mtn_magpie writes:
"www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,935460,00.h tml"

This man is called Matthew Branton and he wants to give you a present. It's the previous two years of his life: two years spent honing and crafting and agonising over his latest novel, The Tie and The Crest, the story of a poor little rich girl and 'the best thing I've ever done'. For his previous four (The Love Parade, The House of Whacks, Coast, and The Hired Gun), Matthew averaged about £50,000 a book, and every one was optioned for a film.

Cool, clever, with a sizeable following for his witty, zippy, modern writing ('both wise and cracking,' said Esquire), Matthew is shaped like a publisher's dream. The Tie and The Crest was all set to be his proper 'breakthrough' book. But - to Bloomsbury's immense chagrin - he's decided to give it away for free. You can download it from his website, www.matthewbranton.com. I've read it. It's great.

This isn't a stunt, by the way: Matthew really could be getting big money for this book, and he really has decided not to. It's a first, as far as I know. Stephen King's much publicised serial story on the net, The Plant, asked readers for money (about half paid); even if they hadn't, the most popular writer in the world could afford to skip a pay cheque for a cute marketing exercise. Matthew's cash rejection isn't a scam, it's political: a one-man protest against the publishing industry. Sophie Dahl's novelette was the straw that broke Matthew's back. 'I don't want their stupid money until the industry is less stupid,' he says. 'Culture is important; it affects how people think of themselves, the world, their place in it, and the publishing industry in this country is now a joke that's gone too far.'

Actually, he didn't say that to me, he wrote it. Matthew used to be a man about London: I'd spot him out, but we never spoke. Not until he sent me an email - a 'batsignal', he called it - about two months ago. We had a small virtual argument when I questioned his motives for his internet gift. Matthew is a passionate man, 'serious, however cringemaking that sounds'.

Born in Kent in 1968, he was the first Branton to go on to further education, at Sheffield Poly in his mid-twenties, working three jobs to fund his studies and still racking up a £15,000 debt. He worked in publishing, travelled America, got diphtheria... Eventually, after a couple of years in London, he moved to Hawaii, in 2000.

Now, he lives on its northern point, with his wife, Julie Stone, a political science academic doing unfunded research. 'We're living off air,' asserts Matthew: they both surf, and they fish and grow their own vegetables. Julie sews Hawaiian pyjamas (she's from a family of tailors), otherwise, what with Matthew's student debt, and, now, his The Tie and The Crest internet gift, air seems to be about what they can afford. So, to save on phone bills, this interview was done via email.

MS: Why are you giving away your work?

MB:The deal in British publishing is supposed to be that the crap is published and put up with because it funds the good stuff. I'm afraid that I have to ask, where is the good stuff? To quote the Manics: 'Libraries gave us power.' Not any more they don't. They're stuffed full of Sophie Dahl and Naomi Campbell's novels, along with Tony Parsons's drivel, a gang of floppy-fringed public schoolboys and their precious pointless literary fictions, a few failed PR girls and all the rest of the cobblers that passes for a publishing culture these days.

MS: What do you think your action will achieve?

MB: Probably nothing. I'm not making any great claims for me or for my work, I'm just saying that against the tidal wave of cobblers, here is one small, good thing that I'm not even asking you to part with money for. Every other writer rewards their readers by charging £25 for a hardback at this stage of their career. I reward mine by giving them my fifth novel for free, because the fact that I have readers is the only thing giving me hope for this world.

MS: Explain your take on British culture.

MB: The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as 'better living': young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let's-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn't make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they're all in Ibiza. No. We're in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don't hear about us because really, why should we tell you?

MS: So, you think that there are many people who feel like you do, and strongly enough to do something about their lives?

MB: Yeah, I really do. We just need some kind of place where people who are getting fed up with the way things are going in this country can come together. And that includes not just everyone who skates, everyone who surfs, anyone who was ever a punk or a crusty and meant it; I think it also includes anyone who went on the veal protests or laid flowers outside Kensington Palace or went on the march against this stinking war. All of these are to my mind little gestures of protest, of saying 'You're not having all of me' while simultaneously expressing a kind of mourning that things are not as we know they should be. Yes, I probably can't make any difference on my own. But I refer you to David Lynch's The Straight Story - take one stick, and anyone can break it over their knee. Take 20 sticks, and it's going to hurt them if they try.