'It is the triumph of expectation over reality,' said Patrick Janson-Smith, deputy managing director of Transworld, 'and reality only comes into view a year down the line.' There is little chance of any of these books making a profit for their publisher. Last month mature student Justin Hill accepted £150,000 from Weidenfeld and Nicolson for his incomplete Chinese saga The Drink and Dream Teahouse, and only last week Anselm Audley, a Millfield School A-level student,was offered £50,000 by Simon and Schuster for a work of fantasy fiction called Heresy along with two books to follow. Richard Mason, then a 19-year-old student, got £200,000 from Michael Joseph for The Drowning People, and journalist John Lanchester was handed around £300,000 in a two-book deal. In 1998 Bo Fowler, author of Scepticism Inc and a graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, was given £140,000 by Jonathan Cape for two books. Now sales figures show that many will not even qualify as one-hit-wonders. In a bonanza of Hollywood-style spending over the past five years, publishing houses have handed out advances of between £50,000 and £300,000 to a fleet of untried writers.
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