Inside-Out Thinking

The Campaign for Real People in Publishing

Lunch with Caroline Dawnay, the head of the new literary agency, United Artists. Caroline has extraordinary eyes, and I was swept along by her enthusiasm, her goodness and niceness and the romanticism of the enterprise. All the agents there had turned down very well paid jobs - with taxis to take them to work and home in the evenings - for the sake of their independence and a dream of continuing to work together. It's going to be hard, she knows.

We talked about PFD, the agency they all walked away from and about the group led by former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil that had bought it. Like everyone else in the business we were trying to make sense of it. If almost all the agents have walked away, what is left but a bit of backlist?

Here's one perspective.

There are may pressures on UK publishing that are going to push it into strange new shapes.

The death of the high street. Even the biggest chains - like Woolworths, M and S - are finding it hard to afford property there. How are the UK book chains going to prosper and adapt?

The great driver of bestsellers in publishing in recent years has been the supermarkets, but what if a recession causes them to focus on the core business - food?

Supermarkets sell  books as part of an entertainment section that's mainly CDs and DVDs. In a year those won't exist as physical objects. Will supermarkets keep the section going just for books?

In the new year Amazon, Sony and others will begin a huge marketing push on e-book readers. Books will also be down-loadable onto phones and there will be a scroll onto which you can download thousands of books for those who want to continue to read on paper. Britain has a uniquely nerdy-techy culture - has done since Newton! - and i predict that Brits will take to these machines like nowhere else .(Combine this with nerdyness with the fact that books you want will become harder and harder to find on the high street.)

As Frank Skinner pointed out to me, buying physical books from Amazon to be sent through the post, the fastest trend in book-selling, is a strange mix of new and medieval technology. Much more natural to buy downloads on the net.

A huge part of the UK publishing industry depends on selling physical copies of American books by big, international authors - mostly thriller writers, to which UK publishers own the British and Commonwealth rights. When significant sales are downloads, these territorial boundaries will be impossible to maintain. As a customer in the UK why wouldn't you download the US edition? These US authors will realize that there is little value to them in giving a US agent, US publisher, UK agent and UK publisher a cut of their earnings.

Perhaps the biggest headache will be collecting revenues. I was recently proposing we take on a series on teenage books, and it seemed to me there would naturally be a big market for them downloaded as audio onto MP3s. I was told they'd just be shared for free like music. Why won't the same happen to downloads of written texts?

Advertising in books, a possible alternative stream of revenue, is something that many publishers and authors will find hard to contemplate.

As I predicted in the Independent on Sunday, changes in consciousness will bring them new art forms - more collaborative, multi-media, constantly mutating - that will eventually replace the novel.

So what is the prospect for UK publishers?  I think that profits are there to be fought for, that greater and greater focus will have to put on creativity. The danger is that the revenue streams that currently support vast superstructures and many layers of management will slip out of their grasp.

The way of the future seems to me to be 'schools of thought', associations of like-minded authors, agent/editors and Internet gurus free to exploit what they create world-wide.

So if you were Andrew Neil, why would you want to spend a lot of money on an agency at the moment developing no significant front list but with a back list?

I think that if you were an international media mogul, a visionary for whom cash flow was no problem - let's take Rupert Murdoch, Neil's former employer as a random example - you might think that in ten years, when the problem of collecting from these shifting, currently elusive revenue streams has been sorted, the people who own copyright will be kings of the world. 

happy

I'm a bit de-mob happy today, as I've done my last radio interview promoting the Quercus paperback. I never tell friends when I'm on and i never listen to myself. I imagine i have a warm, friendly, neutral kind of voice, say like Louis Theroux or an older Simon Amstell, so if I accidentally hear myself I'm appalled by the affected mewling that sounds like Brian Sewell.

Then there's the problem of having to try to tune into the mood of shows you've never listened to, switching from drive-time DJ sound-bites to, say, an interview by a slightly skeptical but genuinely intellectually engaged, serious journalist on BBC World Service. (Actually, i was quite pleased by that one, the last.)

You know, I only started this blog on the publisher's recommendation. These days it's almost a contractual obligation imposed on writers by publishers. I think it may actually be a contractual obligation at venerable old-time publishers, John Murray. Never having read a blog, I found it hard to get the idiom, and maybe i still haven't, but I find I'm actually beginning to enjoy it and look forward to reading it too. I'm going away to Ireland for a few days soon - partly to see if Lorna can tell me anything about the bad things that have been happening - and you know, i think I may miss it. That would be an odd thing, wouldn't it? 

