Saturday, May 31, 2008

Screenwriting For Dummies

Here's a piece adapted from 'Screenwriting For Dummies'.

Enjoy!

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You've probably heard the saying "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." Now, that doesn't mean that you should copy the stories or even the style of other writers, but you may want to try moving through the world as they do.

In the old stereotype, writers don all black and scowl at the world while scribbling furiously in a notebook or subsist on coffee and cigarettes while scribbling furiously in a notebook or drink heavily while scribbling furiously — well, you get the picture. Although you can certainly offset your creative anxiety in healthier ways, that stereotype does contain a small grain of truth — writers are always scribbling, whether armed with a notebook or not. Their senses are story-ready, carefully selecting details from their environment and sequestering them away somewhere for the next great script. Some writers are born with this awareness, but most hone their skills with every new project. To develop this sensibility in yourself, you need to take a closer look at which details writers collect and how they select among them.

What a writer sees

Imagine that you attend a school reunion. You see all the usual trappings: a welcoming committee equipped with name tags, tables piled with food, a beverage bar, party decorations, and perhaps a band. Most people find old friends, socialize a bit, and call it a night. Most people do, but not most writers.

A screenwriter notices the tight smiles on everyone's faces, their quizzical look before they remember someone's name, the one-time school football star drinking too much in the corner, the former sweethearts who exchanged glances then left arm in arm, and so much more. The writer can also recreate the scene in such a way that those images are evident to a casual observer. Under a writer's piercing gaze, these moments flourish and may quickly become the next scene in a script.

The writer's process here is no different from any type of physical training. You're preparing your eyes to catch certain details — in particular, details that personalize the scene. Some of those details include

The scene's overall layout: Screenwriting consists of visual images constructed in a telling way, meaning with choice details in mind. When you enter a space, test how quickly you can assess it, close your eyes, and then recreate it. How would you write it down so that someone else imagines the same space?

Anything out of the ordinary: Scan the scene for unusual details. What about it seems out of place or ill at ease? The man in the suit wearing the lovely woman's wristwatch or the table of sports enthusiasts drinking hot cocoa — many stories rise out of something curious.

Telling looks or exchanged glances: If someone looks at another person for any length of time, generally, something's going on. He may be recalling a past visit, trying to catch her eye, or checking up on her for someone — any number of musings are possible. If two people exchange glances, a silent conversation is underway. Watch and see if you can translate what's being said.

Loaded gestures: Many conversations take place in a single gesture. A father puts his hand on his son's shoulder — this movement may be menacing, commanding, or supportive depending on how it's executed. The gestures of any given moment become a silent score of what's going on beneath the conversation. If you can track the gestures, you can recreate them later.

Personality quirks: Someone's eccentricities, physical and emotional, immediately distinguish that person from others. Twin brothers may look, walk, and talk alike, but one of them may dress with care while the other seems to own a single sloppy outfit. If you watch the world long enough, you soon acquire a list of personality traits ready to enhance any character you create.

Looking at the world this way eventually becomes a habit. Your eyes automatically adjust to the process. When that occurs, you may be ready to retrain the next sense — your sense of sound.

What a writer hears

Imagine the school reunion again. Interesting visual images crop up all over the place now, but what sets them off? Is it the overly loud dance music, the constant whispering behind you, the clinking of glasses in toast, or the flash and click of numerous cameras? Screenwriters pick up on all sorts of sounds that enhance a scene. Try locating the following in your own surroundings:

Noises that suggest the event: Many scenarios come equipped with their own soundscapes. You'd be quick to distinguish a christening from an accident site, even with your eyes closed. Whether your scene takes place outside in a field or inside a prison cell, the surrounding noises immediately provide an atmosphere for your piece.

Noises that punctuate the scene: Occasionally, you may notice a sound that enhances the moment. If you're watching a man cry softly to himself, the laughter of two lovers nearby may enhance the man's loneliness somehow. In the film In the Bedroom, Sissy Spacek smashes a dish on the counter the moment she gives way to her anger. The sound of shattered glass mimics her emotional state.

The rhythms of conversation: Every conversation has its own unique sound. The pace of the voices, the repetition of phrases, the moments of silence — a screenwriter listens to all these things. Listening to the rhythms of conversation helps you compose your own dialogue and provides aural examples of human communication.

Slang and jargon: These terms refer to words and phrases that suggest a culture, a socio-economic background, or a profession. They suggest character immediately, sometimes even location. Filmmaker Spike Lee often utilizes street slang to differentiate between cultures, gangs, and prejudices. Television shows like E.R. rely on hospital jargon to give them a believable edge.

You're not responsible for including all the sounds that you discover in the body of your script. However, if you can close your eyes and hear a scene, you'll be far better able to write it. Sound is often a more intimate way of understanding your story. Because the noise represents the world of your characters, this process may also help you understand their internal dilemmas as well as the external ones.

What a writer remembers and what a writer forgets

Enhancing your perceptive skills can be a full-time job. When you consider the volume of compelling images around you, it's a wonder that most screenplays aren't four hours long. After your senses adapt to this new process of viewing the world, finding and recording those details is the easy part. Like spring-cleaning, the difficulty comes in selecting which few you may keep and letting the rest go.

Of course, which exact details a writer cherishes and which he forgets will vary according to personality. However, if you're stumped as to what you may hold on to, consider the following information.

It may be important to remember

Details that create a compelling image: A "compelling image" means one that is full — full of tension, full of emotion, full of potential movement, full of life. As a screenwriter, your job is to grab an audience's attention through such images. Remember anything that catches your eye in this way.

Details that raise a question: Questions are the key to strong writing. Personal questions fuel the desire to write and find answers; the characters' questions determine the choices they make throughout your story. Any detail that forces a question is worth remembering.

Details that tug at your moral or ethical code: Hopefully, every script you write will serve some purpose — to inspire, to spark debate, to inquire, and so on. In order to communicate clearly, a writer needs to know what she stands for and why. Any details that refute or support your own views may come in handy later.

Details that establish a debate: Many films rely on ongoing arguments to bolster the momentum. Whether the argument exists between characters or audience members, if your script sparks a debate, it successfully engaged someone. Watch for the moments in real life that elicit arguments of various kinds.

Details that help you understand the human condition: Most art strives to understand life and its injustice, its irony, its savage nature, and its glory. Once in a while, you encounter a moment that provides a piece of the puzzle. Keep those moments close above all.

If the detail in question doesn't fit into one of these categories, it may be worth abandoning. Remember that you're constructing every image with an aim in mind. If the details you include distract from or compete with that aim, getting rid of them isn't only a good idea — it's your job.

Consider this example: You're constructing a scene from the school reunion, and you want the audience to focus on one girl hovering by the buffet table stuffing food into her purse. If her eyes dart over the crowd, if she has the hollow look of a woman who hasn't eaten in a while — these are details to preserve. They strengthen the tension of the moment. The fabric of her purse, the size of the table, the number of brownies she takes — these details are unimportant. They distract from the scene's primary focus — the action of a person quietly stealing food.

This process becomes second nature as you orchestrate your own scenes. The screenwriter's job is to tilt the audience's head towards the most dynamic portion of each scene and let that portion jump into the next. Eventually, the story will become so clear that it demands the necessary information and refuses the rest for you.

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Cheers!
Brian M Logan
ThatActionGuy.com
EMAIL ME HERE

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Friday, May 30, 2008

Looking Back At The Writers' Strike, Part 1

Article on the recent writers' strike in Hollywood (part 1 of 2) by the always erudite Craig Mazin.

Enjoy!

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Perspective requires time. Has enough time passed since the end of the strike for a reasonably sober view of it all? Probably. There’s no doubt that more time still will be required to draw the most purposeful conclusions, but here’s an early attempt on my part.

If nothing else, it will give us all something to scoff out down the road if I turn out to be completely wrong.

The obvious question is “Did it work?” That’s a decent amalgam of “Did we win?” and “Was it worth it?”

Next week, I’ll take on the issue of the strike itself as a tactic, as well as the ramifications of our labor action. This week, let’s just start by looking at the deal itself.

There are those who think this deal is very good (John Wells), and there are those who think it’s the end of days (Justine Bateman of SAG and Harlan Ellison of the WGA). I imagine most people fall somewhere in the middle (because that’s how most people fall on most things, including our own leadership), but it’s fairly obvious that the majority of WGA members either leaned towards Wells’ viewpoint or felt that the deal was good enough to put the picket signs down and go back to work.

Let’s go through the terms.

Sales and Rental Residuals

The deal works well here. It’s not as good of a deal on New Media as we got in 2001, when Wells and McLean somehow managed to pull the 1.2% for internet rentals out of a hat without striking. That rate, which is the gold standard for residuals, is really the only significant rate right now if you’re a theatrical writer. A lot of people, including me, were convinced that internet rentals were a non-business, and the majority of the residual load would end up in internet sales.

Wrongo. Turns out the companies are rather jittery about selling movies outright on the web, because they’re freaked (justifiably) about piracy. They prefer to rent them via, say, iTunes. The Wells/McLean 1.2% on rentals is going to be lining our pockets for some time, so I salute them.

On the other hand, the sales rate resulting from Verrone/Young isn’t bad at all. Sure, it’s not the 1.2%, but after a reasonable amount of units are sold at the DVD rate, our percentage bumps up to roughly double the DVD rate.

Not bad at all. In fact, I’d call that very good. If this entire negotiation was predicated on the notion that DVDs would one day disappear, to be forever replaced by digital distribution, then quintupling the rental figure and nearly doubling the sales figure has to be viewed as strong progress.

