WANT to write a bestseller? If so, there are a few methods of going about it. You can do it the Joan Collins way by expecting publishers to do quite a bit of the work for you - turning your sentences into basic English, that kind of thing. The snag here is that to have any chance of succeeding, you have to be already famous for something else (acting, importing cocaine, mass murder) if publishers are to be bothered slaving over your awful prose.
Or you could go to Malcolm Bradbury's creative writing classes at the University of East Anglia - almost all of his graduates have become successful authors. The snag here is that everyone in the world is by now aware of this, and thus places in Malcolm's class are hard to come by.
Or you could read a how to book. There are quite a few of these, including Al Zuckerman's Writing the Blockbuster Novel (Little, Brown) and Sarah Harrison's How to Write a Blockbuster (Allison & Busby). And now there's Celia Brayfield's Bestseller: Secrets of Successful Writing (Fourth Estate), which has the virtue of being written by someone who has come up with a few bestsellers herself (if Mr Zuckerman has done likewise, he has kept very quiet about it).
Ms Brayfield started out as a journalist working in film and television, and she believes that these media offer valuable skills for anyone wanting to write a bestseller: "I do think that it's more helpful to think of the form of the bestseller in dramatic rather than literary terms, she sagely declares." Quite so, as Jeffrey Archer will tell you, but hardly a shattering insight.
Neither is her insistence that the writer should be in touch with what the market wants. And I really don't know how you can benefit from some of her other insights, such as her revelations that most people read for no longer than a half hour at a time, that almost everyone reads while they're in bed, and that many read while in the bath or watching television. Well, I did hear that some people have sex while watching TV, but reading? Is nothing sacred?
SPEAKING of bestsellers, brace yourself for the British publication of Patricia Scanlan's Finishing Touches, which will be brought out by Bantam in May her first title with the Transworld conglomerate (her new one, Promises. Promises, will be published in hardback by Poolbeg in the autumn, and by Bantam the following spring). Full page ads in British women's magazines are due to give her that extra push in the UK market. Poolbeg must be very proud of her seemingly unstoppable success.
And speaking of Ms Collins. Orion are shamelessly cashing in on her recent court case publicity by bringing forward the paperback release date of her, er, novel, Too Damn Famous. This was to have come out in June, but it's in the shops as you read this. Meanwhile, the busy Ms Collins is polishing off a volume of memoirs called Second Act, which no doubt will be full of insights into her battle against Random House. Boxtree will be bringing it out in September and they're already calling it "the publishing event of the year". Well, they would, but spare a thought for the poor Boxtree editors.
THE Bookseller requested the "top April tips" from various bookshop proprietors around Britain, and three have nominated Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors,": which is being published next Tuesday. David Wilkerson of Heffers in Cambridge thinks it "possibly the most disturbing book I have ever read ... a most bleak and desolate tale". The blurb, he says, describes it as "lean and sexy, funny and poignant", and while he feels that it's certainly poignant, "crude, heart rending and frightening would seem a more accurate description."
However, Rob Cassy of Dillons in Gower Street thinks it "touching and funny" and "a significant development on Paddy, Clarke Ha Ha Ha." He'll be surprised "if it doesn't win an award or two". And Jane Shaw of Thin's in Edinburgh thinks that Doyle "makes an impressive attempt at writing from a woman's viewpoint".
I never cease to marvel at people's obsessions, including my own. Still, driving oneself demented for weeks on end in search fan elusive rhyme counts for nothing when contrasted with the task that John O'Byrne and Jerry Ring set for themselves.
They're the joint authors of In Other Words (Leopold Publishing, £4.99), and to make it a reality they had to come up with 600 anagrams celebrating "the historic links between Ireland and America". I don't know why they chose that as their theme, but the work involved must have been immense even though Mr O'Byrne boasts of specialising in word games and Mr Ring was simply "looking around for something to do". Well, he found it.
Actually, I'm a bit puzzled by the result. I thought the whole point of an anagram was that it should offer an appropriate - and usually satirical - comment on the person whose name is being jumbled about, but most of the anagrams here seem to bear no relation whatsoever to their subject. Or am I missing something when (taking just some of the literary anagrams) I come across Roddy Doyle (Do ode dryly), Ulick O Connor (Or unlock icon), Ezra Pound (Azure pond), As I Lay Dying (Idle gainsay) and The Great Gatsby (Three batty gags)?
Still, I suppose, as Dr Johnson said about dogs walking on their hind legs what's, worthy of amazement is not that Messrs O'Byrne and Ring do it well, but that they can do it at all. Odd, though, that they never attempted an anagram of AE.