The Catch-22 of retail book sales

Sometimes whether we wonder if it isn’t just us who have a hard time making ends meet these days. It’s increasingly hard to get books reviewed, as the literary pages of the national newspapers continue to shrink and as they seem less willing to take risks on what they do review. It’s increasingly hard to get books into stores, and when you do, they tend to come right back again at your (significant) cost. Tindal Street Press recently reported problems of this kind – see this link to a Bookseller article for details. And here’s a quote:

“…Alan Mahar, publishing director, told The Bookseller the drop [in reserves] was down to “heavy and sudden de-stocking and serious returns” from chain booksellers, which resulted from taking part in book chain promotions, shortly before the recession began to bite.

He added: “We had a lot of books—for us—in the shops, especially of the old edition of [Catherine O'Flynn's] What Was Lost. Even Girl in a Blue Dress [longlisted for 2008's Booker Prize] was returned in large quantities before interest revived following the Orange Prize longlisting early in 2009.”

Mahar said Tindal took part in store promotions because it was the only way “for books to make any impact . . . We have always considered that it’s worth going in for the main promotions, but we have observed that it doesn’t always have a positive effect.” He added: “We are having to watch our promotion costs and print runs with care this year. Trading has certainly become harder.”

Mahar’s views echo those of Marion Boyars publisher Catheryn Kilgarriff, who attributed excessive consolidation in the retail sector, and the cost of promotions, to her decision to wind down the company.”

You’ll see the bit above that I’ve highlighted in bold text – that’s exactly what we’ve found here at Two Ravens Press. If you don’t participate in expensive promotions, it’s hard to sell books or even to get them into the chains – they’re no longer interested in operating at standard discount levels and if you don’t offer them big discounts are unlikely to stock your books at all. But if you do enter those promotions, you’ll almost certainly fail to make a profit at all, and just as likely make a loss – as we found in 2008 when we participated in half a dozen promotions with Waterstone’s.

What to do? Buggered if we know. Except to encourage, as much as we can, people to buy direct from us, online. Which, with a handful of risk-taking independent bookstores excepted, seems to be the main way we can make anything remotely resembling a profit on our book sales these days.

Sharon

Sometimes you really have to wonder…

…what some literary critics are on. Robert McCrum in The Observer this Sunday, implying that Dan Brown would be a good contender for the Booker. Okay – before you get really excited, I admit I exaggerate! – but if you read the article you really, REALLY have to wonder.

McCrum begins by suggesting that the Booker shortlist has for years “eschewed narrative in favour of sometimes unreadable literary fiction.” That in itself is scary enough – if the former literary editor of The Observer finds the average Booker shortlist “unreadable”, what trust should we place in literary critics?! He follows this by suggesting that Dan Brown “must be doing something right” because his new novel sold a million copies within 24 hours of publication. (Er….)  That “something right” apparently is – plot.

God forbid that I should bore you all with a lecture on all the ways in which Dan Brown’s plots are utterly ludicrous (BBC Radio 4’s Front Row did a fine enough job of that, as have others) but McCrum insists that the key to Brown’s success is ’story, story, story.’  (I guess it must be: unlikely and laughable as his plots are, they’re nothing compared to his plain, straightforward bad writing.) McCrum then rounds all of this off with the assertion that EM Forster (who right now can be heard turning and turning in his grave) would have supported this emphasis on story (yes, I can see it now: the cover recommendation from old EM on Brown’s new novel…) because he “conceded the importance of narrative” in his groundbreaking book ‘Aspects of the Novel.’

Of course EM Forster “conceded the importance of narrative.” You couldn’t possibly not. Fiction IS narrative, by definition! Yes, McCrum is right that ”narrative is part of our DNA.” I spent years as a psychologist developing ‘narrative therapy’ techniques: the use of storytelling in therapy. Nothing new in any of that. And yes, story is critical to most great works of literature. But story alone doesn’t make great works of literature. What makes great literature is the way you handle your narrative, the language you use to impart it, the structures you place on it etc etc etc. A good literary prize ought to be looking at the entire package, not just rewarding the writers who can think up the best plots.

