We all want to side with the underdog. When there's a clash of overdog vs uberdog I suppose the overdog's position is still relatively under, so that's why I say "excelsior!" to Macmillan and "ha ha" to Amazon.
In the space of 48 hours Macmillan and Amazon went from minor border skirmishes to all-out war, declared by Amazon and lost by same a short while later. Ultimately it all came down to Amazon's vastly inflated idea of its rightful place in the affairs of man, finally clashing with a publisher big enough to say "no". Amazon tried to impose terms on Macmillan, Macmillan weren't having it and so Amazon withdrew its listings for every single Macmillan title.
Macmillan controls a lot of imprints. Suddenly, with no warning or reason given, a very large part of the global book supply was unavailable through the world's largest book supplier.
To save you crawling all over the interwebs for further details, Charles Stross has written a useful guide to the battlefield: Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight.
If you're more a bottom line sort of person, John Scalzi has written an entertaining analysis of Amazon's kamikaze strategy: All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend.
As you may have gathered by now, Amazon lost.
I'm not published by Macmillan or any of its imprints: other than general principle, I have no declarable interest in this. But I am still smarting, nearly 10 years later, from the punitive discounts Amazon imposed on Big Engine in return for the privilege of receiving a basic competent service from them: one that listed my titles accurately, didn't unilaterally declare them out of print and so on. Now I feel those wounds healing. A little.
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label publishing. Show all posts
Monday, February 01, 2010
Monday, January 04, 2010
Medical memories
Ten years - where does it go?
In March 1998 I started work at a medical publishing firm that I shall for the sake of legal liability call InsanelyRun. I returned to work after my second Christmas there on Tuesday 4th January 2000 and by the end of Wednesday 5th January I had been given notice. My boss, who shall be called J, had obviously decided on this course of action before Christmas; he didn't have to let me enjoy the break with a clear mind, but he did and it was kind of him.
I had a long rant prepared to mark the anniversary: then I realised I had already delivered a mini-rant, tantalising long-term readers with a few succinct details, to mark the tenth anniversary of the interviews that got me the job in the first place. So here's some extra detail that I didn't say first time round.
InsanelyRun published high quality, highly illustrated full colour medical textbooks, with a bent towards urology. Runaway success in building up a list had led to the reason they wanted me – they had a large backlog of manuscripts that they just didn't have the resources to deal with and the whole publishing programme was behind.
Jerome was a very good commissioning editor. Unfortunately he had the mad compulsion to keep on signing up the same deadweight, non-producing editors and authors over and over again. One reason he had wanted me was because in an earlier existence I had got a list of academic journals back on schedule. However, that was with the full support of a boss who knew exactly what was what, and measures included sacking the dead weights and only using writers who actually wrote. It was only a last chance sanction; we gave the dead weights every chance and every warning, and many of them responded favourably and worked harder for us, or gratefully accepted the chance to step down gracefully. But some were straightforwardly fired.
At InsanelyRun, the dead weights were rewarded for their efforts by being given yet another book to do. They were authorities in their field. Their names on the book covers sold copies. Or would have, if we had copies to sell.
Time and time again, we came back to the dichotomy between Jonquil's expectations and how the world actually works. A signature on a contract was, to Jolyon, just as good as an actual manuscript in hand. (And to be fair, it should be; a professional author doesn't miss deadlines without a very good reason, and plenty of warning if it becomes unavoidable. But these weren't professional authors, they were doctors.) I suspect that a lot of his signing up was in fact a friendly chat over a drink in a hotel bar, which elicited a vague promise to write something for us, which turned into a contract without too much further thought. He never looked them in the eye and spelled out how it was going to be: "you will provide x, in y format, by z deadline." And he enjoyed the commissioning process too much to let me sit by his side and do the dirty work for him. Thus these busy professionals found they had signed a contract to do a lot of work for so little money that they were pretty well doing us a favour, and meanwhile the job they were actually paid to do involved saving lives and making people better. It's not that surprising that the priority slipped down their timetable.
One book, a multi-author textbook on benign prostatic hyperplasia, did so well that a second edition was decreed, with updated chapters. The only problem here was that none of the authors especially wanted to update their chapters as it had only been a year or so since the first edition and the field hadn't progressed that much. No one was actually ready for a second edition, except Justinian. Guess whose fault it was decreed to be that none of the chapters were coming in?
Or there was the time I failed to get hold of an author for whom I only had a phone number. No address, no email, no web presence, just a phone number, with not even a voicemail at the other end. The phone would ring and ring and ring until eventually it cut out.
Juvenal casually mentioned the author's campaign. What campaign?
"Oh, he's standing for the Scottish Parliament ..."
The twit actually thought that a man in the middle of an election campaign would take time out to write for us.
The final nail in my coffin was a website for urologists which I shall call InsaneUrology.com. The idea was good: it would be a regularly updated, dynamic repository of all thing urological – news, articles, abstracts, happenings – with core material was to be submitted by an unpaid editorial board, who like most of InsanelyRun's authors had signed up on a wave of goodwill and then suddenly found reality getting in the way. The editorial board almost universally failed to come up with anything. I phoned them and phoned them and phoned them, leaving message after message after message on their voicemails. I wrote letters and bombarded them with emails. Short of going round and holding them at gunpoint while they wrote, there was not much more I could have done to wring their words out of them. Then one day Jamal sent me an email. "I've just left messages with all the board members. What exactly is the problem?"
I went to see him and demanded to know what the hell he meant.
"I've left messages with each of them," he said patiently, as if explaining to an idiot. "They will get their messages and send their work."
