Dear Dylan

STOP PRESS: May 12th - Dear Dylan is on the long list (of 12) of the Young Minds Book Awards! I hope this will inspire other self publishing authors. You can get more info about the comp at www.youngminds.org.uk

Many of you will know Siobhan Curham as the author of the fantastic self-publishing column in The Writers' Forum. Others of you may know her through the super Literature Lounge, one of London's coolest literary nights. But she is also a great author, and recently turned down a deal with a mainstream publisher to self-publish her new book Dear Dylan, which explores what happens when a fourteen year old girl turns to the internet for solace and strikes up a correspondence with a stranger. I had the chance to ask her all about it. Oh, and to get your hands on Dear Dylan, just go here.


I'm intrigued by the self-publishing angle. I have three mini questions about it. I wonder if you'd be prepared to say a bit about the deal you turned down; could you explain why you chose self-publishing for this book; and will you be seeking a mainstream publisher in the future?

After my three novels with Hodder I had been left feeling a little disillusioned with the traditional publishing world. Although I will always be hugely grateful to them for publishing my books I was left feeling very confused and upset by the lack of support they gave me when it came to the marketing of my books. I have subsequently discovered that this is quite a common occurrence with the large publishing houses and they only seem to put a substantial marketing budget behind an author once they have established a decent sized readership. Anyway, this experience and the rise of self-publishing led to me choosing to self-publish my fourth novel, Finding the Plot back in 2007. My reasoning was that if I was expected to do all of my own marketing anyway would I be that much worse off going it alone? Shortly after I finished Dear Dylan a friend told me that a traditional publisher was looking for new writers for its young adult list, so on a whim I emailed the opening pages and synopsis to the commissioning editor. She got back to me straight away asking to see the whole book and within a week I had been offered a book deal. I was over the moon to get such a quick and positive response from the first person I had sent it to. In the end I was offered a deal for two books. I felt I had built up a very good rapport with the editor and that she really understood me as a writer. However, I was hugely disappointed when I finally received a contract and saw that my advance and royalties were substantially lower than I had been promised. It was the first time I had represented myself rather than going through my agent and it was a real eye-opener. Thankfully I had my contracts from Random House and Hodder to compare it with so, using them as a guide, I sent back an amended version more in line with what I felt I deserved. The publishers upped their offer but it was still nowhere near what I felt it ought to be. A friend of mine who works at United Agents said that publishers will always try and take advantage of authors acting on their own; it was standard practise. This made me really angry. It seemed to be yet another example of authors being shoddily treated in order for publishers to make a quick buck. I know I could have continued to haggle or even taken the book elsewhere but I really didn’t have the stomach for it. Back when I started out as a writer I had very little self confidence and was so grateful just to be published I put up with being poorly treated but not any more. So I withdrew Dear Dylan and took stock for a while, trying to decide what to do next. Then it hit me - I had written Dear Dylan to try and help people going through difficult times in their lives, it had never been about making money or a name for myself, so why not give it away for free? As self-publishing editor for Writers’ Forum magazine I had been really inspired by a writer called David Moody who had given away his first novel as a free download and ended up getting half a million readers. What if I could do the same with Dear Dylan? As soon as the idea took hold I knew it was the right way to go – giving the book away seemed totally in keeping with the ethos behind it and it felt liberating to stick two fingers up at the publishers who had quite frankly been happy to shaft me financially. I would never say never when it comes to traditional publishers in the future, but for now I am happy to self publish as it feels like a far more positive and proactive option.

Could you explain why you chose to self-publish with Authorhouse, and what the package they provided you with involves?

I chose AuthorHouse because they were the self-publishing company I had used for Finding the Plot and I had found them to be extremely professional and reliable. I went for their standard package, which costs around £800. This price includes turning your manuscript into a book, cover design (although I paid for my own cover design privately) an ISBN and distribution through Gardners (the UK’s largest book distributor) thereby ensuring your book is available to order through any UK bookstore and on Amazon.

I love the subject matter of Dear Dylan, however online networking and young people can be a very emotive subject. What led you to focus on an email correspondence between a teenager and a much older adult stranger in the book?