The Good Side of Cynicism

I've been trying to call in favours, use any contacts I can to get coverage for Lorna's book. Yesterday I introduced her to two writers, one whom I've known a long time and the other only met a couple of times quite recently. Then after the three of us went for drink with Rina, Century's genius publicist.

At one point the the guy I've known a long time said that when we met - as students in the late Seventies, so towards the end of the hippy era - I'd introduced him to an entirely new sensibility, which he called 'romantic cynicism'. The other guy seemed surprised and said that he hadn't detected a trace of cynicism in my book?

That's right. But I think that The Secret History of the World could only have been written by someone who's travelled to the far reaches of cynicism and passed out the other side.

Mind, Body, Spirit

I'd hoped to be able to say that Lorna Byrne's book, Angels in My Hair, is number one in Ireland, but it's slipped from number two to four in the charts - partly, I think, because shops have underestimated hunger and there are few copies left on the shelves.

There hasn't been a single review, but then MBS books (Mind, Body ,Spirit, the conventional bookseller's category) are almost never reviewed, even though they form such a large proportion of total books sold. Maybe my book was widely reviewed because it didn't look MBS.

Lack of reviews doesn't seem to affect sales of MBS books, maybe because people who are spiritually-minded know not to expect coverage of their kind of literature on the literary pages.

As for feature coverage, that's easier, though you still have to deal with people who worry they are going to look foolish if they appear to take MBS seriously and give it house room. Even journalists who are believers often suffer from this.

Some people worry about meeting Lorna because they fear she will see the state of the soul, the dark, discolouring thoughts, anything that's twisted or neurotic or plain bad. It's true that she will, but she will regard these things with complete compassion, and people will come away from a meeting feeling blessed.

Then there are extreme cases. Because of who she really is - and that for the moment will have to remain a secret - demons have to show themselves to her. And nothing but good can come from that.

The Wrong Kind of Nut

Very glad to say my paperback edition is published and the cover can now be seen to the right of this post. I think I prefer it to the hardback.

It may surprise people not in the publishing business to know that the dust jacket, cover, blurb, even the title of a book is decided by the publisher. Of course established, successful and otherwise powerful authors can exercise a lot of influence, and these days publishers are much less likely to go with something an author hates, but  convention and precedent says that the publisher in the end has say-so.

Apart from making my book a bit like a conventional history book - which of course it isn't - the hardback jacket was a bit dark, and I think there was also a danger it might've attracted nutters who want to believe that the world economy is controlled by a cabal of rich old Jews or that when you reach the highest level of initiation in Freemasonry, it is whispered in your ear that in fact the organization is dedicated to the worship of Satan.

Nutters like this have minds that are drenched in hate. They want to believe the worst.

The sort of nutters I want to meet want to believe the best. Their brains are drenched in demethyltriptamine - the secretion which gives rise to imagination - and people who have enough imagination know that it is a sacred faculty, at its roots a part of the impulse that creates the world.

What I want to show in my book is that is it is a crucial feature of the human condition that we have immense latitude when it comes to choosing what we want to believe about the world, and it is important that we become aware of which part of ourselves we use to do the choosing. Is it the best part or the worst part? Choosing with the best part is what that great initiate St Paul meant by 'Faith'.

The Making of Jordan

Recently – as Mark Booth - I've been saying in the press and on radio:

Why the hell are people making such a fuss about Jordan not writing her own book? – how is it different from the Monkees not making their own records?
(In the day job I am Katie Price's publisher, among many other authors).

But now I've thought of a much more irritating comparison. I'm going to start saying that the collaborative effort involved in creating her novels is like the building of medieval cathedrals.

Really people are incredibly naïve – or perhaps just intellectual snobs. They LIKE to look down on footballers, pop celebs etc., but do they really suppose that in the normal run of things politicians, businessmen, lawyers, indeed any of our elders and betters write their own books?

what you're supposed to feel

Today I'm meeting an old friend. He looked after me when I was down. Our personalities have grown entwined over many years. We've always shared a sense that we've never felt what we're supposed to feel. When we were in our late teens we tried to define ourselves by what we wouldn't do. For instance, we wouldn't wear watches, carry umbrellas, drive cars - or adopt any of the badges of a maturity we didn't subscribe to. Our tastes in books and music were deliberately unfashionable.