As if. Needless to say, they didn't. Unfortunately Jordan got it into his head that they did and that he had achieved, with a single phone call, what I had failed to achieve with many. And despite my efforts to point out the reality of the situation, he never failed to drag it out on future occasions when my failings needed to be highlighted. The last time I heard this repeated was the final meeting where he finally, mercifully fired me.
But for all that, InsanelyRun was not an unhappy experience. As individuals, Jeremiah and his business partner treated their staff well. Jedekiah let me use the office printers to run off my manuscripts, in those days before electronic submissions. On one occasion he decided the entire company should decamp for lunch to the Head of the River and we stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. (Which didn't help the pressure on anyone's work, but he was the boss ...) The week always ended with wine tasting in the office from about 4pm onwards on a Friday. And the staff were lovely people, all with a considerably better idea of how one actually publishes books than our leaders had.
But, at some point over the last summer, work relations with Jasper reached a new low (once again he dragged out the story of how he had phoned round the editorial board with allegedly more success than me) and I was actually given written notice that I should show signs of improvement. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October I specifically asked: "are you happy with my work?" His answer wasn't quite so specifically "yes"; he talked about how he had had concerns, and those concerns seemed to have been addressed, so yes, he probably was happy.
The year rolled on and into 2000 ...
It would have come as less of a surprise if, at Frankfurt, he had just said "no". Out came the litany of my alleged failings (including, yes, the time he called all the members of the editorial board) augmented by some brand new ones: complaints apparently received from the production manager and the senior editor, neither of whom had at that point come back from their Christmas break. Their version, when I heard from them, was a little different: he had come to them and made them wrack their brains for something, anything in my work that hadn't been quite up to scratch. They obligingly came up with a few instances all of which (they hastened to add, to me) came well within the remit of usual glitches – no production process is ever perfect. But it was enough for Jestocost. I was given written notice and two months pay.
I was a sacrificial lamb. InsanelyRun was strapped for cash. It was eating up money, it badly needed to be getting its books out for its special sales and I was perceived as an obstacle in the flow. Jedekiah didn't even appoint a replacement. The senior editor was given my job on top of her own, which took all her time anyway, with no commensurate increase in salary. She later confessed to me that she had never even looked at the pile of manuscripts I left behind.
Unpleasant though it was, I still maintain getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me for its knock-on effects that last to this day. I may or may not mark more tenth anniversaries over the next few years. Depends how bored I get. I will however share one more memory of InsanelyRun: in tomorrow's post. It will make you smile ...
In March 1998 I started work at a medical publishing firm that I shall for the sake of legal liability call InsanelyRun. I returned to work after my second Christmas there on Tuesday 4th January 2000 and by the end of Wednesday 5th January I had been given notice. My boss, who shall be called J, had obviously decided on this course of action before Christmas; he didn't have to let me enjoy the break with a clear mind, but he did and it was kind of him.
I had a long rant prepared to mark the anniversary: then I realised I had already delivered a mini-rant, tantalising long-term readers with a few succinct details, to mark the tenth anniversary of the interviews that got me the job in the first place. So here's some extra detail that I didn't say first time round.
InsanelyRun published high quality, highly illustrated full colour medical textbooks, with a bent towards urology. Runaway success in building up a list had led to the reason they wanted me – they had a large backlog of manuscripts that they just didn't have the resources to deal with and the whole publishing programme was behind.
Jerome was a very good commissioning editor. Unfortunately he had the mad compulsion to keep on signing up the same deadweight, non-producing editors and authors over and over again. One reason he had wanted me was because in an earlier existence I had got a list of academic journals back on schedule. However, that was with the full support of a boss who knew exactly what was what, and measures included sacking the dead weights and only using writers who actually wrote. It was only a last chance sanction; we gave the dead weights every chance and every warning, and many of them responded favourably and worked harder for us, or gratefully accepted the chance to step down gracefully. But some were straightforwardly fired.
At InsanelyRun, the dead weights were rewarded for their efforts by being given yet another book to do. They were authorities in their field. Their names on the book covers sold copies. Or would have, if we had copies to sell.
Time and time again, we came back to the dichotomy between Jonquil's expectations and how the world actually works. A signature on a contract was, to Jolyon, just as good as an actual manuscript in hand. (And to be fair, it should be; a professional author doesn't miss deadlines without a very good reason, and plenty of warning if it becomes unavoidable. But these weren't professional authors, they were doctors.) I suspect that a lot of his signing up was in fact a friendly chat over a drink in a hotel bar, which elicited a vague promise to write something for us, which turned into a contract without too much further thought. He never looked them in the eye and spelled out how it was going to be: "you will provide x, in y format, by z deadline." And he enjoyed the commissioning process too much to let me sit by his side and do the dirty work for him. Thus these busy professionals found they had signed a contract to do a lot of work for so little money that they were pretty well doing us a favour, and meanwhile the job they were actually paid to do involved saving lives and making people better. It's not that surprising that the priority slipped down their timetable.
One book, a multi-author textbook on benign prostatic hyperplasia, did so well that a second edition was decreed, with updated chapters. The only problem here was that none of the authors especially wanted to update their chapters as it had only been a year or so since the first edition and the field hadn't progressed that much. No one was actually ready for a second edition, except Justinian. Guess whose fault it was decreed to be that none of the chapters were coming in?
Or there was the time I failed to get hold of an author for whom I only had a phone number. No address, no email, no web presence, just a phone number, with not even a voicemail at the other end. The phone would ring and ring and ring until eventually it cut out.
Juvenal casually mentioned the author's campaign. What campaign?
"Oh, he's standing for the Scottish Parliament ..."
