So what do you do? A good story which seems to be worthy of publication but no apparent means to progress?

SELF PUBLISHING?

Years ago "vanity publishing" was a nightmare. Two or three thousand books (which the writer had to purchase) and the prospect of storing them in a damp garage and hawking them round the bookshops. Misery: not for the faint-hearted (or fat OAPs like me) and certainly only for those who have got a very high opinion of the themselves and their abilities. Someone - was it Priestly or Shaw or even Chesterton? - said that anyone who writes one word for any reason other than payment is a fool, and this is an adage of which I have been very much aware ever since I first put finger to PC key. I have never felt butterflies of excitement upon seeing my name in the New Law Journal or any of the other publications to which I have contributed over the years - the only real pleasure being when I cashed the cheque.

Ah, money! And there’s the rub, because the publishers aren’t exactly charities, either! Why would they risk a penny on an unheard of and unpublished old hack with a crime fiction manuscript, when they can have a certain sure-fire earner with two hundred pages of badly written semi porn, dubious fashion hints and near-libellous reminiscences from an illiterate alleged celebrity with an over-sized chest who briefly appeared on a third rate TV show or a retired bank robber who once met someone who knew Charlie Kray?

And so, unless the writer is inordinately vain and desperate to see his work in print at no matter what cost, it really it comes down to confidence – confidence that the prospective book will have appeal and is saleable. Is the writer prepared to take a chance on this? Does he really believe that if he is fortunate enough to get his three hundred pages on a shelf in the book shop at Luton airport that within a week worn and dog-eared copies will be seen beside deckchairs in Marbella and Juan-les-Pins? Does the well-intentioned lady from Tadcaster honestly and truly believe that her revelations regarding Taoism and associated Chinese philosophical religious traditions will sell, any more than retired Colonel Satterthwaite’s memoirs of drunken behaviour in the officers’ mess in Poona in the run-up to the British pulling out of India? No, of course they don’t, but they pay to publish because there a few friends who will read the piece and because they think they have something to pass on. Vanity? Well, not really – but not commercially sound, either.