As the mother of a teenage son I am all too aware of the dangers the internet can pose to young people. However, I also feel very strongly that we can over protect our kids and that the internet can actually be an extremely positive forum for them. One of my favourite books of all time is Goodnight Mister Tom which focuses on the friendship between a young evacuee and a much older man. As a writer I wanted to explore a similar relationship as it develops and show how both parties benefit. I think teens can get a really bad press and I wanted to redress the balance by showing how the energy and enthusiasm they possess can have a really positive effect on older people. There is also a certain irony in the book in that the only real danger to Georgie actually comes from her home life and not in the friendship that she forms online. I didn’t set out to make this point deliberately, but with hindsight I’m kind of glad that Dear Dylan does make it. Despite all of the negative press the internet can get, the fact remains that most kids are far more at risk of being damaged in some way by their families and home lives than so-called ‘stranger danger’.



How difficult was it to write Dear Dylan in a way that engages rather than preaches to the audience, and how successful do you think you've been?

Maybe that’s a question for the readers! But as a writer I loved the freedom the email format gave me. Once I had the characters fully fleshed out in my head it was really enjoyable to write. Emails are often written in a relaxed, almost stream of consciousness style and I loved the way that enabled me to get into the flow of the character’s voices, particularly as they start to open up to one another. I was very aware that I didn’t want the older character to come across as preachy or completely sorted, as I think it would have been quite patronising to younger readers. The main objective for me was that both characters really learn and benefit from each other. And certainly from the initial feedback I’ve been getting from readers this seems to have come across.

I love the cover. How important do you think covers are for self-published authors, and could you tell me about the process of producing yours?

Thank-you, I can’t tell you how relieved it makes me to get positive feedback regarding the cover! I think getting the cover right is an absolutely essential part of the process, whether you are self-publishing or not. I received some awful feedback from readers and bookstores regarding the cover of my second novel with Hodder and it was absolutely soul-destroying. People say ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ but of course we all do. When it comes to self-publishing writers are already at a disadvantage as there is still a lot of snobbery in the book world, especially in the UK. I think it is therefore vital that, if you want your book to be taken seriously, you put maximum effort into the presentation. I did a lot of research into book covers prior to Dear Dylan and I paid a professional book designer called Michael Hill to do the artwork. I wanted something striking that would appeal to both teenagers and adults and that summed up the themes and mood of the book. I was extremely happy with the end result and another really great thing about self-publishing is that you have complete creative control over the cover. It was a fantastic experience working with Michael on his ideas.

I gather you're planning to give this book away in eformat. Could you tell me how you're going about ensuring as wide a distribution as possible, and what you're personally doing in the way of promotion?

I’m giving the book away as an electronic download via my website http://www.siobhancurham.co.uk/ and I am planning to do the bulk of my marketing online; I have set up a Facebook group called Dear Dylan and I will be publicising the book on blogs, forums, websites etc. I will also be doing Dear Dylan workshops in schools and I have entered the book into a competition. The book ‘1001 Ways to Market your Books’ by John Kremer is also proving really useful when it comes to publicity ideas!

What next?

I am about to start work on my next novel for young adults called Finding Cherokee Brown as well as working flat out on publicity for Dear Dylan.

Sharp Teeth

OK, so I decided to go with the medieval myth of the vagina dentata, recently resurrected by some bleeding awful z-grade horror movie, as the title for this post for no other reason than my original one wouldn't fit twitter. It makes no real sense and does little but allude to Zadie Smith (not a bad thing in itself).

The article I wrote for Year Zero tomorrow is a chastisement of the writing classes of the noughties. I ask, very simply, where did all the questions go? When I was a student in the late 80s and early 90s we took it for granetd that whenever we wrote something we were entering into some larger, complex powerplay. We assumed there was no such thing as neutral. It was the age where language was taken to be imperialist/patriarchal as a matter of course and if you wanted to write you had to justify every word you set on the page and explain why it wasn't simply perpetuating the imperialism/patriarchy.

Sure this often led to a combination of bizarro weird non-linear stylisation and the somewhat easier tactic of wwriting nothing and limiting oneself to chattering idly about theory (in the name of the class/race/gender struggle, of course). But there is something inherently good about not taking things for granted - about realising that one is part of a context, about placing oneself within larger discourses and, basically, thinking about the implications of what you write.

What I take issue with in that post is why so few writers question - PROPERLY question - the internet. What kind of a space is it? What's its power status? Where does it sit in the nexus of discursive strategies?

Anyway, having berated others for not asking questions, I thought I should post some thoughts of my own. Here they are - unrounded, probably not thought through. But they're a discussion starter at least. I'm happy to discuss in more detail in the comments.

