A Big Box of Boxes

Well, the big one has finally arrived. We just took delivery of Joseph’s Box – all 688 pages per copy of it. It never wears off – the anxiety and anticipation of opening the first box and seeing what it looks like for real. All the on-screen views and flat proofs never quite tell the whole story of how the book will look. And somehow I never believe that we won’t have spelt the author’s name wrong or put the barcode on upside down. We never have – but it doesn’t stop me breaking out in a cold sweat every time. (Not an ailment that has got any better after the last three titles we have had printed went back in the box and were destroyed – just one of those weird coincidences and none of it, thank heavens, was our fault.)

But there it was – as chunky as that copy of War and Peace I remember as a child. Sharon’s secret treatment of the cover image to make it look like moonlight – spot on. The dark grey endpapers just the job. For a work like this – it just had to right. And we think it is.

As well as the usual new-book anticipation – this one is something of a crux-title for us. I don’t mind telling you that when you take into account its size (which apparently scared off a lot of bigger publishers) we are taking a big financial step with this one. We are sure that it warrants it. But it will be many months before we even see the amount of our printer’s bill back. Are we mad – when small presses are up against the wall of recession? Maybe. But as I said to one of the Powerlines contributors the other day (when he asked ‘why do you always publish challenging work?’) - it’s like this: When I go to the ground I don’t want my headstone to say “Publisher of Julie Flopwit’s titty biography”. But I will be quite happy if it says “Publisher of Joseph’s Box“.

David

Peterloo and Salt – Who Next?

Neither Peterloo Poets  nor Salt Publishing are bankrupt – which is to say, with apologies to Prime Ministers various, “the minister has my full support”. Both companies are nevertheless, in their different ways, effectively shutting down their operations. And they have shut down books in the pipeline – for Salt with “many [cancelled] titles at final proof stage”. And I know that some poets were ‘expecting’ their collections to appear with Peterloo over the next year.

Is this big news? A major ecological wipe-out or just normal evolutionary single-species extinction? Probably somewhere between the two – but to my mind somewhere nearer the latter. Why? Because these two companies in their ways represented the cream of two different, quality, approaches to publishing.

Peterloo was a small but perfectly-formed poetry publisher driven, in large part, by the talent of one man – Harry Chambers – who created a sort of Cornish Faber&Faber which lasted 37 years. Huge depth of quality and famous poets in the backlist. Mr Chambers has now retired and we wish him the very best. And maybe (we don’t know anything about the business arrangements) he didn’t want to sell his brain-child as a going concern. But the fact that some ‘expected’ titles are now not going into print would indicate that the end was not entirely as planned. Mr Chambers, by all accounts, was not only excellent at picking poetry but was a shrewd businessman as well. You tell me what all that  says about the profitability of poetry publishing.

Salt, of course, are a very different kettle of fish. Modern, savvy, ambitious and producers of quality books - exclusively in the poetry and short-story sectors. Not short of a word or two telling the rest of the business how things should be done. Open and honest (on their website) about the fact that they paid authors only a tiny 7.5% of net receipts. A tough business bargain. They had been going 9 years and despite hefty ongoing  ACE funding (we damned-well wish!) they are heavily in debt. Granted, the economic downturn seems to have hit them hard – Chris Hamilton Emery states that “[2009] Spring sales were down 80% on the previous year”. But just looking at the big picture – heft grant funding, good brand, busted flush within a year of the recession?

Well, the car industry is in worse shape. Farming has always been tough unless you want to destroy every hedgerow in sight. So, this is not a moan about how tough things are. Just a statement. If you are a writer and you want to make a living doing that thing you love – pay plenty of attention to the business realities your publisher is undoubtedly facing. And that they will want to convey to you, especially when explaining why they can’t pay for a glossy launch party! If you are a reader of literature and don’t just want celebrity biogs and blockbusters – have a think about where those books are going to come from. And buy them. We may need you to get vocal in the near future as Creative Scotland decides whether to support the publishing sector, and small risk-taking literary publishers in particular, with more than just verbal encouragement.

PS – TRP is very much here to stay. No, really. I’m not a politician.

David

A shortfall in short stories?

