It is called in the trade, as Andrew Marr revealed on these pages last week,
“spoilt”. Once autographed by its author, a copy of a new book cannot be
remaindered; it might sit for months on the shelves untouched by paying
customers, but it still counts as sold.
This is useful information for budding writers, which I was first tipped off
about by the gangster Frankie Fraser. In his days terrorising criminal
London as an enforcer for the Richardson family. Fraser was known as “the
dentist” (“I wasn’t a medical man” he said by way of explanation, “but I
dabbled in extraction.”).
So when he spoke, it was best to listen. Frankie was at the launch party of
a book I’d written (I’m not sure why he was there, but nobody on the door
was going to stop this gatecrasher). He took me by the elbow and whispered
conspiratorially: “Let me give you a word of advice, son, author to author:
whenever you pass a bookshop, go in and sign copies of your book. That way,
even if you never sell a bean, the bastards have still got to pay you.”
Six months later, I happened to be in a bookshop near Frankie’s home in
north London. And there, on a display table, was a tottering alp of copies
of his autobiography, Mad Frankie, a pile so high it must have enjoyed its
own microclimate. A forlorn note on the top of the dusty stash read: “Local
author: special half-price discount. All copies signed.”
Fraser presumably didn’t mind that the mountain of unsold tomes rivaled
Canary Wharf for scale. He was too busy at home, tittering over his royalty
cheque.
I thought of Frankie’s assiduous autographing when I heard a caller on BBC
Radio 5 last week ringing in to say that he had just gone out and bough 15
signed copies of a new hardback the day it arrived in his bookshop. Not to
read them; no, these were to remain pristine in his attic. They were, he
said, investments.
The book that the caller reckoned was worth this extravagant punt is called
Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver. This is not an author who is likely to
trouble judges of the Booker Prize. Nor will her work feature in the
literary pages of the Sunday newspapers. The only context in which most of
us will have heard of here before is when her name is appended to the words
“record advance”. An unprecedented �2.8 million she received from Orion to
snaffle up the rights to a five-book series called Chronicles of Ancient
Darkness, a sum so vast it is usually associated in publishing terms only
with the ghosted life stories of Premiership footballers. Wolf Brothers is
the first instalment in pay-back time. You will find Wolf Brothers in the
children’s section, but its intended audience is much wider. As its rather
sophisticated dust jacket suggests, this is the sort of book that could
discreetly be read on the train by adults on their way to work. On the
inside cover is a hand-drawn map of the journey undertaken by Torak, the
youthful hero, a boy growing up in the world of prehistory, as he makes hi
way across the Deep Forest and the Ice River past the Mountain of the World
Spirit.
But the territory that the book is aiming to traverse is more familiar: turn
left at Tolkien Peaks, walk for several days across the Pullman Plans, cross
the Rowling Foothills and there you will find the Money Well, with it
inexhaustible torrents of cash.
Not much enrages the traditionalist critic more than the concept of the
“kidult” book. Why on earth, they fume, are adults reading the wearisome
adventures of Harry Potter, the pompous sword and sorcery of the Lord of the
Rings or the GCSE philosophising of Philip Pullman, when they could be
engaging with Dickens, Trollope or Austen? Or even Martin Amis and Ian
McEwan, modern fiction-spinners who at least deal with the world of
grown-ups? Though in Amis’s case perhaps gown-up is pushing it.
Publishers, on the other hand, love the concept of the kidult book. This is
sales terrain without discernible boundaries, where young and old club
together, encourage each other, producing a market in which there is no age
limit. And personally I have nothing against JK Rowling. For me, anyone who
makes reading a competitive sport among 10-year-olds deserves canonisation.
No matter how derivative and turgid their prose.
The triumph of Philip Pullman and JK Rowling, though, is that they found
their own market against all precedent. In order to play catch-up, to seize
some of the ground opened up by those pioneers, publishers are obliged to
join the race at a much pricier entry point.
The cost began, in the case of Michelle Paver, with the advance. That in
itself became a story. Then with the money came the mystique: we were told
that, like JK, she had her tales mapped out in her head years ago; she has
known for two decades what will appear on her final page. The hype was all
in place before a book hit the stores, so much so that optimists were
punting on first editions becoming collector’s items.
But he real gamblers here are the publishers, who are playing with stakes
entirely provided by other authors. If this book fails, there will be no
money for future development. If it succeeds – and it is, to be fair, a
rollicking, easy read – it will only reinforce the growing habit of putting
resources solely behind those whose work fits into pre-conceived marketing
boxes.
It is too early to tell which direction Wolf Brother will go. But when I
went into my bookshop to pick up a copy, the pile of unsold items rivalled
that Mad Frankie mountain I once encountered in the Dentist’s own manor.
What’s more, every single one of them was signed by the author.
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