EL James, JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel … the women who dominated publishing in 2012
EL James
Four years ago a dissatisfied TV executive was inspired by Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels to start writing steamy online fan fiction about the leading characters in which sparkly-skinned vampire Edward and bold virgin Bella were made over as an entrepreneur and a college graduate. If the narrative of the first Twilight books was powered by heavy-breathing abstinence and the revelation that good vampires wait until marriage, online forums were where readers could let rip.
There were thousands of similarly sexed-up Twilight stories on the web, but in May 2011 – after some name changes and minor tweaks – a tiny Australian publisher, Writer's Coffee Shop, "talked James into" publishing her BDSM fantasies as an ebook, which was then picked up by Random House in the US. Rumours about copies being exchanged with blushes on the school run or borrowed from hairdressers snowballed into reports of New York hardware shops running out of rope as the book climbed the New York Times bestseller lists. The trilogy was rushed into print in the UK this April and by August, Fifty Shades of Grey, the story of damaged billionaire Christian Grey and eager college student Anastasia Steele, a love affair-cum-therapy session-cum-shopping spree played out against their erotic relationship, was the bestselling book in British history.
Like Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code, it burst the banks of the publishing world; people were buying it who didn't otherwise buy books, if only to find out what the fuss was about. It single-handedly re-ignited the women's erotica market, which had withered when Black Lace covers began to look dated, as well as tapping a whole new readership who didn't know or care that – as those in the know sniffily pointed out – you could find much better erotica, for free, on the web. Thus it was a victory for the paperback, as well as for ebooks and self-publishing. The Kindle has been credited with removing the embarrassment from reading dirty books, but what Fifty Shades revealed is that erotica isn't shameful any more so long as enough people are reading it already, and it's got a tasteful jacket (James wanted restrained covers, having herself squirmed over reading lurid-looking romances on the tube).
In literary terms, the books are atrocious: whole blogs have been dedicated to pulling them apart sentence by sentence. Christian, like Edward in Twilight, is a stalkerish control freak; Anna a bubble-headed klutz who is constantly biting her lip or communing with her inner goddess. The BDSM sex – which is both the book's USP and the only thing it has in common with classic erotica – has been simultaneously decried as a misogynistic manual for domestic violence and criticised for being too tame (the possibility of anal sex is put to one side early in book one, while the narrative arc of the trilogy is unusual in moving from the deviant towards the cosy).
Yet James herself has said that "the domination aspect is completely overstated, and many people are missing the point". It's romance rather than sex that is the real key to the book's impact: "a broken man who needs fixing through love – what woman could resist that?" Like the vampirism in Twilight, the domination is there as a metaphor for the strength of romantic emotion; "mommy porn" was about rekindling teenage intensity. Romance in a sweaty clinch with consumerism, perfect for these fiscally perilous times when we know more than ever about the habits of the super-rich. "I've been a daydreamer all my life. And through these books, I've finally found a way to channel all this daydreaming," James told the Huffington Post. Daydreamy is exactly what the books are – unsophisticated, and unembarrassed about it.
In a single year James's daydreams have inspired countless parodies and imitators, from Sylvia Day's bestselling Crossfire trilogy, featuring lookalike covers and characters, to Jane Eyre Laid Bare, which copies James's original trick of filling in the yearning silences of an earlier book. The formulation "fifty shades of …" has become more overused than "Keep calm and carry on". When compiling an anthology of essays from leading women writers and thinkers, to be published early next year, what was the only possible title? You're right: Fifty Shades of Feminism.
Justine Jordan
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies
The Man Booker Prize has most influence when it seems not to be making a writer's reputation but confirming it. Most of the readers of Wolf Hall will never before have read a Hilary Mantel novel, but in fact it was merely the next experiment of a novelist who has been brilliantly, eccentrically going her own way for decades. In 2004, her entry on the British Council website, dedicated to promoting the best of British writing, praised her "elegance and caustic wit" but lamented that "she deserves a much wider readership". Well, now she has it, and her unprecedented achievement of a second win with the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, also lets us see more clearly a body of fiction spanning some 35 years and a dizzying variety of voices and genres.
