Claire Smith’s* manuscript had been rejected by sixteen publishers and so, when one of them - a household name in the UK - rang her out of the blue to tell her they would be “delighted” to publish her “breathtaking” novel, she was over the moon. She immediately rang her boyfriend, Daniel, to give him the good news. "You've hit the big time now babe!" he exclaimed. For the next eight weeks she was on cloud nine.
Then the contract from the publisher landed on her doorstep (five weeks later than they said it would). Recognising the logo franked on the envelope, she ripped it open and read the covering letter on the kitchen table. “We are pleased to say that Robertson & Wilson* have decided to publish ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’*. It is an elegantly-written novel with the perfect blend of romance, suspense and drama,” it started off. The grin on her face was ever increasing in size. Until she read the contract.
“We expect the book to be published at some stage within the next couple of years… the initial print-run will be 1,000 copies … the advance Robertson & Wilson can offer is £500.”
Surely there was something wrong? Two years to get it published? A print run of a thousand books. An advance of five hundred pounds? Claire had written five novels over a period of seven years and none of them had been accepted by a publisher. She’d spent two years on ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’ alone. Surely the reward was not £500 for years of blood, sweat and tears, it must have been a misprint? Claire, a secretary at Sony Music, was aware that even third-ranking pop singers got advances of £100,000 plus. Whilst not expecting that kind of sum, she had at least hoped to receive more than a figure which would just about cover the price of a dozen meals in London. The smile quickly disappeared from her face.
Claire’s misconceptions about how the book publishing industry operated is all too common. Most people outside the book publishing industry have the idea that authors live a life of luxury, enjoying long lunches with publishers in restaurants known only to the most discerning gourmets, attending glittering book publishers, and being spoilt with enormous advances.
The reality is that, outside of the big dozen or so publishers who generate much of their income from publishing books by and about celebrities who have become well-known through other media, book publishing in the UK is in dire straits. Some of the publishing houses around today originally came into being in the 19th century and it shows. It is still very much a cottage industry, focused on employing people from the ‘right’ social backgrounds, specialising in outdated working practices, and, spectacularly successful in engendering failure. The journalist Asad Yawar has stated: "it is by quite a distance the most inefficient and ineffective commercial sector in the UK," and argued it would even give the notoriously inept public-sector British NHS a run for its money.
Look at the facts: British book publishers often pay authors £500 to £2000 for a book which may have taken several years to research and write while the average wage in the UK has rocketed to £400 a week; the bureaucracy and inefficiency is such that it often take two years to publish a book when full-colour glossy magazines can be printed and distributed in a day; and while competing medias such as television, newspapers and the internet consider audience-reaches of 500,000 to be failures, a novel which sells 5,000 copies will be hailed by the book publishing industry as an “outstanding success” and will have no problem entering the bestseller charts.
The music industry makes an interesting comparison. When launching an already known but newish group, around 60,000 records are cut, instead of 4,000 or less for books. While a record company will often spend £100,000 plus on promoting a new singer, the marketing budget a first-time author can expect for his book is no more than £1000 (sic.).
In an age where the market is ‘dumbing down’, books will obviously never have the same potential reach as music or films. But the blame must not be solely placed on the shoulders of a population which lacks the attention span to read pieces of text longer than a thousand words and prefers words to be surrounding by pictures. The excuses mooted by book publishers for the lack-lustre performance of their sector are a case of ‘buck-passing’. As every person raised in the capitalist tradition is fully aware “the customer is always right”. No, the reason quality book publishing is sinking into the annals of history is firmly, should be firmly placed on the shoulders of the people who run such unenterprising enterprises…
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* names and book titles have been changed to protect the author
