Walter Ellis of the Belfast Telegraph longs to be a novelist. With a little help from Maeve Binchy, he managed to score a lunch date with a well-known New York publisher. Did he land the big contract? At least learn some
invaluable advice for getting published? Well, not exactly...
Jack (we'll call him Jack) arrived 10 minutes later.
He's 50 years old and has the unmistakable aura of someone with an interesting and important job and an income of more than $200,000 a year... ....Jack's first words to me, after saying hello, were: "I don't have much time. One of my colleagues came up to me in the corridor just as I was leaving and said there was an important conference call I had to handle at 1.45 sharp."
This is a very New York thing to say. I smiled and glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was 12.40.
*****
He had no advice to offer on what was most saleable these days, other than to say that fiction was almost impossible to crack. Publishers were reluctant to give unknown authors a try, he said. This was because it had become so expensive to promote new talent. "All those piles of books you see when you walk through the front door of Borders or Barnes & Noble - those didn't get there by accident. Publishers paid through the nose for the space and, every couple of months, the price goes up again. I tell you, it's a tough sell."
Some of his books failed because they weren't as good as he hoped, he added, or because the market had moved on. But it could also be because the major chains refused to stock them - "not even if we pay them."
"Does that happen often?" I inquired, using chopsticks to negotiate my dim sum into an unfeasibly dinky container of soy sauce.
"More often than you'd think."
So it's the booksellers who are in the driving seat these days in America - just like in the UK.
Jack thought I might have more luck with non-fiction, but that everything depended on "platform" and having the right agent.
"Platform is key," he went on. "In New York, people want to know what your platform is before they'll even shake hands with you."
Platform? Is that what they're calling a marketing plan these days? Or is he saying if you're not already famous, with a way to reach millions of readers, just give up? Jack's advice is pure nonsense: that kind of "advice" is only given as a test to see if you have the perseverence and self-confidence never to give up. He also sounds like a self-absorbed, pompous bore. So there.
