Day of Reckoning…

…well, it might have been if the Adobe software mentioned in a previous blog hadn’t worked. Happily, it arrived Friday lunchtime, was uploaded right away (on my computer only, in case of total virtual Armageddon) and to our communal astonishment, it works. The really scary bit was the new web design programme: I designed our current website in an oldish version of Dreamweaver (8) and the new Adobe CS4 version is completely different. I am now grappling with CSS style sheets and HTML markups as if there’s no tomorrow. Did it first to design a website from scratch for David, which wasn’t as painful as I imagined; the thornier question of transferring the TRP website to the new programme is something for a very much rainier (and quieter) day.

In the meantime: the other big job of the week has been to finalise the title and cover for our anthology on the relationship between people and wild places, due in November. Anthologies are always astonishingly hard to title – partly because the content is variable by design. This has had us all racking our brains, but the title ‘A Wilder Vein’ finally got the thumbs-up from everyone involved. Will post the cover next week.

Meanwhile, over on Tales from Green Willow Croft, we’ve been blogging about scanning sheep to see if they’re lambing, and why February is like writing a novel. Hmm. One too many drams in the scanning shed, maybe…

Sharon

Check out our new blog

Rather than flood the Two Ravens Press publishing blog with all the tales of crofting and writing that we’d like to inflict on the world, we’ve decided to set up a new separate blog to do precisely that. It’s called Tales from Green Willow Croft, and you can access it through the link to the right, under the ‘About Two Ravens Press’ category. David and I will both be posting, sometimes about writing and sometimes about the menagerie. In fact, he’s composing a rather sheepy blog right now … something about ten new lambs expected in April/May… Which isn’t to say that we won’t still make an occasional reference to those activities on this blog, but it means that those of you who are just interested in publishing and can’t tell one end of a goose from the other don’t have to wade through animal antics to get to the information you really care about!

Anyway – we hope some of you will enjoy reading both blogs – do visit and have a peek.

Sharon

Keeping the show on the road…

Everything’s a bit frantic here at the Two Ravens Press global HQ as we grapple with upcoming print deadlines and try to get everything we’re currently working on sewn up before the arrival of our upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 4 at the end of the week. That suite of programmes – including InDesign, PhotoShop, Dreamweaver for our web design and a bunch of others, is the basis of pretty much everything we do. And we’re still doing it all ourselves… We’re hoping that the transition from one to the other will be seamless – but just in case, David has the usual not just one but TWO external hard drives at hand to back up everything on our server and individual computers, and there’s a cupboard full of single malt whisky in the kitchen in case it all gets really hairy.

Meanwhile… I’m delighted to see that the Arts Council England Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist includes Thomas Glavinic’s ‘Night Work’, as along with Cormac MacCarthy’s ‘The Road’ (and, of course, everything TRP published …) this was the only decent book I can remember reading in the whole of 2008. It was clear from the reviews that some critics just didn’t get it (though I came to it as a result of reading an intriguing review by Stuart Kelly at Scotland on Sunday) but I thought it was a stunning and fascinating piece of work. If you haven’t read it, it’s a ‘TRP Recommends’ selection!

And AL Kennedy over at The Guardian Book Blog has a great piece on why it’s a complete waste of time to tell people to give up writing because it never pays:

‘…It would be unfair not to remind them [creative writing students] of how horrible their futures may become. If they’re unsuccessful, they’ll be clattering through a global Depression with a skill no one requires, a writing demon gnawing at their spine to be expressed and a delicately-nurtured sensitivity that will only make their predicaments seem worse – and yet somehow of no interest to anyone else. If they’re successful, they still may not make a living, will travel more than a drug mule, may be so emotionally preoccupied that they fail to notice entire relationships, will have to deal with media demands no sane person would want to understand and may well wear far too much black.’

That about covers it!

Sharon

Crunch – a state of the nation

Sometimes we like to write a bit about the nuts and bolts of business. We don’t want to be banging on about it at the moment since there is wall-to-wall coverage of far worse things in the recession than some Highlands independent publisher’s odyssey. But once in a while it is good to look at the plain old pounds, shillings and pence of publishing.

We get e-mail newsletters from the publishing industry (they are free – we stopped taking the subscription magazines a while back). In common with all other industries there are large cutbacks being announced in staff and print runs at the major publishers – three or four in the last week: 15% cuts in staff typical, slightly higher percentage cuts for titles and list. If you already have a publishing deal – way to go. Hang onto it – they ain’t making any more just now! Of course, since there only two of us we might have to lose an arm or a leg to keep up with staff-reduction trends.

It is very hard for us to say whether the economic conditions are affecting our sales – because we have neither much of a historical pattern to compare this month with (we have been nought-to-sixty in two years), nor a uniform flow of new titles month by month. But overall this month we took a kicking from Waterstones returns (they come in bulk every 3 months or so) which is barely outweighed by outgoing sales – at least not by the time you take the distributors’ fees off.   On the other hand we did OK with some sales at one-off events, some author sales etc. And sales from the website, which generate about 5 times as much profit-per-copy as  a retail sale, were better than average. So we keep chugging along. The bank can’t chop us off at the knees, because we don’t have a loan except from ourselves.

