Publicly-funded assistance to publishers has really hit the headlines in Scotland – enough to spill over to the Observer. See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/04/scotland and http://www.tworavenspress.com/HTML%20Pages/News%20Events.htm
I was really struggling to find my own opinions on the whole subject – my instinct is that we are a private company, set up because we chose to, and that we should sink or swim without someone throwing us a rubber ring. On the other hand it clearly wouldn’t make sense for hundreds of thousands of pounds of public ‘arts’ money to go into big budget failures (in my more acid moments I refer to these as the ‘pot plant and receptionist’ model of operation – TRP having neither a receptionist nor a reception area in which the pot plants could go!) while for the sake of £20K we are forced to abandon the attempt to be a publisher of serious literature in Scotland. We are so ridiculously cheap! So, there really is a middle ground here – between ’sink or swim’ and wasting public money – and luckily for me Brian Morton in the Observer has articulated it. He finishes off with a metaphor I like:
“Literary fiction in Scotland is in the same precarious position as the red squirrel. Time to support it against the encroaching greyness.”
David
