DIARY OF A WORST SELLING AUTHOR
A Very Nice Rejection Letter Chris Paling Constable £16.99 ★★★★★
Everyone has a book in them, it is said, and, in the vast majority of cases, that’s exactly where it should stay.
Your memoir about life in the dog-eatdog world of IT support? Your thriller about a woman on the top deck of the Number 19 who sees something awful through the upstairs window of a two-up two-down? Don’t bother. Even if they are any good, they’ll struggle to make much impact among the thousands of books published every single week in the UK.
Unless you happen to be J.K. Rowling or James Patterson, writing is unlikely to make you rich. Indeed, it might actually impoverish you.
At the beginning of this entertaining diary of his life in writing, novelist Chris Paling tots up his earnings for the year so far: minus £300 – the deficit being due to a payment to his accountant for preparing accounts recording just how little he had earned in the previous year.
Paling actually is an accomplished author, the UK and Commonwealth’s 1,001st Most Important Novelist (Living), by his own estimation. He has nine titles to his name and earns respectable reviews. However he is, in publishing parlance, a ‘mid-list novelist… someone who showed early promise but failed to hit the sales or prize jackpot’. And, as he drily observes, there is no such thing as a low-list novelist.
It is his job as a radio producer that puts bread on the table. His writerly life seems little more than series of indignities and humiliations.
A statement from his publisher shows that, as a result of books being returned to the warehouse, he has sold minus 45. ‘I have therefore sold 45 fewer novels than an unpublished writer. No mean feat.’ He is invited to a meeting of his local book group to talk about one of his titles, and only two people there – both of whom he already knows – have ever heard of him.
The ideal is to write something for the screen. If a screenplay is picked up, the financial rewards can be great. At any one time, Paling has several scripts at various stages of development, and is forever having meetings with producers and ‘promising young directors’, although they are never actually filmed.
The bulk of this funny and revealing book consists of Paling’s account of his authorial ups and downs – OK, his downs – of 2007 and 2008. Then he’s admitted to hospital with a serious medical condition and his projects all wither away.
But things start to look up. He takes redundancy from his radio job and works at his local library. The resulting memoir, Reading Allowed, sells more than his last three novels combined.
A Very Nice Rejection Letter will do at least as well because everyone who is convinced they have a book in them should read it.