Synergy City

Any city that produces A.L. Kennedy has to be on a winning line when it comes to literature – but to be honest I’d never had Dundee down as a major hub of writing excellence. In fact I’d never been there until Anna Day of the Dundee Literary Festival invited me to go along. I’d driven through a few times on the way to St Andrews and seen the industrial sinews of the place now looking a bit like museum pieces. But having been once I get the feeling I’ll be back before long. It is a place where people seem to have gripped the changing times. You’ll likely already know of the creative writing programme at the University of Dundee – with Professor Kirsty Gunn at the helm and staff including Jim Stewart and Rachel Marsh. Then there is the Dundee International Book Prize with a prize of £10,000 and publication by Birlinn – for a previously unpublished novelist. That makes it the richest UK prize for that category of writer and the Dundee Council are part of the driving force behind the prize. It is now going to be awarded annually and announced at an event as part of the Dundee Literary Festival. And alongside all these headlines is a network of writers’ groups and projects involving different levels of integration and support from the literature academics. So if you were looking to invest in literature stocks, in a figurative way, you’d be in with the smart money if you took some options on Dundee.

I went down to do two events – a publisher panel chaired by Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and with Bob McDevitt (previously Hodder Headline’s Scottish talent scout an now publisher at Hachette Scotland). It was interesting to compare ourselves with a really big publisher – we were both fielding questions from an audience with plenty of would-be writers. There were differences – Bob thought that a figure of £10K for the average advance on fiction was ‘a bit on the high side’. I obviously thought it was a bit on the astronomical side! But it was interesting how even the big guys are now rolling up their sleeves and getting stuck into the nitty gritty – and how things we insist on (such as the author being responsible for obtaining permissions and the right quality of illustrations they want to use) are actually the same for writers dealing with the big publishers.

On Saturday I then did an hour’s poetry reading from ‘Meeting the Jet Man’.

Not to put you off your lunch, but...

I had a very warm audience and that made it a real pleasure to read poems and talk about how they came to be. Plus I sold 8 copies – which is a personal best. It is a pretty tall order to read/talk on your own, about your poetry, for the best part of an hour – but I have a secret weapon. I am a poet with props. The props consist of two empty cardboard toilet-roll tubes and a curious souvenir from the last Iraq war. Hush, hush. Can’t tell you any more. You’ll have to come and see me do the next reading…

David

‘A literary classic in the making’

A very positive review of Elise Valmorbida’s The Winding Stick on the Vulpes Libris literary blog. I have to say I find new Vulpes reviewer Anne Brooke’s assertion that literary fiction must be uplifting and positive and never despairing or grim because we’re having tough economic times not only bizarre but rather scary. You’d wipe out half the classic literary canon by doing that. And sorry, but life is sometimes grim and despairing and fiction needs above all to reflect what life is, as well as what it can be on a good day. Hollywood churns out more than enough happy-slappy happily-ever-after tales – let’s not dumb the book world down any further than it already is! But can’t help but agree with the final sentence of the review: ‘this book is a literary classic in the making and you should read it as soon as you can. More please from Ms Valmorbida.’

Sharon

Another week, another book launch

At the end of last week we had the very great pleasure of launching Regi Claire’s already highly acclaimed short story collection, Fighting It. The event took place at WordPower books in Edinburgh, and over a hundred people attended, followed by a good 60 or more at dinner afterwards. Regi has had two stunning reviews: by Alison Miller in the Scottish Review of Books and in The Sunday Herald. The SRB said: ‘Her prose has a cut glass quality. Clear and crisp as Alpine air, it refracts the light at startling angles, illuminates the singular, the striking detail, turns a flashlight on the dark corners of the psyche, and manages not to flinch.’  And the Sunday Herald said: ‘Claire’s virtuosity lies in her range. Though she plays her characters out in quite a narrow emotional tonal space – right at that high-pitch, straining end of the scale – the scope of their identities and the settings she puts them in are breathtaking. While so many authors tend to stick to a particular subculture, Claire … roams the length and breadth of Europe, taking in a French ambassador’s wife, a German undertaker, a wealthy couple who live for their flowers and racehorse, a Presbyterian child in Dundee in thrall to her father’s Bible; all ages, all classes. It is as if she is saying that wherever you come from, when we are up against a wall and fighting it, we are all similar animals. … There is nothing ordinary about these tales. They are all extraordinary.’

