Good Evening,
Welcome to our first newsletter, featuring exclusive original content from your friends at The Fence. We’ll be replicating the format of our printed magazine here: ‘insider’ accounts, slanted looks at London life, short comic pieces and other assorted features, all to levitate your spirits up in these baffling times. First off, an anonymous figure from within the publishing industry looks back at the last three months.
jk gets booked!
It is a truism among booksellers that bookshops make books. This might seem to be a self-serving mantra. In many respects it is. But the last few months have demonstrated the kernel of truth at its core. Amazon has proven up to the task of selling books that people know they want. But the Bezos machine is unable to do much for the much-maligned mid-list or the plucky debut novelist. Waterstones and the independents remain the main outlets for breaking out a book like Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five, or developing the careers of authors like Annie Tyler and Tessa Hadley. Yet at the height of the crisis, bricks and mortar book retailers were losing millions of pounds a week in lost sales. This equates to thousands of lost opportunities for authors.
The closure of the bookshops reduced sales of all but a favoured few titles to a trickle. Everything important was shoved to the autumn. This had the unfortunate consequence of exposing everyone’s rank in the publishing schedule. Cue many a strained conversation between agent and editor, with inboxed explanations as to why April 10th remained the best possible release date for their author’s long-awaited novel. Even those ‘big’ books that bravely went ahead and published in March and April suffered the consequence.
After a two-year wait, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s much-hyped My Dark Vanessa, was published on March 31st and while it fared respectfully, it definitely suffered from shop closures. As did Philippe Sands’ The Ratline, whose epic press schedule was cut brutally short by the pandemic. Perhaps the only debut author who seems to have weathered the storm is Naoise Dolan, whose novel Exciting Times managed to move the dial when few other things could. All the same, I suspect the Booker Prize longlist is going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of spotlighting the good novels published in the last few months.
Whether the reopening of the bookshops will ignite an orgy of book-buying remains to be seen. The scenes outside Foyles are not those recorded outside of Nike and Primark. The Guardian reported a massive bounce in book sales in the first week post-reopening. We shall have to wait and see whether this is enough to get the industry back on a decent footing. At the end of the day, bookshops are a volume business. Social distancing measures, PPE, and new staffing protocols – while extremely important – all reduce sales volumes. Furthermore, cafes and coffee shops remain closed, events schedules are white paper, and literary festivals are cancelled. None of this is good.
Within the citadels of the publishing world grows unease. Staff have been furloughed, and have watched as public attention has been swallowed up first by coronavirus, and then by the riots in America. A kind of paralysis has taken hold. Nobody is quite sure which way the wind is blowing. The deluge of book proposals about coronavirus has given way to those on race. The perennial question remains: will they sell in two years’ time?
In the meantime, publishers are taking no chances. Some of the largest, and deepest-pocketed publishers in the country announced that advances will be paid out on a reduced schedule. More generally, the crisis has been a wonderful excuse for vacillating on decisions and low-balling on advances. Publishers are notorious for being cheap and slow; COVID-19 has made them cheaper and slower.
It has also made them more anti-social. Publishing, for all its sins, is predominantly staffed by friendly, sociable people. Publishing dinners, parties, and events are a kind of alternative form of compensation for people living on lowly salaries. As pressing a question for some will be when face-to-face contact between editors, agents, authors, and everyone else will resume. Publishers can function by Zoom – some small publishers operate entirely remotely – but it saps a lot of the fun out of the business. But then again, it might well be that publishing bigwigs return to their offices to find some of the bonhomie has vanished in the intervening months.
Bookish types have always been politically sensitive, and the mounting tide of activism is making itself felt in boardrooms. Black Lives Matter activism has led to renewed attempts by a younger generation to ensure that their employer’s values chime with their own. As in other industries, this is a generational divide. I spoke to a marketing manager at a leading literary imprint who bemoaned that her bosses just didn’t get why it mattered that they make statements on the killing of George Floyd.
The necessary debate about race, diversity, and representation also reveals how cynical a business publishing can be. One agent told me that having failed to get any interest in one of her young BAME authors earlier in the year, now her inbox has been filling up with solicitous notes from editors.
Nor is it all just about race. LGBTQI+ issues are also creating flare-ups. The recent mutiny at Hachette, JK Rowling’s publisher, over the Harry Potter author’s transgender remarks will be interesting to watch unfold. Rowling is of course the biggest beast in the British publishing landscape. She has created thousands of jobs. If it emerges that she, too, can be cancelled, then it will upend everything in the world of books, and reverberate far beyond.
