How to Sell A Book: Part 2

I've been working in a business for the last 15 years without a clue how it works. Like those drones in Marx's theory of alienation, I've no idea what the right hand is doing while my left hand gets on with its commission. I've simply written my books , loads of them, without any idea of how they were going to get onto the bookshelves. In the early days, I even handed in a manuscript on paper, printed off an early Amstrad, and imagined a printing press of little elves magicking it into a real life book. I didn't talk to the publicist, the UK or foreign rights people about making it into a best-seller. I didn't even know their names.

Always a sucker for a party, I organised the launch myself, borrowing favours from some of the chefs I'd written about who, also suckers for parties, were happy to wow my mates and a few journalists with their canapes, and I thrilled the bookshop into supplying the drink. Everyone went home happy and with a book in their bag from that launch - and every one I've organised since.

But publishing is about more than a party, and if I want my books bought by people who like them and pass the word on rather than cynical journalists or bored netheads, I need to think again.

It was at a Society of Author's seminar last month that I decided that I should finally wise up. Sitting around the table with 10 other authors who had had a similar experience, we concluded that if publishing was about pushing top 20 authors, the rest of us would have to do it ourselves. And no, it doesn't make sense as an industry, but are we going to sit around and moan, or are we going to use our nouse and contacts and get our work out for people to see?

So I asked the publisher of my Jamie Oliver update if I could meet their entire sales team, along with editorial before this year's London Book Fair and guess what? They want to sell it too. They haven't got time to read the thing of course, so they were more than happy for me to tell them about it. A new title, a new jacket and a new pitch, shedding the biography that it never was and repositioning it as the book about the Jamie effect on a food revolution, and we're finally singing from the same dust cover.

As I sat there with the Head of Uk Sales, I wondered why this isn't part of the signing process as it is for Hay House UK, surely a truly enlightened publisher. But, more importantly, I wondered where on earth my head has been for the past 15 years...