All Kinds of Antiquarian

Enid Blyton

Getting Published - First Steps

I have a sure-fire way of getting your work seriously looked at by a publisher, the essential first step to getting into print. I discovered it only very recently. An American friend, another writer, sent it to me. He described it as follows.

It all started like this. It's Friday today but just on Wednesday I was walking my children to the big yellow school bus, herding them across the road, when I was nearly swept off my feet by a silver Mercedes which flew in front of my nose, jerked to a halt and disgorged five children. These children were all dressed up to the nines, three girls with pig-tails swinging, their backsides prim in designer jeans and two older boys, with quiffs that cost a hundred bucks at Sweeneys if they cost a dime.

'They're new,' whispered my older girl and eyed the jeans enviously, smoothing down hers with one hand. Whether she meant the girls or the jeans I wasn't sure.

Then the mother got out of the car, very, very long, tanned legs first, a Bermuda tan. And Bermuda's a long way from where we live in Seattle. Maybe it was a Hawaii tan, but what the heck. She didn't look like she'd had five children but then maybe she hadn't. Perhaps she was a new acquisition. At any rate she started fussing over the children, making sure they were presentable to the bus driver, I suppose.

'I know you could go to school in the car, dear ones,' she was telling the three girls, altogether too loudly. 'But I don't want you to be different. You go on the bus with the rest.' To top it all she had a snotty English accent. Put on, I bet. Sure she wasn't English! God, that English accent, it gets me. And they have the cheek to believe that English is meant to be spoken with a potato half way down your gizzard.

'Daddy's got a meeting with the governor in just a few minutes, darlings, so jolly along there!' she added and I could see a man of about fifty smirking behind darkened windows in the back seat of the Merc. Oh! Yes, I should have mentioned that the damn thing was chauffeur driven. And what had the Legs said? "Jolly along there", had I heard right? Well, I'm a writer and I would not blooming well dare to use a phrase like that, even giving it to an English twit in blue stripes and a top hat! Who were these people?

'Dad, dad! They're publishers, they publish books!'

'Whose a publisher?' I yelled over the sizzling pan of hamburgers. It was Helen's night out with her girly friends and I was cooking dinner, if that was what you could call the unidentified frying objects in the pan. 'Whose a publisher?' I called again. I hate publishers. May they be condemned to proof-read a novel without end by Enid Blyton or Dostoevsky, yes, Dostoevsky. Ha!

'Those people we saw this morning,' sang out my elder daughter. She's fourteen and beautiful. Too blooming beautiful, the little wretch, though she does not seem to have found out yet. (How parents delude themselves).

'This morning?' I asked. 'That man in the car who was off to see the governor and the one with the wife with the English accent?' And the legs I thought to myself.

My daughter nodded her head vigorously.

'A publisher? Hmm,' and I absently spilled a tablespoonful of pepper over the hamburgers.

'Oh! Daaaad!' screamed my girls in unison.

'A publisher!' I muttered as I tried to scrape it all off with a knife. 'Ow! Ow!' Hot fat spluttered onto my hand.

'C'mon, gimme' said my elder one and took over.

'What sort of books?' I asked as I splashed ketchup over my plate a few moments later.

'Novels and things! Really famous ones. You know that one...'

' The de Rabelais Cod,' broke in my younger girl. She's only nine.

'Code! Twit!' said her sister.

'Cod. It said Cod on the cover. I can read as well as you!'

It only said Cod because in a fit of hate that such junk should be published when mine was not even looked at, I had inked over the 'e'.
'Cod, code.. who cares. He really published that?' I asked, hamburger perched on my fork between plate and mouth.

'So Crispin said!' she replied. My hamburger fell off and into the ketchup with a splat.

'Ooooh, Kwithpin', lisped my younger one, dodging the swipe aimed at her from her sister. 'Kwithpin, kwithpin, kwithin!' and she began to thump the table. My older girl went pink but collected herself.

'Crispin says that they know hundreds of famous authors. They come to tea. He invited me to tea to meet them. There's a new one coming tomorrow for tea. Can I go, Daddy? Please?'

'Which author's coming to tea?'

'Henry de Pilfort. You know the one who writes about the Crusades and the Templar knights and things. His latest is number 3 on Amazon. Look, I'll show you!' and she dashed off to grab her computer. She shoved it on the table, pushing the plates and the broken bits of hamburger to one side.

'You've got ketchup on the side of it!'

'Look!' she said, ignoring me. She turned the computer towards me. 'There he is!'

'Hey!' said my younger, 'he looks really quite like you!'

'God! I hope not,' I said. But he did. Really very like me in fact. He could be my blasted brother. He wasn't, was he? My ghastly little brother hadn't taken up writing, under a pseudonym, had he? Henry de Pilfort didn't sound like a real name.

'Yeah, you could be him!' said my elder girl.

A thought crossed my mind. I could be him, she'd said. I could be him.....

'Crispin lives at 1250 Lakeside Drive, Daddy.' Oh of course. It would be Lakeside Drive. The poshest address in town. When we got through the electronic gates and past the flunky, the 'Legs' was there to greet me.

