By Gabrielle Brinsmead
When I was nine years old, I was chosen to represent my primary school at a luncheon hosted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Seated across the table from the CBCA’s patron, Lady Cutler, I told her that I was going to be a writer one day.
‘Oh, are you?’ Lady Cutler sounded skeptical.
‘I am,’ I said.
Along with the inevitable knockbacks and disappointments, bright moments and small victories have sustained and encouraged me on this very long journey. I won poetry and essay awards at school and university. I completed a Masters in Creative Writing with distinction, supported by teachers and mentors who assumed that I would eventually succeed. In my first ‘proper’ writing job, my accurate transcription of Alan Paton’s letters was acknowledged by my professor when he published them.
Years after leaving school, a former English teacher met my mother. ‘How is Gabrielle?’ she asked. ‘Is she writing?’ I was, always and endlessly, and when I finished Aussies in Karachi, I believed that it was an entertaining farce that merited and would find an audience.
After sending out a significant number of queries, I was delighted to receive an ‘offer’ from a publisher whom I will call X (no relation at all to Twitter).
‘We enjoyed Aussies in Karachi and would very much like to publish your work. We are however at the present time unable to offer you a traditional contract. If you are interested in receiving information on one of our inclusive contracts where the cost of production is partly shared with the author, please let me know and I can send you the details.’
Without sufficiently researching X, at the time it seemed like the best road to publication. I was elated at the thought of finally seeing my book on a shelf. My correspondent seemed equally enthusiastic, going so far as to welcome me into X’s ‘family’. In return for ten monthly contributions of 250 pounds, my book would be edited, formatted, printed and bound. One copy would even be delivered to the British Library!
Naturally I had reservations about paying for this privilege. Not entirely sure that X was purely a vanity publisher, I was also too aware of the way that covid had affected the world of publishing. ‘It’s a shit-show out there,’ one decorated literary acquaintance told me.
In Pakistan, relatively isolated from my own circle of writing colleagues, it was easy enough to convince myself that ‘inclusive contracts’ were the new normal for first-time authors. Less than three months after signing, my doubts continued to grow. Having been asked to design my own cover and write my own blurb, press release and author biography, my production coordinator was not interested in discussing any aspect of what I submitted. Agitated by her silence, I eventually wrote that ‘my understanding was that the editorial process would entail a certain amount of back and forth. Without a working relationship with you, I don’t know how we can achieve [a book that is finished] to our mutual satisfaction.’
All that I received in return, at least until my last payment, were out-of-office emails and silence. Having paid in full, really fearing that I had been taken for a ride, a new production coordinator (no explanation was ever offered for the change) sent back my first set of proofs.
My manuscript had not been edited in the traditional sense, nor was I convinced that a human being (rather than a computer program) had actually done the work. I received no feedback regarding plot, character development, structure, style, or whether I had achieved what I set out to do with the novel. So, what did I get in exchange for 2500 pounds and 11 months of anxiety? Some spell-checking, but not all, and some inconsistent formatting. For example, eight bullet-points were added to a list of ten details. Even worse, my beloved manuscript had broken out in a rash-like profusion of commas and dashes. This is when I should have complained. But due to a lack of confidence and experience, I enlisted my husband and a few really good friends, and together we attempted to fix the damage.
When the second proofs came back, one year and three months after signing, they were even worse. Some of our changes had been incorporated into the text, but not all. Too late, I examined the other books published by X and read the experiences of other aggrieved writers who had made the same mistake. That’s when I realized that my book, if and when it came out, would not look like or be the sort that I would buy or read.
This was the hardest time to withdraw, after I had paid so much money, waited so long and done so much of the work myself. Although disappointed, I still gained from the experience. Above all, it made me realize that I needed to care more deeply for my work. An unpublished manuscript is like a strange, gifted child. A loving parent would not send such a being to any old summer camp or boarding school, to be mauled and mistreated, bullied and ignored. The same reasoning applies to manuscripts. Over the decades I have come to accept without question that my work is always being evaluated. Now I realize that agents, editors and publishers need to be evaluated too, by writers looking for the best possible hands in which to place fictional offspring. It takes a village to raise a child, and a number of dedicated, gifted professionals to transform a manuscript into a novel that can be appreciated by a wide audience. A writer needs a trusting partnership, grounded in mutual admiration and respect, with an editor who wants the best for their work and will strive, from the beginning right to the end, to bring it out.
Gabrielle Brinsmead is an Australian writer, artist and curator. She lives in Pakistan with her husband, her children and her pets. You can contact her here: gbrinsmead@gmail.com or see her Instagram here: gabriellebrins@insta
