The 1990s were a boom time for fiction. In those days — and this is not an exaggeration — a teenage girl could secure a half million pound advance for a one-page outline of her first novel. Those of us who had been in the business since of old viewed the transformed present with bemusement and bitter envy. These new kids, we said, have no idea what it was like back then, when only a handful of novelists could make a living from their work, and the rest of us had to slave away in academe, or journalism, or even, God help us, the civil service.
You get nothing for nothing, of course. In the scramble for publicity, the high-octane fuel which drove the boom, even the lowest of us had to work for our pittances.
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