I’ve been enjoying an interesting thread on a Lablit Forum in which we’ve been chatting about whether it is best to write to please oneself, or to please others. While thinking about this I have been in correspondence with a kindly SF author who has let me quote nice things he’s said about my book The Sigil.

The author concerned has published many books and stories, some of them award-winning and award-nominated classics, none of which are particularly obscure and all of which are in print. But even an author as seasoned as he tells me that he just cannot get a publisher for a couple of novels he’s written, and is trying to resist hiving them off to PoD (Print On Demand) as he’s done with some other recent works.

If that’s the case then there really is absolutely no hope for the rest of us, and my answer to the LabLit forum was that one might as well just write to please oneself and any of one’s friends who care, and view the prospect of being picked up by a publisher in the same vein of remote fancy as that of winning the National Lottery.

I think that with very few exceptions, the only people who can get their books published have to fulfil at least two of the following criteria:

1. They are well-known for something other than authorship, especially if that activity is ephemeral (sports ‘personality’, pop star, politician);
2. They have appeared on TV in any capacity whatsoever (TV presenter, contestant on reality show, pundit);
3. They are very good-looking;
4. They are under 25.

One can only check off these boxes to see what happens. For me, the results look like this;

1. Does being an editor at Nature count?
2. I’ve been a guest on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman, so that’s probably far too worthwhile;
3. My daughters think I’m terribly handsome, but they are only small and to them I’m a superstar. To the rest of the world I look like the results of a collison between a number-nine bus and a stegosaurus, especially if compared with Myleene Klass, or even Alan Titchmarsh;
4. I am indeed approaching 25, although from the wrong direction.

I think part of the problem is not the unwillingness of publishers to publish books through some kind of idiocy or spite, but simply because, in the words of Spinal Tap’s manager Ian Faith, their appeal has become more ‘selective’. By ‘they’ I do not mean ‘ageing, ugly, non-celebrity authors’, or even ‘authors’, but ‘books’ and indeed ‘print media’. The readership of newspapers has been in a retreat since the 1940s as slow and dismal as that of the sea off Dover Beach. People in Britain seem to be buying a lot of books, though whether they actually read them is another matter: it is hard to get much sense from the ever-hopeful spin in the manifold surveys of the Literacy Trust.

The situation in the United States, however, is utterly dire. In 2004, it was reported that

“A total of 89.9 million adults did not read books in 2002. The number of books bought in the US in 2003 was reported in May to have fallen by 23m from the year before, to 2.2 bn. The NEA study was based on a survey of more than 17,000 adults. The drop in reading was widespread, but the fall was marked for adult men, of whom only 38% read literature, and Hispanics overall, for whom the figure was 26.5%. The decline was especially severe among 18 to 24-year-olds. Only 43% had read any literature in 2002, down from 53% in 1992.”

What this tells us is that people in general don’t read books, so even with the sheer numbers of books that do get published, it is very likely that only a very few will sell many (or any) copies at all. Virtually all books face the long drop – either you’re J. K. Rowling, or you’re nobody. The remorseless logic of publication has made the gap between published and unpublished even wider in recent years, like the gap between rich and poor – and this may explain the reluctance of publishers to publish books even by those authors with a previously strong track record, let alone authors with none at all.

And as much as the tales of Harry Potter are engaging and worthy of readership, it is fair to say that many other books of comparable worth are out there, unread. Ms Rowling happened to be the one author to have bought the winning ticket.

Will publishers strive to fill that widening gap, that great stretch of beach exposed by the receding tide? Some are already doing so: imprints like Macmillan New Writing offer chances, though not many, to unknown debut novelists. But my feeling is that publishers in general will increasingly strive to publish less and less, and those books they do publish will succeed not because they are books, but products that are adjuncts to other things, notably TV series. (It is notable that books reputed to sell in shedloads in the US have been promoted by Oprah – in Britain, by Richard and Judy).

In the meantime there is PoD and other vanity outlets – becoming less and less sneered at as many authors realize that it’s that or nothing. The difference between the two, however, is academic: my SF author friend says that a title of his on PoD will sell enough to buy two bottles of wine, provided you don’t want any food to go with them. And there’s always the web. I reckon that both novels I have out there on the web will attract at least some readers, and a subset of these will enjoy the experience.

But then there’s the money – I am getting nothing for posting my fiction online. But then I’d probably get next to nothing were either of my novels published. Let’s try some calculations: a healthy advance for a first SF novel in the US is, roughly, $5000. Taking off agency fees and tithes for this and that, and that fee is reduced to $4000. Convert that to sterling and that makes £2000, of which £800 will go in tax, and I’d be left with £1200. This is a best-case scenario: remember, $5000 is a healthy advance. Now, this is better than a slap round the gob with an undressed Cromer crab, but it’s hardly riches beyond the dreams of avarice, either, and one must factor in the imponderables. Yes, it would be great to get a book into print to have on one’s shelves, but it is likely that almost as many people will read the novel online as would read it in print (that is, about half a dozen), and I’d have avoided all the not inconsiderable fuss and malarkey of publishing in the old-fashioned way. I won’t admit that I wouldn’t love to be published in book form, but the economics are against it, and the book is out there anyway for a barely significant difference in either profit or loss.

My hope is that the internet will become the home (if it hasn’t already) of a thriving resource in fiction. One day, the publishers might wake up and discover that there might be a way to get stuck in there and sell it. One day.