All aspiring authors, read this (and those of you who’ve already been published and can’t work out what happened…) We could have written this ourselves (except we’d take a few zeros off the figures in no.8…) and it’s the same story in the UK.
Thanks to FictionBitch for the link.
Sharon
Another double-whammy of good news this week: A Wilder Vein made The Independent’s list of ‘best books for Christmas’, saying this:
‘And so back to tales of the heart. A Wilder Vein (edited by Linda Cracknell; Two Ravens Press. £10.99) is an anthology linking writers with the natural world. Its theme is the wilder places of Britain, and its object an exploration of “new ways of seeing”. One way, articulated by Gerry Loose, is to follow what the writer sees almost in real time, taking in tiny details: the way young holly sprays from an oak or how scabs of lichen decorate the rocks. A landscape, suggests Robert Macfarlane in his foreword, is defined not only by what it is but by the way we see it: “certain thoughts might be possible only in certain places”. If we lose those places, we are losing kinds of imagination too.’
And Powerlines made the Country Life Christmas selection this week! – all of which means a nice happy Christmas for us at TRP – lovely to see books taking off like that.
Don’t forget you can still buy them both together for only £12 (£16 overseas) including post & packing, by going to the special offer page on our website.
Sharon
The demise of Borders is already old news. And a pity, because they never returned a single book they bought from us (unlike Waterstone’s, who hardly lift them out of the box before they’re packed off again in disgrace back to our distributors) and the bookshops we dealt with seemed to be stocked by human beings. The loss of the Borders in Inverness is especially sad as it’s right next to the Tesco mega-store and is the only place to have proper (Starbucks) coffee on the entire Inverness retail park. We were fortunate that Borders had paid our last bill, somewhere in the region of £150, just before they went bust – so unlike many publishers we’ve come out of it clean. But I will mourn the only real consistent high-street competitor to Waterstone’s – from a personal as well as a business perspective.
I’ve been away from home/work the past couple of days in the very beautiful university town of St Andrews, depressing the English department there with a lecture on the future of literary fiction (well, hopefully not too depressing – a bit of a call to arms, and also the fun bit, talking about my own new novel). Someone afterwards asked me what I thought of Amazon – were they really as bad as most people seem to make out? And I didn’t even hesitate – not for a moment. I love Amazon. Something about their current plans for world domination with the Kindle and all (something which, as a matter of principle, we plan not to get involved in any time soon) worries me, but as a good old seller of books and miscellaneous other products, to this dweller-in-the-wilderness they’re utter heaven. For me, an hour on Amazon is the perfect browsing experience, as it’s unhampered by the tastes of any particular bookseller that may or may not accord with mine (the average High Street bookseller doesn’t stand a chance). The number of times I’ve followed the ‘people who bought/viewed this book also bought/viewed’ links and found utter gems that I’d never have found in any bookstore I’ve ever been to is … well, innumerable. I love Amazon as a consumer. I can find anything there. And if I can’t, it’s on Abe Books.
And as a publisher? Well, sometimes I wish their discounts were lower and that they were a little easier to navigate. But we supply them via a wholesaler and so never have to deal with them direct. Our books sell on Amazon Marketplace too, sometimes, and that’s an astinishingly effective and efficient system.
So if the high street bookseller (the one remaining one…) should spontaneously combust overnight … this little publisher will hardly notice. And will keep supplying by every available online route to anyone who has a computer.
Sharon
At Two Ravens Press we determinedly break all the rules that are supposed to apply (don’t know who wrote them, let alone who agreed to them on behalf of all of us!) about taking issue with book reviews, if we think we or the author or the book have been seriously misrepresented. If we feel the author of the review hasn’t done their job properly. It has only happened on a couple of occasions, but I absolutely feel that both the writer and the publisher have a right to hit back at a bad review. By ‘bad review’ I don’t mean that the review says the book is bad (if a review does so for good reason, then you just have to bite down and take it) but that the review itself is poorly done or the author trashes a book just because they don’t like the style of writing rather than because it is inherently bad. (We have, on the other hand, seen reviews of two of our books – in the same publication, and by the same reviewer, interestingly – that were so foolishly bad that we’ve just chosen to ignore them.) In that context, John Updike’s ideas about what book reviewing ought to be strike home. Here they are:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.…
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never…try to put the author “in his place,” making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
Thanks to Emma Darwin for this link.
