I have a guilty little

secret. You will find

me on the mid-list

 

Catherine Czerkawska

 

My worst experience of submitting work to a literary agent involved a rejection letter which dismissed my novel, 'The Curiosity Cabinet' – later shortlisted for the Dundee Book Prize, published by Polygon and now available on Kindle – as a 'library novel, fit only for housewives'. They say you only remember the bad ones, and it's true, but he managed to insult me, libraries and women in general, in one short descriptive phrase, and that must be some kind of record.
     Now – all these years, all these words, a few agents and so much water under the bridges of my life later – I understand why he was outraged by the quiet, lyrical but relatively unshowy piece of fiction I had sent him. He had sussed me immediately. I was a natural mid-list writer and he was only interested in hitting the literary jackpot. At least he was honest about it.
     First, I need to explain about the concept of the mid-list for a readership which may not be quite as obsessed with the current state of publishing as most writers generally are. Only yesterday, an artist friend confirmed this by asking 'what's the mid-list?'. And when I tried to explain, innocently remarked 'Oh, you mean the kind of books people want to read?'.
     It's hard to define exactly what the mid-list is, but it's in a bad way. Industry insiders write about the decline and collapse of the mid-list, the parlous state of the mid-list and more recently, the death of the mid-list. Now, it has got to the stage where most authors, even those who would once have belonged fairly and squarely in the mid-list, would prefer not to admit to it at all. Like solitary drinking or being a Christian in intellectual circles, it's our guilty secret and we are faintly ashamed of it.
     It may be easier to say what the mid-list isn't. You won't find much non-fiction there – certainly not those heaps of political, celebrity or impossibly youthful sporting memoirs that colonise our few remaining bookshop with their 'authors' grinning at us from the covers, although authoring is the last thing they do. They're good at pretending though, even to themselves. One celebrity allegedly sent her ghost writer a signed copy of 'her' novel for Christmas, but that may be an apocryphal tale.
     A mid-list novel isn't a stunning debut novel. Besides, you can only have one of those, unless you change your name, although it has been known. It isn't a major blockbuster of the kind you'll find lurking in your supermarket of choice. It isn't a bestseller either – although many bestsellers used to spring from the mid-list. These were termed breakthrough novels. After several interesting and well-written but not quite best-selling books, an author who had built up a modest but faithful following among the reading public would suddenly hit the jackpot with a book – no better or worse than any of the others – which inexplicably appealed on a wider scale.
     But now, publishers strive for certainty. After one, two or – if they are lucky – three under-performing books, a writer will be dropped and will find it well-nigh impossible to be conventionally published again. If they try to find a new publisher, their modest sales statistics will damn them. And none of this will take into account their development as a writer. Their whole future potential will be judged entirely on the first few months' sales of their first couple of novels. This is not a new phenomenon. It happened to Barbara Pym in the early 60s, when Cape decided that her style no longer suited the times. Pym was a classic mid-list writer, with her gentle, wryly amusing and well observed novels (much beloved by housewives – and Philip Larkin) but nowadays, I reckon she would never have found a publisher at all.
     So what is a mid-list novel?

 

     The mid-list may encompass everything from so-called genre fiction, to novels which some would deem to be literary, albeit not wildly experimental – with much uncategorisable work in between. Mid-list limbo is a very big place. A writer may find him or herself at the popular or literary ends of the mid-list, but even these attempts at demarcation prove invidious. For why should an author not write genre fiction which also has depths and complexity? And why must a novel be linguistically experimental to be deemed genuinely literary?
     In spite of what marketing departments would have us believe, anyone who tries to predict next year's big hit on the basis of last year's big hit is almost always doomed to disappointment. The only certainty is that the next best-selling novel will take everyone by surprise. J K Rowling was lucky to find a publisher at all. Magic and fantasy were deeply unfashionable. Realism was the genre of choice among adults anxious to foist their own fixations onto children. And Harry Potter's initial success seems to have had more to do with word-of-mouth among kids who genuinely loved the book, rather than some expensive publicity drive on the part of a peculiarly prescient publisher.
     The truth is that every area of creative endeavour has a massively fertile centre ground. Give it only a little food and water (writers are like the chameleon of legend which was believed to exist on air) and interesting things will grow. Just occasionally, one of those things will turn out to be some exotic specimen of great value. But nobody can predict which.
     It used to be the case that commercial publications would subsidise the mid-list as well as the experimentally literary. But times became hard. One wonders why all those celebrity deals had not done better business for an industry which had so relentlessly promoted them, but such analyses are beyond the scope of this essay. It was the mid-list authors who felt the squeeze, falling victims to an industry which had become obsessed with instant rather than delayed gratification.
     Until now, writers have felt compelled to accept their mid-list shame as inevitable. Agents too have caved in to the demands of publishers for an 'oven ready' product, as one of my previous agents described it to me, conjuring images of books as so many turkeys, plucked, stuffed and ready for roasting.
     But sooner or later, you start to wonder just what has been overlooked in the relentless search for the instant hit. I'm mixing my metaphors here, but it's becoming ever clearer that in abandoning the mid-list, many conventional publishers have managed to kill off the geese that – every now and then – used to lay a solid gold egg. Or a string of solid gold eggs, because one major success would generally be followed by more. But nobody could say for sure which goose – and when it might happen.
     The demise of the mid-list has been greatly exaggerated. It has simply shifted to online publishing, to Kindle and Nook and other eBook readers. We newly empowered mid-listers are reclaiming our lost territories and we need to stop apologising for writing the kind of books people want to read – even if they may not want to read them in industrial quantities. The problem is that however much we talk about the 'creative industries' writing is not a process that can ever be industrialised.
     Traditional gatekeepers, in the shape of agents and editors, still have their place. The gatekeepers can be invaluable when they are prepared to work in genuine partnership with creative individuals, without whom the whole industry could not exist. But professional respect is the key. We must be able to respect their judgement and retain a modicum of belief in their good faith.      When trust in that judgement breaks down as comprehensively as it has of late, then let the gatekeepers beware, for once lost, that faith will be very difficult to regain.

Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright and author