A strong message that we heard twice in association with this year’s Ullapool Book Festival – once very clearly from Ali Smith at the launch back in March, and again from AL Kennedy last weekend (and possibly Bernard Mac Laverty too) – is that people want to read short stories but publishers (and sometimes bookstores) don’t make them available. Well, that’s oversimplifying what they said a little, but that was the essence of it. Both women said that they heard people tell them all the time that they loved short stories, so there must therefore be a demand. So where does the idea that short stories don’t sell come from? I have to say that I think it was probably a slightly self-selecting sample of the population that professed a love of short stories to these writers (let’s face it, no-one’s going to tell either Ali or ALK to their face that they hate short stories!) but do they nevertheless have a point?

We find that the question about whether short stories sell is quite a complex one, and since in June we are about two launch two new short story collections, Fighting It by Regi Claire and The Floating Order by Erin Pringle, it seems like a timely subject for a blog.

Our experience, and yes, we’ve only been going as publishers for a short while, is that most short story collections DON’T sell in any way that makes their publication financially feasible. Why? First, the difficulty of getting them out there. Bookstores are deeply uninterested in stocking them unless it’s a local author or a very famous one, and literary reviewers hardly touch them, unless it’s a very famous author or someone whose work they already know. So, there is a major visibility issue. As ALK said, if no-one knows a book exists, they can’t buy it. I’ve no idea why it is that bookstores won’t stock them and the literary editors won’t review them; perhaps it’s all just part of the mythology that no-one is interested, which makes the whole business something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the other problems is that there is surprisingly little cross-over between novels and short stories. If people buy a writer’s novels time and again, surely that means they must be more likely to want to read their short stories? Not at all, and we’ve shown that to be the case with authors of very successful novels whose very wonderful short story collections have hardly shifted. Reading short stories is a very different phenomenon from reading novels. I am a natural novel reader as well as a novel writer; I don’t like to write short stories and there are very few short story writers that I like to read. (I do, however, love short stories of a certain kind … Sara Maitland, AS Byatt,  Margaret Atwood, Janette Turner Hospital … but I am much much more choosy than I would be about novels.)

I like short story collections to be themed, and wonder sometimes if this isn’t because some part of me hankers still for them to be novels … but I do find that the most successful short story collections (like poetry collections) have something that makes the individual stories hang together. We get a large number of submissions from people whose idea of a ‘themed collection’ is one written by the same author. Without a theme a collection is very very much harder to sell.

The two collections we’re launching in June (both are now available for advance purchase through our website only) are very different but both meet the criteria for all that we believe short story collections should be. Both books deserve to do well; we’ll let you know in this blog how they actually do. Review copies have been sent out (as with all our books) to every literary editor known to man; it’ll be interesting to see who actually picks them up. And in that regard, it’s worth saying that we find literary bloggers on the whole are much more adventurous about what books they review in general – and especially in the context of short stories. Thanks, for example, to Scott Pack on Me and My Big Mouth  for already giving The Floating Order a ‘quick flick’ review, and to The Short Review, who will be featuring it soon. And to Vulpes Libris for publishing an article by Regi about the process of writing Fighting It, and her own battle with illness in recent months.

Regi Claire is already known as a writer. Her first short story collection, Inside Out (and her first novel, The Beauty Room) received rave reviews from the likes of AL Kennedy, Lesley Glaister, Edwin Morgan and Nicholas Royle. Fighting It has an introduction by Louise Welsh and is a perfectly themed collection of stories about people who are, literally, ‘fighting it’, battling to retain their belief in themselves. Erin Pringle, in contrast, is a brand new young writer currently living in Texas whose stories have been described by Michael Kimball as ‘true wonders – a beautiful mix of intimate feeling, thick syntax, and dangerous language.’  The Floating Order deserves to be reviewed: it’s beautiful and innovative and you won’t read much else like it. But it’s hard enough to get first novels reviewed by first-time writers, let alone first short story collections.

Anyway: we’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, have a look at our website and if you’re a fan of short stories you’ll surely find something in one of these collections that strikes a chord.

