Monthly Archives: June 2014

Summer Reading Series: Sam Jordison & Stefan Tobler

It’s the end. Cases are packed. Summer jobs replace exams and deadlines. Offices are emptying; library books are back on the shelves. Is anyone still out there? And are you doing any writing?

If so, Sam Jordison and Stefan Tobler may want to know about it. They are on the hunt for literary talent and when they find it, they shout about it. Against the odds, the finance and the logistics they have compelling success stories to tell. They may look and sound gentle enough, but Jordison and Tobler are dynamos of the indie publishing world and an increasing threat to the bosses of big book publishing.

Amy Sackville; Sam Jordison; Stefan Tobler

Amy Sackville; Sam Jordison; Stefan Tobler

Jordison set up Galley Beggar Press in 2011 with Eloise Millar and their bookseller chum Henry Layte. It began when Layte was approached in his Norwich bookshop by an author unable to place his manuscript, a curious bit of ‘autobifantasy’ about the writer’s great-uncle Robert Graves. Layte read it and passed it to Jordison and Millar, who felt it had to be seen. Unwilling to leave the author at the mercy of vanity publishers, Jordison and co set up a press and printed a thousand copies of the book. The White Goddess: an Encounter by Simon Gough received rave reviews. ‘Thankfully’ says Jordison ‘we sold all the copies, so we didn’t go bankrupt.’

Since the first of those thousand copies hit the shelves, Galley Beggar Press has thrived, building a steady reputation as a publisher of solid literary fiction with surprising sales potential. When they launched Eimear McBride’s Baileys Prize-winning first novel ‘A Girl Is A Half Formed Thing’ last year, they knew it was good, but Jordison hadn’t foreseen the level of success it would bring. ‘Having a big prize winner on the list has been a huge boost.’ If you look for a copy of the novel on the GBP website, the gratifying words ‘sold out’ appear – but they certainly don’t apply to the publishers themselves, who are holding firm to their indie mantra of being ‘an old fashioned publisher for the 21st century’.

It’s a similar story for & Other Stories, the press set up by Stefan Tobler in 2010. Tobler was a freelance translator with a passion for Brazilian poetry. Frustrated by the decisions of big publishers who, for commercial reasons, failed to invest in writers deserving of an audience, Tobler set up his own company to do just that. & Other Stories publishes quality fiction and poetry written in and translated into English. Starting small with seed funding from the Arts Council, Tobler looked to the 18th century business model to run his press. ‘We run by subscription’ Tobler explains. By using crowd funding, the emphasis is not on pleasing a board of directors but on bringing books to an appreciative audience. Pay an annual subscription fee – ‘the cost of a magazine’ – and you can receive up to six books a year through the post, and know you are helping keep the publishers and their principles afloat. More on this, and on the ethics of the press, which is run as a not-for-private-profit company, can be found on the & Other Stories website.

Tobler’s dream of bringing a new readership to existing writers has extended into publishing debut novels. Like Galley Beggar Press with McBride, & Other Stories hit gold with the publication of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, shortlisted for the Booker in 2012. Titles from indie presses are filling up the literary shortlists. While the big publishers remain risk averse, smaller houses have the time to invest in new or overlooked authors. ‘We are small and agile as an indie press’ says Jordison. ‘We are not tied to some person that has the chequebook. We are the chequebook!’ Tobler agrees, although he admits the chequebook is still pretty small. What about the lure of money for writers who are getting some interest? ‘Big publishers can take up authors once they are established’ says Tobler. ‘We’ve both lost authors that way.‘ It’s a sorry tale of riches over loyalty, but both publishers shrug it off – they have earned their stripes this way. And there are plenty of reasons why a writer should go indie regardless of the money. Both Jordison and Tobler love books as objects and believe in the aesthetic of the book. They use the same printers – ‘people with pride in what they do’ – to ensure consistent quality. They invest in their authors, promote them, support them with readings and appearances and get their books reviewed and onto prize lists. Alongside the traditional values of book publishing, they embrace the possibilities of technology too. Galley Beggar Press promote the short story as a monthly ebook sent to subscribers, a piece of hand-selling that, as Jordison points out, is only ‘possible through contemporary technology’. For Tobler, Twitter is a useful tool for creating a buzz about a book. ‘A large part of the publicity for literary books is through word of mouth, not on the sides of buses. Social media is great for this.’