This is the key thing: how to reconcile political demands with the gritty realities of running a profitable media business. Managers often feel compelled to take risks on unpopular authors in the belief that they will work outside the London bubble. An example would be when Ebury, an imprint of Penguin Randomhouse, published Jacob Rees-Mogg’s book The Victorians in 2019. Witness also the revolt at HarperCollins a few months back upon rumours that they were going to publish a book by Nigel Farage (they are not). Some industries might be able to sidestep these questions at little cost. Not so the book industry. And such confrontations between senior management and the rank-and-file always lead to lasting rancor. Bread and circuses might not be enough to placate staffers coming off furlough.
zoo of the new
London Zoo has reopened following the longest closure in its history.
The last time it closed for longer than a day was at the beginning of World War II. During that closure the zoo destroyed all the poisonous snakes and spiders held there as a precaution - though against what, it’s not exactly clear.
At the start of the coronavirus crisis things were a little more measured. The institution lent its car park to key workers at a neighbouring hospital, and many of the keepers who couldn’t easily commute on foot lived full time at the zoo to care for the animals. In the eerie London quiet, the singing of the zoo’s Gibbon monkey could be heard all across Regent’s park in the early morning.
With the petting zoo closed to the public, its pygmy goat population became so lonely that they were mandated daily pettings by the staff. The plight of these needy goats recalls these lonely Japanese eels, as well as the penguins who were taken on a tour of the Old Masters collection at the Nelson Atkins museum in Kansas City.
London’s penguins appear to have declined any invitations they received from Britain's museums. It's hardly surprising: the philistines have long refused to live in their iconic, Berthold Lubetkin-designed modernist enclosure. The enclosure’s weightless, interlocking concrete ramps were said to abrade and cut the penguins' feet. Has no one ever told them that you have to suffer to be beautiful?
With that said: Lubetkin's daughter says the enclosure should be 'blown to smithereens': “It was designed as a showcase and playground of captive penguins, and I can’t see that it would be suited to anything else.”
Maybe the penguins should live in: Rachel Cusk's house, which is up for sale. It's somewhat foreboding exterior masks a surprisingly organic, free-flowing living space that could easily house twenty or thirty penguins with space for aquatic play and creative writing workshops. Yours for £2.5 million.
meanwhile, at the fence
For laughs: ‘If you have a book that isn’t about the coronavirus, this column’s advice is shove it in the bin, then set the bin on fire then set fire to the house in which you keep the bin.’
– Our cultural critic, Rob Palk, takes a look at the publishing industry’s response to COVID-19.
Also: ‘My subject is to be Mr Gladstone – provisional title ‘God’s Only Mistake’.
– The statue wars are on, and Benjamin Disraeli, budding journalist, wants a byline in The Spectator (as imagined by Fergus Butler-Gallie).
And something serious: ‘I came to understand the vagaries of my employer in the same way that a child learns to study the rhythms and temper of an abusive parent. Typically, there would be an eight to twelve-month period of calm, before the sudden, stuttering shock of a round of Friday afternoon lay-offs.’
– An anonymous insider writes about the cyclical carnage of online media.
SHOT THROUGH THE ARM! AND SEAN IS TO BLAME!
The eyes of the world are on the researchers currently conducting vaccine trials at Oxford University. We talked to Sean Ketteringham, who is a subject in the trials that could save us all from our current hell.
Sean, thanks for talking to us. You’re on the Oxford vaccine trial: can you tell us about what that involves?
There was a screening where they take a load of samples and check your history. Then if you’re cleared they put you on the trial, jab you in the arm with either a control vaccine or the real thing, and then monitor you via a daily diary and check-ups.
So were you cleared? And what do you write in the diary? This is going to be a duff interview if you weren't cleared.
I was cleared, yes. You have to have a pretty dirty past or some underlying health conditions to be rejected.
The diary isn’t literary before you get excited. It’s basically a check list of whether you have symptoms that might be related to the injection and/or COVID-19. There's also an assessment of the injection site: things like swelling, itching etc.
Pleased to report no swelling or itching.
Do you think you’ve been exposed to COVID-19? Because you’re not much use if you haven’t been are you? Or is that point? We don’t really understand how vaccines work.