He's funnier than most of the professional humourists I know, but never sought the bigger stage. He's never had any 'career'. He's kept to our opting-out ethos much more strictly than I have.

We have to tell the truth. If he asks me if I've enjoyed being published, what will I say? The truth is I've found it pretty painful. If you work in publishing and so see behind the scenes, the process is not a glamorous one for you. You know how much shit gets published, how much good stuff doesn't make it. You know how unfair it all is, what a political process it is, how often the wrong books get the the marketing spend, the publicity, the sales. You know how partisan reviewers are, how much log-rolling goes on, how many enmities are worked out, how obliquely reviews generally deal with the content and style of a book - and how little reviews affect sales anyway.

And you have a heightened awareness of how many things can go wrong. I was, on the whole, lucky, but my book did have a disastrous copy edit that added more errors than it spotted - though these have, for the most part at least, i imagine - I daren't look - been caught in the paperback edition. I've had wonderful publicity way beyond what I might have expected, and sales have been very good on both sides of the Atlantic. Foreign language editions are appearing in just about every territory I might've wished for..

...and yet I'm too much my father's son. After some early buffetings by fate I think my father perhaps decided to keep his head down and hope fate wouldn't notice him. He wasn't a big risk taker. But more important, perhaps, was his nonconformist background and a sense - a moral sense, I think - that any form of self-assertion, any showing off, any pride would bring with it its own punishment.

To be good at publishing is to be self-effacing, to be a good listener face to face, on the phone and on the page. You're helping other people to fulfill themselves. But if I hadn't tried to be the bride - rather than always the bridesmaid - just once, I think I would've died wondering.

For the most part I find the hustling that being an author today involves agony, and can't wait to put away my cap and bells.

So what have i enjoyed? I enjoyed the writing and I'm proud that I succeeded in writing the book I set out to write. (A book from my father's shelves, Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, inspired what i believe to be the original part of my own book.) I think that, particularly towards the end, as the deadline approached, I had 'help' and my writing moved up to another level. That was a fulfilling process.

Beyond that it makes me happy when I hear from people who've never felt what they were supposed to feel, and 'recognize' the world I am describing.  I think I may have met a few more friends, some of whom will be close.

Existential Despair and a Glass of Champagne

Don't get the wrong idea. I hate publishing parties and hardly ever go to them. Typically they are hot and sweaty and the wine is warm, and most people who work in publishing are not very attractive. I have difficulty hearing what people say and my own voice seems to recede down my throat so I can't make myself heard either. I lose all confidence in what I'm saying and see people want to edge away. We look into each others' and know we have mo interest in talking to each other. The names of even my oldest and dearest friends disappear from my mind completely and beyond all recall the moment I'm required to introduce them.

The only time I wanted to go to publishing parties all the time was when I was a bookseller and impoverished enough to jump at the chance of a free drink, and I was also on the pull, which gave parties a point – though I don't think it over worked.

But I really enjoyed the party we held for Carol Seymour-Jones to celebrate publication of A Dangerous Liaison – her joint biography of Sartre and de Beauvoir.

Carol has deserves the wonderful reviews she's had in all the nationals. She had the lead review in the Sunday Times and the review in the Observer was everything you'd want. She has really captured, she really promotes the glamour of the intellectual life – you want to be in the Deux Magots when Sartre waddled fatly in. All this is exhilarating partly because it's quite alien to English culture. (Lytton Strachey first delineated English anti-intellectualism in his biographical sketch of General Gordon, and nothing's changed.)

I met Philip Johnston, deputy editor of the Telegraph, genial and pugnacious in the way of journalists who still remember Fleet Street as a lost and very drunken Eden. It seems that David Brent management types are taking over newspapers too. We said ain't it awful, and PJ said he'd threatened to throw one of them out of a window, and I thought 'hats off'.

Hannah, a colleague, made a speech with a good joke in it in which she seemed to be talking about Jordan and Peter Andre but turned out to be talking about de Beauvoir and Sartre. We toasted Carol. There was a portly gentleman who was very taken with Hannah and another colleague, Rina, and kept bearing down on them with gleaming eyes and asking me if all women in publishing are this beautiful? He said, more than once, that he was allowed to say these things because he was gay. I wasn't sure I believed him.

His partner – or at least the woman he arrived and left with – was a film producer and we wondered whether Carol's book would make a film, and if so, who would play the leads? I suggested Emma Thompson and Roy Kinnear.

