Hunting Writers

HB: Slightly unfortunate title for the post, maybe. But 'Hunting writers' isn't about guns & mantraps, so much as one of the biggest dilemmas for publishers.

The issue is this. Publishers have 2 ways to find authors.

1) The slush pile. Extremely labour intensive & very poor at truffling up quality.
2) Agents. Excellent at producing quality MSS, but the sales process is designed to ramp prices up to the max.

What is a poor publisher to do? Well, publishers have responded inventively, albeit (as yet) not very decisively. So f'rinstance:

• Hamish Hamilton has set up a literary magazine (Five Dials) as a bait to lure new writers
• Penguin in the US setup an online competition for new talent in conjunction with Amazon
• HarperCollins has set up a peer-review site for writers, Authonomy
• Macmillan has set up a New Writing venture, aimed specifically at non-agented writers

Of these, Macmillan has had the most success so far, and wants to expand its range further. Given that we're proven trufflers up of talent and a big publisher could do loads for us in terms of increasing our profile, then there's huge potential synergy in some sort of linkage. I suspect we won't get to the end of 2009 without something happening on that front.

But meantime, there's always the old fashioned way of doing things. Aida Edemariam who discussed some of this in a Guardian article talks about Tindal Street Press:

"Because we're small and we've been building a reputation, we haven't been an obvious choice for agents," says [Tindal Street] editor Luke Brown, "so the slush pile has been vital for us." This year Tindal Street is publishing three novels that began life this way. Brown admits, however, that this kind of publishing is extremely labour-intensive: not only do you have to find the book - you then have to make it publishable.

"We work a lot with the authors," says Brown. "Generally there are four or five drafts. It's a question of seeing its potential." The process can take up to three years, and there are few big publishers, mindful of corporate owners and bottom lines, willing to give this kind of time to an off-chance.

Personally, it seems to me that the old ways are still the best. They're the ones we cleave to, anyway.