All of this was followed by a very fine interview in The Scotsman by literary editor David Robinson, which you can read here.

So, back at base for a while. David has a poetry reading at the Dundee Book Festival on Saturday of this week at 12.30pm, preceded by participation in their publishers’ panel on Friday at 3.30pm. If you’re in the vicinity, come along!

Meanwhile, I am determined to stay put for a while, trying hard yet again to carve out a decent period of time to work on my own novel. We have a number of authors, including Regi, at the Edinburgh International Book festival (see our News & Events page for details) and who knows, by the time August comes around we may have got second wind and be ready to go on the road again if need be.

The Two Ravens Press bees

 But for a little at least we can stay home and watch the vegetables grow and the bees hard at work, in between bouts of hard work at the computer.

Sharon

Is there a future for Two Ravens Press?

It is generally held that publishing literary fiction and poetry only isn’t sustainable. Can’t be done. Well, two and a half years later, here we are. But can we continue? Some days we wonder, frankly. But here’s an opportunity that will for sure make all the difference. Just over a year ago, after encouraging us to apply for it, the Scottish Arts Council cancelled its ‘block funding’ for publishers (funding from £15,000 upwards to fund an entire publishing programme) and reverted to small amounts of funding for individual publications only. As an entirely literary publisher with books that almost by definition make little or no profit, this was a bit of a blow. We’ve had to respond by cutting our titles back from 23 titles in 2008 to 10 in 2009. If it carries on this way we’ll be at 8 in 2010. But a light on the horizon: SAC recently announced that it had reinstated block funding this year. Which, given that the decision was late and the deadline looms, has meant a bit of frantic activity at this particular computer to take stock and think about what it is that we really need at Two Ravens Press. The truth is that a lot hangs on the balance. This funding (or lack of it, if they turn us down!) will make all the difference between TRP thriving as a literature-only publisher in the future, or reverting to little more than a hobby publisher. We’ll keep you posted on the outcome, but in the meantime, we thought you might like to read the first couple of background pages of our application. Yes, this is how it really has been for the past two and a half years at Two Ravens Press, and here are all the reasons why we can’t continue this way!

1. Background: Two Ravens Press’ achievements to date

Two Ravens Press began its life in November 2006. Our aim was very clear: to establish a list of literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry that provided a home for writers of original, innovative and challenging work and who were having difficulties finding a home in the increasingly conformist world of British publishing. Our list in the past three years (2007, 2008 and 2009) has involved work of the highest literary quality, ranging from well-known Scottish writers like Alasdair Gray and Alice Thompson and the internationally acclaimed experimental author Raymond Federman, to debut novelists and poets, many of whom have been supported by SAC Writers’ Bursaries. As well as novels, poetry collections and works of literary nonfiction, we have supported hard-to-market literary forms, e.g. short stories, and works that cross genre boundaries e.g. Angela Morgan Cutler’s Auschwitz. We have created a unique writer-publisher model that has been backed up by the success of our own writing (critical acclaim for Sharon Blackie’s The Long Delirious Burning Blue, and SAC Book of the Year shortlisting for David Knowles’ Meeting the Jet Man).

