They often have more influence over the covers than publishers would like to admit. Richard & Judy can make a book famous by promoting it on their television show, but only the buyers can make sure it is in the shops. Luckily, he agreed.As usual, the manuscript went to a proof editor who checked the minutiae. Then a typesetter, Rowlands of Suffolk, reproduced the manuscript in a publishable form. This proof copy of the book was checked and sent to Clays of St Ives, a print company whose name appears inside millions of books every year.The cover of a novel like this is conceived about 10 months in advance of publication, when the editor and the publisher’s sales and marketing teams meet with a designer.

The Accidental hardback features a stunning work by the late Derek Jarman.The cover is part of the sales materials with which publisher’s representatives approach booksellers, wholesalers and buyers for major players such as Waterstone’s and WH Smith.These buyers are currently considered the most important people in publishing. Smith used her partner, a film maker, as the sounding board for the early drafts and presented what she considered the finished version to her editor at Hamish Hamilton, Simon Prosser. Smith will not say how much she was paid as an advance (few authors do, unless they’re showing off), but she does say: “If you compare it to the normal salaries people earn over the same amount of time as a book takes to write then if you are very lucky indeed it may be roughly in the same ball park.”The bulk of the novel was written in an all-out sprint in 2004. £12.50-£30Will TuckettDirector-choreographer of ‘Pinocchio’ at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio”It’s a story that seemed to be just begging to be done with music and movement and great design. The 43-year-old author, who lives in Cambridge, first had the idea for it five years ago.She had written “50 or 60 pages” by the end of 2001, by which time she had also become hot literary property. He has offices in New York and London, and a long list of clients ranging from Lou Reed to Salman Rushdie.The Accidental was sold to Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Books, which had also published Hotel World.

She nearly won the Orange and Booker prizes in 2001 for Hotel World, and was in the running for the Booker again this year for her latest, The Accidental, about a family whose holiday at a cottage in Norfolk is disturbed by a stranger.”My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the caf?f the town’s only cinema,” is how The Accidental begins. That made life a lot easier for her agent, the tough-talking American Andrew Wylie, who revels in the nickname “The Jackal”. Ali Smith is an intensely private Scottish author with a habit of winning or being shortlisted for major literary prizes. Quality can still sell, then, but at prices that are sustainable only for the biggest players. Otherwise, the top sellers are celebrities such as Jamie Oliver.New talent is struggling to get through – a book that is not a hit within a month can disappear from the shelves. And one senior publishing executive at a company previously known for nurturing writers says the mood there now is that if an author has not made it big within two books then he or she should be dropped.The path of a book from inspiration to the reader can be tortuous even when the author is highly acclaimed. They say the takeover would mean smaller advances for writers, fewer and less interesting books being commissioned, and fewer of those that are published getting to the shop shelves where they can be seen and bought.”The whole books industry is on tenterhooks,” says Joel Rickett of The Bookseller magazine.

“The deal would bring about the biggest change that publishing has faced in years.”The industry is already struggling. Supermarkets and mail-order companies are slashing the price of books – you can buy all six titles on the 2005 Man Booker Prize shortlist for just £29.99 from one company. A ruling was expected two days ago, but put back to this week. It could come tomorrow.If the deal does go ahead then the people who make the decisions at Waterstone’s – who decide which titles go on the shelves, and which in the windows – will become even more powerful than they already are, with the ability to make authors rich and famous (or strangle at birth the careers of those not chosen).That would be a disaster, according to the Society of Authors, whose concerned members include Margaret Drabble and the children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson. That would create a new super-chain with up to 335 branches, selling half of all the books that are sold in bookshops.