The twit actually thought that a man in the middle of an election campaign would take time out to write for us.
The final nail in my coffin was a website for urologists which I shall call InsaneUrology.com. The idea was good: it would be a regularly updated, dynamic repository of all thing urological – news, articles, abstracts, happenings – with core material was to be submitted by an unpaid editorial board, who like most of InsanelyRun's authors had signed up on a wave of goodwill and then suddenly found reality getting in the way. The editorial board almost universally failed to come up with anything. I phoned them and phoned them and phoned them, leaving message after message after message on their voicemails. I wrote letters and bombarded them with emails. Short of going round and holding them at gunpoint while they wrote, there was not much more I could have done to wring their words out of them. Then one day Jamal sent me an email. "I've just left messages with all the board members. What exactly is the problem?"
I went to see him and demanded to know what the hell he meant.
"I've left messages with each of them," he said patiently, as if explaining to an idiot. "They will get their messages and send their work."
As if. Needless to say, they didn't. Unfortunately Jordan got it into his head that they did and that he had achieved, with a single phone call, what I had failed to achieve with many. And despite my efforts to point out the reality of the situation, he never failed to drag it out on future occasions when my failings needed to be highlighted. The last time I heard this repeated was the final meeting where he finally, mercifully fired me.
But for all that, InsanelyRun was not an unhappy experience. As individuals, Jeremiah and his business partner treated their staff well. Jedekiah let me use the office printers to run off my manuscripts, in those days before electronic submissions. On one occasion he decided the entire company should decamp for lunch to the Head of the River and we stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. (Which didn't help the pressure on anyone's work, but he was the boss ...) The week always ended with wine tasting in the office from about 4pm onwards on a Friday. And the staff were lovely people, all with a considerably better idea of how one actually publishes books than our leaders had.
But, at some point over the last summer, work relations with Jasper reached a new low (once again he dragged out the story of how he had phoned round the editorial board with allegedly more success than me) and I was actually given written notice that I should show signs of improvement. At the Frankfurt Book Fair in October I specifically asked: "are you happy with my work?" His answer wasn't quite so specifically "yes"; he talked about how he had had concerns, and those concerns seemed to have been addressed, so yes, he probably was happy.
The year rolled on and into 2000 ...
It would have come as less of a surprise if, at Frankfurt, he had just said "no". Out came the litany of my alleged failings (including, yes, the time he called all the members of the editorial board) augmented by some brand new ones: complaints apparently received from the production manager and the senior editor, neither of whom had at that point come back from their Christmas break. Their version, when I heard from them, was a little different: he had come to them and made them wrack their brains for something, anything in my work that hadn't been quite up to scratch. They obligingly came up with a few instances all of which (they hastened to add, to me) came well within the remit of usual glitches – no production process is ever perfect. But it was enough for Jestocost. I was given written notice and two months pay.
I was a sacrificial lamb. InsanelyRun was strapped for cash. It was eating up money, it badly needed to be getting its books out for its special sales and I was perceived as an obstacle in the flow. Jedekiah didn't even appoint a replacement. The senior editor was given my job on top of her own, which took all her time anyway, with no commensurate increase in salary. She later confessed to me that she had never even looked at the pile of manuscripts I left behind.
Unpleasant though it was, I still maintain getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me for its knock-on effects that last to this day. I may or may not mark more tenth anniversaries over the next few years. Depends how bored I get. I will however share one more memory of InsanelyRun: in tomorrow's post. It will make you smile ...
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
22 not out
Twenty two years ago today, 3 November 1987 (a Tuesday), I started my first real job. As I'm now 44 that means I have been working for half my life. (This ignores the fact that I was then 22.75, give or take, so the second half will be completed when I'm 45.5, next August.)
I knew I wanted to get into publishing in some way, even though I didn't know much about it. I knew that adverts with bold headings like "BREAK INTO PUBLISHING!" were actually aimed at getting cold calling fodder in to work on business directories, so they were to be avoided, as was anything to do with Foyles (its act has cleaned up a lot since then). I forget how I knew these things but I did. Other than that I was anyone's and had been spraying letters to anyone who remotely looked like a publisher the length and breadth of the country.
Ultimately work found me. My mother's cousin Jessica Kingsley had been running Jessica Kingsley Publishers for nearly a year at this stage, working from home. She had just moved into her new office in the Brunswick Centre, a concrete monstrosity between Russell and Coram's Fields, and she was looking to expand the operation.
We Did Lunch and she explained the set-up and the vision. Jessica was the first person I knew, even among my tech-literate friends from university, to talk about desktop publishing and publishing on CD-ROM. Her imagination was way ahead of the technology (we never did publish on CD-ROM while I worked for her) but she saw it all coming. This was October 1987. She tentatively offered me employment until December, at £6000 pro rata. I joined her a week later, in early November, during which time she had somehow scraped up an extra £500 to make my starting salary £6500, and I worked for her for four years. The pay did go up.
The Brunswick Centre – or the Brunswick, as I gather it now calls itself –is a long rectangular open air shopping centre. It's open at both ends and the long sides on either side of the main plaza are lined with shops; then above them are flats in stepped tiers like a concrete Aztec pyramid. Jessica sublet a single room in a suite of sales offices owned by Gower Publishing. It was a pretty useless location for sales offices, tucked out of the way around a corner opposite the Renoir Cinema, which showed arty foreign films that were never going to generate much drop-in trade. Fortunately a publisher doesn't really need drop-in trade.
