I get up early and head to Liverpool Street. Meet Isabelle Ralphs and Amy Batley from Hutchinson Heinemann publishers and we take the train to Colchester, then a taxi to the giant Penguin Random House (PRH) warehouse, where I am to sign 3,000 copies of my new novel, Farewell to Eden. (I have already signed 3,000 loose title pages or ‘tip-ins’ at home.)
Dave, the local PRH chief, brings in the wooden pallets full of books on a sort of fork-lift arrangement. Isabelle passes each one in from the left, I sign, and Amy, on the right, makes small piles which Dave shifts onwards and replaces with new piles taken from the pallets. Thus the stacked 10ft-long table in front of me remains ever full. I am the Sisyphus of rural Essex. To clear the table takes seven-and-a-half hours.
Why am I doing this? It feels a bit like the death throes of a wounded animal. In ten years’ time there will be no call for it. Probably in three. The appetite for books will be exhausted because no one under 30 has the neural networks to deal with reading one. Thank you, Meta.
But hang on. The Charlotte Aitken Trust (CAT), of which I’m chair, sponsors the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award (for authors under 35) and every year I’m amazed by the quality of the entrants, across fiction, poetry, memoir, biography and reportage. The list of previous winners is dazzling. So some younger people are still reading. How else can they have learned to write so well? At CAT, we’re nevertheless hedging our bets by also giving a large sum to the School Libraries Association to encourage reading in Year 8, the point at which many children abandon books for screens.