Our books have been covered and reviewed in the Scottish national and literary press (The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, The Herald, The Sunday Herald, The Scottish Review of Books, The Scots Magazine, The Edinburgh Review, The List, Northwords Now), the British national and literary press (Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Times, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New Welsh Review, Camden New Journal, The Jewish Chronicle) the poetry press (Poetry London, Magma, Ambit, Poetry Express, Frogmore Papers, Artemis Poetry, The North) the academic press (Forum for Modern Language Studies, The Virginia Woolf Bulletin), other magazines and newspapers (e.g. Good Housekeeping) and large numbers of major literary blogs. Our books have cover recommendations from major international authors (e.g. JM Coetzee, Russell Banks, Gregory Maguire, Gloria Emerson, Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, Andrew Greig, John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Alan Bissett, Rodge Glass, Galaxy Craze, Alan Furst, Kate Pullinger, Emma Darwin, Stevie Davies, RN Morris, Brian McCabe, Henry Woolf, Rex Bloomstein, Stewart Conn, Christopher Rush, Nicholas Royle, Christine De Luca, Todd McEwen, Aonghas Macneacail, Kevin MacNeil, Robert Allan Jamieson, Margaret Elphinstone, Tom Leonard, Alan Riach, Paul Torday, Michael Kimball, Myra Schneider, Vicky Feaver…) and our authors have regularly been invited to participate in literary events and festivals including the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Aye Write! and festivals at Wigtown, Nairn, Ullapool, Cambridge, Kingston, Essex, The Jewish Book Festival and others.

For all these reasons, The Bookseller described us as one of the most promising new imprints to watch for 2008, Publishing News described us as ‘the most talked-about publisher in Scotland,’ The Herald labelled us ‘a quiet publishing revolution’, and Scott Pack, ex-Waterstones fiction buyer and now director of The Friday Project, said recently that ‘Two Ravens Press are prepared to take risks and as a result are one of the most interesting publishers around’. 

We have demonstrated, over the past three years, demand for our books in that we are able to sell them in reasonable quantities, both through chain and independent bookshops and online outlets. We have distribution through BookSource, Gardners hold stock of all of our titles, and we have tried and tested a number of book promotion programmes with major chains e.g. Borders ‘Scottish Book of the Month’ and Waterstone’s ‘3 for 2’s. A growing number of people are interested in the Two Ravens Press ‘brand’ as well as individual titles, as evidenced by increasing coverage on literary blogs and a growing number of fans on our Facebook page. This is what we hope to build on by investing heavily in marketing and promotion not just for individual titles, but for the entire Two Ravens Press publishing concept as we move on.

Although we don’t operate with any geographical boundaries, we have a very high percentage of Scottish authors (around 75% of our entire list of authors to the end of 2010 is Scottish or based in Scotland) and we believe that our activities provide a significant benefit to Scottish writing and the Scottish literary community as a whole, allowing Scottish writers to be published who perhaps otherwise wouldn’t be because their books are ‘too literary’ or ‘too different’.

In 2007 we published 12 titles; in 2008 we published 23 titles, and in 2009 we plan to publish 10 titles. Our strategy in the beginning was to publish a wide range of books to make our mark on the literary scene. I think we can safely say that we’ve done that, but now we need to focus very carefully on the best way to move forward, given the challenges of running a profitable business based solely on the sales of contemporary literature, and given the recent demise of two literary presses in England (Salt and Peterloo, both funded by Arts Council England) and the financial struggles of others. We have neither the inclination nor the resources to develop a commercial list to fund our literary list, and we are still building a backlist that will hopefully over time give us a more stable base. We are a literary publisher, and we believe strongly that it is possible to make a small but reasonable living doing this – but the next year or two will be critical to the kind of company we can ultimately become and to our future financial success.

