Publishing perils: why small isn’t always beautiful

Sorting through a cupboard beneath the stairs, I discovered that many spare copies of my older books had suffered seriously from damp and would have to be thrown out. A few are salvageable, but not many. Beneath these it looks as if old opera programmes and copies of the Wide World which was edited by my grandfather, Victor Pit-Kethley, will have to meet a similar fate. It is sad, but at least many other copies of my old books were read elsewhere and have probably been better preserved by others around the world.

It has a parallel with a publishing disaster I have suffered in the last year. It is time to analyse what went wrong and see if anything can be salvaged. The main component in this disaster is the overpricing of my book, Washing Amethysts in the Bidet. An expensive printer and a lot of illustrations lay at the heart of this. The text could have stood alone without all the images. I have just checked the prices it is being offered for on various Amazon sites. Currently it is £41.38 in the UK, my chief market, €56.33 in Europe and $36.11 in the US. This is a normal size paperback. It is not a coffee table book. And of course, almost nobody wants to buy at those prices. A friend in Tasmania who was keen to read it found out that it would have cost her about £70 including postage. When I signed the contract a few years ago most of the paperbacks produced by this firm were circa £10. I had no way of knowing this was going to happen. Perhaps pricing is an element that should be covered in literary contracts, but it isn’t.

Across my 45 years or so of writing, my experiences of publishing have been very varied. With the largest publishers there was always a high level of competence. You had regular royalty statements and you got answers to letters or emails. This is not always true of the independents.

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