AB: Andreas Björklind IM: Ian McDonald JHH: John-Henri Holmberg JA: Johan Anglemark AH: Anders Holmström BLV: Britt-Louise Viklund RK: Roger Klein CH: Cecilia Henningsson MP: Mikael Pargman AB: Welcome to this discussion between Ian McDonald and John-Henri Holmberg which I will moderate, when they get too angry with each other. I will ask them questions and afterwards give you opportunity to ask them questions. I don't think they need any more introduction than their names, you've seen them through the conference... IM: Thank you. AB: ... convention, whatever. Con. And the subject is the relationship between writer and editor and if we see it goes away in another direction that's fine. Let's start. IM: You're supposed to tell us... AB: Do you want to ask John-Henri a question? I mean, not personally, but generally speaking. As an author... IM: As an author, yes. As I was saying much earlier in the convention, the one question writers want to ask editors, well, it's actually three questions which really boils down to one question. The first question is: "When are you going to pay me?" The second question is: "Why haven't you paid me?" and the third question is: "For God's sake pay me!" Whenever writers get together, the thing writers talk about the most are editors and money. Writers don't talk about science fiction. Writers talk about money and how they can get it off their editors. How they can get more off their editors and how they can get it more promptly. That's it, basically. So why don't you pay us? JHH: Well, in this particular case, my answer of course is: So far we haven't signed any of your books. Audience: ... another one of their excuses. JHH: There are many sides to every issue. IM: Cop out. JHH: When people on the the publishing side of this business meet, we very seldom in fact talk about books, we talk about money. Because they say that a popular conception, not entirely untrue, is that publishing would be a very great kind of business to be in if it were not for four kinds of unfortunate, necessary, but definitely bothersome things sticking to it on the outside skirts of publishing. One is authors. IM: Yeah. JHH: Second is agents. The third is critics and the fourth of course is readers. But as soon as we can make up some way of carrying on in the business without these people, we would be set for life. No, I mean obviously, publishing is an industry which needs authors and we are aware of it. What I think is the problem in a sense is that almost any editor or publisher, certainly any inquiring editor or publisher necessarily does, is that he tries, in most cases in my experience and as far as I can be objective about this, he tries very conscientiously to tread the very thin line between making decisions which he can live with as a reader and somebody interested in literature and also which his publisher or the owners will find acceptable from an economic sense of the business. Because the problem here is that any person involved actively in publishing publishes a number of books which he or she does not personally care for and feels are in fact pretty bad books. IM: But they never tell the writers this. JHH: No, we cannot, because the people who do these books are the ones we live off. JHH: Even the people whom most of the editors personally like and want to publish, also live off, largely, because the problem is that a new novel by Sidney Sheldon or Jean Auel will sell even in Sweden maybe four hundered thousand copies, whereas a new novel by, say somebody popular in here and who is being published sometimes in Sweden, William Gibson, will sell one thousand copies. Obviously, translating the Gibson novel will cost more, in itself, than the company gets in from selling one thousand copies, so that book is published at quite a considerable loss. And the only thing that makes it possible to publish the Gibson novel is 1) the same company has the Sheldon, which makes the company itself profitable, and 2) of course, that the editor requiring the Gibson can, for a certain number of volumes, manage to talk his publisher or owner into believing that Gibson may at some point break out and become at least reasonably profitable. When this turns out not to be so and the general number of books given an author to prove profitability, at least in swedish publishing, I think this is fairly true internationally, is about three novels. After three books, the publisher or decision maker about the editor will say no, we will not do more books by this author which is the reason, as some people sometimes ask, why a specific, particular science fiction author has been published with a couple of books in Sweden, but then never reappears. He's proven unprofitable or unsaleable. IM: This is frightening, from the authors' point of view. AB: Did you have a direct question to... JA?: How would you say when you as an editor tries your publisher to publish a certain author you don't care for and you try to convince him that this might sell. Into what extent would you say yourself that you are deliberately decieving him and in what extent are you... JHH: I mean, personally I no longer have to walk this particular edge, when I did, well, there are many ways of trying to implement somebody. One way of course is saying that, yes, we have these guys we live off but we also need some prestige. You can possibly make them believe that the Gibson novel will get good reviews and so give some prestige to the house. Of course, with science fiction in Sweden this is really not very probable but it can happen. Or you can say that this person, and this may be true and you may believe this to an extent, that this