Author Sir Terry Pratchett
Sir Terry Pratchett was a momentous author, having sold over 100 million copies, and authored over 50 books. He became an author after meeting with Colin Smythe for an interview for Pratchett’s newspaper. He was then published to success. His first book, Carpet People, was published in 1971 and was a hit. Smythe published the first 5 Pratchett books, from there Smythe gave Terry Pratchett to Victor Gollancz Ltd, a larger publisher, as he believed Pratchett would do better with Gollancz. Smythe Remained Pratchett’s agent throughout his career. They Remained lifelong friends.
Smythe published five books for Pratchett: Carpet People; The Dark Side of the Sun; Strata; The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. After he left Smythe he went onto write many more books with Gollancz. Continuing his writing with multiple series and various spin off shows. He was knighted on February 18th, 2009, for his services to literature, but sadly in 2015 after an eight-month battle with posterior cortical atrophy (a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease) he died.
During our interview with Colin Smythe (Sir Terry Pratchett’s first publisher) we asked him questions about his life and career with Terry Pratchett.
How did you get into publishing and how did you meet Terry Pratchett?
Colin attended Trinity College, Dublin where he worked in publishing for the local newspaper, from there he was asked to publish a book “and foolishly said yes”. Then he met with Terry Pratchett when Pratchett came to interview him. After the interview it came to his attention that Pratchett authored short stories. And after looking at them, he decided to publish him.
A hand-coloured copy of Carpet people is pictured below.
During our interview we were lucky to see a hand-coloured copy of a book Terry Pratchet had written. Carpet People. It was one of Terry Pratchet’s first ever books and one of the few rare copies that were coloured in by him. Only six existed.
How do you feel about the books of Terry Pratchett that have been turned into movies? Do you think Pratchett would have liked them?
There was a total of 11 movie adaptations of Pratchett’s work the most famous being Good Omens the Tv show and The Amazing Maurice, a cartoon. Colin Smythe believed that Pratchett would have liked most of the movie adaptations as he always believed that something like that might happen. A substantial portion of the movie adaptations follow the story closely
How was Terry Pratchett to work with?
Colin says he and Pratchett “worked well” and he was close to Pratchett, working as his agent for his entire career. It was a reason Pratchett was so successful. Colin realised that he “deserved” a more successful profile, so he arranged that he should go to Victor Gollanncz who was able to pay him more money than Smythe could. Pratchett would be earning up to a million pounds. Pratchett even described Smythe as “the person I distrust the least”.
AI has affected the publishing world, it has made operations much faster and more efficient. It allows people to rapidly turn books into audio books and makes refining them much easier, overall speeding up the process. However, there are also cons as it makes copyright less easy and lots of platforms are flooded by low level AI generated “slop”. It has also affected the wages of those in the trade, and as AI is never perfect, it can remove the human-sounding element of the text making it bland.
Overall, the life of Terry Pratchet had many turns and emergency brakes, but ultimately he is remembered as a prolific author and an amazing person.
Reported By Tom T and Archie T