To some aspiring writers the book trade looks like a well-defended fortress, garrisoned by what appears (according to your temperament) to be a bunch of celebrity-hunting, money-grubbing clones, or thick-skinned, parasitical philistines. Hang around for - oh, all of ten seconds - on some of the writing forums, and you'd think that the garrison is run by a set of James Bond villains determined to destroy literary civilisation as we know it.
It is heartbreaking to send your work out and have it rejected without so much as a grade attached: even lazy and nasty teachers write C- before they throw it back at you. Giving your writing to any stranger to read is a bit like lying down in the road and offering the next passer-by a disembowelling knife. It can be even more heartbreaking to have it rejected with a comment like, 'I just didn't like your main characters enough,' because you love them to pieces, so how on earth are you going to fix that? And, yes, 'in the current climate' is an often-used way of making impersonal the all too personal statement that they don't want your book. Never mind that 'the current climate' can be the credit crunch, or can be the demise of family reading-aloud sessions, for which we should probably blame the Lumière brothers, though it's true that the economic bar is higher than ever: not for us Harriet Vane's 'reasonable' sales of 'two or three thousand'. It's not surprising that perfectly sane, practically-minded and sometimes excellent aspiring writers are routinely reduced to tears and throwing things, and that those who can't cope with the idea that their work isn't good enough for the book trade (which is related to but not the same thing as good enough for the cosmic literary pantheon) become convinced that it's a conspiracy against their work personally or Great Literature in general.
But the book trade isn't a fortress, and it isn't a garrison. It's much more blurrily-edged and unhomogeneous than that, which is both bad and good news. The bad news is that it's therefore very hard to know how to write a book they'll like, and pretty hit-and-miss whether you'll get any helpful feedback when you wave your work under their nose: it depends on how busy they are, and whether they're good at putting their editorial judgements into a form which gives you something to work from. The good news is that if it's really, really good, whatever it is, you've got a reasonable chance of finding someone, eventually, who'll love it. And the disconcerting news is that since the book trade doesn't have battlements, it also don't have much of a view: they don't actually know what they're looking for, only that they'll know it when they find it.
No, it's not that everything in the publishing garden is lovely. Hang around for - oh, all of ten seconds - at a gathering of published authors and you'll know that. In economic terms we are self-employed suppliers of product: there's no obligation on our buyers to go on buying, but we're very limited in where else we can look for other buyers. In metaphorical terms we're the animals in the zoo. The zoo industry wouldn't exist without us, and individual keepers get fond of individual animals and put in a lot of work to keep us healthy and appealing to the punters. But in the end, a tiger's a tiger, and if we get too difficult or expensive to keep, and they're offered another, any individual animal is dispensible.
But some of those individual keepers do know what it's like for the animals. A few examples:
- Nathan Bransford is one of many agents who understands how writers work. Here, for example, he talks about how the publishing industry's processes are a bad fit for ours, and how not to let that damage our work.
- I always remember saying to my own agent, when I was facing a big revision of A Secret Alchemy, 'I need to manage how I feel about this' and she said, 'Yes, that's terribly important'.
- US agent Janet Reid talking about the courage it takes to put your work out there (thanks to How Publishing Really Works for the link)
- Editorial Anonymous talks about when to do as your editor tells you, and when to realise s/he's being a jackass.
- I mentioned to my agent that as part of talking about my own work in my PhD, I was reading Barry Unsworth. 'Don't tell me,' she said. 'Knowing your work, it must be Stone Virgin?' She then summarised the plot and parallel structure, in detail, of a book which she published in 1985, which is still in print. Books as disposable product? I don't think so.
- Slushkiller goes to some trouble to deconstructs the slushpile and rejection letters. She knows we have our hearts stapled to the pages
- Miss Snark, still the greatest even in the dark, spent enormous amounts of time (a commodity with which agents are usually not usually well-supplied) blogging to correcting misinformation and bad advice, not to mention misconceptions and conspiracy-theories. Yes, she was snarky sometimes, though very, very funny (maybe it's the New York part of my childhood which means I enjoyed it) but not on the whole to the young and innocent, but only to the ones who don't think the rules apply to them.
- And, if you'll forgive the boasting, a publishing friend has just texted from the Frankfurt Book Fair. Apparently A Secret Alchemy is 'all over' Headline's stand. Now for all I know that means that as she whizzed past (with a ghastly sandwich in one hand and her list of half-hour appointments in the other, having just dropped her map of the couple of floors in Hall 8 where the UK publishers hang out) she spotted an edge of the single bound proof peeking out between Jackie Stewart's autobiography and the latest Penny Vincenzi. Yet it's not the latest 80s-style recession-proof bonkbuster, or a celebrity memoir, or a children's book 'written' by a great footballer, or one of the misery memoirs that used to sell by the truckload, or chick-lit in its perennially postponed demise, or a bosom-heaving regency romance. I'm not a brand or a high-profile prize-winner. A Secret Alchemy is a complex parallel narrative about, among other things, surrogate fathers, widowhood, unrequited love, storytelling, arranged marriages and whether you can and should try to recreate the past. By implication, it's a novel about whether and how it, itself, should be written. Even the infamous murder is... well, you'll have to buy the book. It won't be me or my two novels that save publishing from the barbarians at the gate, or stave off The End of Publishing As We Know It (thanks to Nathan B. again for the link). But Headline - even Headline Review - are an avowedly, nakedly commercial publisher, and if they think a book like that is worth its space on their stand at the biggest book fair in the world, I guess we've all got a while.
