In this post on the Guardian's BookBlog, Jean Edelstein examines Costa's recent trumpeting of its award winner, Raphael Selbourne's history as a scooter salesman. Publishers do seem to love those kinds of details when they're writing copy. They impose a sort of romance-novelish arch on the life behind the work, and thus help make the author more marketable. From humble beginnings to literary super-stardom, as it were (although 'beginnings' here is a bit misleading because publication, validating though it is, rarely exempts writers from the ignoble task of bread-winning).
In her article, Edelstein bemoans (rightly, I think) the marketing of a writer's narrative over the narrative s/he has created; the commercialization of the figure as well as the work. What do you think? Will the two months I spent selling cable ever help me make millions?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment