Getting a book published is difficult. Lots of people are trying to publish books, the market is crowded and there’s a whole industry trying to find something original to say. What’s more, in February 2010, I was an unknown person attempting to do something spectacularly outside-the-box.

To complicate matters, as well as trying to get The Jolly Pilgrim into print, I was at my desk in the City for 10 hours a day in the working week; orchestrating my father’s move (from the house he’d lived in for 40 years); assisting my aunt to sell said house; and dealing with a bunch of time-consuming, family-related legal and financial entanglements.  There was a lot happening. And it was all happening at the same time.

In the end, it took a year and five months to bring a product to the marketplace.  The full story is recorded on this website’s blog. Here’s the summary:

The Publishing Industry

Three quarters of books don’t make back their production costs and given the size of the book market, there are far more people writing books (and books being written) than could possibly make a decent living out of it (or sell a lot of copies).

The publishing companies which underlie this industry are therefore fickle, profit-seeking institutions. My initial strategy was to persuade a literary agent to represent me to them.

Approaching Literary Agents

There were 171 agents listed in the 2010 edition of the Writers and Artists Guide (the standard industry Bible).  Narrative non-fiction (the category into which The Jolly Pilgrim fits) was listed as an interest in 106 of them. Most agents receive 10+ submissions per day.  Inevitably, they rarely engage new clients.

My first task was getting a grip on their world. That involved googling agents, checking out their websites, reading reviews of their authors on Amazon and joining two data-gathering websites: ‘Publishers Marketplace’ (for industry info) and ‘Writewords’ (a writers’ discussion forum). That research ended where best practice stopped and self-help began. Then I began my approach.

The practical task was to get an agent to absorb why the product was a commercial proposition.  Given that The Jolly Pilgrim is complex, original and works on multiple levels, that was a non-trivial feat of communication.

On approaching an agent, one sends them a sample. The standard submission guideline is ‘the first three chapters’.  But in the case of The Jolly Pilgrim that could mean 2,500 words (too little) or 35,000 words (too much) depending on one’s definition of ‘chapter’.  I made the judgment call at 8,000 words – a miscalculation, as it turned out.

After bouncing the sales documents off 10 people and discussing them with a marketing person, I had them copyedited, went to Ryman to stock up on posh paper and had everything professionally printed. Those sales documents contained a four-paragraph letter, a two-page book pitch (with a 280-word synopsis), a four-page chapter-by-chapter synopsis and the 8,000-word sample.

Through April and May 2010, I spent my weekends sending out a wave of pitches, then went off to sort out some other aspects of my life, and complete the book’s post-production.

Post production – finding the characters

I met well over 1,000 people, from six continents, through the period the book records.  The names of nearly 200 of them appear in the manuscript, so I had to track them down and obtain permission to use their names. In the end I sent chunks of the completed manuscript to people spread across Argentina, Australia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Ecuador, Italy, Mauritius, Peru, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK and the USA.

It transpires that ‘You are in my book, are you happy for me to use your real name?’ is a no-brainer for almost everyone.

Post production – copyediting

Copy-editing is where someone checks a piece of text for clarity, flow and overall structure. Proof-reading is where someone goes through it with a fine-tooth comb and strips out any last mistakes of spelling, punctuation or formatting.

I hired Stephen Brierley, of the Society of Editors and Proofreaders to do that.  He has a doctorate in ‘Control Theory and Dynamic Systems’ – a scientific training that proved indispensable.  It took Stephen two weeks to check the manuscript and three hard-concentrating days for me to mark up his changes, a process which culminated in a technical two-hour chat between us about syntax and morphology. Job done.

Result of First Approach to Publishing Industry

The first responses to my pitches came in after six weeks.  ‘I was intrigued by your submission,’ said one.  ‘You’ve done an exceptional job of presenting your sample,’ said another.  ‘It certainly has strong voice and depth,’ said a third. But no one was asking to see the manuscript.

The key lesson: 8,000 words weren’t enough.

The sales documentation was calibrated to communicate The Jolly Pilgrim’s cerebral red meat.  But the first 8,000 words record the light-hearted adventures of a hippie cycling across France. That opening’s purpose is to draw readers in and fix its double-narrative structure in their minds – blurting out an explanation of human civilisation in the opening 8,000 words would not be conducive to a well-balanced piece of art.

One had to have faith that publishing professionals would recognise a tapestry being woven when they saw it. However, my experience was that all they saw was the travel story.  One wrote: ‘We already have a book about bicycles.’ Clearly, I hadn’t got my point across.

Networking

That all-guns-blazing charge into the publishing world was borne of a desire to follow the shortest, most direct, route to publication. But it hadn’t produced a hit so, that autumn, I began networking – the most valuable part of which turned out to be sitting down with published writers and interrogating them about their experiences.

I spoke to Roger Mortimer, who published three action-packed adventure stories about swashbuckling mice in the nineties and noughties; hosted a dinner for William Sutton, whose first novel is a crime-busting adventure set in nineteenth-century London; spent an evening in the pub with Lorelei Mathias, who published two romantic comedies that sold in massive numbers; met my old mentor, Simon Cann (who has published 11 books and ebooks) in Spitalfields Market; and drank coffee with Ray Frensham, author of a best-selling guide to screenwriting, in a Piccadilly health food shop.

Reassessment of Strategy

Here are some of the salient facts I learned from that networking exercise:

• On the back of a mainstream publishing deal, first-time writers makes an absolute maximum of 10 per cent of the cover price. Generally, 8 per cent is excellent.
• With self-publishing arrangements, royalties can hit 35 percent. However, while recent advances in technology mean such arrangements produce high-quality physical products, they don’t produce products of the standard I needed.
• No one going through a mainstream publishing house gets proper sales data regarding where, or by whom, their books are being bought.
• Advances for planned books are vehicles for facilitation. Advances for completed books are vehicles to de-risk the author and act as a tool for publishing houses to control of writers at the contract-signing stage.
• Going through a mainstream publishing house means losing ultimate control of creative decisions.
• No one markets a book but the author – publishing houses release hundreds of titles a year for each in-house marketing bod.

Independent Publishing Houses and the HotHive

During this phase of putting myself out there, I learned of two authors – Louise Claire-Pardoe and Jason Paul Claire – who had published their book through an independent house called the HotHive. Given what I was then learning about the book-publishing world, said deal sounded almost too good to be true. When I got my hands on their book, it was a thing of beauty.

Louise was known to an acquaintance, who introduced us. She agreed to put me in touch with the publisher and the following day I called Karen Swinden, the HotHive’s managing director and the first publishing professional who’d ever heard me pitch.

After that, things moved very fast.

I sent her the full manuscript that weekend. We sat down for our first meeting the following week and two weeks after that I was on the train to Worcestershire to meet the publishing team.

Three days later, Simon Cann and I met  for a strategy discussion. The next morning, I called Karen and we struck a deal. It was one of the most significant conversations of my life. It took place on 12 February 2011.

The Pre-Publication Endgame

In the end, I got everything I needed. Feeling my way into the publishing world gradually brought a much more productive long-term result than if I’d scored an early hit during my reckless charge.

I didn’t get an advance, but that wasn’t a goal – the key parameter for me was a big cut of the profit if it were to sell a lot of copies. I also got direct access to the production and design team – so I didn’t lose control of my vision during the closing stages.  This was critical, because there were still many things to get right.

The fact that the journey was so challenging made it all the richer. The goal of all this was to produce something comprehensive, complete, intellectually robust and really sexy, not some stripped-down, half-arsed version. I’m trying to use literature as a medium for changing the world. It’s not supposed to be easy.

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