How an Author gets his Kickers in a Twist

I have been rather off blogging since November, for which I apologise. I have been so very tied up – completing and editing my next novel, mainly.

It happened like this: in my desperate hunt for a publisher brave enough to take on my beloved ‘Ragazzo’, finally I had a bite. Which turned into an actual offer. More anon, closer to publication date.

Ragazzo has proven very hard to place. In the old days Andre Deutsch, which published my first two novels would have been the obvious home for it. Innovative, experimental and brave, publishers of, for example Vollman, Updike, VS Naipaul, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer – they would at least have seriously considered it. But Deutsch has long ago been sold, asset-stripped and forgotten by all but lovers of classic literary fiction.

Nowadays if you’re a new author (or haven’t published for a while) not a celebrity, a pornographer, incredibly sexy or immensely lucky, you have no chance of landing a traditional publishing contract. As a result, many authors have gone down the self-publishing route or to the Pay-to-play publishers, sometimes disparagingly called the Vanity Press.

Now over 180,000 books p.a are published in the UK, many of them absolute tosh. To the extent that extremely good books vanish in a maelstrom, read only by family and friends and cluttering up the far reaches of the Amazon. The website and the river, probably.

There are also publishers who will share the costs with authors in so-called hybrid deals. And it was to the latter that I found myself grovelling. And it was one of these who said yes.

Back to the story: so, this hybrid company which seems to have high standards asked, ‘Do you have anything else we might like to have a look at?’

I delved, I dove into the huge number of manuscripts I have produced, half-produced, sketched out… and amongst the tosh and treasure, found the skeleton of a gay thriller I wrote around twenty years ago. Gosh, I thought. The central premise is not bad. The protagonist appealing. The plot rather believable. The ending poignant. When I told the Publisher about it, he was enthusiastic.

Why didn’t I complete it back in the 90’s? Well, to be honest I was working in a school under the looming shadow of Section 28 – the law prohibiting a teacher from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and was being extremely careful. This book could easily be seen as promoting homosexuality, though only by the stupid. Besides which, my involvement with Martial Arts meant I was often with extremely macho people some of whom, I thought, could be highly homophobic. So I shelved it.

I have since discovered that few of them have the slightest homophobic prejudices – and many of the variations of the sexual spectrum can be found on the Dojo floor, happily miming beating each-other up and ‘developing their characters’.

As to my sexuality? None of your business, unless you fancy me. In which case, get in touch – though I have to warn you, I now regard myself as an ‘ex-sexual’. In other words, sex is just too messy and too much like hard work these days.

So I hired an Editor, the excellent Joie Davidow, who had helped me edit Ragazzo. And now, after a great deal of hard work, the manuscript has gone to the Publisher. It will be published in a few weeks. More anon.

And Ragazzo? Shortly after accepting the offer for the gay thriller, Ragazzo had an offer. From a traditional publisher, new kids on the block. Innovative, daring, experimental. Possibly just right.

So with luck I may have two novels in bookshops and available online, after a drought of years and years.

Don’t give up if you have a brilliant book lying somewhere on a hard disk or even in a file you keep in the toilet for occasional browsing or editing. JK Rowling had over 60 rejections before getting a deal for Harry Potter. I only had 49.

More anon!