So what I say to Mr 'Unthinking', and the others who sneer at me, for making this point, is that they don't know what they're talking about. I don't record this as a complaint. I'm used to it, and the existence of Amazon has to some extent bypassed it. Nor do I expect it to change things. It's just a fact about our society, one of which people should be aware when they study the sales of books. High sales don't necessarily mean a better book. Many books, of all opinions and none, fail because they're not interesting or important or well-written. The problem arises when interesting, important and well-written books vanish without trace, because of bias in the system.
On Bias in the Publishing Industry
Saturday, 22 May 2010
Mr 'Un' (the contributor formerly known as 'Thinking') is among those who jeer at my contention that the publishing industry, bookshops etc are in general biased against conservative writers in this country. I think this is much less true in the USA, for reasons I'll go into.
As a change from some of the other topics that engage us, I thought I would explain why I think this is so. And I shall do so by describing what happened to me when I first became an author.
I was urged by a friend in the BBC (one of the rare conservatives in that organisation, who has since left it) that my chances of broadcasting would be greatly increased if I wrote a book. He turned out to be wrong, as it happens. I have since been told directly by a senior BBC executive to abandon any hope of getting any more than occasional appearances as a tolerated right-winger. I am most unlikely to be asked to present a BBC programme again (I have made two, a brief documentary on crime for Radio 4, many years ago, and a BBC4 film - which I presented because the BBC's original presenter of choice dropped out at the last minute - on Britain's entry into the Common Market). I was at one stage considered as a possible regular panellist for 'The Moral Maze' on Radio 4, but this was vetoed at quite a high level. The people who make these decisions are not accountable to anyone for them, as far as I know. Channel Four, I think, would have asked me to make the programmes I wrote and presented for them (on Nelson Mandela, the threat to liberty and on David Cameron) whether or not I had written a book).
But in any case, that was why I went in for authorship. I thought I would try to encapsulate my general position in the book which was published in 1999 as 'The Abolition of Britain'. I am always tickled by readers who write in bitterly to accuse me of plugging my books in articles, as if I was hoping to boost my income in this way. Books generally make very little money indeed, except when they break the best-seller barrier, which few do. I was reading George Orwell's letters the other day and spotted a 1939 letter he wrote to another author, in which he said his books (and this must include such major works as 'The Road to Wigan Pier' and 'Homage to Catalonia', though it was well before his great successes 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty Four') rarely sold more than 2,000 copies.
I'll get back to that. But I was also told I needed an agent. A friend of mine who had successfully published his own book recommended his agent, who agreed to meet me and discuss the book. This person wrote to me shortly afterwards to say that he couldn't conceivably help me publish a book which contained the views I wished to express. It offended his principles. (Some principles. Only the other day I chucked away the smarmy letter he wrote me later, when 'The Abolition of Britain' was successful, offering to act for me in future.) By asking around I found another agent who was willing to act for me. He told me not to worry. The idea was fine, and he was sure he would find me a publisher in no time.
Months passed. No publisher. (An acquaintance friend in publishing had meantime expressed enthusiasm about the book, and taken the proposal to his boss. He sent it back some months later, with a terse note saying he couldn't touch such 'Thatcherite' material, and, actually, goodbye for ever.) The agent kept on trying. But even this incurably optimistic professional confessed to me at one point that he had never found such difficulty in finding a publisher for a book. But in the end, he got me a deal from a very small publisher, run from a few rooms above a Fitzrovia chocolate shop. It wasn't a big name, or a heavyweight label, but it was an actual publisher. I wasn't going to be reduced to printing it myself.
And so, with much sweat and research (made harder by the fact that computer technology wasn't anything like as easy then as it is now, so there was masses of transcription from handwritten notes to computer screens), I completed the book and handed it over. I won't go into the complex relations that existed between me and the newspaper I then worked for, but I'll just say that they wouldn't serialise it, whereas the Mail on Sunday would and did. And so, thanks to some unique circumstances, I was able to do for my own book what more mainstream authors get done for them. That is to say, I plugged it relentlessly, for week after week after week.
I also managed to get some reviews, and some interest outside the review pages. Polly Toynbee attacked it eloquently in her Guardian column.
