Rhys Thomas is a young Welsh novelist who has recently signed a 2-book deal with leading publisher Doubleday, and who also works as a Texpert. After years of penning stories and novels that were well received amongst friends and family, Rhys clinched a life-changing deal based on the latest draft of his novel, The Suicide Club, which is set to be published in spring 2009. As a flashy-techy sort of company, Texperts is delighted to support creative types, and equally, to benefit from their talents. In his debut blog for Texperts, Rhys discusses those little stickers on books. Take it away Rhys, and best of luck with your novel!

Little Round Stickers on Books
I was ill, miserable, and contagious over Christmas. I spent most of the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day in bed. But luckily I had recently purchased a copy of Stef Penney’s rather excellent debut novel The Tenderness of Wolves. Published to much critical acclaim in 2006 by Quercus, the book paints a vivid, vast, and starkly beautiful panorama of 19th Century frontier Canada. And it also contains a neat little murder and subsequent manhunt to boot.

The Tenderness of Wolves has won praise and also scooped the coveted Costa Book of the Year award for 2006 (formerly the Whitbread Book Awards). And this brings me to my main point: what do the Great British book-buying public currently make their decisions about what books to buy? I discovered this book for one reason – a little, round sticker on the front cover. I had been wandering aimlessly through the book shop, thinking, “Oh god, what am I going to buy?” when I saw it, there in the corner, against the snowy white background of the cover. Bingo.

I don’t know what makes these stickers attractive, but they seem exponentially more persuasive than their small size would suggest. If a book manages to be branded with a “Costa Book Awards Short-List” or “Richard & Judy Good Read” or “Waterstones Recommended Read” or “Long-Listed for the Orange Prize” they somehow zone in on a certain part of your brain that thinks, “ooh, I’m getting this.” It’s a warm and reassuring comfort to see it there on the corner of the cover. The sticker makes you feel relaxed, that you are not taking such a risk when buying, because that little sticker is a stamp that confirms a link between a cultural authority’s endorsement and nebulous kind of mass appeal.

Of course, those stickers have the opposite effect on some people, who see the sticker and reflexively snort, “this novel must be abominably crass.” Mass appeal will always have its detractors. So the sticker has a downside - it will guarantee a certain audience for the book, but also generate backlash. The old adage of “not judging a book by its cover” can work both ways, it seems! But where’s the justice in that? After all, who’s to say that Richard Madeley and his dear wife have bad taste when it comes to fiction? Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell comes with a handful of stickers, including R & J’s – I doubt that even the most selective of literary tastes would associate that book with a “crass mass market” trade paperback.

Stickers and Stickiness
The vast majority of people seem to glad for the “stickiness” of this little sticker. It’s a stamp that eases their book-buying stress by assuring us that a) someone’s whose judgement we should trust has said it’s good, and b) that other people are buying because of this acclaim. I think the little round sticker taps into something very human – the wish to belong. Knowing that a book is being read by many other people, and that you too can plug so easily into that collective zeitgeist, appeals to many of us. I can say with certainty that it was the reason I bought The Tenderness of Wolves. Of course the story interested me, but it was the sticker that first led me to pick up the book. Would I have picked it up had it not been stamped? Probably not. It seems an awful thing to say, but it’s true, just as it is true for ten of thousands of the book-buying public. But surely there’s more to it than that?

Stickers bearing the logo of book clubs and literary awards are hardly a new marketing tool, but it’s become a major phenomenon in recent years. The mainstream media’s attention to literature, which has been growing since Richard & Judy, has made reading more popular across the board. This is not new news. Nor are the rather startling sales figures for books, which are on the rise. In 2007, the Publisher’s Association reported a 7.7% across-the-board increase in book sales. The biggest increase was in the export market where the year-on-year rise was 12.4% in volume and 11.1% by value. UK sales grew by 4.5% by volume and by 3.4% in value. This means that we are all reading more. And this is acknowledged by the publishing industry to be due in no small part to the increased attention given to reading in mainstream magazines and TV shows.

But what does seem to have been overlooked is the way in which the new reading vogue has made the discussion of literature more commonplace. We love being critics! Book groups are flourishing, sales are on the up and I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of budding novelists starts to spike. Many books now come with ready-made book group notes in the closing pages. This is a fantastic thing, of which more later. One major upshot of all this seems to be that for a book to stand any chance in the market today, a little round sticker of some description is almost essential.

Too Good To Be True?
Here we come to another, and perhaps more disturbing, side of the resurgence of reading caused by literary prizes and book clubs. The stickers and the places they come from seem to have created an “Official Reading List of the Nation.” We’re reading more, but we’re reading the same books. We’ve all seen shelves at Tescos stacked, week after week, with the same titles: The Time-Travellers Wife, Cloud Atlas, The Lovely Bones, Atonement, Labyrinth, The Tenderness of Wolves even – all have benefited greatly from this new phenomenon of Stickers on Books, which increasingly are the targets of mass retail and supermarket outlets. But is this healthy for literature as a whole?

Inevitably, a lot of books are getting left out in the cold, and there is the danger of a homogeneous reading culture developing because of the retail space. But my view is that“the good will out,” as they say, and as long as the stickers help to increase the number of readers out there, overall, they have to be a good thing for literature. The phenomenon of worthy books slipping through the cracks is hardly new, and perhaps this cost is worth the benefit: at least more people are reading, and that has to be the most important thing. I don’t hold with the idea of literature being some kind of last bastion of accepted artistic snobbery. The classics are still out there and people will find them (and do find them) if they want. If anything, the Official Reading List of the Nation acts as an excellent jumping off point.

The books that are graced with the little round sticker are rarely hackneyed dross these days anyway. I would say that the Nation’s Official Reading List is more literary now than it has ever been. Granted, many of the titles aren’t going to sit alongside Hemingway in a hundred years, but at least they’re not written by Jackie Collins! And anyway, look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and is a powerhouse of a book – unrelenting and moving in equal measure. Yet the little round sticker shining out from the sales displays tells us only that it was “Oprah’s Book of the Year.” But who cares? Were it not for Oprah it would never have reached the mainstream audience that it has. Cormac McCarthy certainly didn’t object, because he appeared on Oprah’s show.

The Last Word
So as a novelist, I’m actually glad to have the little round sticker in the nation’s bookshelves and on its cultural landscape. There will always be those (who may call themselves purists - I call them something else!) who will prefer to respect books rather than love them. They will never be persuaded that this new breath is a good thing. In fact, the stickers seem to conjure an incredible and disproportionate rage in them (or at the very least an obnoxious snigger). But I like the way that mainstream shows such as Richard & Judy are talking about books, I like the fact that people are now discussing the plots and characters of novels, and I even like the fact that bookshops now have pretentious little tub chairs to sit in whilst you choose. I like the way that literature has moved out of its country mansion and into suburbia. Okay, there are downsides to having an Official Reading List of the Nation, but it is my humble opinion that the sticker has generally upped the quality of popular books being read.

Yes, the little round sticker is okay in - and hopefully, one day on - my book!

Rhys Thomas

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