Drop-in trade there was, though, not quite of the kind we would have liked. The Brunswick generated an endless supply of winos and beggars. I could go back and point to the exact place where I first encountered a beggar – a woman about my age who came up to me and bluntly, wretchedly, explained that she had no money for food for XYZ reasons, could I spare some? I was shocked, horrified, and as I was coming out of a shop with my hands full of chocolate bars ready for the journey home it seemed unreasonable to turn her down. I think I gave her a pound.
After four years of working in London, though, my heart became more hardened.
One little old lady – Polish, I think, hardly any English – in one of the flats was convinced we were the management office, so would come in with her worries and complaints. Once a very elderly, confused gent wandered in because he was looking for his GP, whose surgery was elsewhere in the complex. He was suffering chest pains and couldn't walk any further. I sat him down and ran to the doctor's surgery, where the impenetrable wall of receptionists simply told me to call an ambulance. He survived.
Another flat was home to a sweet, white haired old gent in a slightly decayed long coat and hat, who was the first gay man I know to have clearly fancied the pants off me. It wasn't reciprocated. He worked as a tour guide – he said, and I assume it to be true – at the Houses of Parliament. He had spied me from a distance thanks to the office's conveniently large studio windows and never failed to get into conversation when our paths crossed on my errands (I generally did the evening run to the Post Office, last thing before closing). We even met for a lunchtime beer a couple of times, which seemed a harmless, no-commitment sort of concession. When there was a Tube strike I was invited to stay over at his place rather than fight my way in the next day through the traffic chaos. Jessica however had already told me I could work at home during the strikes which seemed a better alternative.
I was flush with enthusiasm for my new publishing career and assumed the authors I had the honour to be publishing would share that enthusiasm. A publisher has accepted your life's work; wouldn't you fall over yourself to work with them and polish it up into a work to be proud of?
Well, no, apparently not. Many authors tend to assume that their work is done and polished when they turn in their draft, so responding to the publisher's queries or returning proofs isn't that high a priority. In fact, why show any urgency in turning in the manuscript at all? How hard can publishing a book be? If the publisher says "give us your manuscript in January and we'll publish in June," they tend to hear the "publish in June" bit and forget the rest. Then they are indignant and bewildered when they turn in the manuscript on 31 May and learn that it won't be out until December because the publisher, with an unaccountable urge to keep publishing books and therefore earn money to pay the staff and stay in business, has moved another book into the available slot.
In fact, the whole notion of the publisher being bound by commercial imperatives is a bit beyond many authors. They see the publisher as a slot into which you feed the manuscript and a book comes out the other end. What's the problem?
That was what I learned about authors.
About myself, I learned that I hate confrontation (which I knew), and can be painfully shy (which I knew), and have very little memory for names or details (which I hadn't really realised), and can give vague assurances ("your book will be in stock next week") far too easily. The confrontation and shyness points mean that actually chasing authors, which alas is a necessary part of any editing job, is one of my least favourite activities. I've got better at it over the years. The names and details point meant learning to pay more attention, take notes, write stuff down. The vague assurances meant don't make promises you can't personally guarantee will be kept. Life is just so much easier all round if you can be organised, and straightforward, and truthful.
Jessica had spent New Year's Eve 1986 with a bottle of champagne and her first computer, in her own words "working out how to turn it on". The grand sum of technical knowledge within Jessica Kingsley Publishers hadn't advanced greatly since then. Thanks to my trusty Amstrad PCW and various temp jobs I could already turn a computer on, and I didn't need the champagne, so I found my niche in book production, as much as anyone can have a niche in a company that small. I learnt all the dodges of preparing a manuscript in a word processor (remove double spacing and spaces before carriage returns, find and replace various common errors) and setting it in DTP (Ventura, a lovely smooth DOS-based piece of software which frankly has never been bettered, even with the latest incarnation of InDesign that I now use at work). We were way ahead of our time – when I tried to move on I was held back for a long time by the fact that my experience wasn't yet relevant in an industry that still mostly used hot metal.
We often got books sent in on PCW discs, which meant I could edit them at home. We then had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. Jessica kindly paid for me to install a second, high density floppy drive on my PCW at home.
I once got an author's disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen as a list of alphabetically ordered subsections. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn't science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher.
It was four highly intense years that I enjoyed hugely, while I picked up all the basic skills I use now (everything else has just been refinement) and my loathing of London grew daily. Soon after I started work there was the Kings Cross fire: the next Christmas, by which time I was commuting up from Farnborough, there was the Clapham Common crash. I was pretty certain, given the gradual and visible deterioration of all forms of public transport, that soon there would be an incident and loss of life that made those two cases look like statistical blips. I wanted to move, to anywhere but London. By the time I left for Oxford in late 1991 my starting salary had almost doubled (I know, I know, twice not very much is still quite little).
January will be the tenth anniversary of my losing my job in medical publishing, which essentially shaped the next decade more than I dreamed could be possible. Expect more reminiscences.
I knew I wanted to get into publishing in some way, even though I didn't know much about it. I knew that adverts with bold headings like "BREAK INTO PUBLISHING!" were actually aimed at getting cold calling fodder in to work on business directories, so they were to be avoided, as was anything to do with Foyles (its act has cleaned up a lot since then). I forget how I knew these things but I did. Other than that I was anyone's and had been spraying letters to anyone who remotely looked like a publisher the length and breadth of the country.
Ultimately work found me. My mother's cousin Jessica Kingsley had been running Jessica Kingsley Publishers for nearly a year at this stage, working from home. She had just moved into her new office in the Brunswick Centre, a concrete monstrosity between Russell and Coram's Fields, and she was looking to expand the operation.
