Free The Deal by Tony Drury

waiter said “merci” and turned to Alistair, who waved his hand in the air. The waiter wrote something down and nodded.
    “You’re a regular here?” she said.
    “They know I’ll always choose the sea bass if they have it and I like a Caesar salad as a starter.”
    “Is food important to you, Alistair?”
    “I can’t resist food and decent company,” he replied. “Often I’m with authors or agents, sometimes both. But then I have to work.”
    “What will you be trying to achieve?” she continued, as she sipped the water and then drank some more wine.
    “The job has changed from when we first started,” he said. “Initially we specialised in finance books, many of which were, essentially, vanity publishing.”
    “That’s where the author pays to have his book published?”
    “Yes. In the world of publishing it’s the cheap end. A professional publisher would only commission a book if he thought it saleable and worthy of his list.” He sipped some water. “I thought there was a market there and I was right. I found that lots of people in the City thought that they could write and I gave them an opportunity. Production costs, and especially printing overheads, have been falling in recent years so it’s not as expensive as in the past.”
    “So what has changed?”
    “As we became profitable and acquired more titles I started to want to enter the world of general publishing. I was being offered new books all the time. We tried a few and realised that a small niche publisher had a future.”
    “I’m never certain what the word ‘niche’ means.” Sara said, as she smiled at her host and sipped some wine. She was not only listening to his responses, but also studying his face. He was treating each of her points with genuine gravity and trying hard to provide full answers. She found herself beginning to relax and enjoy the lunch. She was being taken seriously.
    “In my world I think it reflects a choice,” he said. “City Fiction concentrates on thrillers and political stories reflecting the world of finance in modern times. Forgive the lack of modesty, but I give the business an edge by being in the City and by knowing people. I find that the books come to us now either from agents or from City people themselves.”
    “And so you spend more time with authors?” Again she smiled, but then hid her expression behind her glass of water.
    “Our authors are our assets,” he replied. “The newer ones can be nervous, perhaps uncertain. They can be lonely. Writing is a solitary occupation. As they become more experienced, and especially if their book, or books, are selling, the issues of advances and royalties will surface. It’s easier to transact deals with their agents. I do enjoy my time with the authors though. They can be very interesting in their own right, of course.”
    The waiter arrived to serve the starters and to replenish the wine glasses. He raised the bottle slightly and Alistair nodded.
    “We haven’t finished the first one,” she laughed.
    “We will,” he responded. “It’s only a matter of time.”
    “So, is publishing basically a numbers game?”
    “In general fiction – which is what we now publish – yes. The objective is to try to create a backlist of titles so that what we call annuity income, by which we mean repeat annual sales, aggregates to fifty percent of the company’s turnover. Put another way, on the first of January each year, we hope to have banked guaranteed sales of our existing titles to pay the overheads in the year ahead.”
    Sara sipped some wine.
    “You have over ninety titles now. What are your… er… annuity earnings now?”
    “Annuity income is the usual term, Sara. You might as well get it right in your report.”
    “I’ll decide what goes in the report, Alistair. What’s the answer to the question?”
    “Our year end is June so I’ll have our final results fairly soon. We think it will be around thirty-two percent this time.”
    “You