e-book-in-a-bath

It has a certain ring to it – a catchy ‘e-book-in-a-bath’. A bit like soap on a rope. So here it is – you saw it from TRP first…

See - no soggy pages

But my new marketing strategy aside – how has our first 6 months with e-books been? Where now? What’s the real low-down?

Well in the blue corner, still, are the digital revolutionaries. Lots of people convinced that some major paradigm shift either has or is about to take place. There is now a novel being published entirely by Twitter and there are a lot of people future-predicting a whole new age of freedom for writers and readers. Print-on-demand and self-publishing be damned – that was just the start of freedom. Now we can go direct from the writer to their reader(s) – your new novel downloaded to an i-phone. Lots of hand-waving in the direction of the music industry – who have apprently handled or mishandled the digital transition with breathtaking stupifidty or admirable wisdom (sorry, I can’t work out from the blogosphere which it is – maybe both). Something about ‘performance is the new royalty cheque’.

Ach, that’s all getting a bit exciting for a plain country-boy like me.   My experience of the digital revolution has been very pleasant but a little less cosmic. We have made and sold some e-books. We’ve sold a handful and had some repeat custom so they obviously work and are, to some readers, a pleasant way to read. Over time we’ll convert more of the list and I expect our sales will creep up and maybe even match the printed versions for some titles. The book is cheaper for the customer and I don’t have to stuff it into an envelope and drive it to the Post Office (or pay someone else to do so).

But the simple fact is that 95% of the process of publishing and marketing an e-book is just exactly the same as for a print book. Nothing much fundamental has changed. If you want national distribution there are people who make a living by selling you the facility. If you want to tell people about the book you either have to get it reviewed or advertised – or you try to get it out through your network of contacts/friends/colleagues. If you want it to look good and want it to be an ergonomic pleasure to read your edition of the work  – then you have to put a lot of graft into typesetting it properly.

Sure, if you want to get your book ‘out there’ without a publisher you can do it with an e-book. But incidentally, even after you’ve typeset it, you’ll find it will currently cost you more to convert your MS to an e-book than it would to print about 200 copies with a reputable printer. Of course you could always just PDF it and send the file around. But there’s nothing new in that. You always could.

Ah, but now there’s Facebook and Twitter. Now I can not only produce my own book without a publisher but I can market it myself in an afternoon. I can bang out a short video clip of me reading an enticing opening chapter. Beam it direct to ‘dear reader’. No need for those pesky reviewers and arbitrary arbiters of good taste. Certainly no need for PR consultants.  Maybe. Despite my scepticism I think you really might be able to set a chain reaction going this way. If the content is very good. But what do you do then? At the risk of sounding very uncouth – where does the money come from? (More general hand-waving in the direction of the music industry?) Chances are that you could approach a conventional publisher – armed with a your storm of internet-based public interest. But that is the end of the revolution.

Sometimes a technological or intellectual advance breaks a log-jam – solves an apparently intractable problem. Everyone sees the problems with literature and the publishing industry – and it would be really great if the e-books and other digital advances could somehow change the rules overnight. But in my opinion the rules remain almost unchanged - you need excellent writing to start with then you need to fight your way past all the other good writing (as well as an overburden of rubbish writing) to the limited attention span of the people who will eventually part with a few quid for your work. Nothing digital is going to change that. You may get a short-term edge on the competition by innovative use of technology – but only one man can write the first novel published on Twitter. I don’t see the media falling over themselves to do a feature on the third twitter novel.

AL Kennedy on the future of writing

A typically forthright article from the wonderful AL Kennedy on the Guardian Book Blog about how hard it is to be a writer these days – increasingly hard (AL Kennedy obviously has no great love for them, but trust me – it’s hard to be an indie publisher too…) and getting harder. Here are the bits that really struck home; regular readers will remember similar rants on past TRP blog pages:

I have no idea what a new writer would do now – attempting to burrow into a market that’s in free fall and a literary “culture” that drastically limits the numbers of books that are published or that will ever be visible in major bookshop chains, reviews or the media generally. Publishers are beyond risk-averse and are currently decision-averse. It is possible that published writers will no longer ever leave whatever other employment they use to subsidise themselves. Meanwhile, the increase in poorly conceived and exploitative creative writing courses will continue, and increasingly the writers who teach on them will end up training potential writers to teach other potential writers to teach on other courses and round and round they all will go – never knowing how good they might be, or what they’re missing … Established writers surely can’t feel morally comfortable about helping new writers to commit themselves to the life while ignoring the fact that the chances of success, or even of publication, are minimal. And we can’t pretend that teaching writers to teach writing is meaningful, or anything close to our primary purpose.

