A word from 4th Estate

Today's blog is brought to you by an editor from 4th Estate. One of the more literary imprints in the HarperCollins stable, 4th Estate is responsible for publishing many highly-acclaimed novels and authors. Take it away Mark...

Fourth Estate is a broad church; it rose to prominence in the 90s publishing non-fiction (Longitude, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, Fermat’s Last Theorem), but its eclectic list now includes novelists (Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jonathan Franzen, Joseph O’Neill), cookery writers (Nigel Slater, Giorgio Locatelli, Richard Corrigan), entertainers (Eric Sykes, Denis Norden), comedians (Mitchell & Webb, Spike Milligan), polemicists (Nick Cohen, Francis Wheen, Ben Goldacre), and a chimpanzee (Cheeta). It’s a list I’m proud to work on, and one that combines a truly excellent stable of writers, with great scope to try out new ideas.

Literary fiction and non-fiction of the kind that Fourth Estate publishes is notoriously difficult to predict. This is, I think, unfortunate for publishers (in financial terms at least) but fortunate for the health of literature as a whole, and it throws down the gauntlet at editors to be proactive in finding the next book that will capture the reading public’s imagination, rather than merely reacting to already-established trends.

The most overriding thing I look for, though, is that all-important but impossible-to-define ‘voice’. You’ll no doubt have heard that a hundred times, and will hear it another thousand, but I can’t overestimate how important it is; there is no point in worrying about character or dialogue or pace or plot if you don’t have a voice to begin with. The thing about voice, from a reader’s perspective, is that it’s unmistakeably there; there is a subtly different shift in the way you read a paragraph that makes you sit up and pay attention, and want to hear what they’ve got to say.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I can’t offer any advice on how to get one. What I would say, though, is read, read and read some more. There really are no good writers who aren’t, first, extremely good readers.

And one other thing - editors really do want to find writers they want to publish. We’re in publishing because we love books, and because we want to publish writers we love. Getting published can be, I know, a very slow and painful and opaque process (if it happens at all), but we set up this site so we could find those writers, and I very much hope we do.