There’s been a bit of hay made over the fact that our deal is now in terms of the total company gross, as opposed to the hated “producer’s gross.” That is, instead of saying we get 1.8% of 20% of 100% on initial internet sales, our deal now says that we get .36% of 100% on initial internet sales. Somehow, this is supposed to position us better and um, make us feel better, or……something.

Being a fan of math as I am, I could care less. They could have said we’re getting 180% of 2% of 100% or .036% of 1,000%. Who gives a damn? What’s the check gonna be? That’s all that matters.

Residuals for Streaming Media

This was the big one. How much would the companies pay writers when they reran television programming on the internet? The fear at the core of this issue was very real and very justified. There is a sense that internet reruns will someday replace network reruns entirely. It was critical to get this one right.

Did we?

I’ll go with a “yes, for now.”

Here’s how it works. When a network airs an episode of a show, they get 17 free days in which to run it on the internet without paying residuals (24 days if the show is in its first season). A lot of people hate this provision, and there’s certainly nothing nice to say about it. However, there is at least one mitigating factor. The 17 (or 24) days must be either immediately after the show’s run on the network or be running during it. That’s a clue as to how the companies may be planning on using this window. It’s likely that some of those free days will be used in advance of the initial airing of the episode, particularly for new shows. In other words, a week before an episode’s airing, the network may run a portion (or all) of the episode on the internet to generate some buzz or interest.

Once we get past the initial hump of the free window, the money kicks in. Sort of. Again, it’s not great, but it’s okay. The problem for the unions was one of calculation basis. When a company licenses its show for internet distribution, what does it get back?

Anything? Something? Nothing? All three of the above are currently true, and the fact that the production company is often licensing the show to another division of the same parent company only confuses things further.

The compromise was to go with a fixed residual for the first three years following the initial broadcast airing, then go to a percentage of license. For an hour-long program, the first three years will net a total residual of $4,262. Following that, the residual switches to 2% of whatever the license fee is.

Thanks to Steven Schwartz from the WGA NegCom for correcting me here. The compromise is to go with a fixed residual for the first year following initial broadcast, and then it’s a 2% of true gross after that. That fixed residual, however, increases each year of the contract’s life, so if that first year occurs in the third year of the contract, the fixed rate is higher than it would be if the first year were in the second year of the contract.

Silly mistake on my part.

Now, you may have heard that we improved upon the DGA deal for the third year of our contract. We did not. We get exactly what they get, down to the penny. The difference is the language. They went with a fixed number, whereas we went with a percentage of distributor’s gross…except we impute the distributor’s gross in the third year to be a number that gets us to the same fixed result the DGA got.

Why the linguistic rigamarole here? Well, it appears that the WGA felt this would position them better for future negotiations. Seems like wishful thinking to me. The number is the number.

Much has been made about the difference between these residuals and the network rerun residual. The first network rerun of an hourlong, for instance, is worth $20,000 in residuals for the writer. So…how can we possibly look at this new rate for the internet as a good thing?

There are two things to consider when comparing this apple to this orange. First, many, if not most hour long programs do not get network reruns. The ones that do are typically the hits. Even those reruns, however, are in danger. The networks are keenly aware that the rerun business is dying. As DVRs proliferate and audiences grow more accustomed to simply time-shifting the first run of a program, it becomes less and less profitable to run the rerun.

As such, it’s unlikely that the $20,000 vs. $1300 argument is a sound one. Most writers aren’t getting that $20,000.

Secondly, what this formula sacrifices up front, it potentially makes up for in the back. As shows are rebroadcast into the ground, the amount they pay out dwindles. Under the internet formula, library shows become potentially more valuable for the writers. The amount doesn’t dwindle. Rather, we have a set 2% of the gross of the license fee.

If (and this is a big IF) the license fees can be verified and held to market standards (and we have some provisions for this), writers can and will come out ahead in the long run…IF…and here’s the other big IF…

…IF streaming on the internet becomes a legitimate business.

The difficult truth is that we were all collectively guessing on this one. We guessed that this would become a legitimate and big business. Let’s pray we were right.

Jurisdiction

This one was the sleeping giant of this past negotiation. Without a guarantee of jurisidiction over made-for-internet programming, our union would have been seriously crippled heading into the future. It’s not that broadcast will ever go away (and for the record, if networks switch their distribution from satellites and airwaves to some kind of IP-based system, that doesn’t count…”internet” means stuff you watch in a browser), and movies will continue to run in theaters, but there’s every reason to believe that made-for-internet will become a viable business for the companies at some point.

We needed to automatically cover that work. And now we do.

Reality, Animation, DVDs

Zippo, zilch and squat. As predicted.

Conclusion

On its face alone, this is a good deal, and I was happy to assign my proxy to Patric Verrone and help ratify it. It’s not a perfect deal (was anyone expecting one?), it’s not a tragic loss (at least, not in the context of our 60+ year history), and it will serve as an okay basis for the next negotiation.

But…

…was it worth the strike? Was the strike necessary? Was it well-run? Could we have gotten this without a strike? And did we really get it at all? Stay tuned for part two.

You might be surprised by some of my answers.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON CRAIG MAZIN CLICK HERE

Cheers!
Brian M Logan
ThatActionGuy.com
EMAIL ME HERE

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Looking Back at the Writers' Strike, Part 2

Article on the recent writers' strike in Hollywood (part 2 of 2) by the always erudite Craig Mazin.

Enjoy!

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As promised, part 2 of our post-strike analysis focuses on the strike as tactic. Was it necessary? Did it work? Should we do it again? Should we have done it at all?

I would have written this sooner, but Grand Theft Auto IV kind of got in the way. And yet, as I was completing a mission in which my assignment was to kill a bunch of construction workers on strike, I was reminded of this unfinished essay (more on GTA4 to come, including an appeal to its creative genius to consider going union…despite that nasty bit of business with those construction guys).

The most important question is the one that’s the toughest to answer. Did we need to strike?

Well, it’s not that tough. The answer is “no,” because I refuse to believe there is no set of circumstances that would have obviated our collective course of action. There’s a parallel universe where we didn’t strike and got the same deal or better. Has to be. But barring science fiction and the presumption of some impossible-to-foresee manner in which we had to avoid a strike…could we have?

Probably not.

There were three major factors that precipitated the strike.

The first was…let’s call it “history of bad AMPTP behavior.” The strikes of the 80’s and the DVD rollback led to an eventual peace, but it was a victor’s peace. We were humiliated by the loss, and it’s humiliation, more than the specifics, that created an untenable balance. It didn’t matter that we made gains in the early 2000’s (like our internet rental rate, which is better than the sell-through rate we just fought for). The bitter sting of the stick in the eye never went away, and any attempts to negotiate around it only made matters worse.

You could feel the rage simmering…at least, I could feel it when I was on the Board. Something needed to be done to exorcise the failure of the 80’s

The AMPTP, by the way, is entirely to blame for this. Rage in reaction to humiliation is not only human, it’s appropriate. I’m no peacenik. If you best me in an unsportsmanlike way and make me look bad, my rage is a gift from the millions of years of humans before me, and I’m gonna use it.

The AMPTP should have understood this better, but they didn’t get it.

So…you have this history of bad blood generated by the AMPTP, and then the second factor is the rise of Patric Verrone.

Patric is a smart guy, but I also think he’s naive in many ways. I think he thinks he’s a pragmatic idealist, but he’s not. He’s a philosopher, and his philosophy was “oragnize, organize, organize.” Patric said many times that we were weak because we didn’t have enough jurisdiction.

Patric’s philosophy…to win a strike, you need to be stronger. To be stronger, you need reality television and animation. To win those, you need to attack the companies and shame them into conceding the jurisdiction.

This was a naive plan, bordering on a stupid plan, and it was also based on a faulty premise (our strength isn’t in our numbers, but in the quality of our membership.

Patric and crew began a series of corporate campaigns, wildcat strikes, street theater, lawsuits, disruptive protests and political lobbying designed to piss the companies off.

Which it did.

But that’s all it did. For all of his efforts, Patric organized fewer reality employees than the DGA did simply by being quiet and doing their DGA thing.

So, we have bad bood fomented by the AMPTP, we have Patric antagonizing the AMPTP to a point where they think he’s a nut…and then…we got the “counter offer.” Granted, we went in asking for a ridiculous laundry list, with numbers that made us look completely irrational, but so what? Chalk that up to dreamy dream dreams and get over it.

The AMPTP couldn’t. They fired back with a proposal to eliminate residuals, eliminate separated rights, establish their right of prima nocta…well, not the last one, but close enough.

That counter offer managed to confirm for WGA members what Patric had been saying all along: these guys were gonna try and take our lunch.

Time to fight.

Once the strike began, it seemed to me that you could classify WGA members into one of the following four basic groups.

The Militants were probably spoiling for a fight long before this one came along. Old guard militants feel like a punch in the face is the most likely thing to get us respect and results. New guard militants are what I call the “swirly-eyes gang,” infatuated with whatever Patric Verrone and David Young suggest is the path to success.

The Loyal Majority may have not been involved much in the union, but once the strike came, they picked up their arms and went to war. They marched, they stood fast, if they questioned leadership they did so very quietly, and they believed that the strike was very winnable…if only everyone would stick together and fight.

The Loyal Minority obeyed the strike rules, walked the picket lines and likely voted to authorize the strike, but they quickly grew concerned about the tactics of the leadership, the efficacy of the strike itself, and the demands the union was making…and weren’t afraid to talk about it.

Sneaks, Scabs n’ Quitters were the writers who cheated during the strike by writing or who didn’t cheat but opted to go ficore.

