I’m over in the UK at the moment, trying to get my first book published. To be precise, I’m trying to get an agent, to get me a publishing deal, to get my first book published. It’s proving to be tricky – two agents have said no so far, and that’s just the first hurdle.

I’m beginning to realize quite how difficult the British book market is. When I started to write this book, about five years ago (before I moved to Russia) publishing seemed a distant prospect, so the process of writing was all about nurturing the delicate flower of my literary talent, shut away in my bedroom, trying to write precisely the book that I wanted.

I really didn’t think or care what the market wanted. I knew I had some good and new ideas that I was very interested in, sufficiently interested that I still find them interesting, five years later. I would never have finished the book, I think, if I didn’t think it contained new and interesting thoughts.

But then you finally finish the book, and you come to the publishing side of things, the commercial side of things. So the first thing you do is try to encapsulate your book on a side of A4 to get a literary agent interested.

This is quite difficult in itself. The book is a collection of quite complex and intertwining ideas on why civilization makes us unhappy and what we can do about it. I’ve realized that, at least for the pitching process, it may be better to have one main idea rather than lots of interesting interlinking ideas. Perhaps that makes for a less interesting book…but it certainly makes for a stronger pitch.

Then you find an agent. This part isn’t that hard. There are loads of agents around the UK, all looking for the next big writer to advance their careers. In fact, I’ve met more literary agents in London than I have published writers. I think there are more literary agents in London than there are KGB agents…and that’s a lot.

The agents’ job is to spot books that are easily sell-able, so that they sell them to a publishing company and then the publishing company makes some money on it. I say ‘some money’, because it appears that books make hardly any money these days.

Fiction books, ie novels, make some money. If you go into a book store, you’ll see that most of the store is filled with novels – detective novels, science fiction novels, romantic novels, chick-lit, soldier novels, lad novels, confessional sex novels etc.

In fact, if you’re a half-decent novelist, you have a chance of being published. A friend of mine was trying to publish a non-fiction book, and his agent told him it wouldn’t sell, before adding ‘you’re not writing a novel, are you? We’re very much on the look-out for novels.’

Even if you’re writing non-fiction, agents say it is better done in a fictional style. Thus, if you’re writing history, better that it’s history about personal stories, great love affairs, heroic deeds etc. If you’re writing books on psychology, as I am, better than it’s done in a memoir style, along the lines of ‘My battle with shop-lifting’ or ‘Vom: my struggle with cough medicine addiction’. Seriously, there are loads of books like this on the market at the moment.

The problem is, I’m neither a novelist nor a memoirs writer. I tried to write a novel about my youth first, but couldn’t make up characters. Then I tried writing a memoir, but I couldn’t really remember the little details of my past. And the point is, after a while I stopped finding writing about my past life particularly interesting. I’d been trying to do it for years, and I was bored of it, it was all so long ago.

The market seems to be very tough for non-fiction books right now. I saw an article in Private Eye this week, which showed the advances received by some writers, and the number of copies their books had sold. It was amazing – they’d received £50,000 - £150,000 advances, and sold just 5000 copies, which works out at around £30 a copy.

Very few non-fiction books actually recoup their advances. Publishing companies are making practically no money on publishing. And as a result, they are very unwilling to take risks on new writers.

One can blame agents or publishers for this, but the real ‘fault’ lies with us, the people: we’re not really buying books any more. I’m a writer, and I’m barely buying books any more. Since I finished the research for my book, which involved a huge amount of reading, I’ve barely read a single book. When did you last buy a book?

What do we do instead? We surf the net, which gives us instant easily-digestible bites of information, we snack on information, and spoil our appetites, so that we can’t be bothered to eat the main course of a book.

We want information that flashes, web articles that include music and Youtube video, and the ability to interact, to add online comments, and blogs, and links to our friends. The digital revolution means we barely have the attention to read a newspaper, much less a book.

This means it’s easier than ever to get your information out there, to an audience. I wrote an article about social anxiety for this website, which is what my book is about, and it garnered at least some attention from all over the world, leading to me being interviewed by a Toronto radio station, and by the Guardian newspaper. They were interested in a little bite-size chunk about social anxiety, for a few minutes or so. But anything more sustained, any deeper analysis? Who’s got the time or attention?

I pondered to my friends if this meant that it was very difficult to put forward new, complex ideas in today’s market-place. No, replied a friend, but the place for it is academia. But academics tend to talk in very specialized ways about their rather narrow pursuits, and they very rarely widen their conversation to talk to other disciplines. Thus cognitive psychologists rarely talk to psychiatrists, who rarely talk to economists, who rarely talk to sociologists, who rarely talk to literary critics, who rarely talk to ethical philosophers, and so on.

In my opinion, that’s why we need generalists in this period, to build bridges between these different networks, to highlight how and where they join.

Books might have been victims of technological innovations, but other art forms are prospering at the moment. For example, it’s perhaps never been easier than now for new bands to break through in the UK. That’s partly because they can distribute their music easily through the internet. But it’s also because there’s a huge demand for new music, because we’ve all become I-Pod addicts, and that means we consume music at a much faster rate, and need new supplies to feed the I-Pod.

But the success of the I-Pod, again, means we read a lot less. We use to read on the bus, or the plane, or the tube, or in the park. Now we just listen to our I-Pods. Good for new bands, bands for new writers.

Anyway, after the second agent turned me down, I briefly went through a dark moment of thinking it wasn’t my fault, it was the market’s. The problem was, we simply gave the people what they wanted, and the people just wanted complete trivia and dumbed-down information. It was market democracy which had failed, not my book. The USSR had it right – the intellectual elite had to seize the means of literary production, had to force the masses to read their books.

But the dark moment passed, and I realized, no, it would probably be easier just to re-work my book pitch and try to make it more popular. And if I still can’t get it published, well, maybe it’s just not a good enough idea.

Jules Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

May 31, 2007