Publish and be damned busy

Dispatches from a midlist writer misfiring in the gig economy

So many publishers, so little time. A friend in publishing suggested attending the London Book Fair at Olympia. It’s aimed mainly at publishers and agents, but for an author she thought it might be useful to get an idea of smaller publishers to pitch to. It’s not cheap at £74.40 for a day pass, but I decided to give it a go.

“Don’t let them see you!” is my wife’s not entirely helpful advice as I head off to Olympia, though I’m hoping that rocking the J R Hartley look might convince someone I’m the next big thing.

It’s lanyard city in W14 and my “Pete May Author” moniker makes me feel pleasingly important. Sartorially the crowd is a mix of shoulder bags, techie Gen Z types, casual jackets, goatee beards, willowy posh agents, well-dressed Europeans and English graduates in black tights and DMs.

The first thing that strikes you is the sheer scale of the endless publishers setting out their stalls. It is rather like parents’ evening at secondary school, as the big publishers like Penguin, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have lots of tables with numbers on where industry types patiently wait for their designated appointment. You half expect to hear that young Jo Rowling is doing well and always hands in her homework in on time.

It’s an international affair, and there are stalls representing Italy, Turkey, Germany, and Saudi Arabia plus Welsh and Scottish publishers. It’s striking how little is in my main field of quirky memoir. There are lots of publishers specialising in children’s books, academia, science, fantasy, cooking, wellness and crime. While I never knew that the hockey romance Pucking Around was a big thing on TikTok.

On the first floor is the International Rights Centre, a Kafkaesque hall full of hundreds of desks with agents sitting down at each one busy negotiating international rights. I’ve never seen so many agents in one room and am tempted to shout, “Sorry, it’s not quite right for us!”.

The LBF, as the aficionados call it, is not the place to pitch ideas. The staff on the Profile Books stall are mainly marketing people and can’t tell me anything about the submission process. But the cluster of stalls under the Independent Publishers Group umbrella is a useful set of indie names, Allison & Busby, Pitch, Pluto Press, Bedford Square, Heartwood, John Beaufoy, the Right Book Press and many more. You can can also pick up free catalogues from the stalls which is a good way of gauging what is selling.

Up on the balcony there is Author HQ where a panel discuss, “Beyond the Love Story: Sharing the Future of Romance in Publishing.” Self-publishing also gets a plug, with a panel on self-publishing on Audible and stalls from KDP, Lulu and Troubador.

Everyone seems to know each other, but even this bottom-list author spots a few friends. There’s ex-Random House Spurs-supporting luminary Mark, who is off to an important meeting after our chat. At lunchtime I get 15 minutes with top-selling children’s author Mary Auld, who is off to an important meeting at 2.30 and later in the day bump into Caroline who publicised my book The Lad Done Bad at Penguin and later outed me as a hybrid writer in ALCS News. She’s off to an important glass of wine with friends.

What the London Book Fair teaches you is that it’s a massive industry and that us writers are just a small cog in a big machine. Still, with all those rights being sold it would be nice for writers to get more than the £7k average detailed by the ALCS’s latest survey.

It’s been an interesting exercise. The day ends with a useful conversation about sports books with someone from Mirror Books, meeting a man who prevents online piracy of e-books and being collared for a survey by a student from the University of Innsbruck. When I make it back to West Kensington tube I’ve completed 21,000 steps. Publishing certainly keeps you fit.

Pete May’s most recent book is Massive: The Miracle of Prague, published by Biteback. He is also the author of the memoir What Are Words Worth?