Strait is the jacket

HB: My post below (Strait is the Gate) seems to have touched a nerve, so here's a little more on the same line.

The book that didn't sell was a crime novel in the Agatha Christie mould, where all the clues needed to solve the puzzle were fairly laid out in the book. A traditional enterprise, but one very open to modern reworkings, a la Rankin for example. But it was also a thriller - with a fine shootout scene at the end. Most strikingly, it was also an exercise in character and voice: the lead character being a highly associative / intuitive dyslexic with a head stuffed full of weird and wonderful facts. It was that last element that made the book so unusual and so worthwhile.

The feedback from editors at publishers was great. They wanted to buy the book. So why didn't they? Because sales & marketing types rule the roost. They said, "This is a tough guy crime thriller and the lead character is not ex-SAS, so it doesn't work for the market we have in mind." [SAS = british special forces, for our American chums].

Feedback from agent to client: "Write me another book like that, with the same character, only make him into an ex-SAS guy please."

Expostulation from client to me (expletives deleted): "For xxxx's sake, this character couldn't possibly be a xxxxxxx SAS guy. It's not that kind of xxxxxx book and he's not that kind of xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx person."

Now I agree with y'all, that readers WANT a crime novel with good splashes of gore, in which the lead character is interesting but not an SAS-man or anything like one. But sales & marketing folk want to pigeonhole readers and of course the more they do that, the more they end up proving their point. Go to the crime-thriller shelves now and you'll find that most bestselling novels do have ex special force types as their protagonists ... which proves the S&M guys right ... but only because no other book is allowed to reach those damn shelves in the first place.

Humph. Nothing a few firebombs couldn't fix, methinks.


One final word. A few people have suggested that our client could just go to a smaller, less strait-jacketing press. Well, yes, he could, and they'd take him, and he'd get into print. But the ugly reality of the trade is that his book would almost certainly die without a big publisher behind him. Yes, there are exceptions, but no there aren't many. And once an author has a poor sales record, it'll haunt him/her for the rest of their days, no matter what the quality of the material.

So come on. Send me your unused Guy Fawkes night fireworks and I'll see if I can't figure out how to make something flammable and fun ...