Found a link to this incredible story from the Sunday Times on Zafar's blog (and Zafar found it in Kitabkhana's blog and while it's still fresh you might want to pass it on some more because it might make a writer near you feel better about that rejection slip).
Being 29, blonde, good-looking and vaguely famous should be enough to get you a book published nowadays.says novelist/critic David Taylor. Having read this morning that the ghastly Jodie Marsh of Celebrity Big Brother fame has just scooped a five book deal I would say his cynicism is well placed.
And those of you who don't know the programme, consider yourself very very lucky. This is television of the lowest ugliest gutter-crawling kind ... and I was hooked.
4 comments:
Hmm..will 31, sort of blond, average-looking and not even remotely famous work? If so, I\'d better start writing...;)
i don't even want to think about the kind of books that will be flaunted on bestsellers lists ten years from now. or perhaps even sooner!
the weaselly response of Lucas gives you a pretty clear indication of the calibre of people we are dealing with here - marketing slime.
The other thing I find amazing is that people who work for a literary agency and claim to be able to judge a work of literature are so poorly read that they haven't even read a Booker Prize winning novel by a Nobel Prize winning author - and not some obscure Eastern European Nobel Prize winner either, but an incontrovertible literary big-swinger.
It reminds me of the people that my husband went to film school at the RCA with - who claimed to adore films, but had never seen a film by (or even heard of) Ozu, Godard, Bresson, Ray, or indeed any non-American film that was more than 5 years old.
Welcome back by the way. Your regular updates on the world of books were greatly missed.
ordan - well look at it like this, 31, sort of blond puts you few steps higher up the ladder than me (crumbly bottle brunette)
starlight - or even next year!
fbt - glad you missed me! yes, there are a lot of illiterates out there passing judgement - depressing
Post a Comment