At Two Ravens Press we determinedly break all the rules that are supposed to apply (don’t know who wrote them, let alone who agreed to them on behalf of all of us!) about taking issue with book reviews, if we think we or the author or the book have been seriously misrepresented. If we feel the author of the review hasn’t done their job properly. It has only happened on a couple of occasions, but I absolutely feel that both the writer and the publisher have a right to hit back at a bad review. By ‘bad review’ I don’t mean that the review says the book is bad (if a review does so for good reason, then you just have to bite down and take it) but that the review itself is poorly done or the author trashes a book just because they don’t like the style of writing rather than because it is inherently bad. (We have, on the other hand, seen reviews of two of our books – in the same publication, and by the same reviewer, interestingly – that were so foolishly bad that we’ve just chosen to ignore them.) In that context, John Updike’s ideas about what book reviewing ought to be strike home. Here they are:

Thanks to Emma Darwin for this link.

Sharon

Susan Hill, in a blog on The Spectator website, talks about the closing of Borders and the future of books in the current decidedly dodgy retail environment. Here’s a quote that struck home:

For the last thirteen years I have run a small publishing company and we recently stopped bringing out fiction other than for children, because we cannot make it pay even modestly. I run the business from home, employ only freelance staff on an ad hoc basis and do not take any salary myself. There is no other way I can so much as break even. How large firms with staff, office overheads, rents and rates can survive is a matter of concern but many are doing so at the moment by making employees redundant. That cannot go on.

Tell us about it! In the current climate, we at Two Ravens Press can only marvel at publishers who still seem to feel it necessary (why??) to open smart London offices and to continue to expand extensively into potentially risky areas. High Street retail is one of the riskiest areas of all. We’ve looked very carefully at the result of our relationship with Waterstone’s over the past three years; after thousands of books have passed through their stores we reckon we’ve made a small loss overall. Yes: that’s right. We haven’t made a penny on any of those books. Waterstone’s could quite easily kill us, if we weren’t now being very careful and selective about how we market to them. Borders have always been better (they don’t have such a wicked returns policy) but the truth is that high street chains are now the last place small publishers who intend to stay in business need to be. We would love it if more independents took our books; truth is that as a generality (yes, there are exceptions) they’re even more conservative. So what do we do? Internet, internet, internet. That’s the future, it seems for the likes of us. One wonders what the future will be for bigger publishers with the demise of one of their major outlets. Little more than Tesco’s and Asda, perhaps…

Sharon

A fairly convoluted but well-argued post from Zadie Smith on the Guardian book blog, in the context of essay writing, about whether ‘novel-nausea’ is a growing phenomenon. While agreeing that ‘novel-nausea’ is common and develops from a frustration with deeply unimagininative ’same-old’ novels (the kind so prevalent in modern British fiction that I regularly rant about on this blog) Smith nevertheless ends on a positive note:

Except, except. Then something remarkable comes into your hands. Not very often – no more or less often now than in the 1930s, or the 1890s or the 1750s – but every now and then, you read something wonderful. (Despite all the dull talk of the death of literature, the rate of great novels has always been and will always be roughly the same. By my reckoning, about 10 per decade. Although behind them are dozens of very good novels, for which this reader, at least, is grateful.) Every now and then a writer renews your faith… But after you have raged at the impossible artificiality of storytelling, once you have shouted, with Kafka, “But then? No then”, well, maybe you will find yourself returning to the crossroads of “And then, and then”, if only to see what’s going on down there. Because there is a still a little magic left in that ancient formula, a little of what Werner Herzog … described as “ecstatic truth”. And every now and again some very imaginative writer is sure to make that “And then” worth your while.

Sharon

… 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.

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 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

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

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

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

… 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