Our latest e-book…

 

… is One True Void, by Dexter Petley. Which had an entire column of Boyd Tonkin’s weekly column in The Independent devoted to it:

‘Delivers scene after scene of exhilarating rage, tenderness, lyricism and pitch-black comedy as its angry young hero discovers that “there was a chasm in society that no book-reading would ever fill”. Conventionally enough, this is a rite-of-passage story about the events that fix the path of a bright but stranded 17-year-old. Less predictably, Petley writes, with a bittersweet mix of stifling intimacy and sizzling exasperation, about the English rural working-class of the early 1970s – no longer the peasant stalwarts of Hardy or Lawrence but the pikey scum that all now feel at liberty to loathe.’

You can buy the e-book here. And here’s what it’s all about:

They still called him Pisspot, the local scrubbers and all his ex-classmates, as they whizzed around the village on their Motobecanes. They didn’t understand why he wasn’t hanging about up the chip shop with them any more, or phlobbing cheese and onion curd outside the public bar of  The Royal Oak and playing inside left for the second team. But it was 1973 and Henry Chambers, aged 17, was motivated to achieve greatness. He’d just found out that if he wanted to be a poet he had to have both a vision of himself and a Pre-Raphaelite girlfriend. But that was impossible in the dead winter village of Hawkhurst. And the Claires and Virginias of West Kent College, Tunbridge Wells already had the Jameses and Jollyons as their social equals. Not Henry, the quiet poet with the tumbleweed bumfluff and cotted hair. No: for Henry, the future was bleak. There was no point and no vision. But just as Henry was putting the black edges round his own stationery and plotting to murder his baggots, he visited an ‘old lady’ on his Thursday afternoon community service. The house was called Plato Villa and Maxine Pollenfex – not exactly the old lady he was expecting – was going to change Henry’s life, and everyone else’s, forever. Dexter Petley’s fourth novel is a searing infra-red vision of 1970s Britain and the tragedies of class and tradition. Written in typically blistering language, One True Void tells how seventeen year-old Henry Chambers turns bleakness into beauty, anarchy and hysteria into poetic redemption, and takes apart the whole life of a small Kent village as he goes.

The ART of writing

Robert Alan Jamieson tells it like it is. This is perhaps the truest and loveliest piece of writing about writing (a novel) than any I’ve ever read. For the experienced and inexperienced alike.

http://editorial-consultancy.co.uk/how-i-write/robert-alan-jamieson/

Sharon

(Photograph stolen from the blog: it is courtesy of Ingvild Andersen.)

We have a winner…

We do a whole lot of telling it like it is on this blog – and ‘how it is’ has been pretty well uphill! So just for once you’ll have to allow us to sit back and beam at you in a pretty pleased-with-ourselves Cheshire Cat sort of way. Why? Well, we aren’t about to retire to the Bahamas on the strength of it (wouldn’t want to anyway)- but ‘A Wilder Vein’ is actually selling like a good book should. We’ve remarked in earlier posts that it was getting some media attention. But we’ve seen that before… What we haven’t seen up until now is a book going out of the distributors in hundreds during the first month rather than tens. Don’t get me wrong – we’ve had a few titles which really gathered some momentum and sustained it for months. But ‘A Wilder Vein’ has beaten all our previous records for coming off the blocks. Whether that turns into a short sprint or a marathon - we’ll see. Of course this is miniature stuff compared to big mass-market publishing - I am talking a few hundred as yet. But, my lord, we were getting in need of a morale booster on the sales front – and now we have one at a modest TRP sort of a scale. 

A Strong Start

This is all genuinely exciting. Not just because it keeps the press afloat. But because it is an ambition made good. It must have been nearly two years ago when Sharon decided that what was really needed was a book which brought together writing about the relationship between people and wild places. How a book like that would start to answer all sorts of important questions that a segment of our crowded population is really wanting to get to grips with. Then the decision to bring in an external editor (Linda Cracknell) to gather and select the pieces.  A long process which has resulted in a book which stays true to all the ambitions we had when we started publishing – and which is clearly going to speak up loud and clear in a crucial national debate. Yep, publishing has its good days.

