JANE MAYS TALK (29th September 2004)
Thank you Andrew for inviting us here today. I thought I'd call my bit of the discussion WHAT THE PAPERS WANT because it seems to me that authors and publishers - dare I say, even agents - don't always appreciate how different our medium is from yours. You've worked alone and hard - sometimes for many years - researching and writing your book. The subject is dear to you and you envisage your readers absorbed in the world you've created for them. Then one day, your agent or publisher calls to say that they've sold your serial serial rights to the Daily Beast for a considerable sum and, for the moment, this is a cause for general rejoicing.
Months later you open the paper and there is your beautiful book cut to shreds and pieced together like a jigsaw with all the most sensational aspects up at the top underneath a headline which has you reaching for the smelling salts and an only faintly appropriate film still with some scantily clad blonde draped over Paul Newman.
To help you understand what's going on I should explain why we buy so many books for serialisation. First, it's for exclusivity and second it's to project them in the way we know will work for us. We know our readers and we know how to present things to them. Your readers have made an informed choice, gone to a book shop and spent anything from £6.99 to £25. They intend to read your book. Our readers have parted with less than 50p and may only have bought the paper for the football results, to read their horoscope or see what's on tv. Most flick casually through the pages so we need to grab their attention by whatever means we can and that means striking 'read-me' headlines, strong-selling introductions, the most dramatic pictures we can find and plenty of snap, crackle and pop. We need to make the content immediate, exciting and accessible and that invariably means adaptation rather than simple extraction.
Many of you will be aware of John Coldstream's attack on our serialisation of his Dirk Bogarde autobiography. We couldn't be sorrier about this because the last thing we want is unhappy authors. It's for precisely this reason that we show our extracts to authors in advance - we'll always correct factual inaccuracies and we're always ready to discuss changes on nuance or emphasis.
It's particularly ironic that an experienced former newspaperman and an agent well-versed in the ways of serialisation should complain so vociferously. Of all people they might have understood that we were unlikely to be concentrating on Mr. Bogarde's kindnesses to small children when his own biographer describes him as a fantasist on a par with Laurens van der Post.
That said, I don't think nearly enough is done by the publishing industry to prepare authors for the experience of serialisation, especially where mid-market and red-top newspapers are concerned. I particularly remember a most uncomfortable conversation with Doris Lessing's agent after she objected to her serial appearing under the headline - I Left My Babies For The Wilder Shores of Love.
But, we do have happy authors, too. One of the most reluctant to appear in the Daily Mail was Claire Rayner who said she 'cringed' when she heard we'd bought the rights to her book. But in a New Statesman diary after the event she wrote: 'They treated my book extremely well, cut the text sensibly, left in as much as possible of my own style and occasional jokes. They even left in the bits that I expected them to cut - like the way I loathe Tories and am a paid-up Republican.
It's a cliche, but selling your book for serialisation is not dissimilar to selling it to a film company. You are relinquishing some control over how your book is used and the chances are you may not like the result. But there are immense benefits, too.
Newspapers rely on books. We have acres of space to fill and finite resources. Books can provide papers with all the things they're looking for - good writing, original research, big names. For newspapers first serial rights in newsworthy books bring front page splashes, headlines, even increased circulation. This alone we've serialised autobiographies of Lord Brocket, Michael Winner and Sheila Hancock as well as Tom Bower's biography of Gordon Brown. Nasser Hussein is currently running on the sports pages and there's not a section of the paper where books don't play an important role from Femail to Weekend Magazine, News to Features. Not to mention our not one, not two but three daily diaries for amusing snippets about who's writing what about whom.
And newspapers are good for books, too. They provide the means to reach massive numbers of readers. In the case of the Mail on Saturday that's some 8 million people a large proportion of whom fall into the desirable book-buying ABC1 category. Reviews come free. And we pay for serialisations. Anything from a few hundred pounds to tens - even hundreds - of thousand. A full page advertisement in the Daily Mail costs £40,068. A 20 centimetre by 2 column ad on the books pages (that's about one-sixth of a page) costs £15,900. Even in my long ago advertising days (when Babycham was an important brand) editorial space was loosely calculated at around 4 times the value of advertising space. Which means that a lead review (equivalent to roughly one-third of a page) could be said to be worth just over £64,000. Minor serialisations can be as little as one page - major ones as many as twenty. And if you factor in televsion advertising support - a rarity admittedly - then you're adding in at least another quarter of a million pounds and reaching literally millions of potential readers.
Sales figures prove that the Daily Mail really does shift books. In my early days on the paper I was amazed when Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval's Fingerprints of the Gods shifted 6,000 copies on the first day of serialisation. And looking at today's figures I see we've already sold around 1,200 copies of Sheila Hancock. The Mail also provides a wonderful opportunity for an author who would anyway be bought by broadsheet readers to extend his or her audience significantly.
It's true that not all books benefit from serialisation. I don't think Alan Samson and I will ever quite recover from the Anthea Turner experinece (a book for which we, at least - I can't speak for Alan - paid a fortune for sight unseen). We were besieged by indignant letters from our readers and sales of the book were lamentable. And only the Times walked away from the Edwina Currie experience smelling of roses. In the first case I think we at the Mail seriously underestimated Anthea's unpopularity at the time. As for Edwina, she too emerged as being pretty unpopular beyond that one sensational revelation that rocked the nation on the Saturday of theTimes's serialisation.
But by and large there's no escaping the fact that books help papers and papers help books.
