IT'S SO MUCH MORE THAN A BOOK...

It's a deceptively rectangular shaped object containing several thousand carefully arranged words, created when a person voluntarily sacrifices their sleep, sanity, social interaction, and a perfectly serviceable amount of their remaining lifespan in order to manufacture imaginary people with imaginary problems, set in imaginary exotic backgrounds, before spending four further months correcting all the commas.

A book is communication, traditionally constructed from paper, ink, caffeine, self-doubt, existential dread and one inexplicably troublesome chapter of blood, sweat and tears. A book exists primarily to transport the reader into another world while its author remains behind, staring nervously at sales figures and wondering why nobody has left a review yet.

Books are instrumental. They have toppled governments, started religions, ended relationships, inspired revolutions, educated civilizations and provided humanity with something impressive-looking to put on shelves behind them during video calls for years now.

In its most advanced form, a book may also be adapted into a major motion picture, at which point approximately 63% of its plot is savagely removed, 22% is re-written, and somebody who never had one previously, is given a sword prior to a gender reassignment. Along with an explosion or two being added to Chapter Three for good measure.

And it's probably at this stage when the audience eventually mutters:

“THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE.”

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The Dangerous Moment When Somebody Says, “We Can Make This Better”

There are few sentences more terrifying to a creative person than: “We love it.”

This sounds a little counterintuitive. You would imagine the frightening sentences would be things like: “We hate it.”, “We're passing.”, “We've decided to go in another direction.”

Or, if you're an author: “We've read the manuscript and would like to discuss page 147.”

Nobody wants to discuss page 147.

Page 147 already knows what it did.

But we love it is different. Because we love it is rarely allowed to travel alone. It usually brings a friend.

“We love it. We just think…”

And there it is. The beginning of improvement.

Improvement is a dangerous business

Before I begin, I have nothing against improving things. Human civilisation would be considerably less comfortable if nobody had ever looked at the first toilet and thought:

I believe there may be room for development here.

Improvement has given us antibiotics, refrigeration, air conditioning and coffee machines that can produce seventeen different varieties of coffee while requiring only a master's degree in engineering to operate.

But creative improvement is different. Because eventually somebody has to decide what better actually means.

Now for this bit, I want you to imagine you've spent twenty years writing a novel. Not twenty weekends. Twenty years.

You've lived with your novel’s characters for longer than some marriages last. You've removed paragraphs you loved because they didn't belong. You've rewritten chapters at two in the morning. You've changed a character's name seventeen times because somehow Bernard wasn't right.

And eventually you think you have something. Not something perfect. But something that’s undeniably yours.

Then someone arrives carrying a clipboard. “We love it.” They proclaim.

Wonderful.

“Absolutely love it.”

Even better.

“There's just one thing…”  <<<  Ah, there it is, WE LOVE ITs best friend.

And this is where Localad gets into trouble

In THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE, Localad has spent twenty years writing his novel Purradise. It is an enormous fantasy novel about a land ruled by cats, fallen knights, singing mountains, courage, grief and a mysterious Wound in the sky.

Nobody has read it and this bothers Localad enormously.

Then Hollywood reads it, which eventually bothers him considerably more.

Because Hollywood loves Purradise. They love the world it has created. They love the characters. They love the emotional depth and the originality. They love absolutely everything about it.

But WE LOVE ITs best friend, would prefer that most of those things were different. The quiet moments could perhaps be less quiet. The complicated characters could perhaps be less complicated. The grief could perhaps become vengeance instead.

The Wound could be bigger. There could be more action. There could be a franchise. There could be merchandise. And could somebody please explain why none of the cats has yet ridden away from an explosion without looking back?

Localad begins discovering something every creative person eventually learns:

Nobody ever destroys your work by openly announcing: “I intend to destroy it!”

They try to improve it.

Nobody means any harm

And this, I think, is the interesting part. It would have been very easy to write the people surrounding Localad as villains. Men in expensive suits sitting around a table saying: “How shall we ruin literature today?” Possibly while stroking a white cat.

Although in this particular story the cat would probably demand points on the backend. But that's not really how these things happen.

The producer wants a successful movie. The studio wants its investment protected. Marketing wants something it can market. The lead actor wants something he can act. The lawyers want everyone to stop talking immediately.

Everyone is just doing their job. And every individual decision made in the process can make perfectly good sense. But somehow, after enough perfectly sensible decisions, nobody can quite remember what the original thing was.