Sharon
Susan Hill, in a blog on The Spectator website, talks about the closing of Borders and the future of books in the current decidedly dodgy retail environment. Here’s a quote that struck home:
For the last thirteen years I have run a small publishing company and we recently stopped bringing out fiction other than for children, because we cannot make it pay even modestly. I run the business from home, employ only freelance staff on an ad hoc basis and do not take any salary myself. There is no other way I can so much as break even. How large firms with staff, office overheads, rents and rates can survive is a matter of concern but many are doing so at the moment by making employees redundant. That cannot go on.
Tell us about it! In the current climate, we at Two Ravens Press can only marvel at publishers who still seem to feel it necessary (why??) to open smart London offices and to continue to expand extensively into potentially risky areas. High Street retail is one of the riskiest areas of all. We’ve looked very carefully at the result of our relationship with Waterstone’s over the past three years; after thousands of books have passed through their stores we reckon we’ve made a small loss overall. Yes: that’s right. We haven’t made a penny on any of those books. Waterstone’s could quite easily kill us, if we weren’t now being very careful and selective about how we market to them. Borders have always been better (they don’t have such a wicked returns policy) but the truth is that high street chains are now the last place small publishers who intend to stay in business need to be. We would love it if more independents took our books; truth is that as a generality (yes, there are exceptions) they’re even more conservative. So what do we do? Internet, internet, internet. That’s the future, it seems for the likes of us. One wonders what the future will be for bigger publishers with the demise of one of their major outlets. Little more than Tesco’s and Asda, perhaps…
Sharon
A fairly convoluted but well-argued post from Zadie Smith on the Guardian book blog, in the context of essay writing, about whether ‘novel-nausea’ is a growing phenomenon. While agreeing that ‘novel-nausea’ is common and develops from a frustration with deeply unimagininative ’same-old’ novels (the kind so prevalent in modern British fiction that I regularly rant about on this blog) Smith nevertheless ends on a positive note:
Except, except. Then something remarkable comes into your hands. Not very often – no more or less often now than in the 1930s, or the 1890s or the 1750s – but every now and then, you read something wonderful. (Despite all the dull talk of the death of literature, the rate of great novels has always been and will always be roughly the same. By my reckoning, about 10 per decade. Although behind them are dozens of very good novels, for which this reader, at least, is grateful.) Every now and then a writer renews your faith… But after you have raged at the impossible artificiality of storytelling, once you have shouted, with Kafka, “But then? No then”, well, maybe you will find yourself returning to the crossroads of “And then, and then”, if only to see what’s going on down there. Because there is a still a little magic left in that ancient formula, a little of what Werner Herzog … described as “ecstatic truth”. And every now and again some very imaginative writer is sure to make that “And then” worth your while.
Sharon
… is One True Void, by Dexter Petley. Which had an entire column of Boyd Tonkin’s weekly column in The Independent devoted to it:
‘Delivers scene after scene of exhilarating rage, tenderness, lyricism and pitch-black comedy as its angry young hero discovers that “there was a chasm in society that no book-reading would ever fill”. Conventionally enough, this is a rite-of-passage story about the events that fix the path of a bright but stranded 17-year-old. Less predictably, Petley writes, with a bittersweet mix of stifling intimacy and sizzling exasperation, about the English rural working-class of the early 1970s – no longer the peasant stalwarts of Hardy or Lawrence but the pikey scum that all now feel at liberty to loathe.’
You can buy the e-book here. And here’s what it’s all about:
They still called him Pisspot, the local scrubbers and all his ex-classmates, as they whizzed around the village on their Motobecanes. They didn’t understand why he wasn’t hanging about up the chip shop with them any more, or phlobbing cheese and onion curd outside the public bar of The Royal Oak and playing inside left for the second team. But it was 1973 and Henry Chambers, aged 17, was motivated to achieve greatness. He’d just found out that if he wanted to be a poet he had to have both a vision of himself and a Pre-Raphaelite girlfriend. But that was impossible in the dead winter village of Hawkhurst. And the Claires and Virginias of West Kent College, Tunbridge Wells already had the Jameses and Jollyons as their social equals. Not Henry, the quiet poet with the tumbleweed bumfluff and cotted hair. No: for Henry, the future was bleak. There was no point and no vision. But just as Henry was putting the black edges round his own stationery and plotting to murder his baggots, he visited an ‘old lady’ on his Thursday afternoon community service. The house was called Plato Villa and Maxine Pollenfex – not exactly the old lady he was expecting – was going to change Henry’s life, and everyone else’s, forever. Dexter Petley’s fourth novel is a searing infra-red vision of 1970s Britain and the tragedies of class and tradition. Written in typically blistering language, One True Void tells how seventeen year-old Henry Chambers turns bleakness into beauty, anarchy and hysteria into poetic redemption, and takes apart the whole life of a small Kent village as he goes.
