Publish or Die! - Katherine Roberts
I came across this book in my local charity shop last week, with a title I could not resist - Publish or Die. The bargain price of 20p is well within my current book-buying budget, so I picked it up, took it home and read it over second breakfast. It turned out to be a teen title written by Alan Durant and published on Scholastic's Point Crime list in the 1990's, a few years before my first book was published. Scholastic did several of these lists as I remember... Point Horror, Point Fantasy, etc... bringing together well-respected YA authors to create what seems to have been a successful publisher-led brand. Publish or Die is set in the offices of a small publishing house, where the heroine Calico has just started as an editorial assistant - for which read coffee-maker, slush pile reader, photocopier of manuscripts, and general gofer. Still starry-eyed with her love of books, she walks straight into a cut-throat office dispute between two of the senior editors, who di...