guy will never be a main seller but he has generated a cult following in other countries. Maybe we can get him to sell maybe three or four thousand copies which would make it break even. And that you may believe. I'm in a worse position, I have now the physical responsibility for my line of books, that is, I have to make the budget which means it is myself I have to fool into... IM: I'm interested about you saying that Sidney Sheldon will subsidize William Gibson, because in Britain that doesn't happen anymore. Whenever Sphere were doing the David Garnett Zenith series of books they lost money and they don't do loss leaders anymore. Every book now that Sphere does has to show a profit so the Zenith line got cancelled, even though it could have been subsidized, it was a good series with excellent stories, well edited. It sold pretty well but not enough. It just failed to break even and it got cancelled because they weren't prepared to subsidize it with something else. It's nice to see that the big dinosaurs can subsidize the little mammals sort of running around between them. JHH: But to an extent, and I must assume this is still true even at Sphere, because they will not believe that a first book by any author will be profitable, so to that extent it's always the case that you accept losses on say, one, two, possibly three books by a new author you are taking on, but after that, that's the toughie, because after that he or she is supposed to pay away with the following books and if they don't, this is when they're dropped. IM: Exactly. From the authors' point of view, authors sort of feel like third world countries in a sense that they're exploited when they're turning out work on which they get a small percentage return. It isn't really like this, it's just how it seems to be, it's a kind of popular perception because writers all like to be paranoid anyway, this gives them a sense of solidarity with each other. After money, things authors like to do best is bitch about editors, basically. Not editor, publishers! Because they all know editors and this is generally a nice crowd, it's the faceless, anonymous publishers they worry about so they all bitch about how they could be getting larger advances and they didn't push that book very well and it was a dreadful P.R. job on that and so on and so forth. The fact is that from the authors' point of view, the editor is a regrettable but necessary mechanism between the author and the public, pretty much. I've lost my chance of ever selling a book in Sweden. JHH: And many other houses. IM: Financial suicide. JHH: On the editorial side, there is of course a kind of problem which makes this view from authors very understandable. And this is the editor of genius-syndrome. There was, in american publishing in the 1920s, 30s and 40s a very famous editor whose name I currently cannot remember, doesn't matter, Maxwell Perkins was his name in fact, and he worked for I believe Doubleday, I'm not sure. Doesn't matter which company. He was an aquiring editor and he was a very conscientious man. He read the slush file, that is the unsolicited manuscripts from unknown hopeful authors and he in fact was the editor of this house who published the first books by I believe Hemingway, by ... one of the other very famous thirties authors and certainly by Tom Wolfe. And... IM: Thomas Wolfe. JHH: Yes, in the late thirties. And a number of other very important authors, he discovered from the slush file, he worked intensely with them, he re-wrote things, particularly Thomas Wolfe. He was a very tall Texan, very young, and he rented a low-pay rent apartment in Greenwich Village and he spent his nights standing writing on foolscap pages on top of his ice box, by hand, and when he had about a thousand of his pages he would send them in to Perkins who would then put them in some kind of order and make up a plot for it, take out the unnecessary things, and see to it that characters had the same name throughout and so forth. JHH: Wolfe was horribly sloppy. The big thing with this was that Perkins became a legend in publishing circles, internationally a legend, he found great authors, at least one Nobel laureate, one who people believe wrote the great American novel and a huge number of young editors have then felt that the trick to it is of course to read through these unsolicited manuscripts, find something with some taint of talent, and then start re-writing it. This is creative editing which I think most authors really should take... If the work is not good enough to stand basically on its own, at least to the extent that necessary re-writes and cuts can be done by the author with perhaps input and suggestions from the editor, but that the editor is sitting there, re-writing it himself, then this author should not be published because he will never write books by himself. And if the editor is such a good writer that he ccan take trash and turn it into masterpieces he should quit his job and go home and write novels. The tendency is there with many editors and this I think is something which sometimes causes pain in many authors unnecessarily. On the other hand, particularly with very new authors, people publishing their first or second book, the idea of being edited at all often strikes them as silly, unnecessary, painful and as meddling from the publishers side, which I think is also untrue and wrong. The editors job, ideally, in working with an author is to try to get to know the author and to understand the manuscript and understand what the author wants to do with the manuscript and to try to look at it with fresh eyes, as it were to see where, perhaps, the authors