One of our longer-term projects this year has involved working on a follow up to our book Guardians Of Power (Pluto Press, 2006). Last year, we documented some of the tremendous press reactions we got to our book from as far afield as South Korea and Japan.
 
The book has also been translated into Korean and Arabic. We cited positive comments from former New Statesman editor Peter Wilby and others. To this day, the book has yet to receive a single mention in any national British newspaper. We can hardly conceive of a greater back-handed compliment!

While the press reaction has been predictable enough, more interesting are the reactions of some of the larger 'radical' publishers to our proposals for a follow-up book. One commissioning editor rejected our sample chapters saying:

"it reads rather too much as a collection of Medialens alerts, rather than as a standalone book, and that puts very severe limits on what it can be expected to do in commercial terms."

A second editor wrote:

"It's of course an urgent subject and you've assembled some great material, but it felt to us more a collection of pieces rather than a book, and we found ourselves wondering whether, as a book, it could make a lasting impact in the trade."

This criticism would have been more credible to us if Guardians Of Power - also built around the most interesting sections from our media alerts - had not been so well received by experienced media commentators. John Pilger, for example, described it as "the most important book about journalism I can remember".
 
Also, our first book involved considerable rewriting, expansion and updating to make it a cohesive whole. We would hope that many readers found it a credible "standalone book" whose argument builds cumulatively throughout. The material we have assembled since its publication in early 2006 is, if anything, even more powerful - on climate change, Iraq, Iran, Latin America and other issues.

The unspoken real reason for rejection, we believe, is that these publishers have a morbid fear of alienating the big newspapers on which they depend for favourable reviews of their books, and of which we are so critical in our own.

We received a taste of this fear in 2002 when we invited readers to ask journalists why they had failed to review John Pilger's book, The New Rulers of the World. We were sent this surprise response by Fiona Price at Verso, the publisher of Pilger's book. Significantly, the email was copied to Susie Feay, the literary editor of the Independent on Sunday:

"Please could you ask the people who visit your website to refrain from emailing the literary editors of national newspapers questioning why they have not reviewed John Pilger's book, The New Rulers of the World. The Independent has a review waiting to be published but after receiving a number of unpleasant emails, all copied in to your email address, they are seriously thinking of pulling the review.

"I am working hard to get other national newspapers to review the book and do not appreciate having my efforts undermined by people who do not understand the pressure of space for reviews in newspapers. A paper's failure to review a title is not always politically motivated." (Fiona Price, Marketing & Publicity Manager, Verso, email to Media Lens, July 30, 2002)

It turned out that Feay had received a grand total of two emails from our readers! Suffice to say, Pilger did not share Price's view (his book was eventually reviewed by the Independent on Sunday, on April 20, 2003).