write. That average figure is less than a 19-year-old friend of mine earns working in a DIY shop - and his income will go up as he gains experience, not down.

Why should you care? Because if authors can't afford to live on their writing, they won't write as much. Yes, someone will still write fantasy series or some other type of fiction they feel like writing (probably not a writer with years of editorial input building his or her skills, though). But who will write the reading scheme stories, the reluctant-reader novels, the remedial maths texts, the books about space, dinosaurs, tractors, One Direction (God forbid we should lose those)? No one ever dreamed of sitting at a desk in Tuscany writing a comparison of fourteen types of digger, but that is exactly what might fire the imagination and love of reading of a five-year-old. If we kill off professional children's writers, our children and grandchildren will be the collateral damage. It's true - You don't know what you've got until it's gone.

Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Latest books: Off the Rails and Soldier Boy (reissues), Ransom, June 2014
Go Figure: A Maths Journey (4 titles), Wayland, June 2014
Mega Machine Record Breakers, Carlton, May 2014 (does not include a comparison of 14 different types of digger)

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In the Middle Ages, the world was all in colour.

This is the period I first wrote about, many years ago. The rich brilliance of medieval colours is startling, a feast for the eyes.There is a lot blue, the colour of heaven (and also a relatively common paint pigment - it might not have been an accurate representation of reality.)








Even when things were going badly, as in this illustration of plague victims receiving a blessing, the world was gloriously coloured.

All aspects of life, grand or mundane, are depicted in vivid manuscript illuminations, stained glass windows, wall paintings, tapestries and (abroad) mosaics.

Later, I wrote about the Renaissance. Renaissance Venice was another colourful place.  This time it was huge paintings that provided most of the information I neeeded. Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese and their schools worked with vibrant pigments.






But then the world became black and white. I'm researching Victorian London for the story I'm writing at the moment. And last year I was hanging out with Amy Johnson in the 1920s-1940s. That's a black and white era, too.








The only colourful resource I'm using for the Victorian age is Booth's coloured-coded poverty map. Black shows the most deprived areas - that's where my story takes place.

Crawlers, John Thomson, 1877

The people and their lives are recorded only in sombre monotone. With the emergence of photography, and the ability easily to print engravings in books, the main method of recording the world around moved from hand-coloured depictions to monochrome images.






I really don't have a feeling for the nineteenth century in colour. The past is a foreign country; they did things in black and white there.











Nor do I think of most of the twentieth century in colour. Almost all the iconic images of the last century are in black and white.











If you imagine the trenches, aren't they grey? There is no vivid blood, the uniforms are grey, not green, and the sky is never blue.




How strange, then, to find colour photos of those long-ago times and see that the world was not, in fact, black and white.

A French soldier, photographed during World War I, looks like someone dressed up to play the part, so unfamiliar is the colour. Did you even know they wore blue uniforms? I didn't. 









Here is Leo Tolstoy, photographed by the Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky in 1908. It's not colourised - it really was a colour photo.















And here are some peasant girls - it looks more like travel photography than a historical image.
 (You can see more of his stunning work on flickr.)





I am struggling to bring colour to my Victorian London. I realised when I came across Prokudin-Gorsky's photos again that my story is grey, and it's grey not jujst because most of it takes place in the slums, but because that's how we see the 19th century. Because I had done all my research with Thompson's photos (such as Crawlers, above) and Doré's pictures of London, I have imagined a world without colour. Without intending to, the scenes where there should be most colour, I have set at night-time, in the dark!

Time to reimagine the past, but this time with colour.




Anne Rooney
aka Stroppy Author
Latest book: Mega Machine Record Breakers, Carlton, May 2014

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Being a writer is a bit like being a whale. One of those big whales that swims around with its mouth open catching krill in its feeding filter (baleen whales, or Mysticeti). I think I'll be a blue whale. It's how we catch ideas. We go around with our minds open and the ideas just get caught, from the aether. They drift and get absorbed. Sooner or later they are recycled into books.