Now, there will always be militants, and there will always be sneaks, scabs and quitters. The former probably need therapy to address serious issues in their character, and the latter have no character to fix. But the largest group of writers will always be in that middle group.

One of the success stories of this strike is how that big middle kept itself together. Unlike strikes of the past, the skeptics never drifted into rebellion. Nor did the unionists slip into irrational zeal. By and large, everyone kept it together, and that’s a credit to the membership above all. Naturally, some people must engage in strike superiority. Tests of loyalty and so forth.

The hell with those people.

If you didn’t write and you followed the rules, I salute you.

For that reason, I look upon the strike of ‘08 as a mitigated success. We have a chance to go into ‘10 with more leverage than ever before, although it will take some serious changing. Still, we have a chance, and the cohesiveness of the membership has manifested that chance.

Mitigated, though, because many mistakes were made.

Out of naivety, I think, leadership believed they could pull a surprise attack. Catch ‘em with their planes on the ground, and declare victory over a stunned enemy.

We really have to stop thinking like this. Frankly, we have to stop thinking in terms of “beating” and “kicking corporate ass” and “winning the strike” and all that sort of nonsense. C’mon. This isn’t a movie. Here’s reality. The AMPTP can’t be “beaten” in any useful sense of the word, and even the most strident of us will still happily turn around months after the strike and take their money. Why not? That’s the deal, right? They pay, we work.

There’s never going to be a quick victory. As such, we should permanently eschew any tactics designed to get us one. Remember how the Teamsters were gonna back us? Lie. Total, bald-faced lie intended to flip the companies out and “force them” to the table. Oy. All that happened was that our bluff was called. There was no Teamster support (and by the way, I don’t judge the Teamsters on that one for a second).

The showrunners refusing to perform producing duties? Again, an attempt at the five finger palm of death. Again, this achieved nothing except unnecessarily exposing a number of our best and brightest to legal action (and perhaps worse…public reversals of their initial refusal to perform said producing duties).

Location picketing was another misfire, in my opinion. Many believed that it was part of the “by any means necessary” tactics required to end the strike and get a better deal, but the truth is that tactics like this will simply never work. All they did was continue to drive the other side into the arms of the DGA (more on that in a bit) and disrupt the production of writer’s work.

Here’s a fun fact (warning: the following is my opinion that I’m tarting up as fact). One of the best things to come out of the strike was the United Hollywood website, which managed to strike a balanced, positive and inclusive tone while still managing the work of cheerleading. I’m happy to be good friends with one of the founders, a buddy of another, and an all-around admirer of a third (who knows who she is, and I still think she should do what I said she should do, even though she won’t and I can’t blame her, but whatever).

What’s great about UH is that it comported itself with dignity. Yelling like a jackass in the middle of a taping of a talk show isn’t dignified. It’s also stupid and ineffective and oddly punitive, considering the hosts of all of the talk shows had to go back to work. But mostly…it’s embarrassing. It would be good to not do that ever again.

Anyway…

We have this possibility of leverage.

Here’s what we really need to do before ‘10 to convert it into gains.

We need…we really need……we reeeeeeeeeally really need…

…to start facing the reality of the DGA.

Yes, I tend to agree with those who say that the DGA made a better deal than they would have had we not struck.

No, that’s not a good strategy for the future. You don’t want to be the Guild that consistently puts its members out of work so that another union can dictate to the striking union what the terms of settlement ought to be.

That’s just a bad outcome.

Nonetheless, we are the bad cop and they are the good cop. No problem there. We need to work with Jay Roth and Michael Apted and the DGA. We need to settle the petty differences. That may require a different E.D. or a different President or both or neither.

Maybe everyone will smarten up.

SAG is clearly not the answer now, nor has it ever been, nor shall it ever be. SAG has managed to screw up unification with AFTRA not once but twice, and in the aftermath, bungled relations with AFTRA (called “a scumbag union” by Justine Bateman, board member of SAG and…diplomat…?) so completely that AFTRA decided to negotiate on its own after decades of joint bargaining with SAG. SAG is currently standing by with a dazed look on its face as AFTRA makes the DGA deal with the AMPTP. SAG still thinks they can get a better DVD deal. Good lord.

If Patric and whoever succeeds Patric and David Young can manage to get over their ideology (which has failed…okay?) and forge ties with the DGA, there’s nothing wrong with our union being the screaming crazies in the street…as long as it’s part of a greater bi-Guild strategy in which we are an equal partner.

I don’t ever want to see the WGA strike again unless our elected leaders and our appointed NegCom members are going to be the ones hammering out the terms in some capacity.

Look, we’ve proven we can strike and stick together, even if we disagree about tactics, even if the companies force majeure us, even if the strike lasts longer than we might have thought, even if the settlement isn’t what we thought we’d get or what we believed we were promised.

For that, I think we ought to demand some control over the outcome.

The DGA. We have to partner with them, or we are doomed to be fodder.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON CRAIG MAZIN CLICK HERE

Cheers!
Brian M Logan
ThatActionGuy.com
EMAIL ME HERE

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Thursday, May 29, 2008

Glossary of Writing Terms

Handy list of writing terms.

Enjoy!

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A

About the Author: A couple of paragraphs to one page describing relevant information about the author. Used for books, book proposals, articles and web sites. Written in the 3rd person.

Acrostic: A saying or sentence where the first letter of each word in the saying will help you remember how to spell a word, or the order of things. (i.e., Never Eat Sour Wieners = north, east, south, west)

Adjective: A word that modifies a noun or pronoun by describing, refining, or qualifying it. (i.e., the red flower or the large boat)

Advance: (1) Money given to an author before the book is published. Usually calculated on estimated book sales. (2) When a magazine publisher pays for an article before the article is published instead of paying on publication.

Adverb: A word that modifies a verb by describing, refining, or qualifying it. (i.e., he walked silently)

Agent: A professional representative who markets creative works to publishing houses. Reputable agents charge a commission (a fee collected only when they sell the creative work) rather than charging up front representation fees.

All Rights: The publication owns the rights to the work in all media types and worldwide.

Allegory: A narrative technique in which characters represent things or abstract concepts in order to convey a message or teach a lesson. Usually used to teach moral, ethical, or religious lessons but sometimes used for satiric or political purposes.

Alliteration: A series of words in a sentence all beginning with the same sound.

Analogy: A comparison showing like parts of two unlike things, used to explain or illustrate a concept.

Anaphora: Several consecutive sentences starting with the same group of words. (i.e., “I will not fail. I will not give up. I will prevail.”)

Antagonist: In fiction, the main character who comes into conflict with the protagonist (hero or heroine). The antagonist could, in some stories, be a thing or situation (a monster, a storm, a flood, etc.).

Anthology: A collection of short stories written by various authors, compiled in one publication.

Antonyms: Opposites (stop vs. go; bad vs. good)

Assignment: An article the editor or publisher has commissioned a writer to create.

Attachments: (1) Files that are attached to an email message. (2) Additional items such as photos, charts or tables attached to a manuscript. Usually for a nonfiction book.

Autobiography: When someone writes their own life story. Different from a biography, when an author writes someone else’s life story.

B

Backlist: List of books published before the current publishing year, but still in print.

Bibliography: A list of people, books, magazines, web sites and other resources that you consulted in the process of writing a book, article, or paper.

Bimonthly: Every two months.

Bio, Bionote: A very short description of the writer in the 3rd person; usually accompanies articles.

Biography: A life story of someone other than the writer.

Biweekly: Every two weeks.

Blank Verse: Poetry that doesn’t rhyme.

Body of Paragraph: The supporting or detail sentences that help explain or support the topic sentence.

Boilerplate: A standard publishing contract, with no changes or addenda made by the writer or agent. The boilerplate should be considered a starting point only; usually changes will be made.

Book Review: A summary of a book usually including a critique of the work.

Brainstorming: Collecting lots of ideas on a subject.

Business Letter: A formal letter written to someone to give or get information, or to discuss a problem.

Byline: Author’s name appearing with his or her published work.

C

Caption: A brief summary or description of a picture, graph, table or diagram.

Category fiction: General term used to denote commercial fiction that falls into genre categories, such as science fiction, mystery, romance, and others.

Cliché: An expression that has been overused.

Climax: The moment of greatest intensity in a work of fiction.

Clip(s): Published samples of writing that an author can submit with queries. Sometimes called “tearsheets.”

Closing Sentence: The summary or conclusion sentence at the end of a paragraph.

Column Inch: A measurement of text in a newspaper or magazine that is one column wide and an inch long.

Copyediting: Checking for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and word usage.

Copyright: The ownership by an author of his or her works.

Cover Letter: A letter to introduce a short story, completed article, novel, nonfiction book manuscript, or a resume. Preferably no more than one page. When used to pitch a creative work to an editor or publisher, also called a query letter.

Creative Nonfiction: Nonfiction in the first person (using “I” as the narrator).

Credits: A list of publications by an author.

CV: Curriculum vitae - a short, one page resume.

Compound Sentence: Two or more sentences put together using the words “and,” “but,” or “or.”

Consonants: All the letters in the alphabet, except for a,e,i,o, and u.

Consonant Blend: When two or more consonants are combined together, at the beginning of a word: “br” or “pr” or “fl.”

D

Dead Metaphor: A metaphor that has lost its original intensity through overuse.

Deadline: When an assignment must be turned in.

Descriptive Paragraph: A paragraph that describes a person, a place, a feeling or an idea.

Dialogue: When the characters in a story are speaking to one another, usually denoted by quotation marks.

