She shuddered. ‘Oh God, it was absolutely awful! That dreadful woman just bullied me into it, and then they all sat around afterwards picking my novels to pieces and being patronizing! And I did it for nothing.’

‘Thank goodness I got out of that one,’ I said.

‘Well, it was good copy, so I did manage to get something out of it – I used the experience in my new book, Blood on the Table.’

‘Did you? I’ll pop into Necromancer’s Nook on my way home and see if they’ve got a copy.’

The panel came on and we had to hush up while this dismal earwig of a man told us all about his little publishing house, which was in fact so small that not only had I never heard of it, but I reckoned you’d have to have a map reference to find it at all. In any case they only published really cutting-edge poetry, and we all know how big the audience for that is.

Then it was the turn of the haggard black-haired woman who’d clearly drawn herself the huge crimson lips that nature hadn’t given her over her own thin lizardy ones. She told us how she’d had a mega success with her non-fiction book: S & M: A Complete History, but somehow no publisher wanted her brilliant first novel, Slapping the Leather, and so she’d had to resort to self-publication. Now it was selling like hot cakes, she bet the publishers were all kicking themselves.

Well, whatever turned them on.

After that, the man from the Affiliated Authors thanked them both and said what an interesting contribution they’d made by telling us about their experiences, and then asked if anyone had any questions.

And boy, did they! I kid you not, I think more than three-quarters of that audience were self-published, and the first man’s question summed it all up when he said that he sympathized with the second speaker because no publisher had taken his History of Newts in Little Botting with hand-drawn illustrations, although he knew personally that there was a huge market out there for it and all his friends thought it a work of genius.

Where have I heard that line before?

‘In the end I had to publish it myself,’ he said in aggrieved tones, ‘and I’ve still got five thousand copies in the garage because selling them myself is proving exceedingly time-consuming and since I can’t garage the car and those old Hillman Imps can be temperamental if you leave them outside in winter, it’s very inconvenient … and why on earth won’t booksellers stock self-published books like mine?’

‘Because there isn’t a big enough market for books about newts in Little Botting to make it worth their while, dimwit,’ was obviously the only reply. ‘Or any of the other minority-interest books and strangely attenuated novels the rest of you have had printed.’