Dream Book Store

I did not spend space yesterday describing the clean, neat, tidy, well-lit and crowded BOOKOFF store. Uniform tall black shelving units crowded the length of the building space that formerly held new technical books for sale. The aisles were a little narrow for full-size, luxury-built Americans, I thought. Admittedly, I saw only one side of the store, but didn't notice any place to sit down or to set anything down. That had me musing once again on the fantasy ideal book shop that I've dreamed of for years. It's probably a concatenation of ones I've known all over the country.

Dusty, even dirty, darkish but with easy chairs by lamps on end tables ... a cat to leap into unoccupied laps and purr you into purchasing ... live potted plants ... a feeling of old, old books, old store perhaps run by a patient old person. Mismatched wooden book cases. A wood floor. A spiral iron staircase to a mezzanine overlooking the main floor. Coffee. Board games?

Baby Boomers, at least, probably want a combination old book nook/coffee house, like the "No Exit" cafe, where my fiance and I spent cozy wintry evenings in the early 60s, trying to like espresso, playing chess, reading poetry from the books scattered around the room.

OTOH, wouldn't it be way cool, rad, high rez or whatever is the current slang for the cat's pajamas, if the books were RFID tagged and the store had a computerized system, so the clerk could tell at a click if they had the book you were searching for AND where it was located? Maybe hand-held devices that could lead you to your selection, because even a computer's records can be wrong and books get moved?

Have I left out anything? What would your ideal used book store be like? Do younger generations prefer clean, efficient, no-frills experiences?

BOOKOFF Values Only Book Condition

For visitors from Writer's Digest Forum, the title answers the burning question left yesterday: what is this book store's unique new business model?

Back story: a colorful, tabloid half-page ad a local give-away attracted me to a new used book store opening. One of the few U.S. outlets of the Japanese giant BOOKOFF opened in San Diego yesterday. The lure for me? They buy books -- and CDs, DVDs, and games (presumably video).

My experience trying to discover how much they would pay for assorted books and four Frank Sinatra CDs was astonishing. They offered ten cents per CD and $2.50 for a primo first edition new, top novel with a retail price of $26. In that aspect, BOOKOFF is no different from any other business attempting to make a profit: buy low, sell high.

Although language problems were a high barrier to an information exchange, repeated questioning of employees elicited the idea that this company has a "new business model". Nothing matters about an item a customer hopes to sell to them, except its condition. Not content, author, autograph, or bestseller status. One woman demonstrated how "We wipe off covers" before, as their English web page states, "reuse of books."

To be more fair and accurate, I think the business information online indicates that the innovative business model is recycling, and nowhere could I find this stress on books' conditions. Perhaps this new staff was overly trained in this aspect of evaluation.

"So," I asked, "your customers would be, say, people decorating a home, who want a nice-looking set of books for a shelf?" I've heard of such, but never see a store dedicated to that idea.

Indeed, the rows of books I perused looked fine. All hard-bound copies had flawless slip cases marred only by the BOOKOFF stickers, at about half the original prices. Of course, I did find Stephen King's On Writing in the "Novels" section. Across the aisle was a section labeled "Nonfiction". Not signs that encourage a return visit.

And what is so innovative about recycling, anyway? Just another used book store.

Dark Writing Humor

Casting about for today's humorous post, I happened on this dark exchange of emails with a supposed PR person. First he sent me a badly-composed, way-too-casual release about a client's new site feature aimed at writers. It was titled: publishers harvest formerly fallow writers. Can you spot at least two problems with this phrase? Would you want to be harvested? Are you an unplanted field, anyway? Or unproductive?

In the body of the release, he referred to those utilizing his client's site as "part-time writers" and "part-time talent". That's akin to, "I'll be your waitress tonight." I always ask, "And what will you be tomorrow morning?" I really bristled at the "part-time talent" and said so in my return email asking to be removed from this agency's mailing list.

I was surprised when the rep fired right back, asking, "What would you call a stay at home mom that writes part time to make some extra cash?"

I responded, "Writers are "writers". They are usually writers all the time, no matter what other tasks they may be performing. Writers often don't end their careers until they are brain dead. Even then, who knows?" I was thinking of Arthur C. Clarke, no doubt concocting great stories in the great beyond.

O.K. Maybe not so silly.

