The essence of it

Following up a little from Friday’s blog - and on the subject of what makes good literature and great novels…

A couple of months ago I finally picked Cormac McCarthy’s The Road out of my slowly diminishing pile of stuff that I must read, and was completely enthralled. First book for an age that I’ve read all the way through without being able to put it down. I’ve always been a fan of good dystopian fiction anyway (if you are, watch out on the TRP website next March for Stona Fitch’s Printer’s Devil, a fine forthcoming example of it) but something about this was especially compelling. The understated way that he handles such big issues – survival – not only of the human race and the planet, but of a couple of individuals in the face of extremity. Of course I’d heard of McCarthy before, but hadn’t really fancied any of his other novels – seemed all a bit male and violent and western for me. Then I saw the movie version of No Country for Old Men and thought it was absolutely brilliant, though I admit to being a little perplexed by the ending (probably because I had to get up and pee at a critical moment and missed a clue or two :- ) Because of the perlexity and my fascination with the way McCarthy could present apparently straightforward genre-style fiction and then turn it completely on its head, I did a bit of research into the guy. To find that he only ever gave one interview in his entire writing career – to the New York Times, in 1992. During which the interviewer said the following:

‘His list of those whom he calls the “good writers” – Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner – precludes anyone who doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death.” Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”‘

Bravo, Cormac McCarthy. That about sums it up for me too, and why I find so many novels lacking in substance. I want to read about situations that are life-and-death – not necessarily literally, with some crazed psychopath following the protagonist around with a gun – but books that deal with issues that are big enough that ultimately it’s the choice between life or death that’s at stake for the characters. That’s one of the things I was writing about in The Long Delirious Burning Blue - not giving in to your fears but taking them and using them, choosing to live fully, in complete awareness of the possibility of death – and what my second novel seems to be shaping up to be about, too: the fictions we make of love, suicide, death… (no, it’s not as grim as it sounds :- ) If I look back at the list of books that continue to matter to me, that have really made a big impression - those books haven’t ever been about, as I quoted Ian McMillan saying in Friday’s blog, “small people making small decisions over kitchen tables” - those books have been books that question, challenge or in some way illuminate the entire basis for our ability to continue to exist in a pretty insane world.

And with that … it’s time to head off down the croft to shovel some chicken shit!

Sharon

Volcanoes and wilderness

A very short blog today, as we’re off to Elgin this afternoon where I’m doing a reading from The Long Delirious Burning Blue at the Museum Hall tonight (7-8.30pm) with fellow writers Clio Gray and Gillian Philip.

As you know, from time to time on this blog we whine pitifully about the state of modern ‘literature’ and all that we feel is lacking in it. We really do feel like lone voices in the wilderness (I know, maybe if we stopped whining … :- ) So it was heartening this morning to read Ian McMillan, writing in the ‘Books of a Lifetime’ section of The Independent today: ”Under the Volcano [by Malcolm Lowry] is a book I turn to when the world seems too ordinary, when my walk to the newsagent’s each morning seems devoid of magic, when every novel I read seems to be about small people making small decisions over kitchen tables, and every new poem I come across seems to make one simple point in 15 stanzas that a stand-up comedian could make in one gag. Under the Volcano renews my faith in literature as a power for good in the world, and you can’t ask for more than that from an old Penguin Modern Classic with the cover hanging off. “

Which I guess takes me back to the Two Ravens Press publishing ‘manifesto’ and where we began; how we want books that “each, in its own way, fight back against formulas and homogenization, against the analgesic washing-out of colour that threatens to fade our bright thoughts.” Whenever modern writing with all its lacks and pretensions gets the better of me, then it’s to the likes of Lowry, Durrell, Lawrence that I turn as well: to the kind of writing that sings and that has more than half an idea in its head. Boy, I wish we could find more of it today!

It was also heartening to read Claire Armistead, The Guardian’s literary editor, talk on the Guardian Books Blog about the quality of the books that are under consideration for the Guardian First Book of the Year award and expressing some of the same perplexity we feel when we look at the longlists for key literary prizes and wonder why: ”Then there were the Everywhere Books – usually novels – which seemed to have surfed the zeitgeist far further than, in my opinion, they deserved to go (these shall remain nameless, though you need look no further than the longlists of some of the year’s other literary prizes).”

Maybe it’s not such a wilderness out there, after all.

