Bursting the bubble

Literary agent Simon Trewin, in the Independent on Sunday, offers a well-needed reality check for writers who think that simply being published means they’ve hit the jackpot:

We are in a market now where the poverty gap is yawning: the small books remain small and the big books get bigger and bigger and swallow up most of a publisher’s resources. Of course, if you are a Zadie, a Monica or a DBC with large advances that really focus a publisher’s mind, your book will be the publishing “event” that everyone craves; but with thousands of book published each year, they can’t all be “events”. It is a sobering thought, but the majority of debut novels will be published to deafening silence, and without ringing tills and positive sales figures the publication of Book Two is likely to flounder and Book Three will probably remain on the hard-drive forever. Bookshops base their orders on precedent, and publishing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Far from untold wealth and being feted in the media the reality is that most writers make less than £9,000 a year from their craft. Clearly, the compulsion to write should come from a genuine desire to say something, rather from a baser desire to get rich fast. Writing for the market is the quickest way to produce a hollow novel which won’t get off the starting blocks.

After relating anecdote after anecdote, Trewin sums up the issue:

Careers are also much shorter now. Whereas 10 years ago an author would be allowed to start slowly and build their confidence (and their sales figures), now it is a question of hitting the ground running. One author told me: “Apparently my first book only did ‘okay’ so the pressure is on. I have found myself trying to write in a ‘hook’ to Book Two that will get us the promotional campaign I know I need. If I don’t, then my career is over. My first book was written for fun, and to see if I could do it. With the second one I am constantly looking up at the sword of Damocles.” In my experience, this attitude is near fatal – great books are written from the inside out rather than the outside in – but you can absolutely see where this nervous author is coming from and that worries me. And one hopes it is worrying the editors out there as well.

And if I thought my new feature on “The Disappeared” wasn’t timely enough before….