Helena Blakemore is a lecturer at UEL. She covers several different areas,
including questions of literary and cultural value, issues around
cultural consumption, and media employability. Her most recent
publications include “Eyes on the Prize” in Clive Bloom’s Literature,
Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today, which examines the
phenomenon of the Booker Prize, and she is currently engaged in a
collaborative project which is concerned with the relationship
between media practice, research and teaching.


Eel: You started off in literature and you did a Masters in…
Helena Blakemore: I did a Masters at Queen Mary College before it was
Queen Marry and Westfield. And then I went back to Middlesex
where I did my first degree and started a PHD on “A Question of
Literary Value”. I was quite interested in the Booker Prize and the
relationship between literary production output, artistic output and
reward marketability and marketing. I spent quite a long time
interviewing a whole range of people who were connected to the
Booker Prize, The Orange Prize, publishing and book reviewing. I was
looking at the process of how contemporary fiction is evaluated, how it gets rewarded and why.


Eel: So what did you find?


HB: I found most people have great difficulty articulating what they think
they are rewarding. And a lot of people have blind spots as
regards context with which they are doing the evaluation. They see
themselves as innocent of it.


Eel: Do you think that’s more a personal decision wherein they know what
they like and they know, personally, what is literature rather than any
particular idea of literature in and of itself?
HB: Yes. They tend to be of the opinion that because they’ve worked in the
arena that they work in, whatever arena that is, for a particular amount
of time, that they are familiar with texts and contexts and they have
developed a nose for it. The problem is when you ask them to
articulate it.


Eel: In your opinion, the industry doesn’t really have criteria for what is
literature?


HB: No. That’s one of the things that I pulled out in what was published in
the end. I went through and identified the language that people
used when they were going through that process and it’s all do with
“you just know it’s clearly the best”; “I can recognise it as…” Rather
than saying because of a particular reason, a particular use of
something.


Eel: Did you ever find discrepancies? One person saying “I’ve found this
within the work” and another would say “well, I’ve found this...”


HB: No, quite the opposite, that they would tend to all say “it was obvious
to us that this was the best of it’s type” And I would say “why” and
they’d have no answer for that at all. That’s one of the reasons why I
moved on to book reviewing. The process of book reviewing in terms,
again, of the language that was used and what it is that was
identified
as the reviewable aspects of it. But then you get
completely subsumed in a discussion of who reviewed what and
where. The problem is that, still, people review books by their friends
well. If somebody has reviewed somebody’s book well, that
person will then, in turn, review the reviewer’s book well. There a lot of
networks. The University of East Anglia network, the Sunday Times
network, the Literary review network. Peter Kemp, a few years ago, in
the Sunday Times, addressed this and the Sunday Times created a
code of practice, and said that they will never ask people to review
books if they themselves have previously been reviewed by that
author. I’m not sure if it’s quite the case - people crack jokes and make
light of it.


Eel: So even if there’s a calling for a re-review, it’s still going on?


HB: If you look at the Sunday Times book section you’ll tend to find that
most of the books reviewed, and certainly the first books that are
reviewed, the books that get the largest amount of space are male
authors, male reviewers and traditional types of writing. Very often
biography. Because they are seen to be the upholders of a
certain attitude. And that is specific to the Sunday Times but because
the Sunday Times has a significant weight and certain influence in this
area I think it’s quite important.


Eel: you’ve done quite a bit on feminism and female writers and how
they’re perceived. Do you think that horizon is changing? Do you think
there is more scope for female writers or is it still dominated
completely by male writers?


HB: It’s very difficult to tell. The way I would try and identify that would be
to look at what books are being reviewed, and by whom and in what
context. And what makes it to the front shelves of the bookshops. And
it doesn’t seem to be changing very much.


Eel: Do you think that’s because of nepotism and the publishing industry
not taking risks?


HB: They don’t even see it as nepotism and it’s ingrained. People are
inclined to employ people who are like themselves. And in the same
way people are inclined to publish, regard well, put in favour, things
that they are familiar with, things that they know. I don’t think it’s
exactly nepotism, but it’s something that’s easier for them to deal with.
I f you give them a book of a kind that they are already familiar with
they are likely to be able to look more favourably on it than something
that is completely unfamiliar. If it’s good enough. There has to be a
standard in the first place, assuming it’s good of its kind. And it can be
spectacularly good of its kind and a publisher will say “we don’t
publish books like that”. Publishers will already be drawing lines
around things that they will and will not publish. They will say it’s
because that’s what they’re good at publishing. Which is true because
they already have the networks available, the contacts available for
that. It’s not so straight foreword,


Eel: So would you say its more a behavioural trait of particular publishing
houses as well as what their networks will allow rather than a risk-
taking ideal?