Sharon

If you prick us …

This week we have been very down to earth. As well as a couple of small breakthroughs on the publishing, we have been rubbing along doing the things that writers do. Sharon had a small piece published in a very handsome literary fishing periodical. What? Literary fishing! I hear you say. But Waterlog lists Ted Hughes among a line of distinguished contributors, and has many fine examples of ‘nature’ writing that really knows about nature (unlike a lot of ‘response to the natural world’ poetry I see from people who have clearly been no closer to the natural world than the patio door. Yeah, I know – I’m getting cranky!) Then I had a ‘commended’ in a regional poetry competition. The point not to say ‘ain’t we clever’ – quite the opposite – just to show that we do all the things that writers do – little bit at a time, hard work, re-write it again and still want to improve it. We said at the outset that we wanted this whole deal to be inclusive of authors because ‘we is two’. Part of that is knowing not only how difficult it is to write anything worthwhile, but also knowing first-hand how next-to-impossible it is to face off good writing against blockbusters and reality TV. But mostly people seem to get what we are trying to do. Mostly.

David

A moment of quiet

All of a sudden, now that the Edinburgh Book Festival and a busy summer of associated events has come to an end, we find ourselves looking ahead to the rest of the year with some pleasure. It’s not that we can sit back on our heels: from a publishing perspective we have another five books to launch before the end of the year (two novels, two poetry collections and a play). Both David and I have readings from our own work coming up in the Highlands area – everywhere from Elgin to Ardnamurchan. We have some hard decisions to make about the size of our Two Ravens Press list and our focus for 2009, which are dependent in turn on some serious funding issues and a realistic assessment of whether it is possible to make a viable living publishing as we are. (No, we’re not going anywhere – we plan to be around for a good while yet, but there may nevertheless be some adjustments to make.)

From a non-publishing perspective, I have a second novel and a non-fiction project to take me through the winter. There are many jobs to be done on the croft as we prepare for the possibility of lambing in Spring 2009 and as we get a little more organised for the continued smooth production of geese and rare-breed hens. There will soon be a greenhouse to erect (one that’s tested against 130mph winds – we’ve had close to that here before now) and a couple of new raised beds for vegetables to finish for next spring.

From my perspective, that seems like a good rounded life – and it is, now that we’re learning to balance all the demands on us a little better and to insist on taking some time for ourselves. Meanwhile, my favourite time of year here on the west coast is approaching and I can already feel that wonderful sense of hunkering down into the comfort and cosiness of autumn and winter. The nights are already drawing in and for the first time in months we can see the moon and the stars. (I get reverse seasonal affective disorder during the summers here, when the days are so very very long that you go to bed in broad daylight, wake up in the middle of the night and it’s hardly even twilight, and wake up in broad daylight.) The light is beginning to change and to grow warmer and there are plums ripening on the trees and it won’t be long before we find the stags coming down from the hills and roaring, Romeo and Juliet-style, in the field just outside the bedroom window.

All in all, a good time to relax for a little while amidst the ongoing cut and thrust of small-press publishing, and to sit back and take stock of where we are and where we can fit, both in this most peculiar of industries and this most beautiful of places.

Sharon

Guest blog from Yvonne Gray: Viking Summer

I have a mixed relationship with boats. I remember standing in the bay window of the flat we lived in when I was small watching ships going by on the Clyde. I remember too a trip on a steamer with my parents and grandparents – then the shock of the sudden oil reek and darkness and clattering of pistons when my father showed me the engine room.

            Living in Orkney for the last 18 years, boats and their activities have been constantly in view, constantly fascinating – the procession of creel boats and dive boats in the harbour, morning and evening; the days punctuated by the coming and going of the ferries to the islands of Graemsay and Hoy and to Scrabster. Out on the Atlantic, container ships and the Faroes ferry have become familiar silhouettes slipping along the horizon. There’s the lifeboat too, darting through Hoy Sound on its regular training exercises – and unease when it appears on a different day or at a different time. Some patterns have changed over the years – fewer fishing boats and creel boats; more dive boats; more yachts breezing in to the shining marina; the old piers extended; bigger ferries edging alongside the new passenger terminal and walkway.

