Visitors to the Green Knight’s Chapel will be aware that for the past four months I’ve been in a state of apprehension over the fate of the sequel to The Cat Kin. For my part, I know that quite a few Cat Kin readers are anxious to get their hands on part two, entitled Cat’s Paw. Well, at last the long wait is over. But not in the way we all hoped.
FF (that’s ‘Faber and Faber’, by the way) are not going to publish Cat’s Paw. They don’t want it. Apparently, FF don’t think that The Cat Kin was enough of a commercial success to warrant a sequel. I use the past tense ‘was’ even though it’s been out barely six months. Maybe FF don’t think the sequel is good enough? Actually that doesn’t seem to be the case; my Editor was in favour of publishing it, but there are higher powers at work within FF, who see only bottom lines. Possibly due to the positioning of their heads.
No consideration is given to the fact that The Cat Kin received almost no promotion, yet was praised in reviews in The Times, The Telegraph, The Sunday Express and the Financial Times. No-one seems to remember that a sequel is itself a powerful marketing tool, a mobile, viral piece of advertising that creates a snowball effect through word of mouth. The second book sells the first, and vice versa. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’ve just sold the German rights, nor that the audiobook rights have been sold. It didn’t sell the required number of units in the first six months, so BLEEP – Computer Says No.
The Cat Kin, to the best of my knowledge, will now be allowed to trickle quietly out of the shops, not to be replaced by new copies, eventually to disappear. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, for there are plenty of other books out there, and better. It certainly doesn’t matter to FF, for whom there will be another naively optimistic new writer along in a minute. But it matters to me, and it matters to others: readers young and old who were gracious enough to open my book, give it a chance and let the story take hold of them. Many of them now have that simplest of wishes: to find out what happens next. That I’m not currently in a position to grant this wish, thanks to FF, is perhaps the most aggravating thing of all. I feel as if I’ve somehow let my readers – as few as they may be – down.
Snakes and ladders, this game is, and it looks like I just stepped smack on a snake’s head. Well, I hope it hurt.
I hate to ruin a lovely black mood, but unfortunately I’m going to finish on a positive. I AM going to find a new publisher, and to them I will sell all three Cat Kin books. That’s right, three.
