Every publisher must pray for the hallowed 'word-of-mouth' effect when they take on a new writer, and the literary salon is one way to create a buzz. If you want to be cynical about it, it is a cut price way of marketing in our straitened times - by turning the poor author into ever more the performer.
Or so I first assumed. Having talked to writers and readers who turn up to these informal literary gatherings which began some years ago in back-rooms and didn't cost a thing to attend (based on the original Enlightenment model) I have become a hard-and-fast advocate of 'new publishing' of this kind.
Authors speak with genuine excitement about them. Many try out works-in-progress. They enter into a conversation not only with a book-loving audience, but also with fellow writers. When Alex Preston read his debut work, The Bleeding City, at Damian Barr's now-legendary salon at Shoreditch House, in East London, he fell into a debate with Lee Rourke and John MacGregor who argued for the uses of writing first drafts in long-hand rather than directly onto a computer. That was three years ago and Preston has been using long-hand ever since that conversation.
The solitary nature of writing means that there are very few places to have these kinds of conversations – book readings are often too formal and literary festival tend to draw much bigger audiences and there is the pressure to shift a table of books at the end of an event.
Full story at The Independent.
a.akbar@independent.co.uk