Literary star-trekking IIaiin Fiinllayson Opiiniion - Publliishiing Monday, 10th December 2012 Once editors and agents would read their slush piles, writes Iain Finlayson. Now they trawl the internet in hopes of finding the next big thing - possibly a self-published book they turned down in manuscript. As a result, there are jewels to be found in the digital dung heap. In film language, a turkey is a movie that goes "straight to video". On the contrary, a book that goes "straight to digital" is - for the time being - given considerable benefit of the literary doubt. It is not knee-jerk-rated as oozing like pond life from the bottom of the slush pile, as unpublishable elsewhere, as blackballed from the literary club. In the literary marketplace, there is something for everybody, at every price and quality: there are 500 shades of good, bad and indifferent. To stretch the poultry metaphor, not all geese are swans. Not every novel is a Booker candidate, not every non-fiction book is a no-brainer for the Samuel Johnson Prize. The digital revolution has, in a sense, democratised writing. It has given a platform to everyone with anything to say. There are difficulties with democracy, of course, and it comes in various imperfect forms, but the digital format has enabled very many writers to publish their work, to make it available to a wide public, often at no, or very little, charge. This is now a fact of publishing life: publishing in the widest sense, that is. In the narrow sense of commercial publishing, it is presently a bane and prospectively a boon. The Big Momma of e-publishing is Amazon, and Kindle, its digital reader, is now beyond being merely a brand name. Kindle is a generic signifier, just as Hoover evokes a universal image of a vacuum cleaner or Coke sparks the mental synapses to recognise a soft drink. Books are Kindled. They are not Nooked or Koboed. Kindle is now the word for a digital reader. Amazon, in global branding terms, got to the commercial magnetic pole first and planted the Kindle flag. With power comes great responsibility, to quote Spiderman's mantra, and Amazon is a powerful publisher. But, unlike most publishers, it is indiscriminate. Irresponsible, some might say. For the most part, it publishes whatever it is given. It takes in product, formats it, publishes and sells it on a digital platform, processes orders from buyers, takes their money and, after deducting a reasonable fee of some 30% for services rendered, promptly pays the author. And that, to put it in terms that Squirrel Nutkin would recognise as food, is what Amazon does for writers and readers. In another nutshell, the lack of editorial control by digital publishers is worrying not only traditional publishers but also writers with aspirations to literary reputation, respected commentators in the book www.bookbrunch.co.uk Design by: BDS Digital © BookBrunch Ltd. world, and some readers. The market for self-selected ebooks may (they say) be swamped with the rawest, unedited, most amateur, lowest common denominator product, unmediated by professional editors, critics, censors, reviewers and other guardians of literary standards and protocols. In other words, the ratio of good to garbage is unpredictable. But are the gatekeepers always correct, always so discerning? The Booker shortlist this year, which included a novel by Deborah Levy that was published by a small independent press, has given ammunition to those who have hitherto regarded the judicial choice of titles for prestigious prizes as elitist, conventional and, sometimes, sentimentally, as Buggins' turn for selection. There is no telling what will seize readers' imagination and sell. Amanda Craig, novelist and The Times critic of fiction for children, quotes the famous story about the head of a top US publisher sending round an email saying, From now on we are only going to publish bestsellers. "But even with the bean-counters in charge," she says, "there's no knowing what will become a bestseller, as editors well know." She cites in evidence Pat Ferguson, a casualty of Deutsch who spent over a decade in the wilderness with Solidus Press before being picked up by the Orange long list and Penguin with her excellent new novel The Midwife's Daughter. Amanda Craig thinks that "The flight of talent to small independents is no surprise when you see how unadventurous most mainstream publishers have become." Danuta Kean, books editor of Mslexia magazine and well-regarded as a commentator on publishing, begs to differ. "Bloomsbury, Headline, Little, Brown, Macmillan, HarperCollins haven't abandoned literary fiction. Let's face it, Hilary Mantel was published by Fourth Estate, part of HarperCollins, and quite a few winners were published from large houses - Ian McEwan, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Howard Jacobson. It's very tough for publishers to publish literary fiction now. The chains aren't taking it in any quantities - maybe one or two copies per store, which is nothing and can't justify the expense involved in publishing some books. What I think is amazing is that imprints like Cape are still taking on books that are very literary. Of course the small houses are doing amazing stuff, but they have much lower overheads and can invest in books that may not sell many copies - just like poetry imprints really. As for the digital market, I couldn't agree more. There is a lot of hype around self-publishing, but the reality is that only Amazon is making much money, because it is a long tail business (like a supermarket, it makes money by selling lots of lines at a low margin rather than few lines at a high margin). Most of the stuff out there isn't very good and most of it - even if good - stands little chance of getting noticed. That is what a large house does well." Duncan Fallowell, a long-established writer, whose latest book How To Get Lost was recently published by small independent Ditto Press and won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for 2012, is more suspicious than Danuta Kean of corporates, who, he believes, "are rejecting 'real talent' as inherently unmanageable." Charles Lambert, novelist and short story writer, published by Picador, is more moderate: "Just a couple of days ago, though I was encouraged by seemingly good sales figures in my first royalty statement for the paperback of Any Human Face, they also made me wonder just what kind of sales publishers need to reinvest in an author (Little Monsters, my first novel, actually did better than this as well). I think of Isherwood's first novel selling 320 copies and Cape (I think) publishing him again and again..." Except that a corporate publisher's tolerance for publishing an author who doesn't profit the list may wear thinner much more quickly now than in Isherwood's case in the 1930s. Amanda Craig has some sympathy for editors and agents in the current media mayhem: "All these creative writing workshops may simply be swamping them." This is undoubtedly true. Just as students these days are rolled off the Media Studies conveyor belt into the marketplace, so professional and amateur writing courses are taking on all comers, all aspirant authors who think they have books in them and that publishers will lay contracts at their feet all along the yellow brick road to bestsellerdom or literary prizes. No doubt these courses discover natural talent and give it polish. No doubt the graduates write some good books. No doubt a few will become www.bookbrunch.co.uk Design by: BDS Digital © BookBrunch Ltd. ornaments to English literature and/or commercial successes. But those that do not, those that are rejected by publishers, will find sanctuary, solace, salvation, perhaps even success, in digital self-publishing. I should say that my interest in digital publishing has been prompted by personal experience. Simon Burt (a friend who is a literary novelist published by Faber) and I collaborated to write Blood Month, the first title in a trilogy of crime novels set in modern-day Notting Hill. First of all, my agent "resisted" (her word) reading it, so I was obliged to send it out to publishers myself. I was lucky: as a long-time reviewer and author of non- fiction books, I could get the novel read quickly by big corporate publishers. In the end, like my agent, but for their own reasons, they found it resistible. Although Blood Month was well, even enthusiastically, received as a classy, stylish piece of work that extended the boundaries of the conventional crime novel, they then turned it down on the ground that it "crossed genres" and so, I suppose, could not easily be niche-marketed either as genre fiction or as a literary novel. I still don't understand this. No wonder publishing is in trouble if it recognises quality fiction when it sees it, but doesn't know how to sell it. So, obviously, I have had to do it myself. As the old Chinese curse has it, authors nowadays find themselves living in interesting times. It has been a steep learning curve, but at the beginning of November this year Simon Burt and I (writing as Matthew McAllister) published Blood Month on Kindle. Who knows how it will do. There is even more competition out there in cyberspace than in the chain bookstores and the book departments in supermarkets and airports. The hard work of publicising the book begins now: another high- gradient learning process. The reward for e-publishing success may be (ironically one might think) an offer of hard copy publishing by a commercial publisher.