My upcoming nonfiction book started revving into production this week. Tuesday night saw a celebration drink with my agent and the book’s publisher, raising glasses in relief that the book has come good. The next morning My Head for a Tree was presented to the team at its UK press, Profile.
Decisions were made. Release date (January), format (hardback B-format), and retail price. £14.99.
This book is the same length as my first novel, published in hardback in 1992. It’s price? £14.99.
Account for inflation over those thirty-two years, and the Bank of England’s website informs me the cost of the same book now should be over £36. (And that’s ignoring the fact that nonfiction books are generally more expensive than fiction.)
How come? You could guess that technological advances have reduced costs, but that would apply to cinema as well. A UK cinema ticket in 1992 would have been around £3 and has tracked inflation since.
I suspect this new book will be more expensive in the North American market, where Barbican Press’s sales team PGW keeps prodding publishers to raise prices. I’ll let you know. But truth is (well my truth at least – add yours into Comments!) that we put too little value on literature.
While book prices have stayed static over the decades, advances paid to non-celebrity authors have declined, and retailer discounts have multiplied. Back in 1992 a Net Book Agreement was in place in the UK, which prevented retail discounting. The agreement was already wobbly and scrapped in 1997. Pay the full £14.99 on my upcoming underpriced book and you’ll likely see it as a charitable donation to your local bookstore.
Get sales volume, print in high multiples of thousands, and you bring production costs down to a level where books make a profit. Publish niche, hopeful, literary titles with their low sales expectations and so meagre print runs and the only sensible thing is to increase the price, otherwise as a business you’re doomed, each copy sold at a loss. Independent publishing could do with some niche marketing, in the way a Michelin ranking encourages people to pay more for a restaurant dish than a Big Mac, so readers recognize they’re acquiring a boutique product.
Meanwhile, a reminder of what Art is about. Happening to be in London, I kept hitting the return key on the Almeida theatre’s website looking for a ticket for their sold-out King Lear. I struck gold and went to their Saturday matinée.
Sometimes a play inverts you, all that is inside and hidden away gets exposed. My previous peak playgoing experience in this regard was Peter Brook’s Mahabaratha at Glasgow’s Tramway back in 1988. It was a through-the-night nine-hour marathon, and by the end of its first section I found a place on the complex’s concrete floor to sit, quivering. It’s one of those before and after moments, when you know your life has been changed.
With hours left of that performance I was drained. I sat numb through the remaining spectacle. This King Lear was different. I sat on steps on the street in the interval, recovering. Afterwards I was even more wrecked, a grown man weeping. Lines that are over-familiar, ‘Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport’, rocked me with shock. Lear’s howls as he carries the body of Cordelia can be merely theatrical – Danny Sapani’s Lear carrying his daughter’s body onto the stage held the angriest grief.
Why was it so good? Yaël Farber brought African energy and colour and a fierce rhythm to her direction. Lear’s family were black, other characters white, but it was played without any racial tension, just stark humanity all round. Characters’ readiness to lie and dissemble and cheat to get whatever they wanted was astounding. Edgar (played by Matthew Tennyson), the son cast out of privilege to take refuge on a storm-ridden heath, pretending madness to save being killed, caring for the father who wronged him, was a model of what humans can do right, losing everything but their own morality.
I presume the weeping and shaking effect on me was cathartic, and it’s hard to articulate that. The release of long buried family trauma? Probably. King Lear certainly probes family dynamics. But this production also turned this great play into utterly relevant artistic expression: it spoke to the horrors of Hamas attacks on Israelis and Israel’s attacks on Gaza; of the ongoing savagery of wars in Ukraine and Sudan; of the plight of refugees and those that fear them; of the political lies that goad people to vote for ugly and misconceived self-interest; of planetary changes sweeping away much that we should hold precious. We feel the horrors of all these things but somehow sublimate them, keep them distant so we can get on with our lives. The three and a half hours of this production stripped us bare and put us in the centre of all these conflicts. Shakespeare makes it clear that all the horrors, ultimately, come down to human choice.
The play has good characters; Edgar, Cordelia, Kent, the Fool. We can recognize that goodness and choose to be like them, knowing it’s back-breakingly tough and may involve a fight. Or we can not do that. That way we lose everything that we truly treasure.
What’s the good of catharsis? A jolly good cry and then carry on?
For me, this King Lear is about the primacy of art. It can jolt us out of societal lies and back to reality. It can remind us of what to treasure.
That’s what I can do, this Lear tells me, in my remaining passage of life in these urgent times. Publish books by others and myself that jolt us back toward our better selves, and be less mindful of comfort and more alert to engagement.
You’ve jolted me back into paying attention to art as I head into the day, and therefore paying attention to life, thank you.
And realising I’m underpaying for books!