How Not to Write a Novel E-Book

David Armstrong

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 319

Beschreibung

Every week, agents and publishers in this country receive hundreds of manuscripts from would-be authors. Of these, fewer than one per cent will make it into print. David Armstrong was one of the one per-centers, his first crime novel plucked from the slush pile at a major publisher and published to acclaim. So far, so good. But it rapidly became clear to Armstrong that being a published novelist is not always as glamorous as it seems from the outside. There are the depressing, ill-attended readings, the bitchy writers' conventions, the bookshops who have never heard of you and don't stock your book. All of these will be familiar to any writer who, like Armstrong, falls into to the category euphemistically known in publishing as 'midlist'. The reality is that for every JK Rowling, there are 1,000 David Armstrongs; for every writer who is put up in a five-star hotel and flies first class courtesy of their publisher, there are 1,000 who sleep on friend's floors during book tours and dine at motorway service stations...Witty, acerbic and wise, How Not to Write a Novel lifts the lid on publishing. From agents to editors, publicists to sales reps, it explains the publishing process - and how to survive it - from the point of view of a non-bestselling writer. A unique book, it is essential reading for anyone who dreams of getting their novel published - and for anyone curious about the inside workings of the publishing game.

Leseprobe

HOW NOT TO WRITE A NOVEL: THE ONLY HOW TO DO IT BOOK THAT TELLS YOUNOT TO DO IT!

Forget the How to… books on writing; this is the book that tells you how not to write a novel.

Every week, agents and publishers in this country receive hundreds of manuscripts from would-be authors. Of these, fewer than one per cent will make it into print.

David Armstrong was one of the one per-centers, his first crime novel plucked from the ‘slush pile’ at HarperCollins and published to acclaim.

But this book is not only for writers, it’s for readers, too. An A-to-Z of the disappointments, frustrations, delays, rejections – and occasional joys – of a writer’s life, there’s something here for anyone who’s interested in what’s really involved in being a writer.

‘Nobody knows anything,’ says Armstrong: huge advances paid for books which fail; JK Rowling’s Harry Potter – sales to date nearly 150 million copies – turned down by some of the country’s biggest publishers.

But with five highly-praised crime novels published during the last eight years, David Armstrong’s only partly right – this is a book written by someone who clearly does know about the agonising road into print.

From Agents to Zeitgeist, via Editors, Launches, Publicity and yes, even Harry Potter, this is a book written by someone who really does know.

If you’re thinking of becoming a writer, read it.

If you’re still writing at the end of it, you’d better accept it: you’re probably a writer too!

HOW NOT TO WRITE A NOVEL

David Armstrong

To Sally Kindberg

FOREWORD

Why Not Be A Writer? ask the ads in the Sunday papers.

The shelves of your local bookshop are packed with How to… books. Books that tell you how to write a thriller, a blockbuster, an historical romance. They tell you how to plot your novel, write dialogue, create characters, pace your prose and then, having done all this, how to lay-out and package your book for dispatch to a waiting world.

They tell you to consult The Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book on how to get an agent (by having a publisher) and how to get your manuscript read by a publisher (by having an agent…); which publisher to send your manuscript to; how to include postage and packing; how long to wait before making a follow-up telephone call and, throughout it all, how to remain polite, but firm.

I’ve just been to my local bookshop. There are forty-three works of guidance and advice for writers.

Many of these books are written by people I have never heard of. Like those ads that claim success for get-rich-quick schemes, if these authors really do know how to do it, then why aren’t they doing it for themselves?

I have several How to write… books on my own shelves: Andre Jute, Michael Legat, Lesley Grant-Adamson, HRF Keating, Julian Birkett et al. I also have several writers’ memoirs/biographies and autobiographies: Alan Bennett, Martin Amis, Brian Aldiss, Simon Gray, Philip Larkin, Mike Leigh and John Braine.

But what I don’t have is a How to write/get published … work combined with a practising writer’s account of the day-to-day business of being a writer.

