Risks of graphomania; the truth about publishing

For your information and entertainment, we present a scene from the British comedy Peep Show, Season 8, Episode 2: "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs." In the following exchange, roommates Jeremy and Mark are discussing Mark's manic, up-all-night habits as a first-time author. Jeremy is concerned in a minimally-invested sort of way, whereas Mark is delusionally confident that his book is going very well indeed.

Mark: I've done 6,000 words since 6 PM.

Jeremy: Yeah, I know. You type like you're trying to massacre imaginary ants swarming your keyboard. 

Mark: I've had seven black coffees and I feel like I'm really nailing it. 

Jeremy: Mark, you're in caps. It looks like you've been in caps for a few hours. 

Mark: Caps still count! I've just drawn an irresistible comparison between Mentuhotep V and Branson. I'm thinking of drawing Branson as a hieroglyph. What do you think?  

Jeremy: I think maybe you should get quite a lot of sleep. 

Mark: I just need to hit a thousand more words, then a spell-check, then I'm done. 

Jeremy: Ah, don't worry about the spell-check, dude. 

Mark: You don't think?  

Jeremy: No. They'll have a big spellchecker with all the latest words. That's what publishers are these days: spellcheckers who take you out for lunch.  

Jeremy: (thinking to himself) "Yeah, keep killing those ants, Charles Dickens."

There is much which is inarguably true in this comic back-and-forth. For one thing, we all know a Dickens. (Don't be a Dickens.) For another, publishers themselves would generally agree that they are really nothing more than elaborate spell-check services with a penchant for expensed lunch-hour indulgence in martinis and club sandwiches. Truth in art.

Extracts from our author correspondence

Over the course of our working with an author to bring a text to a publishable state of completion, it is par for the course to see many dozens of emails and letters exchanged. It seems a shame at times that the attention, appreciation and rapport on display in this correspondence can't also be shared in the book, alongside and around the text which was its cause for being. There is much in this halo of text-around-the-text that would charm or illuminate the reader. By way of example:

One of our Press authors (an actor, professionally) not long ago wrote to us regarding her novel in progress. Her reflection on novel-writing is a valuable insight into her self-knowledge as a writer:

I find I cannot write but inch-by-inch, word-by-word, like a poet does. Somehow I cannot make the large picture into a motor. The intricate specificity of a chain of moments: this is the province of an actor. I am not a terrible director, but my chief talent is for another type of thought; but I hope maybe someday to come up with not-a-terrible novel. 

And now for a bit of charm. In this excerpt from our correspondence with the same author, she responds to our editor's suggestions for the revision of a line of text. Of the two alternatives proposed, she writes:

The first is clearly lovelier, though you know I liked the image of being on "stilts in a sea of jelly." I'm such a sucker for an unusual metaphor and a clear image. . . I have never cared for poems that play hard to get. I have no time for it in personal relationships, either. A smiler, not smirker. That's my goal. Some would argue this was to my detriment in both cases.

(Emphasis added). The phrase "stilts on a sea of jelly" just begs for focused attention on its playful image, doesn't it? Well: we keep scrupulous records here in the office, so perhaps there will be a time when we produce a 'social text' edition of one of our books. It's a project we shall have to see done someday...

On slow submissions

This stock rejection form from the Essanay Film Management Company of Chicago back in the day has been making the rounds in the literary blogosphere for a few years, popping up on blogs like Literary Rejections on Display. We laughed out loud when we first saw it; it's a gas! Then we 'shopped it up nice and sharp and framed it for our press office wall.

Authors have a lot of time on their hands around the holidays, when the business of their workaday jobs slows down, and many shops turn out their employees for seasonal time off. This means that the pace of correspondence in a literary press picks up, since authors have the time to follow-up on submissions, and check in on projects that have been hanging fire, and buzz the tower about forgotten commitments.