ONE of my roles in life today appears to be that of favourite (frequently with Alan Taylor) whipping boy for Scottish publishers. Collectively and individually they apparently need to kick against the pricks, and for understandable reasons I'm a convenient prick.

In his Herald Essay (May 23; my birthday, as it happens) self-confessed micro publisher Hunter Steele of Black Ace Books had a lengthy and laborious go at articles Alan Taylor and I had written in different publications months ago. It's rarely helpful to respond to criticism in the press but Mr Steele so perversely distorts, by selective quotation and precis, what Alan Taylor and I had written, and what our passionately held views are, that I'd be grateful for space to respond.

Mr Steele points out that the first books by such distinguished writers as Janice Galloway, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, A L Kennedy, and Charles Palliser were brought out by Scottish publishers, with a little or a lot of help from their friends at the Scottish Arts Council. He reports the fact somewhat triumphantly, and he is right to be proud that Scottish publishers had the artistic judgment and editorial nous to spot such talent.

Later on he says he doesn't blame the novelists for decamping south with, in some cases, their next books, entirely because fat London publishers bribed them with filthy lucre.

My point is twofold, although the points are closely related, and Mr Steele and the Scottish publishing cottage industry should tak tent of it. Mr Steele makes the point that book publishing is, or should be, less about authors - and by extension their agents - making money than it is about literature, although I don't think he uses that elitist word. I couldn't agree more.

Anyone, if they are so inclined, can sell Jeffrey Archer for a mess of pottage, or indeed a mountain of porridge. The stimulation of publishing (and agenting is an extension thereof, though Mr Steele chooses not to think so) is to ''discover'' new writers of originality, both in fiction and non-fiction, poetry too of course, and persuade the literate world that they are worth reading and supporting. It is as simple or complex as that.

As I once commented in your correspondence columns, I have yet to meet the Scottish writer published by a Scottish publishing house who is entirely, or even partially, enamoured of the experience. I challenged your readers to provide you with names of satisfied - or even self-satisfied - authors. There was a resounding silence, even from the backwoodsmen. No-one wheeled them out.

No Scottish author, or author published by a Scottish publishing house, whether micro or macro or something in between, would want to decamp south if he or she felt that his or her publisher had done as competent a job as a London publisher would have done. Why will no-one involved with Scottish publishing today, including my friend Lorraine Fanin who indefatigably runs the Scottish Publishers' Association, have the integrity to acknowledge that?

That ''competent job'' has to include the design and production of the book (Mr Steele's Black Ace books have covers which must turn off potential buyers in droves although he seems pleased enough with them), the ability to publicise, market, and distribute it aggressively both within Scotland and beyond, and to pay the author the same level of advance and royalty that he or she could command from English publishers.

It's tiresome but revealing of Mr Steele to put down bestselling authors such as Stephen King, John Grisham, Nicholas Evans, and he who is known in the trade as Wilbore Smith. I don't want to read their novels any more, I imagine, than Mr Steele does.

Yet he really ought to understand that it is precisely because their books sell in such large quantities that their publishers, admittedly more macro than micro, can afford to invest in new authors, in taking chances.

Publishing is, or should be, a business. If it isn't run as a business, it will die, and what is the point of a former publishing house? As it is, I find it little short of scandalous the extent to which Scottish publishers use the Scottish Arts Council as a crutch to bail them out, shamelessly to justify their inability or disinclination actually to sell their books in the market-place.

But why should they make the effort when those nice people at the Scottish Arts Council have all that money to give away?

Giles Gordon,

6 Ann Street, Edinburgh. May 24.