I "grew up" studying Irigaray, whose main point about linguistics is that language is male - the qualities of western discourse embody maleness. Language is sex-power. For women to speak they must use a language that is male. Irigaray's own writing is a wonderful mix of theory and poetics as she tries to find a new way of writing that embodies the female yet cuts across the lies of the male (I hesitate when saynig "embody" because it implies essentialism, and "is Irigaray an essentialist?" is one of those string-measuring exercises of which linguistics is full.

It amazes me that more people aren't asking questions of the internet, and how it fits into this theoretical model. So I want to imagine what they might say, and relate it to teh politics of literature.

I have 2 points to make:

1. the internet feminises literature.

2. this is why the literary establishment greets web-based discourse with a mix of fear-conquer-laugh.

1. The Internet Feminises Literature

I am talking in Irigaray's terms. You will probably disagree and find the points overly Freudian. They start a discussion, though.

- webcourse (to avoid repeating web-based discourse endlessly) is fragmented (something Irigaray made steps towards with her incomplete sentences - she must go nuts for text-speak)

-webcourse is associative. It makes links rather than statements. It's unitive but not in a colonizing way - it brings things within a context organically

-webcourse is preservatory by nature. Its caches and dark corners are the marshes and forests that patriarchy could never expel from mythology. They preserve the monstrous and the outcast from deletion.

-webcourse never destroys, it builds on what has gone before.

-webcourse is nutritive - it feeds itself through cooperation and contact


2. No wonder "Literature" hates the web

You will generally find one of three reactions from the literary establishment to webcourse:

- fear - free content, the noise of universal subjectivity, lack of respect for experts, lack of quality control and gatekeeping - are these really treated very differently from the vagina dentata of old? No. Literature fears webcourse because it is different. Because it refuses to respect tradition. Because it is other...

- conquer - the web is great, but do it like this, that and the other. Brand yourself across media, use the web wisely. Use it if you must but use it our way!

- laugh - "you're a writer. Great! For whom do you write?" "Oh, AN E-ZINE"

Like I say, think of webcourse as feminising, and of discourse as patriarchal, and doesn't this suddenly fit?

And of course it's even more wonderfully subversive that this feminised webcourse uses imperialist technology - what I want to avoid owing to its awful Platonist associations is a spirit-body dualism that's hardware/cyberspace based - rather I'll say patriarchy created a space of its own, feminised culture found a way in, resisted, inverted, created an enfolded space of its own from, within, and independent of the oppressor's tools.

In many ways the webcourse debate mirrors the feminist debates of the 70s - you have people of all stripes from the separatists to the revisionists. One could argue that cultural flare-ups simply have a tendency to produce this kind of multi-polarity. Or you could argue that it's the SAME debate.

So where does this leave me, as a male writer? Well, women have been forced into discourse in order to be heard for centuries. If webcourse IS feminised I fail to see I'm in a position to complain. No, what I find exciting is the fact that webcourse might actually be something different. Something with its own set of rules. Something new and fresh and liberating.

Most of all, what I feel is a relief that I've started asking questions about what I write on line in the same way I've always asked them about what I write on paper. And excited that the two sets of answers may be different

Using the Internet to do something NEW

Blogs have turned the internet into some kind of noisy Hobbesian nightmare. Twitter has quietened the noise to a series of feint coughs, but the effect is the same – now everyone has something to say and no one has any time to listen. We are all participants; we are all producers; the consumer is dead.

It sounds scary or exciting depending on your take, but actually it’s rather dully neither. Technology may have changed the number of writers there are, but it hasn’t really changed writing. Writers who talk about the Internet – and even that’s a small percentage of them – see it as a way of publicising their book through a website. A few of them will try exotic marketing techniques like giving away their book, or producing their book as an e-book. The object of their craft, though, remains a book.

Which is a terrible shame when there IS so much creativity out there on the web. Some of it involves stories and characters – the tools, we were led to believe, of the writer. But what creativity there is belongs to the YouTubers and the gamers, groups of people who work together to create stories from the roots up, or to take narrative in surprising new directions.

So what can we, as humble writers, do with the Internet? Tom McCarthy, one of literature’s great innovators, said earlier this year that he couldn’t think of much – the Net did little but make more bad books available than ever. He’s right, but he needn’t be.

The first thing we need to do as writers is stop seeing ourselves as writers, and start seeing ourselves as creators of culture. Stop drawing boundaries and fences and closing off exciting possibilities. So you want to incorporate a video of someone singing into your novel but that’s music and film? So what? It’s a sad indictment of the boxes we put ourselves in that the most innovative novel of the past twenty years remains House of Leaves, a book that only ever existed on paper.