We writers are such a sensitive bunch.

Blog Brags Worth Writing About

Google has finally restored PageRank to this website, back to the #3 rating it had dropped to late last year (from 5). SEO Moz, on the other hand, upped their estimate to a full 5.0 (see badge at the top of the left column), and I breezed through another blog valuation site last night that gave us a 5.5. Strangely, Google also lists almost a thousand back links!

Sweeter, though, was the email received yesterday from Amy Liu at Blogged because she said:

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of (10) in the Entertainment category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!...

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com:

... Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!

You can see the listing and add comments or a review and help make this blog a full 10.

This must be my week, because I also learned that A Writer's Edge is now listed on the Publish-L web page of Subscriber Links, vetted by the list mom (owner), Pat Gundry. It's an honor to be included, and I thank Pat profusely for all her good work managing this most informative mailing list.

All this comes on top of last week's coveted "Recommended" status in the Preditors & Editors guides to services for writers. Combine all these heady accolades with an overflow of work flooding my way (feast or famine), and I'm falling off my rolling desk chair. One of these jobs may become a steady blogging gig, so stay tuned for further announcements.

Book Subjects List

Every once in a while, someone asks, "Is there an official list of subjects to put on the back of a book? One that tells what the books is about and where to place it in the book stores?" The closest listing I can find is the BISAC Subject Headings from an industry standards organization.

Writing Free Books

Last month, did you snatch your copy of Suze Orman's Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny ($24.95 retail price for the hardcover)? I got mine, thanks to a Florida friend, Bonnie Boots. The book was available only for a day, but word-of-mouth spread across the 'net faster than fall flames in southern California. By day's end, more than a million electronic versions were downloaded.

According to the NY Times, HarperCollins is offering a limited selection of free downloadable books on its website, although I was unable to find such a listing to link.

Tara at ResearchBuzz offers tips on how to search for free books from university presses:

... try this search on Google or Yahoo along with your favorite keywords: “university press” free download site:edu .... You’ll get some irrelevant stuff, but you’ll also get pointers to small university presses which are making their books available online for free.

To get other general overviews of what’s available, try site:edu free book downloads “university press” oxford yale harvard.... try free books download “university press” inurl:2008 (The inurl: portion is because many blogs archive by date, and inurl:2008 is an easy way to find recent entries.)

Is it Writing, Editing or Ghostwriting

Sallie Goetsch refers to herself as an "author-izer and collabowriter". She makes an interesting use of a blog as a repository for free articles on writing at Author-ized Articles. I was especially interested in There's More Than One Way to Write a Book, detailing the fuzzy lines among writing, editing and ghostwriting. This is the very concept I'm trying to get across in my newly revamped page on Editing Services.

In the years that I've been editing, I've learned that each job is unique, every writer's needs are different and each piece of writing has a different set of problems or missing parts. In notifying me that my services are now in the "Recommended" status on Preditors & Editors, The Editor, Mr. Kuzminski, said that:

... your site is impressive in what it mentions or describes concerning your services. A lot of writers don't understand the full scope of what editing covers or can cover. Admittedly, it's only a brief description, but it's enough to make the author aware of what will be provided. That's good.

Writing Local News

Many writers just starting out in their careers want to know how to write for local news organizations. Some even succeed in getting short fiction published there. The easiest place to start is with neighborhood freebies. I'm referring to the give-aways that appear on your doorstep, in the mail and sometimes stacked at business' doorways or even in their own vending machines (sans the need for coinage). The mainstay of such publications' editorial content are releases from other businesses and organizations.

This information provides another clue to the starting point to break into writing: preparing blurbs for local groups. This is usually pro bono work, for the good of the group. But you can consider it as for the good of your career and of the publications to which you submit. Hey, it gets you those first "clips" you need when submitting to paying pubs.

On an even more local level, yesterday's dwindling "Books" section of The San Diego Union-Tribune carried no masthead nor byline of Arthur Salm, the previous editor. I would have predicted that the pages will gradually disappear, and that still might happen. A check of the paper's online books section revealed this terse note dated March 10: The UT's art critic Robert L. Pincus will be taking over the responsibility for our Books coverage. Coming soon: his blog here. I should note that Salm got his start writing, for free I think, for local broadcast outlets, parlaying that into reviewing books and finally editing the review section at the paper.