That's what fascinates me.

The death of originality doesn't necessarily require an executioner. Sometimes all it needs is a committee.

The graph has entered the room

At some point in almost every modern creative enterprise, somebody produces data. This is generally considered a serious moment because the data has a graph. And graphs are extremely persuasive.

You can say almost anything while pointing at a graph and people will hesitate before challenging you.

“Our research indicates that audiences respond positively to emotional authenticity.”

Graph.

“Viewers demonstrate stronger engagement with recognisable archetypes.”

Graph.

“Adults aged thirty-five to fifty-four are particularly receptive to emotionally damaged, 64- year-old writers.”

Graph.

Nobody knows exactly how the writer became emotionally damaged. There wasn't time because the meeting ends at four.

And this is where something created because one person desperately wanted to say something, encounters something designed to appeal to the greatest possible number of people.

Those two objectives aren't always enemies. But they aren't always friends either.

Creation is an absurdly personal act

Whether you write books, paint pictures, take photographs, make music, build furniture or construct tiny replicas of railway stations in your garage while insisting to your family that this is perfectly normal behaviour, you eventually put something of yourself into it.

That's unavoidable.

You make choices. This word instead of that one. This colour. This angle. This character lives. That one doesn't.

And sometimes you can't even explain why. You simply know.

Then eventually your product leaves you. A reader reads it. A viewer sees it. Someone listens to it.

And something rather wonderful happens.

They make it partly theirs.

That's the bargain.

The creator doesn't control what the audience feels. Nor should they.

But there's a difference between allowing someone to interpret your work and allowing someone to dismantle it looking for more commercially useful components.

That's the territory Localad stumbles into. He thinks he's selling Hollywood permission to make his story into a film.

Hollywood thinks it has purchased something rather more interesting: potential.

Potential sequels. Potential audiences. Potential merchandise. Potential markets. Potential intellectual property.

Localad, inconveniently, continues thinking of it as a story.

Which brings us now to ownership

Who owns a story?

Legally, that's often fairly straightforward.

Emotionally? Good luck.

A writer might sell film rights. A studio might buy adaptation rights. A publisher might own particular publishing rights.

Contracts can tell everybody precisely who is allowed to do what, in which territories, using which formats, until which dates and probably, under what circumstances someone is permitted to manufacture a commemorative lunchbox.

But none of that answers the more interesting question. Who owns what the story means?

That's harder.

And that's really what THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE became about for me.

Not Hollywood. Not filmmaking. Not even books... Ownership.

The peculiar human need to protect the things we create from becoming something we never intended. And the equally peculiar fact that once we release those things into the world, we cannot entirely control them anyway.

Localad eventually has to learn the difference. So does Hollywood. And neither enjoys the lesson particularly much.

And that's why independent creators do matter

There is something gloriously inefficient about independent creativity.

A person can spend years making something that market research would have killed on a Tuesday morning.

Nobody asked for it. No focus group approved it. There was no strategic gap in the market. Somebody simply thought:

This should exist.

And I love that.

Not: Our analysis indicates significant demand.

But: I've got an idea. And those may be the four most dangerous words in commerce.

They're also responsible for most of the things worth having.

Of course, there is still one tiny problem

Having written an entire novel satirising what happens when creativity collides with commerce, I am now attempting to commercially sell said novel.

Yes, I recognise the contradiction. And I have decided the healthiest response for this is to ignore it completely.

THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE is, after all, a product.

It has a price. It has an ISBN. It is available now from Amazon and here’s the link to prove it.

There are keywords. There are categories. And somewhere in the land of Bezos, an algorithm is currently deciding whether you are the sort of person who might properly enjoy it. So perhaps none of us escapes the machinery entirely.

But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point is simply remembering, underneath all the algorithms and markets and platforms and graphs, why the thing existed in the first place.

Someone had something they wanted to say and somebody else wanted to hear it. Easy as that.

Everything between those two people is just infrastructure. Useful infrastructure, certainly. But infrastructure nonetheless.

And if Hollywood ever does get around to telephoning me for my manuscript, of course I'll answer them. I'm an author not an idiot. I'll listen politely. I'll thank them for their interest. I'll remain calm and professional all the way through. And when they eventually say:

“We absolutely love the book. We just have a few changes…”

I'll know exactly what to say.

