As one of the judges for the Desmond Elliott prize for best debut novelist this year, I couldn’t help reflect on some of the challenges still to come for the authors. With three such accomplished novels on our shortlist, there was some hard talking in the judges’ room, but in the end we decided, by an honourable 2:1 vote, to award the prize to Claire Fuller for Our Endless Numbered Days. It is a dark and perfectly poised account of a survivalist father hiding out in a remote forest with his increasingly embattled daughter that recalls the early work of Ian McEwan in its brooding slow build to a dramatic climax. But nobody could dispute the literary skill evident in the other books on the shortlist: Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey and Carys Bray’s A Song for Issy Bradley.
The vital thing now is that these writers are offered long-term support from their agents and publishers. The amount of publicity given to those first novels that become instant bestsellers distorts the reality for the majority of debut novelists, even very gifted ones: a moderate advance, a small amount of acclaim, a continuing battle to get their next book written and then published. This is the reality for authors who want a sustained career in books.
Ian Rankin famously succeeded with his seventh novel – and Hilary Mantel wrote brilliant, strange and wonderful books time and time again before Wolf Hall, her 10th. It is worth noting not just the number of books that Mantel wrote before she hit the big time, but their variety: contemporary satire, historical epic, memoir and black comedy. Her publishers not only kept publishing her, they kept their faith in her as she wrote the books she wanted to write.
It’s easy for a publisher to support an author when she sells well and wins prizes. In the literary world, as elsewhere, nothing succeeds like success. We call on the publishers of the wonderful books on our shortlist to support their authors not only with their sparkling debuts but with their fourth, fifth, sixth novels. Short-termism in publishing is not only devastating for the authors who don’t get the support they deserve, it’s bad for business. We fully expect to see Healey, Bray and Fuller on prize shortlists, bestseller lists and in the literary pages of our newspapers for years to come, and if they aren’t, we’re going to be asking why. Publishers, we are watching you.