Books by the Month

Those interested in how books are marketed and sold, might like to read, well, OK, try to wade through, a scholarly initial look at the early history of the Book-of-the-Month Club by Daniel M.G. Raff, presented to the Columbia Economic History Seminar last May.

I have fond memories of Book-of-the-Month Club selections that populated my family-of-origin's meager library. I think those included Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Dinner at Antoine's, and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The latter encouraged me to become a writer, although not the fictionalist I had dreamed about. Other books I suspect arrived via the BOTMC included Zotz! and Cheaper by the Dozen. I also still have my father's copy of Dale Caniege's How to Make Friends and Influence People and remember an inspirational one by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, as well as something like, How to Make a Million Dollars in Real Estate.

If nothing else, my parents were eclectic readers.

According to Wikipedia, the BOMC is now just one of many book clubs operated under the Bookspan logo, owned by the giant German publishing conglomerate, Bertelsmann AG.

Just Hit Send

Graphic artist and writer, known by her handle "Lost Girl", Lisa Dovichi's favorite website is Absolute Write. She hangs out in the forum, signing her posts with one of her custom designs, perfect for writers:

You can find the fannies on a variety of products at lostgirl5150 - Zazzle Contributor Gallery.

Writers' Online Research Resource

The Gale Group, people who put out useful directories and other reference materials usually found in libraries, offers an interesting online service, AccessMyLibrary - News, Research, and Information that Libraries Trust. If you have an account with a member library (only in the US, sorry), you can research topics from newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals and other publications your library holds. MyAccess claims to cover 29,614,182 articles from A Friend Indeed to Zap2It.

When you find an article, you're presented with a snippet of the beginning, which ranges from a few lines to a couple of paragraphs. To read the full article requires selecting a library you belong to (it might even be your public school's) and entering, well, I'm not sure what. They say "bar code" but present a text box. Because the San Diego Public Library is part of a different online catalog, and that's the only library I belong to, I can't test out this part myself. I'm guessing the box wants your library card number. You can also have a password for some libraries. An alternative way to see articles is by signing up for a 30-day free trial membership.

Using this type of service rather than just doing a general search of the web ensures that the reference sources have already been vetted by authorities (librarians or information specialists). This provides you with more reliable and dependable results, especially important if you're a freelancer and need to send an editor a list of sources for an article that you write.

Trade Magazine Writing

Earlier this month, I wrote about resources for free magazines from trade publications. In the comment chain, I invited veteran freelancer/editor Lori Widmer (at the left), who blogs at Words On The Page to prepare an article for us on writing for trade magazines. She's come through admirably with one she calls "Trading Places". I've added it to the list of free articles on the Writing Help page.

Highlights from Lori's piece include:

• how the audience differs from consumer mags
• the how-to focus for trades
  
• finding steady jobs in the business
  

The trade magazine is a great opportunity if you’re willing to do a little bit of basic research at the beginning, find an idea that matches that magazine’s style, ask questions with curiosity and no fear of looking foolish, and delivering a good product that shows your enthusiasm and your interest in learning more.

Book Collecting Terms

Don't know your deckle from your hinges? If you happen to be a bibliophile and a collector, you might be interested in the terminology offered at Book Collecting & Bookselling Terms: Illustrated Glossary. Knowledge of these words is especially important if you want to sell one of your treasures and need to describe its condition. I didn't even know books have hinges -- "Inside, it's where the flyleaf (front free endpaper) meets the pastedown ... "

What's particularly pleasant about this listing are the linked illustrations and a small collection of articles about the basics of book collecting and conditions and further resources. These reference pages are courtesy Empty Mirror Books by Denise Enck, who appears to specialize in the Beat Generation.

Balancing Writer's Block

Writing is like crossing the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. Sounds impossible, yes? You know where to start, firmly anchored with an idea. And you know the end, a polished, finished piece. In the center is a yawning chasm one mile deep with sharp rocks and a raging river at the bottom. This looks like an endeavor fraught with danger. But all you really must do to succeed is put one foot in front of the other without losing your balance. Start and finish. Simple.