That’s an important point. It seems to us day after day that there are more people who want to write books than who want to read them (certainly more than those who want to actually BUY them…). There simply isn’t enough room in the publishing business for all these writers. Why? Well, ALK has one answer:

It isn’t the readers’ or the writers’ fault that publishing has fallen on its own sword and allowed book shop chains and short-term thinking to eat its heart away. It isn’t our fault that the Net Book Agreement disappeared (although we should have fought harder to keep it). But we are the ones who’ll lose out, who don’t get the variety of books, who don’t find the unlooked-for pleasures or get to share the new dreams. The appetite for them is still out there.

While the current retail set-up persists, entirely dependent on enormous discounts and excessive promotions, it’ll always be hard for good, innovative new writers to get noticed. Or for risk-taking, creative small publishers to make a living. But here at Two Ravens Press we’re still doing our best to find our way through…

Sharon

 

 

Back in the saddle…

… of the bucking bronco that represents Two Ravens Press. And no longer puzzled about why the BBC chose not to feature A Wilder Vein on Excess Baggage just before we left: because they were always intending to run the feature on 7 November. They just forgot to tell anyone … Ho hum. Listen out this Saturday at 10am, Radio 4: Sara Maitland and Andrew Greig talking about the relationship between people and wild places.

Meanwhile, we’re all coming back down to earth after the week away. Team-building in South Uist for staff members ran very smoothly and apparently required the consumption of a very large rock. Puppies…

Sharon

Gone fishing…

One of the tough things about being a publisher is that you learn very quickly not to rely on anything where media is concerned … but we’re as confused as the rest of you about why our book A Wilder Vein wasn’t featured on Radio 4’s Excess Baggage this morning as promised, even after contributors had travelled to be interviewed. Perhaps it’s simply postponed till another time; who knows. We’ll keep you posted!

Which means it is now an even finer time than ever to turn off the computers, lock the doors and go fishing. Yes, it’s time for the Two Ravens Press annual fishing pilgrimage to the wilder veins of South Uist, where we will try very hard to switch off and recover from the recurring frustrations of being an independent publisher in an increasingly tough climate, and come back with enough energy to pick up the reins again and struggle through another year!

So this blog space will be vacant for a week. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a photograph of last year’s expedition.

Sharon

And another thing … fiction as “so much more than narrative’s slave”

On October 5 I took serious issue with a piece by Robert McCrum in the Observer arguing that story should once again predominate in evaluating contemporary literay fiction: that plot was what really matters: ’story, story, story’, as he puts it. At the time I wrote the blog something kept nagging at me: something I’d read recently that I’d printed off and kept, that seemed to address precisely that issue and why ’story, story, story’ isn’t nearly enough to create a great work of literature.

Today, cleaning out an old filing tray, I found it: a very positive review of Julia Leigh’s wonderful novella Disquiet by one of our finest contemporary writers, Kirsty Gunn – ironically, also in the Observer. I quote:

Poor fiction. Seems all it gets to do these days is tell stories. One barely picks up a review of even the most serious literary work without reading about plot first and foremost, as though all we care about is who does what to whom and when. Yet there was a time when fiction was regarded as an art form capable of so much more than being narrative’s slave. When writers and critics talked about form, style and voice as being as interesting as what goes on in the story. And, more often than not, a great deal more than that.

Those were the great modernist golden days of Woolf, Mansfield, Eliot and Joyce. They were driven by particular and idiosyncratic literary ideas, rather than by that burly, mass-produced engine of the what next? The wide, modernist experience of imagination has got lost in the narrow rush of motorway narration: pages turning and turning all the way to the end. It’s entertaining, but, as Mansfield said, it’s not art.

Art describes itself, not something else. And art, in literature, is about the qualities of the fiction, not the events embedded within it.

I think that just about says it all – certainly says what I was trying to convey in a considerably less elegant and much more outraged fashion about McCrum’s defence of the Dan Brown phenomenon

Sharon

And the good news is…

A Wilder Vein is to be featured on BBC Radio 4’s travel magazine, Excess Baggage, on Saturday October 24 at 10am. Sara Maitland and Andrew Greig in conversation with John McCarthy. Don’t miss it!

Sharon

Why is the publishing business in such a perilous state?

Robert McCrum has one the the answers, in yesterday’s Observer: because the decisions are no longer taken by editors, but by sales people on the basis of sales projection figures.