From outsider to doyenne: if it now seems so obvious that Mantel is one of Britain's leading novelists, it is a fact that is only recently evident. Thus her joke about the Man Booker prize in her acceptance speech this year: you wait for one for ages, and then two come along at once. For years Mantel was the secret of the cognoscenti. She was evidence that the Booker prize was a hyped-up charade. She wrote extraordinarily accomplished novels that sold modestly, every novel being entirely different from the one that preceded it. Her publishers must have despaired of a novelist who so delighted in changing tack. Black comedy, bildungsroman, regional novel, autobiographical fiction, historical epic, satire – she has done them all (and mixed some of them up with each other).
What she has thus developed is an extraordinary technical assurance. Her two Man Booker-winning novels are narrated from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, secretary and fixer to Henry VIII; it is an easy fact to state, but sustaining a narration that belongs both to the author and her character is a rare accomplishment. Mantel uses her own words – there is no fustian in the prose – yet all the observations are her character's. We inhabit Cromwell's consciousness, but in order to recognise his inscrutability in the eyes of all the novel's other characters. "A plank has more expression. A water butt."
The centre of consciousness is the same in both novels – and yet the novels are different. Cromwell has gone from seeking power to possessing it, and Mantel's style has modulated to express this. Curt, sceptical, decided: the sentences that carry his machinations dramatise his attempt to grasp the meaning of what he observes at court. He is thereby the novelist's agent. When Henry, too stout to relive his jousting days, is thrown from his horse and seems dead, the hubbub of panicking courtiers is conveyed via the ticking calculations in Cromwell's head. History is mere succession of events to most; Mantel's intriguing protagonist is always trying to make it into narrative.
As has been observed by others, these two novels take perhaps the best-known phase of English history and unstitch it. We know what is going to happen but the characters do not. Everything is uncertain, provisional, risky. Rarely has a novelist's consistent use of the present tense – a growing habit in literary fiction – been more purposeful. The sense of danger also both animates and inhibits conversation. So dialogue is as charged with implicit motives as it would be in a slice of Jane Austen or Henry James. This is the true drama of historical fiction.
Would you know from her novels that she was a woman writer? Only if you had some theory that disconcerting psychological insight was a feminine privilege (though think of Muriel Spark, a novelist who bears some comparison to Mantel, and perhaps it is). Her two Tudor novels certainly have women – contending women – at their hearts: Anne Boleyn, whose ruthlessness fascinates Thomas Cromwell almost more than the king, and Jane Seymour, with her "silvery pallor" and "a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise". Yet these women and their wiles are seen steadily from the outside, not just through Cromwell's eyes, but through their powers over the King. The narrative trajectory of Bring Up the Bodies is the fall of Anne Boleyn, and her savage, pathetic death scene is the extraordinary dénouement – yet it is as memorable for the mysterious magnetism of demure Jane Seymour, her true thinking a mystery that eludes even the king's clever secretary.
The long career of formal experiment and generic restiveness has made the success of these historical novels. A reader who knows nothing of Hilary Mantel's earlier work will immediately sense the stylistic confidence of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – the sheer verve of those sentences. No British novelist writes such resourceful, delightful prose. Here is a writer who is good enough to persuade us that literary prizes do make sense after all.
John Mullan
JK Rowling
J. K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
As a publishing event it was colossal, with a level of secrecy unheard-of in the usually mellow world of books. Journalists granted access to the manuscript before its official release on 27 September were made to sign contracts – though the Guardian's Decca Aitkenhead found the author herself unguarded, even chatty, in an interview conducted not in a bank vault surrounded by lawyers but in the lobby of an Edinburgh hotel.
As a literary event its impact will take longer to measure. The millions of children, now young adults, who raced through Rowling's early Harry Potter stories in the late 1990s might seem a ready-made market, but their reaction to this brutal slice of 21st-century social realism is unknown. Even for a giant such as Rowling, word of mouth matters. If the 300,000 people who have so far bought a copy of The Casual Vacancy in Britain don't enjoy reading it, their friends might not bother.
So far reaction has been mixed. Aitkenhead loved the novel. So did Melvyn Bragg. Former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore and Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir loathed it, while New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called it "bloodless and abstract", a verdict that must have had the publishers spitting into their lattes: no British critic has half as much clout.
