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

These theological texts, written in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek, cannot have sold in large numbers and were presumably subsidised by the Church or by universities.

By contrast, some more commercial texts were small – five inches by three perhaps – in order to reduce costs and keep the price down.

In 1667, for example, one enterprising printer produced a small book entitled The City and Country Builder. This contained plans for building and rebuilding after the Great Fire of London (1666); it might well have benefited from a larger format, but the publisher evidently thought that a quick and cheap introduction to the subject would sell better.

It may well be that a book such as The City and Country Builder was commissioned by a printer after he had come up with the idea himself; or perhaps an enterprising journalist suggested the idea to the printer. We don’t know. But in 1650, in England, a certain Dr Walton (later Bishop Walton) came up with a fresh idea for financing a major printing project.

Walton wished to print a scholarly version of the Bible. Given that there was much discussion in those days about the true word of God, Walton proposed to scour the great libraries of the world. His plan was to locate the earliest possible versions of the various books of the Bible, in whatever language he and his fifteen associates could find. The results of these searches were then to be printed in such a way as to allow comparisons of the text to be easily made, side by side on the same page. The resulting work is known as the Polyglot Bible.

Between 1653 and 1657 Walton and his team published their Bible in six volumes. Each page, which is about sixteen inches by eleven, contains the same short passage of the Bible in up to nine different languages.

Several of the middle-eastern languages, such as Syriac, Arabic, and Persian, had never before been printed in England, and the typefaces had to be created from scratch. Given that the shapes of the letters in these languages are so extraordinarily intricate, and are printed in such small sizes (despite the size of the page), the Polyglot Bible was an extraordinary achievement.

Walton’s six-volume Polyglot Bible is one of the great triumphs of English printing. Though it is worth noting, perhaps, that English paper was not considered adequate to the task; after a false start, better supplies were brought in from France.

Dr Walton’s method of financing the operation is, however, what caused me to mention this work in the first place. Walton raised the money by inviting rich men to subscribe. A subscriber who provided £10 in advance of the work was guaranteed one copy of the finished set of volumes; £50 gave him the right to six copies.

This method of raising capital for a printing and publishing project was later used by Dr Johnson, for his Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. And interestingly enough, this kind of approach to financing a book project is beginning to find favour again, in the twenty-first century. It’s now known as crowdsourcing.

The eighteenth century saw the emergence of publishers as we now understand the term. Some well known publishing houses were established at that time, Longman (1724) being a case in point: Longman is now owned by Pearson plc, a huge modern conglomerate.

The eighteenth century also saw the emergence of the modern novel. Professors of English Literature keep themselves well employed by debating, in print, the precise details of the history of the novel, but a few facts will serve to make the point. Whatever definition you choose to apply to the term ‘novel’, it is certainly true that the latter part of the eighteenth century saw the publication of some famous works of fiction.

Here’s a short list: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1741), Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759); these are among the most famous. Neither must we forget, of course, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1766), a book which was, and perhaps still is in some quarters, considered blatantly pornographic.

2.4 The nineteenth century

It is reasonable to conclude, I think, that by 1800 the shape of publishing in our times had gradually begun to emerge.

In the first place, we now have recognisable writers of fiction. Second, we have recognisable publishers. These are individuals who find and sign up the authors (or select books from submitted works), commission the printers, and make arrangements for booksellers to sell the actual books.

We do not, as yet, have literary agents, who negotiate with publishers on behalf of writers (although there are occasionally fathers, brothers, and other advisers who write to publishers on behalf of female writers); and we do have some signs that the relationship between authors and publishers is not always going to be a comfortable one. Jane Austen, for example, one of the most famous writers of the early nineteenth century, reportedly sold an early book ( Northanger Abbey ) to a publisher, who did nothing with it for ten years, and then she bought it back again.

Consider too what a tedious and risky business even submitting a manuscript must have been in those days. An author would have to write the whole book out by hand – no typewriters in those days. She might, perhaps, have employed someone to copy the text for her. But then the pile of handwritten paper would have to be conveyed to the potential publisher. The mail services of the time cannot have been fast or reliable, and the whole process was fraught with risk. It’s a wonder anything ever got done.

Another important point which was well established by the early nineteenth century is that there was money in publishing (at least in those days; there’s not so much now, as we shall see).

Sir Walter Scott, while already famous as a novelist, was financially involved in a printing company which went bust. Scott could have declared himself bankrupt, or accepted the offers of rescue from his rich friends, but he made it a point of honour to pay off the debts through his writing; and, since his novels continued to prove very popular, he managed to do achieve his aim.

As the nineteenth century proceeded, the proportion of adults who could read steadily increased. And that is why writers some books, and even small pamphlets, were to sell in very large numbers.

In 1849, for example, a certain Frederick Manning and his wife Maria were put on trial for murder. The case was a sensational one, and their public execution attracted a huge crowd, the behaviour of which appalled and disgusted Charles Dickens, who wrote to The Times about it. One enterprising publisher issued a short but detailed pamphlet about this case; and although the publication was only 16 pages long, it is said by one modern authority to have sold 2.5 million copies.

Another significant development at this time was the introduction of lending libraries, which would rent out books for a much smaller fee than the cost of buying a copy. The two most famous of these libraries were run by a Mr Mudie and a Mr W.H. Smith. The latter’s name is still attached to a well established UK bookseller and stationer to this day.

Fiction was an almost unrivalled form of entertainment in the nineteenth century. There were certainly no cinemas, radio, or television. Fiction’s sole serious competitor was the theatre, which was to be found only in towns of some size. This made it possible for writers to earn very substantial sums of money.

It is at this point in history that the question of copyright becomes vitally important. Copyright is a legal concept, supported by most governments these days, which recognises that the creator of a story, or a fictional character (not to mention a photograph, a stage play, et cetera) deserves to have the exclusive rights to exploit that work, at least for a limited time. Publishers and others are normally obliged to respect copyright, subject to various penalties.