McCrum apparently struggles to understand many of the books on recent Booker shortlists, using words like “impenetrable”, “baffling”, and “unreadable”. The Booker, he asserts, “has held itself apart from the vulgar manifestations of storytelling.” He doesn’t, of course, name those books that he considers so unreadable, but looking back at shortlists – even winners – I really have to wonder what – or who – he’s talking about. Michael Ondaatje? Graham Swift? Peter Carey? Kazuo Ishiguro? Zadie Smith? Ali Smith? Margaret Atwood? Penelope Lively? To name but a few. There are all kinds of ways to tell a great story, and the Booker shortlist has held some stunners over the years.

McCrum’s article depressed us, as well as irritating the life out of us. Why? Because although his basic point – that effective storytelling is critical to the success of a book – can’t be argued with, the implication that only conventional plot-driven novels are exciting and readable is death to literary innovation. And because right now, the book market in this country is dull enough and predictable enough and commercial-blockbuster-PLOT-DRIVEN enough without more of this bizarre reverse snobbery going on. Last year we had Booker judge Michael Portillo crowing “we have brought you fun!” – which was bad enough, but if the likes of McCrum have their way, the next shortlist would include not only John Le Carre and Howard Jacobson, who he suggests ought to have been past contenders, but would probably include Dan Brown as well.

Sharon

The Year Turns Yellow

Hell’s teeth – has it been two weeks since we posted here – it seems like yesterday? We certainly haven’t been fading quietly into the background or reflecting inactivity with a suddenly quiet, ‘it was too quiet’, blog. Sharon has worked all hours to recreate the website. I’ve been launching and pushing ‘The Two Sides of the Pass’ - more in a separate post. The 2010 list is both finalised and we have a fair chunk of the covers and typsetting already done plus advertising scheduled and the 2010 catalogue about to go to the printers. So everything is actually mighty ship-shape at TRP with the books for 2009 all printed, delivered and starting to find their way out through the multiple filters and obstructions of the book trade. And we have the funds to pay for them all, as and when the printers’ invoices become due (this before our grant from SAC hits the accounts – that money is for growing the business next year). That isn’t to say we are rolling in cash – we still don’t have wages, they’ll maybe come next! - but we have inched our way painfully forwards in cashflow so that the money coming in is about up to the money going out,  up to  ’the present’, if you get my drift. Hence ‘the year turns yellow’ – both as the ash trees on the croft go to autumn and as the finances slowly turn from red in the direction of green.

The two anthologies - ‘Powerlines’ and ‘A Wilder Vein’ - which are our end-of-year great hopes – are attracting more media attention and reviews and general buzz than, frankly, anything elase we have published so far in 2009. They were well connected from the outset – that is one of the likely advantages of an anthology (as opposed to the downside - horrendous admin loads working with 20 or more authors at a time – 20 contracts not 1, 20 times more last-minutes and just-a-thought’s :-) but we have been pleasantly surprised by people ringing us for details rather than us constantly trying to bargain our way into peoples’ attention. ‘Powerlines’ will have a signing event at Farlows of Pall Mall (like Harrods for fishermen and field sports enthusiasts, if you aren’t familiar) as well as coverage on Caught by the River website amongst a number of others.  (And before you say – ‘I thought they didn’t splurge on launches!’ – the whole thing will probably cost me the £38 for an early-booked easyjet flight and a bottle of wine for my mate on whose floor I’ll kip! Even we can see the business upside in that :-)) How all the interest and encouragement translates into sales – we’ll, as ever, have to wait and see. But at least we are getting noticed. The ‘big’ media – nationals and TV etc – are sniffing around both titles but the space for any literature is ever more cramped and we aren’t basing our whole strategy on getting a place in the few remaining column-inches there are.

e-books, by the way, are a very slow starter. As fully expected. We have our foot in the door as promised – but it will be a good while yet before the tiny trickle of sales does anything to revolutionise our business. Which is fine – we have made the first moves and, in true TRP fashion, kept the costs down to almost nothing. We will keep things progressing but affordable then pounce when the next upturn in e-book interest comes along.

Finding that place in the sun

So, apologies for the quiet patch – we’ve not been idle – just putting in the foundations for another year on the literary front-line.

David

How the web was woven

- which is the title of an obscure Elvis Presley song that I recall very well, precisely because it was on the B side of the second-ever single (records; remember?) I ever bought as a bright-eyed young thing (don’t ask what the first was – I’m not admitting) by Presley called ‘I Just Can’t Help Believing’.

