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Publishing

‘I hate publishers’ my Mum would say.  ‘They rob you blind.  They don’t appreciate you.  They don’t try.  They never pay enough and they never work hard enough – what a bunch of bastards.’

‘Authors!’ exclaimed my Dad.  ‘What a bunch of self-indulgent wingers.  It’s all ‘moan moan this’ and ‘moan moan that’ and ‘why’s he got a bigger cheque’ and you can never just turn round and say, ‘because his book is better!’ because oh no, every author knows, just knows that they’ve written the greatest thing ever to grace the pages of English literature.  Authors – don’t you hate them.’

This was when I was a kid, and naturally by the time I was 14 my Dad had crossed the fence and joined the ranks of writers and suddenly discovered that actually, publishers were the spawn of the devil after all, and how could he have been so misguided?

For me… I grew up seeing it both ways.  With the sudden take-off in e-books, and the explosion of online publishing, the question is often asked, what next for publishing?  Now that Bob Smith can write his great work –Ode to My Favourite Green Sofa That I Spilt Tea On One Thursday Afternoon – and sell it at 49p an e-copy on amazon, is the world not about to be flooded with electronic books written by the people for the people?  At last, expression and appreciation for all, and really, are publishers needed any more, is there any justification for the system as it currently stands?  What, in fact what the hell happens next?

The answer is, I don’t think anyone knows.  As a writer, I feel highly ambivalent about it.  On the one hand, the collapse in recent years of the paper book market does kinda imply that we need to find a new way of working.  But the idea that authors can survive without publishers at all, and just sell their e-books online, is a terrifying one.  The problem is saturation, for how can I, as just another name in the millions of people posting online, make the case that my work – Puke, Drink and Other Things To Do In Barnet – is in any way superior to that of Bob Jones?  How will people tell?  The market will be flooded, soaked through in no time with a huge range of books, from the sublime to quite often the rubbish, and in this case, how will your hard-working author ever hope to make a penny?

‘Authors don’t need to be paid!’ a particularly opinionated gentleman once told me, albeit while rather drunk.  ‘True writers do it for the pleasure!’

And sure, I believe that writers should write for pleasure – their own as much as anyone else’s.   But it is a time-consuming thing, producing a decent, worthwhile book – for the most part, far more time-consuming than there is surplus money to support it, and so if the reader is to ever hope for a work of fiction worth the bytes by which its transmitted, then there should be some comprehension of the fact that it genuinely takes time, and many tins of baked beans, and thus should be supported – and so we come back to publishers.  Which is not to say that you should uniquely write if you want to be accounted a decent writer – hell, I’m the last person who’d make this claim – but beneath the veneer of dust and spanners under which I hide, is some glimmer of professional pride in the work I do, as well as an awareness of the fact that every second between cues, every lunch and ever dinner break at my theatre is spent thinking of the next book, and when the lights are out and the show is down, I will write twelve hours a day for weeks at a time to achieve my ends.  And while I doubt I will ever stop writing, I can only hope and pray that whatever the future of publishing brings, it takes me with it.