“That's wonderful, I just have a few clauses.”

Why I Wrote a Novel About Hollywood Ruining a Novel

There is a particular fantasy shared by writers everywhere.

Someone from Hollywood telephones.

They have read your book.

They love your book.

They understand your book.

More importantly, they would now like to give you an irresponsible amount of money for your book.

At this very point, according to the prevailing fantasy, champagne appears spontaneously.

But nobody ever continues the fantasy far enough.

Because eventually somebody from Hollywood says:

“We absolutely love what you've done.”

And shortly afterwards:

“We just have a few suggestions.”

And this is where THE BOOK'S A LOT BETTER THAN THE MOVIE begins.

At the centre of the story is Localad, a sixty-four-year-old bookseller who has spent twenty years quietly writing Purradise, an enormous fantasy novel involving cats, fallen knights, singing mountains, courage, grief and a mysterious Wound in the sky.

Nobody has read it.

For most of his life, this has been something of a problem.

Eventually it becomes his greatest advantage.

Because when Hollywood discovers Purradise, Localad experiences every author's impossible dream.

His manuscript is wanted.

Money appears.

Los Angeles beckons.

There are meetings.

There are executives.

There are people whose professional contribution appears to consist largely of saying things such as “audience accessibility” while pointing at a graph.

And slowly, almost politely, Purradise stops being Purradise.

The quiet parts disappear.

The complicated parts become a lot simpler.

Grief becomes vengeance.

Characters become market segments.

And anything that might once have required the audience to think very hard develops a reasonable chance of exploding.

I specifically wanted to write about that collision.

Not simply Hollywood versus books.

Something bigger.

Creation versus ownership.

When does a story stop belonging to the person who created it?

What happens when something deeply personal becomes nothing more than a commercial asset?

And what happens when the person everyone assumes is powerless in all of this, discovers that perhaps he isn't?

Those are reasonably serious questions.

Unfortunately, I am legally and constitutionally incapable of asking such serious questions without somebody falling over a piece of furniture.

So the book became a satire.

Hollywood certainly receives some attention.

Publishing receives some.

Writers receive some.

Independent booksellers in run down stores receive considerably less though because I quite like them and they know where all the books are kept.

But beneath all the jokes is something I genuinely believe.

Stories matter because somebody cared enough to tell them.

Not because they can become franchises.

Not because somebody can put them on a lunchbox.

And not because an algorithm has determined somewhere, that adults aged 35–54 demonstrate quite promising engagement with emotionally damaged writers.

But because one human being made something and another human being connected with it.

That's the relationship Localad spends the novel trying to recover.

The irony, of course, is that I've now written a whole book about the dangers of turning books into commercial products…

… and here I am, asking people to buy it.

I choose not to examine this part too closely.

So, The Book's a Lot Better Than the Movie is available now.

And if Hollywood telephones?

Yes, I'll answer.

I'm not a complete idiot.

I'll just be sure to read the contract first.

“Congratulations on your book!” ‎ ‎

“Your book's cover immediately caught my attention, it has a really great and compelling, cinematic feel.” ‎ 

‎

“I really like the direction and atmosphere you're going for. It already sounds engaging.”

‎‎”Your book caught our attention! And we'd love to learn more about the story and inspiration behind it.”

“We’d love to feature your book on our page, as well as in our Amazon and Goodreads discussion communities, helping you connect with more readers and gain greater visibility.”

“We'd be delighted to feature you in an Author's Q & A with our reading community, giving our readers an opportunity to discover the person behind the book, hear about your creative journey, and learn what inspired you to bring this story to life.”

“We’re currently inviting authors to participate in our (Enter month of choice here) Author Spotlight. Your book could be a great fit for our reader community. And it's a great way to introduce your work to new readers while creating a more personal connection with your audience.”

And now, bearing in mind my book’s title, for a bit of irony:

I’m actually taking and using a quote from a movie to answer you guys with: Taken from the movie Pulp Fiction where Jimmie (played by Quentin Tarantino) snaps at Jules (Samuel L. Jackson):

"I don't need you to tell me how fucking good my coffee (book) is, okay? I'm the one who buys (wrote) it. I know how good it is (I spent months blood sweat and tears…ing over it). When Bonnie goes shopping, she buys shit. I buy (write) the gourmet expensive stuff because when I drink (read) it, I want to taste (believe in) it."

