An article in today's Times on last night's Costa book awards turned into yet another piece about how publishing doesn't work and how "publishers seem to be getting something badly wrong".
To be fair, the journalist does promote smaller publishing houses (Tindal Street Press gets a good mention, mainly because one of the winners is one of their authors), who've been picking up books that have failed to attract the attention of 'bigger' houses and they do have a tiny side-column with advice from Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown and Ion Trewin of Weidenfeld & Nicholson about the querying process. However, what really got my blood up was that the main article trots out the following 'statistic':
This completely fails to distinguish how many of those books were vanity or self-published, or break down the figures sold by the big houses like Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster etc who must be getting something right given that they're still in business and pushing new authors.
What makes this so infuriating is that the focus of the article is on Catherine O'Flynn who won the Costa First Novel award for "What Was Lost" but who had been rejected by 20 agents and publishers before being taken on by Tindal Street. As a struggling, would-be UK author I think it's great to see someone who's had knockbacks but gone on to be a success and good on her for keeping at it. But for the journalist who wrote this piece to then turn it into a "See - this just goes to show how broken publishing is in the UK!" is only going to add fuel to shady POD and vanity presses who misrepresent what publishing involves to people. The journalist even brings out a reference to last year's news story about the 'author' who sent the opening chapters to Pride and Prejudice as a test to demonstrate how "broken" publishing is.
Gah. I know I shouldn't let this get to me, but it's just the kind of sloppy journalism that really gets my gander up. There's a link to the news story below if anyone wants to check it out.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3123455.ece
To be fair, the journalist does promote smaller publishing houses (Tindal Street Press gets a good mention, mainly because one of the winners is one of their authors), who've been picking up books that have failed to attract the attention of 'bigger' houses and they do have a tiny side-column with advice from Jonathan Lloyd of Curtis Brown and Ion Trewin of Weidenfeld & Nicholson about the querying process. However, what really got my blood up was that the main article trots out the following 'statistic':
This completely fails to distinguish how many of those books were vanity or self-published, or break down the figures sold by the big houses like Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster etc who must be getting something right given that they're still in business and pushing new authors.
What makes this so infuriating is that the focus of the article is on Catherine O'Flynn who won the Costa First Novel award for "What Was Lost" but who had been rejected by 20 agents and publishers before being taken on by Tindal Street. As a struggling, would-be UK author I think it's great to see someone who's had knockbacks but gone on to be a success and good on her for keeping at it. But for the journalist who wrote this piece to then turn it into a "See - this just goes to show how broken publishing is in the UK!" is only going to add fuel to shady POD and vanity presses who misrepresent what publishing involves to people. The journalist even brings out a reference to last year's news story about the 'author' who sent the opening chapters to Pride and Prejudice as a test to demonstrate how "broken" publishing is.
Gah. I know I shouldn't let this get to me, but it's just the kind of sloppy journalism that really gets my gander up. There's a link to the news story below if anyone wants to check it out.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3123455.ece
*runs away*
