Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

If that is how the big firms of today treat their distinguished staff, how interested do you think they are in the career of an unpublished writer such as yourself?

Even their published writers get what might politely be called the dirty end of the stick. Consider the fate of science-fiction writer Mary Doria Russell. Mary began to be published by Random House in 1996. She did five novels with them, winning an Arthur C. Clarke award and an ALA Readers Choice award. Entertainment Weekly chose her book The Sparrow as one of the ten best books of the year.

Just as her new novel Doc was released in 2011, Mary received word that Random House was not interested in any more books from her.

There had been no previous indication that this decision was forthcoming.

Fortunately, Doc was well reviewed and was chosen as one of the Washington Post’s top five novels of 2011. Now she is published by an imprint of HarperCollins. So all’s well – after a fashion. But after the Random House experience it took her, she says, about three months to breathe right. ‘I’d been so happy there. The sales people were great with me. But there was a lot of churning with editors. I’d had nine editors for my five novels.’ And what a lot of fun that must have been.

Moral of all this: In today’s world of the Big Five (or the Big One and four others, as some people think of it – it’s no good being a distinguished practitioner in a small-selling niche genre. Today you have to deliver blockbusters, on which everything depends, or else you’re out on your ear.

Mary Doria Russell has a web site with an ‘advice for aspiring authors’ section. It is essential reading for anyone reading this book.

And then there are those sneaky clauses in the big firm’s contract that you haven’t really noticed. In the very week that I wrote this section, a traditionally published author wrote a blog post under the title ‘Honesty post: an average traditionally published author’s pay.’

In this post, the author set out the full details of what she had earned over the previous three years with HarperCollins.

Within four hours, this post was taken down. Publishers, you see, don’t like it when an author reveals how pitifully small their earnings often are. It upsets the suckers who might otherwise offer them books.

The author later revealed that she had to take the post down for ‘contract disclosure reasons’.

Some publishers (probably all, come to think of it), insert a non-disclosure agreement into their contract. They don’t want authors talking about the money.

By 2000, the old publishing system was pretty much broke(n) anyway, and writers were not happy about it.

Luke Johnson, a former Chairman of Channel 4 television in the UK, had previously been a publisher. He described his time in that job as ‘a painful experience.’ Generally, he said, publishing is a ‘terrible business… a barely rational industry.’ And he was dead right, of course.

Across the Atlantic, experienced writers were feeling distinctly unhappy with the results of publishing’s travails over the previous decades. Warren Murphy, a well-known American writer who had written dozens of books and had won two Edgars (crime fiction’s Oscars), described how he had yet to be paid for his latest book (which was then in the shops). ‘In the old world of publishing,’ said Murphy, ‘writers always come last.’ And he wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about getting paid.

Murphy went on to forecast the death of publishing, as currently constituted. ‘Editors who can’t edit... bookkeeping practices that would befuddle Stephen Hawking... an industry whose business practices were old a hundred years ago and dumb even earlier than that.’

And it wasn’t just the commercially minded writers who were fed up. In 2001 V.S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But a few years earlier he has given an interview in which he said, ‘My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world, is an extraordinarily shoddy, dirty, dingy world. There are probably only three or four publishers in London that one has any regard for. The others have the morality and the culture of barrow boys – street sellers, people pushing rotten apples.’

But, round about the end of the twentieth century, change was in the air. Whether publishers knew it or not it, change was rolling inexorably along.

2.6.3 Two aspects of the coming change

In late 1999, publishing stood on the edge of two revolutions. Both of them were essentially technological.

On the one hand, it was readily apparent, at least to anyone who was paying any serious attention, that a major change in printing technology, as opposed to, say, book distribution and retailing, was already under way.

Printing had remained more or less the same process since Gutenberg in 1450. In 1810, the use of steam to power the presses had been introduced; ;this enabled them to work much faster and thus reduce costs. But since then, nothing new. Type was still set in lead, and after the first edition of the book was printed you still had to decide whether to store the trays of lead (expensive), or to allow the metal to be melted down.

But now… In the late 1990s, a technique known as Print on Demand (POD) was already widely available, and about to become more so.

POD was a computer-based technique. Text was entered on to a computer’s hard drive, along with a thousand or two other books, and when you wanted a copy – yes, even a single copy – you just pressed a key and a glorified Xerox machine printed one off for you.

Time: about fifteen minutes.

Result: massive reduction in printing costs. Less investment required, less risk. For a book which needed a first printing of a million copies in paperback, the old way of printing was still cheaper; but the approach of massive change was nevertheless readily apparent.

Apparent, that is, and as I said earlier, to anyone who was paying attention. Most people in publishing weren’t doing that. And even if they sensed the coming of change they were determined to prevent it.

Around the turn of the century, Jason Epstein wrote a book entitled Book Business ; it was published 2001 in the US. This book was an examination of present practice in publishing, and a far-sighted glimpse into the future. Epstein was unusually well qualified to write such a book, because he had been editorial director of Random House, in New York, for forty years.

It was also around the turn of the century that I myself, in England, was setting up small company of my own, mainly to publish my own books, under a variety of pen-names; I intended to take full advantage of the new POD technology. This project involved me talking to wholesalers, printers, booksellers, other publishers, library staff, and, not least, readers. Wherever I went I asked as many people as I could whether they had read Epstein’s Book Business. I never found anyone who had.

This did not surprise me, because by then I had concluded that the people who worked in the book business were, as individuals, a pleasure to know, people whom you would welcome as neighbours, and perhaps even as suitors for your daughter’s hand. But as professionals, profit-makers, long-term business strategists – absolutely hopeless. Clueless beyond redemption.

Even when his book was published, Epstein had already concluded that successful writers didn’t need publishers at all. People like Stephen King and Danielle Steel, with massively successful track records, could quite easily have cut free from agents and publishers, and could have bought in such talent as they needed, in terms of editors, book designers, printers, book distributors, and so forth. By doing so they would probably have earned a great deal more at the end of the day. In practice, however, at that stage, they all chose to continue doing things the old way – but that was presumably because it suited their convenience to do so. (Either that or they weren’t paying any attention either.)