“To see something that is well-written and appetisingly written takes a lot of talent and there is not a great deal of that around,” Naipaul said in response to The Sunday Times’ stunt. “With all the other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is.”

Perhaps even more dismaying than a letter of rejection is a painfully attenuated silence. In the middle of last year I sent a brief extract of my manuscript, just sixty pages or so, to a well known (and very good) independent publisher in Melbourne, and, in accordance with their guidelines prepared to wait for ‘up to four months’ for a response. Despite emails to an editor and the boss, as well as a long conversation with still another editor who works at the publishing house, I am still waiting for my letter of declination over six months later.

The comments I’ve received notwithstanding, my manuscript may not be very good and part of me can’t help regretting the years I spent working on it. But what I regret far more is that you will probably never have the chance to make up your own mind about it. Well, somebody has to make shelf space for all those Bradley John Murdoch books, and I guess it’s my turn. I’m okay with that, but, had their books not already been published, it might well have been time for V. S Naipaul and Stanley Middleton to step aside as well – and that’s a real crime.

Sean Condon is the author of five internationally published and translated books as well as two unpublished manuscripts. For some reason he is working on a third.

If you’re so inclined you can download and read the first chapters of the two unpublished (and, it would seem, unpublishable) manuscripts.