How to make a book

More than 100,000 books are published every year in the UK. Some go on to become multimillion bestsellers, the vast majority do not. Oliver Burkeman follows the 18-month-long journey of one novel, from the author's flash of inspiration in a pub, to the moment it hit the shelves at Books Etc
Gideon Defoe
Defoe: 'We were just thinking how funny it would be to actually write a book'

How to make a book

More than 100,000 books are published every year in the UK. Some go on to become multimillion bestsellers, the vast majority do not. Oliver Burkeman follows the 18-month-long journey of one novel, from the author's flash of inspiration in a pub, to the moment it hit the shelves at Books Etc

Until the spring of 2003, Gideon Defoe's proudest moment was serving Guinness to Tom Baker. Defoe had just graduated with a degree in archaeology and anthropology from Oxford University, and he was making ends meet with a job behind the bar of the Coal Hole, a pub on the Strand in central London near the Savoy Hotel; celebrities such as the former Doctor Who actor would sometimes drop by for a drink. Defoe had no real goals, except for vague thoughts of returning to university to do a doctorate, "probably in monkeys". But before that could happen, and quite without him planning it, something else did. The 28-year-old got sucked into a process that, despite the fact that it happens 125,000 times every year in Britain alone, remains one of the most glamorous and mythologised and - even to those involved in it - mysterious aspects of the contemporary culture industry. He had a book published.

Several hundred books were published in September last year: novels by Roddy Doyle and Nicholson Baker and Alan Titchmarsh, autobiographies by Peter Shilton and Ian Holm, Justin Timberlake and Cherie Blair, biographies of Dirk Bogarde and Screaming Lord Sutch, along with the requisite gaggle of Da Vinci Code tie-ins. This is the story of one of those September books, a 135-page comic novella entitled The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists, published by Orion, priced £7.99, ISBN number 0297848852, which Gideon Defoe wrote, according to the jacket blurb, "to impress a girl".

It is a fair bet that if you are amused by the exclamation mark in the middle of the book's title, you will appreciate its brand of humour, and that if you're not, you won't. Kirkus Reviews, the American journal that reviews 5,000 books each year, called it a "silly and very droll debut by a London paleontologist who likes pirates and has obviously grown up on old Monty Python reruns" - all of which was true, except for the paleontologist part - and summarised the plot as a "story of the high seas, daring, romance [and] ham". The former Python Eric Idle repaid Defoe's obvious homage with a quote for the back cover: "Destined to become a classic of pirate comic fiction."

Fittingly for a book that one internet reviewer said felt as if it had been dreamed up by two mates in a pub for a wheeze, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists was dreamed up by two mates in a pub for a wheeze. "It was the Old Coffee House, a pub on Beak Street [in Soho, central London], and we were sitting under a painting of a reclining naked lady," recalls Defoe (who may, or may not, be related to Daniel Defoe: his mother thinks so, but he's not sure). In person he is courteous, drily witty and softly spoken - although a lot less shy these days, according to those who worked with him on the book, than before he was forced to undertake a publicity tour of London bookshops by rickshaw dressed as a pirate. "We were just talking about how funny it would be to actually write a book. The gag was in knocking out an entire book. Just seeing if you could do it." He wrote the first two-thirds in a fortnight, in notebooks in cafes and on his computer at Westminster City Council, where he was, by then, working as a temporary PA to the Tory councillor in charge of parking fines.

He found the motivation to finish the rest after telling a girl he liked that he was a novelist. This did not have the desired effect. "Of course it didn't impress her. It's a book about pirates. Now she's moved to a town that doesn't even have a bookshop." So he gave a few copies of the manuscript to friends, and went on with his life.

The hunger to be published gnaws powerfully enough at a sufficient number of people that between 30 and 40 unsolicited proposals arrive every single day at the London offices of the American literary agency Janklow & Nesbit. The "slush pile" is not an efficient route to literary fame: Claire Paterson, one of Janklow's two primary UK agents, found only one of her current 40-odd clients that way. Gallingly perhaps for all those would-be published authors, Defoe never really felt that hunger. But when Paterson was sent a copy of Pirates, after a friend of hers, the journalist Caitlin Moran, had seen it discussed on an internet forum, she phoned him at work - where, he recalls, he was "staring out the window and tapping a pencil against my teeth". He agreed to come in for a meeting. "It was all a bit surreal," he says. "They'd got all their Tom Wolfe books on display, and they'd represented the Pope and Ronald Reagan, and there I was." Since an agent must play a multiplicity of roles in an author's life - business manager, motivational coach, therapist - it is essential to meet a potential client face-to-face. "He was terribly shy," Paterson remembers. "He looked at his shoes the whole time." She agreed to take him on, and after demanding a handful of revisions to the manuscript, she felt ready to try to sell it.