Most of us are blessed with the ability to walk, or we have some means of moving, even if only in our minds, so that leaves balancing, the tricky part. I'll leave the tightrope metaphor here, because I have no experience in that area, and anyway I don't want to beat it to death. I'm sure you get the picture by now. Balance is an important element in becoming and remaining a successful writer.

Several different kinds of balancing support creativity:

• physical
• emotional
• intellectual

These are my top three. Losing balance in any of them can block progress.

PHYSICAL

Although "just sit and write" is often hurled at beginners as the cure for Writer's Block, spending too much time sitting at the computer or curled up with your notebook can work against you. Muscles stiffen, eyes burn, the brain drains. The writing part of your life, like everything else it seems, needs physical exercise and variations. Neglect to move around and you may have more than one type of constipation!

EMOTIONAL

It's good to be emotionally invested in your writing. That's part of being committed, and your enthusiasm affects the writing. Too much investment, however, elicits irrational fear of rejection and fosters the myth of the "lonely writer". Keep building connections with other people in your life, spend time with your family and work on improving any troublesome relationships. We writers need the emotional support of others, and sometimes we need to ask for it in plain terms. Fall in love with writing and life, not your characters.

INTELLECTUAL

A novel can easily take over a writer's mind. I used to hear my characters having conversations when I was not at the keyboard. Spooky! The brain needs a break from writing activities, too. Depending on whether you are creating fiction or nonfiction work, the "other" side of the mind can benefit from stimulation from different creative arts or left brain challenging activities like working Sudoku puzzles, preparing tax forms, and home fix-it repairs.

Keeping your life in balance is a good preventative measure for warding off Writer's Blocks, as well as potential cures. Good for the writer in any case, good for those around you, and good for life in general. Take a cue from Mother Nature: balance is everything.

Niche Writing is Specializing

Someone asked yesterday on a forum about choosing to specialize in fiction or nonfiction. I replied that fiction and nonfiction are different forms of writing. A writer specializes within one or the other, e.g., being a poet, copywriter, novelist or headline writer. In contemporary lingo, this is filling a niche. Whenever someone asks, "If you could go back and do anything differently, what would it be?" I respond, "specialize." Here's a hint: technology is not going out of style, nor is science. Given my kind of mind, I think I would have picked something within science to be my niche. By now, I would probably be deep into a sub-niche of DNA manipulation and cloning. Maybe even into the ethics of cloning.

When your crystal ball clears and you've found your slot, the next step is to become an expert in your chosen specialty. The more narrow the niche, and the less competition in it, the better off you'll be. That doesn't mean, however, to ignore the field in general. You need to be able to detect trends and shifts, to foresee when your niche may be petering out as technology invents more finely calibrated tools that make it obsolete. Like X-rays to find tuberculosis and transistors overtaking radio tubes. Don't limit your pursuit of expert status to Internet research or just visits to the library. Consider getting a degree in the field. By the time you write a thesis for a master's degree, my thesis chair told me, you're the world's top expert in your subject at that moment. At least take some college classes and learn about the professional journals you can follow for great leads to stories (fiction or nonfiction).

The niche aspect of your writing carries over to your marketing endeavors. Attend appropriate conferences to learn more and to schmooze with the higher-ups, liberally distributing your business cards. Most everyone likes to be written about. Some will call you with good leads and want interviews. Of course you have a website and maybe a blog about your niche. Ensure they are listed in specialty search engines and directories and on related websites and blogs. Get someone to start sections on you or your business in sites like Wikipedia, About.com, and Answers.com. You may add to them, or in some cases, enter them yourself.

Regularly sweep the Internet for references to your name, website/blog's name and URL, books' titles, and the niche and general focus of your writing. The easiest way to do this is with a search engine "alert". These alerts will look for mentions of your keywords automatically every day and email a report with links to any address you designate. So you can perform this little ego puffing (or deflating) anonymously, if you prefer. Niches are definitely a case of "name it and claim it". Make it your own.

Silly Word Play

I may know many words, but I surely don't know

Scrabble

Score: 20% (2 out of 10)

What an embarrassing quiz Mental Floss dreamed up.

