Ageism in Publishing

[Paul Whybrow]

I can understand writers worrying about their age: we worry about every other damned thing, so why not that too?!

That being said, I have never read a good young author and I could not pick out even my favourite author from a line up (OK, he is dead, so its a bad example, but you take my point).

All I would say is that JK Rowling was no spring chicken when she (finally!) got her deal, though more cynical minds would note that she looks younger now than she did then

I once corresponded with one of JK Rowling's tutors at Exeter University, who observed that she looks younger now than she did twenty years before as a student. Proof that there is such a thing as good plastic surgery...or perhaps she did it with magick!

 

[Paul Whybrow]

At the risk of being accused of being sexist or reverse-ageist, I mention the appearances, ages and literary careers of the winners of the two most lucrative writing prizes in 2017. The Daily Mail/Penguin Random House First Crime Novel Competition and the Amazon Kindle Storyteller Award both offered £20,000 and guaranteed publication as prizes.

I entered the DM competition, rather than Amazon's, largely owing to their insistence on exclusivity, meaning that I'd have to remove my ebooks from other online sales venues—a laborious and haphazard process that can take months. I don't like being bossed about, and also, I was troubled by Amazon's opaque references to the commercial viability of any entrants, which was partly decided by readers' purchases. Sure enough, the winner a historical novelist called David Leadbeater has already sold 750,000 ebooks—so he's a safe commercial bet (it ain't much of a competition when the winner is already the winner!). His appearance and age are unimportant compared to his track record at making money.

On the other hand, the winner of the DM competition is easy on the eye and has youth too, with a marketable family background. Lizzy Barber's winning novel may be fantastic, for all I know, but the Daily Mail is a notoriously sexist and ageist newspaper given to disparaging people's appearance, so I'm not surprised that the winner meets their criteria. It would have been a real turn up for the book had they chosen a morbidly obese, or even haggard, frightening-looking pensioner!

I can't help wondering how much writing competition organisers research the backgrounds and looks of entrants they're considering as winners.

I'm starting to sound jaundiced, I know and I've made some provocative observations, but what do you think?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Heeeheee - I was being mean. I was being a bee-atch and referring to Michael Morpurgo. H-o-w-l. But thank you very much, and how lovely. And everyone talks about Mary Wesley on this point. Mary Wesley was famously 70 when, after a string of rejections, she published her first novel in 1982, but that was then, could it happen now?

@AgentPete offers encouragement, and I'm supposing that actually, she would, because the market for what she writes, historical/ romance, is still so strong. As for what helped her writing sell, this review comments that she was anything but an old dear; challenging in her choice of subject matter, and in her directness. The publisher noted a distinctive authorial voice and knew that here was a 'serious' writer.

 

[MaryA]

Calypso and Hebe remain among my favourite unsentimental and shrewd characters from Mary Wesley.

When it comes to older women writers, I think of Penelope Fitzgerald writing a brilliant historical novel, The Blue Flower, at the age of 80. Fitzgerald was unassuming, observant and desperately poor for most of her life despite a very middle-class upbringing in the Knox family (Ronald Knox etc). She lived in council housing, dyed her hair with tea bags, taught at a girls school for years, stood by her likeable but alcoholic crook of a husband and was patronised by the Booker judges even when she won. One of our greatest writers and she got off to a very late start in her publishing life.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

A friend gave me The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. A quiet book but brilliantly, hideously well observed. God help the man or woman who comes up against any self appointed queen bee on her own turf....