So, Why not be a writer? Well, for starters, there are already far too many writers in the world. Just as there are too many books and too many bookshops. There are also lots of agents who don’t want to represent you, and tons of publishers who don’t want to publish your book! And, unless you’re a genius, it’s very hard: like playing the piano or learning to paint, you really have to stick at it.

How not to write a novel, therefore, is an A-to-Z through the maddening, infuriating, heart-breaking journey that most writers face.

But writers write. Most of us have no choice. We have to do it. If we don’t, we’re miserable. And if we do, we’re miserable too. This book has been written to help you get through the misery!

HOW NOT TO WRITE A NOVEL: AN A TO Z

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Advances

Agents

Audio and Large Print

Bestsellers

Bookshops

Books to read … and not…

Courses

Covers

Crime Writers’ Association (CWA)

Dedications … and family

Discipline

Distribution

Editors

Epiphany

Festivals

Getting Close and Bubbling Under

How to… books

Ideas

Joy of it all…

‘Kill your darlings’

Launches

Luck

Murder

Names

Other jobs

Public Lending Right (PLR)

Quotations

Reading aloud

Research

Reviews

Second One (The)

Slush pile

Talks

TV … and books

Unpleasantness

Vanity and self-publishing

Waiting

Xylophone

Youth… and age

Zen… and the art of writing

Index

About the Author

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne…’

Geoffrey Chaucer The Parliament of Fowls

The list of books rejected by publishers is one of the few things in a writer’s life to give him real joy.

There’s hardly a title that hasn’t been turned down repeatedly… before going on to sell in millions.

Just like the A & R man at Decca who turned down The Beatles, and the comedy executive at the BBC who claimed that no one in Britain was going to find a sitcom about an irascible hotelier in Torquay funny, there are literary agents and editors who go to bed each night knowing that it was they who said that Harry Potter just would not sell.

And these weren’t shoestring operations trying to publish half a dozen titles a year from a back garden shed. No, JK Rowling’s 1997 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – translated into forty-seven languages, total Harry Potter sales over 130 million copies – was turned down by nine publishers, including Transworld, HarperCollins and Penguin, before Bloomsbury signed it up.

John Creasey, founder of the Crime Writers’ Association, wrote more than six hundred mystery novels under a plethora of pseudonyms, but only after collecting several hundred rejection slips.

Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 Day of the Jackal – worldwide sales to date, over nine million, was rejected by four British publishers before it found a home at Hutchinson, and Erich Segal’s 1970 Love Story (21 million copies sold) was rejected by any number of publishers before making a mint for Bantam.

Are these not stories to ease the pain of any writer as he hears his manuscript thud back through the letterbox?

Stephen King (thirty-six novels in print and sales to date in the of millions) collected eighty-four rejection slips before Cavalier magazine bought his short story, Graveyard Shift, for two hundred dollars. But at least King received helpful advice with at least one of those rejection slips – on a hand-written addendum were the words: ‘never staple sheets together: use a paperclip’.

Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult success, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (three million in paperback) was rejected by 122 publishers before it found a home at Vintage. (I didn’t know there were that many publishers in America.)

And literary/commercial judgement appears to have been no less acute way back in 1920, when at least six prescient editors declined to publish The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first novel by Agatha Christie: worldwide sales to date some two billion in over one hundred languages.

Although her sales are dwarfed by these giants, one of the most poignant stories of rejection concerns Shropshire novelist, Barbara Pym. In 1936, her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was rejected by both Chatto and Jonathan Cape. Pym put the book aside and began a new one, Civil to Strangers.

After the Second World War, she re-submitted the extensively revised Some Tame Gazelle to Cape. This time it was accepted, and they published it in May 1950.

During the next few years, as well as working for the International African Institute, Pym published four further novels. Sales were respectable, rather than sensational, but her writing, often likened to that of Jane Austen (whose own Pride and Prejudice, under its original title, First Impressions, was rejected before – somewhat revised – being published in 1813,) was held in high regard.

