Brian Pendreigh: At last, my novel is virtually complete

LP HARTLEY created one of the most famous openings of all time when he wrote: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Increasingly it seems the present is a foreign country too, where they also do things differently, at least as far as books are concerned.

The Go Between was published in 1953, but takes place mainly in 1900. However, people in those two eras shared the same idea of what was meant by the term “book”. A book was a bound collection of pages, invariably made from paper, and each page contained words (and maybe pictures). The basics predate the development of printing in the 15th Century.

I have written eight books – film books and quiz books, hardbacks and paperbacks. One of them was translated into Japanese and you start at the back. But they were all basically bound collections of paper pages. Book number nine is different.

I am now a foot-soldier in the revolution that has seen sales of e-books on Amazon overtake both hardbacks and paperbacks. E-books are intangible, electronic entities, similar to music downloads.

In London, the tube is now reportedly full of people with Kindles, devices on which they read e-books, about the size of a paperback, but slimmer. And very annoying it is too, because fellow travellers can’t tell if they are reading Tolstoy or Black Lace. Holiday-makers can take all the reading matter they need without the traditional weight or bulk.

I posted the news on Facebook that people would need a Kindle to read my book The Man in the Seventh Row: The Movie Lover’s Novel, only to be told that you can also read e-books on iPads, PCs, phones and the latest generation of washing machines – that last one is a joke, but you get the idea.

It was not my intention to be part of this movement. I began writing The Man in the Seventh Row at much the same time as Hartley began The Go-Between.

It can be difficult to find a publisher for a book that does not easily fit established genres. My novel is about a man who finds himself being sucked into classic films and losing his grip on reality. On Facebook, I inadvertently found myself saying it started off like Nick Hornby, but ultimately was more like Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

We pretty much had a publisher on board, Canongate. But someone new arrived and the deal fell through. And then my agent Giles Gordon died. I was approached by Mark Stanton, who left Canongate to become an agent and was passionate about The Man in the Seventh Row.

So I went back to the computer… and promptly corrupted the file. And then I corrupted the back-up file. At that point the book existed only as one old-tech printed manuscript and I was not even sure who had it. We tracked it down and Stan had someone turn it back into a digital file.

Meanwhile, traditional publishers were increasingly focusing on big names, not necessarily writers. But new publishers were appearing, publishers who could produce e-books and distribute them internationally at a fraction of the cost of traditional books. We got an offer from America, but eventually opted to go with a new Scottish company that will launch this month.

There has been at least as much editorial revision and discussion on The Man in the Seventh Row as any other book I have written, not just the text, but also the cover – a cover for an e-book! There seem to be endless websites being set up for it. They feature extracts, endorsements from Andrew Marr and Barry Norman, and hopefully even a film version.

The film includes an extract from the book, inspired by the opening of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, but relocated in North Berwick.

I hate to think what LP Hartley would think. LP? He would be out of touch these days even if he were to rename himself CD Hartley.