Double Entendre: A phrase that can be interpreted in two different ways; one meaning is “innocent,” the other is usually sexual.

Dummy: Hand drawn mock-up of what the page will look like in print.

E

Edit: To review a piece of writing, in order to mark and correct grammatical, spelling, and other types of errors. The editing process also often includes critiquing the content of a piece in addition to mechanics of language usage. Scribendi offers editing services here.

Editing: The process of reviewing a piece of writing and making corrections. See also Edit.

Editor: A skilled professional commissioned to check a work for grammar, spelling and, typographical errors as well as issues with the content. Scribendi offers editing services here.

Editorial: An article, typically short, expressing an opinion or point of view. Often, but by no means always, written by a member of the publication’s staff.

Electronic Submission: A manuscript submitted by electronic means -- that is, by email or on electronic media such as computer disks.

Embargo: In journalism, a prohibition against publishing information released to reporters until a specific date. Announcements of scientific breakthroughs or discoveries are quite often embargoed until a specific date to ensure that all news outlets release the story on the same day.

Essay: A group of paragraphs presenting facts and analysis about one main idea.

Expository Paragraph: A paragraph that gives information on a topic, or steps explaining how to do something.

Euphemism: A phrase used in place of something disagreeable or upsetting (“passed on” instead of “died”).

E-zine: A magazine published online or via email.

F

Fair Use: Reproduction of short excerpts from a copyrighted work, usually for educational or review purposes.

Fantasy: A story that contains some elements or events that could not happen in the real world, like magic, or fantastic monsters etc.

Fees: The amount of money paid to authors for their writing. Different types of writing projects may require different kinds of fees. Some writers charge by the word or by the hour; some negotiate a single flat fee. For magazine writing, most writers get paid by the word.

First Electronic Rights: The right to publish a piece of writing electronically for the first time. Once First Electronic Rights have been assigned for a given piece of writing, this work cannot be published in another electronic medium. However the author can still sell reprint rights to the piece.

First North American Rights: The rights in Canada, United States and Mexico in the medium the writing was published in. The author can publish the piece elsewhere in the world, and may also be able to sell reprint rights.

First Print Rights: The rights anywhere in the world to a piece of writing in print.

Flash Fiction: A piece of fiction 500 words or less.

Follow-up: A polite letter inquiring about the status of an earlier query or manuscript submission.

Formatting: The manner in which a manuscript is prepared and presented.

G

Galleys: The initial typeset form of a manuscript, sent to an author for review before it is printed or sold commercially. This is what the reviewer reads as well.

Genre: Describes a category of fiction like romance, mystery or science fiction.

Ghostwriter: A writer who is paid to write an article or book for someone, but who usually does not receive a byline or credit for the work. A celebrity might hire a ghostwriter and then sell the book under their own name.

Go-ahead: A positive response to a query letter that assigns an article to you.

Grammar: Rules of a language.

Graphic Organizer: A way to visually organize thoughts before starting to write. Examples include charts, diagrams, and time lines.

Guidelines: The instructions for submitting work to a publication for consideration.

H

Haiku: A three-line, seventeen syllable poem.

Historical Fiction: Fiction set in the past, can be of any genre.

Hook: A narrative trick in the lead paragraph or first page of a work that grabs a reader’s attention and keeps them reading.

Homographs: Words that are spelled alike but pronounced differently and/or have different meanings.

Homonyms: Words that are spelled and pronounced alike but have different meanings (for example, baby; an infant, and baby; to coddle)

How-To: An article that gives step-by-step information or directions on how to make or do something.

Hyperbole: Deliberate exaggeration; short form is “hype.”

I

Imprint: A division within a publishing house that deals with a specific category of books.

Interview: To ask a person or a group of people a series of questions about their lives and experiences.

Invoice: A record of payment due, given to an accounting department.

IRC: International Reply Coupons. Used in place of stamps on the SASE included with a query or manuscript sent to a foreign country.

J

Journal: A diary or record of events, feelings and thoughts, usually recorded by date. Some writing guides recommend keeping a journal to develop the habit of writing every day.

K

Kicker: A sudden, surprising turn of events or ending; a twist

Kill Fee: Payment given to an author if a magazine cannot or will not use an article assigned to the author.

L

Lead: The first paragraph of a manuscript. In a story or article, the lead includes the “hook” intended to engage the reader’s attention.

Lead Time: The time between the receipt of a query or article and the publication date of the article. Vital for seasonal articles and stories.

Logline: One sentence description of a screenplay or TV script.

M

Manuscript: author’s copy of a novel, non-fiction book, screenplay or article.

Markets: A listing of publications or publishing houses that buy manuscripts.

Market Research: Information assembled for nonfiction books to show a publisher that there is a need for the proposed book.

Meter: In poetry, the rhythm or pattern of syllables.

Metaphor: Language that indicates a similarity between two different things without the use of the words “like” or “as,” for example, “the moon was a ghostly galleon.” Compare with simile.

Mixed Metaphor: Getting two common metaphors mixed up to form a new, but not necessarily correct, metaphor.

Moral: The lesson in a story.

Myth: A story that attempts to explain events in nature by referring to supernatural causes, i.e., deities and gods, or spirits.

N

Narrative Paragraph: A paragraph that tells a story.

Narrator: The person or character that tells and explains a story.

Newspaper Byline: The name of the person who wrote the newspaper story.

Novel: A work of fiction usually consisting of 45,000 words or more.

Novella: A work of fiction usually consisting of between 7,500 and 40,000 words.

Nut Graf: In journalism, the paragraph that contains the point of the story

O

Observation: Language that describes the physical characteristics or behavior of a person, place, thing or event--what something looks, sounds, smells, tastes and/or feels like.

On Acceptance: The author receives payment only after the editor accepts the finished nonfiction article.

On Publication: The author receives payment when the piece is published.

On Spec: A writer submits a piece speculatively; the editor is not obligated to publish the piece.

Onomatopoeia: Words that sound like, imitate or evoke their meaning, i.e., hiss or slither.

Outline: A point form or list of short sentences that describe the action or major ideas in a written work.

Overview: A one- or two-page description of a novel or nonfiction book intended to introduce the work to a publisher.

Over-the-transom: Unsolicited materials submitted to editors, alluding to the idea of tossing something through the small opening window above a door, known as a transom window.

Oxymoron: A phrase composed of two words with contradictory meanings. Often used to make a joke, i.e., the phrase “military intelligence.”

P

PB: An abbreviation for “picture book.”

POD: Abbreviation for print-on-demand, the printing of a book or books only after a copy has been sold, rather than in large print runs. More cost efficient for publishers, although currently POD is mainly for self-publishing.

Palindrome: A word or phrase that means the same thing when read in either direction, like “mom,” or “Ma handed Edna ham.”

Paragraph: A group of sentences that discuss one main subject. There are four basic types of paragraphs: 1) descriptive, 2) narrative, 3) persuasive, and 4) expository.

Payment: What an editor agrees to pay an author for their work. Print publications use two major types of payment: “on acceptance,” where the author receives payment as soon as the work is accepted for publication; and “on publication,” where the author receives payment only after the work sees print.

Personal Essay/Narrative: An essay written in the first person, usually about the author’s life.

Personification: Attributing human characteristics to something that isn’t human.

Persuasive Paragraph: A paragraph that states an opinion and tries to convince the reader to take the same opinion.

Pica: Printer’s measure of type, equal to 12 points, used to measure columns and photos.

Plagiarism: Presenting another author’s works, words, or ideas as one’s own.

Play: A story told mostly through dialogue between characters.

Plot: The main events of a story.

Poem: A group of words written in a pattern.

Point of View (POV): The perspective from which a story is told. Can be first person (I) or second person (you) or a third person (he, she or they).

Prefix: An auxiliary syllable that attaches to the beginning of a root word to change the meaning of the word. For example, “pre” (before) attached to “marital” (relating to marriage) becomes “premarital” meaning “before marriage.”

Proofreading: Close reading of the work to look for and correct mistakes in language use. Scribendi offers proofreading services here.

Proposal: A summary of a proposed book - usually nonfiction - used to sell the book to a publisher or editor.

Public domain: Any material that can be freely used by the public, and does not come under the protection of a copyright, trademark, or patent.

Q

Query: (1) A one-page letter to an editor pitching a non-fiction article. (2) A letter to a director pitching a screenplay. (3) A letter to an editor or a publisher for a novel; usually accompanied by a synopsis and sample chapters.

R

Record of submission: : A formalized record of where and when an author has sent article or manuscript submissions. Can be hand-written on note cards or in a document or journal, or kept electronically in a word processing file or spreadsheet programs like MS Excel.

Rejection Slip: A letter from an editor indicating that the publisher is not interested in the author’s submitted work.

Reprints: Previously published articles made available for publication in other magazines or journals.

Revising: Making changes that improve writing.

Rights: Legal information about who retains control over all the various ways in which a creative work may be reproduced, used, or applied. Most editors buy only specific rights at any given time, and these should be clearly outlined in the contract.

Rough Draft: The first organized version of a document or other work.

Royalties: A percentage of the cover price paid to the author for every copy of the author’s book sold by a publisher.

Run-On Sentence: Two or more sentences in a paragraph without appropriate punctuation or connecting words.

S

SASE: Abbreviation for Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope, usually sent with a query or manuscript so the recipient can mail back a reply or return the manuscript.

Sci Fi: Abbreviation for science fiction.

Self-publishing: A branch of publishing in which the author publishes his own works. Most commonly done with print-on-demand technology.