In February 1964, she submitted her new book, An Unsuitable Attachment to her publisher. Cape rejected the book. She wrote at the time that it was like hearing that someone ‘doesn’t love you any more’.

And that was it. Barbara Pym, ‘unloved’, spent the next thirteen years sending out her rejected novel, and writing new ones, (The Sweet Dove Died; Quartet in Autumn,) only for them to suffer a similar fate.

In 1977, the Times Literary Supplement published a list – chosen by eminent literary figures – of the most under-rated writers of the century. Barbara Pym was the only living writer to be named by two people, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin.

The following day there was piece about it on the front page of The Times. A matter of weeks later, Macmillan offered to publish Quartet in Autumn.

TV programmes and interviews followed; the book was published in September, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

The following couple of years saw reprints, re-issues, numerous foreign translations, Penguin editions, rights being sold in the USA and, the ultimate accolade, an appearance on Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley.

Barbara Pym died in January 1980.

Mere schadenfreude at these spectacular publishers’ own-goals forces me to mention that George Orwell’s 1945 classic, Animal Farm, was originally declined, notwithstanding that he had already published Coming Up For Air, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia in the late 1930’s.

James Joyce’s Dubliners was rejected by twenty-two publishers before it saw the light of day in 1914.

In Joyce’s case though, readers, too, were apparently lukewarm about the Irishman’s achievement: a year after publication, of the initial print-run of 1250 copies, only 379 had been sold. And, of these, the author himself had stumped up for 120!

And just in case you think that publishers have learned from these costly debacles, it’s worth mentioning that Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) was rejected by HarperCollins (who then entered a bidding war with Penguin for it, and lost), and that the 2002 Man Booker prize winner, Life of Pi by Canada’s Jan Martel, is said to have been turned down by three of the country’s biggest houses before finding a home at the small but respected publisher, Canongate.

Now, most of us are not Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Frederick Forsyth, Zadie Smith or even the tragically spurned Barbara Pym. But what we have in common with them, and many another published writer, is that we, too, will probably have been rejected. Many times.

I spent eighteen months writing my first book, Night’s Black Agents.

Shortly after I’d finished it, I wanted to send it out to a publisher.

There’s a very strong temptation to do this. But be aware: high on the adrenaline of a sustained period of writing, one’s judgement is often less than reliable, one’s critical faculties less than fully engaged.

Of course, it feels very good to have begun the work, and to have actually finished it. After all, it requires a tremendous amount of commitment and determination to complete 70,000 or 80,000 words of even a bad book. Not surprisingly, therefore, you are likely to assume that you’ve done something pretty good. It’s in this state of near-euphoria that you might be inclined to send the book out the very next day.

And ironically, it’s just this sense of belief in your book that you will need to convey to a publisher or agent. But don’t squander that enthusiasm. Do nothing. Don’t, under any circumstances, send your manuscript out. Put it aside and leave it alone for a while. I’d suggest – if you can bear it – a few days; preferably a week, even two. After this interval, get it out, and read it again.

Re-reading it, you may still feel that there are good things there; you’ll probably experience that glow that every writer feels when he comes upon a pleasing phrase that he has written.

The plot may still make sense, the pace feel right according to the action, the characters appear well-delineated and particular.

In fact, if all of these things pertain, and you cannot make any structural improvements, nor smooth the prose, excise a repetition or two, delete a redundant adjective, then certainly, send it off – possibly to Faber and Faber – because truly, they are awaiting your manuscript, and you are almost certainly a genius.

If, on the other hand, you are like the rest of us, and you are able to make further improvements, then do them now.

Because now’s the time – not for you to send the book to an agent or publisher – but for you to try and recruit an intelligent, disinterested reader to look at it for you.

Your choice of this reader is very important. You must, of course, choose someone whose judgement you respect – a ‘reader’, obviously – and preferably a reader who is familiar with the genre of your book.

Yes, she needs to be able to tell you the truth – that’s the whole point of the exercise – and yes, you have to be able to listen to what she has to say without rejecting it out of hand.