Red Room for Writing

As far as I've noticed, Red Room is the latest social networking site for writers that is high class and high caliber in terms of participants and functionality. It's in the stratosphere, it's so high. When PR flack Veronica contacted me last month, she said:

It's an online community for authors and readers, and has been called a 'literary MySpace'. It's getting a lot of attention in the investor and writer community, and the founder, Ivory Madison, has a great story to tell about how she turned her local writing studio into a global community for writers. Already building the community are household names like Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Jane Smile, Alice Walker, Po Bronson, Khaled Hosseni, James Patterson and hundreds more.

Yeah, sure, I thought. After examining the place, I'm wondering how they persuaded top-selling, already-famous authors to participate, and what does that part about "investor" really mean? Usually investors are interested in ways to make money, not charitably fostering literary connections.

The rest of Victoria's release (no last name given) quotes from Madison on a major political candidate (way to alienate half the nation!) and stressed that Red Room is a "creative social network" that provides "community between authors and readers". I can find no way for two-way communication, unless you count comments on blogs. Just finding a particular writer's blog requires searching and wading through layers of menus. Sadly, most everyone's fave, Stephen King, is not listed, although many, many others are.

So, I'm suspecting this is an enterprise set up, perhaps, with publishers or publicists, and the anticipated investors are advertisers. All in all, it offers about everything a writer could want in the way of promotion and marketing, including the ability to link to your own website. Oh, and no cost is mentioned.

If anyone reading this post is a member or regular user of Red Room, please let us know about your experience and impressions of the service.

Quotations for Writing

The Quotations Page claims to be "the oldest quotation site on the Web, established 1994. We have over 26,000 quotations online from over 3,100 authors, and more are added daily." That would make it probably the first on the WWW, which began about the same time. This resource also has a forum and a blog and several other features listed in the left column.

One feature interested me: My Page. If you register (free) with the site, you can automatically save quotations from any part of the website. Deletions from you personal list are also allowed at the click of a mouse. I can see how, after diligently searching out quotations on a particular subject, this would be an easier method to collect them in bulk instead of tedious individual cut-and-paste operations.

You might want to carefully read the site's disclaimer to determine if you can or cannot use the material found there in your own publication or manuscript. If not, at least this resource might point you toward a quotable primary source.

Cutting Your Writing is Editing

How do you eliminate part of a short story or novel to fit a specified word length? That was a dilemma I faced recently. The story I wanted to send was almost 900 words long; the limit was 500. Gut my precious creation? That would kill it, I thought. But I resolved to make the attempt if, for nothing else, to prove my instinct for the story's survival was valid.

I kept removing a word here and there and rechecking the word count with MS Word's "recount" feature that I keep available on my tool bar. Eventually the hopelessness of this approach became evident. Now, it wasn't a bad approach, because along the way the editor took over to adjust and polish each sentence.

I realized the task needed a wider focus. I asked myself, "What sentences can I cut?" In every elaboration of an action or piece of dialog, I found something to eliminate without jerking the plot out of sync or reason. For example, when the protagonist yelled at her mother, "I hate you," followed by the narration She really did despise the woman, I saw that I could eliminate the narrative comment and allow just the dialog to show the emotion.

After the round of sentence eliminations, I was dismayed to find the word count hovering around 600. Whole sections would have to go. Would it be possible? What a challenge. I love challenges! This was getting personal. I decided I would wrestle this story to 499 words or know why I couldn't. I found the key to success in a couple of passages that I'd thought advanced the plot. By rewriting that part to reveal only necessary details instead of literary frivolities, the word count dropped below 500, and the story didn't suffer. It was tight and taut and, perhaps, more effective than when it had been almost twice as long.

As I prepared this post I realized that my actions to fit the story into a set length were similar to what a good editor might have done. Because it was my story, I was too close to it, too proprietary, to see how it could be improved, how less could indeed be more.

Fiction + Fact = Faction

Self-designated struggling writer, R.J. Mangahas has a nice round-up of the latest scandals in fake books in Out in WriteField. I'm not referring to the fake books that singers use (lyrics-only song sheets). I mean the James Frey type of a million little lies presented as the truth. Like the also pseudo-memoirs by Misha Defonseca and Margaret Seltzer, that's what I'm talkin' about.

I would disagree with Mangahas' statement that, "In a lot of people's eyes, there is an unwritten understanding between them and the author of the memoir that the events are true and accurate as possible." That may be a misconception many writers and readers used to have about memoir writing. I doubt the reading public is that naive any longer.