We Did Lunch and she explained the set-up and the vision. Jessica was the first person I knew, even among my tech-literate friends from university, to talk about desktop publishing and publishing on CD-ROM. Her imagination was way ahead of the technology (we never did publish on CD-ROM while I worked for her) but she saw it all coming. This was October 1987. She tentatively offered me employment until December, at £6000 pro rata. I joined her a week later, in early November, during which time she had somehow scraped up an extra £500 to make my starting salary £6500, and I worked for her for four years. The pay did go up.
The Brunswick Centre – or the Brunswick, as I gather it now calls itself –is a long rectangular open air shopping centre. It's open at both ends and the long sides on either side of the main plaza are lined with shops; then above them are flats in stepped tiers like a concrete Aztec pyramid. Jessica sublet a single room in a suite of sales offices owned by Gower Publishing. It was a pretty useless location for sales offices, tucked out of the way around a corner opposite the Renoir Cinema, which showed arty foreign films that were never going to generate much drop-in trade. Fortunately a publisher doesn't really need drop-in trade.
Drop-in trade there was, though, not quite of the kind we would have liked. The Brunswick generated an endless supply of winos and beggars. I could go back and point to the exact place where I first encountered a beggar – a woman about my age who came up to me and bluntly, wretchedly, explained that she had no money for food for XYZ reasons, could I spare some? I was shocked, horrified, and as I was coming out of a shop with my hands full of chocolate bars ready for the journey home it seemed unreasonable to turn her down. I think I gave her a pound.
After four years of working in London, though, my heart became more hardened.
One little old lady – Polish, I think, hardly any English – in one of the flats was convinced we were the management office, so would come in with her worries and complaints. Once a very elderly, confused gent wandered in because he was looking for his GP, whose surgery was elsewhere in the complex. He was suffering chest pains and couldn't walk any further. I sat him down and ran to the doctor's surgery, where the impenetrable wall of receptionists simply told me to call an ambulance. He survived.
Another flat was home to a sweet, white haired old gent in a slightly decayed long coat and hat, who was the first gay man I know to have clearly fancied the pants off me. It wasn't reciprocated. He worked as a tour guide – he said, and I assume it to be true – at the Houses of Parliament. He had spied me from a distance thanks to the office's conveniently large studio windows and never failed to get into conversation when our paths crossed on my errands (I generally did the evening run to the Post Office, last thing before closing). We even met for a lunchtime beer a couple of times, which seemed a harmless, no-commitment sort of concession. When there was a Tube strike I was invited to stay over at his place rather than fight my way in the next day through the traffic chaos. Jessica however had already told me I could work at home during the strikes which seemed a better alternative.
I was flush with enthusiasm for my new publishing career and assumed the authors I had the honour to be publishing would share that enthusiasm. A publisher has accepted your life's work; wouldn't you fall over yourself to work with them and polish it up into a work to be proud of?
Well, no, apparently not. Many authors tend to assume that their work is done and polished when they turn in their draft, so responding to the publisher's queries or returning proofs isn't that high a priority. In fact, why show any urgency in turning in the manuscript at all? How hard can publishing a book be? If the publisher says "give us your manuscript in January and we'll publish in June," they tend to hear the "publish in June" bit and forget the rest. Then they are indignant and bewildered when they turn in the manuscript on 31 May and learn that it won't be out until December because the publisher, with an unaccountable urge to keep publishing books and therefore earn money to pay the staff and stay in business, has moved another book into the available slot.
In fact, the whole notion of the publisher being bound by commercial imperatives is a bit beyond many authors. They see the publisher as a slot into which you feed the manuscript and a book comes out the other end. What's the problem?
That was what I learned about authors.
About myself, I learned that I hate confrontation (which I knew), and can be painfully shy (which I knew), and have very little memory for names or details (which I hadn't really realised), and can give vague assurances ("your book will be in stock next week") far too easily. The confrontation and shyness points mean that actually chasing authors, which alas is a necessary part of any editing job, is one of my least favourite activities. I've got better at it over the years. The names and details point meant learning to pay more attention, take notes, write stuff down. The vague assurances meant don't make promises you can't personally guarantee will be kept. Life is just so much easier all round if you can be organised, and straightforward, and truthful.
Jessica had spent New Year's Eve 1986 with a bottle of champagne and her first computer, in her own words "working out how to turn it on". The grand sum of technical knowledge within Jessica Kingsley Publishers hadn't advanced greatly since then. Thanks to my trusty Amstrad PCW and various temp jobs I could already turn a computer on, and I didn't need the champagne, so I found my niche in book production, as much as anyone can have a niche in a company that small. I learnt all the dodges of preparing a manuscript in a word processor (remove double spacing and spaces before carriage returns, find and replace various common errors) and setting it in DTP (Ventura, a lovely smooth DOS-based piece of software which frankly has never been bettered, even with the latest incarnation of InDesign that I now use at work). We were way ahead of our time – when I tried to move on I was held back for a long time by the fact that my experience wasn't yet relevant in an industry that still mostly used hot metal.
We often got books sent in on PCW discs, which meant I could edit them at home. We then had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. Jessica kindly paid for me to install a second, high density floppy drive on my PCW at home.
I once got an author's disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen as a list of alphabetically ordered subsections. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn't science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher.
It was four highly intense years that I enjoyed hugely, while I picked up all the basic skills I use now (everything else has just been refinement) and my loathing of London grew daily. Soon after I started work there was the Kings Cross fire: the next Christmas, by which time I was commuting up from Farnborough, there was the Clapham Common crash. I was pretty certain, given the gradual and visible deterioration of all forms of public transport, that soon there would be an incident and loss of life that made those two cases look like statistical blips. I wanted to move, to anywhere but London. By the time I left for Oxford in late 1991 my starting salary had almost doubled (I know, I know, twice not very much is still quite little).
