That’s good for the book, right?

This is Tom McCarthy, author of C; this is what he says when I call to say he’s been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. OK – he already knew, and he was definitely happy, but he was cool about it. We at Random House were distinctly uncool. Oh yes. In the thin-walled nooks and open-plan alleys here, there were tears – tears! – and hugs; I witnessed an unnamed MD doing gleeful fist-pumps on the downward escalator of Pimlico tube.

This was on the Wednesday – six days before the public announcement of the shortlist. Within minutes of getting the news, I start getting emails, tentative emails from mates at other imprints, imprints with books on the longlist…and a strange shadow game ensues:

Have you had news?
News?
Yes. News.
You know I can’t talk about the news. If there were news.
Nor can I.
Good … But do you have news?
I hear there is news.
What news have you heard?
That there is news. Have you had news?
Yes.
What news? Good news?
I can’t say.
 Nor can I… So it is good news, yeah?

The publisher is told early so they have time to ready reprints of the book and make grand strategies – the expectation, of course, is that sales of the shortlisted titles are going to explode. And the Booker does help, it really helps – the percentage increase in sales is enormous.

A confession. Before I started working in publishing, I was not that aware of the Booker. One of my tutors had chaired the judges in Yann Martel year, and I remembered the news when Vernon God Little and Amsterdam won – but up until 2005 I had never read a book on the Booker longlist or shortlist (at least not while it was on those lists, if you see what I mean). And I considered myself ‘bookish’. So I don’t quite know how the Booker works for readers – who exactly is it that buys the books? Do people buy all of the books on the shortlist, etc.? I look forward to finding out over the next month or so…

A couple of days after the news about Tom, we got news of a weird, pleasingly symmetrical moment. Matthew Hooton’s wholly beautiful novel, Deloume Road, had been shortlisted for the Not the Booker Prize. Now this got me very excited. Unlike C, this book had not had the rub of the commercial green – and here it was taking on a life of its own months after publication, starting to get some of the attention I firmly believe it deserves.

The Not the Booker is an online contest established by the Guardian a couple of years ago with tongue a bit in cheek – the prize was a mug or something, rather than £50k. This year anybody could vote for a book they wanted to see shortlisted. The site was bombarded, controversially and suspiciously, some think – had authors canvassed friends into rigging the vote for them? There was a call to abandon the voting, but the result stood, and I found myself getting all idealistic (and simplistic?) about this prize – that ‘Not’ in ‘Not the Booker’ seemed fully realised now. Unlike the Booker, the NTB process was anarchic, ill-tempered and perhaps underhand, but it offered up a shortlist of five books which most people would never have picked up, even within the literati – in fact, especially within the literati, I reckon. Publishers weren’t involved – they didn’t select or submit titles (and, for the record, this publisher didn’t vote). Our economic concerns and hunches about judges weren’t reflected in the selection process, and I’m not sure what filled that vacuum exactly, but I like what it came up with.

So, READ C, of course – that’s the main thing … but then leg it over to the Guardian site (http://bit.ly/2uLmw8) and read five bewilderingly different books, and argue about them. Nicely, if you can.