You are very deeply involved with your book and you are likely to be very protective of it: but if your reader doesn’t understand the plot, somehow feels that things don’t add up, or that the prose sounds clunky to her ear, it is probably she who is right, and you would be well advised to heed her.

But whilst you need to be prepared for criticism, try to recruit someone who will be sensitive to the importance of this thing to you, and who will not ride unnecessarily roughshod over your feelings.

When you’ve re-drafted and polished and smoothed your manuscript, left it alone for a cooling-off period, re-read it and worked it over again; when your trusted, reliable, non-spiteful, critically-acute friend has read it, and you have absorbed and – possibly – acted upon her comments; when you have done all this, read through The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook or The Writers’ Handbook, identify a suitable publisher (or agent), parcel up your manuscript, and send it out.

It’s exactly what I did. And back it came.

Again and again and again.

The good news – such as it was – was that the rejections were invariably accompanied by encouraging words, and helpful ‘reasons’ why the publishers were turning the book down: ‘The crime market is very depressed at the moment …’ (Not nearly as depressed as I am, I groaned.) ‘You clearly write well, but the story is a little slow for today’s market…’ (Night’s Black Agents, set on the waterways around Birmingham, is a measured, claustrophobic story of infidelity and jealousy that leads to murder.)

Eventually, a literary agent, a friend of my brother-in-law, agreed to have a look at the book.

He was very nice about it, and offered – without suggesting that he formally represent me – to send it out.

As any budding writer knows, to have an agent on board is a major breakthrough. Agents are busy people, and they are unlikely to offer to help you unless they think there’s a chance of placing your work.

He sent the book out to a couple of publishers.

And back it came.

Each of them, apparently, liked it; each of them said very nice things about it. And each of them decided, finally, ‘reluctantly’, that they were unwilling to offer for it.

‘My’ agent returned my manuscript, and wished me the best of luck in placing it.

It was heartbreaking.

For the umpteenth time, I went over it again, and tried to iron out even the tiniest bump or glitch at which a publisher’s reader might stumble.

When a novelist friend pointed out a publisher’s ad in the Sunday Times ‘inviting’ writers to submit manuscripts, I sent mine.

Publishers asking for manuscripts is the literary equivalent of soliciting for an infectious disease: it just doesn’t happen.

Within a fortnight, Select Books wrote, offering to publish Night’s Black Agents. Wary of a scam, I asked ‘Bruce’ their ‘publishing editor’ to send me one of his company’s books. He sent The Death of Four Presidents, by ‘Densil Barr’.

I didn’t think Mr Barr’s book read particularly well, but it was printed on decent weight paper, had an ISBN, and was wrapped in a reasonable dust-jacket.

The company wasn’t vanity publishing – the arrangement whereby authors pay to be published – but there was no advance either: it was a royalties-only arrangement.

No matter, if Select Books in London’s EC1 were prepared to put Night’s Black Agents between covers, that was good enough for me. I signed on the dotted line.

Six months later, after many phone calls and one depressing visit to a barren office on windy Great Eastern Street – no secretaries, no water coolers, no leafy tropical plants here – I could see that the book was never going to make the journey from Bruce’s filing cabinet to the country’s bookshops.

Maybe he had run out of money? Perhaps he just liked to act like an (impoverished) publisher? In any event, I asked for, and he (eventually) returned my manuscript.

A couple of weeks later, having trawled through Night’s Black Agents (again) I parcelled it up (again) and sent it out (again). And this time, I started (again) with HarperCollins, the very first publisher to have seen it, over a year ago now.

Two weeks later, I got a letter.

The same publisher. The same book. A different publisher’s reader, maybe. Yes, I had repeatedly smoothed the prose, and yes, I had tried to heed the criticism that had been offered by readers, agents and editors as they had repeatedly returned my manuscript. But, essentially, Night’s Black Agents was the same book that it had been a year ago.

And now, here in my hand, on an autumn morning in 1992, was the letter I had prayed for.