            Then there are the times you have to actually go on boats. Lowered shutters on the windows of the passenger lounge of the old Ola was a dreadful omen. It meant two hours or more in a fug of engine and cafeteria smells as she heaved up over monstrous waves then crashed down in the troughs beyond. It meant huddling on a seat, jaw clenched, a sort of recitative, you-are-not-going-to be-e-sick, you-are-not-going-to be-e-sick singing in my head over the concerto for full percussion rattling and banging in the vehicle deck below.

            And yet . . . a crossing can be magical, with familiar places looking strange from the sea; cliffs taking on new outlines; cormorants lining skerries; rafts of guillemots or puffins bobbing past or the startling gleam of gannets’ wings as they soar then fold shut to arrow down into the sea. Once, in Scapa Flow, I saw porpoises looping along, parallel to the ferry, and one summer evening, returning to Stromness on the Graemsay after a day spent walking on Hoy, two whales surged past, heading east through Burra Sound.

            This has, one way and another, been a summer of boats. I had my first trip in a yole, an elegant boat with a deep keel and wide beam and strakes swept up gracefully to the prow, used in the past for transporting goods and animals – even cattle and horses – between islands and mainland. According to one book I read, they gave the horses tobacco to calm them and stop them being seasick.  

            And there’s been the Mailboats project organised by artist John Cumming, bringing together four writers and four artists in Orkney and four writers and four artists in Shetland. We worked in pairs to create poems and vessels to carry them, sharing our progress with each other by email and on the Hansel Cooperative Press website (www.hanselpress.com). The ‘mailboats’ were finally taken to sea on the Pilot Us, an old fifie seine netter and long liner, and launched east of Skerries on 9 August.

            Some of the Shetland artists and writers visited Orkney in June for a poetry reading in Stromness and exhibition of the vessels in the Orquil Gallery in Rendall. Then some of us went to Shetland last month to give a reading in the high roofed Boat Hall of the Shetland Museum. An old sixareen lay on one side of the hall and there were several other boats suspended at different levels above us – the perfect setting for poems about islanders, boats and the sea. Nearby, the mailboats attracted a large number of visitors to Da Gadderie, the exhibitions room where they were shown prior to their  sea launch.

            With strong winds forecast, I’d decided to fly to Shetland rather than face the ferry crossing. The night before I set off, the visiting jarl squads from Scalloway and Cullivoe had a boat-burning in Stromness. I stood shivering in the wind and haar near the Point of Ness till the procession flowed up from the town. As the bearded, Ugg-booted vikings stomped by with their brightly painted boat, I thought what a blatant piece of macho posturing all this was, what an extravagant excuse for a saga-sized booze up. Then I gave in to awe at the sheer spectacle: the helmets, breastplates and shields gleaming; the flaming torches held aloft then thrown into the doomed galley; the dragon prow a black silhouette among the flames.

            But were the old Norse gods irked by my less generous thoughts? After three glorious days in Shetland, haar swathed Sumburgh Airport. The plane which was to have taken me back to Orkney remained firmly grounded in Aberdeen. I made the six hour trip home by boat instead. Without tobacco.

            If I had any doubts about the gods’ displeasure, they were resolved a day or two later as I walked round the coast here. Among the dried bladderwrack and broken buoys on the tideline I came across a clear sign that paradise was lost: a broken name plate from a boat – the Valhalla. 

 

Yvonne Gray lives in Orkney, near Stromness, with her husband and three sons. She teaches English part-time and is a keen musician. She has been involved in several collaborations, including Rationed Air (with artist Carol Dunbar), Between the Terminals, a film for the St. Magnus Festival, Poetry in Place (Orkney Creative Writing Fellowship) and the exhibition Flows and Traces. Publications include Swappan the Mallimacks (Galdragon Press), Nouster and Clear Day on the Black Craig, Orkney (Braga Press). She received a SAC Writers’ Bursary in 2002. In the Hanging Valley (Two Ravens Press) is her first full collection of poetry.

 

 

EIBF Round 2

Just back. Very exciting time. EIBF still has a few days to run and we still have the shelf-space at Charlotte Square flying the flag, but the series of ten Two Ravens events concluded at the Word-Power fringe this afternoon with the inimitable Peter Dorward. We packed the house yesterday with a combination of Mandy Haggith and Stona Fitch. Standing room only and a crackle of independent, no-tramline thinking. They followed Alice Thompson in a fascinating conversation about the process of writing with Linda Cracknell. On to Blackwells in the evening  for a multi-author reading with our own Sharon Blackie wearing her novelist hat for a change.