Reader reviews followed a similar love-or-hate pattern, with most customers on the website of Britain's biggest bookseller giving the book five stars or just one. One reader, "Dave", summed it up well: "Who then should buy this book? I think basically if you enjoy literary fiction then you are in with a chance. Having said that I still think there will be plenty of 'high brows' who will dislike it. It is very plainly written with a slow linear plot line. You will find no hint of Amis type literary smart-arsery so don't expect it. Secondly (shock horror) the book has moral content."
Unlike the Harry Potter stories, which took an old genre – the boarding school story – and magicked it into a saga of growing up amid good and evil that seems to have worked in every country under the sun, The Casual Vacancy is strongly rooted in time and place. As someone who recently campaigned for a new parish council in London I was riveted by the shenanigans on Pagford parish council. Not everyone is gripped by local elections.
But whether or not The Casual Vacancy sells gazillions of copies, Rowling has made her mark on 2012. Her book was published just a few days before Ed Miliband made his "one nation" speech to the Labour party conference. Somewhere between social and socialist realism – and remember Charles Dickens was also a campaigner who used fiction to promote reform – her book is a 500-page indictment of a culture that is divided, unequal and cruel.
The Casual Vacancy doesn't do many of the things 20th-century modernism taught us fiction could. It is not a novel about narration or one that plays tricks with form. It has an old-fashioned omniscient narrator, and old-fashioned characters too: none of the bankers, footballers or immigrant cleaners who peopled a recent spate of state-of-the-nation novels set in London. Instead it has cliffhangers, fabulously written teenagers, funny jokes and an intricate plot. And rage and grief at the shape of things now and to come.
Susanna Rustin
Kate Mosse … From Orange to the Women's prize for fiction. Photograph: Emma Peios/WireImage
Kate Mosse
It's hardly headline news that Kate Mosse is an energetic type – you don't write a bestselling trilogy of complex historical adventure novels and run a prestigious, high-profile literary prize unless you've got plenty of get up and go. This year, though, her energy and determination have stood her in excellent stead: first, she's presided over the publication of the 700-page Citadel, the third and final part of her Languedoc series (an adaptation of the first in the trilogy, Labyrinth, starring John Hurt and Tom Felton, will be broadcast on Channel 4); and second, she's got to grips with the end of the 17-year sponsorship deal between Orange and the literary prize for women's writing that she cofounded.
She has described the parting of the ways, which came as Orange merged with T-Mobile and decided to concentrate on its film sponsorship, as "a happy divorce", citing in particular her and her board's ambitions for the prize and interest in establishing it in other countries. Such expansions and migrations are always, necessarily, limited by a sponsor's arena of operations, and with a blank canvas, Mosse & Co can refocus their horizons.
They do, of course, need money; running and administering a major prize does not come cheap, and the costs involved in what is for the time being called The Women's prize for fiction extend far beyond the £30,000 cheque that the winner pockets on the night. The 2013 prize, its panel of judges chaired by Miranda Richardson, will not have a corporate sponsor, and will instead be funded by a group of 20 private donors that includes Cherie Blair, Joanna Trollope and Martha Lane Fox. Mosse is confident that more long-term sponsorship will have been secured in time for the 2014 award.
The Orange prize for fiction has an impressive winners' list, from Helen Dunmore, who won the inaugural prize in 1996, to Carol Shields, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Marilynne Robinson; this year's winner was the American writer Madeline Miller, for her epic of ancient Greece, The Song of Achilles. It has an even more impressive track record for generating debate and controversy. In its early days its detractors reacted with horror and indignation to the thought of a literary prize that excluded male writers; nowadays, people muse on whether the publishing and bookselling world has changed to such an extent that it is an anachronism. Mosse herself remains convinced that the award's power to spark debate about women's writing, its creation and its reception, is a highly valuable part of the literary culture.
Alex Clark
Julia Donaldson … brought a welcome sense of fun to her focus on the library cause. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Julia Donaldson
Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson has used her first full year as the children's laureate to champion an issue close to the hearts of many children's writers – libraries. With the public library service suffering yet more blows this year at the hands of cash-strapped councils keen to make cutbacks, Donaldson has drawn on the authority of her laureateship to campaign against closures and urge government to show more leadership in supporting the service. In an open letter to incoming culture secretary Maria Miller, calling on her to do a better job than her predecessor Jeremy Hunt, Donaldson laid it on the line: closing libraries is a "false economy" because of the proven links between illiteracy and crime and social problems, she told the minister, and dressing up cuts as "vibrant 21st-century thinking" is dishonest.
