Why does nobody want to publish a manuscript which has won prizes and been highly praised by judges and agents?
Wrong genre?
Probably because it does not fit neatly into a genre. Or it fits into too many to provide ease of placement on a bookseller’s shelf. We need to remember that it is the finance department which makes the final decision to print. Several years ago it won the Constable trophy from the Scottish Association of Writers, that much hankered after little silver stag. But still no publisher showed interest.
It is a reflection of the state of the print market (I tell myself). Yet the pen has twice hovered over a contract to publish this particular book. First there was a management buyout on the very day of the signing. The new team, as a matter of principle, rejected all the unsigned contracts in the pipeline. Fair enough, if you want to make a new start. The second publisher sounded keen, keeping in regular touch, but he kept me waiting – and waiting. Then I heard that his firm had been taken over by Simon and Schuster, good news, but they did not want my book, bad news.
‘Too parochial to publish’
Well, yes. It is set most specifically in North East Scotland, on a farm and reflects the struggles of rural life. To do so it uses some local dialect in much the same way Grassic Gibbon does in SUNSET SONG. That’s the nature of the book. It is also a love story, or three love stories about three generations of women from the same family. You could call it a saga.
Wrong narrator
But it is a saga told by a man, Bruno, an elderly man at that, a no-no, when it was written. I lost count of the number of agents who wanted me to rewrite it. They wanted the point of view of one of the women, probably the youngest. The grit in the oyster of this story, however, is the first woman, Kate, long dead at the time of the action in 1990. The other two, her daughter and grand-daughter, were in New Zealand, barely in touch with Scotland for years. There is no way that either as narrator could reflect the real theme in the book.
That story centres on the mutual support of two vulnerable old men, Bruno and Kilbaddy, Kate’s husband. When Kate died many years earlier she left them to raise her four-year-old child between them. The teller of the tale had to be one of these two, the only characters who knew the whole story. Bruno was the one with the linguistic skills. A story told by Kilbaddy, (aka Jock Wishart who was named after his farm) would been told in the broad Doric of the area because he knew no other. Now, that would have been parochial!
Mental health
Another flaw, in agents’ or publishers’ eyes at the time, was the range of mental health issues touched upon. The two men, very different in character, background and outlook, bonded after WW2, traumatised by their experiences and permanent injuries. Each understood the suffering of the other in a way outsiders could never do. Bruno also suffered from clinical hereditary depression and experiences several bouts during the story. One publisher was blatant enough to say that people do not like reading about such matters in ‘light reading matter’. That included sagas back then. And – is there a ghost hovering nearby?
All that is why I have decided to publish KILBADDY myself, accepting at last that I must forego the authentication implicit in ‘proper’ publication. Let’s hope that people will buy the book or download it from Kindle, and will enjoy it. I am certainly learning hugely as I publish alone.