I've just been away for a long weekend in Northern Ireland. I went to see my bigger daughter, who's doing a PhD at Queen's, and she took me, and a group of family friends, on a grand (as they say in Belfast) trip around her city and its outside world. 
Belfast was pretty good for a mind-whale. There are legends and there's history. The Titanic, the murals, Giants' Causeway, a dodgy rope bridge (not very dodgy at all, actually), trying to follow the boat race on an iPhone as we drove back across Ireland, hunting for chitons under rocks on the beach, watching the birds that nest on sheer cliffs, hoping to see puffins (but not - never mind, I've already written about puffins). Then there were all the anecdotes from the other members of our party. From one, I learned how virologists trap samples of whale sneeze to test whether they can get flu. They can. But I'm not going to tell you how to trap a whale sneeze as I really *must* use that in a book!

Whale sneeze?

I wrote the first Belfast-inspired outline on Sunday morning before breakfast and I'm meeting an editor on Thursday at the London Book Fair to talk about it.

Whales ahoy! (Oh, perhaps I should go to Wales...)

Anne Rooney also blogs as Stroppy Author
Latest book - The Colours of the Day in Daughters of Time, edited by Mary Hoffman, Templar, March 2014

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First successful book! our version doesn't have the touchy-feely stuff

I have a tiny grand-daughter who has just started taking an interest in books. She is 12 weeks old. My first success at grabbing her attention with a book came at 10 weeks (have to nurture new customers!) We'd been to the garden centre and looked at the tropical fish. When we came home, I showed her a book by Lucy Cousins with a picture of a fish in it. She loved it. We're on the way.I showed her some picture books and while she can't follow the story she liked looking at the pictures - all vigorously waving arms and legs and gurgling!

The best of the cot books

So in town yesterday I looked at board books for small babies. Oh my. There are the usual rather dreary picutres of objects, colours, numbers, etc - and some livelier ones such as the much-favoured Lucy Cousins series about animals. There are 'cot books' which unfold into a strip to fasten up inside the cot so the baby has something to look at. That's great, but not for sharing. Still, it's important for a baby to develop skills in independent reading, so we'll get one of those.

You can't be too young for Judith Kerr

Board books for the youngest children don't have a narrative. They are theme-based: animals, vehicles, number, colours, etc. - like our Farm Animals, Pet Animals and Garden Animals titles from Lucy Cousins. But there are some that introduce characters the child will encounter when she starts on stories. These are rather a cunning marketing move - the toddler who recognises Mog from Mog's Family of Cats will want to read the Mog books. No complaints from me - the Mog books are excellent.


 


On the whole, board-book prequels tend to be of the Peppa Pig &co merchandising category. I'd be wary of buying into something quite so commercial, but I guess if the baby has an older sibling who has Gruffalo and Peppa stuff around it makes sense. Here's a Thomas the Tank Engine title that introduces the engines that will feature in the child's coming Thomas TE experiences.





I think I might get the Moomin introductions to colours and numbers, though. Fostering an interest in moomins is, like fostering a liking for vegetables, a good investment in future health.





Here's the surprise discovery: board books for the children of literary parents. Now, it's one thing to introduce your baby to Peppa and Mog, protagonists of stories they can engage with pretty soon.

More for the grown-ups than the babies

But how about Pride and Prejudice? Anna Karenina? Moby Dick? Pride and Prejudice turns out to be a counting book (four stately houses, etc). Not a fan: how to build an interest in the trappings of capitalism and elitism.

Might well buy this one

Moby Dick I rather liked. It calls itself an 'ocean primer' and introduces ideas such as whale and anchor. I don't recall there being a harpoon page, fortunately.

Seriously? Clothes to die for?

Anna Karenina? Wow. Adultery and suicide for the under-twos. But it's massively disappointing. Look closely. It's the Anna Karenina fashion primer. Can you identify Anna's earring? Where is her hat? FFS. Does her handbag hold a one-way train ticket...?

I can understand that Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick might appeal to parents who like those novels. It's a bit far-fetched to suggest that they will lead young readers to those titles 14 years later, but if they did there would have been no serious misrepresentation. But if you turned to Anna Karenina expecting fashion to be a big part of it, you'd be in for a shock. (I do remember some referenc to Kitty's striped silk dress; but I don't think fashion was a theme, as such.)

I'm going back to town to look for more boards books - any favourites to suggest? Without a narrative, for now.

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What makes a story? I've been thinking a lot about this lately as a story I've been writing isn't playing ball. It keeps slipping away into exciting incidents that are fine on their own but don't move things along quickly enough. Each incident has its own logic - but it must all build into the larger story. So I thought I'd take a more analytical, logical approach to it. I've been writing about the Enlightenment, Pascal and Utilitarianism* so I'm in the sort of frame of mind - it's not just perversity.

