I was recently invited by the Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall, to give a talk on ‘Military Books; Where we have been and where we are heading’. This was part of a panel session, under the Chairmanship of Gen Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley, GBE, DSO, MC. Other participants included Frank Cass, Andrew Haywood, Ian Drury, and Lee Johnson.
Following the various talks such as mine, which follows, there was a question and answer session (and I have sometimes known such to be more interesting than the talk itself...). Questions ranged from publishing on the Napoleonic Wars, the value of a literary agent, whether publishers would risk undertaking books on an unusual subject, the small number of defence studies published in the UK, etc.
“Taking up some of the points raised by the previous speakers is rather like the story of those people who bump into an elephant on a pitch-black dark night. One feels a tusk and tries to forecast to what it is connected; someone else its tail. The elephant in this situation is of course a metaphor for military history, and I leave it to you to determine who is at the sharp and blunt end.
When I entered the book world 20,000 books a year were published in Great Britain, and Whitaker’s record shows military was joined with naval as one of 49 subject categories, having 305 books in 1955 (that includes 86 reprints and new editions, and 18 translations).
The 45 year period since then, to the year 2000 has seen a multiplication of nearly six times to just under 120,000 books being published last year. The Whitaker’s record now provides 139 subject categories, and there are five for military subjects with 932 books. Of course books of military interest can also appear in other categories, such as biography.
When I started in the book world the interest was almost wholly in works of a narrative nature about World War II, in escape stories such as The Wooden Horse, high adventure such as The Dam Busters, personal heroism and inspiration such as Cheshire VC or The White Rabbit. Notable authors of the day included Chester Wilmot and Arthur Bryant.
In terms of military fiction, usually overlooked in a discussion of this nature, in the mid-1950s the best-sellers included war novels such as The Cruel Sea and HMS Ulysses, wonderful tales of a traditional nature. It was not until the mid-1980s that a novel which changed military fiction was published. I refer to The Hunt for Red October, a book which I turned down.
The interest in, and sales of, books on military subjects has waxed and waned over the years.
Unchanged and consistently well-received over the years are the major memoirs and works of study. Fine books by authors such as John Keegan, Max Hastings, Alastair Horne and so forth will always find a strong audience. The audience for them is usually a wide one and they are published by the major trade houses such as HarperCollins and Macmillan. The success of Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is an excellent and significant example. But looking at military book publishing as a genre, one has to look at what the specialist houses such as my Greenhill, or Pen & Sword, Spellmount, and Osprey are doing.
The publishing of academic studies on military subjects has very definitely grown over the years, as Frank Cass has discussed. Few enough were published yesteryear; now many are published every year by firms such as Frank Cass, or Praeger and Greenwood in the United States, and many American university presses. Because a company such as Greenhill has to be a viable business we necessarily look to a certain level of sale to make a book published in our context commercially realistic, and we direct quite a number of authors who make submissions to us on to Cass and others. I have to tell you that we have an adage ‘the better the book’ (meaning the greater its academic contribution to knowledge) ‘the lower the sale’. Yes we work hard to publish works of quality and have editors and sub-editors who are both technically qualified as professionals but also knowledgeable in the subject area (you see some of the books by general publishers criticised by reviewers for poor proof reading; I don’t think anyone has ever criticised one of our books on this account), but we have to publish books that we can sell in commercially viable quantities.
But in terms of changing, evolving publishing programmes, one major trend, for about twenty years, was ‘nuts and bolts’. The first military book with which I was personally involved with (just over forty years ago) was The Lee Enfield Rifle by Major E. G. B. Reynolds. I then worked on such books as British Military Firearms by Howard Blackmore or The British Soldier’s Firearm by Christopher Roads. In 1966 I founded Arms & Armour Press and undertook a whole generation of ‘nuts and bolts’ books. A little book like The Sherman by Peter Chamberlain and Chris Ellis led to major works. Another little book like Military Pistols and Revolvers by Ian Hogg - his first ever book - again led on to a whole generation, two generations, of studies of firearms and military equipment. These little books were trailblazers, and the whole period was an exciting one, publishing on subjects which had never been published before. It seems however that now the day of the integrated book, with illustrations and data, has passed. My Arms & Armour Press as it was then could not be replicated today.
Another major trend which probably constituted at one time one third of all military books published was about the Soviet Union. But when the Soviets rolled over and played dead, and were seen not to be ten feet tall, that whole area of publishing collapsed. At that time I had just published a phenomenal, astonishing book called Soviet Wings. It was a large format book with wonderful full colour photographs of things that we had never seen before. It was published in the last days of the Soviet Empire, and almost as we were publishing it interest in the whole subject area changed and we just managed to sell out of the book as sales collapsed. It was a large-format and costly book and the consequences would have been very damaging to us if we had delayed even by a few months. You may remember at that time the immense number of remainders about the Soviet war machine. About six months later I met the team from Moscow with whom we had arranged the book, and they discussed with me the many opportunities that there now would be for similar books. One included an inside view of projects 941 and 705 (the Typhoon and Alpha class Soviet nuclear submarines). We had a good conversation reviewing the success of Soviet Wings, but then I had to say (and this reflects the wider and general enthusiast market, rather than some of you professionals) that we could not undertake further such books because ‘peace is not good for business’.