intentions could possibly be better executed through changes and this, I think, is an occupation which is winful to the author and to the books and to the reading public and generally turns books published into better books if it's done well. There are authors, when you do this to them, will react, my worst author reaction ever was, oh, eighteen years ago, I did a fairly thorough editorial suggestional job on a manuscript including taking out one whole chapter and putting about two paragraphs of it into another chapter and things and had a nine-page closely-typed letter back about artistic freedom. IM: Augh.... JHH: And when I tried to phone the author who was a friend since nine years he had informed his wife to hang up on me. JHH: Which is a reaction which is not really... Suggesting changes in a manuscript is not attacking the book which you have in fact bought, probably, for publication, and it's definitely not attacking the author personally. It's trying to help him, even if he feels, of course, that this is his child that you are putting to the meat grinder. IM: Authors are always too close to their own books. JHH: Yes, they are. I mean, after two years many of them come back and say "Your changes were not so bad after all." IM: Yes. If I write something, I let it sit for about two months, do other things, then come back and re-read it and then it's much easier to say that goes, that goes, that goes there, cut that out of it there and it's usually a lot better for that. If I sent it originally, off like that, they'd have hacked it to pieces, quite rightly. JHH: Yes. IM: I like doing re-writes, actually, I'm never totally happy with anything I write and I always welcome when an editor says "Could you change this?" "Yeah, great!" Sometimes I do them on my own, actually. I'll send something off and say actually, "Do you mind if I re-write this?" The last part of King of Morning, Queen of Day was re-written of my own . Not on editorial advice, but hopefully, it was an improvement but no-one will ever know, because no-one will ever read the original version. Authors also have to make artistic compromises as well as editors... JHH: After you're dead, your children will, like Christopher Tolkien, start ... IM: I'm going to burn them all. Yes, Christopher Tolkien kind of enjoys a parasitic existence on his dead father. Now, there's an idea for a horror novel. IM: Most of his are horror novels. AH: This about editors re-writing stuff, of course there is a chance that he does some improvement but... you may have the bad luck to run into an editor that feels that he has to do some re-writing and changing so that he gets to feel that he's a creative person too and not just an accountant. JHH: Yes, this can happen. This is what I was trying to say about the Maxwell Perkins look-alikes. Nobody is intractable here, generally. If cooperation between a certain author and a certain editor does not function, if the author feels the editor does not understand at all what the author is trying or wanting to do or if the editor, which can also happen I tell you, feels that the author is abusing the relationship, keeps calling him or her up, talking for twelve hours every weekend about their problems, problems with alcohol or problems with their wives... JHH: ...then, the publisher in question or the editorial director will often change an author to another editor in hope that this works better. You have to have a personal relationship to an author and you want to be friends with the author to an extent but an editor in a given year works with perhaps twenty authors. The relationship to each of these twenty people living in various parts of the country can not be that close that they are their best bosom buddies, that they try to solve all their problems. Authors have a difficult situation. An author sits at home, sees nobody when he is working, has nobody to talk to except possibly his spouse, gets no input from people at work, his work is in his mind, and most people think they are loafing off and doing nothing because they work peculiar hours every day and so on, and they need somebody who understands and can talk and this is often the editor, which is a good thing, but it can also reach the point where, to the editor, this is emotionally totally exhausting and unbearable. IM: I always feel guilty when I phone up Betty Mitchell, my editor in America. I mean, it's about once every two months, we talk for about ten minutes and I feel bad that I'm wasting her time or something to have a little chat. Does that sound too excessive, once every two months? JHH: I think once every two weeks is perfectly alright. On the other hand I know one of our authors talked to his editor, from a Friday to a Monday, for almost thirty hours, only about three months ago. IM: If I did that to America, I'd have to get a mortgage for the phone bill. JHH: They call collect. IM: I haven't latched on to that one yet. JHH: They all do. BLV: Does it ever happen that an author doesn't agree and utterly refuses to make a change the editor suggests and what happens in that situation? JA: Who decides? BLV: Who decides, yes. The book doesn't get published, or ... JHH: Well, this actually depends on whether the contract has been signed or not. It is supposed to be a mutual process and if the book has been signed and the advance has been paid out, the book will be published and the author will have the final say. Up to a point, I mean... In the four years with the company I am with currently we've had in my department one novel which we then returned. Although the author got to keep his advance money, but we did not publish the book. IM: Did you