What I Learnt at Penguin

Sorry I’ve been absent for a while. I spent the last couple of weeks doing work experience at Penguin Books. And, although it kept me from writing my blog, it was a fantastic experience and I learnt a lot. So what better title for my return blog post than ‘What I Learnt at Penguin’.

During my work experience, my most frequent job was to read manuscripts and write reports on them. Some of these manuscripts had been sent in by agents hoping to get them published. Others were books that had already been published in the US and the agent was looking for a British publisher. And what I learnt from reading these manuscripts is that it seems as though you don’t need to be a good writer to get an agent, and you don’t need to be a good writer to get published in the US.

I read many finished manuscripts that had already been published elsewhere that were badly written, boring and broke every rule every creative writing teacher preaches. So this led me to the conclusion that a publisher will publish your book if they think they can market it, but not necessarily if it’s any good. I read one manuscript that has been published in the US set during the Afghanistan war. The book was awful. There was no suspense, the characters were unrealistic and inconsistent, the encounters and events of the book were painfully manufactured and unnatural. But, a publisher could market it. It’s based on a very topical subject. War books are popular. With the right book cover, the right quotes, the right comparisons, that book could sell.

This conclusion was supported by the conversations I heard around the office. At one point, two editors and an assistant were gathered around a desk talking about a new manuscript that had been sent to them. All three of them loved the book, couldn’t stop going on about how well it was written and how they couldn’t put it down. But they were considering turning it down because they didn’t know how they would market it.  

I’m not writing about this because I want you to bear it in mind when you write. The worst thing you could do as a writer, in my opinion, is conform to what a publisher wants. I just find it very interesting that the commercial publishing industry is so bloody commercial. I'm also not saying anything bad about Penguin here. I have no idea if those manuscripts I read will be published or turned down. All I know is they had been accepted by an agent, and some of them had been published in the US.

There is so much more I could say about what I learnt at Penguin – and so much I probably will say in subsequent blog posts – but I wouldn’t be able to fit it all in here. So for this week I will leave you with a fact that you may find comforting and you may find infuriating: crap books get published all the time whilst good books are in danger of being turned down.

Thanks for reading.