Small Isn't Always Beautiful

Catherine, way back when.

When I was a student, I had a summer job working in a small hotel in Wales. I almost wrote 'spent a summer in Wales' but I didn't spend the whole summer there. I worked there for a few weeks and then chucked it in and came home. 

I don't remember why I chose Wales, but I think it may have had something to do with liking Alan Garner's book The Owl Service so much, even though when I had written Garner a fan letter some years earlier, and innocently? naively? - I was about 12 - mentioned J R R Tolkien, I got a very dusty response. Still, it taught me a lesson about being nice to people who contact me about my own work, and I hope I still am. 

Anyway, it didn't put me off the Owl Service, which I still reread from time to time. But an indirect result was that I spent a miserable few weeks working in Wales. Not that it had anything to do with Wales as a country, which I'm sure is a fine place. 

It was the job.

If you are going to work in hospitality, do not, if you can possibly help it, work in a small hotel. You will work long split shifts, but worse, you will do everything, all the time. There were three or four of us girls, packed into a small, dark, stuffy bedroom, and we were worked into the ground. Worse, the owner shouted at us and sometimes threw a massive tantrum which involved screaming, while tossing pots and pans into the sink, filling it with a hellish mixture of caustic fluids and ordering us to clean them. We changed beds, we cleaned rooms, we cooked, we waited at table, we washed up, we mopped floors, we cleaned toilets, did laundry, we washed windows, we hoovered carpets, we poured drinks, we ran from pillar to post and we had very little free time. Besides that, the dust had triggered my asthma and I was wheezing a lot. 

Friends who have worked in big hotels tell me that although the work is equally hard, the hours equally long, the rooms even more filthy (I gather that the rich are filthiest of all) - you at least do your own job and that's that. In good hotels, there's a lot more organisation, and usually enough staff for the job in hand. Also management tends not to scream at the staff in public, because it upsets the punters. 

Anyway, I came home a bit early. The only thing I got from those weeks was a knowledge of how to make sherry trifle on a grand scale and a compliment from an elderly guest in a wheelchair who, I gather, was a photographer of some distinction, and who stopped me before I left to say that he would have liked to photograph me. I still thought of myself very much as an ugly duckling at that stage, so it stayed with me. 

What I should have learned, and didn't, was that small isn't always as beautiful as you think it might be - and - later -  that the lesson applies as much to publishing as it does to working in hotels. Big publishers have their drawbacks too as I would find to my cost a few years later when I signed with an excellent, reputable, nurturing, medium sized publisher, only for the company to be taken over in mid project by a mega corporation who were after beach bonkbusters and not much else.

Small publishers, like small hotels, can be well meaning, full of ideas and ideals, praised and admired, and they often produce lovely books. At their best, they are hands on and caring. That's the good side. The media will love them. The reading public who, on the whole, don't care who publishes anything, will see elegant swans, gliding along, but not the many wee feet paddling like blazes below the surface, i.e. the writers. And sometimes they'll be drowning.

Small publishers, like small hotels, simply don't have enough time or money or staff, don't have the bandwidth, to make things run smoothly for their writers. Much of the time, you're on your own. They certainly don't have time to do publicity. Or even, sometimes, to send out review copies. Mind you, big publishers don't have the inclination to do publicity for any except the starry, celebrity few - who don't really need it. So there's that. 

The only thing to do is decide what works best for you, but - if it isn't working - don't stick with it. Whatever doesn't kill you, doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it breaks you. These days, there are always other options.

Like jacking in a job where the boss is a bully, and hopping on the first train home.