Put that firmly into the Friday lunchtime trivia section, and let’s move on…

…to the web I’m really talking about, which is the Two Ravens Press website. The new one, that is. If you haven’t already seen it. It’s taken two solid weeks of back-aching designing and coding and this and that and (with some technical assistance from the very helpful Iain Duncan at Inverness-based web design company Designs for Life) it is finally live.

There’s a story behind the new site, of course: the story of an original website structured badly by someone else and then inherited by someone (me) who didn’t entirely know what they were doing and has no background in web design and the associated technology at all. On the other hand, it’s served us well for the past 2 and a half years, even though it’s deeply out of date and incompatible with the latest software and design standards. Well, not any more, it ain’t. This site has been designed on good old Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, which won’t actually let you do some things badly – it forces you into good choices – and is an immensely complex piece of kit into the bargain.

Anyway: go and have a look, if you care to. You’ll find more information than ever, and separate pages for our books and our authors, giving lots more room for interesting stuff. As ever, all our books are at a minimum 20% discount on RRP and P&P is free in the UK (and charged at a minimal cost overseas). You’ll even find some more heavily discounted backlist books.

And you can sign up for our new monthly newsletter, RAVENOUS: an emailed link to a web page that’ll contain all the latest information about TRP books, authors, events, and other news – as well as special offers exclusive to newsletter subscribers.

Finally, you can have a sneak preview of our 2010 list.

And if you still have any energy left after all that, you can send me commiserations for the fact that a major PayPal glitch this morning meant that I had to redo all the ‘add to cart’ buttons, one by one, for around 50 books…

God bless ‘providers’, one and all.

As always, we’re open to your comments about the website!

Sharon

All you ever wanted to know about the insanity of the book retail world…

… is here in an article in The Independent by DJ Taylor on the excessive discounting (from The Bookseller: The Book Depository will this morning (15th September) drop the price of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (Transworld) to £4.99, almost 75% off its recommended retail price of £18.99…) of Dan Brown’s new novel:

“At a rough calculation, several million pounds that could have been used to irrigate an industry struggling to emerge from recession is simply being thrown away in defiance of fiscal logic. Here, after all, is a product that hundreds and thousands of people want to buy. Why not make them pay a proper price for it?

By chance, the fanfare over The Lost Symbol’s arrival in last Friday’s Bookseller coincided with two other announcements. One was the demise of the fine old independent publishing firm of Marion Boyars. The other was the news that authors’ advances are being squeezed. Up to a point, that is. Should you happen to be in the Dan Brown category you can expect to receive even more money up-front; the rest of us, though, can expect rather more frugality from our sponsors.

All this renders the book’s publication horribly symbolic. For all the bright-eyed talk about ‘diversity’ in the nation’s bookshops, the over-riding tendency in publishing is for more discounted copies to be sold of fewer, similar books. Some might argue that putting Dan Brown on sale at half-price is a thoroughly democratic way of making literature more accessible to a mass public. In the end, though, price-cutting simply devalues the allure of what remains.

…A return to retail price maintenance, in which books have to be sold for the prices stamped on their jacket, can’t come soon enough.”

Bravo.

The only thing I’d take some issue with is Taylor’s comment that no-one in the book trade, apart from Dan Brown, his agent and his publisher, will make money out of the book. The truth is that in Dan Brown’s case, the volumes are expected to be such that the publisher will probably make a fortune even if they only recover 10p a book as a result of these ridiculous discount levels. It isn’t true for your average book – and certainly not for your average work of literary fiction, to sell 1000 copies of which makes for a red-letter day. And I refer back to my post about Marion Boyars going out of business as a result of this excessive discounting, below. Unless it’s a book like Harry Potter or another Dan Brown, the publishers stand to lose. And badly.