I and my family also discovered in time that a lot of publishers need help from their authors. So we worked the phones and the fax machine and sold it (or at least tried to sell it) to every proper bookshop in the country, often meeting quite a bit of resistance from bookshop staff who didn't much like the sound of it. (I should mention here that my publisher and my agent had come to me separately to beg me to remove a chapter dealing with the contrast between the official attitude towards lung cancer, and the official attitude towards AIDS. They begged me to take it out, as it might ruin the book's chances completely. There were, they explained, matters it was best not to tackle. Anything to do with homosexuality was one of them.)
The result of all these various efforts was that, as far as I know, the book sold about 30,000 copies in this country, in hardback and paperback combined. And it is still in print in Britain and the USA.
There was one small incident, also, which told me something important about bookshops. The manager of the branch of one bookshop chain in a medium-sized Midlands town got in touch with me. He said that he was unusual among bookshop managers in that he was conservatively inclined. He liked the book, and he planned to organise an event to sell it, as he did with other books that he liked. Would I come to speak? I would. He used his mailing lists and his gift for publicity, invited me over for an evening's signing session and, as far as I can recall, sold 100 copies.
If every member of the chain had done something similar, I reckon my sales would have been closer to 50,000. Bookshops can influence sales enormously by the following techniques - displaying the book prominently in the front of the store, ordering a reasonable number so that people see the stacks and think this is a popular book, putting it in the window, nominating it as a 'staff pick', and so on. I almost never get this sort of assistance. When and where I do, my sales go up.
Now, of course, the key to all book sales these days is TV. If you're big on TV, you'll be big on the bookshelves. But, (who'd have thought it?) generally if you want to be big on TV in the world of history, politics and thought, you'll need to be left-wing. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but I personally tend to view Jeremy Clarkson (for instance) as a left-winger's caricature of what a conservative ought to be like, and so no danger to the established order.
My second book, 'A Brief History of Crime', was originally accepted by a very large publisher. The manuscript eventually came back with a 50-page screed attached, in which the publisher involved made it clear that he disagreed furiously with everything I said. I couldn't have cared less. I didn't want him to agree with it. I wanted him to publish it. If he thought that I was going to amend it to suit his opinions, and I think maybe he did, he was much mistaken. The facts were indisputable, the arguments coherent and I thought (and think) that it was pretty well written. It was clear that this wasn't going to work out, so I went elsewhere. The book had one or two good reviews in conservative papers, was shallowly denounced (the person responsible has since apologised to me) in one leftist weekly, and that was it. Almost no controversy. And, for various reasons, I couldn't plug it in the way I had plugged 'Abolition' or sell it to the bookshops as I had done. So sales never amounted to much.
As for 'The Broken Compass', it was barely reviewed at all - because I had done a terrible thing and criticised the Cameron project, so the conservative media, once ready to give me a hearing, ignored the book almost totally.
By this time I knew some very important things. Publishers don't do all that much, often because they can't. Very big publishers have more clout with the bookshops and the reviewers (they can pay for special treatment for their authors, in terms of display, and they wield influential advertising budgets). But the thing that really counts is whether the literary establishment - which is completely dominated by cultural left-wingers - wants to help you, or doesn't. Authors are reviewers, and reviewers are authors. Many of them are related to each other in ways you don't realise (because even married couples don't share names these days). Mentions in diary columns, political columns and news stories, are often more valuable than reviews. The greatest enemy of a book is not hostile criticism, but silence.
I think 'Private Eye' once charted the immense amount of backscratching and log-rolling that takes place, not least in those influential Christmas lists of 'My Best Book of the Year' in which I have somehow never featured. Bookshops (see above) can greatly influence the fate of a book, simply through inertia. Books sometimes sit for days in the stockroom, while customers (unwilling to ask for them in case they are then embarrassed into buying a book they only wanted to look at) search the shop in vain for the volume they saw reviewed on Sunday, and which is - if they but knew it - a few feet away, still in its warehouse wrapping.
One problem with the original 'Brief History of Crime' was that they wouldn't put it where it belonged, in politics. Some shops even put it in 'True Crime'. 'The Rage Against God' has a similar problem. If it's not in the front of the house with the Atheist books, where it has a chance of picking up casual buyers, then it's down in the basement with the religion, where it will be bought only by the dedicated.
I once pointed out to a bookshop (which shall remain nameless) that 'The Cameron Delusion' belonged with all the other election books - where they hadn't displayed it. A book called 'Red Tory' which I personally think is not as good as 'The Cameron Delusion' by contrast received the good treatment I hope for and seldom get, and was both widely reviewed and mentioned, and prominently displayed everywhere I went. Why was that? I couldn't possibly say.
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