'It's carnage ...' Inside the genteel world of books

Visit the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest literary marketplace, and you might think publishing is only vaguely about writers - next to the carousing, the deals, and the piled-up 'product'. And then, there's the fabulous gossip, this year centring on the shenanigans at PFD, Britain's most prestigious - and troubled - literary agency

It's some comfort to discover, at the end of my first long, spirit-sapping day at the Frankfurt Book Fair, that I'm not the first Observer journalist who's come and suffered here. A librarian from the newspaper digs up an old microfiche film and there, in grainy black and white, is a copy of The Observer from 1981, with a report on the fair by a certain Martin Amis.

It was a long time ago. Back then, he writes, the biggest book fair in the world had an unimaginable allure, it was seen as a week-long jamboree where 'publishers gorge themselves on expensive food and drink and have the kind of sexual encounters with one another that used to be characterised in novels by phrases like: "towards morning he took her again."'

Really? The only frisson of excitement I see is a Russian book with an illustration on the cover of Josef Stalin and Erich Honecker wrapped in a homosexual embrace. It is, I realise a prime example of what I come to think of as the Frankfurtspecial, a scarcely credible claim wrapped in fancy words that some mug is likely to buy. Even Amis can't keep it up, mind, and succumbs by the end of the article to what looks like a bad case of Frankfurtfatigue.

It is however a neat lesson in how the book fair works: for as long as people have written books, people have sold them too, and this involves a certain amount of talking things up. Erasmus, in the 15th century, is said to have drummed up business here (the fair's been going for 800-odd years) by claiming the first print run of his Colloquies was 24,000. And this in an age when the average number of copies produced was around 50.

Not a whole lot has changed in this regard except that it's now agents rather than Dutch theologians who do the talking. Frankfurt, attended by 300,000 people from 108 countries, is where the inner workings of the publishing industry are laid bare, where traditionally the big deals are done; and where everyone schmoozes with everyone else until five minutes later when they turn round and stab each other in the back. And this year, at least, everyone's been unanimous about which back to stab: the dying corpse of what was once the biggest and one of the most prestigious literary agencies in Britain, PFD.

It's a business that's been all over the broadsheets and the gossip columns in the last few weeks, and before I leave home I talk to Joel Rickett, deputy-editor of the Bookseller, who tells me: 'Nobody's talking about anything else! They're all vicariously transfixed by it. It's complete carnage.' And it's certainly a rollercoaster of a story fuelled by rumour and counter-rumour: in 2001 CSS Stellar, a sports agency, bought PFD, a literary, theatrical and actors' agency; then, earlier this year, the agents attempted a management buyout, which CSS rejected, following which several key agents resigned, including Pat Kavanagh, agent to the great and the good, celebrated doyenne of the literary scene, and wife of Julian Barnes.

And then, parachuted into the heart of the story as new boss at PFD, came Caroline Michel, ex-head of the William Morris agency and before that HarperCollins, one half of a media power couple (she's married to Lord Evans, former chairman of Faber & Faber) and usually accompanied in newspaper articles, particularly those that happen to be written by men, by adjectives such as 'fragrant', 'glamorous' and 'charming'. Just not charming enough, it has transpired, to prevent all 85 members of PFD staff from resigning.

It is nothing short of a blood-bath. And in the middle of it all are the tug-of-love children: the writers, whose fate is being fought over but who nobody seems to be actually talking to. The client list includes the likes of Robert Harris and Ruth Rendell, who have said they will follow their agents wherever they go, but there are hundreds more including Nick Hornby, Alain de Botton, John Mortimer, Ricky Gervais, Margaret Drabble and many still struggling at the start of their careers, or not quite yet household names, their books stranded in the middle of a publishing spat like poor bewildered sheep lost on a moor. (The actors' agency, it has to be said, includes the likes of Keira Knightley and Kate Winslet of whom the sheep analogy works less well.) If the writers follow the agents, their backlists can't go with them - they have to remain with PFD. But if they stay, they'll no longer have their agent. It's the writers, much more than anybody else, who stand to lose.

But then there's nothing like going to Frankfurt to make you think that publishing is only very peripherally about writers, anyway. They're simply the manufacturers of the 'product', and wandering around Frankfurt's eight vast 'halls' - spaces which would comfortably accommodate a fleet of 747s and have enough room left over for a couple of municipal libraries in the corner - is a salutary lesson in just how many other manufacturers of product there are, and just how much product. Or, as we old-fashioned types call them, books. Not just a lot of them but a number you can't actually visualise on any kind of shelf: 400,000, according to the official information.

When Martin Amis came in 1981 he wrote that there was an informal competition for the most unlikely title and spoke to one book packager who talked fondly of an old favourite, Industrial Sealants and Adhesives. Ha! I trump that in about two seconds. What about, Was Your Boss Raised By Wolves? Or The Hair Replacement Revolution? Or Heat Transfer for Cooking Applications? I lose count of the books on knitting, or the kabbalah or pop-up books of dinosaurs, although you have to marvel at a form that can take in titles as diverse as The Story of Your Soul: Recovering the Pearl of Your Identity, and Effectiveness of Urban Wastewater Treatment Policies

It's because there are so many books, and so much competition, that the PFD debacle happened. Stephen Page, the head of Faber & Faber, tells me that they closed their fiction 'slush pile' (of unsolicited manuscripts, the only agent-free route to a publishing deal) a few years back.