Blackwells were kind enough to give three of our books a very big chunk of window space in preparation for the event – you ‘d be amazed how much that would have cost if you wanted to pay to push your titles on a busy street in Edinburgh during the festival. It shows a real appreciation of diversity in Scottish publishing and it will be interesting to see how Blackwell’s Fringe events develop in the next few years. Keep an eye out.

Then there was Stona, visiting from Boston. Senseless has been published in France and Germany as well as the US, and has just been made into a film by Scottish director Simon Hynd. You only have to talk to him for five minutes and you know that it is the literature itself that is his whole motivation. Over many years of writing and toughing it out with the publishing industry he hasn’t compromised an inch. He believes absolutely in the power of the spoken and written word. Not all earnest and stiff, though. On the contrary. A big bag of giggles along with the darker side of his work. When the grind and why-the-hell-are-we-bothering of publishing literary fiction starts to get you down – you need a Stona to look you in the eye, grin and ask ‘Well, you got something more important to be doing with your life?’  Nope, don’t reckon there are are a lot more important things to be doing than getting real books out there.

David

Heavy Books or e-books

No, you do have to admit, even if you don’t like the thought of e-books, that books are mighty heavy. Imagine the trip I am having through Edinburgh right now (assuming you are reading this today – spooky thing the blog timeline – perhaps you are reading this tomorrow). To be efficient with travel and stuff we have sequenced a whole bunch of readings and events for the one 24 hour period. WordPower with 3 authors and then Blackwells with 2, plus WordPower again the next day (which might possibly, of course, be yesterday as far as you are concerned) . Two of the authors have 2 titles to read from. (It begins to sound like a school arithmetical puzzle.) How many books does that mean I have to carry around the streets of Edinburgh in a mighty big rucsack? A bunch. We always hope that there’ll be a moderate run on a title so you have to go prepared. So I am loaded up with 24kg of books. You only have to cart those out of Waverley Station and up Fleshmarket Close a couple of times and you start to wonder about e-books. We’d better dig into that whole issue again. Tomorrow. Or should that be yesterday?

David

Edinburgh again

Tomorrow we’re off to Edinburgh again, for more book festival shenanigans. We have two events at Word Power bookstore: Alice Thompson, reading from her novel The Falconer with Linda Cracknell, followed by Stona Fitch reading from Senseless and Mandy Haggith reading from The Last Bear. Then I’m reading from The Long Delirious Burning Blue at Blackwell’s as part of their Fringe series of author events, and Stona is again reading from Senseless. All the details, as always, are on our News & Events page.

So, we’ll be intermittent on blog action for the next day or two, with a proper update over the weekend.

As those of you who read this blog regularly will have figured, we do like every now and again to let you all know some of the hard financial realities of the publishing business – especially the costs of what could be considered to be ‘gloss’ – author events, readings and the like. Well, talking about Edinburgh, here are a couple more financial realities. We have 5 of our authors involved in events at the main Edinburgh festival. You’d imagine this was good news, wouldn’t you? Great for our authors, great for our profile … But … let’s start to count the costs. Publishers are normally required to cover travel expenses of their authors to attend the events. Happily our authors are cheap … (sorry guys) … and happily two of them are already based in Edinburgh, so the overall bill wasn’t as big as it could have been. Let’s say somewhere between £150 and £200 total. The assumption always is that you’ll make that back in book sales at the signings after the events. Well, you don’t. So far at those events authors have sold between 10 and 20 books, and maybe a small additional number from the festival bookshop over the course of the festival. The EIBF bookstore takes 50% of the retail price of the book, AND you pay for the shelf space to display them (we have 3 shelves. Around another £200.) On 50% retail of an £8.99 book, we make less than £1 once all the hard costs have been taken out; that £1 has to cover our overheads and our own time. Well, you do the maths … we make a loss unless we sell around 350-400 books. And then there are our own travel expenses down there …

It’s a funny thing: doing all of these things – having authors in big events like the EIBF, having your books on display – all give people a nice warm feeling about you as a publisher. And undoubtedly there will be spin-off in terms of our profile etc etc. Authors are of course delighted, and other influential types think you’re playing all the right games and are therefore as a consequence to be taken more seriously. But as the above figures show, it’s really hard to sustain this kind of thing over the long term, unless you have other profitable book sales to make up for it. And that’s another story!

