Word Count 88: A library secret, medieval dog names, and let's credit ghostwriters
Plus US money in British TV, and HarperCollins' CEO has some stupid ideas for AI.
Housekeeping: I’ll be putting this newsletter’s paid subscriptions on hold as soon as this lands in your inbox so that I can take a break over Christmas. I’ll be back some time in the New Year, though exactly when remains to be seen! I hope you all have a wonderful festive season!
Hi there,
The Christmas tree is up and decorated, the cards sent, the gift shopping done and I have some time off for a trip to Salisbury for a day pootling around the Christmas market.
But if you find yourself at a loose end over the holidays, I have some interesting links to keep you occupied:
Read this: What secrets libraries keep
The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh discovered that they had a secret door leading into a hidden street, unseen for nearly 200 years.
Library staff found the door to Libberton’s Wynd in the 90s, and recently allowed the BBC access to The Void, as it’s known.
The original buildings that lined the narrow passageway were knocked down to build the George IV Bridge, and the library was built on their foundations. The library describes the The Void as:
a sub-street space between the structures of the Library building and of George IV Bridge itself. To get there, you have to find a door hidden on one of the stack floors, deep within the bowels of the Library. Within ‘The Void’, you can see the brickwork of the Library’s lower levels; the underside of George IV Bridge; and the stonework of the bridge’s structure which was built in the 1830s.
Now, if that’s not the best writing prompt ever, I don’t know what is.
Tip-top tip: 1,065 medieval dog names
When I’m thinking up names for characters, I like to do a bit of background. I’ll often pick a name that has some sort of meaning relevant to the story or their character, or I’ll look at lists of extinct or endangered surnames.
I don’t have any dog characters, being more of a cat person, but if I ever did I’d pick a name from this exhaustive list of dog names from the Middle Ages. Included in a manuscript that was written some time between 1460 and 1480, the list gives us “a rare glimpse—a snapshot as it were—of the spoken language of daily life in the fifteenth century”, according to David Scott-Macnab, a professor of English at North West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.
Some names include Birdismowthe, Go-bifore, Rage, Lusty, Charlemayne, Damysell, and Conquerour. But it’s nice to see that good doggos never change, do they Beste-of-all?
Read this, two: SoA calls for ghostwriters to be acknowledged
If you’re in the industry, you already know that celebrities often don’t write their own books, but that is not necessarily something that most readers know.
So the Society of Authors is now “calling for celebrities, publishers and agents to acknowledge the writers behind celebrity books, particularly for children”.
Quite right too. We need much more transparency around all the work that goes into creating books so that we can get a way from the idea of the lone hero author and instead show publishing to be what it really is: a team sport.
Three: How US money powers British TV
This piece by Rachel Aroesti about how US studios have developed funding relationships with British TV makers is fascinating. British TV channels just don’t have the kind of budget they used to and many are turning to American money to get stuff made. But money comes at the cost of having to “cosplay Britishness for American eyes”.
Phil Clarke, head of the production company, Various Artists Limited, sees the problem:
Despite his positive experiences working with HBO and other US companies, Clarke views this dilemma as something of an existential crisis for UK television. “British comedy, and I suspect drama as well, needs a Britpop moment where we say: hang on a sec, how do we just go back to making shows about Britain for British audiences?”
Quite. We have enough American entertainment. It’d be nice to have stuff that’s uniquely British and doesn’t feel the need to explain itself to overseas audiences.
And this: Print books are strong; more AI nonsense
HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray told the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference that “the strength of print books has been surprising”, which should bring a little seasonal glow to every writer’s heart. Murray singled out deluxe editions as being particularly popular, and also said that audiobook sales are still growing, probably due to marketing from Spotify and Audible. Ebook sales have declined, however.
That’s the useful news bit over.
Murray also came out with some ideas for AI-powered slop, suggesting that a “potential product” might be “a ‘talking book,’ where a book sits atop a large language model, allowing readers to converse with an AI facsimile of its author”.
Dear fucking lord, no.
He also suggested that “it is now possible for AI to help HC build an entire cooking-focused website using only content from its backlist, but the question of how to monetize such a site remains.”
Yes, yes, that is a bit of a question, isn’t it?
Cooking-focused websites already exist and it’s really not clear that the world needs another one. But even if you chose a less well-served niche, it’s websites aren’t that easy to monetise anymore. Just look at the whole of the rest of the web.
This really feels like Murray is desperate to find a use for AI just so that he can feel like he’s ahead of the pack. Meantime, however, he’s leaning into using AI audiobook narrators and “using AI to help its teams work more efficiently in such departments as sales, marketing, and editorial”. And we all know that that will come at a cost.
Finally, tucked away at the bottom of this piece is the nugget that Trump’s proposed tariffs on Canada could be a bit interesting for the US publishing industry: the “vast majority” of their paper comes from Canada.
Obligatory cat picture
Finnish researchers have discovered a rare new cat coat colour that they call ‘salmiak’, which translates at ‘salty liquorice’ (sounding more like a personality type than a coat colour!). These black and white cats have a distinctive salt-and-pepper look, thanks to the colour of each hair changing from black near the root to white at the tip.
Cat coat colour genetics is fabulously complicated. Calicos, which have black, ginger and white patches, and tortoiseshells, which are black and ginger, are pretty much always female — males very rare and sterile. White cats are often deaf. And ginger cats are usually, but not always, male. But rather than having a different genetic combination that explains their unusual colour, salmiaks actually have “a chunk of their DNA missing”.
Right, that’s it for this week! I hope you have a fabulous festive season and I’ll see you in January!
All the best,
Suw