Excuse me while I hold my swollen head under a cold tap.
No, I don’t have a hangover; it’s swollen in the other sense – puffed up with pride because someone said something really, really nice.
Two people, actually. This morning someone congratulated me on ‘establishing a respected name and a recognised imprint in a short time’. I’m glowing like a glowy thing from glowland, as Bev Morriss would put it, and may well continue to glow for some time to come.
And I was already feeling pretty pleased with what I saw in the mirror, because last night I gave a talk to a writers’ group, and the guy who gave the vote of thanks called me a crusader, and said it was the most interesting, informative and honest talk he’d heard in all the time he’d been in the group.
Working mainly alone, as small publishers do, it’s often hard to get a perspective on things. There’s no benchmark, nothing to measure yourself against; most of the time you have no idea at all whether you’re getting it right. So please forgive a little glow when someone says we have.
Oh, there are sales figures – but as often as not all they tell you is whether or not a book is popular, or whether you got the marketing right; or even how hard the author is working at promoting the book. They don’t tell you if a book is actually good – and popular and good aren’t necessarily the same thing. I’ve said more than once that I would have turned down The da Vinci Code, and even though it might have cost me my luxury yacht in the Caribbean and second home in the French countryside, I would stand by that decision if I’d had the opportunity to make it. Who needs yachts and second homes anyway?
But who’s to say what qualifies as good? That was a question that took up quite a sizeable chunk of the lively discussion that followed my talk last night: what criteria do I use to make the decision to publish one book and not another? How do I decide whether or not a book is good?
The answer, of course, is I have to fall in love with it. I think the approximate words I used went something like this: I know I want to make the investment in a manuscript when the initial 10,000-word submission grabs me and won’t let go; when I’m so engrossed in it that my coffee goes cold and I don’t hear the phone. When the fate of the characters affects me as if they were my friends. When I reach the end of the initial extract and find myself scrabbling around for the author’s phone number so that I can demand the rest by return.
But when all’s said and done, it’s just my opinion, and I have absolutely no idea what that’s worth.
By the same token, who’s to say whether I’m achieving anything worth the sweat and tears with Crème de la Crime? We haven’t – yet – won any awards, though we’ve made a couple of longlists. I suppose a point in our favour, though not yet as much to our advantage as I’d like, is that several authors who debuted with us have gone on to greater and more prestigious things. But who’s to say they wouldn’t have got there anyway?
Mostly I like working alone. It means I get to do things my way without a struggle, or time-wasting meetings which take hours to arrive at a decision that was inevitable after five minutes’ discussion.
