Well, it seems like last night and this morning the entire literary community has been blogging away furiously about the Booker longlist. One of the reasons why this blog is late is that I’ve been trying to fight the temptation to do the same … I can’t necessarily comment on the specific books there as to be honest I haven’t even read the majority of them. All I can say about it is that I agree 100% with Jamie Byng of Canongate (see dovegreyreader’s blog for a comment on this – she does too) that it is quite inappropriate for a non-literary novel, no matter how well-written and enjoyable, to make it onto the Booker list. The Booker list is one of a very very small (and rapidly decreasing) number of prizes that are supposed to value literary excellence over all things (which could bring me to the subject of the judges they have and what makes them arbiters of literary excellence but that’s been done too, so I’ll shut up…) We don’t need another prize that seems to value a rollicking good read over anything innovative, original and ground-breaking. Take the Costa. I read Steph Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves to see what all the fuss was about, and although I don’t normally much like historical fiction I did enjoy that. It was well-written. All the things that a good plot-driven novel should be. Was it a prize-winning novel? No. Not to me, anyway. It was a conventional, albeit very fine, example of contemporary historical fiction. There was nothing startlingly original about it. Why did it win a prize? The idea that the Booker will go the same way strikes horror into my heart.
On another related issue … a number of our authors, not surprisingly, want their books to be put in for prizes. It isn’t ever as simple as that, of course: as a publisher I believe you have a responsibility to choose the right book for the right prize. But it’s not just a question of sticking a few books in the mail and hoping that fame and fortune for both author and publisher will ensue. Let’s take the Booker. If your book appears on the shortlist then you as a publisher have to contribute to the Booker organisers £5000 for marketing and promotion. If you win, you have to cough up another £5000. In my view this clearly discriminates against small presses. At Two Ravens, for example, we simply don’t have that kind of cash available. How could we, when we barely make a profit on the kind of literary fiction and poetry we do publish? So if one of our books did get shortlisted for the Booker (it hasn’t happened yet…) we’d be delving very deeply into very shallow pockets, and if we didn’t sell enough books to make that money back then we would, quite frankly, be bankrupt. So: prizes are a difficult business, in all kinds of ways. Like so many in the business, on the one hand we abhor them and on the other hand we covet them.
I think it’s called the human condition.
Sharon