I submit that writers like Frey, Defonseca and Seltzer are perpetuating a genre that perhaps began with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. I call that confounding of fiction and facts "faction". Perhaps bookstores, publishers and critics should establish this as a legitimate literary form. After all, memoir is really elaboration of biography. Faction is more elaboration of memoir.

Donate to P&E Defense

From the Preditors & Editors news page:

Unfortunately, there are those who do not like P&E or its editor because we give out information that they would prefer remain hidden from writers. Usually, they slink away, but not this time. P&E is being sued and we are asking for donations to mount a legal defense in court. Please click on the link below and give if you can to help protect P&E so it can continue to defend writers as it has for the past eleven years.

Please visit the page and scroll down to the clickable PayPal graphic to donate to defend this wonderful writers' resource.

If you distrust that method of helping, visit PayPal and send money directly to the d.l.kuzminsky[AT]att.net account. (Dave Kuzminsky runs P&E and is named in the suit.)

Preditors & Editors lists thousands of writing services with notices about scams and bad deals and recommendations for the good ones. You can research potential assistance for your writing at P&E at no charge. It is one of the best uses of the Internet that I've run across. The service is hosted by Another Realm magazine of speculative fiction.

Women's Day, History Month

Saturday, March 8th, is International Women’s Day and all of March celebrates women in history. The 2008 National Women's History Project has a focus on women in the arts. One of my most enjoyable re-creational experiences was discovering the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, where I purchased their lovely eponymous book, published by Harry N. Abrams in 1987 and apparently out of print now. Viewing and celebrating sister artists' creations is one method of renewing your well of creativity.

Free Trade for Writing

If you're getting started as a magazine freelancer or looking to supplement your income while waiting for the fiction to pay off, consider writing for the trades. Trade magazines offer decent pay and, once you become established, regular writing gigs. The editors like to keep a stable of dependable writers both to commission and ones who can find good stories to query about.

As always, however, you need to know the market before trying to break into it. With magazine writing, that means reading, no, studying several issues before querying. How to get your hands on the trade rags? Here's good news: free subscriptions are available through at least two websites:

Free Trade Magazine Source

TradePub

Both offer search services and you can sign up for email alerts when new publications are added. TradePub even offers RSS feeds by category -- a truly handy feature for those who intend to specialize in this type of business writing.

Writing Through Writer's Block

Avoiding the empty page. Staring at the blank screen. Puzzled at a pause. Stopped at the end of a sentence. You've come to the start of a Writer's Block. Nothing is coming. "I have no more to write," -- or so you think. Right here, right now, on the same page, begin a new section and write about this temporary interruption in creativity. *

• How or where did it start?
• What does the block feel like?
• How do you feel about yourself?
• What were your plans?
• What do you need to continue?

When you've exhausted these and any other issues you can think up about your block, cut and paste this section into a new document (if you're working on a computer) and "play" with it. Shape it up into an article, a blog post, a journal entry. Turning it into a salable article might include listing methods to prevent or overcome this particular form of Writer's Block. Maybe you will need to do a little research, digging up references.

At any rate, you will have been writing. Not blocked at all. In the process, you will gain insight into your feelings and thoughts, perhaps about the original piece, perhaps about yourself as a creative producer, and perhaps about writing itself.

* reframing the problem can help overcome it

Superprize for Writing Novels

This year the bookish people who run the Man Booker prize will celebrate the award's 40th anniversary with a The Best of the Booker award to "honour the best overall novel to have won the prize since it was first awarded on 22 April 1969." The same type of award was given on the organization's 25th anniversary, but this time the public will be able to help choose from a shortlist of six chosen by a panel from the 41 contenders. The regular Booker prize is 50,000 pounds. The winner of the Best Booker only gets a trophy, I guess because the author already got the loot the first time around.

According to The Times online, bookies give authors these odds of winning:

• 4-1 Yann Martel – The Life of Pi (2002)

• 5-1 Salman Rushdie – Midnight's Children (1981)
  

• 7-1 Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (1992)

• 8-1 Ben Okri – The Famished Road (1991); Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things (1997); Ian McEwan – Amsterdam (1998)

• 10-1 J. M. Coetzee – Disgrace (1999); Anne Enright – The Gathering (2007)

If nothing else, this probably makes a good reading list for aspiring novelists.