BITCH SLAP

Publishing has gone a bit Carmen Callil over the last few weeks. After the relative calm of the British Book Awards (apart from my being refused entry for some ridiculous technicality – something about not being a nominee/ guest/ wearing a I PREFER IT DIGITALLY t-shirt) I settled down for what I thought would be a quiet couple of weeks laughing myself stupid over the slush-pile (‘I have novelized the film Pride and Prejudice etc’) and excessive tweeting. O, how wrong. How very wrong.

On submission with a dead cert (hot chick, posh surname, high-concept book about a gay fish who reverses the effects of Global Warming) I set my auction date and waited. And waited. Total #fail - with not even Jamie Byng camping on my doorstep or a totally unnecessary £500,000 pre-empt from Simon and Schuster. I felt wretched and I realized right then that this job was impossible – a bit like trying to manage Geri Halliwell – and that it was time I ditched it for something cushy and well-paid like editing or bookselling. I started putting feelers out…

Suddenly I got a call from Colin Firth, as one does, begging me to take him as my plus one to the hottest ticket in the publishing world tonight. I said I would see what I could do. Ever since I gave him such successful career advice earlier this year, there’s no getting rid of him.

The first job call I made was to a man with Russian accent who told mehe was about to buy ‘Vaterschtones’ and needed someone to head it up. ‘Look no further’, said I, ‘I once worked in a Pound Store and I have a strictly vodka only diet.’ He sounded very interested but when he asked me about my national strategy I was confused. ‘National strategy? You mean there are OTHER stores than the Piccadilly one’. The phone went dead rather too quickly…

I then got straight through to Gail and said I was a dead cert to take over from Kate Elton. ‘Whatever makes you think you can head up Century?’ growled Gail in a honey-over-gravel voice. ‘Well I love reading books covered in pink glitter or dripping with gore and the thought of spanking Ben Dunne when he gets out of line makes me feel all warm inside. There can’t be any more to it than that surely’. Dead line AGAIN.

Finally the Big One – heading up Amazon Publishing in the U.K. As long as I didn’t have to work in a big drafty warehouse full of brown cardboard boxes I could really go for this one. It can’t be that hard – choose books with bold covers and screw people for ‘marketing contributions’. Sort of like running an Oxfam shop in Sicily I imagine. I tried in vain to find Larry Kirschbaum’s phone number and had to resort instead to filling in a drop down box, selecting Superprime option to deliver my C.V before being asked if I wanted to giftwrap it. I then gave up in frustration as an email pinged into my box ‘Daisy – customers who applied for UK CEO of Amazon also bought ‘You’re Fired’ by Lord Sugar.

Later I did let Firth come as my date to The Big Event because I’m nice like that. Parking at the back of a warehouse in Swindon we made our way through the rubble until we found a group of people in a circle in a rubble-strewn patch of land. Surrounded by the ghost of Catherine Cookson, a red-faced Tom Sharpe and several other authors (whose names are subject to super-injunctions) I could see Susan Sandon and Sonia Land smacking the living hell out of each other using only e-readers and rolled contracts as weapons. Forget job losses, bookshop closures and promoting the best young literally voices – this was the stuff of life. As Sonia drop kicked Sandon  into a pile of broken glass I felt proud to be an agent. How could I ever give this up?

@missdaisyfrost