Sharon

Moving Forward

Yes, it’s here: David’s copy of the Forward Book of Poetry 2010 (why 2010? It’s published in October 2009 and the prize is for poetry published in late 2008/2009…). As you may remember, one of the poems from Meeting the Jet Man was included among the poems that were Highly Commended by this year’s judges (including one of my favourite poets, David Harsent): ‘So What Does it Feel Like?’ That was exciting enough, for a poem from a first collection, but looking at the astonishingly fine list of other poets keeping him company in the Highly Commended section brought us both out in spots: Andrew Motion, Roger McGough, John Burnside, Derek Mahon, Anne Carson, Mary Oliver, Alice Oswald, David Constantine, Mimi Khalvati … Given that we’ve only ever published 2-4 volumes of poetry a year, it’s also fantastic for Two Ravens Press to have a book in the Forward Prize at all, whether it’s David’s or not. But the biggest congratulations of all must surely go to Salt, who have not only 7 volumes represented in the Highly Commended list, but a shortlisted ‘first collection’ volume too.

Actually, it’s a fantastic volume. Order it for only £8.99, direct from the Faber & Faber website, here.

Sharon

Armageddon in the book world: another indie publisher bites the dust

These are SUCH hard times for small publishers. I know that many of you will only really have focused on, or been made aware of, the tales of  woe that Salt have been putting about this year (although we can’t help finding it fascinating that their apparent financial difficulties haven’t stopped them from opening brand spanking new London offices in the heart of Bloomsbury on schedule…), but there are other small publishers, with arguably a much sounder business base, who have been quietly dying while Salt has been getting all the media attention. The quietly inspirational Maia Press has recently sold out to Arcadia Books. More tellingly, long-time wonderfully bolshie indie publisher Marion Boyars has just decided to call it a day and has sold a bunch of titles to Penguin.

Where it gets really interesting is when you begin to delve into the reasons for Marion Boyars giving up. Here’s one in The Bookseller that quotes Marion Boyars’ daughter Catherine Kilgarriff as blaming it largely on retail discounts:

“Marion Boyars is being wound down because of excessive demands from retailers, and the growing concentration of retailers, publisher Catheryn Kilgarriff has said.

It was announced this morning that the independent publisher, which was home to titles such as Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, had sold these and 36 other classic titles to Penguin.

The company, which started out in the 1960s as Calder and Boyars and has been run by Marion Boyars’ daughter Kilgarriff since 1999, gave the news in a letter to trade customers.

Kilgarriff told The Bookseller: “It was the discounts that got me, and the fact I was not able to publish without the confidence that we would get into one of those [special deal] offers. And even if we did, you have to kick back something to get there, so in the end we were lucky even just covering costs.

“Without Borders [being so active], the whole retail end is uneven. You have one company dominating the high street, one online, so it’s impossible for independent publishers to budget with any kind of confidence”.

She added the costs of marketing a book that was shortlisted for an award were prohibitive “which meant I was no longer wanting to take on literary fiction, because I couldn’t afford to enter prizes”.”

Boy, we know about those discounts. And regular readers of this blog over the past year or two will maybe remember our own blogs on the subject of discounts and the appalling cost of ‘3 for 2′ campaigns in high-street stores like Waterstone’s. (And the costs and risks of entering literary prizes…) This is combined with an outrageous entirely risk-free returns policy that mean that if something doesn’t sell within say 3 months it’s taken off the shelves immediately and sent back at considerable cost to the publisher. Which makes keeping afloat near impossible. 

And yet it’s important to bear in mind that not every retail problem a small publisher faces can be blamed on high-street chains; we have found that independent bookstores in Scotland (a few very fine notable exceptions among them, including Achins in Lochinver, Tam’s Bookshop in Stromness, The Ceilidh Place Bookshop and The Ullapool Bookshop) have been considerably less than enthusiastic about the prospect of stocking new Scottish literary fiction – a couple of recent high-profile openings among them.

It is always easy for people to wonder whether, when Two Ravens Press whines about this kind of stuff, we just don’t know what we’re doing – after all, we’ve only been at it since late 2006. And it’s easy enough to criticise Salt (as many people with a strong business background have done) on the basis of their particular problems and idiosyncratic and risk-taking responses to them. But it’s awfully difficult to write off the views of a publisher like Marion Boyars, there since the 1960s with a backlist to die for and with a name like John Calder behind them in their original incarnation.

We are feeling the pinch like everyone else. We just don’t have it in us to beg, and also we want people to WANT the kind of books we publish because they want them, not because they feel sorry for us. And so we haven’t indulged in any big campaigns – and neither, yet, have we decided to give it all up and breed hens (an infinitely more profitable occupation).

