Extracts - Learning by Experience
The Writer's Handbook is into its 15th edition. Barry Turner looks back on the teenage years.
Optimism ran high in the first edition of The Writer's Handbook. Fifteen years ago 'the aspiring author had everything to play for' or so we believed. And with good reason. A refreshing wind of change was blowing across the market place. Better produced books at affordable prices were being sold more energetically in ever greater numbers. And there was plenty of money around to invest in new talent. Takeover mania, some fifty buy-ups of old established names in less than two years, often achieved at spectacular prices, caused jitters among writers who feared the loss of the cosy editorial chat favoured by the smaller houses. But publication by a conglomerate had its compensations, not least the sales muscle to propel a title into the bestseller lists.
Beyond the book world, the media outlook was no less rosy. We were promised more newspapers and magazines, more hours of television and radio, more of everything. And this had to mean more opportunities for writers.
Well, up to a point. There were contradictory forces that went largely undetected in the mid-eighties. Maybe we should have known that Kingsley Amis was right when he famously argued that 'more means worse'. Instead, Writer's Handbook along with other observers of the literary scene, chose the sanguine view that 'more simply means more, neither better nor worse'. We then stood back in dismay as standards plummeted.
On television, the dedication to pushing audience figures up and costs down led to a plethora of chat shows and panel games and the near disappearance of modern drama. Writers who did best from the multiplicity of channels were adapters of costume classics and the creators of long-running situation comedies and police series. On radio, the expansion of air time was filled by news, endlessly repeated, with inconsequential discussion. ('Well John, at the end of the day …') Movies went for monosyllabic action—audiences were said to get impatient with a script that had a lot of words — while the press favoured bigger headlines and more pictures.
Books were different, as the publishers never ceased to remind us. Every year the output of titles edged upwards so that by the mid-nineties it touched 100,000. But this achievement masked changes in publishing that made life harder for some writers and for newcomers in general. Creeping Americanisation — nowadays we would call it globalisation — was the single biggest influence on publishing economics. Nearly all the conglomerates were trans-Atlantic companies either controlled from New York or with powerful American subsidiaries. Increasingly, a sellable book in the UK meant a book that would also do well in the US. Shrewd writers adapted their style accordingly. At the same time, buying in from the US was a soft option for publishers who paid modestly for titles that had already earned their keep in Barnes and Noble. Of the new titles appearing each year in the UK, at least 15,000 were American imports. The chief impact was on fiction. Claims that we were turning out more novels every year were misleading.
Once reprints and American authors were crossed off, output was shown to have changed little in forty years.
It wasn't all bad news. Brave new publishers appeared on the scene. Hodder Headline, Bloomsbury and Orion quickly made their mark but others (Carcanet, Fourth Estate, Granta, Canongate, Serpent's Tail, The X Press) less well known in the general market, were discovering original and exciting talents. The new technology (new then, old fashioned now) so simplified the printing of books that anyone with modest capital could set up as a publisher. In 1995, Whitakers listed no less than 25,000 small publishers. Most were one man, indeed, one book affairs with little prospect of being anything else but the fact that they were there at all suggested a creative energy that promised well.
Encouraging also was the steady increase in the volume of books sold. The lift-off titles were rarely from the literary establishment but the fact that a screen obsessed public was ready, even eager, to read was encouraging. Those who lost out were the middle range authors, those who could list a few titles which earned more on PLR than on retail. No one wanted to know them, not the big boys who were obsessed by mega sellers nor the newcomers who were looking for fresh talent.
The cries of outrage by the dispossessed were drowned out by the roar of unbridled commerce. Authors with a place on the inside track discovered that book sales were only part of their good fortune. As the century came to an end the book, more than ever before, was the starter for every other medium. Books could be serialised for newspapers, adapted for television, read on radio, made into movies, themed for merchandising and filleted for computer games. The book was the easiest and cheapest way of starting a trend. If the punters took to a book they would take to anything. Publishers and agents became overnight experts in subsidiary rights.
The economics of writing was set to become yet more complex. After the joys of the mobile telephone (fancy being able to spend a journey chatting cover designs with your editor) came the orgasmic pleasures of the Internet. Suddenly, any writer could find readers, if only former train spotters. But making money from the Net was another matter, as Stephen King and other author entrepreneurs soon discovered. This is not to say that a money making formula will not be found. It is early days. HarperCollins has just launched the first e-book list. Already we have updates of technical and reference books on Web pages, electronic journals are multiplying and we are well into the age of print-on-demand with books transmitted on-line and printed when, where and whatever quantities they are needed. Can it be long before a choice of books on a handy portable screen becomes the commuter's companion?
And best of all, as yet no one has conceived of a way of cutting out the writer. Technology will get ever more surreal but in so far as it depends on words, somebody has to write them. Those with the necessary creative skills have everything going for them. But where have we heard that story before?