As always, our aim here isn’t to moan: just to educate. We always go into these things with eyes wide open now, and sometimes we choose to do things that are high-profile for our authors in particular even when we know we’ll make a loss. But it’s always interesting to us how shocked people are when you actually present the figures. Don’t be shocked; buy a book :-)

Sharon

Guest blog from John McGill: No Googling

Here’s a little tale for the 21^st century. A few Sundays ago I was shaken out of sleep at 6 am by Morag, who was shouting in my ear, “Maggie’s started!”  Memory has it she was slapping me hard on both cheeks, but that’s probably just storyteller’s embellishment.

 

Maggie is the great Clydesdale mare who’s been grazing the paddock in front of our garden wall for most of the summer. We’d been watching her grow bigger and rounder for months but somehow the big event always seemed to be in the indefinite future: ‘a few weeks yet’ was the mantra. Blear-eyed as I was, I could see that something strange was going on at her back end. Trouble was, John the farmer was in Stromness, ten miles away. Normally I can’t function till I’ve brushed my teeth and washed at least one of my oxters, but these were desperate times, when a man had to do what a man had to do, even with the elastic in his pyjama bottoms gone. Hoping the farmer hadn’t had too big a Saturday night, I phoned Stromness to rouse him.

 

And somehow it didn’t seem amazing, it wasn’t surprising at all, that Morag should say, “You go and watch her while I get on the internet.”

 

Mid-July or not, there was a bitter easterly wind scouring our Quoyloo hills. Maggie nibbled absent-mindedly at some hay while I tried to make sense of the miracle. “There’s a hoof!” I shouted across the dyke. Our broadband connection always seems to be dodgy in the morning, but Morag had managed to get surfing.

“There should be two – and a head,” she shouted back.

I looked closer: everything seemed to be wrapped in a Co-op recyclable shopping bag, but I could just about make out the bits.

“Yes – two hooves and a nose!”

“That’s fine, don’t do anything, just encourage her.”

 

So I encouraged, and damn damn, I switched on the music. Some monstrous composite it was – culled from Stagecoach and half-a-dozen other westerns – mostly violins, but with a clarinet all poised ready to out-schmalz them. And the women were taking charge and the men were shuffling their feet and water was being boiled all over the place. He’s two feet taller than me and he wasn’t in Stagecoach, but it was James Stewart I finally settled on – as he was in Firecreek, when he did for Henry Fonda and his thugs despite his leg being shot off and his wife having an endless tough screaming labour. How else can a small Glaswegian get a chance to say “Shucks” and mean it?

 

No words for the half hour that followed: let the picture do the job.

  

Just to complete the Hollywood script, though: last Thursday, Dounby Show day, the farmer leapt over the dyke waving a rosette: Finn of Quoyloo, aged two-and-a-half weeks, was Champion Foal.  More violins.

 

I once laughed myself silly when a colleague said, out of the blue, “I hate music.”  It seemed like the most bizarre remark I’d ever heard – like saying “I hate standing” or “I hate looking” or “I hate breathing”.

 

Now I’m not so sure. If you regard yourself as an inheritor of the Scotch Enlightenment – and don’t we all? – there’s bound to be something scary about the way violins and flutes and screeching sopranos assault your ganglia. Puccini and Wagner are high on my list of thoroughly repellent human beings, so it bugs me that I burst into tears when old Rodolfo hits high C and that I can’t look over a big grey sea (and we get a lot of those in Quoyloo) without feeling the Tristan chord oozing through my ribs.  Scientific friends tell me it’s not my ribs at all, but my cerebellum (or reptilian brain) and my amygdala, but knowing that I’ve got a bit of crocodile in me is no great comfort. Most monstrous of all: why, after I’ve been watching one of those minor-channel documentaries about the Third Reich, do I catch myself, as I put on the kettle or trot to the loo, humming the Horst Wessel song?

 

Not that I’m so naïve as to imagine that great art can only be produced by nice people: far from it – I don’t think Shakespeare or Michelangelo would have been wonderful guys to have a pint with. No, the disturbing thing about P and W is that the yuckiness almost seems to be part of the art itself: all those suffering self-sacrificing heroines, all that repetitive overblown mythic nonsense – frontal attacks on good sense and Enlightenment values. Yet I won’t stop listening. I don’t think many people outside the specialist circuit read John Dryden nowadays, or even mention him. In using his full name rather than just ‘Dryden’ I’m demoting him from the Eng. Lit. A-list. I retain a soft spot for him, however, because his ‘Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Musique’ was one of the first grown-up poems to make a strong impression on me.  How old Timotheus with his lyre puts the conqueror through the emotional wringer! How he can ‘swell the Soul to rage, or kindle soft Desire’!  The bastard. For a paler version, you can try Nanki-Poo in The Mikado.

