The ducks are being recalcitrant. Having (in their first spring) decided that it might be nice to lay an egg ortwo, decided it wasn’t much fun after all, stopped for a while, and then decided what they’d really like to do is to lay eggs where the hens lay eggs in the hens’ nestboxes in the hens’ shed (NOT suitable for duck incursions) … we are now in a battle of wits with the little creatures while we try to stop them getting into the hens’ shed and instead to lay in their own very nice nestbox in their own very nice enclosure. The score so far? Ducks 20, Ravens 0. Ho hum.
It’s been that kind of a week, really – ups and downs. An unpleasant situation of the kind that makes us wonder why we spend so much time, energy and genuine love on our books for so very very little reward. We have those times every now and again, when in a flash of blinding clarity we realise just how quixotic an enterprise this really is. And then something comes along that gives us a bit of a boost and whoa – we’re off again, all stars a-shining.
So: this week’s nice things? An unexpected opportunity at the Edinbgurgh International Book Festival that has led us to move the publication date for Suhayl Saadi’s ground-breaking second novel, Joseph’s Box, forward by three months. A fairly daunting task, as the book is around 700 pages long and we didn’t even have a cover finalised yet. All fixed now, and here it is. 
Then, it’s always so very satisfying in ways I can’t even begin to express when authors come back for a second round with Two Ravens Press, and bring us their next precious book to publish. One of those authors is Stona Fitch, whose disturbingly clairvoyant novel Senseless, in spite of a cover recommendation from Nobel prize-winner JM Coetzee and others, was largely ignored by the UK literary press when it was launched here last August (except for the deeply discriminating and very fine novelist Doug Johnstone, who gave it a glowing review in The List). Undaunted, Stona handed over his new novel, Printer’s Devil, a piece of dystopian fiction that also resonates strongly with and mirrors current events. Printer’s Devil is our February book, and to our delight it’s had a bit more success in the literary media department, with a major feature due in The Independent on Sunday mid-Feb. Watch out for it!
And to cap it all, we had yet another new submission from another author that we published last year. We figure that if people are coming back a second time, we must be doing something right somewhere.
But so much is in the expectations. Another thing that made us wonder about how best to characterise our publishing model this week was a comment that we came across in a blog (nothing to do with TRP) in which someone stated that the publishing industry should pay authors better wages. What a curious idea – to us, at least. We don’t see ourselves as part of a publishing industry that ’employs’ or ‘pays’ authors. Rather, we see ourselves as two professionals with a wide range of skills, who decide to take a chance on and invest a good deal of time, money and energy, in an author and their book. We see our relationship with authors as a partnership, based on mutual trust and respect. It doesn’t always work out that way, but for us it pretty much always has. Anyway – as a result of that we decided to expand our ’submissions’ page on our website still further and put down some notes on how we expect to be able to operate. Have a look and we’d be interested in your comments.
Sharon
