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

I am an Englishman, and most of my experience has been in UK publishing. Many of the examples that I give will therefore be from an English context; but you can be quite certain that the rest of the world, particularly the USA, does not behave any differently.

All spelling follows English conventions: colour instead of color, for example.

I am not going to provide hyperlinks in the main body of this book. Instead, I am going to assume that you are quite capable of googling a name or a subject if you wish to know more about a person or subject that has been mentioned in the text. This not done to eat into your valuable writing time. It is done because, when you start googling a name or a subject, you may, serendipitously, come across something which is not only relevant and fascinating, but also so obscure that not even I know about it.

PART 2: TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING – A short history

2.1 Books before printing

Ten thousand years ago, there were only about three million human beings on the entire planet; most of them were hunter-gatherers, and none of them could read or write. Today there are seven billion of us, and, at least in the western world, we are nearly all reasonably literate. (But book-reading is still confined, as one person put it, to an effete elite. Most people don’t read books.)

When the first tribes of hunter-gatherers began to settle down in the Mediterranean Fertile Crescent, civilisation (as we like to call it) was able to make substantial progress. And something like a book was an invention which occurred about two thousand years ago.

Those who settled beside the Nile discovered a common marsh plant which we now call papyrus. The stems of this plant could be split open and spread out into flat sheets which could be joined together on the left-hand side. You could then write numbers or letters on this material.

The trouble with papyrus, however, was that if removed from the dry climate of Egypt and Greece it soon deteriorated; and it was not until the invention of parchment that a more durable writing surface was available.

Parchment was made from the treated skins of soft-skinned animals such as sheep. And the best parchment was made from the carefully prepared skins of young calves.

The earliest book which I have personally been able to handle and study closely dates from 1343. It is handwritten, and three different men worked on it; you can tell by the shape of the letters. The language of the book is Latin, and it is entitled Regimen Animarum , meaning The Guarding of Souls. This book is a priest’s manual – it tells him how to conduct the mass, how to take confession, and so forth. There are only three copies known to exist, all of them slightly different.

The Regimen Animarum is written in black ink on calf-skin vellum, and it’s still in pretty good shape, with crisp black print and all its pages complete. It probably took the three scribes a year to complete the text, and perhaps forty animals were slaughtered to provide the necessary vellum.

In short, the making of books, before the invention of printing, was an expensive and laborious business.

2.2 The invention of printing

By the middle of the fifteenth century, book production had reached a peak, because there were only so many animals available for parchment. (And not a lot of skilled calligraphers, either.) But paper saved the day.

Paper was an invention of Eastern cultures, where it had been used for centuries, but from the twelfth century onwards it spread into the west. At first, the raw material of paper was linen rags – it was only in the nineteenth century that wood pulp began to be used – and the manufacture of paper was complicated. But the raw material (linen) was surprisingly plentiful, and when printing was invented the production methods for paper rapidly improved.

Printing was not invented by scholars and gentlemen: it was invented by hard, practical men, often with little education but with a sharp eye for a quick buck. If you must have one name for the inventor of printing in Europe, that name is Gutenberg; and if you must have a precise date for the beginning of printing, 1450 is the best we can do.

If Gutenberg was the inventor of printing, he was also the first casualty of this new business, or art, or science. He died bankrupt and disappointed, thus demonstrating a vitally important point.

Gutenberg, and many others like him, had discovered the one unchangeable feature of the production and publication of books – it is a hard fact of life which has remained constant for over five hundred years.

The painful truth is this. It is one thing to write a book, though it takes a huge investment of time and labour. And it is another thing to print it; though that too requires ingenuity, persistence, and capital. But the real problem – the really tricky bit in the book business – is selling the books.

As we shall see shortly, almost every publisher, since the days of Gutenberg, has at one time or another seriously misjudged the potential market for a given book, and has ended the day with a warehouse full of unwanted goods. In England, not so many years ago, a firm known as Dorling Kindersley thought they had a little gold mine in the form of books linked to the Star Wars movies. Unfortunately they were wrong. They printed what proved to be 10 million copies too many, and the firm collapsed as a result. It was taken over by Pearson and became part of the Penguin Group.

In the early days, printing was a business which appealed to technology enthusiasts, and by 1500 they had seen to it that printing was well established, despite all the many problems associated with it.

In 1490, a wealthy young man by the name of Juliarius went on a visit to Venice. As he walked through the streets he was astonished to find the stalls of numerous booksellers, piled high with printed books. Several hours later, when his host came to look for him, Juliarius was still browsing, and was surround by piles of his purchases. He was perhaps the first serious book collector.

2.3 The first three hundred years

And so, by 1500, we were well embarked on the age of printed books.

Historians will tell you that there were no great technical advances in printing between 1500 and 1800. But there were certainly some important developments.

In the early days, there was hardly any such thing as a publisher. Yes, there were authors; and there were printers; and booksellers. But the printers and booksellers were often one and the same, the bookshop being just the front room of a house, opening on to the street, with a printing workshop in the back.

The financial arrangements between authors and these printer/booksellers were doubtless numerous, and varied according to circumstance.

It so happens that I work as a volunteer guide in a library which has an important collection of early books (including the Regimen Animarum referred to above), and the collection can provide some useful examples for me to refer to.

We know, from centuries-old bookseller catalogues, that many early books were immensely practical – how to treat a lame cow, for example. But such ‘books’ were often more in the nature of pamphlets, which hung on a peg in the barn for fifty years, until they eventually fell apart. The books which tend to have survived for hundreds of years are those which were long, scholarly, and expensively bound. These had longer working lives than the pamphlets, partly because they were well made, but also, I suspect, because they were seldom handled and read.

In a library containing many such books, you can see at a glance that many of them were large by modern standards. Some seventeenth-century volumes, containing the writings of the early church fathers, were made with pages some eighteen inches tall, 12 inches wide, and as much as a thousand pages thick. In some cases the covers were made of wooden boards! Just taking one of these books down from the shelf is a major effort.