Two things excite me about the web. First, the potential for collaboration; and second, the fact that it exists in so many places and in so many ways that are all only a click away from each other. To make the most of these we have to get rid of two preconceptions – that we as writers sit in our attics dispensing words to the masses; and that what makes something literature is the possession of a story arc that can be contained neatly between the covers of a book.

It’s only since the printing press that writers have been physically able to separate themselves from the communities for whom they wrote. Storytelling always used to be a dialogue between teller and audience. The web allows it to be that again - it allows us to take our writing to people, listen to them listening to us, and change things as we go along. We can produce different versions of a book; we can even write the whole thing as one gigantic, multi-authored mess. Why don’t more of us stop worrying about the fact collaboration means the end of “auteurishness” and see where it leads in its own right – why don’t we allow ourselves, for a moment, to revel in the anarchy of it all, and see what emerges the other side?

I have offended countless writers by calling the centrality of “story” a myth – those writers who know their theoretical onions accuse me of swallowing Denis de Rougemont’s rather torturous conclusion that narrative arcs are an infusion of Platonic death into the pure life of culture. I haven’t swallowed him at all- historically speaking, his Tristanocentrism is rubbish. But he’s right about one thing – there’s nothing “natural” about the mythic status the likes of Dwight Swain accord to “story”.

Story implies unity, direction, that things follow from one another. In order (and I’ll explain if you want to know more): story is a phallocentric invention; story is the obsessive compulsive ritual at the heart of western literature; story is what literature should look like if quantum never happened and relativity still ruled the astrophysical high seas – only it did, and it doesn’t, and story is, therefore, an atavism, a throwback, a genetic anomaly that has interest but shouldn’t, by rights, exist.

What the web gives us as authors is the ability to put bits of stuff here there and everywhere and leave readers to join the dots. The fact that we as writers don’t is, to be honest, rather patronising. Of course most of the time people just want to relax in the bath with a good book. And for that, nothing is better suited than something with a good story. But there are other times when as readers we want to discover, elicit, be part of the uncovering and unravelling – revel in the wide-webbed mess of an entity that’s everywhere – it’s like watching the Usual Suspects with a zillion bells on. And the web gives us the potential to do this.

The Man Who Painted Agneiszka’s Shoes, my Facebook novel, is a vague stab at this. There’s a text. But it exists within a great morass of other “stuff”. Some of that stuff is on the Facebook group in the form of character sketches, back story articles, podcasts and pictures. But there’s also this blog, there’s a YouTube channel, there’s tweets, there’s a whole game the successful completion of which will influence the novel’s end; there’s fake websites; there’s fake blogs and dead end links; there are all sorts of phrases that you can google and find yourself in another part of the novel. You can enjoy the “story” without any of this – but you can also follow it down a hundred different routes, and enjoy it in as many different ways. There is no “one” novel. There are as many novels as there are readers – and then some to spare. As a writer, laying down these paths is like writing a thriller only in four dimensions. It’s the most intense adrenalin rush imaginable. I still haven’t figure out why other writers don’t agree, why they’re all still pounding away to write “a book” rather than exploring this wonderful multi-dimensional virtual notebook we now have. A few of us are – I invite the rest of you to come and join us. It’s fun.

It’s also got serious commercial potential. But that’s for a later post. This one’s all about getting you creatively excited.

Welcome to Agnieszka's blog

This is the official blog of the interactive free novel I'm writing on the Facebook group of the same name. Over the next week I'll be loading the blog posts over from there and blogging about it here.

please comment on anything you want. there are really no rules to this project

There is a synopsis, though, which I'll give you for now - and a bunch of links to look up over the weekend.

In 2009 one image became as iconic as the face of Che Guevara.

A story of art, politics, online communities, environmentalism, and the nature of celebrity;

Of the search for the truth behind a seemingly tragic death, that became the most watched YouTube video in history;

Of two personal journeys – a man whose daughter, missing for ten years, is fading from existence in a world he cannot reach; a schoolboy whose quest for beauty in mathematics has kept him locked in his room for three years; and the website that unites them;

Of the world’s most reclusive artist; of a dominatrix who uses other people’s pain to break down the doors to parallel worlds in search of the origin of her own agony; of an astrophysicist determined to preserve the moment of his wife’s death forever; of a vicious vigilante who spends his evenings composing haiku;

Of a novel that draws its life from the conversation between its writer and its readers.

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