How can we possibly keep going like that? Well, we also generate some profit from hiring out our typesetting services to other smaller publishers (yes , there are one or two!) – normally ones who have niche markets or charitable status to back up their book sales and can therefore afford to outsource. We, on the other hand, continue to do absolutely everything conceivable ourselves – and will likely extend that to include the accounts this year (I already did the bookeeping since we started). Having done that, I believe we will have taken our costs and overheads down to absolute bedrock. We outsource the actual printing, of course, and ‘mass’ distribution. And that is all. (Well, all those of you in business for yourselves will be thinking ‘there’s always more to cut off costs’ – but I promise my pick-axe is hitting solid rock pretty consistently.)

So actually this isn’t a grump about recessions and tough times at all. We thank our lucky stars every day that when we want to make a decision for TRP  then we can just go ahead and do it – right there and then. A board meeting over the porridge. No committee to convene (except maybe a quick word with the odd cockerel or sheep). We are now running at a tiny operating profit, we have big ideas for turning that into something sustainable by the end of the year, and we are still getting to work with some startlingly talented people. Two writers have asked me in the last week or so whether setting up a publishing company was a clever thing to have done. The answer was – not unless that is really what you get satisfaction out of. Which we do.

David

Spring in the air…

Just back from a day in Edinburgh – much as I love the city, it’s always exhausting to do a day-trip, with the alarm call at 4.15am and getting home at 9.30pm, ‘fresh’ from 8 hours total on the train. But there’s always something doing down there, and so we grit our teeth and count it as the price of living up here in civilisation. Yesterday involved a meeting with Linda Cracknell, a very fine writer of short stories (mostly) who is editing our forthcoming anthology about the relationship between people and wild places (a title has ALMOST found its way down the birth canal, but like all anthology titles it’s proving recalcitrant) to see where we are. And a meeting with Jenny Brown, Suhayl Saadi’s agent, to discuss promotional plans for Joseph’s Box (due out end July).

A return home to find that spring is definitely in the air: the geese have started laying. Which always means a scurry of activity: unlike hens and ducks, geese only lay for just about a month, and so you only get one chance at a hatch. Our strategy this year is to blindly follow what we did last year, as that resulted in a bumper crop of goslings both fresh from the incubator and fresh from the goose (as those of you who’ve been reading this blog for that length of time might remember).

Last year's incubator crop

So we’ve been running around trying to improve on their nests and trying to organise it so that the two older geese both have somewhere to sit for hatching should it work out that way. There always has to be the option of having them quite separate from each other once they decide to sit on their eggs, otherwise they steal each other’s eggs and try to sit on each others’ nests. No, they’re geese: it doesn’t have to make sense. Meanwhile, the one remaining goose from last year’s hatch has to be separated out for a few weeks until everyone’s settled, as her first-year eggs will be no use and if they get mixed up with everyone else’s will dilute the fertile crop.

Other news: the first tomato seedlings are pushing through in the propagator. How much more exciting can it get?!

Sharon

Grace-ful review

Just a quick snippet to point out a very fine review of Alex Pheby’s debut novel, Grace, in this quarter’s Scottish Review of Books. The review says:

‘A world evocative of Grimm and Kafka, and furnished by Freud… Risky first novels are gutsy and Pheby’s style conjures Penelope Fitzgerald, Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt… This is an accomplished fable of how we are all constantly struggling to escape our histories and reach a state of grace.’

We couldn’t agree more!

Sharon

Poetry Please

End of last week took me away for two trips to meet poets – David Troupes came up from the Leeds area to chat in Glasgow on Saturday – and we signed off on contracts to publish his first collection under a drizzly central-belt sky. Wonderful crisp work from a true technician – the sort of technique that means you don’t see the technique – Parsimony will be published at the beginning of September. At 30, our youngest poet - he has deliberately followed the advice he received from Martin Espada that poets should generally not seek to publish a full collection until they are 30. David comes from Massachusetts – he was more than born there, he grew up there and his close family are there – which adds to a surprisingly large number of American authors on our list, some still living there, some over here. It really is a small world.  

On Friday I met up with Myles Campbell  (check out the scenery on his website – people really do see this stuff out of their kitchen windows!) and Mark Goodwin, much closer to home, in Gairloch. They both live on Skye and have created a collection of poetry as a dialogue between them - The Two Sides of the Pass – Myles of course as a native and a Gaelic poet (the book will be completely bilingual) and Mark as someone who grew up in Devon but came to Skye as a permanent resident 14 years ago. The book will have a cover image and illustrations by artist Eoghann McColl (there is an accent on the ‘o’ in Eoghann which I don’t seem able to reproduce here without an ugly change of font – apologies) whose work will be in a major exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Sep/Oct this year. We are aiming to have the book ready to launch at the same time. Living where we do, we were always half expecting to publish in Gaelic and English at some point – it just took the right manuscript. The poetic conversation between these two poets is a literal one across a high pass that separates their homes – 12 miles as the raven flies (it really is more likely to be a raven than a crow) – and a conversation between poets from two cultures.  It is a very fine and pertinent conversation to eavesdrop on.

