How to get your book published (from the author of Fantasy Island)
Published writers are full of advice for people wanting to get their first book into print.
Here is some succinct advice for those wishing to do the same thing with their second book - get a move on.
Unless you are modelling your writing career on that of the late Philip Larkin, with about ten years elapsing between each slender volume, then there is no time to waste.
Any goodwill built up by your first effort will melt away like snow in the sunshine. The idea that publishers will wait indefinitely for you to get your act together is sadly illusory.
The industry has a short memory, unsurprisingly given the sheer volume of books being churned out. A brain surgeon who stops practising is still a brain surgeon. Ditto solicitors, accountants and philosophers. Stop writing, and you are not a writer.
Ten years ago, Larry Elliott (then, as now, economics editor of The Guardian) and I teamed up to write The Age of Insecurity, which was duly published in May 1998. It sold moderately well and was reviewed far and wide, mostly favourably. Indeed, given it was a critique of the free-market economy, it attracted some unlikely (but welcome) friends: John Redwood MP and The Wall Street Journal Europe.
During the rest of that year and early into 1999, Larry and I had great fun promoting the book at various events, culminating in a very jolly trip to Brussels as guests of the Tribune group of Labour MEPs. A serious dinner-debate was followed by a night of quite remarkable over-indulgence by the authors.
The Age of Insecurity went into paperback and was, improbably, translated into Chinese. We talked of writing a new book, as the old decade became the new one, naturally, but there was no hurry. Furthermore, we had other things on our minds.
Larry became a member of the trust that owns The Guardian, and was serving as a magistrate in his native Hertfordshire. I changed jobs in 2000, moving to my present post on The Mail on Sunday. My wife was pregnant with our third child, who was born in March 2001. And so on...
Not until late 2001 onwards did we seriously start trying to get a second book published, and even then we had an unfortunate habit of arranging working lunches and drinks meetings that tended to be big on lunching and drinking and not so big on working. Not, surely, that there was anything to worry about? I remember one Christmas Eve, walking with my family in the village in which we then lived to do some last-minute shopping, popping a proposal into the letter box at the Post Office, pleased that I could now relax and enjoy Christmas but also confident that wheels would soon start turning. They did not.
To be fair to the unenthusiastic representatives of the publishing industry who turned us away, I am not sure any of our proposals were especially strong. But to be fair to us, the above-mentioned representatives did seem to have a habit of asking for proposals to be re-written in such a away that they would eventually decide they did not like them.
By the middle of the decade, for example, we suggested a book exposing the huge credit bubble puffed up round the world by central bankers, led by Alan Greenspan at the US Federal Reserve Board. We envisaged a punchy book with a pithy title: The Party's Over.
The industry had other ideas, asking for the temperature to be lowered, for more thoughtful reflections on the growth of China and India, for a more discursive tone. We complied, and they decided they didn't like it. I do not blame them. I didn't like it either.
Finally, we ceased our search for spurious international gravitas. Fantasy Island would be a book about Britain and about the extraordinary legacy of the soon-to-depart Prime Minister, Tony Blair.
The proposal was thrown together at top speed and put to publisher Constable & Robinson in early September, just before we both headed off to the International Monetary Fund annual meeting in Singapore. Presumably, we should have devoted our spare time out east to refining our ideas for the book; my only memory of a serious conversation involves the two of us in a bar at Changi Airport, arguing about which were the ten best albums from the Seventies.
Anyway, an offer came through, the book was written and duly published in May.
Will there be a book three?
Certainly.
Will we get our skates on this time?
Absolutely.
Well, put it this way, we are having lunch in a few days' time.
Comments