Category: books (Page 1 of 4)

POST-TRUTH PUBLISHING: Shipwrecks and Hares..

July 16, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Titanic of Publishing just hit the iceberg of Raynor Winn and not many will make it to the lifeboats.

In recent days the media has been slowly coming to terms with a sequence of revelations of the sheer scale of the deception involved in the creation of the Raynor Winn myth (here I want to state that the two protagonists as sharp as any confidence tricksters can be are not alone) it takes more than two to tango it takes a whole machine of publishing to get a bestseller rolling then an army of PR and agents to keep it ringing the tills.

In a brilliant whistle-blowing exercise an ex-editor at Penguin -Michael Joseph  which published the sequence of fake memoirs reveals it just the tip of an almighty iceberg. Amelia Fairney has switched horses and now attempting to expose the practices that created  this mess in the first place.

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-revelations-should-be-no-surprise-to-anyone-in-publishing

As she does this The Observer continues to drip feed us with ever more pertinent revelations the latest of which states that the terminally ill ‘Moth’ (Timothy Walker – Landscape Gardener) has never been diagnosed with anything more than mild symptoms, in fact as he appeared at the film launch he seems fitter than most of us. Well sitting around in a cheaply rented farmhouse whilst sinking the advance then royalties into god knows what property or money-making schemes is pretty easy work. The conned Cider Maker is reported here:

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/moth-told-me-he-was-dying-when-a-doctor-had-said-his-brain-scan-was-normal

In recent days a good many silly people ( some of whom are welcome to share more of their hard earned cash with the Winns) have swallowed the whole saga hook line and sinker have been defending the couple. I suggest even a quick read of this article may make them change their minds although this image may mean they will not (thank you facebook). Maybe these views are just indicative of the gullible nature of most people these days. Barnum comes to mind some people some of the time…also the majority of defenders are women who after all are the target audience for this type of book by a very wide margin so the marketers spot on.

In my honest opinion this is not a casual author got it wrong tale this is premeditated fraud on a long term and professional level from day one.

More importantly it is a timely reminder to the publishing industry – as bloated, overpaid, arrogant and classist as it is that the public mood can turn when it finds out it been taken for a ride. Even more it seems that it rife and the article above details many more such fake memoirs, nature novels in works as long as publishers see a gullible income stream to fleece. With AI ever more able to create decent documents it highly likely that at some point an entire AI generated Nature/Memoir/Wellbeing book will be created by agents alone working in tandem with unscrupulous publishers. As Fairley states agents already do nine tenths of the work in getting books to publishing deadlines and increasingly a fair amount of actual editing and rewriting the content to hit publisher targets.

Celebrity ghost-written tat and books that never saw their author already litter the shelves. They are easy to spot. Generic titles with on message themes and very little actual worthwhile content but a fucking great illustrated cover abound these days.
The Essex Serpent been mimeographed and fed back out to the masses about a hundred times already. Want a book about talking to a bird or animal it like Doctor Doolittle these days. In fact the big seller being hyped with every trick cardboard hare in the book (sic) Raising Hare is a masterpiece of clear fakery anybody who genuinely thinks it a true story is simply delusional. The funniest thing is the author probably was a spin doctor so well suited to ’embroidering’ the truth or post-truth as it now known.



Having read some books (not that many but probably more than you) I do know that in Romany culture the hare symbolic of trickster and devil…an apt symbol of our present alleged pro-bono book-selling businesses.  Ironically in my provincial city the only bookshop left is owned by the American investment group Elliott Investment Management and is connected to Barnes and Noble.
It has recently absorbed one of the flagships of honest real bookselling (Blackwells).
They appear to have removed the Raynor Winn as it not a good look and kept the hares…
Sorry if some luvvies out there thought that Waterstones was a bastion of white muddle-class handwritten notes about books by people that genuinely care it isn’t in fact it is just another viscious global merchandiser – the ALI BABA of Books.
If anybody wants to fact check that with me just leave a email I will give them first hand knowledge from an ex employee (not me FYI).


