There was I happily droning, sorry, moaning, about the poor quality of submissions so far this month and lo and behold over the weekend we get three good ones in, as well as another one we’d seen previously and suggested the author rewrote parts of it.
All four, were not only submissions of a reasonable quality, but they also conformed to the revised, and some say draconian, submission guidelines, including the author’s ideas on marketing. I was really pleased to see that.
Maybe the message is actually getting out, you need to work on selling your book just as much, and possibly even more than the publisher is doing.
After all we can’t all be Jamie Oliver can we?
I was reading the paper (Ed – apparently he can read) this morning and I saw a list of the top celebrity chefs in the UK, ranked by how much they were worth. The aforementioned guru came top of the list with a fairly substantial pile, and a large portion of that pile was made from book sales.
Now, unlike ghost written celebrity autobiographies and kiss and tell books, at least these books have some kind of purpose that outlives the first few days after Xmas. Nevertheless over ONE HUNDRED MILLION POUNDS STERLING of book sales in this country is a heck of a lot of cook books by this one guy alone.
Maybe we took the wrong turning, and we should be concentrating on the non-fiction market rather than publishing, mainly, fiction.
There again, maybe it’s sour grapes he didn’t come to use first. Wink. Sob!
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