So, I guess we are back at a gallop for a while – we have somewhat fewer books this year but hardly any of them are straightforward manuscripts. Hopefully my new Adobe Creative Suite Update 4 will do it all automatically when it gets here next week – at £600 for the upgrade it really ought to.

David

More treasures

Another very fine end to the week for both of us, meeting new authors – a couple of poetry collections for the end of 2009 which David will no doubt blog on, and a new novel for me for 2010. We’ve obtained UK & Commonwealth rights to Homecomings, by Inverness writer Donald Paterson, through Nicola Barr at the Susijn Literary Agency, complete with a strong recommendation by novelist Ali Smith. It’s wonderful novel about a Highland crofter in the late 19th century who emigrates first to Canada and then to the US. Although as a rule we don’t take on much historical fiction, the language and, more specifically, the character’s voice in this novel is superbly realised and I just couldn’t resist it. So that’s three novels in the bag for 2010, and we’re rapidly becoming full - chances are we won’t be publishing much more than half a dozen or so works of fiction a year as we move forward, to leave room for some poetry and the literary nonfiction we’re hoping to expand our list to include.

Then, today, there’s a very fine article in The Independent on Sunday by Scottish novelist Doug Johnstone about TRP author Stona Fitch. Read it at http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/free-spirit-stona-finchs-bold-scheme-to-give-away-books-1607019.html. Printer’s Devil, described as “a wonderfully dark, dystopian tale set in a world where excessive consumerism has led to an environmental apocalypse”, is available for order through the TRP website.

Sharon

Backlist book sale and strange dreams

One of our sale titles

We’re having a spring clean of our office store cupboard, and there are seven backlist titles we’re discounting to half-price or less, on our own website only. P&P is free within the UK and discounted overseas. If you’d like to have a browse, the ‘Special Offers’ page is at http://www.tworavenspress.com/
HTML%20Pages/SALE.htm. All titles have in the past received rave reviews in the national papers. Titles include: Cynthia Rogerson’s Love Letters from my Deathbed, Peter Dorward’s Nightingale, Tom Lappin’s Parties, Lisa Glass’ Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, Dexter Petley’s One True Void, Clio Gray’s Types of Everlasting Rest, and the anthology Riptide: New Writing from the Highlands & Islands. Prices vary from £3 to £4.50, all in.

Meanwhile … the good news of the week is that we’ve signed Stona Fitch for yet another book. Stona is obviously a real glutton for punishment … this will be his third book with Two Ravens. First Senseless, then Printer’s Devil … and now the UK paperback edition of GIVE + TAKE, the first book Stona’s deliciously subversive Concord Free Press published. It’s already had great reviews, but the limited edition they printed sold out. We hope to make our version available (sadly you WILL have to pay for it…) in early 2010 around the same time as a US hardback edition will be published by a major publisher there.

Which brings me neatly to the strange dreams of the title. Yesterday’s publishing highlights were firstly having our offer for GIVE + TAKE accepted, and secondly explaining to an author why a £400 launch for a small-press literary novel made no business sense at all. The two events combined wonderfully in a dream in which the highlight of Stona’s UK launch of GIVE +TAKE was the glorious rendition of Tom Jones’  The Green Green Grass of Home, intercut with the final verse of the Clash’s Shall I stay or Shall I Go, performed by two baby elephants. The Inverness branch of Waterstone’s sadly didn’t recover…

Sharon

The demise of criticism

As we plod through a busy week full of disrupted meetings and activities due to everyone else’s snow (we have a little bit here, but surprisingly little compared to the rest of the country) here is a tidbit for you to ponder on: an interesting article on the Bookbrunch website about reviews and the demise of criticism. One especially interesting thought:

I don’t think any newspaper editor believes the quality of the paper’s book reviews helps increase circulation per se, let alone in preference to its rivals. Neither do book reviews any longer attract advertising revenue. They add a little to the personality and society of their journal, but that’s about all. Once literary editors were national institutions and could add thousands to circulation figures and make a book a bestseller.

And I guess that about explains why so many newspapers are downgrading their books pages, and why so many publishers are now looking for other ways of getting the news about their books out there – through blogs or webmags or readers’ groups. It’s certainly the case, as we’ve found out to our cost, that even a stream of good reviews for a book in prestigious outlets doesn’t necessarily make the enormous impact on sales that you might imagine.

In the meantime, sometimes I wonder if I’m the only person in the universe who’ll buy a newspaper specifically for their books page – The Independent if it’s Friday, The Guardian if it’s Saturday, The Sunday Times if it’s Sunday… But then I persist in believing (in spite of David’s last blog and in spite of the fact that yes, we will be making e-books of our books available in 2009) that all this e-book business will never catch on. And wasn’t that a fairy I saw at the bottom of the garden the other day?…

Sharon