Book publishing is all about knowing your audience. Knowing that there is a book out there for everybody, you just have to understand what kind of a book people will want to read and then find the best way to tell people about it.
So when we published a book called Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain, we knew exactly who to send it to if we wanted to hit the right audience... but the people at the Booker Prize didn’t seem particularly interested, even confused. They rambled on about fiction this and fiction that but, to be honest, we weren’t really listening, we just knew that it was because the book wasn’t written by Ian McEwan or J. M. Coetzee. And then the people at the Orange Prize said the same thing! It’s discrimination against non-fiction publishers, I tell you!
So we looked at the other book prizes out there and finally settled upon the one that would give Big Brother Watch the recognition it truly deserved... but for some strange reason, they told us we weren’t quite right for the Costa Children’s Book Award. They didn’t even give us a reason. I mean, not that we’re bitter or anything, but who needs ‘em!
Brushing off the haters we settled upon one last literary prize. It was a long shot, but we figured that there might be a small chance that the Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing that is also named after the guy who wrote 1984, might at least consider our book.
Unfortunately, despite George Orwell having coined the phrase ‘Big Brother’ and written most of his seminal classic about the demise of civil liberties in modern society, they told us they couldn’t consider our title for the Orwell prize. But they said, understandably, that this was because they didn’t accept collections of essays. And at least they were nice about it as well, not like those Booker people.
(Note: we have heard that the people at the Booker prize judging panel are actually quite nice, but we only publish non-fiction and haven’t yet got the political equivalent of Wolf Hall lined up for the Spring.)
Even though it can't win the Orwell Prize, you can still order Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain here for £9.99