But here’s the thing: books are important. They’re pivotal to our culture; they’re the legacy we give to our kids. And if we at Two Ravens Press put all the energy that we have into publishing good quality contemporary literature because we believe it’s important, and if we do it out of our own home so as not to have unreasonable overheads, and with just the two of us learning everything from doing the company accounts to web design programmes so we can keep running costs to the minimum – and still we can’t make a decent profit – then we have to believe that there’s something wrong rotten somewhere in the world of books.

Every time you allow the big promotions to influence your buying choices you’re keeping that system going. Books have been globalised by the publishing industry to the extent that, if a political party were to attempt a stranglehold on literature (or anything else) of the kind that has been achieved by these people, there’d be fighting in the streets. The people who control literature now have no interest in literature. And here’s the question all of that leads to: what kind of world do you want to live in? A world where adventurous publishers go out of business, even if they can just about manage to keep afloat financially, just because they lose the will to live (a state of mind that I encounter on at least a weekly basis)? Understand that your literary culture – our literary culture – has been stolen. Hijacked.

What to do about it? Well, that’s the more complicated question and we’re certainly not in the business of dictating to our readers. All we ask is that you think about it every time you allow your buying choices to be influenced by hype or promotion; that you think about who you buy from (it’s not always cheaper to buy from Amazon, for example. Though it’s true that it’s often easier). And bear this in mind: if a small group of efficient fundamentally dull people get to determine the optimum breakfast cereal and sell us only that – well, we get some pretty dull breakfasts. If a small group of efficient fundamentally dull people get to determine what books get sold, we’re fucked.

Sharon

Alan Bissett on Kelman

Alan Bissett’s piece on Kelman’s comments in The Guardian blog is, I think, one of the most reasoned responses to the whole issue. So good that I’m pasting below his reply to the seventy-odd comments of varying degrees of quality that stemmed from his original piece. So god that I wish I’d written it :- )

Sharon

This has provoked a vigorous response. Australian ABC news, incredibly, have been on the phone. It seems everyone has taken a side dictated by how they feel about genre fiction, James Kelman, Scotland itself, or their definition of the word ‘colonised’. I’m glad this sparked debate, as it’s rather an important one, but there is much for me to disagree with.

Few literary writers would begrudge anyone the right to read or write whatever they like; indeed I often find myself irritated by those who do, or who turn the worship of the avant-garde into some kind of cult. Many literary writers, I’d imagine, actually read genre fiction from time to time, or at least grew up with it. I myself was a Stephen King and Clive Barker junkie for years, and had fruitful forays into Fantasy and Sci-Fi. I even once edited an anthology of Gothic fiction. But theres a reason I stopped reading it, which is that your ability to comprehend complexity in literature grows, and so more ‘generic’ forms no longer satisfy. That seems like neurological certainty.

Literary writers accept that there is a smaller readership for themselves than there is for, say, the average Crime or Chick-lit writer, and that the more experimental their work is, the smaller that audience will be. This is the same in all fields of the arts – music, theatre, film – and we can largely attribute it to market forces, and the tastes of the public being what they are.

It’s hoped, though, that spaces of intelligent discourse – such as academia, book festivals and broadsheet journalism – would protect and give coverage to writers who are more risk-taking, either politically or formally. Kelman believes that these institutions in Scotland have given undue space and attention to genre writers, to the detriment of genuine radicalism.

I myself am not saying genre fiction is never good, nor would I cast aspersions about the quality of any writers mentioned in my blog. I do think Kelmans wholesale dismissal of them as ‘crap’ demonstrates a wee blind spot in his analysis. But it is true that a new release by virtually any Scottish Crime writer (Denise Mina, Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Val McDermid, Alexander McCall Smith, Karen Campbell and Stuart McBride) will receive extensive review and feature coverage. This will definitely happen in Scotland and probably also in England. More angry, experimental or less-easily marketable Scottish writers such as Tom Leonard, Suhayl Saadi or John Aberdein would struggle, however, for the same attention, even in Scotland. They will almost never be covered in London. Kelman sees that as a failure of the literary establishment, a capitulation to market forces which distorts our perception of our own literature.