The insidious slow erosion of ‘truth’ in favour of profiteering ‘lies’ is everywhere from political party propaganda to your school run chit chat re broadcast on community social media. The aim is churn, the turnover creates the income stream, the eyeballs get the adverts and the content is marginalised and hidden slowly, inexorably and deliberately. This creates a passive, consumerist mass who think no further than the next dopamine shot ( see Ted Gioia and Derek Thompson discussing that here: https://www.honest-broker.com/ and here https://www.derekthompson.org/ )

I am a working-class writer with little hope of being published by the big six or whatever it is i.e. penguin, Faber and Faber, Cape etc etc. However I now think that I might outlive all of them and that the whole concept of BIG publishers is sinking fast, holed fatally below the waterline. The Titanic has hit the Raynor Winn iceberg it will not sink overnight but it will slowly erode as lies scuttle the whole fleet.

The future of publishing was unveiled in Oxford at a XML lecture in 1998 or thereabouts I know I was there. They predicted then the complete dissolution of paper publishing starting with scientific journals. From 1999 my job was archiving and setting up the then new internet based publishing models. The future had arrived but the big ships sailed on not knowing that within 30 years there would be thousands of little icebergs ahead and finally a hare. .a golden hare they never saw firing a great gold torpedo into the engine room.

It not Raising Hare …it sinking ships.
Raynor Winn is but the canary in the mineshaft…..

No turning back?
In my honest opinion paper is dead unless sold as fetish object (pace new vinyl records) but in the long term small hands are holding a shiny object that visualises information, has replaced the book…replaced truth…and is the drug of choice for millions.

Every phone should have a golden hare emblem on the case.

THAMES VALLEY TEXAS – The Photobook

May 12, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This PHOTOBOOK WITH POEMS will be about my hometown of Didcot, Oxfordshire.

I am a Working-Class boy from a council estate in Didcot, Oxfordshire which is the wrong side of the tracks from Oxford and all it stands for.

This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.

I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…

Read the poems here:

https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?page_id=2693

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CHALKLAND: The Collected Poems 1984-2024

May 10, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This is an ongoing project I just started and will take time to complete.

I began writing poetry in my hometown of Didcot in 1981-2 after a few perfunctory ‘poetry’ lectures at Hornsey College of Art introduced me to Larkin, Heaney and Hughes. Then a slightly tipsy Adrian Mitchell joined us under a tree in front of Alexander Palace.

My early poems were slightly surreal, landscape orientated and drew on the American Poets travelling selection I came across by chance in my local library. W.C.Williams especially affected me. From early on I was influenced by American and Scottish landscape and eco poets especially Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, Al Purdy and Canadian Prairie poets.

By 1991 having failed to make a living as the new Francis Bacon in London I ended up back home in Didcot and working part-time at the Poetry Library on the South Bank. Here I really started to write seriously as I saw that poetry not a dead end and my first publication was in John Harvey’s Slowdancer magazine which Chainlink tips a hat to. I quit the library to become famous elsewhere (Scotland ) which of course didn’t happen or if it did nobody told me.

I loved my time in Edinburgh and wrote some pretty mad or bad or great poems about that time that will appear for the first time in the proposed book above. Whilst in Edinburgh 1994-6 I joined the Shore Poets and was again influenced by people I met and read with.

Some of those never seen folders of poems…

The Back Catalogue:

Being ignored by the English poetry establishment on return from Scotland and feeling pretty tired of tiresome poetry types I put my career on hold. Oxford does that to one if you not from the establishment and not waited on…

The problem is that of the roughly 2500 poems written in the last 40 years about half are still typewritten in folders and never seen the light of day.

This is where I take on the task of producing a respectable collection as above. It will take time. Arsenal may well have become European Champions by the time I finish. Everybody has to have a hobby when retired now you know mine.

At the risk of appearing a bit deluded (most poets are some made careers from it) I’d say I am probably the best unpublished (currently) poet in Nottingham if not the whole East Midlands..time will tell.

Meanwhile I will stick my various irons in the fire and moan about lesser poets being funded and/or published (with no evidence of brain or talent) which to be fair I been doing for close on 40 years.

As for the various people who helped me survive and keep prodding the muse you will get your credits in due course.

There aren’t many of you.

To keep up to date with progress visit the writing blog here.
https://shaunbelcher.com/writing

Ten Books I Love

August 30, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I accepted a challenge from Neil Fulwood on facebook to post ten books that I love, one book per day, no explanations, no reviews, just the covers.