If you are looking to get signed up by either press, you could be in luck. Both Galley Beggar Press and & Other Stories operate an open submission policy. You don’t need representation by a literary agent to be considered: there are no gatekeepers in the indie world. All Tobler asks is that you buy one of & Other Stories’ books – a policy that Jordison vows to take on. After all, ‘if you aren’t interested enough to buy one’ says Tobler, ‘why would you want to be published by us?’

Given the evidence, why would you want to be published by anyone else?

Galley Beggar Press is based in Norwich where the founders have their roots. Find them at www.galleybeggar.co.uk . & Other Stories straddles continents, if in an unassuming eco way. Visit www.andotherstories.org to find out how. Both presses and Tobler and Jordison are active tweeters, so do look them up.

That’s it for the term and the academic year. Thanks to our postgrad readers from the last in the Reading Series: Matthew West, Beau Jackson, Michael Milton and Jacob Peatey. Thanks for being at events, for listening, writing and reading.

Campus may be quietening down, but the summer will be full. There will be festivals. There will be nervous interviews. There will be grand graduation ceremonies in Canterbury Cathedral. And maybe there will be some Kent CW leavers in literary shortlists before the next year is out.

Have a great summer.

Sonia

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Summer Reading Series: David Miller

The decorous beige face of Keynes SCR is wearing a slightly twisted complexion. Design work on the walls, heads in glass cases, ceramic shopping bags. Flags of oversized print hanging above the audience. A man in an apron flaunting kitchen utensils over the speaker’s right shoulder. Postcards of grimacing Elizabethan clowns dishing out steaming bedpans.

The backdrop of the Fine Arts degree show may have heightened the irreverence, but David Miller doesn’t need much encouragement. Here was plain-speaking from the first moment. Miller interrupted his host (and client) David Flusfeder to rephrase his opening remarks: ‘I’m editing already’.  After the postgrad readers – Katie Szyszko’s memories of wheat barns and family tragedy, Alex Carey’s pacifists at an air show, Melissa Hicks’ sentient mirror and Charlotte Geater’s dawn gin & tonic – Miller deflected the attention back to the audience. If we had questions, we were to interject, not wait politely for the end and forget what we wanted to say. ‘I’m not here to do a miserable parody of a Samuel Beckett monologue.’

agent & client: David Miller, David Flusfeder

agent & client: David Miller, David Flusfeder and some familiar CW faces

David Miller has been an agent for half of his life. He schooled in Canterbury, studied theology at university and ‘hadn’t a clue’ what to do next.  Then he was tipped off ‘by the woman who was the object of my desires’ about an agent who represented ‘everyone I had ever told her to read’. The agent needed an assistant. Miller sent in his CV, and after three months of silence he phoned to ask if there was a still a post. There wasn’t, but he got an interview anyway, and started soon after as a receptionist at the agency where he still works, Rogers, Coleridge & White. ‘I was a smug twenty-three year old. I didn’t know anything, but I stuck around and now represent the authors I’m proud to have on my client list.’ It’s a list which includes Kent tutors Flusfeder, Scarlett Thomas and Abdulrazak Gurnah. So how do aspiring writers get on it, and what would someone like Miller do for them anyway?

Miller described the literary agent as ‘the ghost in the machine’, a shadowy role that encompasses counselling, representation, being a middle man, handling money, nursing bruises, industrial espionage, match-making and ‘acting as a Jiminy Cricket’. By way of explanation, Miller read an extract from the work of one client, Keith Ridgway, featuring a down-at-heel writer lunching with his exuberant agent. The writer, while determined to retain his integrity, is penniless, recently dumped and really just wants to get drunk. The agent, whose significant pauses are intended to suggest import but actually signify confusion, bemoans those publishers who only pay for inconsequential trash, and suggests that the writer gets a job to keep him afloat. Could he teach Creative Writing, perhaps? The writer is horrified. The agent smoothes him down.