Sentence Fragment: A sentence that is missing the subject, the verb, or both.

Serial: A publication that appears periodically, such as a magazine or newspaper.

Short Short: Fiction under 1,000 words.

Simile: Comparing two different things using the words “like” or “as.” For example, “his eyes were like blazing coals.”

Simultaneous Submission: The practice of submitting the same query or manuscript to many editors at once.

Side Bar: In a nonfiction article, extra information or hints and tips put together in a separate box or bar attached to the main body of the article.

Slant: The bias or angle with which the author presents the information in an article. Three different authors writing about the same set of data (for example, child nutrition statistics) could have three different slants.

Slug Line: (1) A line in a screenplay describing a new scene. (2) The identifying tag for a story in a newspaper or magazine.

Slush pile: Term for unsolicited manuscripts received by a publisher or editor. See Over-the-transom.

Short Story: Fiction under 10,000 words.

Sonnet: Refers to a fourteen-line poem with a rigid structure and rhyming scheme. Shakespeare wrote many sonnets.

Speculative Fiction: Fiction that extrapolates from some phenomenon or theory and postulates “what if?”

Spin-off: A new product developed from an original product. In a TV show, a popular supporting character in one series might be given the starring role in a separate series.

Stanza: A group of lines in a poem that form a metrical or thematic unit.

Subject: The main topic in a piece of writing. There can be a subject in a sentence, paragraph, an essay or a book.

Submission Guidelines: The guidelines provided by a publication which explain how to submit queries or completed manuscripts for consideration.

Suffix: An auxiliary syllable that attaches to the end of a base or root word to change the meaning of the word. For example, “arian” (one who does) attached to “discipline” (direction or control) gives “disciplinarian” – one who exerts control or gives direction.

Summary: A short description of the main ideas in a body of work.

Synopsis: An abbreviated description of a book or manuscript sent to the publisher. The synopsis covers all the main points of the work.

Synonyms: Words that have approximately the same meaning, for example, happy and glad.

T

Tearsheet: A sample of an author’s published work which consists of a page ‘torn’ from a magazine or a newspaper, or more commonly these days, a photocopy of the article.

Terms: The deal made for publication of a particular work. These include types of rights purchased, a payment schedule, expected date of publication etc.

Trade Journals: Specialized publications for a particular occupation or industry.

Topic Sentences: The sentence, usually at the beginning of a paragraph, that includes the main idea of the paragraph.

U

Unsolicited Manuscript: An article, story or book that a publication did not request.

V

Vanity Publishing: A form of publishing in which the author pays a publisher to publish their work.

Verb: The word in a sentence that indicates action.

Voice: In writing, the style, tone, and method with which an author composes a work.

Vowels: Five of the letters in the alphabet: a, e, i, o, and u. Sometimes the letter y is also a vowel. These letters represent a speech sound, created by the free passage of breath through the mouth.

W

Widows and Orphans: In publishing, a “widow” is the last line of a paragraph, printed alone at the top of a page. An “orphan” is the first line of a paragraph, printed alone at the bottom of a page. These generally aren’t desirable.

Withdrawal Letter: A letter to a publication or publishing house withdrawing a manuscript from consideration.

Word Count: The estimated number of words in a manuscript. Most word processing programs will calculate this automatically. For example, in MS Word/Office, go to the Tools menu and select Word Count. To estimate the word count by hand, multiply the number of pages by the number of words per page. For double spaced documents, assume about 295 words per page. For single spaced documents, assume approximately 400 words per page. See our word count FAQ and online word count tool

Work for Hire: A job where the writer is commissioned to write a piece, but does not receive a byline, and does not retain rights to the work.

Writer’s Block: The inability to write for some period of time. It can take many forms: an inability to come up with any good ideas to start a story, unable to start writing a new work, or extreme dissatisfaction with all efforts to write.

Writer’s Guidelines: The guidelines provided by a publication that explain how to submit queries or completed manuscripts for consideration. Also known as submission guidelines.

X

Y

YA: Abbreviation for young adult - ages 13 to 22.

YW: Abbreviation for young writer - ages 12 to 22.

Go back to top

Z

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Top 15 Science Fiction Book Series

Nothing is better than finishing a brilliant science fiction novel knowing that it is only the first in a series. Some of the greatest minds in sci-fi have used the series format to create complex and thrilling universes for their story characters to exist in, while others have created dystopian (and utopian) future environments on earth. This list takes the best of the science fiction series genre and attempts to rank them - a difficult (and obviously subjective) task. For your reading pleasure, here are the 15 greatest science fiction book series.

Enjoy!

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15
Vorkosigan Saga
Lois McMaster Bujold

The bulk of the Vorkosigan Saga concerns Miles Vorkosigan, a disabled aristocrat from the planet Barrayar whose entire life is a challenge to the prejudices of his native planet against “mutants”. The novels The Vor Game, Barrayar, and Mirror Dance each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, while Falling Free, Memory, and A Civil Campaign were nominated but did not win. The series makes travel between star systems possible through the use of wormholes (spatial anomalies that exist in five spatial dimensions) - enabling instantaneous travel. The inhabited systems are known collectively as the Wormhole Nexus.

14
The Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe

Written by Gene Wolfe, this four-part novel is about Serverian, a journeyman torturer who shows mercy to his victim by allowing her to commit suicide to avoid further suffering. As a result of this act he is exiled from the torturers guild Seekers for Truth and Penitence. The series belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre - a type of science fiction or fantasy set in a far distant future in which the Sun is dying. Wolfe uses a lot of allegory in his series, with Severian being identified as a Christ/Apollo figure. It is his destiny to revive the sun and, thereby, save the earth.

13
Hyperion Cantos
Dan Simmons

Simmons’ Cantos is one of the most well known science fiction series of the last two decades. It is set in the far future and focuses heavily on plot and story development, giving a much lesser role to technical detail. It would be considered soft science fiction and is often described as “space opera”. Of the four novels in the series, Hyperion received the Hugo Award for best Novel and The Fall of Hyperion was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel. Hyperion is home to the Time Tombs, large artifacts that allow people to travel back and forth in time. The region where the tombs are found is also the home of the Shrike, a menacing being that appears throughout the series.

12
The Space Odyssey series
Arthur C Clarke

This is, perhaps, the most well known of the series on this list due to the commercial success of the film 2001, a Space Odyssey. The whole series was originally sparked off by a short story by Clarke, which he later evolved in to a full length novel in conjunction with the production of the movie by Stanley Kubrick. The series combines science fiction and metaphysics. Because the stories and settings of the various books and films diverge, Clarke stated that the continuity of the series represents occurrences in a set of parallel universes.

11
The Culture
Iain Banks

The Culture is an anarchistic, socialistic, and utopian society set in the future. It is a “post-scarcity” society - meaning that it is is set in a time in which man has overcome all of the problems of poverty and need in the world - as well as eradicating death and disease. It is a totally egalitarian state, requiring no use of force or compulsion except when necessary for the protection of others. The novels deal mostly with people living on the fringes of this society - diplomats, spies, and mercenaries - those who do the dirty work of the culture.

10
Rama Series
Arthur C Clarke, Gentry Lee

Rendezvous with Rama (the first in the Rama series) was published in 1972. It is set in the 22nd century when a thirty mile long cylindrical object passes through the solar system of Earth. It is revealed to be an alien starship and man decides to intercept it in order to unlock its mysteries. This is a brilliant book and it was accordingly given both the Hugo and Nebula awards upon its release. It is considered to be one of the cornerstones of Clarke’s total output and is seen as a science fiction classic. Under pressure to produce a sequel, Clarke teamed up with Gentry Lee to write the remainder of the series. Lee did the majority of the work and Clarke merely looked over and edited the writing.

9
Dune Series
Frank Herbert

The Dune universe (Duniverse) is the political, scientific, and social setting of this six book series of science fiction meets fantasy books. The first book (Dune) was extremely popular and was ultimately adapted in to a film by David Lynch. It was also televised as a miniseries in 2000, and in 2003, its first two sequels also appeared as miniseries. The universe is set in the distant future of man and it has a history stretching some 16,000 years, covering considerable changes in political, social, and religious structures.

8
Heechee Saga
Ferderik Pohl

Frederik Pohl’s HeeChee are an extremely advanced star traveling race that explored Earth’s solar system millennia ago, disappearing without a trace before man began space exploration. They originated as a plot device to allow Pohl to give a plausible reason for humans to make the effort of colonizing the inhospitable planet Venus. In the book of the series “The Merchants of Venus”, the Heechee are nowhere to be found, but the discovery of tunnels beneath the surface of the planet proves that they were there.

7
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a comedy in science fiction form. It was originally a radio broadcast on BBC Radio 4 which was later adapted in to various other formats. The first series was six self-contained episodes each ending with the planet earth being destroyed in a different way. When Adams was writing the first episode he realized that he needed an alien on the planet to provide context - he settled on making the alien a roving researcher seeking the book “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

6
Ringworld
Larry Niven

Ringworld was a the 1970 winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards. It is considered to be one of the classics of Science Fiction literature. The book was followed by three sequels. The series is set around the year 2855. Two humans and two aliens explore a mysterious “ringworld” - a large artificial ring shaped structure surrounding a star. It is set in a very technologically advanced universe which allows for instant teleportation. The ring has a habitable flat inner surface of an area equal to roughly 3 million earth-sized planets.

5
Ender’s Game Series
Orson Scott Card

This series started with a small novel “Ender’s Game” which was later expanded in to a full sized novel of the same name. It now consists of nine novels, 10 short stories, and two yet to be published books. The first two novels in the series both won the Hugo and the Nebula awards and are considered to be among the most influential science fiction books of the 1980s. The main character, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, is a child soldier trained in a battle school to be a future leader of Earth.