Robert Alan Jamieson tells it like it is. This is perhaps the truest and loveliest piece of writing about writing (a novel) than any I’ve ever read. For the experienced and inexperienced alike.
http://editorial-consultancy.co.uk/how-i-write/robert-alan-jamieson/
Sharon
(Photograph stolen from the blog: it is courtesy of Ingvild Andersen.)
We do a whole lot of telling it like it is on this blog – and ‘how it is’ has been pretty well uphill! So just for once you’ll have to allow us to sit back and beam at you in a pretty pleased-with-ourselves Cheshire Cat sort of way. Why? Well, we aren’t about to retire to the Bahamas on the strength of it (wouldn’t want to anyway)- but ‘A Wilder Vein’ is actually selling like a good book should. We’ve remarked in earlier posts that it was getting some media attention. But we’ve seen that before… What we haven’t seen up until now is a book going out of the distributors in hundreds during the first month rather than tens. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve had a few titles which really gathered some momentum and sustained it for months. But ‘A Wilder Vein’ has beaten all our previous records for coming off the blocks. Whether that turns into a short sprint or a marathon - we’ll see. Of course this is miniature stuff compared to big mass-market publishing - I am talking a few hundred as yet. But, my lord, we were getting in need of a morale booster on the sales front – and now we have one at a modest TRP sort of a scale.
A Strong Start
This is all genuinely exciting. Not just because it keeps the press afloat. But because it is an ambition made good. It must have been nearly two years ago when Sharon decided that what was really needed was a book which brought together writing about the relationship between people and wild places. How a book like that would start to answer all sorts of important questions that a segment of our crowded population is really wanting to get to grips with. Then the decision to bring in an external editor (Linda Cracknell) to gather and select the pieces. A long process which has resulted in a book which stays true to all the ambitions we had when we started publishing – and which is clearly going to speak up loud and clear in a crucial national debate. Yep, publishing has its good days.
All I want now is for ‘Powerlines‘ to cross over into the literary mainstream from the strong reviews it is getting in the angling world. Ah but there I go already. Want, want, want…
David
We are delighted to announce that Regi Claire’s collection of short stories Fighting It has been shortlisted for the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award 2009, and Esther Woolfson’s Piano Angel has been shortlisted for the Saltire Society Homecoming Award. Other publishers whose books appear on the shortlist are: Jonathan Cape, John Murray, Duckworth, Quercus, Granta, Faber, Bloodaxe, Macmillan, Edinburgh University Press, Oxford University Press, Birlinn and Ùr-Sgeul. With the exception of Ùr-Sgeul, Two Ravens Press is the smallest publisher on the lists – which makes it especially satisfying to appear twice. The Prizes, worth £10 000 for Book of the Year and £1500 for the Homecoming Award, will be awarded on Monday 30th November by Michael Russell, MSP, Minister for Culture in a ceremony at The National Library of Scotland.
Esther Woolfson’s shortlisting comes hot on the heels of Piano Angel’s appearance on the prestigious IMPAC Award longlist. And here’s the interesting thing about that. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that back in September 2008 we took serious issue with a reviewer in The Scotsman who made a false statement about our editing policy (suggesting we didn’t do editing at all) in the context of an early review of Piano Angel. But what’s interesting here is the content of that review when it comes to the book itself. While recognising that reviewers absolutely have a right to say whether they rate a book or not, we nevertheless found this one more than a little brutal. The reviewer, Lesley McDowell, states: “Woolfson commits all the basic errors a good creative writing course would have hammered out of her, and that a good editor would have excised.” (Esther at the time was teaching creative writing courses, but let’s not get too hung up on that…) With a flourish, she ends the review with the following statement: “This novel is simply not ready for the market, and handing it over, unedited, in this way, [N.B. the novel WAS edited!] may even have done Woolfson’s nascent career as a novelist some harm.”
Well, we find no small satisfaction in noting that it didn’t.
Sharon
