GETTING
IN PRINT - the need, the sweat, and just a little luck
Staple
Magazine, 2008
Getting
in print is damn hard these days, and you’re always going to need a little
luck! If you’re not a celebrity – and preferably one that is a chef,
model, singer, footballer, media pundit or talent show judge – then chances
are you’re going to struggle. And even if you do manage to – to
get an agent and convince a publisher to take a punt – you’ve next
got to battle it out on the high street, a ruthless place where publishers and
retailers increasingly tend to bet on just a few books.
Each store only has so much shelf space, and unless your book is going to be
a bestseller it is, quite literally, a waste of space. Added to this, your publisher
is not going to throw money at it and invest in a substantial consumer marketing
campaign unless it has the full support of the retailers: it makes little sense
to invest in media when the book isn’t available anywhere.
Thus, if you’re not already a big name author (someone who’s been
churning out the same old stuff for yonks); not a likely top thirty title (your
media profile is in the ascendancy because you’ve started fucking someone
famous – it all helps, let us not forget!); not one of Richard & Judy’s
chosen few (the two of them might as well call themselves 'God', they have so
much influence on the UK book trade now); and not a recent prize winner (or
at the very least a shortlist nominee) – well then, to be honest, you
don’t stand much of a chance.
What will happen to your book, then? Well, a few bookshops around the country
will each take a couple of copies and plonk them in range (the A-Z part of the
store, now always found at the back, a dimly lit place where no one ventures
any more – for the modern consumer is only interested in what is front
of store, where he or she will find the titles that are hot, in the chart and
must-have), and then these few copies will most likely be returned to the publisher
a few months later (the business is S.O.R., sale or return), once they have
started accumulating dust on the shelf, with a small note from the bookseller
to your publisher stating, 'We tried, sorry', or something equally patronising.
I sound jaded, and well, that’s because I am, but not by writing
but by the market. The former I care deeply for. Call me an idealist,
but I believe in books, their capacity to affect, to inspire, to transform.
But I do not believe in the demands of a market which is driven solely
by profit and demand, and hence has no place for the difficult, the challenging,
the obscure. 'If this writer will not appeal to the majority of our customers,
then there is no place for him or her in our store,' so goes the logic
of the savvy bookseller.
Savvy this might be, but not wise (at least in the metaphysical sense), and
hardly conducive to a culturally rich society – there is only so much
that the aforementioned celebrity authors can offer us. This is why the many
other books, and there are many, though they might only appeal to a small number,
a minority, must still be afforded the space in the marketplace and not simply
ruled out because they’re not mass market, not going to make a load of
moolah.
Faced with such a profit-driven market – obsessed with the wants of the
majority, a popular mass that it must perpetually mould, manipulate and cater
for – if you’re going to write you’ve got to really want,
perhaps really need, to write, and it was when I submitted an early draft of
my first novel, Love and Mayhem, to The Literary Consultancy a number
of years ago that I realised this.
The reader and editor I was assigned, Ashley Stokes, was tough on my manuscript.
In short, he judged it to be painfully austere, self-indulgent, repetitive and
verbose, with few commercial prospects – all the hallmarks of a first
novel, in fact. I was angry, less with Ashley and more with myself. 'I am putting
in all this damn work, and for what?!' I asked myself. 'I have spent years on
something which might never see the light of day, and if it does, well it will
hardly pay the mortgage. Why should I heed his editorial advice? And why should
I work at yet another draft? What’s the point?!' I was becoming increasingly
gloomy and apathetic.
But then it hit me. Because I want and need to write, that is it. And because
of this, then surely the best thing I can do is take instruction, learn the
craft, graft and sweat at it, and, ultimately, produce good work. If I feel
this desire, and it is this demanding, this insistent, then I might as well
strive to accommodate it, to fulfill it (I sure as hell can’t ignore it!).
For this is what it is about, when it really comes down to it.
Writing is not about possessing a perfect understanding of the marketplace in
order that I might pen the definitive mass market paperback (though this would
of course be nice); it is not about winning a big literary prize and consequently
becoming a 'great author' (it was Anne Enright, this year’s winner of
the Booker, who remarked, rather wonderfully, on BBC Radio Four’s Today
Programme that she, or any other writer for that matter, 'would be mad' to take
any literary award that seriously); and it is not about selling as many books
as possible so that I can lead a lavish lifestyle, indulge myself and make it
nigh impossible for any of my contemporaries to judge me as anything other than
a 'winner!' (though I would no doubt revel in it, a little, if I were).
No, rather, it is simply about meeting and honouring this need I have to do
it, to write, and finding fulfillment and contentment in this, and if a few
people along the way take note and get something from what I’ve written,
then all the better.