All I want now is for ‘Powerlines‘ to cross over into the literary mainstream from the strong reviews it is getting in the angling world. Ah but there I go already. Want, want, want…

David

Double-whammy for Two Ravens Press on the Saltire Award shortlists

We are delighted to announce that Regi Claire’s collection of short stories Fighting It has been shortlisted for the Saltire Society Book of the Year Award 2009, and Esther Woolfson’s Piano Angel has been shortlisted for the Saltire Society Homecoming Award.  Other publishers whose books appear on the shortlist are: Jonathan Cape, John Murray, Duckworth, Quercus, Granta, Faber, Bloodaxe, Macmillan, Edinburgh University Press, Oxford University Press, Birlinn and Ùr-Sgeul. With the exception of Ùr-Sgeul, Two Ravens Press is the smallest publisher on the lists – which makes it especially satisfying to appear twice. The Prizes, worth £10 000 for Book of the Year and £1500 for the Homecoming Award, will be awarded on Monday 30th November by Michael Russell, MSP, Minister for Culture in a ceremony at The National Library of Scotland.

Esther Woolfson’s shortlisting comes hot on the heels of Piano Angel’s appearance on the prestigious IMPAC Award longlist. And here’s the interesting thing about that. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that back in September 2008 we took serious issue with a reviewer in The Scotsman who made a false statement about our editing policy (suggesting we didn’t do editing at all) in the context of an early review of Piano Angel. But what’s interesting here is the content of that review when it comes to the book itself. While recognising that reviewers absolutely have a right to say whether they rate a book or not, we nevertheless found this one more than a little brutal. The reviewer, Lesley McDowell, states: “Woolfson commits all the basic errors a good creative writing course would have hammered out of her, and that a good editor would have excised.” (Esther at the time was teaching creative writing courses, but let’s not get too hung up on that…) With a flourish, she ends the review with the following statement: “This novel is simply not ready for the market, and handing it over, unedited, in this way, [N.B. the novel WAS edited!] may even have done Woolfson’s nascent career as a novelist some harm.”

Well, we find no small satisfaction in noting that it didn’t.

Sharon

Which wood did British literature lose itself in? And can we have it back, please?

We set up Two Ravens Press back in 2006 imagining that there were all kinds of wonderful unpublished writers out there writing masterpieces of meaning and insight that the major publishing houses were rejecting for purely commercial reasons – like the demise of the good old literary ’midlist’, because they’d be impossible to shift in sufficient quantities to pull their weight in the context of the costs of their organisations and their massive promotional budgets. We’d fill the gap, we naively thought – we’d provide a home for all the really great deeply innovative MEANINGFUL books that we weren’t finding on the bookshop shelves any more.

Three years later, we’ve figured out not only that there are very few such writers in this country (which is why we struggle always to get good manuscripts) but also what we believe are some of the reasons for it. We are such a complacent, comfortable society, so deeply anaesthetised by our own crass forms of entertainment, that there’s really very little meaningful left in us to bring out. We have nothing of very much interest to say. Contrast this with literature coming out of zones of conflict and upheaval like Eastern Europe (thanks to Mark Goodwin for this link http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-08-raabe-en.html) and our own British literary efforts look fairly pitiful by comparison. We’re capable of producing some very fine writing but it’s attached to almost no content. Our so-called finest writers do this on a regular basis.

A brief case in point: Infinities, the new novel by John Banville. Banville’s a wonderful ‘prose stylist’, as the critics like to call him. He can produce scenes and sections of writing that take your breath away, they’re so beautiful and finely wrought and so very real. Certainly so in The Infinities. But when it came down to it, much as I enjoyed odd sections of prose, I found the entire novel utterly pointless. Why? Because it’s narrated by a Greek god, for heaven’s sake. Hermes. Whose father, Zeus, still runs around seducing beautiful women in contemporary Ireland. I won’t rant on about how silly a notion this is; that’s not really the point (although it’s not unrelated to the point, for sure!) The point is that you get to the end of the novel and you’re deeply unsatisfied. What was it all for? What did I learn? Nothing that’s especially memorable. Same as when I read Banville’s Booker prize-winning The Sea a couple of years ago. I remember at the time thinking it was very finely written, but I remember not a single thing about the book now. Not one thing. I couldn’t even tell you what it was about. There are other Emperors possessed of way too many suits of new clothing out there too – most of the darlings of British literature seem to me to fall into that category – Ian McEwan being another fine example – all style and form and nothing new or interesting to say in the context of how we might view the world. We might be vaguely entertained, quietly admiring of a nicely turned sentence – but we’re not going to be shaken to our very roots by a new idea of what we might become.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been weeding out my own heaving fiction bookshelves. Giving away the books that I know I’m never going to want to read again; holding onto the books I’ve already read more than once and couldn’t bear to part with. What I find, over and over again, is that the most recent books – books published in the last 5 or 10 years – are eminently forgettable and easy to part with, and the only ones I want to hang onto are the ones that have already travelled around the world with me and back again. Not just the obvious ones that I’m always talking about, like Camus or Lawrence, or even more modern greats like Atwood or Turner Hospital or Ondaatje, but the good old 70s/80s/90s midlist – the likes of Alice Thomas Ellis, Janice Elliot – the likes of which you just don’t find any more. The bean counters in the big publishing houses wouldn’t think them big enough; the marketing guys wouldn’t know how to classify them.

