We had a great party here in Kings Cross yesterday evening to celebrate the publication of the first six titles in the Macmillan New Writing fiction imprint. As followers of this blog or readers of the Guardian, Observer etc newspapers will know, our announcement of this initiative last year caused something of a stir amongst what the British call 'the chattering classes'. Thomas Hardy was going to turn in his grave because Macmillan was proposing not to rewrite an author's work if it wasn't up to scratch. Macmillan was sinking into becoming a 'vanity press' (in spite of the fact that we have rejected well over 99% of all submissions and absolutely do not accept money from authors wishing to be published). Macmillan's standards of editing would fall because the person running the scheme was a 'marketing guy' (actually that is one job Mike Barnard has never done and he is a damned sight more literate than many of the editors I see hanging around in the Groucho Club). And so on.

As a matter of courtesy we invited every journalist, literary agent and commentator who had written on the subject and expressed concern to a debate on new writing at the London College of Communications and to the party. Not one showed up in spite of both events being hugely successful with authors, publishers, printers and booksellers mixing and discussing new ways to stimulate creative writing. I suppose the commentators were too busy protecting their reputations and trying to spike other initiatives which might threaten their comfortable and elitist status quo.

Most of our industry is decent and professional but clearly not as unified and unbitchy as for instance beekeepers - a thousand great places to bee on the web!