Inside Book Publishing, 4th ed.
Giles Clark & Angus Phillips
Published in the UK by Routledge.
ISBN 978-0415441575

If you’re a writer, it may seem that mastering your craft is more than enough work, but it’s worth learning what you can about the industry as well. Whatever else it may mean to you, finding a publisher and getting your book into print is primarily a business activity, and as with any other business, the more you know before you get involved, the better your position will be.

Inside Book Publishing, by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips, is an excellent introduction to the subject, managing to be both comprehensive and concise. While its primary audience is academic (it’s used on several publishing courses, including at Oxford Brookes where Phillips teaches), it actually has a much broader appeal. Chapters explaining marketing, distribution and the allocation of rights are worth reading for budding authors and publishers alike, and a detailed breakdown of the costs of publishing a book will help new writers to understand why they’re not going to be able to retire from sales of their first novel. Each chapter concludes with a ‘further reading’ list, making this a perfect starting point for deeper research into whichever topics are most relevant to you.

There are shelves of books available on the subject of publishing (and in particular self-publishing), but I think it’s worth reading something that takes a serious-minded, academic approach to the core of the subject, and this book fills that role perfectly.

The latest edition was printed this summer, and is backed up by a respectable website, also called Inside Book Publishing. The site includes a blog, which has an interesting update on the potential effect of the recession on British publishers.

The Minutes of the Lazarus Club is a story of murder and espionage in industrial nineteenth-century London, the kind of thing that some people call a “gaslight romance”. The central character, George Phillips, is a doctor at St Thomas’s hospital, but the novel’s being sold on a supporting cast that includes Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Florence Nightingale, and even Charles Darwin. Tony Pollard is a well-regarded historian and archaeologist, but how well does he fare when he brings the historical elements into a work of fiction?

A real danger for historians and other academics when they try writing fiction is the tendency to overload the narrative with facts and trivia. The story forgotten, they launch into a technical description of an object or a brief treatise on some aspect of the period, making the reader feel as though they’ve fallen through a hole in the story and landed on somebody’s lecture notes. This is a pitfall that Pollard largely avoids, though: after some early wobbles (the early chapters set in the hospital have some very informative dialogue in them), he does a good job of keeping things relevant to the story, and the historical information serves to colour the goings-on, rather than distract from them. (Keep reading …)