Dan Franklin: 'I am a tart. I am deeply shallow'

He is the publishing colossus behind Britain's superstar authors. How does Dan Franklin stay ahead? He talks to Susanna Rustin about McEwan, Amis – and the death of the boozy lunch

by Susanna Rustin, guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 March

'It still really turns me on' … Dan Franklin. Photograph: Sarah Lee

Every Monday morning, Dan Franklin scours the book charts on Amazon to find out if the weekend reviews of his authors' books have done anything for their sales. Today, the publisher will have eyes only for Ian McEwan and his new novel Solar. Early reviews have been good, with the Sunday Times judging it a "stellar performance", but Franklin is nervous. "It will be hailed as a comic masterpiece and an important book about global warming, or it will be the moment when the backlash begins."

For Franklin, the success of Solar – and The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, which appeared to a blizzard of headlines last month – is vital. Cape's performance this year will be down to those books: whether they sell, whether they win prizes. "The market at the moment does polarise: the big books get bigger and bigger, and the rest get smaller and smaller. So it's very important that the big ones do sell."

McEwan's Atonement and On Chesil Beach were career highs for Franklin. He is careful not to take too much credit from his superstar author, but describes the cover of Atonement, featuring a black and white photograph by Chris Frazer Smith, as a masterpiece. "We were actually shooting something different," he says. "We'd rented this house in Hertfordshire on the basis of its library and the girl who was being Briony got fed up. She was sitting on these steps tapping her foot in a fury, and he started shooting and I thought this is it. One's hair stood on end."

On Chesil Beach, which some critics thought should have been described as a novella, sold 225,000 copies in hardback. Franklin has similar hopes for Solar, saying he is not at all worried that people might find a satire on climate science a less appetising prospect than a period romance.

As the boss of Jonathan Cape, Franklin has one of the most prestigious jobs in publishing, but puts a good deal down to luck. Early in his career, he secured the rights to Michael Jackson's Moonwalk simply by being in the office on Christmas Eve when the offer went out; no other publisher was at work. A year later, he published Thomas Harris's bestseller The Silence of the Lambs. When he was at Heinemann in the 1980s, he was rummaging through unsolicited manuscripts and came across Roddy Doyle's The Commitments and the first chapter of Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent.

Franklin says he inherited "the best list of authors in Britain" when he joined Cape in 1993: Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, Doris Lessing, Bruce Chatwin and Tom Wolfe. He knows, too, that he was fortunate in arriving just in time for Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theatre, which marked the start of Roth's remarkable resurgence. The first McEwan title he published was Enduring Love, "which I would argue was the same trajectory – the beginning of him becoming what he is now".
The full story at The Guardian online.