| (1) It is called in the trade, as Andrew Marr revealed on these pages last week, “spoilt”. | ||
| Once autographed by its author, a copy of a new book cannot be remaindered; it might | ||
| sit for months on the shelves untouched by paying customers, but it still counts as sold. | ||
| (2) This is useful information for budding writers, which I was first tipped off about by the | ||
| 5 | gangster Frankie Fraser. Frankie was at the launch party of a book I’d written (I’m not | |
| sure why he was there, but nobody on the door was going to stop this gatecrasher). He | ||
| took me by the elbow and whispered conspiratorially: “Let me give you a word of advice, | ||
| son, author to author: whenever you pass a bookshop, go in and sign copies of your | ||
| book. That way, even if you never sell a bean, the bastards have still got to pay you.” | ||
| 10 | (3) I thought of this when I heard a caller to BBC Radio 5 last week ringing in to say that | |
| he had just gone out and bought 15 signed copies of a new hardback the day it arrived | ||
| in his bookshop. Not to read them; no, these were to remain pristine in his attic. They | ||
| were, he said, investments. | ||
| (4) The book that the caller reckoned was worth this extravagant punt is called Wolf | ||
| 15 | Brother by Michelle Paver. This is not an author who is likely to trouble judges of the | |
| Booker Prize. Nor will her work feature in the literary pages of the Sunday newspapers. | ||
| The only context in which most of us will have heard of her before is when her name is | ||
| appended to the words “record advance”. | ||
| (5) An unprecedented £2.8 million she received from Orion to snaffle up the rights to a | ||
| 20 | five-book series called Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a sum so vast it is usually | |
| associated in publishing terms only with the ghosted life stories of Premiership | ||
| footballers. Wolf Brother is the first instalment in pay-back time. | ||
| (6) You will find Wolf Brother in the children’s section, but its intended audience is much | ||
| wider. As its rather sophisticated dust jacket suggests, this is the sort of book that could | ||
| 25 | discreetly be read on the train by adults on their way to work. On the inside cover is a | |
| hand-drawn map of the journey undertaken by Torak, the youthful hero, a boy growing | ||
| up in the world of prehistory, as he makes his way across the Deep Forest and the Ice | ||
| River past the Mountain of the World Spirit. | ||
| (7) But the territory that the book is aiming to traverse is more familiar: turn left at | ||
| 30 | Tolkien Peaks, walk for several days across the Pullman Plains, cross the Rowling | |
| Foothills and there you will find the Money Well, with its inexhaustible torrents of cash. | ||
| (8) Not much seems to enrage the traditionalist critic more than the concept of the | ||
| “kidult” book. Why should adults be reading the wearisome adventures of Rowling’s | ||
| Harry Potter, the pompous sword and sorcery of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or the | ||
| 35 | GCSE philosophising of Philip Pullman, when they could be engaging with Dickens, | |
| Trollope or Austen? Or even Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, modern fiction-spinners who | ||
| at least deal with the world of grown-ups? Though in Amis’s case perhaps grown-up is | ||
| pushing it. | ||
| Publishers, on the other hand, love the concept of the kidult book. This is sales terrain | ||
| 40 | without discernible boundaries, where young and old club together, encourage each | |
| other, producing a market in which there is no age limit. And personally I have nothing | ||
| against J K Rowling. For me, anyone who makes reading a competitive sport among 10- | ||
| year-olds deserves canonisation. No matter how derivative and turgid their prose. | ||
| (9) The triumph of Philip Pullman and J K Rowling, though, is that they found their own | ||
| 45 | market against all precedent. In order to play catch-up, to seize some of the ground | |
| opened up by those pioneers, publishers are obliged to join the race at a much pricier | ||
| entry point. | ||
| (10) The cost began, in the case of Michelle Paver, with the advance. That in itself | ||
| became a story. Then with the money came the mystique: we were told that, like J K, | ||
| 50 | she had her tales mapped out in her head years ago; she had known for two decades | |
| what would appear on her final page. The hype was all in place before a book hit the | ||
| stores, so much so that optimists were punting on first editions becoming collectors’ | ||
| items. | ||
| (11) But the real gamblers here are the publishers, who are playing with stakes entirely | ||
| 55 | provided by other authors. If this book fails, there will be no money for future projects. If | |
| it succeeds - and it is, to be fair, a rollicking, easy read - it will only reinforce the growing | ||
| habit of putting resources solely behind those whose work fits into pre-conceived | ||
| marketing boxes. | ||
| (12) It is too early to tell which direction Wolf Brother will go. But when I went into my | ||
| 60 | bookshop to pick up a copy, the pile of unsold items was sky high. | |
| (13) What’s more, every single one of them was signed by the author. |