publish any books by him later? JHH: This was his third. No, he then went to another house. So when you reach that point, it generally is a break in the relation. JA: Have you ever experienced having to turn an author down just because he was so impossible to work with? Even though he sold, I mean, not... at least he generated a profit. JHH: Well, the one I just talked about, where we did in fact return the third novel and let him keep the advance. IM: Do you have a question? AH: If a guy sells a million copies, can he be as absolutely impossible as he wants? JHH: No, not... almost, yes. JHH: In fact, there is a Swedish author who is very well known in the trade, who does not sell a million copies, nobody does sell that in Sweden, but who does sell, I would say, never less than mayby forty or fifty thousand copies. This means it is not Jan Guillo, just to mention a name which everybody thinks I am talking about though I'm not, it's somebody else, and who is famous for being possibly the most obnoxious writer in Sweden. This is a person who will occupy you daily. From the day of acceptance of a new manuscript to the day of publication he will be on the phone every day, he will make up entire publistic campains, all by himself, and talk to everybody in publicity and in public relations, trying to sell his things which are enormously costly, and which you know from experience will sell often not a single copy of the book and you will always compromise and give him something, some small part of a compaign which costs you two, three or four thousand pounds only for no good reason, because then you may get rid of the other fifty thousand pounds expences he expects. He has switched houses a number of times, but, yes, he has a lot of leeway, people will stand for things from this author which they would not stand from any other author because the sheer cost in manpower and time and irritation generated by this accounts for the first twenty thousand copies sold. The other twenty thousand will still go a long way. But there is a limit. IM: What about authors being late? That's the one thing that will get me on the phone to the editors if I'm late. King of Morning, Queen of Day was eighteen months late. It's not the record, the record as far as I know is Bob Shaw who has a book with Gollancz, the sequel to Who Goes Here?, which is three years late. Admittedly, his wife died so he has a good excuse, but... Is this what editors hate most? JHH: No. In Swedish publishing, we hate this, and I think everybody does, mostly from the translators, because there you feel that you work on a time schedule and you should be able to schedule the book and you do and if it's late past the point where publicity has gone into action and catalogs have been published and covers have been printed and the sales forces are out selling the book because we sell, our sales people here started about April first selling the books with publication up through early October which meant that books where the translation was due perhaps May first were being sold already a month earlier and if the translator doesn't tell us until May second that he will be two months late, then we will start hating this translator, not the authors, you're talking to them beforehand, you discuss with them if they say on March fifteenth "Maybe I'll be a couple of weeks late," you will not put that book in the early fall catalog but in the late fall so you have another couple of months leeway and you can lift it out. We understand that, I think. IM: Good. JHH: There are some exceptions. You mentioned Bob Shaw, but of course in science fiction publishing the legend is Last Dangerous Visions which is sold and is now, I believe, seventeen years late. I saw the manuscript three weeks back. It all exists. It's a number of files with the . He'll get down to it any day now. RK: What was the reaction to the eighteen month delay? IM: Well, it's always in the editors to lie to the authors. They never give you the real truth of the fact, they may be furious but they always try to be nice to you, sort of, "Oh well, we'll get it when we'll get it, I suppose", but in reality "This has shot our schedules to hell and back again." That was a personal record, everything I do is late, but only by a couple of months1. I phone up and say "It's going to be a couple of months late" and they say "That's fine." I think whenever I sign a contract, they add three months on to the date on the contract and schedule it from there. JHH: You almost always do this with anybody freelancing. Same is always true with translators, you add some time. AB: Ian, could you perhaps give us some short description of your leisurly work as a lazy author. I mean, we talked a bit about the impression people get that authors just sit home in their garden, typing some sentences... IM: Actually, I do sit home in the garden. I can move the word processor to the garden which is very nice this time of year. I have the concentration span of a fruit fly. IM: I can't concentrate for more than five, ten minutes at a time, then I go and watch television for half an hour. I'm addicted to game shows. IM: I don't get enough of them. I write and I go and watch a game show, and then you have to get back into writing again and every it's like running a marathon, you have the wall up at about twenty miles, where you can't go any further and then you get through it and writing is a kind of wall, but comes right from the start where you write and nothing happens, every word is just dreadful and you scratch it out and you say "I cannot do this, I'm going to go and apply for a job in a bank" and giving up and you write a