 

And yet again, Hollywood knows best. I once casually remarked to my film-pundit daughter that Stephen Foster’s exquisite dollop of syrup ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ featured in more movies than any other song. At that point, about two years ago, I could muster about seven examples, but my assertion started us on a desultory exchange of texts in which we alert each other to further manifestations.  There’s an unwritten rule that they have to arise by chance, as with the guy in the story who devotes his life to stumbling across all 52 paying-cards – no research, no Googling. Our tally now stands on the brink of two dozen. She watches ten thousand times more films than me, but my predilection for westerns restores the strategic balance. Please feel free to join the quest: I offer here a few, drawn from the top drawer, to get you going:

 

The General

Gone with the Wind

Shane (the greatest movie ever, of course)

Move Over, Darling

The Naked Spur (James Stewart again!)

Batman (Tim Burton’s 1989 classic)

McCabe and Mrs Miller

 

But no Googling!

 

John McGill is a writer living in Orkney with his wife, Morag MacInnes. John’s most recent novel, The Most Glorified Strip of Bunting, was published in 2007 by Two Ravens Press. His previous books were That Rubens Guy and Giraffes.

Feet firmly

Pre-script (like a P.S. only first). Stona Fitch (Massachusetts-based author of Senseless) is now in Scotland – we’re having lunch with him tomorrow. No, not publishing darlings’ champagne and caviar. More likely soup and a roll in Ullapool. Then off to Edinburgh for a couple of readings – Word Power and Blackwells on Thursday.

I wrote the other day about how much of the work to achieve sales is done by authors ’selling’ the book after publication – and that train of thought led me to wonder how much people really think about other parts of the process: for instance the bit that goes between a ‘completed’ manuscript and books in a box delivered to the distributor. Because that bit is a vital ingredient which I know a lot of people fail to take into account when asking us to consider publication.  They skip straight from a publishing contract to Waterstones ‘3 for 2′ tables with little in the middle. Heck, they’ve already written the book.  I suppose if your mental map of a published author is: write-publish-sell 30,000 copies – then the fiddly bit of making the books is just a side-issue quickly paid for out of the profits. To paraphrase out of Blackadder: Percy:  ”Oh pay the typesetter his piffling thousand and be damned!” to which Blackadder replies: “Percy, I don’t have the thousand”.  

The combined tasks of copy editing, proofreading, typesetting and cover design represent day after day of meticulous work. Generally weeks. Not glamorous stuff, that’s a fact. On the other hand, the writer may have spent many thousands of hours writing the work and “nothing but the best” will do. And there, of course, come the age-old ingredients of misunderstanding and, sometimes, farce. The set-piece writer/publisher comedy. Is the writer doing the publisher an enormous favour in letting them have his work? Or is the publisher doing the writer a good turn by puting their work on the shelf? The answer of course is at neither end of the spectrum.

But I would say that if every ‘how to write for publication’ book was honest, it would have to start with a reality chapter (though it would probably kill its sales stone-dead!). First – for the kind of book you are thinking of writing, go and find out typical sales figures (we think you’ll be surprised at how small a number of copies even prize-winning literary fiction sometimes sells). Second – with those sales figures, roughly  work out how much revenue the book could possibly generate after all the costs of printing and distribution (and if you don’t have a clue, do the research as part of your career as a writer).   Third – write your book, bearing in mind that someone (not you) is going to have to spend many hundreds or more likely thousands of pounds on it before it even gets made. In other words – someone is going to make a risky financial investment in you. With their time and money. If you are still convinced that what you are doing makes sense – well, maybe it does! 

We go back to our ‘publishing manifesto’ from time to time where we state that we are prepared to publish books which ‘barely make a profit’. Have we changed our tune so quickly? No, not at all. Those were very carefully chosen words. They represent one of the horns of the dilemma on which literature has sat since the printing press was invented.

But then, maybe I could make a few bob by writing a ‘how to get published’ book …

David