The process by which a publishing house acquires a new manuscript would be nervewracking even if those involved knew how to tell in advance what customers will want to buy. But they don't. They are guessing, staking tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands on little more than a hunch. One Friday in August 2003, Paterson emailed Defoe's manuscript to Helen Garnons Williams, the editorial director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the publishing conglomerate Orion. "Helen had just lost out on a big auction, and she was a bit miserable," says Paterson. "I said, 'Don't worry. I've got something that'll cheer you up.'"

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists certainly stood a good chance of doing that. Its plot, which is not particularly easy to summarise, is set in 1837, and concerns the misadventures that arise after "the Pirate Captain" - he doesn't have a name - attacks Charles Darwin's ship, the Beagle, after misidentifying it as a Bank of England bullion vessel. The Darwin of the book is not quite today's towering figure of natural history: his main achievement so far is to have been teaching a chimpanzee to adopt the manners of a distinguished English gentleman. They proceed to London, where the proportion of chaos in the plot quickly increases. (Defoe peppers the narrative with exuberantly anachronistic similes: "Search the hold, men, and bring me back some gold," said the Pirate Captain, with a sneer reminiscent of Elvis.)

Williams quickly read the manuscript, and liked it, but the days have gone when an editor can make such a financially significant decision alone. She immediately consulted Joanna Carpenter, head of Orion's sales department, for an impromptu forecast of how many copies the book might sell. "You never want a manuscript to be your 'rope book'," Williams says - the work you passionately campaign for, only to see it fail in the marketplace. But even Carpenter makes her judgments primarily on gut instinct and experience, not scientific market research. "It's enthusiasm," she says. "When Helen comes down here with her eyes shining - if you can replicate that in front of a book buyer, you've got it made. It's only with that that books work. Without that, it would be a dreary process." Williams punched Carpenter's forecast into an in-house spreadsheet that uses the estimate to compute a suggested advance to be paid to the author. "The problem is that it almost always comes up with a figure of about £4,000, so you have to ignore it," says Williams. By Monday morning, she had made a low five-figure offer.

At this point, bidding for a book can quickly escalate into a breathless auction, in which the agent, who is the power-broker, can demand that all interested publishers submit blind offers - essentially, guessing how they think the market would value the book, then adding the smallest possible amount on top to guarantee the acquisition. "That's when you start to get bids for £101,000, and £102,000, and £103,000," says Williams. "Everyone's trying to second-guess everyone else and to outbid them by just enough." In the case of Pirates, though, Williams was trying to engineer a "pre-empt" - offering an amount large enough to persuade Paterson to cease offering the book to any other bidder.

"I said, 'No! No way!'" Paterson recalls. "Her offer was nowhere near big enough to take it off the table." Williams reconsidered, and upped her offer to £40,000, on one stress-inducing condition: Paterson and Defoe had exactly 60 minutes to take it or leave it. "Claire is one of the most honourable agents I know," Williams says, "but there's always the risk that if you give them longer than an hour, they'll start phoning around, trying to get an auction going." Paterson phoned Defoe, who was drinking coffee in a cafe in Holborn. "I certainly wasn't going to start arguing," he says. Forty-five minutes later, Paterson phoned Williams, and the deal was done. Fifteen per cent of the cash, the standard industry commission, would go to Paterson. The same day, Defoe gave his notice at Westminster council. "That was stupid, actually," he says now. "I was completely screwed, because I stopped getting paid, and the money didn't come through for ages."

The publishing industry operates primarily through the medium of lunch, and so, a few days later, the three celebrated with a meal at the French House in Soho. "Gideon had steak, followed by steak," Paterson recalls. "He doesn't seem to eat vegetables."

Seventy-six per cent of Finland is covered in trees; it is Europe's most densely forested country and, as a result, the source of 15% of the world's paper, including the sheets on which The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists would eventually be printed. In the autumn of 2003, Defoe's words were still more than half a year away from meeting Finnish paper at a printing plant in Suffolk. Williams and Defoe, meanwhile, had embarked on the editing process: often a months-long undertaking but, in the case of Defoe's idiosyncratic book, whose humour Williams didn't want to disturb for the sake of literary elegance, a matter of a few meetings.

The cover was another matter. The design of a book jacket is the single moment that brings together almost everyone involved in the publication process: the author, who usually has his or her own ideas, the editor, who wants the cover to be true to the text, the sales team, who want it to sell, and even, on some occasions, the retailers: in the US, the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble has been known to purchase 20,000 more copies of a title on the condition that its cover be redesigned. For Pirates, Orion sought out the veteran designer David Eldridge of Two Associates, an independent firm based in Chiswick. "There's a menu of things you're allowed to do," Eldridge says. "So if you foil the cover, for example, it'll add another 10p to the unit cost ... I've always wanted to do a round-cornered book, but the costs have always been prohibitive. They wouldn't be able to print it in the Far East, or something like that."