And the truth of it is that when it comes to questions about why our own very fine books – the best of which we really do believe at least begin to have something interesting to convey (the usual example: Angela Morgan Cutler’s stunning Auschwitz) – sell less than we always imagine, we are beginning to believe (now that we have more experience under our belts) that the truth is, it’s because people really don’t care to read them. Much easier to buy the latest Dan Brown – or better still, buy an X-box (whatever that is) to distract ourselves from our own emptiness. Perhaps that’s why more and more people who truly want to be challenged when they read are turning to fiction in translation. As a result of the article I’ve linked to above, I came across a new translation of a book by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk by the very fine Prague-based Twisted Spoon Press. And found myself longing for the day when you might find such books again on British bookshelves, by British authors. And reviewed by British literary critics.

Sharon

How Waterstone’s killed bookselling

Ah, but they said it, not us. The Guardian that is. Read it and weep…

“The emphasis given to the few is staggering,” says Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors. “It’s our mid-list authors, who may not write the most commercial books but who often write the best, who are suffering. The big corporate publishers dominate the shelves and squeeze out smaller publishers.”

Hilary Mantel’s agent Bill Hamilton worries that books are being sold like shampoo. “In retail, if you are selling a new shampoo you would expect to pay Boots, for instance, for a promotion, to make sure your shampoo is more visible than other ones. That pattern has been copied by Smith’s and Waterstone’s to an extent that has never been seen before in bookselling: you pay for almost any presence in the stores, you pay a huge amount for special promotions in the front of the store, and you go on paying every week even if the books are selling strongly anyway.

“There seems to be a frantic scramble in the book retail world to rush downmarket in order to compete with the challenges of Amazon, the supermarkets and next the ebook. Publishers have to fight their corner, year after year, against ever more aggressive demands for higher discounts from the chains, but seem at a loss to know how to cope with the underlying problems they face. They fear speaking out about how their books are being sold.”

And…

“There’s been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months,” says Hamilton. “Publishers are sending out to pasture established literary novelists because they realise they aren’t going to be sold by the chains. The complaint now from publishers is that most of their quality books hardly get a look in at all. In the past, sales for many literary novels were never very high, but now publishers are cutting down on their lists in desperation.”

Ho hum. Sounds familiar… And the solution? Buy direct from the publisher.

Sharon

And continuing in that Wilder Vein…

… Sharon will be on BBC Radio Scotland tomorrow afternoon (11/11/09) talking about what it is like to be a publisher in a remote area, and how operating from a wild place informs our approach to the business. (Hint: it makes us idiosyncratic, independent, and often quite radical!) If you don’t live within the ‘catchment’ area, you can listen online here – live or afterwards: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007j1q3

e-book-in-a-bath

It has a certain ring to it – a catchy ‘e-book-in-a-bath’. A bit like soap on a rope. So here it is – you saw it from TRP first…

See - no soggy pages

But my new marketing strategy aside – how has our first 6 months with e-books been? Where now? What’s the real low-down?

Well in the blue corner, still, are the digital revolutionaries. Lots of people convinced that some major paradigm shift either has or is about to take place. There is now a novel being published entirely by Twitter and there are a lot of people future-predicting a whole new age of freedom for writers and readers. Print-on-demand and self-publishing be damned – that was just the start of freedom. Now we can go direct from the writer to their reader(s) – your new novel downloaded to an i-phone. Lots of hand-waving in the direction of the music industry – who have apprently handled or mishandled the digital transition with breathtaking stupifidty or admirable wisdom (sorry, I can’t work out from the blogosphere which it is – maybe both). Something about ‘performance is the new royalty cheque’.

Ach, that’s all getting a bit exciting for a plain country-boy like me.   My experience of the digital revolution has been very pleasant but a little less cosmic. We have made and sold some e-books. We’ve sold a handful and had some repeat custom so they obviously work and are, to some readers, a pleasant way to read. Over time we’ll convert more of the list and I expect our sales will creep up and maybe even match the printed versions for some titles. The book is cheaper for the customer and I don’t have to stuff it into an envelope and drive it to the Post Office (or pay someone else to do so).

