I have just received a copy of Green College News, the alumni magazine of Green College, Oxford where I was once a supernumerary fellow (whatever that means). The college was set up by Sir Richard Doll with money from Cecil Green, the founder of Texas Instruments. Doll was then Regius Professor of Medicine and was committed to growing the Oxford faculty of medicine significantly (which has indeed happened, spectacularly successfully). Many of the established colleges were sniffy about offering college facilities to all these new medics ('we'll be over-run...') and so he established Green to abosrb some of this growth and to offer a new sort of Oxford college. He succeeded.
The sad news reported in the magazine is that Green is to merge with Templeton College, an institution set up to specialise in management and business studies. The move is justified on the grounds of scale, cost, academic strategy and available capital (Templeton sold some land and they could use the cash generated to develop further the Green College site in the centre of Oxford).
So, why sad? I'm not sure but I'll bet that academic politics has played a part and that this merger was driven by that more than anything else. The new entity will not differ significantly from the other colleges. The medical and management strands of the individual colleges will be lost. And I'll bet the synergies promised do not emerge. It all sounds like the mergers that happen in publishing on a fairly regular basis where two and two end up making three.
On a more positive note, warmest congratulations to Joe Wikert whose Publishing 2020 blog has won the 2006 Annual Litty Award for Best Publishing Blogger from the Book Chronicle. I'm not surprised.
And finally today is the first birthday of Macmillan New Writing and I asked its editor, Will Atkins, to bring us all up to date with this heinous (in the eyes of some people) creation.
Macmillan New Writing – ‘The Ryanair of Publishing’™ – is a year old this month. We launched in April 2006 with six debut novels, and have published one per month since then. News of the imprint’s creation was greeted with scepticism from some quarters of Literary London: apparently Macmillan was not only ‘abdicating cultural responsibility’ but taking advantage of ‘impressionable young authors’.
So what was all the fuss about? The business model is simple: we consider unsolicited novels from unpublished writers; we don’t pay an advance but we do pay a good royalty. (Nicholas Clee lamented in a recent Bookseller piece that royalties from sales of his own recently published book were ‘lower than they would have been under the terms of the Macmillan New Writing list.’) Anyhow, suffice to say some commentators found this rather modest, rather old-fashioned way of publishing distasteful.
In other respects, MNW works in the same way as any conventional publishing imprint: the books are edited and produced to the same standard as other Pan Macmillan titles; jackets are designed by Pan Macmillan’s design department; publicity is handled by a dedicated publicist.
The criticism that greeted MNW’s launch twelve months ago doesn’t appear to have been taken seriously by writers (and it has, in any case, been outweighed by far more positive coverage since then): around 7,000 completed novels have now been submitted, of which we have published eighteen. The latest, Brian McGilloway’s superb police procedural, Borderlands, was launched last Thursday at a packed event in Derry.
Not only does publication of Borderlands coincide with MNW’s first birthday, we believe it also marks the emergence of a major new voice in crime fiction. Set on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the novel follows Inspector Benedict Devlin as he investigates a series of murders on his home patch; it’s a hugely accomplished piece of writing, deftly plotted, and distinguished by intelligent characterisation and a powerful sense of place. As Marcel Berlins said last week in the Times, ‘Brian McGilloway’s command of plot and assurance of language make it difficult to believe that Borderlands is his debut . . . his characters convince, and he skilfully conveys the cloying atmosphere of a small rural community.’
MNW will publish the sequel to Borderlands, Gallows Lane, next April, and Brian has recently been signed up by Macmillan to write a further three installments in the Inspector Devlin series. A German edition of Borderlands will appear next year, followed by the translation of Gallows Lane.
One of the principal aims behind MNW's creation was to find a sustainable way of publishing debut novelists, some of whom we hoped would find a long-term home with Pan Macmillan's mainstream imprints. With Brian McGilloway's recent signing to Macmillan, that is starting to happen, and we're confident that it won't be long before other such deals occur. In addition to second novels by several MNW 'debutantes', a nuumber of MNW originals will be reappearing as Pan paperbacks over the coming year, starting with Edward Charles's superb In the Shadow of Lady Jane in August (and look out for Edward's second novel, Daughters of the Doge, next month.
As for taking advantage of vulnerable young authors – ask Brian Martin. The urbane and erudite author of the critically acclaimed literary thriller North (to be published by Pan in paperback in September) describes himself as ‘rivalling Mary Wesley’ – in that he published his first novel at the age of 68.