The Business of writing fiction
Lecture, City Of London Girls' School

I’m here today to tell you about being a novelist, and especially about being a woman novelist, but what I’m going to tell you isn’t about the romantic side – like discovering you love reading so much that you want to write books of your own. I’m going to tell you about the business of being a novelist, which is the nasty side.

Those of you who buy books, or who borrow them, are probably unconscious what a huge effort goes into the act of getting a reader to look at a book, pick it up and buy it – let alone read it. Of course, you already know how much advertising and the media attempt to influence your choice of clothes, make-up, pop music and food. They act as what an American academic, Vance Packard, famously called Hidden Persuaders. It’s the same with books, and novels in particular. How does it happen that one year, a poor single mother writing in cafes is the obscure author of a book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and the next she’s the richest woman in Britain?

In the case of JK Rowling, it happened in the best and rarest way possible: children just loved her book, and bought it in droves. But most best-sellers are created, not made. How is this achieved? If you’ve stuck to reading classic fiction – what universities call the canon – you might think that success comes simply when an author writes a really good novel, or novels.

Henry James wrote a magisterial essay called The Art of Fiction in which he opposed the popular and the good, and argued that a writer’s sole responsibility is to their art. That debate remains as fierce as ever. At one level, a successful author is one whose book sells hundreds of thousands of copies. It gets into the best-seller lists, and the author becomes moderately or even immoderately rich. Usually, a literary novel is considered to have done well if it sells just 3,000 copies in hard-back, and 30,000 in paperback. But a commercial novel, like a chick-lit romance or a thriller, would be considered a failure if it only sold 30,000 paperback copies. It needs to sell 120,000 copies to succeed. How does it do so? Well, in order for any book to be considered for a Waterstone’s Book of the Month selection, publishers have to pay the company £10,000. In order for a book to be on a table, instead of a bookshelf in a shop, they have to offer the shop huge discounts, and advertise it heavily in trade magazines like The Bookseller. Even to have a book put face out on a shelf, instead of with its spine showing, costs money. It’s all bribery. A book that you’ve picked up in a chain-store, without knowing anything about it, will probably have had £50,000 spent on promoting it in the hope of catching your eye and opening your purse.

Meanwhile, the person who actually wrote the book is probably living off beans and toast. There are 26 new novels published a day in Britain. If I tell you that there are only 30 novelists in Britain every year that can live off the income from their books, you can have some idea of how rare commercial success is, whatever kind of fiction you write. Authors get what are called advances, which can sound like a lot - £30,000, say. However, in practice, it isn’t all that much. An agent takes 10%, which brings it down to £27,000. You get a lump of about £10,000 on signature, and the rest paid in two stages on publication. Of course, the tax-man takes his cut, too, which brings your £10,000 down to £7,000. You have to make that support you while you’re writing the next book, which takes at least a year. Try living on £7,000 a year, and you’ll find it is as hard as living on the dole. We get 0.02p every time our books are borrowed from a public library, which brings in about £200 per title each year, and nothing at all when our books are bought second-hand. Most of us have to keep doing other jobs, like journalism or teaching, as well as writing a book. What makes a real difference is if our books get bought by Hollywood and made into a film. A friend of mine who buys novels for Miramax films told me you have as much chance of this happening as being struck by lightning. Basically, you aren’t going to get rich by writing.

At the other end, what makes a novelist successful is critical success, supposedly reflected by literary prizes. There are a host of these for writers under or over a certain age, but the big ones are the Booker, the Whitbread and most recently the Orange Prize, which is limited to women. Winning one of these is like quadrupling your income at a stroke, because suddenly you get the kind of marketing reserved for commercial fiction. Yet these prizes don’t by any means go to the best book. I’ve been a judge for many of them, and each time the experience has underlined the joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. One of the few great novels to be appear in the last decade, Ian McEwen’s Atonement, did not win the Booker Prize when it was published three years ago – and nor did it win the Whitbread. Yet he won the Booker for the novel he wrote before it – a book which the TLS described as being like balsa-wood to the mahogany of Atonement. Why did he win it for such a flimsy work of fiction? Well, perhaps the judges that year really thought it was outstanding, but my impression is, that a feeling went round the literary circuit that it was time McEwen won. He is a fine, very serious writer who is liked personally, and to whom many felt sympathetic due to a harrowing divorce. It wasn’t his fault that he won for the wrong book. It just happened as a result of a system which is hidden from readers, but which tries to shape your tastes as surely as record producers try to influence what music you buy or listen to.