How shifty was Sartre? He seems to have found in Simone someone with whom he could be completely honest about his sexual inclinations. (A few years ago I commissioned Angela Lambert's biography of Eva Braun, fascinated by the idea of someone seeing Hitler through the idea of love – what would that look like? I was also fascinated by Angela's friendship with Dennis Potter, and, talking about this she once told me that men have all sorts of sexual inclinations they are ashamed of and felt they had to keep secret, but that women would understand. Oh yeah? Simone de Beauvoir, Angela and who else?)

Being and Nothingness was one of my favourite books as a student. I still have my copy, well thumbed and with all the good bits underlined (!) Years later I invested - very heavily, there being no cheap, student edition - in a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time, and I think that I came to the conclusion that large parts of Being and Nothingness were little more than parts of Being and Time translated into French. (There was guesswork involved, because I was reading both in English, but you know what I mean.)

But for my money Sartre's plays and novels, especially La Nausee have stood the test of time. I love the French tradition – going back to Voltaire - of using narrative, in a very overt way, as a vehicle for exploring and dramatizing philosophical ideas - something I was aiming to replicate in my own book.

I think La Nausee is extremely important, because it is the most honest account, down to a visceral level, of what it feels to live life believing that it has no meaning, apart from what we choose to give it. I reckon that most people who hold life to be meaningless on an intellectual level don't allow the implications to work into their lived experience in a way which is honest or – as Sartre would say - authentic. If you do so, as I did for a short while as a student, life is extremely painful, and this is what La Nausee portrays.

Sartre couldn't keep it up for very long, and I suspect it's difficult to do so without risking mental illness.

Reminds me that have been times in my own life when I would've thought my book drivel from beginning to end.

That was before the great waves of dimethyltrtamine began to roll on down.

Hallelujah.

Unreliable Narrators

The annual sales conference of a large publisher sees upwards of 30 editors presenting their projects to the sales force. It's competitive. As an editor you want your books to be the first out of the bag, the lead titles.

The sales people have to listen to the editors for 2-3 days, which is very, very, very boring for them. I imagine that at the end of it they can scarcely remember the names of any of the titles presented to them. So I've always tried to make it a little less boring by being unpredictable, sometimes, for example, driving onto the stage on a motorbike to present Valentino Rossi's book, but mostly just by being unpredictable, a bit subversive, gently sending the whole thing up.

I once had to present a book about UFOs, a book unlike anything the reps had had to sell before. It had an introduction by a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - so someone who had recently been the UK's senior military man and probably in a position to make an informed judgment on matters 'above top secret'.

I told the audience - of 2-300 - I was going to read from this intro, and started to do so in a slightly bufferish voice. But gradually i introduced into his text elements of parody, at first very mild, so the audience couldn't be quite sure, then more and more extreme - the best way to deal with Johnny Alien in my experience etc - until it became a psychopathic rant.  Some parts of the audience got it before others. The Japanese reps were apparently looking at each other in puzzlement.

The author would probably have been horrified, but it did mean that the reps remembered it and sold huge numbers into the shops. It was no 2 in the Sunday Times bestsellers in its first week of publication.

I love that device, and used it with The Secret History of the World. I hope readers will be unsure of what they're reading but at the end understand what it is.

The Richard Burtons

Last night I watched a very good, colourful documentary about the explorer Richard Burton, fronted by Rupert Everett.

I think I saw his West End debut in Julian Mitchell's play about the school days of the Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean - Another Country. He co-starred with Kenneth Branagh. I remember that when Rupert E. first walked on stage the audience gasped - quite loudly, unmistakably - at his physical beauty. Later I used to hear gossip about his exploits from Derek Jarman. In line with this the documentary focused on his sexual exploits more than his esoteric interests, which are the reason Burton features in my book... but I did try to suggest how sexual and spiritual experimentation are often intertwined.

Burgess has always fascinated me, because of the teasing games he used to play. When drunk he used to tell people he was a spy, but of course they just thought he was being ironic. It was a new note in British sensibility, which these days is everywhere at all levels of society.

The actor Richard Burton never played his namesake as far as i know, but looking at the craggy, brooding explorer in  his portraits perhaps he should've done. I published a memoir of the actor by one of his brothers a few years ago, and there was a launch party in a pub near Cardiff. The relatives - very, very Welsh - kept calling me 'the big cheeyuz from London'.

Who's taking the piss out of who?

That's the authentic disquiet, the disconcerting whisper that distinguishes the best of British culture today from Banksy to Jordan.