Such is the climate in which new fiction is often published today. At the public end, there’s the razzmatazz. Off-the-radar, new fiction by unknown writers, the lifeblood of the business, is being scrutinised by people who have neither appetite for, nor understanding of, originality…

After a decade in which the editor had been king, with very mixed results, and certainly a lot of wasted investment, the suits took control. Some editors were purged, others were muzzled. The balance of power shifted towards sales and marketing, backed up by the newly dominant book chains.Here, as in Hollywood, the cry was: “Give us books that look like other successful books” or: “Give us authors the public’s heard of.” Publishers’ lists began to fill up with lookalikes: sequels to genre hits, film and television tie-ins, books by celebrities. Worse, serious writers became imprisoned in the tyranny of the Epos system, the computerised record of backlist sales. Fail an Epos audit and marketing didn’t want to know. That’s no way to run a creative business. Original books are, by definition, not like others. They must be selected by experienced readers (aka editors).

Ezra Pound’s injunction to writers was “make it new”. But if the dice are loaded, and the people who are calling the odds are not readers but marketing people, what hope for new fiction?

Which about says it all … until you look at it from the writer’s point of view, and find successful novelist Amanda Craig on her blog asking ‘What is the point of keeping on writing?’ -

If you happen to be one of hundreds of so-called “mid-list” authors, life has never felt more grim. Few of us have ever been able to live off our income from books, but now, if you haven’t ever written a best-seller, been on Richard & Judy, had a TV or film adaptation or been short-listed for a major prize, the future has become absolutely horrible. Journalism, which has always been the default setting for many, has either slashed its freelance rates by 25%-50%, or vanished altogether. Teaching, the other standby, is besieged with eager new applicants and so hedged about with testing and regulations that anything approaching creativity is almost impossible.

Meanwhile, authors travel up and down the country to go to literary festivals where, humiliatingly, they sell almost no books…

Such doom and gloom from all quarters may make you want to never read another publishing blog again - and we don’t like to see ourselves on this blog as the purveyors of constant bad news and misery. But neither can we pretend, for the sake of a happy-snappy blog, that everything is wonderful in the world of publishing, whether in the world of big conglomerates or of small indies. It isn’t; it’s pretty sick out there. Writing has never been an occupation in which to make a fortune, unless you happen to be one of a very select few – but with more people apparently wanting to write books than appear to want to buy them these days, you really have to ask why. Why write, and maybe even more questionable, why publish? Sadly, Craig has few answers; at Two Ravens Press we have fewer still. In fact, for us as indie publishers it probably comes down to just one: the pleasure and even the pride that you feel when you hold a book in your hand that you’ve saved from the everlasting slush pile, slaved over, edited, proofed, typeset, designed, marketed … and you open it up and lose yourself once again in the beauty of the language or the unique light of this author’s imagination – when you know full well that without you the more unusual books – the risk-taking books that the bean-counters will NEVER understand – wouldn’t ever see the light of day. Something that I feel every time I open Angela Morgan Cutler’s Auschwitz, or Suhayl Saadi’s Joseph’s Box, or so many others that we’ve worked on over the past three years. Because, ultimately, someone has to be banging the drum for innovation and originality. And it sure as hell isn’t going to be the sales guys at the big publishing conglomerates around the world…

Sharon

Poet Strike

Just the thought of trying to do business out of the Highlands during a postal strike is enough to send me off to the shoreline to build sand-castles. At least the tide will wash our hard work away in a predictable fashion.

But after the gnashing of teeth, the forthcoming strike did prompt me to wonder – what would happen if we had a union of poets? After all, the screen-writers recently brought Hollywood to the negotiating table. I wonder how long it would take for somebody to notice that all the poets had gone on strike – or were working to rule and only producing rhyming doggerel.  Are there many poets that society would just never miss – and would ’being missed’ be dependent on the content of the poetry or the intention of the poet?

Aye well. Maybe poetry just isn’t ‘that sort of activity’ (like, say, delivering the mail) which would make people notice strike action. But I, for one, find that a troubling prospect.  

A little bird with spurs

David

The Catch-22 of retail book sales

Sometimes whether we wonder if it isn’t just us who have a hard time making ends meet these days. It’s increasingly hard to get books reviewed, as the literary pages of the national newspapers continue to shrink and as they seem less willing to take risks on what they do review. It’s increasingly hard to get books into stores, and when you do, they tend to come right back again at your (significant) cost. Tindal Street Press recently reported problems of this kind – see this link to a Bookseller article for details. And here’s a quote:

“…Alan Mahar, publishing director, told The Bookseller the drop [in reserves] was down to “heavy and sudden de-stocking and serious returns” from chain booksellers, which resulted from taking part in book chain promotions, shortly before the recession began to bite.