Critics don’t usually bother with commercial fiction, which sells almost entirely because of the money put behind it, but they do all vie to review literary fiction, because, rightly or wrongly, this is seen as creating the culture in which we live. There is this kind of distinction in many professions, which comes down to a rather snobbish attitude towards risk. A barrister is often regarded as posher than a solicitor, and a surgeon posher than a GP because they risk their reputation (and somebody else’s life) when they perform their duties. Of course, both are equally important, but the commercial writer, the solicitor and the GP are perceived as having a steadier, less stressful, less competitive way of earning a living. We are a species that rewards successful risk-takers, and few people live quite as much on the edge as literary writers, where reputation counts for at least half of your success.

So – how do you go about getting a good reputation? You don’t get it by delivering your manuscript on time. Nor do you get it, necessarily, by writing a brilliant book. Although 95% of what is published is rubbish, the competition to succeed within the tiny 5% is ferocious. It takes place largely in the review pages of the national newspapers. Only about 5 to 10 books get noticed each week, with the inevitable consequence that some really wonderful ones don’t even get to be reviewed. They may be by unknown authors, have the wrong publisher or simply the wrong cover. Nobody wants to touch them. And if you don’t get reviewed, you’re sunk. Nobody will know your book exists.

Critics therefore have enormous power, and although some of them treat this responsibly, they are far and few between. Two of you are going to read a passage about this process of creating public opinion from a novel of mine called A Vicious Circle. It caused a scandal because a critic – now literary editor of the Evening Standard, and a Booker judge this year – got it cancelled by the publisher, Penguin, by claiming that it libelled him. The novel was subsequently bought by another publisher, and is probably still my best-known book. This is a conversation between Ivo Sponge, a manipulative journalist, and Mary an Irish waitress who is about to become a reviewer.

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Everything that Ivo says to Mary about reviewing, was said to me by various critics and literary editors in the course of my career as a novelist and critic. It has always been the case that reviewers attack the author quite as much as what he or she produces. Lord Byron hated Keats, and savaged him in the Edinburgh Review because he felt an aristocratic disdain for a poor young medical student daring to write poetry. Keats went through agonies because of this, and was so crushed that when he died of TB at the age of 26, he asked for the inscription on his gravestone to read: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” The Brontes were greeted as geniuses by the Victorian public when they pretended to be men, and as grossly emotional when they revealed their true sex. Today’s publishers and newspaper editors tend not to be interested in someone who merely writes a good book. Prospective authors have to come with a story attached to them – a story, perhaps, of famous parents, or exotically ethnic ones, of misery, murder and mayhem which are generally inimical to the process of writing fiction, but which makes the author newsworthy. Meanwhile, mature writers who have spent years perfecting their craft struggle to find any publisher at all. The business of writing is in conflict with the art.

Ivo is, I have to confess, my favourite fictional creation – he reappears in my most recent novel, Love in Idleness, an update of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as one of a quartet of lovers given a real love potion. He voices the pragmatic, business side of being a writer, or an artist of any kind. We actually need people like Ivo, as long as they don’t become corrupt and attempt to manipulate the system for purely private gain, to remind us that writing is a business, as well as an art. Ivo’s perception of how the world of the media works by the “fear or favours market,” is close to my own, though I put that perception to a very different use.

The favours market is easiest to spot. When you see those lists of Best Summer Books, or Books of the Year chosen by well-known authors, you should be very, very wary of believing what they say. The majority of the books enthusiastically recommended in these lists are by the author’s best friend, lover, protégée or patron. Usually, there is a quid pro quo: you’ve praised my book, so I’m going to praise yours. This is known as log-rolling. It’s a pretty harmless past-time - unless you happen to be a reader who forks out £16.99 for a bad book.

The fear market is much more poisonous, and much less discussed. You may recognise it from your own experience of cliques and gangs in school. One author has annoyed another author – perhaps by giving him or her an unenthusiastic review, or simply by making an off-hand remark at a party. This earns them the enmity not just of the author, but of their clique. Very few novelists can survive without such a clique. Writing is such a high-risk business that any bad review can make the difference.

