‘Gentlemen, I agree with you that Napoleon is a tyrant, a monster, the sworn foe of our nation. But, gentlemen – he once shot a publisher. ‘ – Thomas Campbell (1777)

Yeah, way to go, Clare. Slag off the Editor of The Bookseller in your first post. What are you planning for tomorrow? A quick drive-by on one of our investors? How about an e-hit on the head buyer for Waterstones? That would be super.

But, sod it, Clee started it. In an earlier instalment of Hot Type, he pointed out my hypocrisy in calling traditional publishers ‘backwards’ before promptly becoming one myself. The little shit.

So, anyway, thanks to Clare’s unprovoked attack on the Editor of the most influential magazine in British publishing (the little shit), it falls to me to balance out the negativity. Sigh.

But as luck would have it, I stumbled over this post on Snowbooks’ ‘Snowblog’. In it Snow Books’ MD, Emma Barnes asks the rhetorical question ‘How lovely is Scott Pack?’

Scott Pack, for the uninitiated is Buying Manager for Waterstones. I have no idea whether he’s lovely or not, I’ve never met him, but he’s the man who publishers like me would happily – and attentively – fellate if we thought it might make him order a few more copies of our books. Which it may or may not. I don’t know, I’ve never met him.

My point is that Emma has fallen for Scott because he wrote kind words about Snowbooks in The Bookseller. It’s a real mutual love-in and one that would normally have me gnashing my teeth at the horrible lovveyness of it all. But not in this case – because, in truth, Snowbooks is absolutely my favourite ‘rival’.

Not only do they have an obsessive-compulsive need to produce really, really lovely books (I urge you to buy The London Scene) but, from day one of The Friday Project, Emma has been an incredible source of knowledge and advice on the actual grubby business of getting books into bookshops, and then into the hands of actual punters. She’s also smoking hot and can kickbox – but that’s irrelevant.*

Meanwhile Scott – who may or may not kickbox; I’ve never met him – is genuinely passionate about smaller publishers. So much so that in his Bookseller column he wrote that he’d like to see titles by companies like Snowbooks appearing on the Booker longlist, so they can sell more copies. And that’s despite the fact that there’s literally no commercial incentive for him to say that. He has no need to court small publishers – he’s already beating them off with a stick. He’s just saying it because he means it. And because he’s being nice.

And now so am I. Honestly, It’s like a publishing circle jerk.

But it gets worse. I swear I am not lying when I say that, in my short life in print publishing, I’m yet to meet anyone who I didn’t genuinely like. Unlike the dot com world which is chock full of self-aggrandising, silver tongued, money-grabbing shysters (trust me, I am one), print publishing is packed to the gills with people who are terrifyingly passionate about what they do. And passionate about other people who care about what they do.

And what’s more disturbing is that the passion gets more fierce the further up the food chain you go. By the time you reach CEO level (and I’m talking CEO level of the major, major houses as well as small houses like Snowbooks) you will find, without exception, a group of people who love books – and the business of books – more than Angelina Jolie loves adopting children and giving them stupid hair. The lack of bullshit and shysterism is terrifying – the vast, vast majority of people who run publishing houses actually want to make great books, and they’re bloody proud when they succeed.

Now that’s not to say that publishers don’t do terrible things (I refer you to the ‘Ltle Bk of Txt Msgs’) or that they’re not horrifying egotists (I urge you to read Tom Machler’s autobiography and count the ‘I’s) But even when they’re doing terrible, egotistical things, they’re doing them with a zeal and a passion that would make a Christian fundamentalist proud – or envious. If pride and envy weren’t deadly sins, obviously.

And it’s for those reasons – that zeal and that passion – that when people ask me what I do for a living, a question I used to answer by mumbling something about writing jokes or ‘the Internet’, I’ve suddenly found myself saying, proudly and boastfully, that I’m a publisher.

And that’s when they look at me with a mixture of contempt and pity and tell me that I should publish their wife’s book about cats.

* She’s also happily married. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.