A story should have an excitement graph something like this:

Time goes along the bottom, excitement is on the y-axis.

How many peaks there are before the climax will depend on how long the book is. Even a picture book of 300 words benefits from at least one peak before the big one. A book of 500 pages will need a good many peaks, and probably have this pattern repeated within each peak. The general shape of the story is shown by the red line here:












Underneath that, it can fractalise as much as necessary to hold the reader's interest. Keeping excitement at a very high pitch for a long time, as some films do, is tiring for the reader and can exhaust their sympathy. There needs to be a breathing space now and then.

Essentially, a story can be reduced to any of these:

First...then...and - this is quite boring. If it gets progressively more miserable, it's a misery memoir. Or Black Beauty. It's really a re-phrasing of the And then... and then... and then... structure that children themselves use in  their very first attempts at narrative.

First... then... so - this at least has causation. Progress.

First... then... but... so...- ah, conflict!

As soon as we start getting some 'but's there is conflict/challenge and excitement. Each incident has this shape, and the 'so' should lead naturally to the next incident.

First... then... but... so... then... but... so... then... but... so 

It's the 'so's I'm having trouble with.I have all the little mountain shapes but they aren't sticking together. It could almost be Black Beauty. No, quite that unconnected - the incidents are held together with more than string. But they need to grow out of each other in an order that looks inevitable and then looks set in stone - like mountains growing from their foothillls.


* The Utilitarianism and so on is for The Story of Philosophy, published in August/September this year.
** With thanks to Descartes for use of the X/Y axes, appropriated for this non-mathematical use


Anne Rooney - new website!
Stroppy Author - new address!

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"All of us ... are so habituated to words that we cannot escape them. If we are left alone long enough and forbidden to read, we will very soon be talking to ourselves... starve yourself in a wordless void. Stay alone, and resist the temptation to take up any book, paper or scrap of printed matter that you can find; also flee the temptation to telephone someone when the strain begins to make itself felt - for you will almost certainly scheme internally  to be reading or talking within a few minutes... Once we have learned words, we must be forever using them."

Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer, 1934

Now we would have to add that you can't use the computer, or radio, or television, can't text anyone or look at your Kindle. It's true - we are addicted to words and find ever more ways to use and encounter them.

Brande's advice is directed at writers who are stuck. She goes on to list ways stuck writers can get the words flowing again, including walking, listening to music (with no words), sewing and riding. The activities strike a chord - but I had never noticed that walking works precisely because there are no other words than those in my head. Perhaps she's right - to make words come, we just need to create a word vacuum. It's why the internet is often the enemy of writing - all those clamouring voices not just drowning out the interior voice but making it unnecessary.

Think of the books written in prison: Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison, and Auerbach wrote Mimesis - his great history of western literary tradition in prison, without having any of the books before him. Malory wrote the Morte Darthur, Pound wrote the Pisan Cantos, the Marquis de Sade wrote Justine, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, Wilde wrote De Profundis and Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Pogress - all in prison. Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German and Walter Raleigh wrote a History of the World. (Oh, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.)

Starve yourself in a wordless void, and write a masterpiece. Let's see if it works. (But not today.)

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)

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Fabulously serious logo by Sarah McIntyre

I got back from my summer holiday last night. I went to CWIG, which is not an obscure Welsh village, but the Society of Authors Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Group conference. It happens every three years in different cities, and this year it was in Reading.It was called 'Joined-up Reading'. Is that 'joined-up reading' or 'joined-up Reading'? Who knows. Maybe both.


Normally, we writers and illustrators spend our days, doing what we want, bossing around people  who don't exist and skiving work to chat on Skype/Facebook/twitter about the work we should be doing. We're not used to being with other people all the time, or doing as we're told. We're not used to having to get dressed before working, eat at regular times, use a knife and fork nicely or sit quietly without telling a bunch of lies. But a conference is a proper organised thing with set mealtimes, talks to attend and other people to interact with.

So why do we go? Holiday!

CWIG is a delight. Full of old friends and potential new friends, a chance to gossip, eat, drink and whinge. If any snippet of useful information leaks in, that's a bonus.

