Barbara Taylor Bradford Meet the Author

So, welcome James Paterson. Thank you. What are Book Shots? Well,

hopefully, they're a revolution in reading and the way we look at

books. At the least they're going to continue an evolution. They're under

150 pages. Relatively inexpensive and hopefully impossible to put

down. It's like one of my regular books, at like 145 pages, very

tight. You can get on the train, you go to work, you get on the train

going home and you have read one. So you have accomplished something

which is kind of cool. The slogan is all thriller, no filler. Is that

what makes you think somebody will pick up one of these rather than a

magazine or go online? It's like reading a movie. There's no fat,

it's all story. You know, hopefully with good characters. If you like

Alex Cross, here is one you haven't read before but it just happens so

quickly. Here in England we are going to start with six. It's kind

of a category. There will be a Alex Cross, a zoo, one about the Royals

which is fun. There is one about a big heist, a diamond heist. Recently

I was interviewed in my office and I pulled out these eight very deep

drawers and I have 107 of these book shots that are either finished now

or in process and of the so 7 I would say 80 are stories that I

created. It's like, oh, my God, the person

that interviewed me over there went like this is insane. This is crazy,

I said, great, this is insane. But I think for readers this is going to

be a real boon. Because they are addictive.

You have written some of them but like your full-length novel, you

employ a team of co-writers, tell us a bit about how that works,

I wrote last year over 2000 pages of outlines.

My outlines are always three or four drafts.

And usually when I co-write a book, I write

an outline, for these it may be 30 pages and it is chapter by chapter.

And what I will do with the co-writer

is give them the outline, I will say please contribute to the

outline because that is useful and it gets the co-writer

The template for the BookShots is every single chapter moves

both the characterisation and the story forward and turns on the

meaning you can't see it, you can't feel it, and taste it

and smell it, if it is not moving forward and I'm not interested

characters I will say, hold it, we have lost something here.

Then I will make suggestions and occasionally

I did not figure out the outline correctly or more often

If you look at them, they are smaller,

thinner and hopefully on the trains and planes you will see

I have read that you work seven days a week,

52 weeks of the year, is that true, do you not

even take a day off for Christmas day?

Christmas I would say would be a very light day but generally

Somebody said you are lucky if you find something you like

to do and it is a miracle if somebody will pay you to do it.

Doing these BookShots, it has been the most fun year

of my life, because I love to tell stories and I was

blocked with the books I had because I had the Alex Cross

and it was like we don't need any more hardback,

so there was no place for me to let my imagination go

I will have more content than Marvel by the end of this year.

It is little wonder that you are known as the busiest man

in publishing, not just because of the number of books you write,

but because of the time and the money you spend

on championing literacy, why is that so important?

For me, the most important thing is getting kids reading.

Because if our kids do not become competent readers,

especially kids at risk, how are they going

If they get through, ten and 11 and they are not competent...

There'll be a drag on society and the city

and all of us, and it will make for a harder life for them

As an individual I can't do much to solve global warming

or health care crisis, whatever, but as an individual

we can all get the kids in our homes reading, mostly,

we can help the local school, we can help the local libraries,

libraries are a big issue now and how they get funded in England.

I just hope that people will stand up and go,

our libraries are really important, we need the money for libraries.

How much does your interest in this stem from the fact

that you had a son who was a reluctant reader?

When he was eight-years-old, that summer, we said you can read every

And we said yes, unless you want to live in the garage because we read

But we said this is going to be painless,

so we've got a dozen books like Percy Jackson,

and one of mine and by the end of the summer Jack had read

a dozen books and his reading skills went up dramatically,

and ultimately they have SAT scores in America

so a perfect score in reading is 800 and he had 800 in reading,

and he is going to an Ivy League college.

In terms of what can happen, if you take charge

with your children, make it your responsibility.

There is nothing more important than a mother or

father or grandparents to do than make sure the kids read.

It is good you get them out with exercise but they

You are hugely successful, a writer of

commercial mainstream fiction, do you hanker

after writing the great American novel?

I have already - they are just commercial!

On my gravestone, "James kept a lot of people up late at night."

And BookShots are going to be one of the reasons.

This is going to change the way people read.

Although she says that she thinks of it as comic, the comedy is darker

than forever. For one of our most prolific and most read authors Crock

lat was an international bestseller and memorable film.