 2. The challenge ahead

We began Two Ravens Press by investing our own funds in the business, and we’ve had £2500 start-up funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise and some funding from the Scottish Arts Council for ten individual publications. We are determined to build and to run the business on what we can make from it, rather than running the risk of bankruptcy like so many small presses and previous literary initiatives, by taking out large bank loans at the risk of overextending ourselves seriously. We run Two Ravens Press with just the two of us. We work from our own home, with no additional office accommodation or staff, thereby keeping our overheads very low. Because the business doesn’t generate enough profit to employ others, we have spent the past three years doing absolutely everything relating to the operation of the business ourselves – with the sole exception of distribution. We edit, copyedit, proof, typeset, design covers, and do all of our own publicity, promotion, marketing and selling. We create and update our own website and blogs and stuff our own envelopes and take mail on the regular 25-mile round-trip to the post office. To cut costs this year we even did our own corporate accounts. In spite of this no-frills approach, we have discovered, over two full financial years of operation, that if we carry on as we are there simply isn’t enough money in the business to pay back our investment in it in a short time-frame, and to pay anything remotely resembling a living wage for two people. We have effectively been working for nothing for three years. However, we cannot live on no salaries forever, and nor can we keep up our current pace of work. And so we now face two choices: (1) to ramp up publicity, promotion and marketing for both our individual titles and for Two Ravens Press as an entity in order to increase awareness of our books, our brand and thereby increase sales and the long-term viability and profitability of the business, or (2) to reduce the number of titles we publish, cut back on distribution, and operate it on a hobby basis only. It would be a great pity if, after all the successes listed above, we had to take the latter approach. However, in order to move ahead we need a real push to promote both our forthcoming titles and backlist and the business itself, and we cannot begin to fund that from our book sales. This is why we are requesting programme funding from the Scottish Arts Council: both to fund our 2010 list and to enable us to invest in publicity and promotion for the Two Ravens Press backlist and frontlist in both print and the increasingly important electronic (e-book) formats.

 In summary, we require the following in order to build on our initial successes and grow Two Ravens Press into a sustainable business:

•  More time, and so more funding with which to buy freelance resources
• More readers – which will come from fulfilling the points below
• More publicity for our books – reviews and feature articles, both in the print and online media, and more advertising
• More books in bookstores and building relationships with key independents – more coverage in the trade press
• A higher profile for Two Ravens Press as a publisher and for our ‘brand’

The funds that we’re requesting to the Scottish Arts Council in respect of our publishing programme for 2010 would allow us to invest in our business to build on what we’ve already achieved and allow us to grow a sustainable literary publishing business that we believe makes a significant contribution to Scottish literature.

Yes, that’s how critical this application is, and the decision point that’s facing us as we move ahead. We’ll keep you posted!

Sharon

Strange

Mandy Haggith started a bit of strange week by sending me a forwarded notice about ‘Combat Paper Project’. As many of you will know, Mandy is a major campaigner against environmental damage resulting from our excessive use of paper. So I thought – Hmm, more along that line. But no – this is an offer to make paper out of old military uniforms – a twist on the swords into ploughshares theme I guess:

“Combat Paper Project brings together veterans who make paper from their uniforms as the basis for cathartic artworks. As a prelude to a traveling exhibition of their work that will be coming to the Birnam Institute in November 2009, members of the group will be demonstrating their papermaking technique. Veterans of conflict and members of the public are invited to share their experiences, and are welcome to bring a uniform or any fabric holding memories of wartime to transform into paper.”

(If you didn’t know – I recently retired from a 26-year career as a Tornado pilot – so I have enough old uniforms to do a whole print run.) But, you know, I have a horrible feeling I wouldn’t have really fitted in…

Then the book trade took some strange twists. W H Smiths decided to only sell one publisher’s travel books in all their airport stores. So much for consumer choice. And woe betide the other travel-book publishers who currently have stock with Smiths (this from the Bookseller newsletter):

“The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild (OWPG) have become the latest writers’ groups to hit out at W H Smith’s exclusive deal with Penguin, as rival travel publishers say they are bracing themselves for a “whopping great returns” list. The Bookseller revealed last week that W H Smith would only sell Penguin foreign travel guides from its travel oulets.”

Ouch!

And then a particularly strident message in the Guardian from Robert McCrum exhorting good writers to get back to ‘entertaining’ their readers. That must have been something like Portillo meant when he said that the Booker Prize judges had brought us ‘fun’. Of course in a how-could-it-be-otherwise sense, writers should indeed entertain their readers. But then you wouldn’t be writing an article in the Guardian about it if you meant it in that most general sense.  Perhaps I’m being picky over words – but when I read great works of literature from Camus to A.L. Kennedy – it isn’t quite ‘entertainment’ I’m looking for. When I watch the X-files I’m looking for entertainment (and, well, of course, some tips on how to find my local aliens).

So it seems the world is a funny old place this week. Luckily for me, we have our new bee colony. So I can go and tell them all about it. Nothing strange in that …  is there?