Nicola Davies, unfazed by being elbowed by a giant ghost - all in a day's work for us

CWIG is just writers and illustrators - it's not somewhere to look for an agent or publisher. And so no one has to be impressive, there's no point in showing off, and we can all just relax. It's a time for singing silly songs and drinking the bar out of wine. (We did that on the first night; the last time I was party to drinking a bar out of wine was in Outer Mongolia in 1990 on the day the Iraq War started.)

I loved it. But like all the best holidays, it had its grumble-points. The food was poor, the bar was hopeless, the cabaret compulsory (hah! we laugh in the face of compulsory!), the coffee undrinkable (that's serious) and the microphones non-functional. The Germans took all the sun loungers and there was tar on the beach. Oh. Hang on.

But we don't get this stuff every day, unlike, say, manager-type-people who are forever going to conferences and staying in the Scunthorpe (or Dubai) BestWesternMarriotHilton hotel. Indeed, most days we don't get interaction with another human being who actually exists. To be in a whole room of around 100 people, none of whom can be given green hair or three arms on a whim, is quite a novelty. CWIG is a weekend away in the real world.

Only our invisible friends were skiving outside

But look - we can play in the real world, too.

We talked about the state of publishing (in turmoil), of what the hell the government thinks it's doing with libraries (wanton armageddonising), of the progress of e-books in children's publishing (mollusc-like in its rapidity) and whether Allan Ahlberg's glass contained red wine or Ribena (who knows?) And heard the usual disingenuous comment from a publisher that there's never been a better time to be a children's writer.



Now for my holiday snaps. Don't shuffle like that. You might like to visit the real world one day.



Here is our venue: a very plausible-looking Henley Business Centre at Reading University.









We had proper signage, just like real business people. Well, perhaps not quite like real business people.







Just in case we didn't know where to walk ...





.... and where to dance, there were some stick people drawn on the floor.

(Obviously the nice people at Reading know that all writers - and  especially illustrators - speak fluent stick.)








We know how to dress. Alan Gibbons and John Dougherty, as usual, wore shirts chosen to burn out the eyes of Ed Vaizey. I won't dazzle you with those. Sarah McIntyre chaired her session in the best conference hat I have ever seen. [What do you mean, 'what's a conference hat?']








 Allan Ahlberg brought his teddy.









And he had a drink on the stage, though his wasn't see-through, like they usually are when you see conferences on TV.










We all transacted our own little bits of networking and business. I secured a promise from Catherine Johnson to translate some text into Jamaican Fairy and asked Jane Ray if I could commission a dodo from her.





So you see, we do know how to do it.

I had a wonderful time, but holidays can't last forever and it's time to settle be back into speaking stick and bossing around a steam-powered autamaton and an orphan in a boat. Sigh.

(If you would like to read a more informative account of what happened at CWIG, you could turn to David Thorpe. I'm sure more will appear, and I'll update this list later in the day/week/millennium.) 

Anne Rooney
(Stroppy Author)

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Are you e-experienced? Until a week ago I wasn't. But, in the last three weeks I have made and published my first e-book.

It feels a bit like giving birth to, I don't know, some kind of strange mutant mongrel beast, some hybrid child whose destiny is unknown, who may grow up to mock me, betray me, give me glory (but only by leave of the wayward capriciousness of viral flukeiness) or, even worse, disappear completely without trace in the infinitely absorptive sponginess that is the e-thernet.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I thought I would share my experience. Some of you may be teetering on the edge of this mysterious pool of brave new publishing opportunities, debating whether to take the plunge. I expect many of you already are e-experienced swimmers with Olympian credits. If so, you can poke fun at my ineptitude.

I kindled thoughts of these waters for a long while. Some of my books had been converted into ebooks by my publishers, but they were like the offspring of alcohol-obscured one night stands; unknown and unclaimed. The publishers didn't even tell me they had been born, I only found out by accident, and I don't have a clue about sales figures.

In a tentative way, I had previously offered PDF downloads of one or two stories or chapters for sale through my websites, but they had languished as forlorn and undownloaded as an unfertilised dandelion in a meadow of opium poppies.

I own no e-reader; nothing I cannot read in a bath without fear. Every work of fact or fiction in my library looks dissimilar from every other, and I like it like that.

What persuaded me to dip my sceptical toe in these waters was partly the persistent encouragement of a local publisher, Cambria Books, whose manager, Chris Jones, is passionate about their new business model.