January will be the tenth anniversary of my losing my job in medical publishing, which essentially shaped the next decade more than I dreamed could be possible. Expect more reminiscences.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Another year, another Children's Authors Christmas Party
Well, in chronological order, I first met up with my agent for the first time in the 13 years he's represented me, which was nice. And I'm glad to say we get on well. Discussed various possible projects. Intriguing. All good.
Then on to Berkeley Square for the do. Chatted to various names and faces, authors and illuminati of Random House: some not what I'd expected at all, some exactly as I expected because I met them last year and even the year before. The waiters bearing trays of nibbles retain their extraordinary ability to walk through a room packed to the gills with people and still not quite come near enough to offer food to anyone. Fortunately the wine waiters haven't mastered this art, though I told myself I was only feeling light headed because it was very hot and I had given blood 24 hours earlier.
Retrieving my bag from the cloakroom wasn't as straightforward as you might expect, as the numbered ticket had come loose and was sticking to a woman's handbag. Cloakroom lady took some convincing it wasn't mine. I identified my own bag visually, and to prove my ownership I told the lady that if she looked in it, the first thing she would find was a blue jumper.
She opened the bag. She pulled out the jumper.
"It's black," she said sceptically. The cloakroom was quite dim.
"No, it's definitely blue in the right light," I assured her. She remained sceptical as though I had made a not quite lucky guess. I can only assume the cloakroom was full of bags stuffed with jumpers removed by their owners in advance because they knew how hot the party gets (actually, that could be true). I performed a further feat of clairvoyance by naming the book I was about to pull out of the bag before I had actually looked at the cover. She remained sceptical, possibly suspecting braille, but in the end she let me take it.
I could have pointed out that it was probably the only bag present emblazoned with "Networkshop 36, 8-10 April 2008, The University of Strathclyde" but I was too taken with my own cleverness and I really wasn't thinking very clearly by this point.
The only name I will drop is John Dickinson, who writes very worth reading grown-up kids' fantasy. He sought my views on our mutual publisher's intended new science fiction line but got away before I could complain that his father was responsible for giving me nightmares when I was 10. He might get that a lot.
Then on to Berkeley Square for the do. Chatted to various names and faces, authors and illuminati of Random House: some not what I'd expected at all, some exactly as I expected because I met them last year and even the year before. The waiters bearing trays of nibbles retain their extraordinary ability to walk through a room packed to the gills with people and still not quite come near enough to offer food to anyone. Fortunately the wine waiters haven't mastered this art, though I told myself I was only feeling light headed because it was very hot and I had given blood 24 hours earlier.
Retrieving my bag from the cloakroom wasn't as straightforward as you might expect, as the numbered ticket had come loose and was sticking to a woman's handbag. Cloakroom lady took some convincing it wasn't mine. I identified my own bag visually, and to prove my ownership I told the lady that if she looked in it, the first thing she would find was a blue jumper.
She opened the bag. She pulled out the jumper.
"It's black," she said sceptically. The cloakroom was quite dim.
"No, it's definitely blue in the right light," I assured her. She remained sceptical as though I had made a not quite lucky guess. I can only assume the cloakroom was full of bags stuffed with jumpers removed by their owners in advance because they knew how hot the party gets (actually, that could be true). I performed a further feat of clairvoyance by naming the book I was about to pull out of the bag before I had actually looked at the cover. She remained sceptical, possibly suspecting braille, but in the end she let me take it.
I could have pointed out that it was probably the only bag present emblazoned with "Networkshop 36, 8-10 April 2008, The University of Strathclyde" but I was too taken with my own cleverness and I really wasn't thinking very clearly by this point.
The only name I will drop is John Dickinson, who writes very worth reading grown-up kids' fantasy. He sought my views on our mutual publisher's intended new science fiction line but got away before I could complain that his father was responsible for giving me nightmares when I was 10. He might get that a lot.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
A poor deluded moonstruck dimwit with less idea of reality than a day-old chick
... is just one of the nice turns of phrase to come out of Philip Pullman's address at the weekend to the Society of Authors' Conference in Cambridge. Read it yourself to see exactly who he was speaking about.
A clue is that he was talking about the age banding of books, which has been mentioned briefly here before. His contention - and he gets no argument from me - is that age banding is just a symptom of a much wider spread illness of our modern world.
A clue is that he was talking about the age banding of books, which has been mentioned briefly here before. His contention - and he gets no argument from me - is that age banding is just a symptom of a much wider spread illness of our modern world.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Battle of the Bands
I'm officially a children's writer, or at least a young adults' writer, which I became by accident. I was aiming at Serious Grown-up Science Fiction writer, but I have to admit I like it here. When someone asks me what age I write for, I generally say something along the lines of "teens and up", which seems to cover it (and my own reading tastes).
Supposing I said "13 and up," and someone then asked "I'm 12, may I read your books?", and I replied, "no, absolutely not, stick to your own reading age until your voice breaks, you little punk."
Has anyone read To Kill A Mockingbird, in which at one point Scout is practically ordered to stop reading ahead of her age because it upsets her teacher's system?
Starting this autumn, various children's publishers are apparently going to start putting age bands on their books as a guide for who should be reading them. 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett and over 3500 other people, including myself, don't, and we've signed the petition to say so.
Bookshops already do this in their own way, of course - go into the children's section and you'll see the shelves classified by recommended age. No problem with that - it helps make the selection, especially if (most likely) you're a parent doing the buying. But honestly.