David

Media Threads

We get all sorts of ‘trade’ news feeds - mostly from free-to-receive e-newsletters such as BookBrunch or The Bookseller – others bits we pick up from the literature pages of the national press online. News like this – like all news – is hard to piece together into any sort of a ‘whole’. But sometimes I get a curious satisfaction from just juxtaposing different bits and pieces.

So, following on from Salt Publishing’s recent meltdown, despite heavy Arts Council England funding (and their open and very persistent plea for everyone to ’save a publisher – buy a book’  – which is a marketing strategy we have half considered once or twice - but thankfully only half considered) we read this week about Quercus posting losses of £280K. Not that Quercus can’t weather it – this is venture capital-funded big business – but it is interesting to see even the big guys currently paying out more than they can sell their books for.  And, on the other hand, is this from today’s BookBrunch:

Arts Council England has announced awards to four publishers to promote literature in translation.

Bitter Lemon Press, the specialist in foreign crime fiction, wins £22,640 to go towards the publication of four titles and the digitisation of its list. Banipal Publishing gets £18,080 for marketing and rebranding its magazine, which translates contemporary Arab fiction and poetry. Peter Owen gets £17,934 towards the publication of new titles and ones from the Peter Owen Modern Classics range. And Pushkin Press receives £25,000 to subsidise three titles.

Grant, anyone?

What’s my point? Only that this pair of news items shows the ‘pulled-in-both-directions’ issue of being a publisher and, consequently, of funding for publishing. Is a publisher just another business driven by market forces and finances - or is a publisher on a par with other artists and the public provision of arts?  Clearly there are publishers who are almost entirely one or the other – but a great number of us lie somewhere uncomfortably in the middle of the two extremes. The aim for TRP – stated publicly on Day 1 – was never to compromise on the art, but still to make a profit. We were warned that this was an impossible feat – and that may well prove to be the case. But what is also clearly the case (as Scotland’s politicians still consult their latest committee on funding for publishing) is that not only is a small literary publisher in Scotland fighting against market forces – but that we are also fighting against a funding regime south of the border which heavily subsidises our competitors.

David

Is the love story dead?

Last night I took part in a literary debate in Perth, with fellow writers Ewan Morrison and Carmen Reid, and with academic Dorothy McMillan and Scotland on Sunday literary editor Stuart Kelly. The event was chaired by novelist and Perth writer-in-residence Ajay Close. I was asked to join the debate because my second novel, The Bee Dancer, which I’m still working on, is loosely themed around the fictions and illusions we create for ourselves of romantic love, and how those romantic fantasies can ruin us for love in the real world.

What was interesting to me was the great variety in the views expressed by that panel about love. The three writers arguably were selected for their differences: Carmen writes chick-lit, Ewan writes contemporary novels about love that are centred around issues like the ‘menage a trois’, and my writing tries to tear down some of the illusions we subscribe to when we think and talk about love, so that we recognise them for fictions. None of us was exactly anti-love story (though it is true that on average we were talking more about literary heavyweights like Nabokov and Milan Kundera than your average Mills & Boon), but at least one member of the panel argued strongly that the reason we don’t have any great love stories any more – stories of overwhelming passion and obsession (except for stories set in the past, or in situations of extremity like war zones, or countries in which individual liberties are severely restricted) – is because we just don’t love in the same way any more. That our consumer- and media-driven, deeply sophisticated western society doesn’t lend itself to grand passions any more, and that instead anything goes: there are no more taboos, we’ve broken them all, and so people write about their family and their children with all the passion with which they used to write about love.

It’s a line I have some sympathy with: many of the great love stories – including great modern love stories – are indeed set in times of great turmoil. But not all. Not ‘Madame Bovary’, not ‘Jane Eyre’, not a whole bunch of others. (I don’t consider Jane Austen’s books, often cited in this context, as great love stories – rather as very well-written but fairly conventional social romances – sorry, all Austen fans: I know the arguments but I just don’t buy them!) And if we are now doing ‘love by managerial process’ and we all know far too much about relationships because we read too many self-help books and so we take no risks any more, as was suggested, then I’m obviously living in a different (maybe just older…) world.