OK, I said. But I wasn't sure what content to offer first. Then, an old colleague and the series editor of some of my non-fiction, suggested that I republish an old novella of mine. (Thank you, Frank.) This seemed a perfect way of testing out the market, since I knew it would have an existing audience, and that there'd be a new one to which I wanted to introduce it. All I would have to do was find those readers. (The expected readership, by the way, is YA, most likely readers interested in humour, politics, science fiction, and comics/graphic novels.)

I still am sceptical, so I'm going to be watching sales with interest.

The whole process of preparing the content from start to finish took two weeks, which itself is very attractive: contrast this with the swimming-through-jelly tempo of traditional publishing - two years start to finish?

Here are the stages it went through:

One of the illustrations, by Rian Hughes

1. Scanning in the original book using OCR (optical character recognition) software. I used ABBYY. The software is remarkably accurate but does need a bit of an eagle eye for spotting 1s that should be Is and Os that should be 0s.
2. Scanning in the 12 illustrations, which different comics artists from Dave McKean to Simon Bisley had contributed to the original edition. This was the fun bit.
3. Designing the cover, which included colourising in Photoshop a black-and-white illustration that had been on the inside. That was fun too.
4. Adding a short story on the same theme to give extra value, that had been published elsewhere in another collection but not widely seen.
5. Writing a new afterword. This involved a nostalgic and enjoyable expedition into overgrown verges along the side of my personal memory lane. I took my butterfly net for effect (a butterfly effect) to catch those extra special chaotic moments.
6. Completing the whole thing in Word. Word, the software, is not my friend, although Word, the archetypal personification of language, is. But sometimes you have to dance with the Devil, since the e-book conversion process requires a Word file. How did Microsoft sew that one up?
7. Making sure all the prelims were hunky-dory and accurate. That included researching and writing up short biographies of all the artists, updating them from the previous edition, and making sure I thanked everyone.
8. Then I thought I ought to add some adverts for some of my other books at the back that readers might be interested in. Why not? 70-90 years ago, most books had adverts in the back - and the front, sometimes, just like magazines. Perhaps this is the way to go to finance this new form of publishing? Interactive ads for acne-banishing face creams in the back of YA novels, anyone?
9. Then I got carried away and added a real ad from the 1940s for a chemistry set for boys that included real uranium! Most people don't believe that I didn't make this up.

I sent the file to the publisher, who checked it over, made more corrections, added the ISBN and converted it into the .mobi format, which Amazon likes.

I chose to go with Cambria Books, but there are many other companies offering similar deals. It may be worth shopping around, but I didn't bother. Some of them offer print-on-demand as another option. This may be worth considering as well. If you want to get reviews you should have a few print copies to send to reviewers. Also, if you don't think you will sell more than 1000 print copies, print-on-demand is generally cheaper than a conventional print run. Over this number, you should go down the conventional printing route.

The publisher then sent the e-book file back to me to check. I was horrified. I had designed it in Gill Sans font, which I love, and it came back in a frankly disgusting, evil, serifed font. All my lovely formatting was strewn about like weatherboard in a hurricane, and my unique work was reduced to the same common denominator as everything else that you see on a Kindle.

I had to resign myself to the fact that there is little you can do about this, except to control where some page breaks go. It's a bit like designing for the web, except you have even less control. That's the nature of this homogenising beast.

Then, holding a stiff drink, I muttered: “Go!" The publisher uploaded the file to Amazon and it was live - for sale - in less than 24 hours! Wow.

However, I didn't just want to sell it through Amazon and merely contribute to their increasing domination of the market. I wanted people to be able to read it on something other than a Kindle.

So the nice publisher also gave me a version in the .epub format, which works with other e-readers.

Cambria Books also made a Facebook page and a webpage on their company website for the title, to promote it alongside all of their other titles. For all of this Cambria charged £200, which includes £50 for the ISBN. The book is for sale at £1.84. So, I need to sell, bearing in mind the cut that Amazon takes, just 125 copies to get my money back.

I could also have chosen to do all of this myself, but I'm lazy, and I figured that it's worth it, especially since this was my first time.

But I wasn't finished yet.

I then chose to make the files available on my own website. I already sell books on my website through PayPal. Selling e-books is slightly different, because there isn't a physical product to ship, and you need to create a place where buyers can download the file, after PayPal has checked that they have paid for it successfully.

