Jonathan Pinnock - Writer of Stuff

Last week I was asked by Joe Melia (otherwise known as “Mr Bristol Short Story Prize”) if I’d like to contribute a piece to the BSSP site about how Mrs Darcy came into being. Before I go on, I must say that one of the things I really love about the BSSP is the way they keep in touch with everyone who’s ever made it onto their shortlist – it makes it so much more than just another competition. Here’s where you can enter this year’s competition, by the way – I strongly recommend having a go.

Anyway, I never turn down the opportunity for a bit of publicity. However, there was a small problem. At the time when I got Joe’s e-mail, the Mrs Darcy website was in something of a period of transition between its old state as the blog used for serialising the book and its putative new promotional form. Which meant that before I could respond to him I really had to lick the website into shape, and this in turn meant that I had to learn some CSS skills very quickly indeed. (I’d just like to quickly say sorry to my family for my unpleasant demeanour over the last few days, by the way. You have no idea.)

But after much tearing of hair and thumping of monitors, here’s Mrs Darcy’s new website. There are still a few gaps, but it’s taking shape.

And here’s that BSSP piece. There really is no standard path to publication, you know. Everyone’s story is completely different. Which is what makes it exciting, is it not?

What is the point of a publisher? After all, anyone these days can, without much effort, put together a reasonably presentable manuscript in PDF form and upload it to the likes of Lulu or CreateSpace and – bingo! – they’ve published a book. Not only have they ensure that their cut of royalties is a much higher percentage than if they’d gone via a traditional publisher, but they’ve retained absolute control of the process. Sure, self-published books will struggle to find their way into bricks and mortar bookstores, but there are plenty available on Amazon (and hang on, isn’t CreateSpace an Amazon venture anyway?) And we haven’t even begun to talk about e-publishing yet …

So why bother with a publisher at all?

There are good arguments to be made from the point of view of marketing budgets and distribution muscle (although these obviously apply less to smaller outfits than the big boys) but to me the key factor is credibility. Even if your book is, frankly, of a rather silly nature, you still want it to be taken seriously (well, I do anyway). Generally speaking, there are two things that usually militate against the credibility of a self-published book: an awful cover and lousy editing.

It’s true that not all books put out by publishers have fantastic covers (here’s a truly appalling story about When Covers Go Bad), but one of the things that made me so excited about being picked up by a subsidiary of Salt is that Chris Hamilton-Emery’s covers are (or certainly ought to be) legendary – and he’s certainly come up with the goods for Mrs D. So that’s one win already in the bag. But when I signed my contract, I still wasn’t entirely sure what would come out of the editing process. Sure, the feedback I’d had on the first three chapters that I’d submitted indicated that Proxima completely understood what kind of a book it was, but I had no idea how this would work out in practice.

Before continuing, I’d like to digress first to my previous career as an author of software books. The way that my publishers, Wrox, worked was that I’d send them my copy for each chapter in turn and they’d then send it off to up to a dozen of their tame experts, all over the globe. These experts would then plaster loads of comments over the text and I would then have to sift through this lot and re-write. In the case of the first couple of chapters of “Professional DCOM Application Development”, this amounted to 200-300 individual things that needed fixing per chapter. It got better in later chapters, partly because I’d got better by then, but mainly because the subjects were sufficiently arcane as to mean there were fewer experts around. But it was awful. The process came close to costing me both my health and my marriage.

Relatively speaking, this time around it’s been a breeze. My editor at Proxima, Steve Haynes, aided and abetted by his wife, Jane Holland (who runs Salt’s Embrace imprint and has just signed a rather impressive publishing deal with Transworld in her own right) has essentially done most of the edits himself, leaving me simply to nod or to object. The attention to detail has been incredibly impressive and I was initially quite taken aback by the sheer number of tweaks. But the result is that the whole thing flows much better than it ever did and all my writing tics have been excised.

Ah, those tics. My characteristic tic used to be the word “eventually”. Once that had been pointed out to me, I managed to get rid of it. Eventually. Although I do have to be on my guard. However, this time around, it was mainly eye-rolling and nose-tapping. I was in fits as I read through the edit and found yet another one that had been removed. It never occurred to me at all when I was writing the thing.

Of course, there are some more fundamental re-writes that have needed to be done, and these have resulted in some (entirely amicable) exchanges of views. One scene was completely re-written between the initial submission and the full, another before the final edit and there’s one more that I’m going to have to do this week. I’m going to put the originals up on the “Mrs Darcy” website after publication, incidentally, in a special “deleted scenes” area, just for interest. But we’re getting very close to a final edit now and with any luck we should be done by the end of the coming week.