"Most books sell nothing..."

This is what my agent, Sid, chooses to say to me on the way to our first post-contract signing meeting with the publisher. I don't know whether he is playing devil's advocate to keep his own hopes down, or whether he is genuinely bracing me for inevitable faliure, but either way it seems a strange time to tell me this.

But then there are many strange things about Sid. I cannot fathom how he managed to get Harper Collins even to read my novel, let alone agree to publish, but it took just a couple of months from when we signed our little agreement. I can only guess he has some suction with an executive there, a compromising photograph perhaps, or secrets too dark to contemplate, but when he told me the news I laughed at him. He was unfazed. He expected me to expect him to fail.

I had been rejected by countless literary agents before I approached him. Well, not countless. Twenty-seven. Which is still a lot. And I had really given up hope. The second book will be better, I thought. Patience. And when he wrote back to me asking to see the whole manuscript, that he had liked the synopsis and first few chapters, I had wondered what was wrong with him. 'No one else likes it,' I thought, 'So he must be desperate.' But so was I, and I went to his pokey little office on Regent Street.

"Why don't you move somewhere cheaper and get a bigger office?" I asked him.

"It's Regent Street," he said, spreading his arms wide. "Unfortunately my business is all about perception. That's why agents all fuck beautiful women and drive Porsches."

"Do you drive a Porsche?"

"No," he admitted. "I take the bus."

I looked at him, slouched on a beaten up sofa dressed like Bilbo Baggins, and decided not to inquire about the women.

Even now, done up in his best suit, he still looks scruffy somehow, like an adult William Brown after a long school day. But he seems sober at least.

I am introduced to my editor, Chris - we have the same name! Oh how we laugh, "That should make things easy, or maybe confusing," etc... - and then we sit around a table with a few other Collins people whose names and titles I don't listen to because I'm focusing on my own conduct.

It's mostly a blur because I'm not good in meetings. I trail off and think about other things, like whether the final "controversial" episode of the Sopranos is going to disappoint me, or how smug I am at having discovered Black Kids before any of my friends, and then 'Hurricane Jane' is looping through my head.

Luckily Sid does most of the talking, and I am impressed by his authoritative tone, even though everyone can surely see it's a bluff. Then the suit who seems like the main Harper guy, a good-looking bloke in his forties (hey, I'm a writer, we observe these things about everyone we meet, we can't help it) turns to me and tells me again how much they all like the book. "So, are you working on a follow up?" he asks.

I nod. "I'm about a thirteenth of the way through it."

"A thirteenth, huh? That's great news."

"I mean, it's not a follow up per se, but, you know, a second book."

"Not a follow up?" The Collins men share concerned looks.

"Well, it's not connected. But it's still a novel written by me. So it's a follow up in that sense. Just not a sequel or anything."

The head honcho gives me a stern smile. "Sci-fi readers like to get involved in a different world over many years. They like a whole series of books set in and expanding the same universe. Like the Discworld books. Then latecomers to the series will go back and buy the earlier volumes."

There are murmurs of agreement and then Sid, curse him, says to them "I told him that."

"I don't see myself as a sci-fi writer," I tell them. "It's just my first book happens to be set in the not too distant future."

The head guy blanches. "So the second book isn't even the same genre?"

"Well, no." Another murmur goes up. "This book is just a story like any other," I plead. "I'm not Philip K Dick. It's not set in the year three billion on the planet Zarg. I'm a writer."

"In this day and age we need someone we can market. It's difficult for readers to recognise what they like if authors skip around genres."

"I'm sure Christopher can come up with something," Sid says.

Then there's a long silence while we all look at each other. Then the head guy says "Well, have a think about it."

So I was almost happy for a few weeks, which is a record. Now I'm a sci-fi writer, apparently. Which is still better than not being a writer.

"I think they like you," Sid tells me. Sid's full of shit.