The publishers supporting the scheme say that, again, it's just guidance - it's not arbitrary. No child who reads a book ahead of his age will be shot for doing so. But look at it the other way round. Say your child of 10 has a less advanced reading age than his peers; say his reading age is 7. Will he be seen dead reading a book that's marked for 7 year olds?
It's one more symptom of our national obsession with getting everything classified. Tick a box on a form and you have apparently achieved something. But the statement "this book is for a x year old" is meaningless. The only meaningful statement is "this book is for whoever has the maturity to read it."
Oh dear. It seems I'm supporting the idea of making judgements based upon taste and maturity and insight, rather than because some unaccountable arbitrary authority tells us to. Can't have that, can we?
Supposing I said "13 and up," and someone then asked "I'm 12, may I read your books?", and I replied, "no, absolutely not, stick to your own reading age until your voice breaks, you little punk."
Has anyone read To Kill A Mockingbird, in which at one point Scout is practically ordered to stop reading ahead of her age because it upsets her teacher's system?
Starting this autumn, various children's publishers are apparently going to start putting age bands on their books as a guide for who should be reading them. 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett and over 3500 other people, including myself, don't, and we've signed the petition to say so.
Bookshops already do this in their own way, of course - go into the children's section and you'll see the shelves classified by recommended age. No problem with that - it helps make the selection, especially if (most likely) you're a parent doing the buying. But honestly.
The publishers supporting the scheme say that, again, it's just guidance - it's not arbitrary. No child who reads a book ahead of his age will be shot for doing so. But look at it the other way round. Say your child of 10 has a less advanced reading age than his peers; say his reading age is 7. Will he be seen dead reading a book that's marked for 7 year olds?
It's one more symptom of our national obsession with getting everything classified. Tick a box on a form and you have apparently achieved something. But the statement "this book is for a x year old" is meaningless. The only meaningful statement is "this book is for whoever has the maturity to read it."
Oh dear. It seems I'm supporting the idea of making judgements based upon taste and maturity and insight, rather than because some unaccountable arbitrary authority tells us to. Can't have that, can we?
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I watched TV with my eyes shut
I know that kinda misses the point, but they don't do Dragons' Den on the radio. I could listen but I couldn't bear to watch.
Normally I don't even tune in to Dragons' Den or any form of reality TV. It's just not my thing. There's the occasional success story, yes, but most of it is deliberately designed to "entertain", i.e. to humiliate the participants. Either the producers set these up to be appalling from the beginning - cf. Big Brother - or they just point the cameras at a clueless no-hoper and sit back, letting them self-destruct for all to see. Not much fun either way.
But occasionally my buttons are pressed, and an easy way to do that is to be clueless about publishing. I know how fiercely the publishing flame burns within an author's breast; but I also know how easy it is to be clued up about the business before dipping your toe in the water. In the absence of certifiable mental illness or other similar unavoidable circumstances, those who have one without managing the other are fair game.
Last night's Dragons' Den on BBC3 was a repeat of a programme first shown last year in which one Denise Channing, a.k.a. self-published author Jaq D. Hawkins tries to get investment in her film company that is producing a movie of her self-published fantasy novel Dance of the Goblins. (Actually not technically self-published; it's the second book of a total of two in the publisher's catalogue. The first is the publisher's own book.)
The total budget for the movie is £1.5m, of which £1m is the associate director fee for her big name - whom Denise can't actually name, or she's in trouble. He was apparently in both Pirates of the Caribbean and Phantom of the Opera, so a little elementary searching narrows him down to Kevin McNally. Whether Mr McNally knows he's associated with the movie and can command million-pound fees is unknown at this time. His IMDB entry says he has mostly acted with a little singing and some writing. No producing, associate or otherwise.
Denise's director of photography has been in the business for 18 years. What's he done? "I can't tell you what features he's done - he hasn't told me that." It was obviously an in-depth interview that signed him up, then. Or she hasn't mastered the IMDB herself.
A little mathematical wizardry shows that if you subtract Mr McNally's putative fee, the total budget for the movie is "considered in film terms, very low" ... half a million. Well, yes, it can be made cheaply, says Denise. And how.
Has Denise any experience of moving making at all? No.
How has the book sold? 2000 copies since 2005. By Big Engine standards it's a bestseller, but then, I never went on Dragons' Den.
Here's the Dragons' Den page, including a link to the actual presentation and grilling. Watch it if only for the reaction of Theo Paphitis:
Normally I don't even tune in to Dragons' Den or any form of reality TV. It's just not my thing. There's the occasional success story, yes, but most of it is deliberately designed to "entertain", i.e. to humiliate the participants. Either the producers set these up to be appalling from the beginning - cf. Big Brother - or they just point the cameras at a clueless no-hoper and sit back, letting them self-destruct for all to see. Not much fun either way.
But occasionally my buttons are pressed, and an easy way to do that is to be clueless about publishing. I know how fiercely the publishing flame burns within an author's breast; but I also know how easy it is to be clued up about the business before dipping your toe in the water. In the absence of certifiable mental illness or other similar unavoidable circumstances, those who have one without managing the other are fair game.
Last night's Dragons' Den on BBC3 was a repeat of a programme first shown last year in which one Denise Channing, a.k.a. self-published author Jaq D. Hawkins tries to get investment in her film company that is producing a movie of her self-published fantasy novel Dance of the Goblins. (Actually not technically self-published; it's the second book of a total of two in the publisher's catalogue. The first is the publisher's own book.)
