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

Trend (ii): Paperbacks became a vital factor in the incomes of publishers and individual writers.

As mentioned above, the Englishman Allen Lane created his Penguin line of paperbacks in 1936, but it was not until about 1950 that the sale of paperbacks really took off. And the most dramatic developments were in the US.

At first, paperbacks were limited to reprints of books which had already been a success in hardback. But, before long, some enterprising businessmen, particularly in the US, began to market paperback originals. What is more, these new books were sold outside the usual trade channels: they were distributed to petrol stations, news stands, and supermarkets.

These paperback originals were frequently aimed at the bottom end of the market, intellectually and socially speaking, and they were initially despised and feared by old-fashioned ‘respectable’ publishers. LeBaron R. Baker, of Doubleday, once claimed that paperbacks would ‘undermine the whole structure of publishing.’

This remark was nothing less than the truth, of course, but the way in which it was said illustrates rather nicely the mindset of publishers at the time. Such men (and they usually were men) were not looking for fresh markets, new readers, and new ways to make a profit. Far from it. They were happy with the old way of doing things, didn’t want it changed, and resented the vulgar upstarts who were taking books into places where they didn’t belong. This attitude persists to the present day, and it is as good a recipe for commercial disaster as could be devised.

At first, the new paperback publishers and the traditional book publishers were separate companies. And since the new guys were very keen to obtain the paperback rights to established big sellers, there was a brief period when traditional book publishers and their more successful authors were the beneficiaries of bidding wars.

In 1968, for example, Fawcett paid $410,000 for the paperback rights to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather . A decade later, in 1979, Bantam paid $3,200,000 for Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy.

This last payment seems to have been something of a turning point. It finally dawned on the old-time publishers that, although they were doing pretty well out of these crude and vulgar new boys, they might do even better if they owned the paperback company outright.

From then on the thinking was that it was better for a publishing house to be ‘vertically organised’, i.e. to have its own in-house paperback division, rather than be ‘horizontally organised’, which allowed entirely separate firms to buy the paperback rights and take the full profit on paperback sales.

Today it is only the smaller fiction-publishing houses which would even think of selling paperback rights to some other company.

Trend (iii): Literary agents increased in number and influence.

By the time I began my own writing career, round about 1960, the existence of literary agents was widely known, but it was certainly still possible to submit a manuscript to a publisher yourself. Most of my books were sold through agents, but at least twice I did the job without help.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to discuss how publishers find the books which they eventually sell to the public (via the booksellers, of course).

I have previously written at length about the book-selection process in publishing houses, and you can find a full description of it in Chapter 2 of my book The Truth about Writing (available as a Kindle ebook). Suffice it to say that, in the case of books submitted to publishers by their authors, the initial reading of manuscripts has always been conducted in just about as inefficient a way as could possibly be devised.

Numerous accounts have been written, by those who have done the job, of what typically happens to unsolicited manuscripts (the so-called slush pile). These eye-witness accounts do not make encouraging reading. Giles Gordon, for example, once stated that when he was the slush-pile reader at Gollancz, he learnt how to tell whether a manuscript was any good within 15 seconds. ‘It’s just a matter of practice,’ he said airily.

As the twentieth century moved towards its end, the bigger publishers lost whatever faith they might have had in the judgement of their own staff, and decided, in effect, to delegate to others the separation of the possibly publishable from the oh-my-god. Hence the increase in the number and influence of literary agents.

The current position (2014) is that very few publishers of fiction will consider an unpublished novel unless it is submitted through an established agent. So when a novel or non-fiction book is complete, the writer’s task becomes one of finding an agent, rather than a publisher – at least as a first step.

But don’t imagine that this task is an easy one either. Barry Turner, writing in The Writer’s Handbook , once mentioned an agent who, in 14 years of reading 25-30 manuscripts a month, found 5 good ones. Another agent, at Curtis Brown, personally received 1,200 manuscripts in one year, and took on just two of the authors as clients.

Traditionally, a literary agent was rewarded by being paid 10 per cent of any contract which the agent negotiated on the writer’s behalf. But today you are much more likely to have to part with 15 per cent.

I have often remarked that being an agent is the toughest job of all in the book business, and my opinion has not changed. At the risk of being described as cynical, bitter and twisted (again), let me advise you to treat your agent (if you ever find one) as someone who is first and foremost a business person. In particular, exercise great caution if asked to sign a contract with an agent. Time was when we were all gentlemen in the publishing world, and a handshake between author and agent was enough. The parting of the ways, if either party felt it necessary, was effected in a well mannered way. But those days are gone. A literary agent is not your friend: he or she is someone you do business with.

Trend (iv): For the last fifty years, amalgamation cum conglomeration has been the name of the game.

Conglomeration means that big publishers take over small publishers, and if the original small publisher’s name survives at all, it does so as a sub-division, or marketing label, within the big publisher.

This process of big eating small has been widespread wherever publishers are found, and certainly so on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1950 there were about 30 or 40 publishers of fiction in the UK. These ranged from firms which were small and unheard of by anyone, to major firms which were well known in the book trade if not to the general public. Over the next fifty years many of these small companies were swallowed up into bigger ones, and hence into even bigger ones, so that by the end of the century there were, both in the US and UK, only about six really powerful trade-publishing firms.

Let’s consider a few examples of how this amalgamation process worked. We’ll begin with the small English firm of Frederick Muller.

The British Library records 354 books published by Frederick Muller, the first being in 1932. In the 1950s, Muller must have been quite a successful company, because it published the UK edition of Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, a book which was a big seller in the US on account of its ‘racy’ content. By today’s standards it was about as racy as a well controlled church picnic, but you get the idea.

I had a book published by Muller myself, in 1980: Counter-coup , written under the pen-name Michael Bradford. By that time the company was clearly in some difficulty. I visited the office at one point, and was somewhat shocked by the cramped conditions in which the staff worked. The firm’s HQ was not in a venerable Georgian building in a fashionable part of London; it was out in an industrial area in north London, and the staff seemed to be housed in former sheds.