Over the years, I have heard stories of authors who have demanded that their publicist go score drugs for them, had tantrums with booksellers or dressed down literary critics in crowded rooms. In this business, get a reputation for being difficult and you risk cutting short your career.Last year I told a well-known young author that I had enjoyed her last book (it had received some vicious reviews) “Well, bully for you,” she snapped The encounter left a very bad taste in my mouth Next day I told an author friend about it. Within days I had heard enough about this author’s gracelessness to fill a book. Suddenly her increasingly bad press and rivals’ mealy-mouthed attitudes towards her made sense.”There are a handful of authors who are notorious and whose sales have never amounted to the promise of their first book,” says one anonymous publisher “It isn’t a coincidence. You don’t want to push someone’s book when they are nasty.”But a little grace goes a long way.
Even the receptionists at Random House big up Nigella Lawson, thanks to the tasty treats she brings them when visiting the building Booksellers bend over backward for Maeve Binchy. After an extensive tour the Irish writer writes to each bookshop to thank them for their help.It is a lesson Jeffrey Archer finally seems to have learned. For years, trade tittle-tattle about Archer’s attitude was far from flattering, but that seems to have changed on his latest tour of Australia. The peer launched a charm offensive with booksellers and journalists that produced positive press and book sales.Years in publishing before she turned writer taught Kate Mosse that authors must recognise they are a part of a team.
“Publishers have to work really hard to sell your book in a very over-crowded market, and you should expect to work hard too,” she says. She worked harder publicising Labyrinth than she did for her previous novels, writing articles for newspapers, appearing on radio and being willing to turn up at the tiniest event It left no time to work on her next book. “I said to someone the other day that I haven’t really written anything for months, and they said, ‘What do you mean? You’ve been writing articles for the last six months to publicise the book.’”Her willingness to answer every journalist’s call and schlep around the country has paid huge dividends. It is why, despite an early set-back when publicity planned for Labyrinth’s July launch was pushed out of newspapers by the 7 July bombings, the hardback still went to number one.It also laid strong foundations for the book’s endorsement by Richard & Judy, and explains why it was the first of their choices to go straight to number one since Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea in 2004.The X Factor is not an arcane mystery; it is sheer professionalism and the willingness to get out there and, horror of horrors, be nice to people.
It is a lesson a few of Mosse’s peers should learn too.The London Book Fair seminar, ‘The X-Factor: promoting the unpromotable in a sea of celebrity titles’ takes place in the Orange Theatre, ExCel, E16 at 3.45pm on Mon 6 March See page 28 for more details about the LBF. Editing an anthology of poems about people recently, I remembered an earlier anthology I had made, aged 14, which first got me interested in writing poetry. My older sister had gained prestige by making one for my father the previous Christmas and I was keen to reap the same favour. The technical-sounding word, “anthology” bestowed authority on what was really just a notebook with poems copied into it. I got the book back like a piece of homework when my father died. Opening it again after so long, I marvelled at the handwriting and taste striving so hard to mimic his own. The effort of neatness over 100 pages was painful to behold, but I looked with envy and nostalgia at the excited “Turn quickly” I wrote at the bottom of a page on which I was copying out Laurie Lee’s “Town Owl”.