while and eventually it comes, it starts to flow, but the first ten minutes are awful. I just live in self-torment, because I write in such short bursts, I can only get about at the most three minutes of actual flowing writing before I lose concentration and go to watch a game show. IM: I also drink immense amounts of coffee. I've had to switch to de-caffeinated coffee because when I was writing Desolation Road I had so much coffee that I was shaking by twelve o'clock, I was like this, the telephone would ring and I would be up on the ceiling. High as a kite. It doesn't sound a lot, but I reckon if I can do four pages, four good pages a day, I can do a book in six months which seems pretty reasonable. That sounds like a couple of hours work, it is a couple of hours work, but it's about six hours of game show watching and drinking pots of coffee. AH: How do you maintain you mental state watch such huge amounts of game shows? IM: Yet again, it goes back to the remix. I watch so much television that an awful lot of what I see on television goes into the books. AH: You can watch a lot of television without having to watch a lot of game shows. IM: I like game shows. I love them. They are great. The way I actually work is I can't type so I do everything with two fingers, two fingers and a thumb on the space bar. Those two fingers, the thumb on the space bar and the word processor. Everything is written out longhand first and my writing is so bad that if I write quickly I can't read it. By the time the ideas start coming, I'm writing so fast that it's just a blur, a mess of writing and I can't read it so I have to slow down and then I sort of reach a bit where... Maybe this is true for every writer. I tend to think in scenes, you get a scene here, a scene there and the real difficult bit is linking the scenes together. I'll write a scene and then I'll get stuck and have to think of a way of linking it to the next scene or section. I'll get a bit of dialog or a description of something or whatever. Linking them together is where I take the breaks. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm getting space and time and a bit of mindless television to think about how to link into the next section, to introduce it... It's hell, but there it is. I wouldn't do anything else. AB: I've always wondered, where does the editor come in into this... I mean if you look at a book from the beginning, from the conception to publication, where is the editor, in that time line? JHH: At any point. AB: You could actually go with an idea? IM: I sell books on outlines so the editor is there from the very start. JHH: It depends a lot on the writer, you have people who will not say a word to you "I'm working on something, You'll see it." and you get in a complete manuscript, four hundered pages typewritten nicely double-spaced, and they say "Well, here's my new idea" and you start the process by, actually you start with the line editing, more or less unless there seems to be some huge flaw in the part or conception which with these people often there isn't, because that's the way they work, they will not talk about what they do, then you have the authors who talk ideas to death and in fact turn in something else because... maybe one of these, we talked about him some days ago is Lucius Shepard, he will always talk about a new book and go over it in detail and it never gets written. What he does in fact do is then, suddenly, from out of the blue, he hands in a manuscript for something else. He works on parallell lines. Some books he only talks about and the other books he never talks about, he writes. IM: Now there's a great suggestion for a panel, talking about books that you might have written, the one you meant to write but the one you actually wrote was something different. JHH: Editors have similar kind of work habits as authors in a sense, working with texts on the level it is supposed to be from both the authorial and editorial side demands the kind of intellectual concentration which you cannot uphold for a long time. I would say probably an editor can work more than ten minutes but certainly not ten hours or even two hours at a stretch, I mean everybody has some vagary sort of thing to relax and get their minds together again to start over. When I was doing... JHH: ... It's a Wonderful Life, a movie... IM: That's a great vice. JHH: I've seen it two hundered times ... JHH: ...because you work with the manuscript, and you drop it, you often do this at evenings, at home and you do a couple of hours, you go in and watch a half hour of It's a Wonderful Life, and you do another couple of hours on the manuscript and watch more of It's a Wonderful Life and you do it over and over again. After a while, it's almost like a game show, just like you say. AH: Heretics. How can you compare Frank Capra with game shows? JHH: After a hundered viewings... JA: outlines, to what extent do you feel that you can sell almost any outline because the editor knows that you're a competent author and that this outline might be weird, might be mighty bad, but you will turn it into something good. IM: There is a certain amount of... trust between editors and authors. King of Morning, Queen of Day the book bears not an awful lot of resemblance to the outline. It might be a good outline and the book will be as good as the outline or maybe it's a dreadful outline but they hope and trust that the book will be better because they have read previous things that you have done and hopefully they have seen that you have improved on previous outlines, so hopefully the next one you do will be the same. My books very seldom bear any real resemblance