'We were getting 6,000 a year which we had a work-experience girl reading a page of once every so often,' he says. 'We had only discovered two books on the slush pile in the previous however many years. It was just unfortunate that one of those was Lord of the Rings so we felt a certain obligation to keep looking.'

That is one reason why agents have become increasingly powerful. They've become the gatekeepers of Britain's literary culture and you have to get past them to get anywhere at all. Herein lies the problem. I try to ring around a few to canvas opinions but it turns out to be no easy matter. I attempt to reach Clare Alexander, a prominent agent who's credited with popularising the concept of crossover fiction with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and I fail, so I ask for her email. Only the receptionist won't tell me it.

It's the same at other agencies, alongside notices plastered across their websites saying 'we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts'. Out of curiosity I email AP Watt, 'Britain's oldest literary agency', and ask, 'How does one become solicited?' There's no reply.

Instead I call Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown. Like PFD it's another big agency, and Jonny is what Joel Rickett calls 'one of the new guard'. I moan at him at how snobbish and elitist it all seems. 'It's like Jude the Obscure!' I say. It's as if you have to be on lunching terms with the MD of Penguin before you'd even get your manuscript looked at. Gratifyingly, Jonny agrees with me, but it's not unrelated to the fact that he's not just an agent, he's also my agent. And he accepts 'unsolicited' submissions. Such as mine. But then he says that's how he picked up a lot of his writers: Hari Kunzru, Jake Arnott, and Tracy Chevalier among others.

'That's the trouble with this PFD affair,' he says. 'It makes it seem like we're back in the old days when it was all "Martin" and "Julian" having fallings-out; we've spent the last 10 years trying to get beyond that, to make it more professional and prove that it's not all old boys doing deals down the Garrick Club.'

What he's referring to is the famous incident when Pat Kavanagh - or Pat, as I'll call her rather inappropriately, since she expressly said in an email she didn't want to talk to me - was Martin's agent (that's Amis, obviously, again), right up until he walked out on her after 22 years, in favour of Andrew Wylie, at which point Julian (Barnes, married to Pat, try to keep up) severed relations with Amis and called him (Wylie that is) 'a card-carrying shit'. Although most other people know him as 'the Jackal'.

It's all so precious somehow. But I have to say that coming across Wylie, still regarded as one of the most powerful agents around, in his booth at Frankfurt, he does have the air of a man who looks as if he could enjoy a meat-based snack of anyone, a journalist, say, who ended up on the wrong side of him.

'Gatekeepers?' says the Jackal. 'I don't see it that way. Editors move around more frequently than they used to. A writer is looking for a stable relationship. It's why this PFD situation is such a mess. The agent is employed by a writer to seek a publisher.'

You say that, but actually it's usually a question of finding an agent who's willing to take you on, I say.

'Technically, agents are employed by writers. Occasionally agencies make the mistake of believing that they are strong and the writers are weak but this is not the case. It's like a gardener at Longleat deciding that he or she is in charge.'

He doesn't accept unsolicited manuscripts either.

'How do you find writers, then?' I say.

'We ask around.'

What this means, basically, is that unless you come with a letter of recommendation signed by Martin Amis, you might as well as forget it.

The PFD affair, he says, is 'a tragedy for the writers'. Everyone seems to agree on this, and then proceeds to tell me with relish the latest twist in the saga. I've been trying to get hold of Caroline Michel - she's due in Frankfurt, but then when I call her assistant I find out that her husband has broken two ribs and she's cancelled. I tell this to Helen Fraser, the head of Penguin, and she tells Caroline Dawnay, a senior agent at PFD, who repeats it back to me a day later, and I start to realise how easy this rumour-spreading is. It's how 'buzz' builds about a book: anybody can come up with any old guff, and if it gets repeated enough times it might just come true.

Traditionally, there's always been a 'book of the fair' that emerges this way, but this year there's only a story of the fair, that involving PFD. Caroline Dawnay is one of the leaders of the PFD rebels, so I'm rather expecting her to be wearing a sleek suit and to have a business plan tucked into her pocket. Instead she's a silver-haired woman of a certain age with a kindly face wearing half-moon spectacles. It's a bit like discovering Beatrix Potter was responsible for the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. She wants me to mention the book that she's co-written that's coming out this week, called An Alphabet of Aunts, and then she tells me how she helped organise the dissolution of a multi-million-pound media company.

'Everybody's gone! All of us! Although of course we're all still there because we're working out our notice. But everyone's resigned. Eighty-five of us.'

Isn't that a bit uncomfortable, I say, being in the same office with Caroline Michel?

'Well, let's just say that I'm not sad to be here!'

