23 November 2009
So What Actually Do You Need To Do To Get Published?
This gingerbread man looks how I feel. Bemused, exasperated, puzzled, and maybe a bit sugary. I've chosen this image as the one which best represents my state of mind when I think about Guy Saville's book, "The Africa Reich." I first spotted it when I was contributing to the mutual critique site www.youwriteon.com The Africa Reich by Guy Saville won readers' accolades as one of the most popular books on the site, and then Guy got awarded an Arts Council grant to finish the book. It is not even my kind of book, but I thought it was great, not just a dramatic story but well written too. Here's some of the blurb:
"The swastika flies from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. Britain and a victorious Nazi Germany have divided the continent. The SS has crushed the native populations and forced them into labour. Gleaming autobahns bisect the jungle. For almost a decade an uneasy peace has ensued. Now, however, the plans of Walter Hochburg, messianic racist and architect of Nazi Africa, threaten Britain’s ailing colonies..."
Anyway, I suddenly thought of the book for no particular reason - as one does - so I googled it. I discovered that Guy has representation from Curtis Brown, one of the top literary agents.
AND IT STILL ISN'T PUBLISHED.
What does anyone have to do to get fiction published these days? A great plot, a great story, brilliant writing, top representation, readers' accolades, and the Arts Council giving you a grant.... yeah, yeah, yeah. But what he REALLY needs to do (I can hear them all saying) is....
---er---
---um---
---duh---
Feed
Great story, brilliant writing, all that stuff are necessary (unless your name is big enough) but not sufficient. I actually have a slip from a major UK publishing house, praising my book, saying it was well written, witty and an accurate pastiche of Lewis Carroll, but declining to publish it because I was not (quote) a celebrity author.
So, unless you have just been on the latest reality TV show, been photographed on the arm of a premiership footballer, or run naked across the turf at Wembley, I don't feel there's a lot of hope.
I was lucky that my Alice book was picked up by Evertype but I am rapidly realising that being published by a small press is only a small leg-up. With no publicity budget the game then changes from trying to attract a publisher to trying to engineer it so that more than a dozen people have actually heard of you.