“But authors rarely get a second chance to make a first impression with new readers.”

“Now that your book is live, the biggest challenge is getting it in front of the right readers.”

‎‎”What you need next is:

A cinematic book trailer

An Audio Book version

A full marketing and launch strategy

A KDP Specialist to optimise your listings and bring them to the fore

Letting loose on all our followers for added exposure

‎‎Interested in being featured? “They’re all great ways to turn attention into actual readers. Would you be open to seeing a quick example of how this could look for your book? Capture attention, spark curiosity, and make people want to learn more about your story.”

No, No, No, No, NO!

What I really want, is for you guys to actually go buy and read a copy of my book before you start telling me what it needs.

You know, the book that holds the story about the writer who thought he needed exposure for his book regardless of the consequences but quickly learned how wrong he was. The story about how a barrage of compliments (just like those at the top of this post) regularly preceded further direction and cost to the original manuscript. The story about how Hollywood was blindly guided by what they thought the story needed. The very same story that has been referenced on the last 40 posts of this very blog. Yes all the TLDR posts that came before this one. Notice any parallels yet?

And now let me tell you what your cut and paste (something even I can do, as proved right here) complimentary comments are really telling me:

Dear Author,

I saw your post (or my computer did through an alert system) just now on whatever channel it was and immediately assumed you must be desperate for exposure and or sales. So, I am now sending this, auto-responder based, cheap punt on you wanting to buy into my lazily offered, I really can't be bothered services, DESPITE the fact I have shown no real interest in your product at all. I take great pride in knowing that any future relationship we may build together isn’t even worth an initial investment of $20 on my part.

And then, you have the audacity to ask me to chase you up. So maybe I will one day. Maybe I won't. But let me first warn you, I’ve been self-employed since leaving school fifty years ago and have probably forgotten more about marketing, sales and promotion than you could ever learn me (he says feigning his ignorance like you already feigned an interest).  At 64 years of oldness, my writing is just a hobby I enjoy sharing and not a stand alone source of income. 

In fact, I think I can honestly say…

"When I want your opinion guys, I’ll give it to you."

And in the meantime, anyone out there with a serious agenda of their own to push, If you can recite, word for word, the full contents of the second paragraph on page ninety-seven of my book:

The Book’s a Lot Better Than the Movie

Then and only then, when we both have a vested interest in said book and its future, I’ll be more than happy to then seriously consider your pitch for you. You can accept your receipt for said book purchase as an official invite to do so.

Please feel free to DM me for more elaborate details (Email address can be found on copyright notice page). Buy the bloody book!!

The Trials and Tribulations of a Writer

Andy Robinson is a man who has spent months writing a pretty good novel about a 64-year-old stubborn bookseller whose manuscript gets completely mangled by Hollywood, then spent even longer obsessing over the cover, ISBN, spine width, barcode, KDP categories and whether there was enough film strip below the bloody scissors on the front cover image.

At some point, this whole book writing incident stopped being wordy fiction and became a prolonged cry for help with page numbers.

His relationship with his The Book’s a Lot Better Than the Movie has fast progressed beyond simply a struggling “author and his novel.” He’s now basically becoming its helicopter parent.

“Is the blurb going to look better centred or full justified?” he asks himself.

“Can the title move up another three millimetres? It may look more balanced that way.”

“Where’s the film strip for the spine gone?”

“Purradise should be BLACK, I left it white. Damn”

“The spine is all wrong. It’s not going to wrap over that many pages”

And meanwhile, somewhere at Amazon HQ, a KDP server sees him log in and quietly mutters:

“Oh Christ. He’s back!”

And then there’s his marketing strategy. He doesn’t merely want people to buy the book.

Oh no no, He wants Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Blogger, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon and presumably any passing weather and Star-link satellites all coordinated together into a global literary assault.

He went to a ‘marketing guru’ asking for viral Facebook posts as though virality were something he could simply order up from the kitchen.

“Yes, I’ll have the full viral post, please. Extra engagement. Like and share algorithm on the side and extra comments.” he requested.

Then Meta ceremoniously gives him its very finest bugger-all reach, so his immediate reaction isn't, “Oh well.”

It's: “We will have to circumvent that.”

“FFS Mate, you're selling a comedy novel, not organising the French Resistance.” says the narrator.

And as for all his recent blog chapter image prompts for ChatGPT…

Dear God.