But I shan’t give too much away here: we hope to have an audio recording of the entire debate soon and will link to it on our website from this blog. And look forward to your thoughts and comments.

Sharon

AL Kennedy on the Ullapool Book Festival. Oh. And a gannet…

Just in case you thought we were alone in the world in raving about the Ullapool Book Festival … have a read of what AL Kennedy said about it last Friday in The Guardian book blog:

“Meanwhile and on an also not-unrelated topic: Ullapool – a great wee festival all the way up in the far(ish) North – next stop, Isle Martin and the Summer Isles – with the listeningest audiences I’ve ever met. A weekend of talk and thought and a genuine sense of one long conversation/meditation being conducted over the course of consecutive events. The organisers looked after everyone extremely well with friendly attention to detail in a remarkable location. In that kind of environment writers can really get to know each other, and their audiences, and exchange ideas. (Most of us were too old or too married to exchange anything else.) Everyone there got to throw ideas around and appreciate a genuinely resourceful and imaginative community. And our final conclusion as a sunny Sunday eased its way towards lunch? That none of what we do would be worth doing or would really mean much without love.

Dreadful, I know – but we’d got all relaxed and unparanoid and truthful and there it was: love. At which point I have to cough a lot and think about death to counteract any disturbing or embarrassing sensations of wellbeing.

Death was, of course, present in Ullapool – as it is everywhere. I made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to rescue an unwell gannet there. Gannets, it turns out, are remarkably heavy birds and can be tetchy. I ended up simply having the thing die in my arms as I carried it towards the Wildlife Rescue Centre. (And please don’t write in: I was advised to try carrying it, had covered its head, had not chased it about … it was just a very poorly gannet.) I have since received a surprisingly high number of gannet emails, gannet postcards and gannet-related items. Obviously, the idea of a gannet-bearing novelist catches the imagination, somehow. I can only say that divesting oneself of a large dead, staring-eyed, rapidly stiffening gannet at the edge of a small and inquisitive town is something I would not necessarily wish upon you. Onwards.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/29/al-kennedy-literary-festivals

Sharon

You shall have a fishie …

We are soon going to publish an anthology of new fishing writing – Powerlines – a project conceived well back at the beginning of 2007 and slowly matured in its editor’s (Dexter Petley) very organic hands. Big established names and some brand new writers – just the way we like anthologies. Of course some people have no interest in fishing – but the writing in this book is around fishing and through fishing. So you might well like it even if you don’t fish yourself (you sure as hell will if you do fish!). As Dexter says in his introduction – how weird that non-fisher people reject the notion of reading a book where the central character fishes –  while they will lap up a book about a pianist or a basket-weaver even though they do neither of these things themselves.

Interestingly there are literary fishing books hitting the news right now. For instance Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown and Caught by the River  (in which Dexter has a contribution). Not that good fishing literature hasn’t always been there – and, of course, you’ll have found some of it through Ted Hughes and Robert Redford’s film of A River Runs Through it - but for a pastime (many would say ‘a way of life’) that draws so many people in to such a deep level of involvement it has probably been under-represented in the mainstream of literature. Maybe fishermen have just been too busy fishing to write books – it has that effect on you. But it seems that all that is about to change.

It is curious how these projects gather energy and validation. When I say that we are doing ‘an anthology of fishing writing’, people often think that we must be doing it purely to make some money away from our literary ‘core business’. But it isn’t like that at all – this anthology is right at the heart of what we do. So, it made absolute sense when, at our writer’s group on Monday,  John Glenday (poet previously with Peterloo Poets and now with Picador) was talking about taking a young boy fishing for the first time. He was amazed at the raw power – ‘for the boy’ – of the experience of catching a fish. Mind, I don’t know that John is an habitual hunter-killer himself - and I wondered whether the boy’s excitement at the catch and his ‘racing heart’ weren’t actually a very shared sensation.   I tell you – there is something about those fishies, lurking down there in the water…

David