The Rep Rap Part One

One of the most salutary lessons any editor or publisher can do is to spend a day treading the shop floors with a sales rep. Because it’s all very well negotiating with agents, commissioning books and working on the editorial nuances of the text, but unless you’ve got a clear idea of what it’s like out there at the coal face – till point? – all that hard work counts for nothing.
I used to be a bookseller many moons ago. When I first moved to London, back in the mid 1990s, I worked at Waterstone’s in Hampstead. The salary was south of £10,000, yet the shop was bursting full of bright and committed booksellers who had a real passion for books. This was in the days when booksellers had responsibility for their own sections and when ‘scale-outs’ of titles chosen by head office was only just beginning. It was a fun place – and a fun time to work. And in terms of publishing, I always think that sort of experience gives you an edge over those who have come in to the business straight from finishing their English Literature degree.
Today it’s all different. The bookshops are being squeezed on both sides: on range by Amazon and the Internet sellers; on price by the supermarkets. It’s all a bit grim. Times have been ‘tough’ on the high street for as long as I can remember. Which is not great, when you’ve got a new list of books to sell in.

‘I thought I’d send you the whole manuscript anyway’

Another tip for sending in a submission to a publisher – send in what they ask for. Everyone has their own guidelines: find out what they are and follow them. Personally, I like a decent synopsis and a couple of sample chapters. That way, I can see if the book has legs, and whether the writer can actually write. If it’s good, I’ll ask for more. But not before. Writers who ignore such requests and send in the whole thing anyway I don’t tend to look favourably on. It’s a waste of the editor’s time. And more importantly, it’s a waste of trees.

Conversely, I’m not a huge fan of those writers who fire out emails with half a dozen book ideas, each a couple of lines long, and then expect a full length critique on the merits of each one. Not so much full of ideas as full of it. I say: come back when you’ve done some work.