to the outline. Books are funny things, actually, those who are into quantum indeterminancy and the uncertainty principle and all that... If you'd written that sentence five minutes later or five minutes earlier in a different place it wouldn't have been exactly the same sentence. It would have been a totally different book, you know, a book is a very particular thing, it just comes together in one place at one time . That's sort of the way I sit and think about writing, it's a kind of vague sort of thing, it's... A word can be changed here or there, that's why I re-write so much, because, you know, written down, later you look at it and think, at that time "I could do better than that. I'd like to change that." JHH: The only thing I could add is that what Ian says is certainly true. In European publishing I hardly believe anybody really buys first or even second books on outlines, it happens, of course, but very seldom. Then, when you have worked with an author, it's totally OK. In American publishing, which is a very different thing from European publishing, they will buy things for a million dollars on outlines from someone they have never heard of and they can sometimes be surprised. I know, for instance, there was published last October by quite good psudo-novel called Generation X by a guy called Copeland, first book... IM: Yeah. JHH: ... which is about, it's a fiction, very nicely done, quite clever, witty and I think very thoughtful about the under thirties generation, the ones who feel let out of everything, but the funny thing is that this was bought three years back by the company, on an outline, and the outline detailed this as a journalistic expository non-fiction book. IM: Actually, that book is getting a lot of P.R. hype at the moment in Britain and all the P.R. hype emphasizes that kind of journalistic thing, that it's a record of this generation, not actually a novel. They must have picked up on the outline, rather than the book. ??: When you've done a lot of editorial work, when you kind of read in another way, reading is your profession and... you read the book in another way, you're supposed to interact a lot more... JHH: I think you do. ??: ... can you switch modes? Can you just pick up a book and relax, read it in a relaxed way or do you read it in a professional way? JHH: It's very difficult just to read it for relaxation. Another secret vice which I think has come into publishing is that you relax reading, is actually when you re-read things you read a long time ago, before you started working. I mean, I can ... vice, this is not as unknown as my Frank Capra vice I admit, when I'm sick or when I have to get out of thinking about books this way and read for relaxation, I re-read things like Robert Heinlein juveniles if I want to read science fiction because I read those long before I started thinking about things so I can recapture that sense of reading but reading a new book is almost impossible, you see the wrong wordings, you get hysterical about the spelling mistakes and you also want to read in a different mode because you read in a sense unless it is something which has already been bought by a competitor for publication you will always read it at least with some small sense this might be something publishable. Then you think about things like how does this translate, how does this travel, to which audience is this geared, and when you've got about a hundered pages into the book, this is when you start feeling will he handle the ending well, that's when you look at the ending because you never read the middle parts... IM: Right, so I can put anything I like in the middle part of the book. JHH: Well, for a first reader report, you can IM: If you're reading a book in your editorial role, can you read it with the point of view of thinking "no" and being convinced to say "yes," or do you read it thinking "yes" and the book will say "no" to you if that makes sense. JHH: It makes sense. You generally do the first, because there is always a limit to your lists and so you have to reject many more books than you can possibly accept and so you basically start each one wanting to reject it and have to be convinced to buy it. Secondarily of course, you read, as I said initially in the first comment I had on this panel, you publish two kinds of books, you publish the things which are basically published to make money. This should not be things which you are ashamed to do. No publisher should publish something which they really hate or feel that it should not be published at all because you can not do this successfully. You can never talk down to the audience. I believe you will be a failure if you do that, but you do a number of books which are books that you know personally that although you think this is a competent piece of work, it is entertaining, it is fun to read but you know that you personally will not remember this book in a week's time. It's not a book which you will want to go back to. Then you do the other kind of books, the ones which you do because you love them, they are the books which have to be published even if nobody reads them they have to be brought out because they are so good and you will remember them in ten years time and when you start reading a submission, or a manuscript or something, you know immediately, more or less, which kind this can fit into. The second kind of course doesn't come along as often. When you find one of those, you go hysterical and you start thinking about ways to make this possibly pay its way but even if you feel that you will sell twentyfive copies you may still do it if you are in a position to be able to, whereas the