How to pick a Man Booker novel
Man Booker’s youngest publishing house on their extraordinary first year in publishing
It was only last December that I was busy marking mock GCSE and A level papers, fitting my part-time English teaching around caring for my three year old daughter and one year old son, while working every spare hour to help establish a new independent publishing house, Myrmidon Books. Nine months on, my teaching career squeezed out of the picture, my children as lively and entertaining as ever, Myrmidon is the youngest publishing house ever to appear on the Man Booker longlist. Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain was just the third book we published.
Neither I nor Edward Handyside, Myrmidon’s Publishing Director, has a background in publishing. Ed’s background is manufacturing consultancy but he has a long standing love of books. Myrmidon was formed by combining Ed’s passion and business knowledge with my English teacher’s love of literature, language and the red pen. We’ve learnt a lot in the year since we published our first title, Ian Brotherhood’s Bulletproof Suzy, last August, and we know there’s plenty more to learn. We’re looking forward to learning it.
Myrmidon’s first year has been exciting, rewarding and frustrating. The sources of the excitement and reward are, no doubt, obvious: opening the post each morning to discover new manuscripts waiting to be read; to-ing and fro-ing with authors throughout the editing process; commissioning great designs for jackets; seeing the finished books on shop shelves; reading great reviews from readers and critics. The frustrations have often stemmed from the difficulties faced by a new independent publishing house trying to get books read by ‘the people that matter’. Early on I actually wondered whether the words ‘new independent publishing house’ spoken over the phone in a Northern accent sounded like ‘photocopier and stapler in a garden shed.’ Once people have actually seen and read our books, however, responses have been very positive and so, happily, as our reputation is growing our frustrations are becoming less acute.
Last October Myrmidon had a stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but the fair was during term time so I couldn’t go. I’m really looking forward to being there this year. I’ve never even visited Germany before. I certainly enjoyed the experience of the London Book Fair in April. It was fascinating to meet others from all around the world and all areas of publishing and bookselling. The whole publishing experience is still so ‘shiny and new’ for me that I’m not surprised The Bookseller described me as ‘wide eyed’ at a recent meeting held for publishers on the Man Booker longlist. I’m still drinking it all in.
To have one of our titles on the Man Booker longlist is really such a thrill. For many years I’ve been a Booker aficionado: eagerly awaiting the longlist announcement, reading as many of the longlisted titles as I could fit in, reading the full shortlist then choosing my own winner. Last year, however, juggling two careers and two children, I only managed to read five of the shortlisted titles before the winner was announced. I hadn’t yet started The Inheritance of Loss. This year I’ll be pleased if I manage to find time to read five of the longlist. It seems ironic that as the Man Booker’s significance to my career has increased, my involvement in it has slipped away. Must do better! (Where’s my old red pen when I need it?)
Since the announcement of this year’s longlist I’ve been asked many times how we managed to pick a Man Booker novel. The answer, I think, is that Ed and I don’t have to please others. We are fully involved with each novel throughout the process from first reading the manuscript to getting it into print and into bookshops. This hands-on approach means we choose books we love rather than books which need to please a marketing department or belong to a popular genre. In response to one of our previous titles, Sebastian Beaumont’s Thirteen, the buyer for a major retailer told us, ‘I’m really enjoying Thirteen but the problem with it is I’m not sure how to categorise it, it’s not really similar to anything.’ In our view originality is interesting and appealing not problematic. And the beauty of the Man Booker Prize is that it rewards books on their literary merits rather than how straightforward their marketing campaigns are or how well they fit into current trends in book buying. When you take this into account I think it is entirely unsurprising to find independent publishing houses and ‘little known’ novels on the longlist.
As soon as we received the manuscript of Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain we knew we wanted to publish it. We knew it was a wonderful, beautifully written story. We knew it deserved an audience. And, although it had previously been offered around for two years and rejected by every major publishing house, here it is, published by Myrmidon and on the Man Booker longlist. Smug, us? Never!
