Does Size Really Matter?

Posted on June 11, 2006 in Uncategorized

The November 2005 London Speaker Meeting gave much insight to those who have always wanted to know what it was like working for the ‘other side’. Our three speakers – Carole Blake from Blake Friedmann literary agency, Carole O’ Brian and Andrew Franklin from Profile Books – gave us the gossip on working for independent and conglomerate publishing firms.

Andrew was made redundant from his job as director of Penguin and is happily nurturing his new (and very small) company, Profile Books. However, he still languishes over the large office perks: the free gym membership, the healthcare, the pension plan and the long boozy lunches. As well as these luxuries, he also misses his first love, books. As a director he was given a box filled with the books Penguin had published each month, and would cram as many as possible into his bicycle basket, riding unsteadily home to devour them all. Our other speakers also reminisced about grazing the huge slush pile for one-off interesting reads (although they conceded that most books were written by middle-aged men indulging in their fantasies!)

Whilst Andrew found it awe-inspiring to be part of such a well-slicked machine, a huge publishing monster that would surge into action, swallow books and regurgitate bestsellers overnight, he felt like a cog in the machine. In a small publishing firm, the decadent perks and the prospect of decent pay are out the window, the choice of books is limited and the prospect of getting your hands on a bestseller is vastly reduced. However, you are part of every process that takes the author’s work from manuscript to a bound book on a bookseller’s shelf, and you deal with the mundane as well as the exciting; for instance every member of Profile gets to meet and know the authors.

Carole O’Brian, who has worked at such illustrious publishing houses as OUP, Hutchinson and HarperCollins, fundamentally agreed with Andrew. It is much more fulfilling to work to make a book a bestseller when it was bought for £3,000 rather than getting it on the bestseller list when it was bought for £250,000. The relationship with books (as well as with colleagues) seems more intimate and humane, as books from the (greatly reduced) slush pile are more valued, and they have to be carefully read with imagination and seen in terms of what could be (i.e. their potential), rather than what is.

Our third speaker, Carole Blake, gave us an agent’s perspective. She told us that money isn’t all-important, and that authors need a certain level of adoration, which can be more easily derived from a smaller company. Small companies also have to take more risks, as their resources are squeezed, which makes for a more exciting job and perhaps even more success. Let’s hope so!