This place has to be completely inaccessible to search engines, otherwise people will just grab the files for nothing.

Here's what I did:

• I made the webpages holding the downloads, one for each format, which just need to be very simple, and put them together with the files in a folder on the server. At the top of the web pages is this text: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />.
• Just to be safe, I also uploaded a text file to the folder named robots.txt, which simply contains the following:
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /
• Both of these little tricks should prevent search engines from indexing and making public the content of this folder.
• The next thing to do is to get an account with PayPal, if you haven't already got one, and, once logged in, go to the Buy Now Button-making page (if you can't find it just type those words into the search function), which allows you to create a button for a single item purchase.
• All you need to do here, is to put in the name of the e-book, a product code that you make up, and its price. There is, of course, no shipping cost. You probably want to check the button that says “Track profit and loss".
• Then you come to Step 3, subtitled “customise checkout pages". This is the important bit. Answer the questions the following way:

1. “Do you want to let your customer change order quantities?" No, because they won't order one more than one e-book.
    
2. "Can your customer at special instructions in a message to you?" No, there's no need for that.
    
3. "Do you need your customer's shipping address?" No, because messages will go to their PayPal e-mail address.
    
4. Check the box saying “take customer to a specific page after checkout cancellation" and type or paste in the full website address for your shop page.
    
5. Check the box saying “Take customer to a specific page after successful checkout". Here is the really, really important bit: type or paste in the full website address for the page they go to download your e-book. Make sure this is right! This is the complete address for the page that you made earlier and uploaded, the one at the otherwise secret place.

• All you have to do now is click “create button" (don't worry, you can go back and change things if you made a mistake, as I did), and, when happy, copy the code and paste it on your page exactly where you want the button to be.
• Save your page and upload it to your website.

That's it!

The things writers have to do these days.

But I still hadn't quite finished. I had to write a news item publicising the e-book for the front page of my website, in which I included a link not just to the page where people can buy my books, but to the exact part on the page where they can buy that e-book, to make it super-easy for them.

On that page, I include all the options for them to make the purchase: a link to the Amazon page, because most people will be comfortable doing that; and the two buttons for both formats that I made using PayPal.

You can see the news item on the front page of my website here.

I then wrote a post on my blog promoting the book, which you can read here.

Of course, I also had to promote it on Facebook, on both my own page and the page made for the book itself, and on my Twitter account.

And, I launched the e-book at what was billed as the UK's first festival for e-books, in Kidwelly last weekend. My publisher had a stand there.

Unfortunately, this event was poorly promoted and badly attended (having it in a more accessible place would have helped), but there were many excellent speakers, not to mention, for children, our own Anne Rooney, plus Simon Rees and Mary Hooper, Clive Pearce and Nicholas Allan.

Several speakers told their own experiences of publishing e-books. Notable for me was Polly Courtney, who confessed her lamentable experiences with HarperCollins that made her realise that self-publishing was a far better route than being with one of the big five, and Dougie Brimson, who has sold over one million self-published e-books, because he knows his audience really well.

Listening to the speakers gave me confidence that it really is okay to do it yourself and publish ebooks. It doesn't mean you have to give up working with mainstream publishers. You can do both. But given that we all nowadays have to spend at least 25% of our time marketing ourselves and our books, in practice it is not that much more work.

As one of the speakers said, most readers don't care who the publisher is, as long as the book is good.

Did I leave anything out? Is there a better way of doing this? Perhaps some of you will share your experience. After all, I'm just a beginner, but at least I'm no longer an e-book virgin.

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Everyone knows it's illegal to photocopy books that are in copyright, rip off videos of films, and copy music from a friend's collection. In schools and colleges, where teachers often need to photocopy portions of books for their students to use in their studies, there's a mechanism for recording the copying of copyright materials and then, through some magic and not entirely efficient process, ALCS - the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society - distributes payments to authors of copyright materials that have been copied. Schools and colleges pay a fee to ALCS for the right copy copyright work. Although the system doesn't work brilliantly, it is in place and could be improved so that it works better.

But now the government is planning to change the regulations governing copying of copyright materials for educational purposes. In some cases, authors will no longer be paid when schools copy their work. So the authors' incomes - already generally very low - will fall even further. The publishing industry will be damaged further. Schools don't use pirated copies of Microsoft and Adobe software, they pay for an educational license - which is cheaper than the license everyone else pays. The government does not - cannot - demand that Microsoft give software to schools for free. Why should books be different?