first kind it's only a question of how to gear it. If it fits into the lists, if it fulfills the need for the twelfth thriller of this year, otherwise you might let it go because you will find twelve new ones next year and so on. Different modes of reading again, the first kind you never finish, you only read about twenty percent of them. IM: Just to see that they're competent enough... JHH: ... and entertaining enough, which means you read enough to know the plot and enough to know the level of writing in a general sense. AB: Question? CH: I feel that there is one person missing here. That is the translator. We talked a little about translators. How do you feel about translators? Do they do their work well? AB: Have you been translated yet? IM: Into German, French and Spanish. The best translator was French, he used to give me these very long phonecalls and send pages of questions about Desolation Road and the story collection Empire Dreams. He was by far the most conscientious, I've thumbed through the German ones and the Spanish onesâ my knowledge is just about miniscule but the translation has been rough in places. He was the best, definitely. There's a Dutch company doing Kling Klang Klatch, the graphic novel, apparently it's impossible to translate, they're having incredible problems but that's what they get paid for, solving problems. Let's talk about agents. JHH: Do you want me to say something about the translators? One, I think they are paid well. The current minimum payment for translators as agreed between the writers and the publishers unions organizations is about 1400 crowns plus 13% of occasional additional money in addition to which we of course pay the social costs per 32000 type spaces which comes out as about twelve, thirteen printed book pages and if you type reasonably well... IM: This is more than I got for a book! JHH: ... if your typing ability is decent, if you use all ten fingers, you will as a translator make on the average I would say make something like four, five, six hundered crowns an hour. The problem of course with translators is that they often are not fully occupied, they get a commission, they do one book and they may have a couple of months when they don't have any job before they get the next book. On the other hand, to be absolutely honest, I must say that a translator contractually generally gets about one month for each hundered pages of book they are supposed to translate and they almost never hand them in before their deadlines and this generally means to my personal experience with translators and as having been one myself that, in fact, you goof off for three months, then you start slowly working on the book for one or two hours a day until you have two weeks of time which is when you start working eighteen hours a day to hand it in only a week late. Of course, this way, you don't make huge amounts of money in a year. There are translators in Sweden who work very, extremely, rigidly controlled and who make enormous amounts of money I can tell you. Second question are there any good... Being a good translator, I think, is one of the most difficult things having to do with at least fiction because a good translator has to be as good a stylist and as conscious of two languages as the best of the authors he works with but he also has to have no discernable individual style. He has to be able to change his writing to fit the mood and the level and the sensibilities of either one of many authors and there are very few really good translators. In Sweden from English, we have eight or ten really good translators and we have maybe twentyfive who are good and another forty-fifty who are OK and then there's a lot who are very bad in fact. CH: How do you pick a translator? JHH: You read things they've done and then you phone them and try to convince them to do your books. The best ones will always pick which books they work with, they read them first and say "No, I don't like it" and you can't force them there, they know what they're worth. AB: Time for one, very short, question. Did you have a very short question? MP: I have a question on translations. AB: Perhaps something else on translations, or? MP: This was about translators. Can you sell a book depending on who the translator is, I mean I guess the critics know it but... JHH: Not generally, no. Very popular authors are very often very badly translated. Sidney Sheldon. Because publishers will tend to take the best translators for the books they know will get reviewed heavily so if you publish a book by a famous literary author which you know will sell maybe two or three thousand copies you still get a very good, highly paid translator because this means it will get good reviews and libraries will like it, whereas if you publish Sidney Sheldon you use one of the bad translators because the four hundered thousand seems not to notice the difference. Sadly. MP: OK. Do you work with a translator like you work with a writer about editing and... JHH: We do, in fact. Not all houses do today. They used to, but not all publishers do now but we do. There is an editor for each translation, the editor will work with the translator, go through the translation line by line, basically, comparing to the original and discuss diverging opinions with the translator and if the translation is bad it is supposed to be re-written by the editor. AB: OK. MP: he got contacted by the French translator... JHH: Some do this. There are many who do this. There are many who don't. Not necessarily a question of whether they are good or bad. It's a personal matter with them. Many do. AB: OK, that's the end of the panel, thank you both.