I suspect the sales of this book might be quite modest said Trewin

“I suspect the sales of this book might be quite modest,” said Trewin.”I thought I was committing suicide,” says Mo “But every day since then it’s got better… So Mo, like a student fanzine editor or an undiscovered eccentric, decided to self-publish – to edit, typeset, manufacture, promote and distribute his book himself, against the multi-media machinery of the international publishing houses. I got these weird responses to it, like this guy saying, `It needs a lot of work done to it…’ Three bidders left at 125 grand, and I said to my agent, `I don’t want to be published by these people with their idiot remarks about the book and their lukewarm enthusiasm.’ “”Timothy Mo had no interest in hearing anybody else’s views,” says Alexander, who nevertheless offered him “six figures”. “You could deduce from that a difference between a nice English woman and an outsider taking on the system,” says Clare Alexander of Viking Penguin.)The manuscript of Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard had been sitting around for nearly two years. Chatto and Windus had published Mo’s last two books, An Insular Possession (1986) and The Redundancy Of Courage (1991), to substantial critical approval, but Mo blamed the company for their disappointing paperback sales, so he decided to sell Brownout on the open market The open market didn’t like his opening chapter “I had a distinct feeling of pearls before swine…

(Interestingly, Jill Paton Walsh’s self-publishing of her Booker-nominated novel was regarded as heroic. Mo, the consensus went, was a once-promising author now sliding into creative senility, his new book wilfully shocking, and publishable only by himself. The last month has seen publishers queueing up to question his talent and judgement – “You’d hardly recognise the same writer at work… Something went to his head,” says Ion Trewin at Weidenfeld and Nicholson – culminating with what Mo calls a “street mugging” in the London Evening Standard under the headline “life in the writers’ gutter”. “It’s very important to publishers that I fall flat on my face with this one.”
He’s partly right.

But now, at 44, he’s publishing his new novel himself, with a block-printed cover as cheerfully low-budget as anything on an Asian market stall. Mo’s currency has slipped from “promising” to “difficult”: the new book, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, opens with a witty eight-page description of a Filipino prostitute pleasing an elderly German professor by defecating on him “I’m a loose cannon on the deck,” says Mo. A few years ago people put Timothy Mo up there with Amis and Barnes and Rushdie. As the old empire’s writers struck back, Mo’s complex, confident books about his native Hong Kong and Southeast Asia won three Booker nominations in a row, and advances and sales in the high five, even six figures. Winter-tanned ladies glide by outside; behind net curtains he worries about middle age and money. Small and nervy, he gratefully picks up a friend’s call praising his Late Show performance the night before.