He added: “We had a lot of books—for us—in the shops, especially of the old edition of [Catherine O'Flynn's] What Was Lost. Even Girl in a Blue Dress [longlisted for 2008's Booker Prize] was returned in large quantities before interest revived following the Orange Prize longlisting early in 2009.”

Mahar said Tindal took part in store promotions because it was the only way “for books to make any impact . . . We have always considered that it’s worth going in for the main promotions, but we have observed that it doesn’t always have a positive effect.” He added: “We are having to watch our promotion costs and print runs with care this year. Trading has certainly become harder.”

Mahar’s views echo those of Marion Boyars publisher Catheryn Kilgarriff, who attributed excessive consolidation in the retail sector, and the cost of promotions, to her decision to wind down the company.”

You’ll see the bit above that I’ve highlighted in bold text – that’s exactly what we’ve found here at Two Ravens Press. If you don’t participate in expensive promotions, it’s hard to sell books or even to get them into the chains – they’re no longer interested in operating at standard discount levels and if you don’t offer them big discounts are unlikely to stock your books at all. But if you do enter those promotions, you’ll almost certainly fail to make a profit at all, and just as likely make a loss – as we found in 2008 when we participated in half a dozen promotions with Waterstone’s.

What to do? Buggered if we know. Except to encourage, as much as we can, people to buy direct from us, online. Which, with a handful of risk-taking independent bookstores excepted, seems to be the main way we can make anything remotely resembling a profit on our book sales these days.

Sharon

Sometimes you really have to wonder…

…what some literary critics are on. Robert McCrum in The Observer this Sunday, implying that Dan Brown would be a good contender for the Booker. Okay – before you get really excited, I admit I exaggerate! – but if you read the article you really, REALLY have to wonder.

McCrum begins by suggesting that the Booker shortlist has for years “eschewed narrative in favour of sometimes unreadable literary fiction.” That in itself is scary enough – if the former literary editor of The Observer finds the average Booker shortlist “unreadable”, what trust should we place in literary critics?! He follows this by suggesting that Dan Brown “must be doing something right” because his new novel sold a million copies within 24 hours of publication. (Er….)  That “something right” apparently is – plot.

God forbid that I should bore you all with a lecture on all the ways in which Dan Brown’s plots are utterly ludicrous (BBC Radio 4’s Front Row did a fine enough job of that, as have others) but McCrum insists that the key to Brown’s success is ’story, story, story.’  (I guess it must be: unlikely and laughable as his plots are, they’re nothing compared to his plain, straightforward bad writing.) McCrum then rounds all of this off with the assertion that EM Forster (who right now can be heard turning and turning in his grave) would have supported this emphasis on story (yes, I can see it now: the cover recommendation from old EM on Brown’s new novel…) because he “conceded the importance of narrative” in his groundbreaking book ‘Aspects of the Novel.’

Of course EM Forster “conceded the importance of narrative.” You couldn’t possibly not. Fiction IS narrative, by definition! Yes, McCrum is right that ”narrative is part of our DNA.” I spent years as a psychologist developing ‘narrative therapy’ techniques: the use of storytelling in therapy. Nothing new in any of that. And yes, story is critical to most great works of literature. But story alone doesn’t make great works of literature. What makes great literature is the way you handle your narrative, the language you use to impart it, the structures you place on it etc etc etc. A good literary prize ought to be looking at the entire package, not just rewarding the writers who can think up the best plots.

McCrum apparently struggles to understand many of the books on recent Booker shortlists, using words like “impenetrable”, “baffling”, and “unreadable”. The Booker, he asserts, “has held itself apart from the vulgar manifestations of storytelling.” He doesn’t, of course, name those books that he considers so unreadable, but looking back at shortlists – even winners – I really have to wonder what – or who – he’s talking about. Michael Ondaatje? Graham Swift? Peter Carey? Kazuo Ishiguro? Zadie Smith? Ali Smith? Margaret Atwood? Penelope Lively? To name but a few. There are all kinds of ways to tell a great story, and the Booker shortlist has held some stunners over the years.

McCrum’s article depressed us, as well as irritating the life out of us. Why? Because although his basic point – that effective storytelling is critical to the success of a book – can’t be argued with, the implication that only conventional plot-driven novels are exciting and readable is death to literary innovation. And because right now, the book market in this country is dull enough and predictable enough and commercial-blockbuster-PLOT-DRIVEN enough without more of this bizarre reverse snobbery going on. Last year we had Booker judge Michael Portillo crowing “we have brought you fun!” – which was bad enough, but if the likes of McCrum have their way, the next shortlist would include not only John Le Carre and Howard Jacobson, who he suggests ought to have been past contenders, but would probably include Dan Brown as well.

Sharon