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

Muller at that time was owned by the UK television company HTV. But HTV never managed to make a success of it, and Muller ran up debts. There was a man called Antony White associated with the company, and in the 1980s he bought the business for a nominal £1. He was obliged, however, to take on the company’s debt, which as I remember was £400,000.

I wrote another Michael Bradford book at about that time, and I was contractually obliged to offer it to Muller first. Antony White took me out to lunch to tell me that he didn’t want to publish the book, which didn’t distress me particularly because I’d made next to nothing out of the first one, and so far as I know it was never reviewed anywhere. But I thought it was odd to invite me to lunch to say no, when a letter would have sufficed.

Anyway, by 1984 Frederick Muller had merged with the firm of Blond and Briggs. And by 1985 there had been yet another desperate attempt to restructure and, no doubt, refinance the company, under the name Muller, Blond & White.

At some point, all attempts to breathe life into this failing enterprise came to an end, and the firm disappeared into Hutchinson. There all trace of the Muller name disappeared, even as some sort of in-house imprint.

Hutchinson, you may wonder – who they?

Hutchinson was founded in 1887, and made something of a name for itself by issuing cheap editions. The first Mr Hutchinson (George) was given a knighthood for his services to publishing.

On George’s retirement, his son Walter took over, and he also expanded the business by acquiring numerous smaller and once well known firms: such as Hurst & Blackett and Herbert Jenkins. Walter was also knighted. But eventually Hutchinson ended up being taken over by Random House UK.

As the twentieth century proceeded, Random House UK also took over about a dozen London-based companies which had once been considerable powers in the land all on their own: Chatto and Windus (founded 1855), William Heinemann, Jonathan Cape, Sinclair-Stevenson, and Century were among the firms gobbled up by Random House UK.

Speaking of Random House UK allows me to give you a quick summary of the history of that company in the US.

The original founders of Random House were two lively young Americans, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, who set up business in New York in 1927. They chose the name of their firm because they were ‘just going to publish a few books on the side at random’.

By 1958 Random House had become a leading publisher of general-interest books, but it still had only a hundred or so employees. But it grew and grew, mostly by taking over and absorbing other firms, such as Alfred A. Knopf, and Pantheon Books. Today it occupies a substantial building at 1745 Broadway in New York City – which is all a bit different from the shabby sheds in north London which were once occupied by Frederick Muller.

Random House now employs more than 4,500 staff. In July 2013, Random House and Penguin completed a £2.4 billion merger to create the biggest publisher in the world. But Random House is itself owned by Bertelsmann, which Wikipedia describes as a German multinational mass-media corporation based in Gutersloh. It is apparently a privately owned company, with a complicated share structure. It seems to me unlikely that anyone in the upper reaches of Bertelsmann knows anything much about books.

So now you know what I mean when I say that the history of publishing from 1950 has been one of constant amalgamations, mergers, and takeovers.

This process of growth by lumping together has led to considerable disadvantages for any writer trying to break into the business. When two companies merge, there is now one less market available. And that is one less chance for your novel to impress a publisher’s reader.

The reduced competition means it is less likely that two editors will feel wildly enthusiastic about your book, and will bid the price up in trying to persuade your agent to give it to them.

And these days, of course, you definitely will need an agent. Big-time editors in giant companies do not waste their time with out-and-out beginners, newbies, and (as they see it) time-wasters.

Trend (v): The relaxation of censorship in respect of sexual content.

Relaxation is not quite the word. In fact, what happened in the second half of the twentieth century is that censorship of sexual content in fiction was effectively abandoned. And if you are, say, twenty years old today, it’s very hard for you to appreciate just how massive a change this is.

In England, the Victorians in general are always considered to have been total prudes. There are apocryphal stories about Victorian hostesses covering up the legs of tables with something like trousers, because to leave them exposed would be indecent. These stories, though exaggerated, express a certain truth about Victorian fiction.

As mentioned above, the nineteenth-century subscription libraries were important sources of income for writers and publishers alike; and the two biggest such libraries were operated by men called Mudie and Smith – W.H. Smith. It so happens that both these men were hard-core non-conformist Christians, with very strict views about sex in general. Sex, they considered, was best never mentioned at all. In fact, if you could find a way to reproduce without having sex, it would be wise to use it.

These hugely influential men made it clear that they were never going to tolerate any sort of sexual hanky-panky in the books which were available in their libraries. And that circumstance, all on its own, was enough to guarantee that all commercial writers of the time fell into line and closed the bedroom door in the reader’s face.

Not only that, but there were various laws in force in England which were designed to prevent obscenity occurring in literature or anywhere else. The precise details of what constituted ‘obscenity’ were never revealed, thus leaving it open to local magistrates to make their own minds up. And if said magistrates were of the Mudie and Smith school, this could result in some very odd decisions.

Some time in my teenage years, in the 1950s, a group of magistrates in Swindon, England, ruled that a bookseller was guilty of publishing an obscene article because he had in stock a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron. This, in case you have never come across it, is a fourteenth-century work which includes some 100 short stories varying from the erotic to the tragic. Many of the stories satirise the idleness, corruption and sexual indulgence of the monks and nuns of the day. It is regarded by scholars as an important piece of literary history. But the Swindon magistrates were having none of that. It was a dirty book. End of.

Most newspapers regarded the Swindon decision as ludicrous; but, fatuous or not, it was the magistrates’ interpretation of the law; as such, hard to challenge.

A fraction more understandable were similar decisions to punish the booksellers of various lurid paperbacks. Lurid, that is, in the sense that the covers featured women in underwear or less, but the prose was still the same old restrained stuff, with none of the so-called four-letter words in use. Hank Janson was a pseudonym created in the 1940s, and was eventually used by a series of writers of these racy thrillers; at least one such writer was prosecuted for obscenity.

In England, in the 1950s, most reasonably mature writers, readers, and printers, were fed up with the uncertainty which surrounded sex in books. They had no clear idea of how far they could go in sexual matters. One thing was pretty clear, however: if writers used words such as fuck, cunt, prick, arse (ass) and all the usual vulgar synonyms for sexual organs, they were going to be in trouble. ‘Serious writers’ in particular found this situation intolerable.