Les Misérables
We all feel like embittered orphans from time to time.
Last night I went to a book launch for an orphan book.
In the picture library world, grappling with abstracts of copyright and ownership, there has recently been much talk of ‘orphan works’ — images which cannot be readily traced to the original owner. This isn’t helped by social networking sites routinely stripping images of all metadata, but that’s not what I want to talk about on this blog, that’s a subject for the fotoLibra Pro Blog.
I want to talk about Orphan Books. By my definition, an Orphan Book is one that has been commissioned by an editor in a publishing house who has then left before the book has been published.
It has happened to five of my books.
1. Follies — A National Trust Guide: Robin Wright, Publishing Director of the National Trust, died. Then Liz Calder, Editor at Jonathan Cape, left to co-found Bloomsbury.
2. Architectural Follies in America: Buckley Jeppson, CEO of the Preservation Press, left when the company was acquired by John Wiley & Sons Inc.
3. Follies Grottoes & Garden Buildings: Sheila Murphy, Editorial Director of Aurum Press, quit the company before the book was published.
4. The Encyclopaedia of Fonts: Jane Lloyd-Ellis left Cassell a year before the book was published.
5. Follies — Fabulous, Fanciful & Frivolous Buildings: Margaret Willes, Publishing Director of the National Trust, retired. The book was published eight years later by the National Trust.
What this means is that there is no one within the publishers to root for the book. No one to stand up at a sales conference and say “This guy is pretty good. He writes like a dream, looks like a Greek god and has a 36DD bust” — all the attributes the modern publisher demands from its authors. Instead they probably pictured some fat old git slumped over his keyboard and relegated the title (and any attendant publicity) to the ‘Also published this year’ pile.
It’s not enough to be published. The publisher has to back his judgement, even the judgement of former staff, and promote the hell out of the book. Of course, we don’t always know the reason the former staff left, and their departure may have rankled. In which case the publisher should be honest enough to tell the PBA (poor bloody author) that he doesn’t want his crappy book any more and please keep the advance.
It doesn’t happen. The book goes through the due publishing process, minus any marketing, and is released into the community rather than being published. In the case of my Encyclopaedia of Fonts the publisher issued it on December 15th, so unopened parcels of it sat in the back corridors of the bookshops before being returned in January with all the other Christmas books that didn’t sell.
Penguin Books, now the world’s largest publisher, are publishing ‘The Wretched’, by Victor Hugo, perhaps more familar to you as Les Misérables, in a new translation by Christine Donougher. Now I haven’t read it yet (1,304 pages — give us a chance) but knowing Christine’s earlier work it will be stupendous. It will in all probability become the definitive English translation of the work.
And what is Penguin doing with it? The person who commissioned the translation left some time ago, and as a result the answer is what you might expect. Nothing. Christine has produced an Orphan Book.
What if these Very Large Publishers created an Author Liasion Director, someone not directly involved in any part of the publishing process, whose job it was to comfort and reassure all the authors and translators who feel they are being trampled underfoot? It wouldn’t cost a lot, and the goodwill generated would be incalculable.
Incidentally at the party last night I met the Art Critic of The Lancet. What a benign employment.
