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

In the UK, copyright was certainly well understood by the 1660s. In 1663, the blind poet John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost to a printer for the sum of £10.

In the US, copyright was also understood, but often ignored, at least as far as English authors were concerned. In fact, US publishers largely ignored the copyright in English books throughout the nineteenth century. Macaulay’s history of England sold 400,000 copies in the US market, but the publisher sent him not a penny. Charles Dickens also suffered from piracy of his books, but took the trouble to travel to the US to complain in person.

If you want to read the best short summary of the purpose of copyright, and a sensible period of time for it to apply, read Macaulay’s 1841 speech to the House of Commons. You can find my own comments on Macaulay’s views in an essay entitled ‘Macaulay on copyright’ on the blog Grumpy Old Bookman, 6 February 2006.

2.5 The twentieth century

Allow me to remind you at this point that the only reason for this short historical survey of traditional publishing is to allow us to see how writers were enabled, over a period of some 560 years, to find a way to market their novels (and other books) to the general public.

In the beginning, before books of any kind existed, a story could only be told orally. The storyteller would stand in the light of the fire, no doubt after as good a meal as could be provided, and tell his story aloud. Very often he would use rhyming verse to make the task of remembering it easier.

Then came the development of parchment, and vellum, materials which could make a book fit to last for a thousand years; but the process of writing a book out by hand, one copy at a time, was slow, labour-intensive, and expensive.

The invention of printing, about 1450, marked the beginning of a revolution: it provided a huge reduction in cost and speed of reproduction. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, with faster machines and better quality paper, plus a hugely increased pool of customers – the result of compulsory schooling – the publishing business was well placed to become very prosperous indeed; and the authors, one might think, would become more prosperous than most of those involved in the book business.

But it didn’t quite work out that way.

2.5.1 The first part of the twentieth century

For convenience, let us divide the twentieth century into two parts: first the years prior to World War II, and then the rest of the century.

Prior to 1939, publishing trundled along fairly quietly. In the UK, something called the Net Book Agreement came into force on 1 January 1900; it remained in force for almost a hundred years.

This Agreement was a law which decreed that no one could sell a book at a price lower than that set by the publisher, though public libraries got a discount. This meant that publishing was as gentlemanly a trade as could possibly be imagined. There was no provision for cost-cutters; aggressive businessmen and deal-makers were considered unacceptably vulgar. Small but regular profits became the order of the day.

Literary agents had begun to make an appearance in the late nineteenth century, but there were still few of them. A.P. Watt was the first, in 1875, but there were few firms of any note before 1950. In theory, such agents would be men (mostly) who knew the book trade well (which most authors certainly did not). Agents would therefore be well placed to know what constituted fair remuneration for authors, and, since they often knew the publishers personally and dealt with them on a regular basis, they would be far better placed to negotiate a contract than would the author herself – the author sometimes being a distressingly naïve lady in the provinces. That, at least, was the theory, and as the twentieth century proceeded, agents became more and more influential.

Publishing at this time was a comparatively easy business to get into, as it required relatively little capital; hence, at any given time, there were quite a number of small firms. In England, a writer of fiction could probably find at least 30 possible markets for a novel, with not a lot to choose between them. And, given that it was very difficult for an outsider to find out anything whatever about any of these publishers, picking a firm to approach was often a matter of using a pin.

Paperbacks just about made an appearance in the 1930s, with the founding of Allen Lane’s Penguin imprint, but most books were hardbacks. Printing was done in the old way, with manuscripts (usually typewritten) being set in lead type and printed off in minimum runs of several hundreds – or preferably thousands. Indeed, given that the time spent setting up the machine determined most of the cost, most printers would not dirty their machine for a print run of less than 1000 copies. And these, of course had to be warehoused somewhere before (it was hoped) being shipped to booksellers.

In the first part of the twentieth century, as in every decade that we shall examine from here on, there emerged a number of ‘big name’ authors in the fiction-publishing business. These names divided into the literary and the commercial. And while it is not surprising how often the commercial names were forgotten within a few years (Baroness Orczy and Dornford Yates), it is also the case that many writers who then had a high literary reputation are also now ignored (Gertrude Stein, Edwin Arlington Robinson).

Publishing during this period can be well described by the phrase ‘an occupation for gentlemen’; indeed, when the British publisher Fredric Warburg came to write his autobiography, that was the title he gave it.

This phrase reflects an important truth about publishing. Outsiders, particularly young people who have developed a love of books, often mistake glamour and press coverage for commercial success and economic importance. But the fact is that publishing has always been a piddling little business, tiny in size when compared to any other serious business sector, and never an arena in which any decent money has been made – at least when compared with truly big business. The atmosphere in publishing was, and still is, entirely suitable for the unworldly souls who think that profits are of minor importance compared with the need to publish ‘good books’. Not only that, but the most valuable possession that a writer or a publisher can possess is a sizable private income. If you notice that your publisher is wearing a Bentley Drivers Club tie, it is probably not because he bought one with last year’s bonus. It’s because he has inherited money.

2.5.2 The second half of the twentieth century

In the second half of the twentieth century we begin to draw closer to modern times, and to conditions which existed well within the working lives of some of us.

The trends which emerged during this period can be summarised as follows:

Trend (i): Unpublished authors continued to be as ignorant of trade-publishing practices as they had been throughout history.

Unless they took the trouble to subscribe to book-trade journals, such as The Bookseller (UK) and Publishers Weekly (US), there was almost nowhere for authors to acquire any working knowledge of publishing practice. (The internet was decades away.) Subscriptions to these journals were surprisingly expensive (I should know – I was a regular reader of both for a couple of decades).

This ignorance of the trade’s conventions and dangers left the writers wide open to exploitation by the publishers. Who were not slow to use the opportunity. Exploitation is, of course, a harsh word, but that is what it amounted to, as serious examination of any standard publishing contract will reveal. A good agent could prevent that worst of such exploitation. However… it always has to be remembered that an agent has to deal with a publisher next week as well as this week. An agent cannot therefore expect to be too difficult to negotiate with and then be invited back when he next submits a book. The agent sometimes has to bend to the publisher’s wishes, rather than the authors. (Oh, what crude cynicism, I hear you cry. Damn right I’m cynical.)