It’s the sort of thing that usually only happens in fiction. A young bank worker buys a home computer and to fill his spare time writes a first novel. A few months later the book has been sold here and abroad in deals worth £750,000; a Hollywood film is under consideration. That, though, has been the experience of Michael Ridpath, who before tapping out Free to Trade, a fast-moving thriller about international financial crime, had never written anything more imaginative than a financial report.
For those of us who still haven’t found a legal, decent and honest way of getting rich, such stories get us excited. But the trouble with trying to pen a small literary masterpiece is that everyone else is too. Writing unsaleable bestsellers is one of the most popular hobbies in Britain. According to one estimate, 20,000—30,000 manuscripts of proposed books are lying in British publishers’ in-trays at any one time. That suggests there must be several hundred thousand people out there nightly peering into word processor screens and seeking inspiration. Blake Friedmann, Mr Ridpath’s literary agent, – receives 20 to 30 manuscripts a day sent in by hopeful writers, but the company has only seen two writers published from this so-called ‘slush pile’ in the last decade. Any other London literary agent or publisher will tell you the chances are the same. The sad truth is that for 99.9 per cent of authors, all their masterworks will ever earn is a string of rejection letters, and some praise from Auntie Doris if she can be persuaded to read the thing.
David O’Leary, a literary agent who is currently wading through a huge pile of manuscripts from hopefuls, says: ‘The Mr Ridpaths of this world are a bad example. People read about them and think they can do it. But there is a mystery at the heart of writing. The more you see, the more you realise this is the sad truth. Pick up a page and you can tell whether someone can write or not. Some publishers who shall be nameless have a 10-page test. If the story hasn’t gripped them by then, they don’t read any more.’
Pierre Reylan, one of the readers employed to go through the vast number of unsolicited manuscripts at one publisher, says that the only manuscript sent in unrequested he can remember being published was a non-fiction book — on how to improve your eyesight. ‘What impresses me is the huge amount of work and effort going into the manuscripts. It feels sad always having to send them back.’ Sometimes a letter will accompany a no-hope manuscript, announcing that the author has given up a perfectly respectable job to spend their whole time writing.
Darley Anderson, a London agent who receives 100 manuscripts a week (he might get up to four writers a year published) insists the talent is out there. ‘It’s just that some publishers are too lazy, too busy or don’t have the imagination to find them.’ Two years ago he sold a novel by a nurse, Martina Cole, for £150,000. ‘If in that year I had not taken on anybody else I would have felt it was a very successful year.’
The odds against success, then, are enormous. But for some writers, the urge to write a book is too great to be resisted, whether it is because of the need for money, the desire to be famous or the wish to be creative.