A book-lover’s night out: A literary salon in Brighton

The Independent - 6 December, 2011

There is a lot of talk of 'new publishing' these days - a way for publishers to better relate to readers (and thereby sell more books, one supposes). Perhaps this is the idea behind Bloomsbury's announcement to stage a series of literary salons. The publisher is certainly riding on the back of a trend that has proved its success in relating to readers, and which appears to be having an impact on reading choices and book sales too.
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