Sharon

Ullapool Book Festival’s Grand Finale

And boy, was it grand. Jackie Kay at 10.15 on a Sunday morning is an experience the like of which no-one in Ullapool is ever going to see again. It’s going to take me a while to forget ‘Ma Broon sees a therapist’ and ‘Ma Broon goes for colonic irrigation’; the walls of the ‘wee Free’ church across the road were probably trembling in Sabbath-inspired horror. Following on from yesterday’s post, Jackie is another consummate performer, and her laughter and the joy that she takes in her laughter (and everyone else’s) make her utterly irresistible. Stomach-churningly funny but lots of seriously good stuff as well.

And then – AL Kennedy again, reading from ‘Day’ and a short story collection due out in August. If I could only ever listen to one writer speak about writing again, it would be AL Kennedy. She is compelling, inspirational, mesmerising and utterly bullshit-free. And I think there’s something about the Ullapool atmosphere and structure that lends itself to the ‘performers’ maybe relaxing a little more than they might at other events. By the time they get on stage they’ve already been mixing with the other writers and with most of the audience for a good while (no special ‘writers and press’ room at this festival!) And the audience tends to go to several events rather than just a single one (if you travel to Ullapool for the book festival, what else are you going to do there, and if you’re attending locally then an event is only ever a short walk away, so why wouldn’t you go to a bunch of them). And so, for the performers, it’s not like talking to a group of people that you’ve never seen before, but to people you’ve already spent time with before you get onstage and who you’ve seen reacting to other sessions (the authors tend to go to each other’s sessions, too).

It’s going to take a long while to assimilate some of the things I heard at this festival, and no doubt there’ll be more references to come in the weeks ahead. But for now, the sun is shining, we have all ten of our lambs now, the goslings and ducklings are out and about and the vegetable patch needs some serious attention. So I’m off outside for a little croft therapy.

Sharon

The most entertaining Ullapool Book Festival of all

Yesterday at the Ullapool Book festival we were treated to some stunning sessions from writers who are clearly professionals at performing their work. Which is always a difficult thing to evaluate the importance of; after all, writing and performing don’t necesarily go together, any more than the ability to write like a dream and read your work in anything other than a petrified monotone do. But it’s increasingly important for writers to be able to get out there and do readings, and if as a writer you do, it’s also important that you learn how to do public speaking properly.

The writers we had in Ullapool yesterday, though, are in leagues of their own. Bernard Maclaverty reading from his most recent short story collection was an absolute revelation. It was a reading filled with nuance that in every way enhanced the experience of looking at the words on the page. But most entertaining of all was the late-evening session with young Scottish writers Doug Johnstone and Alan Bissett. Doug is also a performing musician and Alan (whether he would describe himself so or not) is a skilled actor who has just put together a ‘one-woman’ show in which he adopts the perspective of (I think her name was) Moira, a Glasgow school cleaner. As well as hilariously acted-out readings from these guys’ most recent/forthcoming novels (The Ossians for Doug and Death of a Ladies’ Man for Alan) we were treated to performances of song and stand-up, and a hastily-cobbled-together-that-afternoon but wonderfully funny ‘Words of Bono’ improvisation with Doug softly singing ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ while Alan intoned the U2 equivalent of Bushisms at an enthralled audience. The Ullapool village hall may never see its like again. And if you ever get the opportunity to see these two together, take it.

Can it get any better than that? Well, the final morning, as well as a session from poet Jackie Kay, includes AL Kennedy reading from her most recent novel, Day, so chances are this year’s Ullapool Book festival will end on a high note.

Sharon

Alice Thompson and AL Kennedy at the Ullapool Book Festival

Alice Thompson

Last night, the opening night, as always at the UBF, was a stunner. It began with the very unlikely pairing of TRP’s own Alice Thompson with Alison Miller, debut author of Demo. Not much in common – in fact, I think it’s fair to say nothing at all substantial in common – between the two books or the two authors, but enjoyable nevertheless. Alice read not only from The Falconer, but from the novel that she’s just finished, a very Thompsonesque ’detective story’ set in Portobello. Alice’s finest moment? A declaration, in response to a question from chair Sam Kelly about whether she didn’t think that her writing was a little subversive, that subversion is the default state for most thinking people. Absolutely!