4
Future History Series
Robert Heinlein

Heinlein’s Future History described the future of the human race from the middle of the 20th century to the early 23rd century. He wrote most of the stories early in his career (between 1939 and 1941, and 1945-1950). The series primarily defines a core group of stories, but Heinlein scholars now agree that some books not included by Heinlein also belong in the series. Two of the better known books included in the series are The Man Who Sold the Moon, and Time Enough for Love. A complete list of the included books can be found on Wikipedia.

3
Barsoom Series
Edgar Rice Burroughs

Barsoom is a fictional version of the planet Mars invented by Burroughs for his series of stories. In 1911 he began his career as a writer with A Princess of Mars. Several sequels followed, developing the planet in much greater detailer. A Princess of Mars was probably the first 20th century fictional work to feature a constructed language. Its influence can be clearly seen in both the Star Trek and Farscape franchises. While many of the tales appear to be rather dated today, they were extremely innovative in their time and they helped to inspire serious interest in Mars and space exploration.

2
Lensman Series
E E Smith

The Lensman series by E E Smith introduced many innovative concepts in to the science fiction genre. It was also a runner up for the Hugo All Time Best Series award. The series begins with Triplanetary two billion years before the present day and it is based in a universe with few life forms. The peaceful Arisian race understand life and life-forces in a way that no other race does, and as a result they create the lens - an object which gives its wearer a variety of special mental capabilities including those needed to enforce the law on alien planets and to bridge the communication gap between different life forms.

1
Foundation Series
Isaac Asimov

The Foundation Series is an epic series of books written over a span of 44 years. It contains 7 volumes all closely linked (though they can be read separately). The term “foundation series” is also sometimes used to include the Robot Series and the Empire Series, all of which are set in the same fictional universe (though in earlier times). Including these other series, there are a total of 15 novels and dozens of short stories. The Foundation Series won the 1965 All Time Best Series Hugo award. The premise of the series is that a scientist (Hari Seldon) develops a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory in which the future can be predicted due to mass behavior of humans.

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Brian M Logan
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Timeline: 1997 to 2008 - A Thriller in Ten Chapters

Follow up article by Robert McCrum at the Observer.

Enjoy!

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The Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum stood down this month after more than 10 years in the job. And what a tumultuous 10 years. When he started it was a world of 'cigarettes, coffee and strong drink'. But that has all changed - new writers, big money, the internet, lucrative prizes and literary festivals have all helped revolutionise the books world. Here he charts the changes in 10 short chapters - and wonders if an 'iPod moment' is imminent.

The story is told of GK Chesterton delivering proofs, late, to his editor. The office was deserted, with just one person, from the accounts department, to take delivery of the great man's work. When Chesterton produced from his bag not only his corrected pages but a bottle of port and a glass, the terrified clerk confessed he was teetotal. 'Good heavens,' Chesterton squeaked in dismay. 'Give me back my proofs!'

When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors, from George Orwell and Cyril Connolly, to Anthony Burgess and Clive James. Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript.

The business end of books - WH Smith, Dillons and Waterstone's - was run by anonymous men in suits whose judgments were largely ignored. Trade was trade. Literature was another calling. The atmosphere was dingy, time-hallowed and faintly collegiate. Every October, we all got together in the Guildhall and gave a cheque to the novelist of the year. In 1996, the winner of the Booker Prize was Last Orders by Graham Swift.

Now that world is more or less extinct. Many of the great names from those times (Hughes, Murdoch, Mailer, Heller, Gunn, Miller, Vonnegut) are gone. Books, meanwhile, have been pushed to the edge of the radar. A series of small but significant insurrections has placed the language and habits of the market at the heart of every literary transaction. The world of books and writing has been turned inside out by the biggest revolution since William Caxton set up his printing shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

Heaven or hell? It's too soon to say. This is a story whose outcome remains mysterious. There's no doubt that this transitional decade from the 20th to the 21st century has been decisive, but no one knows when or how it will end. One thing is certain: the appetite for print is growing. In 1996, there were between 60,000 and 100,000 new titles in the UK each year. By 2007, it was pushing 200,000. That's the biggest annual output of any country in the Western world, turning over some £4bn a year.

All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a new literary stratosphere. Two things complicate this equation. First, despite the steady evolution from typesetting to digitisation, the printed book has held out against electronic options. It is as if, after lift-off, the Apollo mission turned out to be not a space capsule but a Spitfire.

Second, it remains the paradox of the world wide web and the global economy that, while this has been the decade in which millions have found a voice through the internet, only a minority has discovered an audience. Self-expression has been democratised, but books and writers still face that age-old struggle to achieve a readership. How they do that remains a mystery, but in the alchemy of literary success, 'word of mouth' remains essential.

At the turn of the millennium, this concept was given a brilliant new spin by a young Canadian journalist, Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point was almost a flop. It was published to mixed reviews in the US, did no serious business in the UK and was saved by - yes - word of mouth. After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book 'tip'. Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on the New York Times bestseller list. This was one of those pivotal moments that illustrates the story of this decade.

People will argue about the decisive milestones (I have come up with my own 10, which I have set out in chapters), but there will be general agreement that, in Britain, a decade of change starts with the election of New Labour in 1997. That was also the year Random House launched its website, John Updike published a short story online and Vintage started a series of reading guides to encourage new book clubs. As well as new readers, the millennium saw the emergence of a new literary generation, writers born in the Sixties and Seventies, and few of them more fascinating than Zadie Smith...

Chapter 1: New Blood: Zadie Smith

The author of White Teeth was first noticed in 1997 when she landed an unheard-of advance, rumoured to be £250,000, for her work-in-progress. Such hype was dangerous. When publication came in 2000, there were plenty of envious critics to pronounce her book dead on arrival, as they had done to so many precocious talents in the past. But White Teeth was exhilaratingly and distinctively new. In his review for The Observer, Caryl Phillips declared that her 'wit, her breadth of vision and her ambition are of her own making'.

With worldwide sales of more than 2 million, White Teeth won success that was sustained by a new global market. The effect was almost instantaneous. In London, Sydney, Delhi and New York, publishers were now on the alert for 'the next Zadie Smith', a new generation of writers - Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Peter Ho Davies and Ali Smith among them - who would replace Ackroyd, Rushdie, Swift and Seth.

These new faces represented a global culture. The revolution in the marketplace was global, too. It can be expressed in one word: Amazon...

Chapter 2: Amazon

In the excitement of the dotcom boom, from which Amazon (launched in 1995) emerged as a fortunate survivor, the most visible symbol of change was a marriage between the 600-year-old printed book and the high-tech world of online selling. At first, it seemed like a marginal enterprise: in 1996, Amazon sold just $16m worth of books to 180,000 customers. By 2007, sales had soared to $3.58bn in 200 countries. On one single day, 10 December 2007, Amazon customers ordered 5.4 million items. Without Amazon, there would have been no 'long tail', no 'online bookselling' and no Richard & Judy Book Club.

The club's executive producer, Amanda Ross - identified by an Observer poll as the most powerful figure in the British book world - says it was Amazon's rankings that provided the essential data for 'doing books' on TV. 'When we started,' she remembers, 'we used to plug into Amazon before and after the show. We could see at once that people were watching and then buying the books we'd featured.'

Ross's company, Cactus, was influenced by the example of Oprah Winfrey in the US, but she says: 'We were doing something rather different. Oprah was sycophantic towards the author. We didn't want to have the author anywhere near the studio. We wanted to have a proper chat about books. And we used celebrities because we didn't want to intimidate the viewer.'

Amazon was indispensable to this process. Across the English-speaking world, it did one simple thing, with profound consequences: it united the market. Previously, new editions of books had been confined to territories like 'North America', 'Australasia' or 'the West Indies'. Now books could be accessed by and sold to customers across the world. Where once books travelled from the publisher's warehouse to the consumer at the speed of a Dickens stagecoach, now two or three days was the norm. Almost as revolutionary, Amazon, and its imitators, put the customer first.

New writers who found a readership in the global marketplace began to command substantial advances. By the end of the 1990s, a new generation of market-savvy literary entrepreneurs was beginning to emerge. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) by Dave Eggers was one of the first titles to benefit from this new global English audience. Hari Kunzru netted about £1.25m from international sales of The Impressionist (2002) and Nick Hornby endured all kinds of envious commentary for an advance of £2m from Penguin. Several other bestselling writers wisely kept their earnings to themselves, but the headline news, never fully reported, was that, at the top end, the book trade was now bestowing extraordinary riches on a privileged and talented few.

Money (too much of it) also cursed the launch of Londonstani by Gautam Malkani and Richard Mason's The Drowning People. Nobel laureate Doris Lessing has been one of the few writers secure enough to speak out against the aggressive marketing of young quasi-celebrity authors. She observed recently: 'If you're a girl who's good-looking and has written even a passable book, you can be earning enormous sums very quickly and are then sent on a promotional tour.' This, says Lessing, is the worst possible thing for a young writer because it denies them the all-important environment of the 'empty space' in which to write.

Such a market-driven process makes the young writer a hostage to the book trade, reversing the traditional flow of influence between artist and merchant. There are, of course, any number of counter-examples. One writer, who found plenty of empty space to develop her vision, and who would eventually hold the world's book trade in the palm of her manicured hand, was a children's book writer named Jo Rowling...

