By the end of the 1980s, particularly after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia, the commercial aspect of writing began to take up more of my time. If I wanted to have some idea of the financial possibilities of my profession, I had to learn fast about the nature of the business I was involved in. If I wanted to be an ‘artist’ I had to be practical.
Now, at least a third of my writing life is taken up with phone calls, letters, faxes, emails, business arrangements, interviews, readings, signings, travelling, seeing agents, accountants, students. In other words, it’s like running a small business. All the working writers I know constantly have to make decisions about the proportion of actual writing to publicity they will do. The creative part soon becomes as hard to protect as it would be for someone trying to write while doing another job.
The modernist writers I admired when growing up — Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Beckett, Burroughs, Genet — didn’t expect to trade in the marketplace. They didn’t work on TV series or do adaptations on the side; they didn’t consider writing for Hollywood. They were artists and individualists, to say the least; they had integrity. Commerce was corruption. The second-rate writers made a living at it; the artists didn’t care. Graham Greene seemed an exception: he wrote good movies and novels that sold. Otherwise, the world of the nineteenth-century novel — writer and large public in contact; writer to the side of, but part of the ruling class — didn’t exist for serious writers. Storytelling in its crudest sense, as entertainment, as escape, had been taken over by the cinema, and then by television.
Yet Burroughs, Beckett and Genet did begin to sell, in the 1960s and 1970s, as did Sartre, Camus and Grass; when I was at university writers like Borges and Márquez were in most serious students’ pockets. Publishers like Picador made hip books fashionable and sold them to the same people who would buy the Doors and Dylan. The expected ‘break’ between artist and mass audience never occurred. Just as in the cinema there are usually a couple of ‘arthouse’ hits a year, so it is with literary novelists, some of whom ‘cross over’.
The sort of writer you can be is partly determined by the market and whether you want to sell books or not. If you want to make a living by writing, the kind of work you will produce might be different to that which you’d do if you had another job. Your relation to your audience will be different. By the end of the 1980s the nature of the profession and the opportunities available within it had changed considerably. Book publishing, with the rise of massive media conglomerates, became more dynamic. There was more media, more places to promote books and more ‘profiles’ of writers.
The intensification of publishing coincided with the rise of better bookshops — mostly Waterstone’s, then, a bit later, Books etc. and Borders. Soon vast palaces of books were opening in London and other cities, where you could buy coffee and croissants, as well as CDs and magazines. These shops started to organise readings, where writers and their public could, at least, see one another. Each seemed curious about the other. The small independent bookshop — much idealised and often useful — could, at times, drive you mad. These shops were usually small and the selection narrow. In places like Waterstone’s — if the past sometimes seems to have been expunged and you can only get the latest books — you can instantly get a good idea of what is in print.
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I became aware of these imminent changes when a well-known American agent came to the apartment in which I was staying in New York. It must have been in the late 1980s, before I’d published The Buddha of Suburbia, and when, I imagine, I was still attending film festivals and conferences on the back of My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, which I did for months, travelling the world for the first time.
This thin, intense, black-suited man brought with him a calculator with a paper roll in it, which I doubt he still has. He sat down, set the machine up, and asked me what I intended to write in the next few years. As I reeled off the list of essays, stories, novels and travel pieces I’d been mulling over for years — adding a few extra, just for luck — he punched in figures. Finally, he came up with a figure so astronomical, with so many noughts on the end, that I couldn’t believe my efforts could be worth so much.
Probably, going with him, I’d have made more money than I did eventually make. But it was a high-risk game. I might have moved publishers several times in the process, chasing the dollar, and been less well published as a result. I wouldn’t have had such a productively quiet life. It might have been different if he hadn’t reminded me so much of the bullying, loud-mouthed, suburban wide-boys I’d grown up with, selling socks and watches from suitcases on a pub floor.
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Every celebrity these days, in whatever field, aspires to the condition of rock stars. Being ‘good’ at publicity might be as important for a writer as it is for a performer. But if writers are marketed in this way, their careers are going to rise and fall rapidly, too, and the pressure on them will increase. Recently a bookshop manager told me that the writers of the generation preceding mine, the writers I once wanted to be like, hardly sold now even as their reputations and advances increased. They had written neither literary classics nor popular novels. There were younger, more attractive, enviable and relevant writers out there.
There might be more opportunities to sell books, but you will have to work harder to get your work before the public, which includes giving interviews. As a kid I’d have read any interview with almost any writer to get an idea of how it’s done, to find inspiration, and to increase my hunger and confidence. For me, writers have always had status as semi-sages. Where else do you go for insight, if not wisdom? Certainly not to politicians; and priests will give you only religious propaganda or morality. Perhaps you’d go to a therapist but there you’re really only going to find out what you think. Writers at least think seriously about the world in all its aspects — emotional and political — and don’t usually have a programme. They think for a living about the lives of men and women in all their aspects.
The writer who disappears behind his work or seems to dissolve into it, is almost impossible in the modern marketplace. The artist might want to discuss his work, but the journalist wants to know about the artist’s life. The artist has attempted to capture some kind of complexity while the media caricatures and empties people out. The writer is stripped bare; no mystery can remain, unless he turns himself into a grotesque enigma like Pynchon or Salinger and will, therefore, be pursued and caricatured even more.
What can an interview do? There’s usually a photograph and the name of the book or film you’re promoting. This might be sufficient to get the work to an audience, to let them know it’s there. You might also be invited to explain how you came to make the piece. Although some writers hate this — they’re superstitious about how they operate; or, like conjurors, don’t want others to see the banal workings of created wonders — it isn’t uninteresting to talk about your work, particularly if you’ve just finished something. That is when you do want, maybe in exchange with a journalist, to get some idea of what has been achieved. You don’t really know what sort of book it is you’ve written until someone else has read it. If you cook a meal you want people to eat it and tell you they liked it. Yet talking about a book after you’ve written it, when it’s published, bears little relation to what you thought you were doing when you were writing it. The story of the book told in interviews becomes another made-up story.
Of course, as you promote a book or film in many countries, the questions are always similar and it is tempting to give the same replies. (This is odd and frustrating for an artist: how their work only stimulates certain kinds of questions.) It’s exhausting, too, to talk to someone who cannot talk about themselves. You begin to hear your own voice droning on. It can be helpful to think of the questions as Zen paradoxes. Each time, if you empty your mind, you might hear yourself say something different, particularly if you try to think about what is really being asked.