4th Estate

It’s that time of year again when publishers up and down the land get excited about being on the Booker Long-list.

The booker prize, as I’m sure you know, is a Pretty Big Deal. The winning books almost always go on to be huge commercial successes.

In recent years, if memory serves from the research I did when our own ‘Wolf Hall’ won, paperback editions go on to sell over 80,000 copies (at the least) and over a million in the case of ‘The Life of Pi’.

Now that’s a pretty big gap and ‘The Life of Pi’ is certainly the exception rather than the rule, but the point is that for literary publishers this level of commercial success (even at the lower ends) is difficult predict without the endorsement of a Booker prize win – which is one of the reasons why winning is a Pretty Big Deal.

We might not have anything on the long-list from 4^thEstate this year, but we’re not here to criticise the judges’ decisions as we’d be here all week, suggesting our own novels and other publishers’ ones too; the fact is that everyone on the long-list deserves to be there and it’s a great accolade for which we applaud them all.

What we would like to do is to celebrate all of our past Booker listed authors, winners and short-listed alike. The Booker long- and short-lists are a great way to discover books you might otherwise have missed, so why not delve into some older novels that have also had the nod from the judges?

Over the coming days we will post extracts of some of our listed books from recent years; interviews with the authors and videos where we have them.

Yes, this is a shameless plug for our books by capitalising on the PR around the Booker prize, but forgive a shameless marketing man for giving it a go.

Keep an eye out around the site for extracts and videos of our winning and short-listed titles.

The Full Longlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize is:

• Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side (Faber)
• Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail – Profile)
• Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child (Picador – Pan Macmillan)
• Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
• A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
• Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
• D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus – Random House)