Personal experience also continues to be a strong form of writing, especially when coupled with Special Forces. Adventure is read by an awful lot of ‘wannabes’, people who but for commuting and having to hold a nine to five job could be doing what they read about. When I undertook a book about the SAS and I advised a colleague, he asked if this meant that the business was going to be moving sideways into books on civil aviation. Can you believe that there was a time when nobody had heard about them? The author in fact persuaded me to use his suggested title, and I let him have his wish for the audience for books of regimental history was limited; I felt it would make no difference in the greater scheme of things. The book was Who Dares Wins by Tony Geraghty.
The Arab-Israeli Wars were good for military publishing, with a clear-cut goodie with a white hat and a baddie with a black hat. The enthusiast audience likes that. However the 1973 war, surely one of the most under-rated campaigns in the second half of the 20th century, led to the oil embargo, to the Lebanon incursion and massacres, and books on the subject just stopped selling. The Gulf War was also good until the shoot-up on the Basra road, the refugees, and the lack of a definite end. Politics spoils war for the military enthusiast.
The Falklands were good, but were too brief. We can however re-fight it next Spring for the 20th anniversary. Greenhill are to publish a book about 3 Para; I hope not too many of my colleagues here today are producing Falklands anniversary tie-ins.
Looking ahead is akin to the Polynesian seafarers who Captain Cook met whilst exploring the Pacific, in a canoe and a vast distance from land. He asked how they navigated and they said that they looked over the prow of the canoe and ‘read the waves’. We, too, in publishing ‘read the waves’.
Still the strongest, continuing wave of all is the Second World War. Within that, it is German subjects that still continue to be of particular strength.
A weak wave for us at any rate is in fact British military history. When I started in publishing and one looked at a listing of who one did business with, probably fifty percent of the top customers were the contractors who were entirely focused on supplying books to the British Public Library system. Now there are only two contractors in our top accounts and we cannot trace the sale of some of our books to British Public Libraries. We do not know where future generations are going to look for the reference materials that they may need. It pains me that it is easier commercially to publish on the German Army than on the British.
That comment leads on to the importance today of the export market. Yesteryear there were some sales to the Commonwealth, but exports couldn’t make or break a book. Nowadays in order to make a book commercially viable we look for some sales to the Continent but in particular the United States is critical. If you built a wall around Britain this afternoon, and we could not export, tomorrow morning we would be out of business.
Technoogical Innovations
In terms of technological innovations affecting publishing, a recent one is of course the internet, which has made information and books far more accessible, but I am not at all sure by how much it has increased sales. The Greenhill web site receives 70,000 hits a month. Bear in mind that the web has gone from ground zero to its current level in just a handful of years; who can forecast how it will advance from now? The big question is how quickly the world will move to reading on a screen. There is no indication that e books will have any measure of success in the foreseeable future, or change the nature of the traditional book. And you can forget CD Roms. On line information systems will however certainly be of increasing importance. However there is another area which is undoubtedly going to be of increasing value and that is ‘on demand’ publishing. Especially in the United States whole libraries of books are being scanned and digitised and will be available for downloading and printing. This will make more books than ever before more readily available than ever before. Another and important aspect of making books more readily available than before are the web sites which enable you to locate second-hand books. It is easier to obtain a second-hand book now than ever. Of course as part of this there is a whole new generation discovering military books through the low price paperback reprint series from Cassell, Wordsworth and Penguin.
Our own military publishing extends in period from biblical times to current military equipment, and because one is covering virtually the whole of human interest we, and other publishers, do so at a variety of levels. We recently received a submission for a cartoon military history.
It is because one is covering a range from biblical times to current military equipment that one reads the waves, listening especially to one’s customers, and I see no reason why there will not be active military publishing for many years to come. On the one hand what is past is prologue. On the other hand one really should quote the announcement that appears in financial advertising to the effect that past performance is no indication of the future. Greenhill and I am sure all the publishers here today always welcome submissions. I have to say however that only a small percentage of our publishing programme is based on submitted books that come in without an introduction. The majority, and most successful, come from sitting down with the authors and discussing what is of interest to them, their area of knowledge and what we think we can publish successfully.
Preparing these notes for today, and taking advantage of some briefing notes, a colleague of mine suggested that I should point out to this particular audience that for the wider, general, non-professional market what we really need is a good war, with a goodie and baddie, without the politicians involved, without collateral damage, refugees or nuclear warfare, and preferably involving Special Forces.”
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