The idea is to promote good books, encourage reading and create a wonderful reading list.

Here my 10 as posted and explanations of why chosen.

This book is the only volume I have kept from a bookcase full of victorian books which given to my country grandparents of whom my step-grandfather could not read. It was my introduction to books from being a small child but strangely never saw read. I wrote about them in poem The Hare Lip. Read that here:

The Ice Horses – 1996

Bought in 1985 when it came out from a bookshop in Plymouth (sticker on back) whilst visiting my sister. I heard a lot about Carver from muisc reviews at time referring to the ‘Carveresque’. Loved his writing and background fitted my notions of writing working class stories in poetry and song. Years later met his widow at Poetry Library also a great poet. Still a significant writer for me 30 years later.

Simply the greatest poet I have been in the same room as ( Norman MacCaig’s birthday party in Edinburgh) although I did stand next to him outside the Edinburgh Central Library as he lit a cigarette but was too shy to speak to him. Bought this in Scotland probably at James Thins. Edinburgh made me a poet Oxford made me give up being a poet simple as that.

Again a chance meeting meant I handed a signed copy of the original Goldmark publication of Whitechapel Scarlet Tracings one of his best and earliest books when I at a Goldmark exhibition private view Sinclair attended. Instead of that book I chosen this as John Clare was a fundamental inspiration that got me through A Level English thanks to my mad teacher Miss Millington a bonkers mid 50s spinster who regaled us with tales of dope smoking camel races from her previous lives…..years later Clare inspired a song that ended up the title of a Norwegian Country Lp..go figure..

I love this book more than anything else he written (hence three copies) and he written a lot ( I know I have all of them).No never met him so cannot name drop this time but this book defined my concept of americana long before it became fashionable. Without this book there no Flyinshoes and probably no Alt Country..this was the text book.

Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh a reading to promote this book and probably the best poet of my generation by a mile. Looked like the computer programmer he was still at this point. Opened his mouth and surreal suburban odes the like of which I not heard before or since. Favourite single poem is the Asylum Dance…….superb writer and sadly will write no more but what there is awesome.

A railway labourer from Swindon who learnt several languages and wrote a series of books about his region including this amazing collection done on a bycycle tour of the Upper Thames. The achievement alone is astonishing the writer almost totally obscure like a good few of what I call the English South Downs Spiritualists.Nature writing before the current faddists and big publisher bullshitters got in on the act. He, Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas….ECO before the word invented…..my holy trinity.

I lived on a council estate where half the houses were better built in brick and known as ‘Atomic Houses’. They were built to house the workers at Harwell Atomic Research Laboratory. It about a mile and a half across fields from my town of Didcot. I knew neighbours that worked there. My mother helped place rods into reactors when a teenager and I worked there. It was where the UK atomic bomb was built it created the plutonium. I signed official secrets act just to do a shit job there. It was an airfield used to launch Arnhem and D-Day gliders it is the reality nobody knows…..gorillas dosed with radiation early experiments with a little understood thing called radioactivity one day I will tell my stories..

Full circle the only book my father ever owned. A school prize before he sent to fields as labourer at 14. He was denied further education left that to me….never wrote but thought and spoke a lot.

In a fire this the book I save…

THAMES VALLEY TEXAS

October 6, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I just read some of this volume at the Open Book reading is Thames Valley Texas (updates at link above or direct here https://shaunbelcher.com/writing/?cat=106)

This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.

If I cannot get a publisher to take this chapbook length collection on I will try and publish as a Horsehoe Press pamphlet.

Potentially in future I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…


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The End of the Line for Books?

June 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I recently posted a Ted Gioia substack repost of a Elle Griffin report on Major Publishing traits none of it good…’nobody buys books’ …

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

Before long nobody will even print them especially in poetry.

For the paper poetry magazine the writing been on the wall for a while see my response to Wendy Pratt on Substack here:

https://shaunbelcherwrites.substack.com/p/the-impossibility-of-producing-a-print-literary-magazine

Only subscriber based paper editions like The Poetry Review (UK) stand up due to being part of a subscription-model which was mentioned in Victoria Maul’s Poetry Review critique’ on Substack

https://vamoul.substack.com/p/what-is-a-poetry-magazine-for

As for actually producing poetry books read on…thanks to Jo Bell for sharing

https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/what-does-a-book-cost

Add all of this together and it not a very good prognosis in fact as Galleybeggar Books state…

This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.

