Lies, damned lies and publishers' advances

Without a Unique Selling Point - looks, celebrity, heartwarming disability - the only way to get publicity is through the money paid

The author Magnus Mills has done a brave and unusual thing. He has told the truth about how much money he was paid as an advance for his first book, The Restraint of Beasts. It was apparently £10,000, which is rather less than the figure widely reported at the time – a million in one newspaper, £1.1m in another. Mills was a bus-driver and, in a society where only a certain class of person is expected to write serious fiction, journalists sniffed a story in his literary debut. They staked out the bus-station where he worked, spoke to his fellow-drivers, rang the publishers and... well, somehow or other, the idea of the bus-driver's million-pound novel became the accepted newspaper truth.

In response, the author and his agent mentioned the correct figure, but it was too late. The publishers brought forward the date of publication – "After all, there was little to be gained from a publicity scoop if there were no books to sell," as Mills puts it – and the book was launched on a tide of advance publicity.

Soon the money paid, whether it was £10,000 or a hundred times that amount, became irrelevant: the book was a great success and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In fact, Mills says, he has, in six years as a writer, during which he has published four novels, two short story collections and some journalism, earned under £250,000, an average of around £40,000 a year.

The unusual aspect of this story is that the truth behind the hype and excitement has been told at all. In every other way, it is an everyday story of a book-publishing industry peopled by nice, ambitious, middle-class folk who work on a system of willed, fraudulent optimism. This, in a less amiable industry, would be described as lying. In many ways, allowing a few myths to take root in the public consciousness would appear to be a harmless way to drum up business. Stories about how much a new author is being paid, for example, tends to involve a conspiracy of vested interests, all of whom stand to gain from bending the truth.

Here is how it works. The lodestar of publishing a successful book is publicity – that is, ideally, coverage that spills over from the books and arts sections of newspapers into the news and features pages. Unless a new author has what marketing people call a Unique Selling Point – class, age, looks, celebrity, some kind of heart-warming disability – almost the only way to gain public awareness is by publicising the amount of money that has been paid for the book.

This ties in neatly with the interests of the press. The tale of a rags-to-riches writer is a favourite among journalists, perhaps because many of them share the fantasy themselves. The process which follows is not exactly a lie but, more precisely, involves publishers remaining silent while a promotionally useful myth becomes established as the truth.

The result is that the newspapers get an appropriately upbeat story and the publishers get their pre-publication publicity. Almost always (and in this Magnus Mills has been an honourable exception) the bewildered, gladdened author and his connections stand aside as the circus takes over.

Some would say that none of this matters – that, apart from the fact that a few poor saps are gulled into thinking that there's easy money to be made out of writing, little harm is done. But that is to forget the one contributor the business of writing, publishing and bookselling whose interests are so often ignored: the reader. Often inventions or exaggerations about the amount a new author is being paid, and how successful they are, are peddled with the sole intention of selling a book that might otherwise have not been noticed.

There is nothing particularly unusual about this. Moral compromise and the quiet massaging of fact are as intrinsic to book publishing as they are to advertising, journalism or politics. Pre-publication puffs are frequently extracted from established authors who are represented by the same agent as the newcomer, or published by the same imprint, and who are pleased to co-operate.

More vulgarly, there is the trick of review-tampering. It was not so long ago when a leading publisher took a critic's verdict on a book, "Only a fool would rush out and buy this book" and reproduced it in the blurb of the paperback in a slightly edited form: "Rush out and buy this book". In the bookshops, the new titles presented most ardently are not the best or most readable, as is often implied, but those for which the bookselling chain has been paid most to promote.

Maybe this is all part of the market-led media merry-go-round – the world slides along on various mild, collusive forms of corruption – but the next time you buy a new book which fails to live up to its advance publicity, it might be worth bearing in mind that quite often the book business does not just sell fiction. It lives by it, too.

terblacker@aol.com