The first proposal for Pirates was expensive and, Defoe concluded, "awful": a skull with an eye that winked according to the angle at which you looked at the jacket. "The editor wanted something that looked a bit different," Eldridge says, perhaps a touch sardonically. "It's pretty common for people to want their product to look different, to stand out in the sea of covers at Waterstone's. But publishers' views of what's 'different' tend to differ from ours." (For sales departments, meanwhile, "different" often ends up meaning "just the same as the cover of that recent bestseller": witness the career trajectory of Jeff Fisher, who illustrated the famous blue-and-white jacket of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and whose covers went on to become ubiquitous.) After much back and forth, Orion and Eldridge settled on blue foil text for the title, surrounded by a collection of objects drawn from the plot: a monkey, a trapeze artist, some birds. This had the added benefit of being easily adaptible for the sequels that Defoe was already planning to write.

Meanwhile, in New York, at the Park Avenue offices of Janklow & Nesbit, the manuscript had landed in Eric Simonoff's email inbox. "This is a business built almost entirely on personal relationships and personal taste," says Simonoff, an agent who also represents the writers Geoff Dyer, ZZ Packer and Douglas Coupland. "I loved Gideon's book. But while you might love something, if you can't think of a single other person in New York publishing who'll love it, it will do the author no good. And the people in New York publishing known primarily for their sense of humour you can probably count on the fingers of one hand."

Simonoff sent the manuscript by bicycle courier to one of those few: Marty Asher, the editor-in-chief of Vintage. Asher had a track record when it came to quirky British humour, having previously acquired, on a hunch, the works of Alexander McCall Smith, which now regularly grace US bestseller lists. Asher offered £30,000 for the Pirates book plus one sequel. That represented a small advance, but the book was far too much of an unknown quantity, especially in the American market, for Simonoff to haggle for more. "This may be the only time I'll use the words 'Eric Simonoff' and 'reasonable' in the same sentence," Asher says, "but everyone was being rather cautious. It seemed a ridiculous long shot. It's the kind of humour that I love, but it's one of those books that if you show it to 10 people, five will laugh hysterically, and five will just stare at you ... Still, we live in a very tense time, and I tend to think that if I can publish anything that can give you an hour of respite and a few smiles, one is performing a public service."

The first 20 feet of any large bookshop, people in publishing will tell you, are all that really counts. Not that the placement of books in the shelves at the back of the store isn't fought over too: whether a book is displayed "face-out", or merely "spine-out", is a subject of much negotiation. But what matters most of all are the windows, the "new titles" shelves and the display tables, with their special offers: inclusion in Waterstone's famous 3-for-2 offer, for example, frequently boosts the sales of low-profile literary fiction titles by as much as 5,000%. To decide what gets placed in these crucial zones is, in large part, to decide what is going to sell, and it is here that the pyramidal structure of the industry becomes most acutely apparent. At the bottom are hundreds of thousands of would-be authors, straining to land an agent. Then there are hundreds of agents, straining to entice tens of publishers. And at the very top, handing down judgments from Olympian heights, is Scott Pack. "He's the man who can make or break a book," one publishing executive says.

Well, not just Scott Pack, not literally. But the national buying manager for Waterstone's is one of a relatively tiny number of people - including, increasingly, buyers from the major supermarkets - whom publishers must convince to purchase a title in bulk if it is to succeed. For Pirates, that process began in February last year, more than six months before publication, when a group of Orion executives visited the Waterstone's head office in Brentwood in Essex to present the titles they were planning to publish in the second half of the year.

Campaigning for their books to be included in promotions is a bittersweet business for publishers, for one reason: if they succeed, it is they who bear most of the cost of the discount enjoyed by the customer. To be included in the right offer, publishers can sometimes be persuaded to supply their books to retailers, who only take them on a sale-or-return basis anyway, for more than 50% off the cover price (independent booksellers will rarely get a discount of more than 35%). This leads to two obvious accusations: first, that the retailers essentially hold the book business in a headlock, and, second, that publishers with deep pockets can simply buy their inclusion in 3-for-2 offers, or their nomination as the Book of the Month.