Yeah I have no idea. But I do know they're planning for a few of us from the trial to be naturally exposed to the virus, so they can assess the immune response. I've had no symptoms.
Were you asked to be included for human exposure? Or did you volunteer like Jason Bourne is revealed to have done in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)?
They’re not doing a dedicated trial like that yet. As in they’re not ‘challenging’ participants of our trial with the virus. They ran a trial with monkeys a few months ago and challenged them with COVID-19. Apparently their immune response was good: no dead monkeys. They might do full human testing in the future but this trial, I’m told, was mainly to see whether the vaccine was safe for humans. Obviously if participants naturally get COVID-19 ‘in the field’, not in the lab, then they will get some data.
They didn’t ask if they could give me a dose of COVID-19, although I probably would have been up for it. So no.
Did you get any sense from the nurses/doctors/attendants that this was a particularly exciting trial?
The day I had my jab was the day the AstraZeneca deal was announced, so there was a fair bit of hype about that and the trial size had been doubled, so there was a sense that it was a big deal. But most of it was pretty laid back. The doctors and nurses were all very professional and lovely people.
Can I ask what colour the vaccine is?
Nuclear green. No, I didn’t even see it. She hid it from me.
Wait, is that ethical? By the way, have you made any extra attempts to try and get the inside line on what’s happening? Do you have friends on the trial? Have you dug up anyone’s social media?
Oh, also: have you played The Last of Us?
Well it’s a double blind trial so technically no-one is meant to know what's in me until the end of the trial. No one else I know is doing the trial, and no, I haven’t stalked the research team. Should I have done?
OK. Hypothetical: you've been watching their social media for a few weeks. They say they need someone from the trial for an operation: it will create a successful vaccine, but it will kill you. What would you do?
Hold on, what's The Last of Us?
Right, so this is relevant. It’s a video game set in a post-apocalyptic world blighted by an awful fungal disease. The dilemma it outlines is this: what if the human price of that vaccine outweighed, for one individual, all the good it might do for humanity at large?
I mean, would you sacrifice yourself for the good of mankind?
Well, I suppose I wouldn't have a choice. I think I'd have to be in love.
With?
Someone. Something. You would do. It would add to the drama, make the sacrifice worth it.
Have you ever been in love?
I don't think so. I've never said it. Does saying it make it real?
Who knows! Ok. A few questions from readers. From Jonny R in Hampstead. He wants to know ‘Why would you let Bill Gates control your mind?’
Fuck, I hadn't thought of that. Is Bill a bad guy?
There's a case to be made that no-one should be that wealthy, but most people think well of his charity work.
OK, this from Pat in the North West: ‘Sean, I think it’s awful what you're doing, you can’t convince me to vaccinate my beautiful baby boy, I vaccinated his older brother for MMR and he died in a helicopter crash the very next week. I hope you and your elite friends are happy!’
I think this is more of a comment, not a question, to quote every 40-year-old man at a conference. Patrick should enjoy his 5G phone.
Finally, Robert on the south coast asks, ‘If you could be a human guinea pig in a hypothetical vaccine trial for any pandemic, past or present, which would it be and why?’
It would have to be the 1918/19 flu pandemic. Prevent the whole thing with a timely vaccine, and in doing so stop T S Eliot from writing The Waste Land. Also: save the most lives, then party in Weimar Germany!
Sean Ketteringham is a PhD student researching the modernist home; he co-conves the Paul Mellon Centre’s Doctoral Research Network. Rather than share any of his own work, he asked that we direct your attention to this document of ways to volunteer with Black Lives Matter Oxford.
DIGITAL JEWELS
The best of the web: all the articles that have given us pause for thought at Fence Towers.
Stop what you are doing and read this story, about an abusive social media cult that convinced teens they were going to destroy white supremacy by eating their own semen.
“Even the perennially irrelevant Dixie Chicks have made their contribution to this ‘reckoning’ by altering their stage name to simply ‘The Chicks’ (I’m not sure ‘Dixie’ axiomatically denotes you as a white supremacist per se, but you do you).” – Ralph Leonard writes about ‘the genius of woke capitalism’.
Alex from online is not taking questions at this time.
Like always, today our thoughts are with 52 Blue, the world’s loneliest whale.
That’s all from us. See you in two weeks for more of the same.
Yours,
TF
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