'Mr. de Pilfort, what a pleasure! So kind of you to collect Crispin's friend on the way. Why, you look so much younger than your photograph!'

Do I? Damn it all! Perhaps the one on Amazon was an old one? What do I do if the wretched man is seventy or something? They said in some review or other that he was a recluse. How old was the vile fellow? I had been swatting up on Henry de ruddy Pilfort until two in the morning, but it didn't give his birth-date anywhere. He always wore a bow tie, I'd learned. He had a Texan drawl. Oh God! I'm a writer not an actor and I didn't possess a bow tie.

'I never was photogenic!' I heard myself reply to the Legs. I tried the Texas drawl a bit. I felt my mouth hanging open with the effort and shut it again quickly.

'Ah! Mr. de Pilfort. It was so lucky that you were able to catch such an early plane. You could almost have had lunch with us, sir!' The Legs' husband, the publisher, had arrived.

I gave the man's outstretched clammy hand a limp shake.

'You don't have your lawyer with you, Mr. de Pilfort - for the contract I mean.'

A lawyer. Damn! Noone had said anything about a lawyer.

'He will be here by a later plane, Mr. um..er..'
'Linklater, Linklater.'

'Sorry. I'm terrible with names.' I said. I'd forgotten the Texas accent. It could go hang, I decided.

'Not in your books, not in your books! Great names in your books,' chuckled my host. 'What have you there, if I may be so bold as to ask?' nodding towards the briefcase I was clutching. "So bold as to ask", sycophantic worm, I thought. Just because he sees great dollar signs flashing up like a cash register in front of his eyes each time he looks at me.
'Oh! Something that you might like to cast your eye over, perhaps!'

'Perhaps? Certainly, certainly. Another one to keep people awake reading all night, thrilled to the core?'

'Well, it's a bit different,' I began cautiously. I'd brought my work along of course. Would he fall for it? Would the real de Pilfort turn up before the publisher could get a good look at it? At all events, I'd decided late last night that chapter 1 was a bit boring. I'd start him at chapter 3.

'Well, it's like this..' I began to explain. We sat down at a table, as Legs ushered the children, including my daughter, out of the room and into the yard. 'The book begins with a dream sequence in which ...'

'A dream sequence,' muttered the publisher. 'Sorry, go on,' he added.

'In this dream, this man, who is an alchemist...' The publisher's head shot up. 'An alchemist?'

'Yeah, he dreams of transmuting lead into gold, but only figuratively, mind you. Not real lead into real gold. What he really wants to do is to take bad novels and rewrite them so that they become good novels. Or transmute them into good novels. Lead into gold, you see.'

I'd been looking at the table but now I looked up to see the publisher's eyes round and staring.

'Are you with me?' I asked. He nodded. 'Well, this guy, the kind of hero, if You Like, he has to make money of course so he works as a travelling salesman for women's underwear. You know, he goes from store to store trying to get them to stock Nobbler's lingerie. Nobbler, that's the name of the company he works for, see.' The publisher nodded again, more faintly this time, I thought. 'So he does quite a lot of flying, naturally.' The publisher's eyebrows shot up. 'No, I mean in aeroplanes of course!' I tried to laugh at my joke while the publisher looked at me suspiciously, probably wondering if I was completely off my head.

'Well,' I continued, 'the flying's important because it's in airports where he really wants to operate. In airport bookshops. There can be nowhere else on the planet where bad literature is so highly concentrated as in airport bookshops. Look at those shelves of bestsellers.'

I was getting a bit heated up, quite forgetting that I, Henry de Pilfort, would generally find my name writ large in the bestseller section and also that the publisher before me was probably responsible for quite a few of those potboilers. 'Yeah, look at them,' I went on regardless, 'so much pulp. Toilet paper, the lot of them. Okay, back to the story. When he's not hawking bras and panties around the country, he's at home working on.....'

'Mr. de Pilfort,' interrupted the publisher hesitantly. 'This does sound very interesting indeed and very unlike anything that you've written before. I wonder if it would sell? Perhaps with your name on it, anything...er...' He corrected himself just in time. 'Perhaps you would like to leave it with me and I'll get a good read of it.' This is where he should have steepled his fingers. His sort always do in the bad novels that I would like to burn. But he didn't. He just put his hand out in a gesture which seemed to indicate that I should hand the manuscript over to him. So I did.

It was great to see my manuscript in the hands of a publisher - even if after he had had it before him, it might well end up behind him shortly afterwards. Figuratively speaking of course.

Well I promised you a sure-fire way of getting your work looked at by a publisher. Flip through all the famous writers, find one you look like and impersonate him (or her). It's the only way and good luck.

PS A note was added by my friend which I should like to communicate to my readers. It reads: In a further piece of advice to authors, which I will ask my friend to put on ezines at a later date, I will tell you the next step (if I'm not in the State Pen.)

About the Author

David Field is a professor of Astrophysics at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. He has published numerous articles in many Astronomy and Physics journals. His most recent novel, The Fairest Star, the third installment of His Friends and Enemies Trilogy, has just been published. For more information, please visit:
http://www.davidfield.co.uk

Enid Blyton Promotional Video