Читать книгу The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York - Peter Godwin - Страница 38

I log on to Amazon.com, the online bookseller, which has started carrying the sales rankings of the books they stock. This is fatal. You can now track the sales of your book on a daily basis – an agonizing process for us so-called ‘mid-list’ authors. Customers may also air their own reviews and bestow you with a star rating. Today my latest book, Mukiwa, a memoir of growing up in Africa, is the 20,181st best-selling book in American cyberspace.

While online I collect an e-mail from Amazon.com. It is an advertorial plugging new books on the subject of writing. I must have signed up for this electronic junk e-mail sometime by failing to tick the box declining it. I am very taken with an account by the children’s writer, Maurice Sendak, best known for his fantastically fuzzy Wild Things, who says he’s ‘never spent less than two years on the text of one of his picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long’.

Two years to do the words alone. All 380 of them. By my calculations he’s polishing off 190 words a year. That’s fifteen words a month. Say, a bon mot every couple of days, on average.

Go, Maurice! That’s my man.