In light of that and faced with a seeming mountain of online magazines being inundated by a million would be poets is there even any point in continuing down the old paper based path?

Now here we go. I read through the Galley Beggar stuff BEFORE looking at their list and I was struck how Londoncentric white middle-class it was. Not much diversity there more who you know London journalists who romantically dream of being the next Saul Bellow. fair enough but in that case would it really matter if they only published online or as digital ebooks. the answer is NO and here we come to the political point of all this. Far from beggers people of this comfortable a background are basically living a dream that probably never existed.

I am sure that some are Guardian picks (mates of mates etc) and I sure some write like angels BUT for fucks sake it a diversion from reality not reality in the present poilitcal climate and there isn’t a writer that deserves sympathy in front of the very real shit going down out there.

So oh dear Galley Press never mind there hundreds literally of presses and people like you but it does not fuckign matter in the rather prissy way you boost your list. Nobody on there is Saul Bellow and it nice you manage to knock a few books out every year but that’s it.

What is not touched on in the Galley Beggar description is a wider awareness of the fundamental shifts occurring in terms of phone driven distribution, reading etc. In a matter of a decade the very premise for the Galley beggar romantic Left bank writer dream will have evaporated. The technical disollution of the ‘literary’ scene is happening now and it will disappear before our very eyes.

I am old enough to have missed the literary dream first time around..that ship sailed without me when it did float. Now it sinking faster than Hugh Kenner’s original island. I met Lucy Ellmann’s father when he was still alive…he was a connection to a romantic life that now fading.

The future is bright, non nationalistic (even Parisian) based and always on always morphing. Today’s Samuel Beckett or Hemingway is on tik tok right now we just can’t see them yet.

The original nobody buys books article was mind boggling but one line from Galley Beggers Press sums it all up so that big name author reading down at Waterstones with the nice clothes and the air of superiority their fabulous avant-garde novel winning book of week in The Guardian or LRB……nobody fucking cares really apart from people like them that want to carry on the delusional times….meanwhile Waterstones..totally fucked..gone like Borders in a decade already sliding….it is over people you read it online first…Galley Beggers just wrote the epitaph of their own business.

the median sell-through for literary fiction (in the first year of publication) is 241 copies (Publishers Association stats).

Galley Beggar Press does not deal in anything but Fiction ( pace Salt new business model) as it the only sales left and it failing……Poetry..been fucked financially apart from a few better selling female poets for decades already.

Fake businesses stagger on maintaining the literary super-structure like a wasps nest with no wasps…paper thin..crumbling…

soon to be gone…

This is an industry – an immensely valuable one, brimming with passion and care – that is running on borrowed time.

The future looks like this

https://shaunbelcherwrites.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-line-for-books

My Back Pages

August 2, 2022 / / 0 Comments


Latest volume Grass Clouds Poems 2002-22

A selection of published and self-published volumes 1992-2022…30 years! I will be reading poems from these various collections tonight at The Organ Grinder with Neil Fulwood.

Here my CV 🙂

A NEW YEAR GREETING

****
(poem here)

Addenda: What I am not.

Shaun Belcher is the author of one out of print slim volume that disappeared into the virtual ether before it was printed via lightning strikes/amazon so qualifies as a work of fiction.
He did not edit any anthology of obscure, unacknowledged legislators nor did he win any prizes, nor should we be specific did he enter any competitions.
He has held no official tenures as a creative writer at any top end nor third rate provincial university and has never reviewed other poets he dislikes for the simple reason of building a profile to get published.
He has never been recommended by friends in the poetry world as he has none and has studiously avoided anything to do with poets or poetry for over two decades.
He is member of no group who look after his publishing and reading interests when his work over time slides into fabulous irrelevancy or simply becomes so bad it an embarrassment.
He has no agenda nor minority axe to grind and has never played on his working class beginnings for pity or favour.
He regards his lifelong devotion to obscurity and keeping some semblance of sanity in a world over-run with poets like a corpse covered in flies that he should not add to other’s suffering by maintaining a steady output of academic poetry which simply done to fulfil research departmental targets.
His earnings from poetry over 40 years accrues to £70 he once got paid for being given a slot at Ledbury Festival by a friend and a commission again via a friend for £500 which works out to roughly £14.25 per annum which a living wage in the poetry world these days.

