The Bookseller.com

8th January 2009

Clare Alexander is a literary agent with Aitken Alexander Associates, and ex-president of the Association of Authors’ Agents. She was formerly a publisher at Viking and Macmillan.

What are we so afraid of?

11.09.08

The news that a GCSE examining board has decided Carol Ann Duffy's poem: "Today I am Going to Kill Something" glorifies knife crime and has dropped it from the curriculum not only indicates a failure to understand the very purpose of literature, but seems to chime with a number of recent stories. There's the one about Random House in America deciding not to proceed with publication of The Jewel of Medina, or Random House in the UK insisting on the change of "twat" to "twit" in Jacqueline Wilson's My Sister Jodie. In the meantime, some publishers have begun to ask for new contractual warranties from authors to cover some pretty far-fetched eventualities, including that writers of children's books not behave in an unsuitable manner.

What are we so afraid of? The purpose of literature is to make us think, empathise and imagine. Good writing takes risks, and good publishers know that. There are manifold examples of publishers standing by their authors to ensure their freedom of expression, so why is there a whiff of anxiety in the air at the moment?

Three possible answers come to mind. The first is that publishers' flirtation with misery and celebrity culture has brought them up against tabloid realities. You hardly need to defend an author's freedom when the "author" didn't write the book, but the cost of libel in this world can be very high. Then there's the fact that publishing conglomerates tend to have legal departments who are divorced from daily publishing realities, and tend to deal with things only when they go wrong. In my long career in publishing, I only once encountered an author who knowingly libelled someone. Most authors are terrified of being in breach of their warranties, but a legal department's view can be skewed so that publishers put protecting themselves ahead of promoting their books. And finally there is the question of size. Much of publishing has become bigger and more global, which may carry more risks but, as it turns out, not much more power. Vulnerable to giving offence in any culture, liable to legal action in any country, it may turn out that even the biggest publishers are still small when measured against other global forces or businesses.

We need to rediscover our core values. Now that authors can make their work available themselves, a publisher can best add value through their selection and promotion of the best writing. If they need extra protections when publishing certain types of books, so be it, but most of the time they need to work in partnership with their writers. But first they have to trust them.