Sler An exploration of some of the most troubling relationships between

teachers and pupils and the havoc they can sometimes wreak. It strikes

me that schools attract you, you like them, don't you? I am very

fobbed of schools, I taught in them for 15 years and they're wonderful

observations of community. The observation here is as I said at

the beginning, pretty dark. It's funny, it's touching. But it goes to

some very dark places. Both in terms of the staff and their charges. It

does. I found that schools are a kind of perpetual stage for tragedy

and farce and everything in between. So many things can happen. It's an

unpredictable environment. And that isn't just because of setting, it's

because of the age of those involved. You are talking about

adolescents going through crises, some imagined, some real and

relationships with teachers which are inevitably delicate things. I

think so, yes. It's an intense stage of life, adolescence, you feel

things very strongly. You can experience experience things for the

first time and they can be powerful that they're completely create an

upheaval in your life. I found it interesting to be part of but it's

daunting as well because later I realised as a teacher you can really

influence somebody's life and people remember you and they remember what

you said and if it was unfair they will resent it in a way that an

adult I don't think would resent. Some bad things happen in this book,

I will not talk about what they are, it's safe to say you are led into

territory that's become more familiar to us in the last two or

three years, allegations of sexual impropriety and misconduct and so on

and emotional trauma with staff and pupils, did you know that's what you

were getting into when you started? Not entirely, no. I think what

happened was I started off with a germ of an idea in this book and

then in real life Operation Yewtree started to unfold and I found there

was an uncomfortable crossover in what I was writing about and what

happened in the world. It became much darker and more topical than I

thought it would be. You touch on the question in this book of

atmospheres that can develop, rather hysterical ones leading to a kind of

almost a witch-hunt atmosphere, or a territory where there are false

accusations and difficulties and great damage done as a consequence.

It's something that clearly fascinates you, the unfairness that

is lurking there under the surface. Yes, I think so. Also the past and

how the past affects the present. And how memory is not inherently a

reliable tool, particularly when dealing with experiences of trauma,

how memory can be affected by all kind of things happening in the

present day and how memory can sometimes be both unreliable and

frightening. The main character has been a teacher for a long time, this

has happened to him again and again. There's that interesting sense of

having seen generations of pupils coming through in his case to learn

classics or not to learn, first of all, you clearly adore him. I am

very fond of him. We are not entirely the same person but I might

have grown into him if I stayed at the school in which I taught for

long enough. He's flawed in a lot of ways but ultimately he has a good

heart. He is warm, he is affectionate. He loves his job. He

is aware of the consequences of the job that he does. He is aware that

he is affecting young lives and he has a strong sense of duty. I also

like the fact that he is a bit of a subversive. That he has various

prejudices which is unaware of, he has favourites and he is unaware of

this. He is bad with technology. He likes the odd sneaky fag outside

when he shouldn't have. One of the interesting things about the way you

construct the narrative here is that you have got an older man talking

but you have youngsters as well so they're inhabiting different -

they're in the same place in the school. That's right. I had the

benefit of being in that environment for long enough to pick up a lot of

voices, to remember the way teenager boys talked, the way older members

of staff talked, and so I have borrowed from colleagues, from

pupils who are now ex-pupils and watch the whole process with joy

from Twitter and Facebook. You are a great Twitter user? I am, yes. A lot

of boys say I remember this and read this book and often they turn up to

readings and of course they all think I am writing about them, which

isn't quite true, but there are certainly little vinets. It's a dark

story but you are having fun. You are a successful author, widely

read, are you irritated when people say you are the Chocolate woman?

Does it sometimes hang around your neck? Inevitably a little. I am very

grateful for the response to it and the fact that people loved it and I

love it too and I am still writing about those characters. What I find

irssome, if anything, is that assumption I will do the same thing.

I could go in almost any direction and have done, I am lucky in that

sense. You are and you take what I might call the authorial

responsibility seriously. You are speaking up for authors and recently

you talked about not going to one nameless literary Festival because

they were expecting all kind of things and exclusive contracts and

saying, hang on, authors deserve to be treated in a better way. It's not

just about me, about me wanting money or special treatment,

completely the opposite. I would like is for people to see writing as

a job, it's a profession. And to treat authors professionally and

this is particularly important for young authors who have a real

difficulty sometimes in getting to Festivals because of what it's going

to cost them. They don't make much money writing, contrary to public

opinion. Absolutely. The average salary for professional author is

?11 thousand a year, according to the Society of Authors, this isn't

much, not many of us get to write for a living and make a reasonable

living out of it. You are an author who conforms I think to one of the

wonderful stereotypes, you work in a shed at the bottom of the garden. I

do, yes. You enter a different world when you are there? Shed world is a

specific space. It's psychologically important for an author to have a

work space, particularly somebody like me who was on a timetable for a

long time, it's difficult to manage time and difficult to get into the

psychological head space of writing. So I think it's important to create

a place where you work and nothing else happens, whether it's a shed,

whether it's a desk, when I was just starting off I didn't have a desk,

so I had two objects that I would put in front of my laptop when I

wanted to write and that created the work space, wherever it was.

Sometimes I am working on two at once, in fact nearly always because

I have books I write on sunny days and book I write on dark days. This

was a dark day book? Definitely a dark day book. Although it has some

glimpses of sunshine in there. I should say it's fun, as well. Joanne

Harris, thank you very much. Well, this is about as much snow as

I can offer in this weather forecast. It's going to be an

incredibly mild Christmas, pretty windy too, especially across

Scotland, particularly Boxing Day. It will be stormy there. This is the

next storm,