Cup cakes are over, hello macarons

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
150,000 new books are published each year. Nonetheless, a new writer looking for a publisher will find it an uphill struggle to find one who will even glance at their manuscript. Amber Pearson, freelance book reviewer and former fiction editor and assistant literary editor on The Daily Mail, gives OCA writers the inside view on how to take advantage of the fads and fashions of the reading public.
If you want to get a book published, it’s probably not the best idea to get a job on the books desk of a newspaper.
Of course, the cynical among you might argue that when it comes to building up useful contacts in the publishing industry that’s precisely what you should do. Maybe so. But I will never forget walking into the office on my first day at the Daily Mail and being confronted by a teetering wall of books, stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves and covering every available surface. And that was just the titles published that month.
According to The Bookseller magazine, there were almost 150,000 new books and editions published in the UK in 2011 – slightly down on 2010. This could give you hope. After all, if all those other authors found a publisher then surely it’s only a matter of time before it’s your turn? And yet, with competition this fierce, how many of these budding authors go on to become household names or even to get their second book published? Are there really enough readers out there for all these hopefuls? It’s enough to daunt a weaker, less determined soul.
Still, if you really want to see your name in print, perhaps it’s simply a matter of taking an overview of the book trade and spotting the next emerging trend. Just witness the raft of copy-cat titles that followed in the wake of massive bestsellers like 50 Shades, The Da Vinci Code or the Twilight series (after which our office was taken over by vampires, vampires and more vampires, with the occasional werewolf for variety).
After Marley And Me proved a hit, we were introduced to pets of every conceivable type – each more winsome than the last – helping to heal their families’ emotional problems. A Child Called It spawned the whole genre of misery memoirs (thanks for that), while Schott’s Miscellany – and its numerous imitators – tapped into the public’s newly-discovered love of trivia. Going a little further back in time there was Peter Mayle’s A Year In Provence (expat buys ramshackle farmhouse abroad and befriends amusing locals), a category of book still proving popular with both publishers and readers. Even cookery books are subject to the whims of fashion. As one publicist confidently told me, cupcakes are over; it’s all about macarons now, apparently.
You could say that this applies to a certain sector of the publishing industry, and what you’re really interested in is more high-brow fare where talent will out. But even literary fiction is subject to noticeable trends – be it Victoriana, stories with a supernatural twist, or novels narrated from a child’s point of view – and it’s hard for cash-strapped publishers, no matter how much they prize true originality and creativity, to completely overlook such things if they prove popular with the book-buying public.
So maybe it’s worth considering Thursdays In the Park, Hilary Boyd’s novel of a romance between 60-somethings, a unexpected publishing success. Its current position among the Amazon bestsellers suggests that publishers may now increasingly target a generation they’ve tended to neglect in the past. Could this see the start of ‘Granny Lit’ as some newspapers are predicting?
Obviously, much of this is nonsense. You should write the book you want to write and trust that it will find a suitably appreciative audience. And, fortunately, publishing is still an industry prepared to take risks; where making a profit isn’t the sole justification for publishing a work. What I’m advocating, however, is to try thinking like a publisher on occasion. After all, if you want to sell your book a certain degree of salesmanship is always going to be involved.
Any literary agent who takes you on will need to sell your book – and increasingly you as an author – to the right publisher. The editor who takes a risk on you will have to justify their decision to the rest of the publishing house. They will argue about how to publicise you; they will discuss what market you should be positioned in; they will debate (heatedly) the appearance of your book’s cover. You and your book will become a commodity.
So there’s no harm in taking a moment to think about ways to market yourself (it’s never too early to start practising those amusing anecdotes for when you’re on stage at a literary festival), and definitely make the most of new media to build up your own audience. Publishers love evidence of ready-made success. For far more sensible and well-grounded advice than mine, try literary agent Carole Blake’s book, From Pitch To Publication, and take a look at some pithy tips on getting published from another agent, Andrew Lownie.
Lastly, for goodness sake, never let yourself be daunted by the sheer number of books out there. Good luck!
Amber Pearson worked as Fiction Editor and Assistant Literary Editor on the Daily Mail for 11 years. Before that she was employed at publishers Random House. She is currently a freelance book reviewer.
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