None of these latter writers imagine they’ll ever sell in the numbers of Rankin or Rowling. But when even the intellectual sphere, which is supposed to encourage and critique innovation in the arts, are denying them in favour of glossier sells, then you can appreciate the despair. Kelman is a man who has battled all his life to have the marginalised voices in his books, and the Glaswegian working-class communities he represents, recognised. The stooshie (good Scottish word there!) over his Booker Prize win in 1994 demonstates this. His groundbreaking novel ‘How Late it Was, How Late’ was dismissed by Simon Jenkins as ‘the ravings of a Glaswegian drunk’, and Jenkins was far from alone in this class prejudice.

You can see why Kelman would feel aggrieved that the same spaces which once decried his work as sub-literate are now failing over themselves to praise genre writers, who produce a series of books slightly different but mainly the same as the last, down to the very same characters and story structure. These books can be terrific reads, yes, and provide great pleasure for their armies of fans. But are they as thoughtful and penetrating as books by Kelman, Alasdair Gray or AL Kennedy? Do they make us think in radically different ways about ourselves and the world we live in? Do they push language and structure to breathe new life into a three-hundred-year-old form? Well, in the main, they don’t. Most Crime novelists wouldn’t see that as their remit. Mina admits as much in her comments. Which kind of writing do we value more though, not commercially, but culturally? That’s whats up for debate here.

I’d say its the case, for example, that when genre fiction is reviewed in broadsheet pages, it’s largely appraised by other genre practioners, or at least admirers of the genre. The critique tends to be of a different nature: is this a page-turner? Is this story twist plausible? Are the characters consistent from the last book? Is it as good as the last one? These are questions which beset the fans of that series. Reviewers of literary fiction, however, set the benchmark at Joyce, Woolf or Nabakov, and are thus far more excoriating. In the same arts section of a newspaper, Ian Rankin can get a thumbs-up for producing another page-turner that zips by and builds shocks into the right places, while Zadie Smith can be torn apart for failing to write the greatest novel of the decade. Rankin is clearly one of the finest writers of Crime we have – everyone I know who cares says so – but there do seem to be too many rewards in this system for satisfying convention. They’re not just financial ones.

Another row about literary vs genre fiction

Those of you outside of Scotland may be blissfully unaware of the intense debate that’s running here as a consequence of some remarks made by Booker-winning Scottish writer James Kelman at the Edinburgh International Book festival last week. Kelman, often classified along with writers like Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard – experimental, often radical writers who came from Glasgow’s working classes – is reported in the Sunday Herald as having done the following:

Kelman, a Booker Prize winner, made his blistering attack at the Edinburgh Book Festival by deriding Scotland’s obsession with “upper middle-class young magicians” and “f****** detective fiction”. He went on to target the whole of the Scottish literary establishment.

Singling out this country’s failure to embrace its “radical traditions” and its insistence on doling out praise to “mediocre” writers, he bemoaned a commercialised literary scene in thrall to Harry Potter and Rebus.

“If the Nobel Prize came from Scotland they would give it to a writer of f****** detective fiction, or else some kind of child writer, or something that was not even new when Enid Blyton was writing The Faraway Tree, because she was writing about some upper middle-class young magician or some f****** crap,” he said.

Contemporary literature, he said, was “derided and sneered at by the Scottish literary establishment” who were “Anglocentric” and bent on ignoring the edgier talent that is right under their noses – citing poet Tom Leonard as an example of one such cruelly marginalised Scot.

Not surprisingly, there have been a few reactions. Michael Schmidt, professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow and founder of Carcanet Press and editor of PN Review, called Kelman’s approach ‘Stalinist’ and argues that it ‘disparages the common reader’. Popular crime writer Denise Mina, perhaps understandably, wasn’t exactly singing Kelman’s praises, either – more of her later. Others – young novelists Rodge Glass and Alan Bissett, for example, have suggested that Kelman has an important point. In the Sunday Herald article, Bissett points out that: 

“… mediocre writing – by which he means genre writing – is given undue attention by the Scottish literary establishment. Also, the commercial success of certain titles and writers is distorting the view from outside Scotland of what Scottish writing is, just how hard edged and radical it can be.