HB: They can’t afford to take a risk that’s the problem. There’s not enough
profit in it anyway. They just need to identify what can be sold and
what they know how to sell. One of the other things that I found when I
was interviewing a lot of people was the number of book review
editors who decided who went on the pages, who claimed that they,
as opposed to anyone else, any other paper, that they were the ones
who were promoting new writers. The Guardian did it, the Times
Sunday supplement did, they all said, “we are the ones who like to
push new writers because we like to be seen as be exciting, cutting
edge and looking at what’s new all the time”. But they all say it. I think
the reason they’re doing that is that there is certain kudos in that.
They’re seen to be up to the minute with all of it. But the front page will
be the book that’s big at the moment. The Sunday Times will probably
have something by Ishiguru or it would be Peter Carey or
somebody like that. Straight out of the East Anglia review group and
reviewed by someone like Maggie G. As far as I remember, this is
vaguely apocryphal, the year that Ishiguru won the Booker prize, he
had studied at University of East Anglia, and Maggie G was on the
judging panel and she had taught at the University of East Anglia.
Which doesn’t prove anything. But…


Eel: What kind of recourse is there for unknown writers who haven’t got a
foothold in the industry, who haven’t already created a part for
themselves?
HB: I don’t know if it actually matters. Because the irony is, the Guardian
has a circulation of something like 300, 000 and its book pages are
quite highly regarded. A new hardback novel, if it’s lucky, will sell 500
copies, or 1000 copies if it’s doing exceeding well and up to
blockbuster selling 5000 copies. If readership is 300, 000 and you can
assume that quite a lot of that readership will have at least a glance at
the book pages, then it suggests that they will be influenced one way
or another. So it sort of destroys the argument, on both sides. So I’m
at a loss now as to what the purpose is. My conclusion was that in
order for a book reviews editor to have space in a newspaper, they
have to fight very hard for it. There has to be a reason they can justify
it. It’s do with cultural capital. It’s do with the fact that the Guardian, or
Time Out or the rest of them want to be seen as taking culture
seriously. Whether or not those book reviews then lead to book sales
doesn’t actually matter. If you want your book to sell, you get it
on Richard and Judy, because they do shift books. Hugely. And the
other way is buy your space into the front of a book shop. Or you buy
into Waterstones 3 for 2 promotions, which is what publishers do.


Eel: People who have written a novel, who have gone through numerous
drafts and are trying to get on a ladder that has quite a few broken
rungs, how do they go about getting it published?


HB: You have to have an agent. Most publishers won’t even look at a
manuscript without an agent or unless you can prove you’ve been
previously published. I don’t know what the figures are for online
publishing but I imagine it’s not that great. I would think getting things
published in magazines are a good way to do it. Serialisations are
very good, extracts and short stories. Because then you’re reaching
an audience and if that audience likes it they’ll pick it up and go and
find it in a bookshop or ask for more. That’s the way I would try and do
it. But it’s a nightmare because there’s little money in it unless you’re
writing blockbusters. It’s a very strange industry because a lot of
people value it extremely highly but there’s so little cash and it has a
great deal of cultural capital. It’s perceived to be really important. The
Booker Prize on TV, prime time TV - an hour when there is absolutely
nothing to see, what you see is somebody handing a cheque over to
somebody in posh evening clothes. There is no visual value in the
programme at all.


Eel: Do you think that’s important?


HB: I’m not saying that it should be an event in that way. I’m saying that it’s
extraordinary that Channel four, ITV, BBC have fought over the rights
to broadcast it. Fought. It’s buying into this idea of cultural capital. It’s
important to be seen to be that way. They’re getting a demographic.
The programme itself is… meaningless. You could have a very
interesting programme about the books, but it’s never about the books
it’s an hour of waiting to see who gets the cheques. Which is a bizarre
literal lotto. It’s very strange. It’s quite cheap programming which is
probably why it’s been going on for so long. But then they’ve had the
People’s Booker and the Booker Booker and all the rest of it. I think
it’s very Pierre Baudelaire, buying into the notion of value, and what is
added value. Raising the value of one thing by its association with
something else. That’s why I’m quite cynical.


Eel: It seems to be that there aren’t all that many places were a new writer,
someone who is talented, who has the cojones to write something of
value, to be able to put anything out. Do you think there is credence or
value in putting yourself online as opposed to magazines or should
you just put yourself out in as many places as possible?


HB: I would say that’s probably what you need to do. I don’t know if
everyone at UEL would agree with me, but yes. It depends what you
want. If you’re looking for writing as a career which is going to pay you
and help pay the bills, it’s unlikely to ever pay the bills but to help pay
the bills, then you need to get out there as much as possible. And you
might have to compromise every now again. But that’s what being
a writer is. Some of it will be writing what you want to write in the way
that you want to write it and some of it is going to be other kinds of
writing. There is a lot more online now and I think that will increase
and people will become more and more familiar with using web
sources as a means of finding the kind of writing that they want. It
needs to be organized better. At the moment I don’t think there are
that many sites that are very well known that are recognized as being
valuable because we don’t know about the editing process. If
Penguin were to set up a site for new writing then you would
assume an editing process, then you would assume a standard of
writing. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be that sort of process,
so you don’t know what you’re reading. Ordinary readers tend to go
for what they know and what they like or for what someone else has
recommended.