He is however still a poet if being a poet is none of the above.

He is still alive at time of writing and doesn’t expect things to change radically.

It all depends on a red wheelbarrow apparently and he does not have one.

Happy New Year.

GRASS CLOUDS : 20 years on the poetry bench.

July 14, 2022 / / 0 Comments
Armitage has been run ragged at left back let’s see what the new boy can do…
Grass Clouds Full Version PDFDownload

I will be offering this as a free download from this evening as it Bastille day.
GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth

Contains 80 poems and some illustrations. I will be reading from it on Tuesday August 2nd at the Organ Grinder Canning Circus with Neil Fulwood who celebrating his new Smokestack Press publication.

Includes the following pamphlets and projects:

Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011

Edwin Smith Commission 2014

Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018

My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019

At the Organ Grinder I shall also be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which due in Fall 2023.





The Function of Criticism

February 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I have spent the afternoon reading the beginning of Yvor Winters ‘The Function of Criticism’ which I acquired about 30 years ago.

I also read a couple of interesting articles online.

The first by the poet David Yezzi is interesting and makes a case for his continuing relevance. The second is a wider career over-view from the now defunct Contemporary Poetry Review.

I also mused upon the slow demise of the ‘Poet-Critic’ a sad reflection of the sorry state of contemporary poetry where popularity and social media profiles count for more than intellectual rigor. Even with Larkin, Heaney and Hughes there were solid publications of other writing. Can one imagine a serious book of Simon Armitage or Helen Mort criticism ..no because it too dangerous an occupation in the ‘blow-back’ noughties where any -expression of opinion is frowned upon. Books are reviewed but mostly to further mediocre careerist blogs but serious criticism that gone the way of decent classical music radio i.e. popularised out of existence.

So reading the opinionated Winters is refreshing. He was wrong as much as right but at least he expressed an opinion.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/1997/6/the-seriousness-of-yvor-winters

https://www.cprw.com/the-absolutist-the-poetry-and-criticism-of-yvor-winters

Talking of opinionated tody I also picked up this Further Requirements book by Larkin to add to Required Writing which again I had for over thirty years. I wonder how long before Larkin is ‘Decolonized’ from the local university stacks which considering his lifetime devotion to maintaining library collections is beyond sad.

The last great White Elephant

January 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

In 1986 or thereabout I bought the Carver stories above from a shop in Plymouth whilst visiting my sister. It was the start of my obsession with all things ‘Americana’. I moved on via Granta’s Dirty Realism collection to a whole series of American authors including Lorrie Moore, Bobbie Anne Mason and then backwards towards the Deep South ( a title of a Paul Binding book I still own). Along the way stopping off in a whole number of places revealed to me by these authors. My mental map of USA is formed by them as I have only actually been there once for three days for a conference in New York City.

The subject in a lot of cases were outsiders, renegades..working class trailer trash. The characters who in the last few days have stepped out of ‘wilderness’ America and into all our front rooms as led on by the new Barnum they tried to occupy the centre-ground. The warriors of the marginalised wilds.

Trump’s misguided revolution is a drive-by shooting or a mall massacre on a huge scale. Every misfit and shamen of the dispossessed risen up like a biblical flood not forgetting the Jim Crow preachers and snake oil hucksters and medicin men waiting to profit from the carnage.

Watching this unfold like a sequal to a new series of Justified complete with guns, white supremacists and jingoistic cops leaves a hollow feeling…..

Art imitating life or the other way round?

The American Dream seems somehow tawdry and washed out right now….the idolisation of small town freaks and clowns somehow deeply compromised by their depiction.

There are many predictions of further unrest but frankly a United States Marine against spear carrying shaman is fanciful…..armed highly organised militia with military background far more realistic. Hopefully the above the sideshow to Barnum T’s assault on democracy but who knows what tigers he has in his circus cages or skeletons in the Pentagon…..the next few days will tell.

Hopefully it will be Trump’s Skeleton history stands in line to see not democracy’s….

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