Picked up via a blogger called Tim Worstall; a frustrated author submitted copies of the first three chapters of Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Jayne Eyre which I am informed are amongst the crown jewels of literature to 18 different publishers. Can’t stand Jane Austen and that genre myself; hated it at A-level, and still find it turgid and unwieldy even now, but chacun a son goût. The irony is that only one of the publishers recognised it.
This simply reinforces my long-held view that you have to be either an insider or extremely lucky to even get a book read by publishers. For an industry that should be crying out for new talent, this hardly seems the way to go about finding it. You don’t find Radium unless you do the hard work of processing a lot of pitchblende.
Mind you, this piece in the Telegraph made me smile. A book signing by Alastair Campbell disrupted? Tsk, tsk. Well done that man.
