Puzzled
I’m puzzled by a question I’ve been asked repeatedly over the last year or so: have you really represented Hilary Mantel from the beginning? It’s the tone that worries me, implying that I might have had due cause to stop representing her, before the breakthrough with Wolf Hall. The assumption itself is bizarre, so insulting to Hilary, but comes from publishing types for whom talent and industry aren’t enough, an author has to have that early breakthrough from a prize or a piece of luck or from particularly strong publishing, or else they should be candidates for the chop.
Of course there are wonderful writers who never get that breakthrough, and others for whom it happens overnight and then passes, or some who make it spectacularly at the beginning of a career. There’s an element of lottery in all this, which can operate alongside or despite the most strenuous efforts of the agent and the publishers. Sometimes it just happens that a writer suddenly converges on public taste at a particular moment. We can’t fix the prize judges, or get books picked by Richard & Judy, or ensure that a writer who is paddling along in the UK market suddenly becomes a bestseller in say Germany; but these things happen, and they too can transform a career. What we can do is back talent, in the confidence that if there are enough people who think highly enough of a writer, or they are adaptable enough in what they write, they will eventually make it. Some of the commercial writers who hit big in the 1970’s and 80’s and remained at the top of the bestseller lists for decades often succeeded with their third or fourth pseudonym, writing in different genres until one worked for them. Pot luck? No, that required a hell of a lot of persistence, a ferocious appetite to speak to readers, and a marketplace that had space for experimentation.
It’s a feature at the retail end of the marketplace at the moment that persistence is in rather short supply. The major accounts are interested in backing sure-fire bestsellers, and do a terrific job for them, but there aren’t enough outlets capable of backing a wide range of writers. We can fall back on the enticing method of digital publishing to start a career if the opportunity for conventional print isn’t there. That’s fine for genre, particularly crime and thrillers. The question for literary writing is whether, as newspapers shrink, we’ll have enough bloggers and internet reviewers to sustain careers long enough for them to find their breakout moment. And we’ll continue to get asked whether we have the patience to keep going….