Seven months later, Night’s Black Agents was published.

A few weeks after that, the reviews started to appear. Amazingly, almost miraculously, the very things for which the book had been rejected were now singled out for praise. The ‘lack of pace’ that had made the book ‘unsuitable for today’s market’, metamorphosed in the Daily Telegraph into ‘prose with a slow, dark, rhythm’.

In the Guardian, the ‘Midlands setting’, frequently cited as an insurmountable barrier to publication, was now, ‘unique and interesting’.

And then, out of the blue, a week or two after the Literary Review called Night’s Black Agents ‘a tale of crime and punishment that Zola wouldn’t disown…’ my editor telephoned to say that the Crime Writers’ Association had shortlisted the book for the John Creasey Award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year.

Would I, she asked, be her guest at the ceremony at the Law Society in Chancery Lane the following month? Would I?!

Tips and Summary:

1) Don’t be a writer.

2) Your book may well be good enough to be published. It may well be better than any number of books that are published. But as well as the many poor books that are published, and the good ones that are rejected, remember that a lot of thoroughly bad books are rejected too. And for the very best of reasons: they really are not any good.

3) Get as much feedback on your novel as you possibly can from informed readers. In this way, although you probably need to be obsessive about your book, you won’t be obsessive, as well as megalomaniacal and deluded.

4) Be determined, bordering on obsessive.

5) Don’t kill or kidnap editors and agents who turn down your book.

6) Best of all, save yourself the heartache: don’t be a writer.

ADVANCES

‘Some day I hope to write a book where the royalties pay for the copies I give away.’

Clarence Dallow

It’s said that Bloomsbury paid Donna Tartt just under £1,000,000 for The Little Friend (2002) – the southern belle’s second novel, ten years after her first, The Secret History, was both a critical and commercial success.

Way back in 1977, Macdonald Jane paid what (then) seemed an astronomical £155,000 for Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. The Australian-set novel sold only 19,000 in hardback in the first year, but then justified the advance by going on to sell over a million in paperback.

In the early 1990’s, Ian McEwan received £650,000 for his Berlin novel, The Innocent; Fay Weldon £450,000 for a three book deal, and biographer Peter Ackroyd received a similar figure for his lives of Charles Dickens and William Blake.

Even people who’ve never read a Martin Amis novel will have some recollection of the furore that accompanied the £500,000 advance paid for his 1995 jealous author novel, The Information. OK, it was paid as part of a two-book deal – negotiated for him by New York agent, Andrew Wylie – but it was still a lot of money.

More recent deals that have escaped the confines of the books pages and made it into gossip columns, celebrity scandal pieces and even front page broadsheet stories, were Amy Jenkins’s £600,000 deal with Hodder and Stoughton for HoneyMoon (2000) and Funny Valentine (2002). This advance was paid to the writer on the strength of a synopsis and a couple of chapters: although she had created the BBC TV series, This Life, and written several of its episodes, she had never written a novel.

In 2001, SundayTimes journalist Paul Eddy was apparently paid £1,000,000 by Headline for Flint, his first thriller.

I say ‘apparently’, because perhaps we should take some of these figures with a pinch of salt. According to a recent Guardianarticle by Mark Lawson, many of these heavily-publicised advances are themselves fiction.

Magnus Mills was widely reported to have received a one million pound advance for The Restraint of Beasts, (1999) his first novel. In fact, the London bus-driving author received ten thousand pounds. The grander sum was invented in collusion with a Sunday newspaper hack to make good copy. And, of course, it did just that: decent article, some free publicity, and extra sales for the book.

Publishing publicists, not surprisingly, are happy to inflate the sums supposedly paid simply because big figures make the news, and news of the book means sales.

Of course, no matter what publishers pay for them, most books, like most films, lose money. A bit like the adage about advertising: 50% of all we spend on campaigns is wasted – we just don’t know which 50% it is. It’s the same with books. If publishers knew which books would turn a profit for them, there’d be no risk and we’d all be publishers!