The total budget for the movie is £1.5m, of which £1m is the associate director fee for her big name - whom Denise can't actually name, or she's in trouble. He was apparently in both Pirates of the Caribbean and Phantom of the Opera, so a little elementary searching narrows him down to Kevin McNally. Whether Mr McNally knows he's associated with the movie and can command million-pound fees is unknown at this time. His IMDB entry says he has mostly acted with a little singing and some writing. No producing, associate or otherwise.
Denise's director of photography has been in the business for 18 years. What's he done? "I can't tell you what features he's done - he hasn't told me that." It was obviously an in-depth interview that signed him up, then. Or she hasn't mastered the IMDB herself.
A little mathematical wizardry shows that if you subtract Mr McNally's putative fee, the total budget for the movie is "considered in film terms, very low" ... half a million. Well, yes, it can be made cheaply, says Denise. And how.
Has Denise any experience of moving making at all? No.
How has the book sold? 2000 copies since 2005. By Big Engine standards it's a bestseller, but then, I never went on Dragons' Den.
Here's the Dragons' Den page, including a link to the actual presentation and grilling. Watch it if only for the reaction of Theo Paphitis:
"You need to go home. You need to go home, go to your bedroom, turn out the lights, get under the quilt and get some sleep. When you wake up in the morning if you really think this is a really good idea, may I suggest you turn the lights back off again and go back to sleep ..."And then Peter Jones tops even that.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
3650 days later
It’s coming up to ten years, must be. Let’s count back. I started there in March 1998. My second interview was early January 1998. Therefore my first interview was late 1997; I’m pretty certain it was November. So, we’re approaching the tenth anniversary.
I was climbing the walls in my job of six years, publishing IT-related journals, which I had streamlined to the stage where a trained monkey could do it. I knew I could handle much more, and we had become part of the Great Big Dutch International Publishing Company, who showed no sign of promoting me and every sign of wanting to make us all big and corporate and move us down to head office in London. Time to move.
My new employer was a four-year-old medical publishing company. They had about thirty forthcoming titles, all badly behind. In my letter I said, correctly, that I had got a list of journals back onto schedule. They welcomed me with open arms.
Strangely, no one at either interview asked if I was squeamish, which as all the books were fully illustrated in colour would have been useful. As it turned out I can look at pictures of diseased and excised genitalia until the cows came home. My weak spot was the book on knee surgery. Who knew?
Something that did come out at the interview was the oft-repeated mantra from my new boss, ‘I’m not a details man’. He said it right from the start so I have no excuses – I should have realised back then. Sadly I never heard what he was actually saying until it was too late. What I thought he was saying was, ‘I am not a details man, by which I mean, I have a full grasp of the details but choose to delegate them to capable minions such as yourself.’ ‘Knockout,’ I replied. ‘Point me at ’em.’
But no. What he was actually saying was ‘I have no idea what the details are, nor any intention of finding out. This will not stop me making grand and unworkable plans that I will expect you to implement.’
It was not a happy experience - disappointment and disillusion on both sides, for two years.
The really sad thing is that the fool thought things would get better by getting rid of me. This was a minority view amongst the staff, and three further people were to leave after I was given notice: the production manager because (as she told me) she no longer had faith in the man to make sensible decisions, her assistant who had no intention of being lumbered with her job, and the senior editor who was given my job on top of her own, with no commensurate increase in salary. But it all ceased to be my problem on January 7th, 2000. And by the start of the second week of January 2000, it had dawned on me that this was the opportunity to put my years of academic publishing experience to some practical use and start my own company.
Which, no, didn’t work out, but the experience opened doors, gave me a great time and had a knock-on effect of other changes in my life that included meeting my future wife.
So, happy anniversary, whenever it is.
I was climbing the walls in my job of six years, publishing IT-related journals, which I had streamlined to the stage where a trained monkey could do it. I knew I could handle much more, and we had become part of the Great Big Dutch International Publishing Company, who showed no sign of promoting me and every sign of wanting to make us all big and corporate and move us down to head office in London. Time to move.
My new employer was a four-year-old medical publishing company. They had about thirty forthcoming titles, all badly behind. In my letter I said, correctly, that I had got a list of journals back onto schedule. They welcomed me with open arms.
Strangely, no one at either interview asked if I was squeamish, which as all the books were fully illustrated in colour would have been useful. As it turned out I can look at pictures of diseased and excised genitalia until the cows came home. My weak spot was the book on knee surgery. Who knew?
Something that did come out at the interview was the oft-repeated mantra from my new boss, ‘I’m not a details man’. He said it right from the start so I have no excuses – I should have realised back then. Sadly I never heard what he was actually saying until it was too late. What I thought he was saying was, ‘I am not a details man, by which I mean, I have a full grasp of the details but choose to delegate them to capable minions such as yourself.’ ‘Knockout,’ I replied. ‘Point me at ’em.’
But no. What he was actually saying was ‘I have no idea what the details are, nor any intention of finding out. This will not stop me making grand and unworkable plans that I will expect you to implement.’
It was not a happy experience - disappointment and disillusion on both sides, for two years.
The really sad thing is that the fool thought things would get better by getting rid of me. This was a minority view amongst the staff, and three further people were to leave after I was given notice: the production manager because (as she told me) she no longer had faith in the man to make sensible decisions, her assistant who had no intention of being lumbered with her job, and the senior editor who was given my job on top of her own, with no commensurate increase in salary. But it all ceased to be my problem on January 7th, 2000. And by the start of the second week of January 2000, it had dawned on me that this was the opportunity to put my years of academic publishing experience to some practical use and start my own company.
Which, no, didn’t work out, but the experience opened doors, gave me a great time and had a knock-on effect of other changes in my life that included meeting my future wife.
So, happy anniversary, whenever it is.
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