The way Dawnay tells it, it's rather like Five Go Build a Company. 'We've found an office and we've got funding and we're all just up and positive about the future. United Agents, we're going to be called.'

So, was it like Jerry Maguire? Were you and Caroline Michel both on the phone to Alain de Botton, with him yelling "Show me the money!" at you?'

'No. Although Alain was doorstepped after getting off a plane and so he said various things about Caroline [Michel]... how she was so charming and so on... but I think the situation has been explained to him now.'

The agents haven't even managed to talk to all their clients yet. And, as one of their writers told me, 'They're not without blame in all of this - they sold the company in the first place and they pocketed that money. It wasn't as if any of the writers saw any of that cash.'

There's no simple explanation or neat exegesis of what's happened to PFD. It's a difficult situation for the agents, for Caroline Michel - who, most people think, was misled about the job - but mostly it's the writers who are the unwitting pawns in all of this.

Oh, the writers. What becomes abundantly clear from Frankfurt is that if you've got a book inside, it's really not a bad idea to keep it there. Why does anybody even want to be a writer? And I say that as one. Two weeks ago the BBC reported that it came top in a survey of the nation's dream jobs. I end up ranting about this at the Bloomsbury stand, and Alexandra Pringle, the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury, rants with me.

'I know!' she says, 'It's mad. It's a horrible job. It doesn't pay well. It's lonely. It's depression-inducing. It's frustrating. There's no fun to be had. But everyone has a drive to be a writer. And everyone thinks they can do it.

'Whereas to be one is some sort of mental derangement! They're all bonkers. When my writers say I could earn more money at the till at Sainsbury's, I say, well go and do it. There's no point writing unless you feel that you have to do it. You have to really want to do it and to be prepared to suffer to do it. Or else you really might as well go and work on the till at Sainsbury.'

And even if you do write a book, the obstacles are so huge. Jonny Geller tells me he personally receives 1,000 unsolicited submissions a year, and the general slush pile holds another 3,000. Out of those, he takes on maybe five new authors. I always knew that the odds against getting my first novel being published were enormous but I'm actually quite grateful that I didn't know quite how enormous.

He also tells me: 'No writer should ever go to Frankfurt. It's soul-destroying. You see writers being traded like pork bellies.'

It's a funny old game, all right. Could it have been experience gained in Frankfurt that allowed Martin Amis to ditch Pat Kavanagh in the Nineties, in favour of the Jackal, who promptly scored him half a mill for The Information? It's a business like any other, after all, and, as Joel Rickett points out, it's illogical that 'people take a moral stance towards publishing that they don't take towards any other industry'.

Patrick Janson-Smith, whom I find in the agents' centre looking rather gloomy, says: 'You look around and you think the world needs another book like it needs a hole in the head.' I know Patrick because he used to be the head of Transworld, and the publisher whose signature is on my contract. He's also one of the highest-profile publishers in recent years to jump ship and become an agent.

'If you're not in a three-for-two or Richard & Judy, forget it,' he says. 'There's no point. If you ask me, publishing is in a mess.'

Even in the last two years, he says, fiction has got tougher and tougher. 'The retail side, Borders and Tesco have squeezed them so much that they've become completely risk-averse. It really is all down to what sales and marketing think these days. And, frankly, there's no point even selling to a publisher if they can't get enthusiastic about it - you might as well chuck it in the bin.'

But you can't let it get to you. Or maybe here I mean me. Alexandra Pringle is right about the madness, I think. Fiction-writing is just not a logical thing to do, so you've got to either get on with it and not moan about it, or head off to Sainsbury's.

What saves Frankfurt for me in the end is the rest of the world. The British and the Americans occupy Hall 8, but Hall 6 and Hall 5, I discover, are distinctly more interesting. Nobody in Georgia or the Faroes Islands or Ukraine or Iraqi Kurdistan is attempting to publish yet another rip-off of The Dangerous Book for Boys. Nor is Jordan riding high in the fiction charts.

And while foreign buyers snap up British and American novels and translate them, we don't return the favour. Doesn't it frustrate you? I ask a woman in the Netherlands stand. 'Frustrate me? No. I just think it is a problem for you, that you see so little of the world.'

Tina Mamulashvili, a publisher in Tbilisi, shows me the works of Georgia's bestselling author, Aka Morchiladze.

'How many do you have to sell to be a bestseller in Georgia?' I ask

'If you sell 2,000 or more you are really successful. The average print run for fiction is 500 copies.'

'Five hundred copies!' I say.

And then she shows me a copy of Morchiladze's Santa Esperanza and it's a wonderfully inventive thing - a tiny explorer's sack containing 36 booklets and a map of a fantasy island in the Black Sea 'which is populated by Georgians, Turks, Italians and British'.

It's a bit like The Unfortunates, BS Johnson's 1969 novel-in-a-box, and is a lovely thing in and of itself. But although it's been translated into German, where it sold five times as many copies as it did in Georgia, it's not going to be hitting a bookshop near you very soon. But, still, become a writer in Georgia and you do it for love. And that simple moral clarity, in the end, is the one Frankfurt lesson that I choose to take home with me.

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