As the final book in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series dominated publishing industry events last month, selling a record-breaking three million copies in its first weekend, another, less likely female author was also making the headlines. Jane Austen’s works were thrown unexpectedly into the spotlight when David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, conducted an experiment to discover how well the publishing industry would appreciate Austen’s works were they submitted today.
After making only minor changes to Austen’s works, Lassman sent opening chapters to eighteen of the UK’s most prominent publishers and literary agents. Every single establishment rejected the works, with most seemingly having been unable to identify them as classics of the literary canon. ‘I was staggered.’ Lassman commented, ‘here is one of the greatest writers that has lived…and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen’s work.’
The publishing industry has responded defensively to the stunt. Lassman has been derided for a lack of originality – the same trick was pulled last year by the Times, which sent copies of VS Naipaul’s In a Free State to twenty agents and publishers, all of whom rejected it.
The overwhelming response in the press has focused on the fact that, although Jane Austen may be a great classical author, her writing would not be considered suitable for publication in today’s literary climate. As Andrew Franklin comments in The Independent, ‘Jane Austen belongs at the heart of any list of classics, where all her books sell in numerous editions by the hundreds of thousands every year. But a new novel? An Orange Prize winner? As she would not have said: yeah, right, lol.’
The defence is a strong one. It would not be appropriate for an editor, seeking the next great voice in twenty-first century fiction, to back the style of a Georgian socialite. This argument would stand up strongly to the criticisms being levelled at the publishing industry. However, most publishers, in an attempt to evade the accusations that they didn’t spot the similarities between the submitted work and those of the great writer, have chosen to defend themselves by denying that the submission was even read. A spokeswoman for Penguin pointed out that the rejection letter from Penguin had said only that it ‘seemed’ original and interesting, but insisted that ‘It would not have been read.’
While this exonerates the industry for not having recognised Austen’s writing, it throws up more alarming issues about the way in which books are selected for publication. If the classics of two hundred years ago slip through unnoticed, does this also mean that any potential modern-day classic will also be ignored? If the publishing industry – and that includes literary agents – are not reading submissions, who, if anyone, is?
Anyone who has worked in the publishing industry is aware of the odds of making it into print. For every book that is published hundred and hundreds of hopefuls are binned. And that means hundreds and hundreds of submissions to be waded through before any one shows any potential. Many editors are expected to seek new publications whilst managing the demands of putting several books through the printing process. The constraints this places on their time have resulted in a stratification of the process. Most publishing houses no longer accept any submissions from members of the public, relying solely on agencies to provide high-quality pre-sifted manuscripts.
Ultimately, this places a great deal of power in the hands of agencies. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent bidding war for the autobiography of Keith Richards. Literary agency Ed Victor, which is handling the sale of the book, invited only three publishing houses to offer bids, and has seen the sums reach higher than $7 million.
There has been much shaking of heads within the industry, and it is difficult to watch this process without witnessing a cynical exercise in managing expectations. These figures are for a book that is unwritten. There is no question here of assessing the quality of a piece of writing, or even the value of the content, only of evaluating the enormous scope for marketing and publicity. The book will sell, because the publisher will invest in making sure it does sell.
It is partly as a result of this process that we witness an industry that concentrates less and less on the quality of writing. This example is taken from non-fiction but even in fiction publishers face a scenario where concept, a writer’s profile and the potential for a hefty marketing/publicity strategy make or break a book, before anyone has even seen the writing. As David Taylor, the novelist and critic commented, ‘Being 29, blonde, good-looking and vaguely famous should be enough to get you a book published nowadays.’
The problem is self-perpetuating. It is partly as a result of this hype, which focuses on six-figure advances and multi-book deals, that volumes of submissions are so high in the first place. As more people try to cash in on the perceived gold-mine of publishing, in the wake of the mega success of Rowling and those (few) like her, the more difficult it is to plough through manuscripts, the more the focus shifts to unique selling points and away from quality of work. Confronted with the sheer volume of submissions no one has any time for reading any more.
While this has been accepted as the case for publishers for a while it is more alarming to see the scenario filter down to agencies, whose raison d’être is to analyse the potential of proposals. Patrick Janson-Smith, of the Christopher Little agency, who represent JK Rowling, commented, ‘We get masses, and it would be a foolish person who pretended they read every sentence.’
It is no secret that JK Rowling herself experienced numerous rejections in the process of submitting the Harry Potter books. That anyone ever read it at all now seems surprising, and is perhaps attributable to sheer will and determination on the part of the author. It is a shame to imagine that it is perhaps more through luck than judgement, that so awesome a publishing phenomenon has come into existence at all. Perhaps with this humiliating admission it is time for the publishing industry to work on closing the net before some other work of such potential slips through.
