CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE BOOKHOUSE
The media: Paul Johnson on how authors can cope with the recession in the publishing trade
WANDERING round the superbly de- signed new Dilions in Kensington High Street recently, I reflected on the prolifera- tion of good bookshops during the long years of Thatcher prosperity, and the fundamental improvement in their layout. How easy it is now to find the books you want to buy! If some books find it hard to get a look-in, blame the publishers for producing so many. In January-June 1990 they put out 27,986 titles of which 7,086 were reprints and new editions. In Britain alone, then, books are being published at an annual rate of nearly 60,000 a year, of which three-quarters are entirely new. Yet the trade is plainly depressed at present. Sales of fiction are down about 12 per cent on last year and non-fiction almost 25 per cent. The festive season has been a particu- larly anxious time, for about 30 per cent of all books are sold in the run-up to Christ- mas and this year most of the predicted big sellers appear to have missed the target.
Downturns in trade traditionally hit books hard. The financial crash of Decem- ber 1825, for instance, brought down (among others) the big Scots publisher Constable and with him poor Sir Walter Scott, who spent the rest of his life writing frantically to pay off £100,000 of debt. The consequences in France were still more devastating, one reason why the July 1830 revolution in Paris was spearheaded by writers, editors and print-workers. The big Wall Street crash of 1929 had similar consequences. None of the public libraries in Chicago, for instance, bought a single new book for 12 months. As John Stein- beck complained, 'When people are broke, the first things they give up are books.' Little, Brown of Boston reported 1932-33 as the worst year since they began pub- lishing in 1837, and total book sales throughout the United States fell 50 per cent. Yet the effects were not uniform. Old J. B. Priestley used to tell me that the depression actually helped the sales of The Good Companions (1929), which went on to become one of the great bestsellers of the century, and certainly Victor Gollancz made a dramatic publishing success of the early Thirties.
I am keeping my fingers crossed for
1991, having just delivered a big new book for New York publication in June, London in September. It is called The Birth of the Modern and describes the years 1815-1830 when, in my contention, much of the matrix of the modern world was forged. As it covers painting, music, literature, scien- ce and engineering — and much else —.as well as politics and economics, and as it deals with the entire world, it is not surprisingly over 400,000 words long, with many thousands of source-notes. Such a work represents an investment of many years of time and mental energy. I try to cover myself by writing for the long-term: that is, imagining a book which will be still selling in ten years (Cyril Connolly's defini- tion of the crucial span), and with luck in 20. It is also vital nowadays to write for the world market, rather than just the British one, which is comparatively small, The United States is the biggest of all, for Americans do buy a great many books, and this is the one which most merits careful study and cultivation by authors. But there are important English language markets in such places as Australia, South Africa, Canada, Hong Kong and west and south Asia. The Japanese, German, French and Italians markets are now huge, and there are immense opportunities for Spanish and Portuguese translations. Scandinavia and the Netherlands constitute worthwhile markets too, and unknown opportunities 'I suppose you learnt that little trick in
Kuwait.' are opening up in Eastern Europe. Such potential armies of readers throughout the world are unlikely to he much interested in books written simply to suit the chattering classes here.
This is my 27th (or possibly 28th) book, and a rather sad landmark in my writing life since it will be the last produced by traditional technology. It was written directly onto two Olympia Electronic Compact typewriters, placed side by side or in L-formation. I use one for the text and one for the source-notes, moving between them on a secretary's chair with wheels, so that text and sources are typed at the same time. It always amazes me when experienced writers tell me they compile the source-notes after they have finished the book — an infinite and quite unnecessary added labour, and one certain to produce avoidable errors. Yet I don't remember anyone having advised me to adopt my simultaneous technique. I must have discovered it for myself, and of course it is pretty obvious once you thing of it. I suspect most of the secrets of book-writing are thus learned by trial and error. Those who claim to teach the craft are, almost by definition, failed writers, with not much of value to impart. Most successful writers cannot talk about their books coherently or are unwilling to divulge what they have acquired the hard way.
What young writers (and many experi- enced ones, alas) most need to know is how to construct a book, especially a long and complicated one. Writers get into difficulties, and abandon a book, not be- cause they are suffering from 'writer's block' — there is no such thing — but because they have not devoted enough time and concentration to the structure. I discovered, when making television documentaries in the 1950s, that it was a useful exercise, when the filming was completed, to scrap the shooting-script, write down each bit of film on a small card. spread the cards over the floor, and then spend a few days reassembling them into a powerfully sequential order. I then applied the process to book-writing and now may have as many as 500 cards, each covering a topic from 250 to 1,000 words and contain- ing detailed references to my notes (I have a central note-index too). I then spend a week, even a fortnight, getting them into chapters, and in the correct order within the chapters. Once this is done, and each card numbered, the writing can begin, and proceeds smoothly: if something goes wrong, it is invariably because I have not spent enough time and thought getting the structural order exactly right. I have de- veloped this system over the years, impro- ving it with each book. Now I face the daunting task, for my next effort, of adapting this tried and tested method to the demands of advanced computer word- processing. It's one more reminder that new technology raises as many problems as it solves.
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