“Single landscape-oriented image. Not a montage.”

He’s requested that so many times now, we can all be reasonably certain it will be permanently engraved on his tombstone.

He’s commissioned so many pictures of Localad standing inside Harbour & Page, 32 of them in all, one for each chapter, plus duds, that the fictional man now has a larger photographic archive than most Only Fans profiles.

And every time the AI thinks it’s nailed one:

“Landscape oriented.” he shouts.

“Remove the caption.” he demands.

“The Purradise cover is all wrong.” he reminds it.

“Make it plain black.”

“White serif font.” etc, etc, etc.

At this stage Localad is probably too terrified to pick up his book, in case the continuity supervisor notices.

And then there's his astonishing capacity to turn a tiny publishing decision into the Yalta Conference (Google it)...

He didn't simply get an ISBN.

There was a pending phase for it.

Then came the updates.

Then approval.

Then the triumphant announcement:

<<<  ISBN 978-0-6454939-5-5 FOR PAPERBACK.  >>>

Any spectators had half expected church bells.

They were waiting for King Charles to issue a statement.

And then, once the ISBN had finally been granted, naturally the manuscript had to be further changed from 290 pages to 292 pages, because apparently two additional pages had been hiding in the house, waiting for all the necessary paperwork to be cleared.

He also possesses the magnificent confidence of someone who asks:

“Mmm, Can I sell my book in just six words?”

And somehow, amidst all this never-ending chaos, he’s created himself a fictional character called Localad who is shy, stubborn, slightly grandiose, runs a bookshop, writes for decades, distrusts corporate nonsense and eventually discovers that perhaps the world might appreciate what he's made.

Completely fictional, obviously. Yeah right!

Absolutely no idea where he got him from.

The resemblance is purely coincidental we're sure.

Localad spends twenty years writing Purradise.

Andy Robinson spends twenty minutes deciding whether the words “A NOVEL BY LOCALAD” should be slightly smaller.

Localad battles Hollywood executives.

Andy Robinson battles Amazon metadata.

Localad fights for artistic integrity.

Andy fights the vertical positioning of scissors on his cover.

Same war. Smaller artillery.

And then there are the cats.

He’s somehow constructed himself a creative universe where cats aren't just pets. They're intellectual property.

Normal person: “I like cats.”

Andy: “I have developed myself a mythological feline civilisation involving fallen knights, singing mountains, a deep existential grief and a metaphysical rupture in the heavens.”

His cat doesn't simply knock a glass off the table.

His cat fulfils ancient prophecies.

And despite all of this, he now requires a meaningful bio for his Amazon Page:

“Describe myself like I'm trying to warn someone about me before they meet me.” he thinks.

Andy, nobody needs a warning. They’re gonna need release notes.

ANDY ROBINSON v5.6

Known behaviours:

May spontaneously discuss book marketing. 

And his favourite motivator doing all of this…

“Go for it.”

Those three words have probably caused more computational brain strain activity than some small European countries use in governing their entire populations.

He says “go for it” with the casual confidence of a Roman emperor lowering his thumb.

He tells himself:

“Andy, this will require rewriting 40,000 words, restructuring three whole acts, creating six different marketing campaigns and probably designing seventeen more images... Cool. Go for it!”

No fear.

No hesitation.

No apparent awareness that normal humans need sleep.

And he’s now actually reached the stage where he calls his ‘AI photograph producer’ , buddy.

Which sounds quite friendly until you realise the relationship largely consists of him walking into the room carrying another manuscript and saying:

“Right, buddy…”

Those words for AI now have the same psychological effect as a dentist saying: “This might feel slightly uncomfortable.”

But the most worrying thing about Andy?

He’s spent all this time writing this heroic specimen of a book whose central joke is essentially:

The indie writer Localad, cares deeply about his work while an enormous machine, called Hollywood, buys into it for a movie and then completely misunderstands its meaning and totally ruins everything.

And then he hands over all the required illustration work to an artificial-intelligence machine and spends months saying:

“No.”

“No!”

“Not like that.”

“Move it up.”

“Wrong font.”

“Remove the cats.”

“Landscape.”

“LANDSCAPE!!”

“WHERE'S THE FILM BELOW THE SCISSORS DAMMIT?”

So that's Andy Robinson...

He didn't just write The Book’s a Lot Better Than the Movie.

He’s been living the damned sequel!