PD Smith

Writing a book is a solitary process. For months and often years, the book only exists in the writer's mind. Sometimes, as you write, that book can seem like a mirage on the horizon, its form shimmering and changing before your eyes. Believe me, it's disconcerting. But you press on.

Over time, as the words flow and the pages increase, the book takes shape and becomes more substantial, more real. But for me the book doesn't really come alive until it has a cover. I've been working on my current book - a history of cities - for about three years now. It's more or less written, although there are still a few straggling, wayward sections to finish.

And now it has a cover. My editor at Bloomsbury Publishing emailed it to me a day or so ago. I'm very pleased with it. In fact, I think it's rather wonderful.

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As part of my research on cities I've been reading Restless Cities, edited by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart, just published by Verso. It's a wonderful series of meditations on the experience of the city that communicates "a sense of the metropolis as a site of endless making and unmaking". Contributors include Chris Petit, Marshall Berman, Patrick Keiller, Geoff Dyer, Michael Newton, and Iain Sinclair.

Michael Sheringham's piece on "Archiving" was immensely rich and suggestive in its exploration of the city as a repository of memories, as "layer upon layer of compacted material detail". I was particularly struck by his idea that as well as the written history of a city, there is a unique and personal history experienced by each inhabitant - the Tube station where you met your lover on the first date, the street where a grandparent used to live, the anonymous office block where you used to work. The city's street corners are dense with histories both written and unwritten. The city, says Sheringham, is "a memory machine."

It reminded me of Calvino's beautiful fantasy, Invisible Cities, in which he says that a city’s past is written into its fabric like the lines on a labourer’s hand, “in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

You can read my review of Restless Cities on the Guardian's website.

Twitter is great fun. Yes, it can be distracting, as many writers have complained. But hey, so is life!

Twitter is also very useful. I've made contact with many people who share my fascination with the subject I'm researching for my next book - the history and future of cities. I've listed nearly a hundred of these people here. I recommend them - they're well worth following.

It looks like some people have found my tweets useful too: the other day the cultural news website Flavorwire included me on a list of the "10 Book Types You Should Follow on Twitter". Quite an honour when you think it includes people like Sarah Weinman (@sarahw), Ron Charles(@roncharles), the Washington Post’s fiction editor, as well as book website The Millions (@The_Millions).

Oh, and by the way - I have my own list of book people to follow on Twitter here. So what are you waiting for?

An interesting discussion developed the other day on Twitter about the idea of "crowdfunding" books - asking people for donations to fund the author while writing a book. Simon Sellars (@ballardian) started the ball rolling, sending me a link to Deanna Zandt's blog in which she asks for donations.

I have to say I was initially sceptical, not to say cynical, about the whole idea. As Will Wiles (@WillWiles) said, it seemed a bit too much like "panhandling". Science fiction author Tim Maughan (@timmaughan) was similarly negative about the idea. 

But having thought about this and listened to Deanna's side of things I see that it certainly can work. Although, as she says, it clearly works best if you are talking to a community that is open to this approach. I'm not sure it would work for the kind of cultural history books I write, for example.

Tim Maly (@doingitwrong), co-founder of Capybara Games, pointed out the advantages of this way of funding books and other artistic projects. As he said, if it works for Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) at Kickstarter, why shouldn't it work for other authors?

Anyway, it's an interesting debate and Tim Maly has collated the various comments from people and written a fascinating blog on the issues it raises which is well worth reading.

Michelle Pauli (@michellepauli) at the Guardian has also written a rather more sceptical piece highlighting the ethical problems involved. For example, she points out that "as [Deanna Zandt] is writing about social networking it might be relevant to the reader to know if, for example, the MD of Facebook has contributed a large sum to the writing of her book".

One nagging fear I have about crowdfunding is that if it catches on then publishers may stop paying advances altogether. Authors are already having to make do with much lower advances. And today I see in The Bookseller that an agent has struck a deal where there is no advance and the profits are split between author and publisher.

Perhaps the new age of the eBook will change things, allowing authors to reach untapped audiences and making writing more rewarding. I hope so. If not then crowdfunding books may well be the only option for some authors.

My review of Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson, is in today's Independent. It's a wonderfully eclectic collection of specially commissioned essays celebrating the 350th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society. Among the authors are scientists (Dawkins, Steve Jones etc), historians (Simon Schaffer) and novelists (Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson). It's also beautifully illustrated with images from the Royal Society's collection. I was particularly struck by a reproduction of the title page of Einstein's 1917 popularization of relativity, On the Special and General Theory of Relativity. It is signed by Einstein who had sent it to his friend, the Berlin physician Hans Mühsam. On it, Mühsam has written (in German):

"This copy is the first one which left the printer. It was sent to me by Prof Einstein the moment he had received it, and shortly before I went to France with the army. Hans Mühsam, Berlin, at present at the French Front, April 1917."

The idea of Mühsam taking this copy of Einstein's book with him to the hell of the trenches in the First World War is deeply moving. It speaks volumes about the power of scientific ideas.

You can see the title page of Einstein's book here and read my review here.