But Donaldson has also brought a welcome sense of fun and celebration to her focus on the library cause. She wrote a playful poem on the joys of the library for National Libraries Day in February, saying it was more fun than writing an "earnest" article. "Everyone is welcome to walk through the door. It really doesn't matter if you're rich or poor … / Come and meet your heroes, old and new, / From William the Conqueror to Winnie the Pooh".
This autumn she toured nearly 40 libraries from the far north of Scotland to Land's End and listened to classes of schoolchildren act out or recite their favourite poems and stories, and performed her own tales with them. Everywhere she went she did local media interviews to highlight the tour and the reasons why libraries must remain.
Her enthusiasm for the demanding journey pervades the tour blog she has written on the children's laureate website, where she muses on the crucial role particularly of small local libraries – the very ones which are most under threat. "It's so important for children to have somewhere local that they can walk to regularly. For a lot of kids, if their local branch closes down, a visit to the library might become just a twice-a-year event," she wrote. Donaldson's passion for using music and drama to boost children's confidence also saw her launch a website this autumn – www.picturebookplays.co.uk – to encourage teachers to act out stories in the classroom.
Benedicte Page
Amanda Hocking
Amanda Hocking, Ascend: Book Three in the Trylle Trilogy (Trylle Trilogy Young Adult Edn)
Look at Amazon's ebook bestseller charts these days and you'll notice something remarkable. From Claude Bouchard's Vigilante ("in the dark of night, moving like a shadowy wraith, a vigilante prowls the city's streets") to Kris Pearson's The Boat Builder's Bed ("Out of the sleek black Jaguar storms super-yacht tycoon Rafe Severino"), they're stuffed with self-published titles.
2012 is the year in which self-publishing grew up, when "vanity" publishing broke out of its slightly embarrassing cage and went mainstream. And there's one woman who can take much of the credit, or the blame. Back in 2010, a broke Amanda Hocking made a decision that would rock the world of publishing; she decided to start uploading her paranormal romances – which had been rejected over and over by agents and publishers – to Amazon. She priced them low – between $0.99 and $2.99 – and by January 2012, she had sold 1.5m copies and made $2.5m. She's now signed a deal said to be worth over $2m with St Martin's, and the wannabes have been quick to (try to) follow in her footsteps.
It's impossible not to gawp at the extraordinary numbers coming out of the US, where 235,625 DIY books were published last year; in the UK, meanwhile, 11% of all ebooks bought in the first half of this year were self-published. The massive growth is largely down to the ease with which hopeful Hockings can now offer their manuscripts to prospective readers. Want to release your own ebook? Try Smashwords, which brought out 47% of America's ebooks in 2011. Fancy print? Go for Amazon's CreateSpace, home to 39% of the US's self-published print books last year. These firms make self-publishing as easy as uploading your text and choosing a cover picture. They also offer hugely attractive royalty options, sometimes as high as 80%, compared with traditional publishers' usual 10%.
Finding someone actually to read your book, however, is another matter. The most successful self-publishers promote endlessly and offer eye-watering deals on their titles (many self-published novels cost nothing on Amazon). They even – in the case of writers such as John Locke, the first self-published author to sell a million ebooks through Amazon – buy in hundreds of reviews. And increasingly, the most successful are catching the eye of traditional publishers, who are keen to sign up authors with readymade fans.
While Hocking, EL James and their ilk are still the exception – a survey this summer found that average earnings from self-publishing were just $10,000, with 10% of writers making less than $500 – for many, the thought of the royalty options they can get by going it alone is still too tempting. Even established writers are dabbling; Jackie Collins is self-publishing a new version of The Bitch in ebook in the US, and thriller author Barry Eisler turned down an advance said to run into six figures to do it himself.
Not everyone's convinced. Malcolm Gladwell has said that "what will sustain this industry is someone to act as gatekeeper and tastemaker"; for Richard Russo, the thought of self-publishing "chills my blood". But self-publishing is no longer that easy to dismiss. Like it or not, it has come of age.
Alison Flood