Bookbuyer's
Bookend
The English Arts Council has taken a good deal of stick for its miserly support of the printed word, and often quite justifiably so. But it deserves full marks for dreaming up and sponsoring the so-named New Fiction Society, a non-profit making book club to be launched next month. The idea is to help the beleaguered British novel by providing book club editions of the best new fiction at two thirds the price of a normal trade edition, just as commercial book clubs do. The difference is one of scale, for whereas the bigger clubs would be talking in . terms of 5,000-plus copies of a potentially "popular" book, • the New Fiction Society is envisaging editions of 500-2,000 copies of a novel chosen for its quality.
Since, the argument runs, the NFS will be taking extra printed sheets from the commercial publisher, the publisher himself will be partly subsidised, and the author will receive additional income in the form of book club royalties. That makes sense of course, but if you think about it for a moment it is not quite the real point. The reason 'serious' fiction is difficult to get published is not so much because it makes a loss (though it often does) but because most publishers are not interested in it. During the past two years publishing profits have on the whole been healthy, so that several firms could, if they so wished, afford the indulgence of ten commercially doubtful novels a year. It is not necessarily a condemnation of them to say that they do not want to. Some, after all, see themselves as beholden to shareholders who prefer reading bank statements to books; others are beholden to multi-faceted , corporations in which there are executives who can hardly read at all; and others still are shy of "literature" because they are honest enough to admit that they would not recognise it if they saw it. In other words the publishing of quality fiction is often a matter of will.
Looking at the New Fiction Society's first admirable choices — new novels by Lawrence Durrell, Muriel Spark, Nadine Gordimer, Richard Adams, Beryl Bainbridge and Dinah Brooke — it is safe to say that there are no books that would not have been published without the NFS 'subsidy'. It seems unlikely that this will be the case with many of the twenty-five titles the Society hopes to offer next year. The 'subsidy' will be welcome but probably not essential. Nor is it necessarily true to say that authors will be able to carry on writing books they would not otherwise have written. How could the New Fiction Society possibly know that Does it plan to conduct a means test for writers, picking the novels of those who can prove themselves most needy? Of course not.
The real hope for the New Fiction Society is not that it will help a few publishers, or a few authors, but that it will attract people to the habit of buying hardback fiction. By the end of its third year, the Society hopes to have enlisted 10,000 members, each of whom will be committed to buying at least four new novels a year, and since they will be getting their discount in the form of book tokens, they will also have to visit bookshops to redeem the balance. From such acorns, one or two oaks might grow. In fact when you come to think about it, the Arts Council's New Fiction Society is doing what publishers should be doing for themselves through that old and oft-proposed chestnut, the co-operative Book Promotion House.
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