Eel: So it’s by the reviewer, brand or the writer.


HB: Apparently the best way to get a book read is to stand in front of
someone in a library and hand back the book and say “I just read that
and it was fantastic.” You’re guaranteed the person behind you will
take it out. The marketing, this is where I become very cynical,
marketing is a terrible thing. I interviewed the manager of Guildford
Waterstones and asked about how they select their books. The
process of selection is horrendous. They flick through the covers and
say “we ordered ten by this author last time, shall we pick him this
time?”, and they say “yes”. Sometimes they make mistakes. There
was a coffee table book that came out on things to do with beads.
They meant to order 5 and ordered 50 copies of it and they weren’t
sale or return so they had to sell them. So they made a huge window
display and sold the lot in a week. If you sell it as something big and
important and new and you’ll love it, there will be people who think,
indeed they will love and they’ll go out and buy it. Had they just stuck
it the table or the shelves as normal then the people who did things
with beads normally would have got it but that would have been all.


Eel: There seems to be an undermining of good writing by the single virtue
of the people who are selling it, promoting it, publishing it, who don’t
know what it is, who haven’t read it at all.


HB: The people who are in the business of it. For them what’s between the
covers isn’t very important. It’s the puffs on the back and the name of
the author and what the cover looks like. And what sort of hook it has
that they can hang it on. Which might be that it’s written by Victoria
Beckham. It might be that it’s got something scandalous in it that’s
never been put in print. There has to be something otherwise it’ll
disappear. It might be that it’s by the guy who won the Booker Prize
last year.


Eel: So on it’s own, good literature cannot stand unless it has a good
backing, either word of mouth or industry.


HB: As with cornflakes, you have to have a reason to look for it. You don’t
go into a shop and just trawl the shelves. You normally will be looking
in, at least, a particular interest or a particular author or range. You
have to look at the points at which the cutoffs are but once it’s got into
the bookshops, if your favourite author is Stephen King and Stephen
King says “this is the best thing since sliced bread” the chances are
you might pick it up. That’s the hook in that case. But equally, the
publisher is going to be more inclined to publish it if it comes from
Stephen King and he says “you really must publish this, it’s fantastic”
because then the publisher can say to the sales force “Stephen King
says this is great, and here’s a quote from him that you can use when your talking to the bookshops”. So the bookshops do it for the customers.


Eel: If you were talking to someone with a new book, would you say to
them send it to someone who will possibly read it, who isn’t a
publisher, who is an author?


HB: No, I think they get far too many manuscripts. The first thing to do is
aside from going through the agent channel, is find the right publisher.
And finding the right publisher is probably the most important thing.
It’s finding a publisher who knows and understands the kind of writing
that’s involved and therefore the market.


Eel: Do you have any faith in any of the small publishing companies
coming up at the moment?


HB: Yeah, some of them are really good. Whether their tiny or huge. I don’t
know how effectively they can reach a broad audience though. We all
know the stories of people who got turned down. The story of Jeanette
Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which everybody turned
down until the Silver Moon bookshop in Charing Cross Road said
they’d take twenty copies and they made the book. From there it just
sold, and sold and sold and sold. One small bookshop, an
independent bookshop. There are all sorts of things that you can’t
anticipate. But normally the best thing to do is find the best publisher
for the kind of writing that you’re doing. It’s worth trawling shelves of
the bookshop and look for things that are akin to what you’re writing and who is publishing them and publishing them well.


Eel: How did you end up teaching at UEL?


HB: I worked in the music business before I was an academic, in
marketing for 18 years. It was more an introduction and then I went on
to do degrees. I moved out of marketing because I was in that for long
enough. I wanted something more worthwhile, that gave me a bit
more back rather than just tickets for gigs. Having got into academia I
found that I could use a lot of the stuff I’d previously done. Doing the
cultural studies stuff, doing the Acid House stuff. I still had a lot of
contacts. Then I was doing employability stuff. I was drawing on
people that I’d been involved with previously in the music industry.


Eel: So literature brings it all together?


HB: Because my approach to Creative Writing and Literal and Cultural
Studies areas tends to be based around literature. It’s a literary
approach as an academic discipline because I’m interested primarily
in the context in which the text is produced. Why it came about in the
place and time that it did. Rather than starting inside the book I’ll be
outside looking in. I regard that as a literary studies approach. You
can move around a lot within that.


Eel: Have you thought of writing something of your own?


HB: I do write, but again not for public consumption. Because I haven’t vdone enough of it yet. There are a number of things I’m involved in at the
moment: writing short stories, a screenplay in collaboration with
someone else… it’s just ongoing.


Eel: Is there anything else you’d like to add for our EEL readers?


HB: Well.. I know a lot of what I’ve said sounds very cynical about the
market place and the publishing industry but that doesn’t mean I think
it’s a complete waste of time I just think you should go into it with
your eyes open. You need thick skin and a recognition of the fact that
having your work turned down doesn’t mean it’s not good it means the
person who’s turning it down can’t find a place for it at the moment
and that might be all.