Women novelists have an especially hard time of it. Male novelists and critics tend not to read us, let alone take us seriously, and too often, women want to curry favour with men by savaging their own sex. How many of you have seen the film Mean Girls? The difference is that in the literary world, the Plastics are almost all guys. Given the fact that over 60% of fiction is produced by women, and that 7 out of the 11 serious national papers have women literary editors, this might strike you as odd. Yet men are seen as the “big beasts” of the literary world, as indeed of all worlds. In a recent issue of the New Statesman, for instance, of the twelve notable novels picked out for this year, only four were by women – and two of those were the new Harry Potter and the new Jilly Cooper.

Some of this, women have themselves to blame for. Unlike men, we find it hard to take ourselves seriously. We worry more about what people think of us, about paying bills and not looking like a fool. We tend to be more afraid of risk, and risk as I’ve said is essential in the make-up of a literary writer. So women tend to write more commercial fiction, the stuff that keeps them as cash-cows for publishers and agents, but which means they are out of the cultural swim.

The only way you are going to change society is if you resist prejudice, both external and internal. At school, some of you may see each other as rivals. Outside, you are going to be in opposition to an entire sex, one that has co-operated and competed for thousands of years to stay on top. If you are interested in fiction, ask yourselves why, when so many girls are better at English from the moment they start speaking, so few ever win prizes or even get short-listed for them – why four times more men win the Booker than women, ten times more win the Whitbread and twenty times more win prizes for journalism. Are men really so much better at writing than women? What are we doing wrong? Is our vision too compromised by “soft” subjects such as love when it should be addressing “hard” subjects like war? Is love less important than war, or does it only matter when it’s addressed by a man like Tolstoy or Flaubert? Read what Virginia Woolf has to say in A Room of One’s Own about the way men and women write. Ask yourselves why women are encouraged to write romances or lightweight journalism, but mocked for or strongly discouraged from thinking of themselves as serious writers or artists. Read magazines like Mslexia, which champions women’s writing, and ask yourselves why, if girls repeatedly outstrip boys academically, more of us aren’t equally successful in the world of art – and business. To succeed in these worlds, you are going to need to become braver and stronger and more determined than you can possibly imagine.

The most recent winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year, Andrea Levy, had everything against her. She was black and Jewish, and barely scraped her English A level at a London comprehensive school. Unlike Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, she didn’t go to Oxbridge. She’s middle-aged, in a business obsessed by youth. Her fourth novel, Small Island, was about the experience of two West Indian people – based on her own parents – who sailed on the Windrush to post-War London. It’s a splendid novel, and it was turned down by every publisher but one. Yet Small Island got into that magic 5% of serious contenders, and won the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. It still didn’t sell. The biggest obstacle she had against her was not her race, but that she was a woman: and here she was lucky, because this year two out of the three judges for the Whitbread prize were also women. I was one of them. Small Island won because it was a very good, original novel - but had there been two men to one woman on the panel, it is probable the result would have been different. Since winning the Whitbread, she has sold over 100,000 copies and come to be seen as one of our most important modern novelists.

Of course, you don’t write to win prizes, or even to make money. Writing is, as I’ve said, a vocation – as strong as the vocation to be a doctor, or a politician or a mother. You’re very lucky if you find out what you really want to do with your life, and even luckier if you are able to make some kind of living doing it. In the end, that is what counts. But it is also very, very important to stand up against the Sponges of this world, as Mary eventually does in A Vicious Circle. It is very important to make your own decisions about art, and to not let yourself be swayed by the opinions of others. It is important to have your own vision of what you want to say, and learn about. A novel is not just the product of a business, the kind of business I’ve just described to you, but a window into the world of another person’s mind, something that could and should help you become a richer, more complex human being. Not everyone is going to find the same path to that depth and breadth of consciousness, but however you find it – whether through books or art or music or acting or science or sport – you should value it for what you yourself find, not for what other people tell you. The one thing all these hidden persuaders are powerless against is the freedom of an unfettered mind. That is what you have now, and what I hope very much you will keep.

Ends.