“Kelman comes from a pure place and sees that commercial fiction is inevitably controlled and dominated by market forces, pushed on us by publishers and booksellers because they know it will sell. What some people might see as snobbery is simply Kelman trying to fight for a space in mainstream culture for radical voices.”

And at Two Ravens Press you’d certainly expect us to agree with that. 

On the other hand, we find it harder to accept Kelman’s implication that the only valid radical writing is work that comes out of the working classes (and I’m speaking as someone whose family came right out of the working-class tenements of Granton). Michael Schmidt says: “There is a parochialism that says Scotland first, and there is an internal parochialism that says Glasgow first, and then Glasgow working-class first. Each time you get into a smaller parochialism, the more authoritarian the feel of the language is.” And there is an important point there too.

And yet, Scottish authors make up around 75% of the Two Ravens Press list, and it’s hard to disagree with Birlinn/Polygon publisher Hugh Andrew when he says:  “We should remember in terms of promotion of books that the last 10 years have seen Scotland lose all control of its own book trade.” And it is close to impossible to get good new Scottish authors covered in the national newspapers down south (but bear in mind, guys, when you criticise the ‘Scottish literary establishment’ that the Scottish literary editors DO on balance cover those writers – and their Scottish publishers). So we have some sympathy, nevertheless, for the position that Scotland needs to better support its own writers (and publishers!)

A fascinating debate, and a complex one. But whether you’re Scottish or not, working class or not, and whether you’re primarily a reader of genre fiction or of literary/experimental fiction, you should remember this about James Kelman: first, he has the guts to say in public what so many others believe and yet are too frightened of offending that ‘literary establishment’ to say themselves; and second, he has the guts to write what he believes is important – to actually commit works of art - rather than writing, like so many, ‘for the market’ or purely to make lots of money. You really have to wonder where Denise Mina is coming from when she suggests, also in the Sunday Herald, that genre writers don’t need to worry about boring (“That act is so dreary and so over”, she snarls) and elitist (“the persona of ‘writer’ is dull. It’s just donning a cape and smoking a pipe and swanning about being patronising.” – NB: has anyone ever seen Kelman in a cape smoking a pipe???) concepts like art. No, no, she says: ”Genre fiction doesn’t need prizes to promote it and we don’t need money from the Nobel Prize Committee because we make a good living …”

Guess that makes it all OK, then. Why bother with producing art (or talking some ”awful schtick about pushing the boundaries of literary technique”, to quote Ms Mina one final time) when you can make lots of money writing something easier? “We have accepted the Faustian compact of material plenty for mental starvation,” says Hugh Andrew, and I’m with him 100% on that.

Although it’s not my daily reading fare, I admire good, intelligent genre fiction. It’s really hard to trash the likes of Rankin, for example. But attitudes like Denise Mina’s tell you all you ever need to know about why we desperately need more writers like Kelman.

Sharon

Sharon

Back from the brink…

…which is how it always feels these days when I get back home after being in what oddly seems to pass for ‘the real world’. I had a very fine time at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as a guest of the Edinburgh City of Literature folk, to attend a series of events focused on the creative writing departments of Scotland’s universities. I can’t imagine what a petrifying experience it must have been for those students, especially those for whom it was a first-ever public reading, reading in front of an EIBF audience – but without exception they all did incredibly well. As part of the ‘expo’ I also attended a ‘lunch reception’ at the permanent Charlotte Square home of the festival organisation. A weird experience – being based up here in Ullapool we don’t often get to ‘network’ with the rest of the literary and publishing community in Scotland. I have to say we really quite like being out on a limb – and delightful as it was to catch up with a few literary folk that I know and to meet a few others for the first time, I certainly am not built for that kind of hob-nobbing on a regular basis. On balance, I’m going to keep my ‘networking’ focused on the sheep…

And so even after the real pleasures of some time out with friends (and TRP authors) Alice Thompson and Regi Claire (complete with husband Ron Butlin and delightful dog Laila) I found myself more than glad to get home to a wild-eyed puppy, worn-out husband and rather chaotic house!

Meanwhile, the nights are drawing in, and now that I can see the night skies again after months of seemingly endless northern bright summer nights, the world seems to have shifted a little so that everything is in better balance. As David reported below, our final two books for 2009 have arrived and we’re well into working on the 2010 list – which we’ll be telling you about in a month or so.

Sharon