Publish and be damned tired As the joke goes, making a small fortune as an independent publisher is easy: you just have to start off with a large fortune. Jim Driver explains.

There are two distinct types of crime and mystery publisher and The Do-Not Press – together with a select band of other Jolly Roger wavers, including No Exit, Payback and Serpent’s Tail – is involved in the second: the independent sector. Far from luxuriating in a world of long, languid lunches and second homes in Tuscany, most independent publishers of my acquaintance are lucky if they can find time to grab a quick sandwich between calls and maybe a weekend in Scarborough, off-season. After a couple of self-sold and self-distributed try-outs, The Do-Not Press arrived at the bookseller’s door in the spring of 1996 with Fresh Blood, edited by Mike Ripley and Maxim Jakubowski and Quake City, the third Charley Case thriller from John B Spencer.

Both had a lot going for them – ie they were great books – but the conservative nature of the bookselling trade (no one gets fired for not taking risks) drilled the message into my brain that it was going to be a hard slog. We’ve moved on immeasurably since then and learned a lot of hard and expensive lessons, but there’s a long way to go before BMG make that multi-million pound cash offer. Publishing is a rough, tough business that favours the conglomerates (you know who you are) and makes it damn difficult for the rest of us. Even when you get over the stigma of being new and exciting, you still have to have good books to sell. The independents take risks with unknown authors and battle to get reviews and sales, only to find the majors step in and offer chunky advances and reap the big rewards.

And if it doesn’t work for them, what the hell? it’s only a few grand down the spout – most of it appearing on internal budgets, anyway – and they’ve always got the million-selling Dick James or PD Francis to pay for the oysters and champagne. Whereas we independents cannot really afford any poor sellers. In 1997 we published a first crime novel that had already done the rounds and had been politely rejected by every major publisher in the land. We prised it out of the author’s bottom drawer, blew the dust off the yellowed pages and took a chance, getting some good reviews in the process.

We also read the author’s second, but so did a few others and when crunch came to shove, we couldn’t get near the advance he was offered from a larger rival. There’s no bitterness felt towards the author (not a member of the CWA), because I know he couldn’t afford not to take the money. Plus, we’re hoping to sell the 2,000 copies of his first book we’ve got resting in our warehouse on the back of this new blockbuster. One major irony of publishing is that the big publishers, with their legions of staff, refuse to read manuscripts at all. They say they rely on agents to sort the wheat from the Weetabix, but the weak link in this argument is that agents are also loathe to read manuscripts – some do, some don’t – and so what usually happens is that the people with an ‘in’ to the agents, get an ‘in’ to the publisher.

We on the other hand (the ‘we’ used throughout is usually the Royal We) do not have much time to read anything, least of all dotty manuscripts about the Second Coming and rehashes of Christie and Yorke.

I usually work seven days a week, an average of 60-70 hours, and that doesn’t include finding time for reading. The Do-Not Press get around 80-100 submissions a week and, including work in hand, we have only published 16 books in our Bloodlines crime imprint, of which only five are first time novels and only one was sent in by someone we didn’t know. And then it turned out that she – Carol Anne Davis – had already had three novels published in another genre. So, a plea to prospective authors: Please buy as many of our books as you can afford (call it research), and unless you think you can help us make a fortune together, please don’t send me your latest manuscript. Unless, of course you happen to be incredibly famous and don’t need a huge advance (you know who you are) …