‘IT’S very hard to make a definite assessment of this book.’ In the course of rejecting novels they probably should have published, big publishers sometimes, kindly, enclose with your rejection letter a copy of their reader’s report, should your particular manuscript have got that far in the assessment process. The day after receiving this particular rejection, I took a copy of the reader’s report down to the local library where I used the photocopy machine to photocopy this phrase then enlarge it to ten times its original size. I then took this enlarged phrase home and glued it to the wall above my desk. It’s still there now: ‘It’s very hard to make a definite assessment of this book.’

So what did the reader mean by this, and in what way did this form part of the argument for the book’s rejection? Because no matter which way you hold it up and look at it, the reader clearly intended it to be taken as a negative comment. The reader, basically, was not easily able to sum up the book, identify its genre and therefore its market—and if they, the reader doing the reader’s report, were unable to sum it up and package it succinctly, then how on earth would the marketing department? The book was rejected, in part, because the book could not easily be explained.