Extract from Chapter 4: How the publishing industry works – or not, as the case may be
The one unchanging characteristic of the book world is that everyone in it moans ceaselessly about everyone else. Authors complain about publishers (with every good reason); publishers complain about authors and booksellers; and booksellers criticise all the other parties. Distributors, wholesalers, agents, literary critics and assorted hangers-on come in for their share of stick too.
The agent George Greenfield tells us in his book A Smattering of Monsters that the publisher Walter Harrap once actually remarked to him, ‘Ours would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the authors.’ And, I dare say, many another publisher has said the same thing. So, before we go any further, let me state, very firmly, that there ought to be a law.
There ought to be several laws, actually, but the one I have in mind would require every publisher to go down on his knees at 9.00 a.m. each morning, face in the direction of his warehouse, and recite the following mantra ten times over: Without writers there are no books. Without books there is no publishing. Without publishing there is no free lunch.
If all publishers were required to follow this procedure, on penalty of losing a finger each time they forgot, then it is possible – not guaranteed, mind you, but possible – that writers might, just occasionally, and largely by accident, be given the credit they deserve.
As things are, the publishing world is so constructed that, to repeat the distressingly crude words of one anonymous complainant in Publishing News, writers are ‘pissed on from start to finish.’
Next extract.