I’ve got engrained optimism to the point of delusion, which makes me a happy fool, and with the commercial instincts of a fly.
The truth was forced home for a moment this week after I spent two days hauling together the accounts for Barbican Press’s last tax year. They are dire. The biggest loss stemmed from the use of a PR agency to broaden the press’s reach into North America, which brought us close to zero attention. An ongoing killer has been a return rate of over 80% from the US library distributor (libraries won’t buy books that haven’t been reviewed in the trade magazines) and Amazon (who send speculative stock to regional centers then return them in such a haphazard fashion they have to be destroyed). In the UK, Amazon orders according to demand and returns are minimal. All this has meant that while books sell we receive no income. Margins are pitiful on low print runs and money is absorbed in charges.
I’m still turning up to sales conferences and punting our upcoming titles as bestsellers, and everybody seems convinced, and I convince myself afresh. And we pitch the books with gusto. Check out our titles. Buy some. Make our day!
And I laughed at myself at Profile’s summer party. They are bringing out my new book My Head for a Tree next January, and my publisher Mark Ellingham put me together with his son Miles. I’d read with deep appreciation Miles’s feature article on whales for the Financial Times – it was informative, took you on a journey, and managed to be very personal without parading an ego. ‘Tell Miles about your book,’ Mark suggested, and so I looked for the pitch that might interest him.
It's about the Bishnoi, I say, bringing their story to the west in the way they asked me to do. Theirs is the one universal religion that has nature conservation as its core. The title My Head for a Tree comes from an episode in 1730 when 632 Bishnoi villagers in Rajasthan hugged on to trees to stop them being chopped down, and were all beheaded in the process. Their founding guru, Jambhoji, is an equivalent figure to Mohammed, Jesus, the Buddha, and while he is seen by many as an incarnation of the great Hindu god Vishnu he is viewed by his followers as the first environmental scientist.
Such were my sales points. Who can’t be fascinated and find a story in all that?
Errr, many. My true passions are often solo adventures. While England was losing the Euros final last night I grew bored, subdued the volume and went back to reading an obscure novel from 1954.
Back to the Profile summer party … Miles smiled politely. His father breezed past. ‘Have you told him about Salman Khan?’ he asked, and so I did.
Salman Khan is a huge Bollywood star, who was found near midnight in the deserts of Rajasthan next to two slain blackbucks (an endangered and spectacularly handsome antelope protected by law). For decades the Bishnoi hounded the actor through the courts till he was found guilty of killing the beasts and placed in prison for some days. The Bishnois are fierce. Though unarmed they take on armed poachers and are often killed. An utterly renegade Bishnoi bandit has vowed to deploy his gang members to kill Salman Khan and shots were recently blasted into the actor’s front door.
Miles’s smile became broad, his questioning excited. Bollywood megastar versus vigilante Bishnoi ecowarriors and a bandit issuing death threats from a cell block, now that was a story.
‘How about the religious angle?’ I say to my North American publishers. ‘Will you be selling into that market too?’
I think we’ll focus on the trees, they say. Knowing, I’m sure, that more people buy books about trees than about unknown religions.
Mark Ellingham was the publisher of the dynamically successful Rough Guide series. As well as his role at Profile, with his wife he also runs Sort Of books, a plucky independent that has bestsellers and won a recent Booker Prize. He’s an optimistic publisher like I am yet somehow combines it with commercial nous.
I’ve just been rewriting My Head for a Tree to engage with a legal vetting from lawyers in India. Salman Khan is appealing his guilty verdicts, the case I am writing about is still sub judice, so that chapter now bristles with citations. And remains thrilling. Honest. You’ll love it. Its plucky Bishnoi warrior heroes taking down a Bollywood megastar will utterly inspire you!
Your passion, persistence, and clarity of view about yourself, with humour, are in inspiration…..