While it’s true that some of these big advances have not been earned back from book sales – Naomi Campbell’s Swan comes to mind – Martin Amis’s half-million pound deal looks like a bargain now.

All of this is a far cry from the £1,500 (in two instalments,) that JK Rowling received from Bloomsbury for her first Harry Potter book, or, indeed, the £25 that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was paid for full rights to his 1888 Sherlock Holmes tale, Study in Scarlet.

But no matter what the amount, not every writer is happy to take an advance for an as-yet unwritten book. Baroness James of Holland Park, (P.D. James), creator of the Adam Dalgleish novels, (Cover Her Face 1962; Innocent Blood 1980 and Death in Holy Orders 2001) will not accept an advance before she has written a book, saying that the pressure would be unwelcome: ‘What if the publishers didn’t like what I eventually came up with?’ she ponders.

There have been cases where this is exactly what has happened. Hunter Davies, the author of more than forty books over a thirty year career, and husband of prize-winning writer, Margaret Forster, (The Memory Box, 1999) was commissioned by his publisher, Michael Joseph, (part of the Penguin group,) to write a non-fiction book, London to Loweswater, a journey through England at the turn of the Millennium. His publisher offered him an advance of £15,000. Davies pushed them to £20,000. They agreed, on condition that he would accept a first payment of only £2,000, instead of the usual one-third upfront.

Davies spent a year writing the book, and incurred some £3,000 in expenses.

Two months after delivering the manuscript he received a curt message saying that his publisher didn’t care for the book. Naturally, he was upset.

He asked for the manuscript to be returned, and for his outstanding £18,000. The publisher refused, claiming that he had failed to deliver the book they wanted, and that the contract said acceptance was subject to their ‘approval’.

An acrimonious battle ensued, the upshot of which was that Davies eventually received a further payment of £9,000, and the matter was closed.

The story has a happy(ish) ending though. Hunter Davies ran into the publisher of one of his other titles in Soho’s Groucho club one day. Bill Campbell of Mainstream Publishing offered to have a look at the work. He liked it, paid Davies £5,000 and published the book some months later.

Davies’s advice: always get as large a part of the advance upfront as you possibly can.

Problems such as the one experienced by Hunter Davies can arise because of the ever-changing personnel that are a feature of the publishing business. Someone who enthusiastically commissions your book this year might have moved to another publisher, gone on maternity leave, or have retired by next. There seems to be almost an unwritten rule that the new person in the seat of power will treat all of their predecessor’s putative acquisitions with suspicion and disdain, if not outright opprobrium.

Hunter Davies’s unpleasant experience made a story in the Sunday newspapers, but Joan Collins got wider coverage for her not dissimilar case.

When she delivered A Ruling Passion in 1991 and, subsequently, Hell Hath No Fury, in 1992 to Random House, as part of a four-million dollar contract, they claimed that the books were not satisfactory, and sued her for the return of their one-million dollar advance.

Ms Collins, notwithstanding the literary merits of her novels, (her contract did not include an ‘acceptance’ clause) felt that she had done the work and submitted completed books.

The case came to court in 1994, and Joan Collins was awarded substantial damages.

Most of us, though, are not these stellar performers, but are what is known as ‘midlist’ writers. This term, although often used as a term of general abuse, is actually the ninety-five plus per cent of writers who have written perhaps four of five novels, and yet have not become household names.

Until relatively recently, most publishers had several midlist writers on their books. These authors produced books which sold respectably without breaking records. The publisher’s bestselling authors subsidised their midlist writers who, occasionally, would make the breakthrough and become bestsellers themselves.

Ian Rankin wrote eleven novels before he became the celebrated author he is today; Louis de Bernieres had written several novels before Captain Correlli’s Mandolin became a hit.

However, in today’s highly competitive market, it’s unlikely that a publisher will continue to publish an author who does little more than breaks even. He is much more likely to be dropped.