Miller batted away applause for his reading. ‘Save it for Keith. Buy his book!’ When asked if this story was typical of the agent-writer relationship, Miller claimed that his relationships with authors are ‘singular’, atypical, and that the whole business is ‘disgustingly promiscuous’. Does every writer need an agent? ‘I have never said that a writer has to have an agent. So why do they?’ Miller puts it down to the amount of legal bureaucracy thrown at them by publishers. ‘A writer wants to go off and write. Some might want to run their own business, in which case they don’t need me to do it for them.’ An agent’s job, Miller said, is to ensure that a writer reaches ‘the audience they deserve’, but he baulks at the sense of entitlement that some writers convey. His own experience as a novelist made him realise that ‘a lot of people whine’, something he has no time for.  ‘When I took on the writer Magnus Mills, he drove a bus. He’s written nine books and he still drives a bus. He doesn’t feel entitled.’ By staying in the world of work, Mills is also well placed to gather inspiration for his writing. Miller admires those writers who have ‘lived a bit first’ and started their careers later in life, such as Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner: writers who embrace the ‘slow build’ of a reputation, rather than chasing the money and ‘going for advances’.

Miller conceded that publishers take fewer risks these days. ‘There was more originality and risk-taking twenty years ago’, when publishers were willing to create a readership for new authors. ‘It’s no surprise that people who have won prizes lately have been with smaller publishers, where there’s more ‘room’ for them.’ But publishers have to make their money too. ‘A publisher isn’t a charity.’ As far as Miller is concerned, part of the problem is that books are just too cheap. We’ve lost respect for them.  ‘You don’t think twice about spending £10 on a Pizza Express pizza, where the ingredients probably cost 60p. But you if you go into a bookshop and what you want isn’t in the Buy One Get One Free you think you’ve been diddled. Why do we think the price isn’t worth the value?’ While Miller feels that some of the blame for this rests with the publishers and their price wars, and the stranglehold of a few retailers, it is also our fault for ‘not valuing our literary culture’.

Much of what Miller had to say about selecting writers chimed with Lee Brackstone’s talk the week before. ‘Write a good book. Be careful about it, think about it and mean it.’ Miller won’t accept a partial manuscript, although other agents may. He doesn’t need any more clients, so if he takes one on, he knows it’s because he really wants them. Don’t send him your manuscript just because he has published something similar before (‘why would I want it if I’ve already got one?’). He promotes what interests him, which is why his list is ‘all over the place’.

If your idea of an agent combines the starchy non-nonsense comforts of a house matron with the irreverence and comic timing of that Elizabethan clown, David Miller could be the man for you. Find out more about him at http://www.rcwlitagency.com.

Last of the season: Ink, Sweat & Tears and Sabotage Reviews, 11th June; Gallery Beggar Press and & Other Stories, 18th June. Keynes SCR as usual, £2, 6pm start.

Keep writing.

Sonia

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Summer Reading Series: Lee Brackstone

It’s ten to six. In a few minutes you’ll be reading your work in public. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve done this. Breathe. Drink some wine (enough for the nerves, not too much for the tongue). The room is filling up. You know some of the faces, but there is one you daren’t look at. Now the hush, the introductions. The paper in your hand wrinkles. That was your name. Was that your name? Stand up, walk to the front of the room. Everyone is looking at you, and one of them, that one, with his hand on his chin, reading your words as you stumble over them, is a man who has been in the industry for two decades, made literary stars out of unknown scribblers – people like you, people like you want to be – and he has rubbed shoulders with the writers whose work you have spent the last five years of your life studying, distant legends of poetry and prose.

