This article is from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. Why not subscribe to the full magazine? We’re currently offering five issues for just £10.
OOne of the funniest Grub Street exposes ever written is a novel by Nigel Williams called My life ended twice (1977). His unfortunate and eternally unpublished hero, Martin Steel, makes a point of keeping and numbering his rejection letters.
The 729th such entry is from a Scottish theatre company and reads: ‘Dear Martin Steel, Sorry to have to read your play but we are a bit behind schedule. I found it quite interesting. Do you have any new stuff we could look at?’ All very encouraging, you might think, and exactly what the trainee writer needs, were it not for the fact that the play in question was submitted a good four years ago.
The slowness that was so characteristic of the literary world at the time when it still depended on mail and telephone has, one might assume, been somewhat mitigated by the advancement of technology.
A text can be like a slap on the wrist. For some reason, the email that wafts through cyberspace is less easy to ignore than the unexpected brown envelope with its cargo of unpublished poems. The man who hired George Orwell as literary editor of tribune In 1945, he found a desk drawer full of contributions that his predecessor had not had the courage to send back, but eight decades later it is a relative rarity.
Where the delaying tactics continue, and in some ways get worse, is in the area of corporate decision-making. Let’s say you’re an author with an exciting nonfiction project whose agent has brought you to Tender & Mainprice, once an independent publishing house with plush offices in Bloomsbury, but now just an imprint of some multi-armed book-world squid, based in London, which houses half a dozen other companies it has bought up over the past 20 years, and with headquarters in Manhattan.
The agent is delighted. The editor he shows it to is equally delighted. The editor’s assistant, who has also been shown the sweet work, can hardly wait to start working on it. And yet, and yet…
At this point, an extraordinary game of tricks begins between the publishers. Their sponsor at Tender & Mainprice takes it to the editorial meeting, which fortunately it gets through without any problems.
Any sign of a contract? No, because the proposal then has to go to the sales meeting, whereupon a thick fog of financial realism rises, engulfing a landscape that was previously full of wide-eyed optimists (there are still a few of them in publishing) who believe that because a book is valuable, it should be published in hardback.
Then someone remembers that next week is half-time. So the sales meeting is postponed for two weeks. After that, the sales manager decides to go on vacation…
And so it goes on. The sales meeting finally takes place, the project is approved, but the advance is so small that your agent despairs.
Lengthy negotiations ensue and a new offer is finally cobbled together, with the condition that “only Simon (the stressed-out managing director) can sign it.” Simon is, of course, also on vacation at this point.
By the time a deal is agreed and a contract signed, a good three months will probably have passed. The zeal you put into the outline that exploded out of your agent’s inbox, however it may be, Bloomsbury at War or Stephen Spender: The Persecutionwill most likely have subsided to a slight enthusiasm.
If Carmen Callil wanted to publish a book, she would publish it and the accountant could disappear
Thirty or forty years ago, it wasn’t like that. Or rather, sometimes it wasn’t. Readers of this column know that there was never a golden age in publishing, and that the world of books was just as corrupt, short-termist, trash-focused and profit-obsessed then as it is today. If the mavericks and one-man bands who ruled the world then had one unique selling point, it was a certain amount of freedom of action.
Anthony Blond of Anthony Blond Ltd., for example, was known for heading out on his nightly party tours with a stack of contracts, which he would hand out to prospective authors over the course of the evening, while his business partner Desmond Briggs was left to deal with the consequences in the cold, grey daylight.
The same was true of Carmen Callil of Chatto & Windus. If she wanted to publish a book, she would publish it and the accountant could disappear. Thirty-five years ago, the Secret Author was walking past the door of the CEO of a newly formed company when the man himself walked out.
Was the secret author working on anything at the moment, he asked. In fact, he was. Interest was expressed, a draft was hastily produced, an agent notified, and a contract agreed within a week. These were great times, and they were based on people being given autonomy, which of all business attributes is the one that the modern publishing industry most abhors.