Not surprisingly, Pack doesn't quite see it this way. "Ultimately, the decision we make on a book is about the book: will our customers buy it? Sometimes it's obvious - if it's the new John Grisham, for example - but sometimes we need to persuade our customers, because it might be a really good book that they just haven't heard of yet." Anyway, says Pack, "publishers do have budgets to spend with retailers. It would be stupid for us not to take advantage of that." Retailing is a hard terrain, where the commercial considerations that have been kept in the background of the publication process suddenly force themselves to the forefront, and personal hunches are no longer enough. "You can't just go on personal judgment," says Jon Howells, who bought Defoe's book for the Ottakar's bookshop chain. He loved Pirates, he says, "but I've fought before to get books in our stores just because I love them, and I've seen them fall flat."

For an author, getting a book published means gradually letting more and more people have a say in the fate of your creation - first it's just you, then you and an agent, then you and an agent and an editor - and by the middle of last year the number of people involved in the gestation of Pirates was quickly ballooning. Uncorrected paperback editions - were being dispatched to the media. Sales executives were continuing their rounds of the retail chains. In the United States, the text was being Americanised. And in the Midlands, behind the wheel of his Peugeot 407SW, Jon Small was beginning his own personal effort of evangelism.

For all the centralisation of the industry, people like Small are still essential. He is one of Orion's network of regional sales representatives, charged with criss-crossing the country to make sales to buying managers at individual stores. The reps' personal relationships with local buyers makes an unavoidable difference to the success of their sales pitches, as does their personal taste in books. "I read it in one sitting, and I fell about laughing," says Small, a 39-year-old father of two, who got his start in the book trade by walking into a jobcentre in Birmingham and taking a low-level post at Dillons. "He struck me as a clever guy, having fun, without ever saying, 'Ooh, look at me, aren't I clever?' One of the reasons I can't read Martin Amis is that there's a lot of that: 'Ooh, look at me, aren't I clever?'"

In the meantime, Defoe's book was finally achieving finished physical form at Clay's Printers in Bungay, a market town in Suffolk. Clay's call themselves "book printers for the world", and the boast is not unjustified. Most big British publishers get most of their black-and-white titles printed within the company's grey corrugated-metal buildings; the site employs 600 people; and produces around 150 million books a year. Twenty thousand copies of Defoe's book - an unusually large print run for a first work of fiction in hardback - were ready by the first week of July last year, and the majority were taken by road to Littlehampton Book Services, the central distribution point for the British book industry.

In the months since Pirates was published, Gideon Defoe has come to loathe - in his characteristically jovial way - a novel called Ireland, by Frank Delaney. It is bigger than his, and on alphabetically ordered shelves it is always stacked close by, face out. Defoe, who is hardly unique among authors in keeping a close personal watch on the physical placement of his book, admits he has been known to loiter in bookshops, surreptitiously moving it into more attention-grabbing spots. "But you can't do that for more than two months, or you start to get sick of it," he says. "I'm sure bookshops are massively used to that. They probably just sit there, watching the really obvious author skulking around." Last September, in a further effort to promote the book, Orion's publicity department also made Defoe dress as a pirate and tour London bookshops by rickshaw, autographing their stock. "It was," he recalls, "the most mortifying day of my life."

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists was barely reviewed by the national media - although the Sun did mention it, wrongly identifying it as a children's book. And yet by mid May, according to the research organisation Nielsen Bookscan, it had sold 6,899 copies nationwide. The fact that this is considered a vigorously healthy figure, and yet barely accounts for a third of the print run, tells you much about the curious economics of the publishing industry. Defoe is close to earning out his advance, after which he will begin to receive royalties, and many more copies may yet be sold. But thousands could be returned and pulped, with the book still potentially being considered a significant success. The truth is that conglomerate publishing works by relying on a very few mega-sellers to subsidise and cushion risk-taking elsewhere: In the US, the Da Vinci Code and The Pirates are, in fact, stablemates at Random House, which is owned by the Bertelsmann media empire. This does not stop publishers from talking up the economic precipice on which they claim perpetually to be poised.

For Defoe, who never really meant to become an author anyway, the real kick comes from seeing individual people reading or buying his book. When he finally visited New York this year to meet Asher, he saw someone reading it on the subway. And the other day he was in Books Etc in Shepherds Bush, west London, "when this really lovely girl came in and actually asked the guy behind the counter: 'Do you have The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists?'" Defoe decided not to say anything. "It would have been a bit creepy to tap her on the shoulder and say 'Actually, I'm the author.'" Instead, he left it to the sales assistant to deliver the disappointing news that they had sold out - and to deliver, at the same time, a verdict on Defoe's work that might have offended a more precious author. "We did have it," the assistant said. "It had a really good cover.'

· To order a copy of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon Defoe for £7.99 (inc UK p&p) call 0870 836 0875 or visit theguardian.com/bookshop.
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