Producing a book is a collaborative exercise so it’s never going to be 100% all your own work – at the very least there are (or should be) editors and copy-editors to help improve what you produce, as well as commissioning editors. If you’ve got an agent – I don’t (I’ll talk about that another time) – they are also a key part of the mix.
So here are some concrete examples of my books where other people have, frankly, made them better.
Images
Pretty much the first thing the commissioning editor who gave Rooms of Their Own the green light said to me at our first meeting was, how about getting an illustrator on board? Up to that point, I’d imagined we’d buy in photos of all the writers’ rooms to be covered and hadn’t even considered commissioning original work. I can’t say I jumped up and down at the idea but, as so often, I quickly changed my tune. The editor came up with several people to approach and we whittled it down to one that we both really liked, James Oses. And the final product that is officially published on April 19 has benefited immeasurably from James’s fine work (example below) – indeed, the first people who saw it (family, book group members) were all delighted by the book well before they actually read any of the text.
Taking bits out…
One of the main reasons for material not making it to the final cut is simply space. By the time we’d submitted all the material for Menus That Made History, it was clear we had too many sections. Several had to go and several of mine got bumped – suggested by the editors - though you can now read them on my website (Famous Five Picnic Menus; British Rail Food, 1977; The First Chinese Restaraunt Menu in Britain; and Winston Churchill’s BOAC Flight to Washington, June 1954) . The same thing happened to my second book, Bookshelf. I had to take a few out because I’d overly-enthusiastically collected far too many examples. About 15- 20 had to go, all them very fine but for various reasons not quite the right fit. In this case, I decided which ones to leave out rather than the publishers.
Another reason that things don’t go in is that people simply don’t give permission. For Shelf Life, the collection of essays about #booklife I edited for The British Library, nearly all the ones I selected were out of copyright so not a problem to reuse. However the marvellous Buchhandlung columns by Flann O’Brien needed approval. They didn’t make it because the rights holders simply didn’t reply to repeated queries. This was one of the most disappointing of all the cuts in my books because I really love them. You can read them in The Best of Myles and there are also some examples online here.
I had the same problem with Art Day by Day. Each entry starts with a quote but some of the ones I’d originally plumped for had to go – there were various reasons for this, but mainly because of extortionate useage fees (one magazine in the US wanted $5k for a single quote…). In a few cases the quotes were so integral to the entry that I had to cut it entirely and swap in something totally different.
… and putting bits in
Staying with Art Day by Day, from the very start I was keen to get a good spread of entries. In broad terms this meant featuring lesser known corners of art history, but more importantly ensuring it wasn’t just an endless run of White Anglo-Saxon Males. My editor was pretty pleased with my choices, but did suggest some more diverse choices in terms of gender and race, and again the book is all the better for her pushing me to make it the best it could be.
There was both In and Out for A Soundtrack for Life which I wrote for Scala Radio. The first plan was to come up with about 100 pieces/tracks. They liked my tone/style for the first six sample pieces, but – for entirely understandable reasons – didn’t want to use any of them. Based on my suggestions, we then threw ideas backwards and forwards – very happily and entertaingly - numerous times before settlingly on something slightly north of 150. There are some entries that I would probably not have chosen, but it was their book so they had the final say. And to their credit, there were some that they were not so keen on but I rather insisted on that they let through. If this sounds like a nightmare scenario, it wasn’t, but it’s a good job everybody involved was a decent person or the whole thing could have simply not worked.
Co-authors
I’ve co-authored a couple of times - Menus That Made History, Shed Manual - and it’s all gone smoothly but there’s always a bit of give and take about what works and what doesn’t feel right. Both times I’ve done it with friends so that’s helped a lot, but they would have been different books if I’d done them entirely on my own.
How To Give Your Child A Lifelong Love Of Reading wasn’t technically a co-authoring, it was a book idea suggested to me by a keen commissioning editor who was closely involved nearly all the way through. Though the main text is all me, we asked about a dozen famous writers to contribute small pieces and naturally none of that is mine, on top of which there is a hugely useful reading list section that again was provided by experts and into which I had no input.
General thumbs down
Sometimes I write something that I think is great and my editors, very politely, suggest is maybe not quite as great as I believe. So there were a couple of entries in my Edward Lear and the Pussy Cat: Famous Writers and Their Pets that my editor put question marks by and suggested that if that was the full anecdote then it either needed considerable more buffing or, better still, chopping (reader, I chopped them). And my editor for Book Towns said very much the same thing about a couple of the minor entries – in this case, I reused the material seamlessly in a couple of other chapters and the introduction.
Note: Following on from last week’s newsletter about book covers, here’s an interesting and not too long piece from my friends at rare book dealer Peter Harrington.
Next week: An exclusive preview of Rooms of Their Own
What I read last week: The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan. Rollicking Richard Hannay-esque stuff, with a supernatural time travel element and some surprisingly funny elements. An autumn/winter holiday read rather than a beach one. I also enjoyed an advanced copy of the imminent Work From Shed.
What I’m reading this week: The Golden Flea: A Story of Obsession and Collecting by Michael Rips, a slightly odd account of New York’s famous flea market. I’ve just finished the slightly odd memoir, Accidents of Fortune by Andrew Devonshire as I’m off to Chatsworth (his home) on Friday.
What I’m planning to read next week: Welsh Food Stories by Carwyn Graves (I’m being very slow with this even though I’m enjoying it).