But the simple fact is that 95% of the process of publishing and marketing an e-book is just exactly the same as for a print book. Nothing much fundamental has changed. If you want national distribution there are people who make a living by selling you the facility. If you want to tell people about the book you either have to get it reviewed or advertised – or you try to get it out through your network of contacts/friends/colleagues. If you want it to look good and want it to be an ergonomic pleasure to read your edition of the work  – then you have to put a lot of graft into typesetting it properly.

Sure, if you want to get your book ‘out there’ without a publisher you can do it with an e-book. But incidentally, even after you’ve typeset it, you’ll find it will currently cost you more to convert your MS to an e-book than it would to print about 200 copies with a reputable printer. Of course you could always just PDF it and send the file around. But there’s nothing new in that. You always could.

Ah, but now there’s Facebook and Twitter. Now I can not only produce my own book without a publisher but I can market it myself in an afternoon. I can bang out a short video clip of me reading an enticing opening chapter. Beam it direct to ‘dear reader’. No need for those pesky reviewers and arbitrary arbiters of good taste. Certainly no need for PR consultants.  Maybe. Despite my scepticism I think you really might be able to set a chain reaction going this way. If the content is very good. But what do you do then? At the risk of sounding very uncouth – where does the money come from? (More general hand-waving in the direction of the music industry?) Chances are that you could approach a conventional publisher – armed with a your storm of internet-based public interest. But that is the end of the revolution.

Sometimes a technological or intellectual advance breaks a log-jam – solves an apparently intractable problem. Everyone sees the problems with literature and the publishing industry – and it would be really great if the e-books and other digital advances could somehow change the rules overnight. But in my opinion the rules remain almost unchanged - you need excellent writing to start with then you need to fight your way past all the other good writing (as well as an overburden of rubbish writing) to the limited attention span of the people who will eventually part with a few quid for your work. Nothing digital is going to change that. You may get a short-term edge on the competition by innovative use of technology – but only one man can write the first novel published on Twitter. I don’t see the media falling over themselves to do a feature on the third twitter novel.

AL Kennedy on the future of writing

A typically forthright article from the wonderful AL Kennedy on the Guardian Book Blog about how hard it is to be a writer these days – increasingly hard (AL Kennedy obviously has no great love for them, but trust me – it’s hard to be an indie publisher too…) and getting harder. Here are the bits that really struck home; regular readers will remember similar rants on past TRP blog pages:

I have no idea what a new writer would do now – attempting to burrow into a market that’s in free fall and a literary “culture” that drastically limits the numbers of books that are published or that will ever be visible in major bookshop chains, reviews or the media generally. Publishers are beyond risk-averse and are currently decision-averse. It is possible that published writers will no longer ever leave whatever other employment they use to subsidise themselves. Meanwhile, the increase in poorly conceived and exploitative creative writing courses will continue, and increasingly the writers who teach on them will end up training potential writers to teach other potential writers to teach on other courses and round and round they all will go – never knowing how good they might be, or what they’re missing … Established writers surely can’t feel morally comfortable about helping new writers to commit themselves to the life while ignoring the fact that the chances of success, or even of publication, are minimal. And we can’t pretend that teaching writers to teach writing is meaningful, or anything close to our primary purpose.

That’s an important point. It seems to us day after day that there are more people who want to write books than who want to read them (certainly more than those who want to actually BUY them…). There simply isn’t enough room in the publishing business for all these writers. Why? Well, ALK has one answer:

It isn’t the readers’ or the writers’ fault that publishing has fallen on its own sword and allowed book shop chains and short-term thinking to eat its heart away. It isn’t our fault that the Net Book Agreement disappeared (although we should have fought harder to keep it). But we are the ones who’ll lose out, who don’t get the variety of books, who don’t find the unlooked-for pleasures or get to share the new dreams. The appetite for them is still out there.

While the current retail set-up persists, entirely dependent on enormous discounts and excessive promotions, it’ll always be hard for good, innovative new writers to get noticed. Or for risk-taking, creative small publishers to make a living. But here at Two Ravens Press we’re still doing our best to find our way through…

Sharon

 

 

Back in the saddle…

… of the bucking bronco that represents Two Ravens Press. And no longer puzzled about why the BBC chose not to feature A Wilder Vein on Excess Baggage just before we left: because they were always intending to run the feature on 7 November. They just forgot to tell anyone … Ho hum. Listen out this Saturday at 10am, Radio 4: Sara Maitland and Andrew Greig talking about the relationship between people and wild places.

Meanwhile, we’re all coming back down to earth after the week away. Team-building in South Uist for staff members ran very smoothly and apparently required the consumption of a very large rock. Puppies…

Sharon