In 1993, I was offered (and accepted, gratefully) £1,500 for my first book. I don’t know how HarperCollins came up with a figure of one thousand five hundred pounds. Possibly it was arrived at after some arcane calculations based upon the fact that I was a first-time author; projected library sales (the destination for the majority of the print run of 1,000 hardbacks); and Rupert Murdoch’s need to make a bit of profit after he had paid the editors, printers, warehousers and transport companies that were going to deliver Night’s Black Agents to bookshops throughout the land.

Something like that, anyway. I was glad to accept the initial cheque for seven hundred and fifty pounds, (it’s usually a three way split: a third on signing the contract; a third on delivery of the manuscript, and a third on publication. But, given that HarperCollins already had my book when we signed contracts, it was fifty percent on signature, and the rest on publication).

Like most first-time writers, I suspect, I would have accepted an advance of fifteen pounds, let alone fifteen hundred, so keen was I to see the book in print. The money was merely a bonus, a vouchsafe of my work, sign that I was a real writer, a bona-fide author.

With some of the dosh, I put on a launch party at the town’s biggest hotel. I also kept at least one of the many promises that desperate people make to themselves when they are stepping over paving stones to avoid the cracks: I donated a couple of hundred of the seven hundred and fifty quid to the ashram where my wife studied yoga.

She had been a steadfast supporter of me and my work, and I wanted to thank her.

Over the next five years, with four more titles, my advances crept up. For Less Than Kind (1994) I got two grand; in 1995, for Until Dawn Tomorrow, two thousand five hundred; for Thought For The Day, my last title with HarperCollins, I received the grand sum of three thousand pounds. OK, I never received royalty payments thereafter (the cheques you receive when – if – your book ‘earns back’ its advance) but, by the same token, only a very few copies of one of my titles were ever remaindered either, (i.e. returned and either offered back to the author at a knock-down price, or sold off cheaply to the burgeoning remainders shops).

It may have been only a modest number, but I think at least a few of the lightbulbs in the big HarperCollins building on Fulham Palace Road were paid for out of the profits from my four books for the company.

For my most recent book, Small Vices, (published by Allison & Busby in 2001) I was paid a smaller advance but, for the first time in my writing career, I have now received a couple of decent little royalties cheques. Swings and roundabouts.

People somehow imagine that if you write and publish books, you’re wealthy and (probably) famous. I’ve written five novels, am skint(ish) and few people beyond my few thousand readers know my name.

The hardback print run for a first-time crime writer might be 1,000 or 1,500 copies. It might go as high as 2,000 or 3,000. But it’s very unlikely to be more than that unless it’s adjudged to be very special indeed (and will, therefore, in any case, be trailing a lot of pre-publication hype, which will, in turn, translate into some sales, even if the book’s a turkey).

The paperback run might be anything between 1,500 and ten thousand.

1,250 hardback copies of my last book were printed. They retailed at £17.99. Six months after publication, my publisher told me there were only 23 copies of Small Vices left in the warehouse.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough unfilled orders to reprint (that would have needed an American library order which had not been forthcoming). Frustratingly, they did have an order for two hundred and fifty copies from Australia, but unfortunately, the order was sale or return and, if two hundred of them eventually came back from the Antipodes, that would undermine all the profit on the book, so it looks like they’re not going to have the opportunity to read Small Vices in Ayers Rock, alas.

So, both myself and my publisher were pleased with how the book sold. There had been no advertising and only a few reviews (although those that the book did get were pretty good).

I was delighted that the book had done well, not only because I think it’s a good book, (certainly the best that I have written) but also because Allison & Busby picked up the manuscript knowing that HarperCollins had passed on it. This was not a good wicket to be batting on: ‘The publisher of my previous four titles has decided that this is not the ‘breakthrough’ book that they wanted from me, and have therefore decided to let me go. Will you, therefore, publish me?’ No, not a very attractive wicket.

But they did go for it, and the book, which might otherwise even now be languishing in my drawer, is in print. Of course I’m glad. And, notwithstanding Samuel Johnson’s dictum that no one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money, the money was the least of my considerations.