Then on to AL Kennedy who’s very high on the list of my favourite novelists and has been for many years. I love all her novels, but Paradise is an especially awe-inspiring piece of writing. I’m accustomed to thinking of her as a very dark, often quite bleak writer, so it was a revelation to find her standing on the stage in a one-woman show acting for all the world like a stand-up comic. And AL Kennedy can be wonderfully – and intelligently – funny, but somehow there’s a hint of darkness that shines through still. The show is entitled ‘Words’ and apparently is heading for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. If you have a chance to be there, be there. It was one of the greatest inspirations for other writers that I’ve ever read. AL Kennedy lives words, lives writing, is passionate about the power of both – and it shines through everything that she says and everything that she appears to be.

I was left, an hour later, with a lot to think about. But my immediate reaction to it was that this is why so many aspiring writers fail, or why so many published writers fail to be great. It takes passion, it takes dedication, it takes a way of living words and stories. Being them. Not just sitting down for an hour or two here and there to write a story, not sitting down and thinking ‘I want to be a writer; what can I write?’ – but having a love for words careening through every part of you, so that writing becomes less a question of what you do than of what you are.

Sharon

Ullapool Book Festival Starts Today

Today is the start of the Ullapool Book Festival – which has grown over the last five years into certainly the most enjoyable and arguably the best, unashamedly literary Scottish book festival. If you aren’t familiar with Ullapool it is a small port village on the cusp of being a town – based around a very old protected harbour on the sea loch called Loch Broom, way, way up north-west Highlands. Its about a 6-pub village if you get my drift. The whole festival takes place over three days and once you are here you can just walk from the Ceilidh Place, the permanent cultural pivot of the area, to the main festival venue and back by way of the harbour-front, all in a couple of minutes. There are two small but perfectly stocked bookshops in town. You are just as likely to find yourself sat at the bar with an internationally renowned author as with a creel fisherman or a crofter. Ullapool is at the heart of the west coast and I’ve never known a more friendly place. There is no ‘arty’ division between the man/woman in the street, the locals, the visitors and the authors, reporters, critics. Because here there was never any suspicion that poets and tellers of stories were something apart – some snooty other-class who didn’t get their hands dirty. Here the poet might always have been on the deck of a trawler and the storyteller been a crofter from over the hill. They might not have had 50,000 sales worldwide, may never have had a word in print. But that doesn’t make a jot of difference. They still know how to welcome a storyteller from Edinburgh or London, or a poet from Fife or Cambridge.

Sharon and I have whole-festival tickets so we will have a weekend packed with writers and writing – including tonight ‘our’ Alice Thompson reading and talking about The Falconer. It isn’t like we have back-stage passes – there is no ‘back-stage’ at the Ullapool Festival – but it feels just an exciting bit that way.  

David

‘The Winding Stick’ – our new release for May

Blogs have been rather scattered recently; we’ve been a bit distracted with all the baby thigs that are running around the croft and need a surprisingly large amount of looking after – goslings, ducklings and six lambs to date (see Tales from Green Willow Croft for updates on all that!) But we’re still here, and still plugging away. We have most of our books for 2009 finished and ready to go right now (the only exception being our nature anthology, A Wilder Vein, which is the last on the list for completion – but at least we’ve made the final selection of contributors now) and I’m trying to get some decent writing time in on my new novel. Which, like everything that I write, starts off with a fairly simple image and a reasonably simple idea, but then develops new layers of meaning with every page I write. I did actually imagine at the beginning that this really was going to be a shorter and simpler one…

But anyway: here is Two Ravens Press’ new novel for May: The Winding Stick, By Elise Valmorbida. It was in the context of this book that Scott Pack made his very fine comment about Two Ravens Press not being afraid to take risks, which he said makes us ‘one of the most interesting publishers around.’ Is it a risky book to publish? I don’t know. It’s a stunner, for sure: a wonderful atmospheric tale of immigrants (especially London’s Tamil community) centred around an all-night garage and a clerk who has visions about the lives of the people he serves. I wish there were more novels about this kind of character and others out there on the fringes of life and of society. The Winding Stick is Elise’s third novel and fourth book, and her previous work has been highly praised. Take a look at her page on our website (see link above) and judge for yourself.

Sharon