Chapter 3: JK Rowling

I began to grasp the true dimensions of the Harry Potter phenomenon on the morning of 8 July 2000. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone had been published - a good lesson this - with a tiny first printing of 500 in 1997, to modest but enthusiastic reviews, swiftly followed by Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Such was the word-of-mouth success of the series that Bloomsbury took the unusual step of releasing the new book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to the literary media at 6am on a Saturday morning. As I drove at dawn to Bloomsbury's central London offices for my copy, I passed an extraordinary sight. Snaking down the pavement outside Hatchards on Piccadilly was a long line of Harry Potter fans, all waiting to devour the latest 636 pages of Harry Potter.

This was not driven by celebrity hype or massive discounting (this was Hatchards, not Asda) or bestsellerism, but by readers' passionate desire to get the next instalment. Just as ardent Dickens fans in New York were said to have greeted transatlantic vessels with: 'How is Little Nell?', so the queue in Piccadilly was animated by the same question: 'What will happen next?'

Rowling never failed to grasp that her job was to tell a story. In the countdown to the launch of the final volume, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, one London bookshop teased its readers with a huge window display: How Will It End?

My feeling, as I wrote in the summer of 2000, remains that this was 'a commercial blockbuster with knobs on, storytelling of a high order but not to be spoken of in the same breath as CS Lewis. Not that Rowling will give two snitches: she will be laughing all the way to the bank.'

Indeed she did. Ms Rowling has now sold some 400 million copies of her books and is worth £545m. By nice coincidence, the story of the public-school boy with magical powers came to a close in the same month that Tony Blair stepped down from his premiership.

Occasionally, the pressures of this new market for books, and its concomitant vulgarisation, would inspire a protest, but such moments were rare. In 2001, American novelist Jonathan Franzen staged a highly significant freak-out...

Chapter 4: The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen, who had laboured in near-destitute obscurity throughout the Nineties, spoilt his publisher's lunch by refusing to allow The Corrections, his 'sweeping account of a dysfunctional American family' and the surprise literary bestseller of the stricken 9/11 season, to be selected for Oprah's Book Club.

What Franzen objected to, as he had every right to do, was that in order to join 'Oprah's authors', a rollcall that included Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, he had to allow the chat-show queen to label The Corrections with her garish orange book club logo, a promotional vehicle, he said, for 'schmaltzy, one-dimensional novels'. Franzen's artistic soul would not permit this. 'I see this book as my creation and I didn't want that logo of corporate ownership on it,' he was reported to have said, presumably overlooking that the logo of his distinguished American publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) already identified his book as part of the Holtzbrinck corporate empire. Just in case his message had been misunderstood, and as a further assertion of the disintegrating old-school claim that highbrow and popular culture are mutually exclusive, he added: 'I feel like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition.'

To this, Ms Winfrey responded by swiftly disinviting him from her club.

The Franzen episode illustrates the paradox of this decade that the more golden the opportunities available to the book, the more marginal, even vulnerable, it has seemed to become. Despite, or perhaps because of, this market transformation, the common reader, and many authors, have not been grateful. An oddity of this New Labour book boom is that it has left many readers querulous and unsatisfied. Like many cultural phenomena, this is partly real, partly an illusion.

Behind the brilliant façade of new technology, new money, and new markets, there has indeed been a massive interior renovation in the house of books: senior editors taking early retirement, small imprints selling up, little magazines folding, middle-aged writers giving up and corner bookshops closing down countrywide. At the same time, introspective, old-style bookishness has been replaced by another icon of these times - the literary festival...

Chapter 5: Festivals

When Peter Florence and his father, Norman, enthusiastic provincial bibliomanes, launched the first Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1988, the experience offered to the public was distinctly unpromising. A wet weekend in Wales? A town devoid of acceptable hotels and restaurants? A marquee in a muddy field? But against the odds, Hay flourished. The punters came. The writers had a good time. Slowly the idea took off.

Hay's tipping point came in 2001 with the visit of ex-US President Bill Clinton. With his genius for infectious slogans, Clinton declared Hay 'the Woodstock of the mind'. Exactly! After Clinton's barnstorming visit (who could ever forget the way he worked the crowd?), literary festivals became the new rock'n'roll. Soon, there was hardly a town in Britain that did not hold some kind of literary festival.

Traditionally, the special joy of the book was that you communed with it in the one place that no one else can trespass: your head. Only poets and playwrights were expected to celebrate their art in public. With a few exceptions, like Dickens, writers of novels stayed at their desks, their proper domain, in the world of the imagination.

Not any more. The novelist had become a cross between a commercial traveller, a rock musician and a jobbing preacher. What did it signify? The cultural historians of the future will surely pick over the larger meaning of this festival fever but one thing was indisputable: in just over a generation, the novel had gone public in the most astounding way. Even the Booker Prize, symbol of tradition and continuity in the literary world, surrendered to the new mood and found a typically 21st-century sponsor, the Man Group, a Canadian venture capital company. After 2001, prizes joined festivals at the cutting edge of literary life....

Chapter 6: Prizes

In 2002, exhilarated by the Man Group's new money and grandiose cultural ambitions, the Booker administrators moved the prize-giving dinner from the Guildhall to the British Museum and appointed the witty and provocative Lisa Jardine as the chair. Professor Jardine immediately set the tone by declaring that the shortlist for 2002 marked 'the beginning of a new era'.

Promisingly, for those who had grown weary of Booker fiction, some of her fellow judges then waded in with snappy comments about the novels they had been required to read. 'It's like a formula,' complained David Baddiel. 'They attempt to grab a big theme, and have a vulgar, obvious seriousness, even a kind of pompous pretentiousness, about them.'

Way to go! We hadn't heard this kind of talk since John Berger donated his prize money (for his novel G) to the Black Panthers. Next, in another defining moment of literary prize marketing, Jardine took her panel for an impromptu ride on the London Eye (ostensibly to settle a dispute about the plausibility of a scene from Howard Jacobson's novel Who's Sorry Now?). It would be hard to imagine previous panellists - for instance Philip Larkin, Penelope Fitzgerald or Cyril Connolly - submitting to such a jape. But the Man Group wanted a marketable prize and this Jardine delivered with merry zeal. She also steered her committee to choose a novel, The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, that the reading public actually enjoyed (it remains the favourite with Booker's reading public).

Book prizes, notably Orange, Whitbread (rebranded as Costa) and Samuel Johnson, now began to play a new and important role, one previously played by reviews. In 2008, the literary prize has become one of the most reliable guides to the literary maze, a map to the perplexing contours of the book landscape.

Kate Mosse, founder of the remarkable Orange Prize, says: 'Prizes, far more than star reviews, are what make books succeed now and it's also prizes that give readers the confidence to trust a new writer.' For example, Anthony Cheetham of Quercus Publishing reports that when Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves won the 2006 Costa Prize, her sales jumped from about 40,000 to 400,000 copies.

So all-consuming were these upheavals in the book world that few paid attention to that other great crisis of these years, the Iraq War. In literary terms, this was the dog that did not bark. True, there have been many volumes of reportage from Baghdad (notably George Packer's The Assassins' Gate). But as far as I am aware, and in stark contrast to the many novels inspired by 9/11), only one novelist has been moved to tackle the subject of Iraq, achieving a high-low cultural response derived partly from his own anguished reaction to the war. If there was one writer whose popular success typifies this decade, it is Ian McEwan...

Chapter 7: Ian Mcewan

Saturday is probably not McEwan's best book and comes some way down a list that includes Atonement, The Child in Time, The Innocent and Amsterdam. Nevertheless, when it was published in 2005, Saturday enjoyed the kind of success that can only be explained by this new worldwide market for English literature.

After its first week of publication, Saturday was doing so well that it actually became a news item on the ITN evening news. The conventional reviews had been far from ecstatic but there it was, piled up in the supermarkets and reported on commercial television. The day a British novel by a 'literary novelist' became a TV news item was certainly one of the moments of this decade.

Although the new millennium had seen the changing of the guard, McEwan was a canny survivor whose command of the market was sustained by the film of Atonement and then by his novella On Chesil Beach, shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize.

Even so, in the new marketplace, literary fiction still had its limits. This was dramatically demonstrated when On Chesil Beach, together with the entire Booker Prize shortlist, was outsold by Crystal, a ghosted novel marketed under the brand name Katie Price, formerly the model Jordan. Last month, another book by Katie Price appeared as a contender at the British Book Awards, producing a frisson of anxiety in some literary quarters. Tracy Chevalier was 'shocked'. Robert Harris described the affair as 'emblematic of the tacky culture we live in'.

Had the market gone too far? What did it say about British culture that a ghosted children's book should be considered for a literary prize? Actually, it was just the market flexing its muscles.

The crisis in confidence among some cultural gatekeepers was revealing. After a decade of change, many of the old, elite signposts through the contemporary jungle of books and writing had become smothered in a profusion of comment, from blogs to book clubs. It became harder and harder to achieve a serious-minded consensus. The dictates of commerce seemed to threaten the traditional authority of the critic. Could it be that booksellers were now more important than reviewers...?

Chapter 8 Blogs Vs Reviewing

If you believe, as I do, that Britain still sustains a vigorous and independent literary culture, look at America. The omens are not encouraging. American democratic instincts have transformed its literary landscape as surely as its colossal market has revolutionised bookselling. Anyone can review books - and now, in America, everyone does.

Book blogs such as emergingwriters.typepad.com, maudnewton.com and syntaxofthings.typepad.com now have such power and influence that a publisher's editor in Manhattan is likely to advise a new novelist not that they will be reviewed in the New York Times but that they will be covered on curledup.com. This, according to Trish Todd of Simon & Schuster, 'is the wave of the future'.