Thankfully, Lee Brackstone knows how you feel. Before launching into stories of his publishing career, his own mistakes and successes, he praised the bravery of those CW Reading series postgrads – Hristina Hristova, Inge Watson, Matthew Gregory and Wendy Edwards – who had graced the stage before him. ‘Reading in public doesn’t get any easier’ he said, ‘but publishers function better on two glasses of red wine after six o’clock.’

Amy Sackville, Lee Brackstone

Amy Sackville, Lee Brackstone

Of few words before the event, Brackstone had plenty to say when given his ground. He has seen vast changes in the publishing landscape since he cut his teeth in the offices of Faber and Faber in 1996. Having fallen in love with the ‘handsome black livery’ of Faber’s literary list of the ’80s and ’90s – ‘those incredible authors like Milan Kundera’ – he found his first secretarial job there, reading the slush pile, aged 21. Stepping into this circle of privilege – he studied in Manchester, ‘not Manchester, Cambridge’ – Brackstone was one of few ‘outsiders’, signifying a seachange due since TS Eliot’s editorship. He is now an institution himself: or, as he put it, institutionalised. He worked alongside Ted Hughes on The Birthday Letters. He spotted the genius of Jeet Thayil’s stunning debut novel Narcopolis. He now is Editor of Faber and Faber’s Fiction and Music lists.

So what advice did he have for the writers in the room? He admitted that ‘publishing is intimidating’ and can seem ‘like a guarded fortress’. Although there are no secrets to unlocking that tower, some ways are better than others. Firstly, Brackstone’s list is pretty full these days, and the chances of being acquired on his fiction list are slight. He may publish only one new author a year, and he never touches ‘commercial’ fiction. Most books he takes on come through agents; there is no slush pile any more, although exceptions do occur. He looks for ‘that spark’ in a manuscript that sets it apart, and responds ‘at the level of the sentence’. Working on sentence-level writing is key: a writer, he said, should be ‘like a carpenter, learning to plane a table’. Brackstone expects ‘technical virtuosity’, and writing by authors ‘that take risks but are in control’. He likes to know ‘from the first sentence’ what the moral compass of a book will be. The title, first sentence and opening paragraph are, for Brackstone, ‘the blueprint of a novel’. Authenticity is essential: he can see through those who write to pay the mortgage, rather than those who simply ‘have to’ write. ‘I read for style; it’s the style that excites me.’

Balancing his high expectations of literary fiction with the demands of the Sales Director and financial targets is a major part of Brackstone’s job. Many of his acquisitions go on to be prize winning successes, so he is known to have a good scent for talent. Despite this, he has his ‘war stories’, those missed opportunities that he never got to sign. His first acquisition for fiction didn’t get the go-ahead, so someone else signed up Dave Eggers’ AHWOSG. He hounded colleagues with a 600 page masterpiece by ‘a dead Chilean writer that nobody else believed in’, and watched as another house enjoyed the acclaim of publishing Roberto Bolano in translation. There are other times when he has failed to spot things himself. ‘Sometimes the reading doesn’t go right.’ And there is always the matter of taste, which is why Brackstone has fellow fiction editors to pass books to that have potential but just don’t appeal.

So, supposing a writer has fulfilled these criteria, what route does he recommend for publication? Firstly, finding an agent: the right one. ‘Find out which agent represents the kind of writing you like. Publishing works on every level on the basis of sycophancy and flattery.’ An element of showboating is essential, while maintaining that vital authenticity. ‘You need to get their attention. It’s all about showing you are smart enough and you care, and that what you do is true.’

So you’ve read your work and survived. You’ve got a script. You’ve read Lee Brackstone’s recommended fiction highlights (The Sun Also Rises; Tender is the Night; Something Happened; White Noise). What next?

Bring your notebook along to Keynes SCR on Wednesday 4th June, 6pm, and find out What Agents Really Want. David Miller of RCW Literary Agency will be ready to answer your questions.

See you there.

Sonia

P.S. Don’t forget there is more still to come of the Full English Festival, including a programme of high profile speakers throughout the week – facebook.com/fullenglishfestival

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