Had I been unable to find a publisher for that book, it would have been very difficult indeed, even for a dedicated writer like myself (for ‘dedicated’ read obsessive) to have found the impetus to write another, similar book, without fearing that it, too, might suffer a similar fate.

So, yes, it’s good to show a profit for the firm, and it’s good to have been able to repay the faith that they had in the book.

It’s hard work writing a novel, and it takes a tremendous amount of love and labour. Publishers are well aware of this fact. But they are also aware that there are endless numbers of would-be writers who are ready to accept this situation, always have done, and probably always will. It’s a given; it’s taken for granted. What they have to do is try to make a profit. It may be your labour of love, but it’s their investment.

Why not take my advice: just don’t do it.

Tips and Summary:

1) Don’t do it.

2) If, as I know you will, you ignore my advice, write the book and, by some miracle, get a publisher to offer for it, get as much for it as you possibly can. If they’ve invested heavily in it, they’ll make at least some effort to sell a few copies.

3) As a first-time writer, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be paid in advance of actually writing your novel (being ‘commissioned’), but if you are ever in this position, get as much of the advance upfront as you possibly can so that, if there are problems on delivery, you are in a stronger position to negotiate.

4) Ignore no. 3 above. Many writers (myself included, notwithstanding the above) are loath to accept money for work not yet done. I would find it an unwelcome burden to have been paid already for something not yet written, especially something as tenuous as a novel.

AGENTS

How do you get an agent? By having a publisher. So, how do you get a publisher? By having an agent…

Theoretically, given that they earn at least ten (often fifteen) percent of your income, agents need only secure their additional percentage of the advance that they are negotiating upon your behalf for them to justify your employing them.

Christopher Little, who represents JK Rowling, presumably secured for her that £1,500 advance for the first of the Harry Potter books. The SundayTimes Rich List now estimates that his cut of JKR’s literary earnings amount to some four million pounds per year.

But even if you are dealing with figures more modest than JK Rowling’s, business negotiations are frequently onerous to conduct – after all, valuing a novel is not like putting a value on your house or your collection of stamps.

There are all sorts of questions and issues to be considered: print-run; hardback and paperback editions; large print versions; audio, TV and film options; foreign rights’ editions; delivery and deadlines; author copies etc., as well as the important matter of just how much the publisher is prepared to pay upfront – the ‘advance’ – against sales.

OK, many of these things are pretty straightforward, and many publishers use a standard(ish) contract, the contents of which have been agreed between the Society of Authors and publishers.

But to a novice, this stuff can look as daunting as any other legal document. It’s therefore generally reckoned to be less stressful to have an expert intermediary to negotiate terms for you, even if you have managed to secure an offer from a publisher without using an agent – an increasingly unlikely prospect, given that most publishers today will not even consider looking at a manuscript unless it has come via an agent – Catch 22.

Just how many author copies are you entitled to? What are your rights, and the publisher’s, with regard to your next book? Which countries is the book going to be available in, and for how long?

Bona fide publishers are not in the business of trying to pull a fast one over you, and trying to short-change you for a few hundred quid on your advance. But these are negotiable areas and, without an agent, how can you be expected to know what your book is worth, what its print run is likely to be, and whether there’ll be an American or Swedish edition?

Secondly, having an agent can be a great help in not only negotiating the terms and conditions of your contract with a publisher, but removing the potentially awkward task of dealing with your editor on both business and artistic matters.

Trouble is, it’s quite difficult to actually get an agent these days. Yes, of course they want to represent hot new talent, but when you are that hot talent telephoning their office on a cold Thursday morning and asking if they’d like to have a look at your brilliant new novel, it’s much more likely that they’ll tell you that they’re not taking on any new clients right now, as their list is full.

And even if you do get through to someone, the odds are, asked on that same telephone to outline the idea behind your book, you’re likely to mumble and stutter out the plot, giving such a woeful performance that it would make King Lear sound dull.

But if you