Occasionally, in the past year, this wave has threatened to sweep away many of the old landmarks on the coast of literature. In California, the LA Times merged its stand-alone book review section into a 'comment' supplement, while the San Francisco Chronicle's book review shrank from six to four pages. But the news that hit the headlines and inspired widespread head-shaking was the decision by the Georgian daily newspaper Atlanta Journal-Constitution to abolish its books editor. Howls of pain reverberated across the States. The New York Times, which still publishes an excellent books section, noted mischievously that a certain Dan Wickett, a former quality-control manager for a car-parts manufacturer, was now singlehandedly writing 'half as many reviews as appeared in all of the books pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution'.

Readers had been posting reviews on Amazon for year. Now these book blogs - in Britain, for example, a highly responsible site like Vulpes Libris - could take over and hand the power back to - time honoured term - the Common Reader. My view is that the Common Reader generates more heat than light. On closer scrutiny, we find that this creature, as fabled as the hippogriff, is just as uncertain as everyone else. The equation of Amazon plus Microsoft has left the Common Reader dazed and confused. How else to explain the extraordinary success in 2003 of Eats, Shoots & Leaves...?

Chapter 9: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

A little book with a fearsome subtitle - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation - Lynne Truss's plea for proper English usage touched a nerve. Eats, Shoots & Leaves spoke to an anxiety about usage and standards in an age of cultural upheaval. Perhaps you can't police the internet but at least you could take a stand on the sanctity of the Oxford comma. Truss's little book (scarcely 200 pages) was a statement of defiance in a complex and troubling cultural landscape.

Here, the new global market played its part. Word of mouth on a worldwide scale made Eats, Shoots & Leaves a bestseller in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia. With such numbers in so many parts of the globe, now intimately linked via the world wide web, had the time not come for the printed word to be available in electronic form...?

Chapter 10: The Kindle

There have been many false dawns in the new world of digital publishing, but this spring can make a good claim to have witnessed the tipping point in the innovative commercial development of e-reading. While the market expanded, and more and more readers were enfranchised by the English language, the technology was racing to keep up.

In November 2007, these two forces finally converged with the American launch of the Kindle, the first electronic book to capture the imagination of professional readers - the publishers and literary agents. The Kindle, in direct competition with the Sony Reader, is a handheld, wireless reading device that can hold all manner of digital material, ranging from PDF files containing unpublished manuscripts to the complete works of Marcel Proust.

The Kindle is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, a man who has already made one fortune from global online bookselling. It has many of the features of its e-book predecessor, the Sony Reader. But what sets the Kindle apart is one new feature: wireless connectivity via a system called Whispernet. As a result, says Bezos: 'This isn't a device, it's a service.'

Here, with the actual marriage of Amazon with the world of internet technology, a reckoning seemed finally to be due. Was it not time to say Goodbye Gutenberg? Were we now about to see that long-predicted 'iPod moment' for books, the moment when the new technology finally swept six centuries of ink and paper aside in the low electronic hum of integrated microchips.

For five years and more, there had been a steady trend towards the digitisation of the world's copyright material, pioneered by the Google Print Initiative. To Google's alliance with some of the world's greatest libraries, including the Bodleian, all the major publishers had responded by digitising their back lists. There were protests and baleful warnings about 'intellectual property rights', but almost everyone had begun to anticipate the day when a workable e-book would arrive.

You know the game is up for traditional publishing when the CEO of Random House delivers a lecture entitled 'New Chapter or Last Page? Publishing Books in a Digital Age.' On 11 March this year, Gail Rebuck declared: 'Digitisation is here and books will never be the same again. Digitisation frees books to reach new audiences in new ways. Books used to furnish a room,' she joked. 'Now they will furnish a virtual world. The e-book is here and its impact will be far-reaching.'

She was, at times, even blithe in the face of change: 'We are not concerned,' she said, 'as long as you want to read it, we are happy to supply books in whatever form you like...'

No, said Rebuck, this was not a threat - not the end of civilisation - but a wonderful opportunity. Rebuck's message, now widely shared, is that the Kindle and its e-book competitors will not kill the book but happily co-exist with it in a bright new bi-literary environment.

Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury concurs. He says: 'There will continue to be a market for printed books for a very long time. I believe the bulk of people will still prefer to hold, feel, treasure, give, receive, display and read a printed book.' Tellingly, Charkin adds: 'Unlike CDs, I do not think books will be displaced by downloads.'

The 'iPod moment' in the book world, so often postponed, is expected to happen this year, probably in the autumn. It's an awesome prospect. John Naughton, The Observer's veteran internet correspondent, has calculated that 'the indexed part [of the world wide web] hovers at around 40 billion pages' while the so-called 'deep web', hidden from search engines, is between 400 and 750 times bigger than that.

Universal access to this virtual library, and electronic browsing through its myriad files, will be an enthralling prospect in the immediate future. Charkin says: 'There will be continuing competition for leisure time. Publishers will have to make books even more desirable as objects. If we do so, there will continue to be a thriving market for great printed novels.'

Readers and writers may now experience the liberation of literature in ways that Caxton never dreamed of. The word, written and spoken, remains at the heart of our culture, but it's no longer watched by a Praetorian Guard of elite gatekeepers. It has been handed back whence it came, from the few to the many.

This, perhaps, explains the paradox that despite more book activity than ever, the book itself seems less central than before. Actually, what I have described are the birth pangs of a golden age. The market for the printed book is now global; the opportunities for the digital book are almost unimaginable. To be a writer in the English language today is to be one of the luckiest people alive.

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A Decade in Books

Article Robert McCrum on 10 years that shook the world of books from The Observer.

Enjoy!

----------------

1997
Booker winner: Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things

· Welfare mum Joanne Rowling finally gets her boy wizard tale published after numerous rejections. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone has an initial print run of 500 copies. Small fry, but little did we know...

· Zadie Smith lands a huge advance, rumoured to be £250,000, for her debut novel, still three years away from publication.

· Major publisher Random House takes the unusual step of launching a website.

1998

Booker winner: Ian McEwan for Amsterdam.

· Harry Potter strikes again, this time with his Chamber of Secrets. It'll never last...

· Poet Laureate Ted Hughes dies.

· Online bookseller Amazon, launched in 1995, starts to nibble away at the profits of the traditional high street bookshop.

1999

Booker winner: JM Coetzee for Disgrace.

· Never mind the Booker ... celebrity chefs have become a national obsession and a young geezer named Jamie Oliver cashes in with his pukka guide to cookery, The Naked Chef. In not too many years, he'd be cooking Britain's school dinners.

· Harry Potter has his third outing.

2000

Booker winner: Margaret Atwood for The Blind Assassin

· Thousands queue all night outside bookshops; acres of newsprint are devoted to the rags-to-riches story of JK Rowling; and literary critics are forced to admit that something remarkable is happening. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is published and all over the land, children, not to mention adults, are actually reading books

· Those who frown on Harry Potter are to be found reading Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which finally makes its appearance, justifying the hype, and that big advance, with healthy sales worldwide.

· Hari Kunzru ups the stakes with one of the biggest advances for a first novel in publishing history, a total of £1.25m for UK, American and European rights for The Impressionist

· Dave Eggers unveils his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius... and brings to our attention new writers such as Vendela Vida (now his wife) and George Saunders via his journal and publishing house McSweeney's.

2001

Booker winner: Peter Carey for True History of the Kelly Gang

· Jonathan Franzen is shunned by Oprah's Book Club for expressing unease at his selection, but Oprah's role as America's top tipper of gripping books, soon to be followed in Britain by Richard & Judy, proves to have a bigger impact on the literary landscape.

· Ian McEwan cements his position as the discerning reader's darling with the publication of Atonement

· Bill Clinton addresses Hay-on-Wye, dubbing its festival the 'Woodstock of the mind'. Suddenly reading has morphed from private pastime to public talking-shop.

2002

Booker winner: Yann Martel for The Life of Pi

· Life of Pi is the public's favourite-ever Booker winner, reflecting a marketing makeover for Britain's top literary prize.

2003

Booker winner: DBC Pierre for Vernon God Little

· Madonna kidnaps children's fiction with The English Roses, published simultaneously in more than 100 countries.

· Everyone on the tube is reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

· Everyone on the tube is now reading 2003's The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.

· Strangest of all, millions around the world obsess about commas in the company of Lynne Truss and her Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

2004

Booker winner: Alan Hollinghurst for The Line of Beauty

· For his memoirs, My Life, Bill Clinton receives the biggest advance of all time, believed to be worth $12m.

· Richard and Judy start their book club. It quickly becomes a passport to big displays in bookshops and guaranteed sales.

· Everyone's reading Brick Lane by Monica Ali.

2005

Booker winner: John Banville for The Sea

· Eat your heart out, Bill: Oprah's new diet book tops Clinton's record advance.

· But all is not lost for serious literature: Ian McEwan tackles the Iraq war in Saturday and Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize.

2006

Booker winner: Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss.

· Angel, the first novel by Katie Price, aka Jordan, marks a new watershed in celebrity-penned fiction.

· A setback for the 'true-life' misery memoir: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey is exposed as significantly fabricated. 'A million little lies...' say the headlines.

2007

Booker winner: Anne Enright for The Gathering.

· Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the series, attracts the largest pre-order of all time.

· Katie Price outsells the collected Booker shortlist and turns up at the British Book Awards.

· Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Prize.

· Amazon sells 5.4 million items in one day.

2008

Michael Portillo chairs the Booker Prize.

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Brian M Logan
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