Of course we all approve of education. But educational establishments have to pay a fair price for everything else they use. They pay full price for the electricity used to run the photocopiers, don't they? They pay salaries to the teachers who use the materials authors have produced. Teachers' salaries, though not generous, increase over the years - the rates for writing educational books have FALLEN over the last ten years. Money from ALCS is not an extra - it's an entitlement. It's pay for writers' work being used, payment which the government has no right suddenly to withdraw by legislating away the requirement for schools and colleges to pay to copy copyright content.

You don't see the government saying that a GCSE English class can watch pirate videos of the set texts, do you? If they did, Hollywood would come down on them like a ton of bricks, and quite rightly. Is it because writers are individuals, without the clout of a Disney, that the government feels we can be disregarded? After all, if our work were not of any value, schools wouldn't WANT to copy it, would they?

Schools are where we teach young people models of acceptable behaviour. The curriculum requires that  children are taught that they cannot copy copyright materials for their own purposes. Rules about plagiarism mean that they will be disqualified from exams if they steal material from books or online resources without crediting the source. This is responsible behaviour that should indeed be enforced and taught.

But the lesson is seriously undermined if the school can steal something a writer has written and distribute it for free, against the writer's wishes, probably without attribution. How is a pupil to distinguish between using stolen text given to them by a teacher and downloading a pirate copy of a game or film? There is no distinction. Books written in the knowledge that they could not be legally copied for free are stolen if they are so copied and distributed. It's like suddenly saying you can shoplift from Aldi and Tesco because only poor people go to Aldi and Tesco, but you can't shoplift from Waitrose and Marks and Spencer because rich people go there. Schools can steal from writers because schools are underfunded. Tesco wouldn't like - and writers don't like it. If schools can't afford to use the resources they need, GIVE THEM MORE MONEY (or stop them wasting it on things they need less), don't just steal the resources. It sets a bad and confusing example to students as well as endangering the production of further books.

I, for one, won't keep writing books to be stolen. I won't be singled out to subsidise education.  If I'm not paid fairly, I'll write books

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Writers' notebooks are personal, valuable, essential. Somewhere to jot down thoughts as they occur before they disappear back into the ether. They contain the germs of ideas, solutions to problems, plots and titles that never went anywhere - a nostalgia-fest for the writer and a boon for literary biographers and critics in the case of the famous. Reading them is like looking into lit, uncurtained windows on a winter night, especially those in the backs of houses passed on the train. They give a privileged insight into the interior life - the writer in the wild, roaming his or her territory unaware of observers.

I've been using a facsimile of Bram Stoker's notebooks for Dracula while researching my own vampire series, Vampire Dawn (Ransom, March 2012). They look familiar. Spattered with odd jottings that are hard to interpret later, but also with longer pieces meticulously copied or summarised from books and conversations. There are typewritten notes and annotated bits of typescript as well as pages of handwriting (thankfully neat in his case). They offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of composing Dracula. The bits he didn't use are just as interesting as those he did.

He was very thorough. He went to Romania and interviewed local people. He wrote long lists of Romanian words he might use. He researched boats that had sunk off the coast of Whitby and boats that carried their cargo to shore. He recorded any odd episode or story he could use. Just as we all do.

I have two types of notebook. There's always a general notebook that is carried almost everywhere, and filled with odd ideas, observations, scribblings of any kind. Those are a chaotic jumble that probably make little sense to anyone else. Then there are specific notebooks for each project. These show the genesis and evolution of a book. It's interesting later to see the bits that never made it, the ideas that look really stupid later, and how far the final book has wandered from the original idea or plan.

My notebooks will never be of real interest, like Stoker's, but I can't show his as the facsimile is copyright, so here's a peek inside mine as a poor substitute for the curious.



This is a Moleskin softcover brown notebook. On the cover is a printout of an early version of one of the covers of the series (the first cover we fixed on).

I always stick a picture on a notebook or folder as it's the quickest way to see which is which.







Inside... these are bits printed from the web. I needed to know exactly how a guillotine works and the position of the body of the victim just before execution. This continues on further pages. In case you ever need to know, there is a tilted bench that the beheadee lies on.