Nicholas Clee on why more people want to write fiction than read it

Here is the deal. You send your first novel to Macmillan, which, if the publishers there like it, will admit it to the New Writing list on these terms: Macmillan has world rights, will offer you no advance, but will pay you royalties of 20 per cent of receipts. You will get some marketing support, but should not hold out hopes of banner posters or lavish bookshop displays. Nor should you have high expectations when you turn to the bestseller lists.

It is not the publishing contract of which ambitious authors dream. They would prefer to emulate Zadie Smith, who got a £250,000 commitment from Penguin before she had sold a single copy of her debut novel, White Teeth - indeed, before she had even written the best part of the book. If they know a little about standard contracts, they might hope to receive a royalty of between 10 and 15 per cent of the retail price, rather than a percentage of what the publisher gets after subtracting the discount to booksellers.

The agent Natasha Fairweather has described the Macmillan New Writing project as "shocking". In a report at the end of last month in the Guardian, she was among several book-industry figures who condemned the scheme. They did not put anyone off. Since the piece appeared, the number of submissions arriving at Macmillan has doubled. Michael Barnard, who is in charge of the list, tells me that he is receiving 50 manuscripts a day.

One gets the impression that more people want to write fiction than read it. A very small percentage of all the novels published in the UK each year sells more than a few thousand copies. Yet creative writing courses are oversubscribed, and multiplying; self-publishing is a booming industry. Most leading publishing houses, and many literary agencies, have abandoned their "slush pile" (unsolicited manuscripts): the deluge was too great, and the chances of salvaging a jewel from it too slim.

If you have discovered, painfully, that a publisher is not going to give you a £250,000 advance, or even look at your book, and that no agent is willing to do so either, you might fantasise about joining that other exclusive club: the one comprising successful self-published authors who have gone on to be discovered by the big houses. Yet the chances of that happening are also vanishingly small. Digital technology has transformed self-publishing, and brought in firms that are a good deal more respectable than the vanity presses that used to be associated with the practice. The author pays, however, and has to have a talent for self-promotion, as well as a good deal of luck, to enjoy a chance of making any kind of return. Macmillan New Writing, which puts you on the list of one of the world's largest publishers at no expense to the author, is more attractive than that.

It appears to be so, at any rate, to thousands of aspiring novelists. Is Macmillan exploiting their desperation? It is paying them less than they would earn from conventional publication; but their chances of finding such a deal are slim. Macmillan, which is shouldering editorial and production costs, will lose money on the list. The company's motives are not entirely altruistic, however: it says that it hopes to broaden its access to new talent. Like all the big publishers, it has been cutting its lists and concentrating its marketing budget on fewer titles. The official publishers' line, until now, has been that the industry maintains a huge variety of output, and very rarely overlooks people of real talent. Macmillan is the first big publisher to admit that this claim is flawed.

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