Edge Hill Prize long list and what it shows

Last year, or maybe the year before, the Edge Hill Prize (for a published short story collection) began publishing their longlist. This move is to be welcomed, chiefly and most obviously because it gives publicity, and introduces us, to a larger number of excellent books that may otherwise get no attention whatsoever, but also because it provides us with some measure of the current state of short story publishing. This year the Edge Hill longlist is larger than ever, and it does indeed paint an interesting picture.

It does seem that the locus of short story publishing in Britain and Ireland is now firmly the small presses, and that there are more small publishers than ever in existence producing excellent work. Of the 24 publishers represented on the list, 19 are truly small publishers. It's even more interesting to look at the proportions for the longlisted books: 37 books are listed, but small publishers have produced 29 of those, Salt and Comma being responsible for nine between them. Perhaps another interesting fact is that six of those 19 small publishers - Doire Press, Arlen House, New Island, Stinging Fly, Blackstaff and Lilliput - are Irish, two (Parthian and Old Street) are based in Wales, and another (Freight) is Scottish, reinforcing the notion of the short story as non-conformist.  Perhaps to my own shame I hadn't actually heard of Doire, Freight or Lilliput, or indeed of some of the remaining ten: new to me were the Valley Press based in Scarborough, Route which operates from Pontefract, of all places (I'm prejudiced - I once lived there!), Skylight, Elsewhere, Tightrope (Canadian) and Odyssey (US, I think - they charge for their books in dollars, at any rate). The two I haven't yet mentioned are the northern-based Pewter Rose, and the Bristol-based Tangent.

It's perhaps to be noted, though, that the bigger publishers are still producing short stories - two longlisted books come from Pan Macmillan, and Bloomsbury has fielded no less than three. Interesting, though, that Faber, which one thinks of as the home of literary fiction par excellence, and which has triumphed in this prize in the past (their authors Claire Keegan and Sarah Hall have both been overall winners), appears to have nothing to enter this year (Junot Diaz, the only short story writer they seem to have published this year, failing to be eligible as he's not British-born).

Anyway, many congratulations to those writers on the longlist, and if you'll permit a little indulgence, very special congrats to those on the list I happen to know personally: Carys Bray with Sweet Home (Salt), Nuala Ni Chonchuir with Mother America (New Island), Tania Hershman with My Mother Was An Upright Piano (Tangent), Jackie Kay with Reality, Reality (Pan Macmillan), Adam Marek with The Stone Thrower (Comma), Jonathan Pinnock with Dot, Dash (Salt), Jane Rogers with Hitting Trees With Sticks (Comma) and Tony Williams with All The Bananas I've Never Eaten (Salt) 

Salt Sale, Hard Times and Doing It for Yourself

My publishers, Salt, are having an amazing sale, and anyone interested in poetry would be advised to get on over there quick, while stocks last. Salt make beautiful books and some are going for as little as £1 !

There's a serious side to this, though, of course. The reason Salt are running this sale is that they need an emergency injection of cash if they are to keep going. The Just One Book campaign started last summer continues, and as a Salt author I am asking you once more to do that: buy just one Salt book - and brighten up your life into the bargain! If you want prose, you could buy one of my own Salt books: Balancing on the Edge of the World, a story collection that lifts the lid on some of the untold stories in our everyday lives, or my novel Too Many Magpies, on the surface a spooky tale of adultery but on the deeper level a study of our present sense of the precariousness of the world, and of the ways in which we think. (If you've got them already, why not buy one for a relative or friend - Too Many Magpies, since motherhood is one of its themes, would make a great Mothers' Day present!) Or you could buy a book by one of the great short story writers I feel privileged to be published alongside: Carys Davies, Matthew Licht, Paul Magrs, Tania Hershman, Vanessa Gebbie, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Chrissie Gittins, Padrika Tarrant, and on... Or you could buy Salt's guide to the art of the short story, Short Circuit.

Times are hard, the publishing industry has changed, and all but the most commercial sectors of publishing are suffering. Last night I attended a meeting of north-west women writers, convened by the novelist Sherry Ashworth and others with a view to setting up a press to publish fiction by women in the north west, in response to these changes. The reality of those changes was illustrated by the fact that there were several writers present, both prize-winning and mass-market, who were now facing difficulties in publishing their latest books or had moved to small presses. Basically the feeling is now that writers must do it for themselves.

A propos this, my fellow Salt author Nuala Ni Chonchuir writes an interesting post on the subject of self-promotion by authors. I have come across criticisms on the web of authors who ceaselessly promote their own books, and I have to say that, although I try to do it conscientiously, it still goes against the grain for me, but the fact is that it's now an absolute necessity - most of all for authors with small presses, but also it seems now for most authors with big publishers. I'm sure that Vanessa Gebbie won't mind me replicating here her comment on Nuala's post:

I was at a large writer's convention last weekend, with talks from some senior figures in the publishing world - (Get Writing 2010 - and a speaker in question was the MD of Hachette) - it was a wake-up call for anyone in the audience who thought that all you had to do was get a book accepted and then sit back!

Cross-posted to my author blog.

Salt Just One Book Campaign

I guess it won't have escaped many people's notice that last week my publisher Salt announced that they were in trouble. The ending of their Arts Council grant, designed to get them on their feet while they built up a market (which it seems they had been doing with some success) coincided with the economic turndown and the apparent loss of market for books generally in spite of hopes expressed elsewhere that literary books would weather the storm.

When this kind of thing happens to independent publishers, they usually fade away quietly - perhaps no one ever wants to announce the problems before the end actually comes: too bad for business while there's still hope of some miracle! So it was with a fair amount of amazement that I began to read Salt director Chris Hamilton Emery's Facebook announcement of the difficulties Salt was encountering. But the statement led up to another announcement, of an idea which may come to be seen in publishing history as a brilliant marketing stroke - well, I hope it does anyway! Chris announced the Just One Book campaign. If enough people bought just one book, Salt could pay off their debt and the troubles would only be temporary, and Salt would not have to end.

The result has been astounding and proved the power of the internet for publishers. As Chris says, the news went instantly 'global': it was facebooked and twittered and blogged (this is why I've been busier on my other blog than this one), it made the Bookseller, and the response in terms of orders has been huge. It seems the backlist is now secured, and the frontlist is getting on track.

Susan Hill, expressing her familiar and indeed reasonable view that publishing is above all a business not a charity, has commented in a Facebook thread that books requiring their publishers to beg people to buy them in this way should not be being published in the first place. If people don't want books, she says, ie if there isn't a market for them, then they shouldn't be being published. It's more complicated than that, though: as I've said so many times, people can't want books if they don't know about them, and the thing which large publishers have and which small publishers don't is huge marketing budgets to get the knowledge of them out there, to the punters and to the bookshops - a point poignantly protrayed in the latest of Chris's searingly honest and vivid bulletins.

What so many emails and Facebook messages have made clear to me this week is that Chris's campaign has indeed alerted to the presence of Salt and their books many people who were unaware of them, or only peripherally aware, and whose interest has now been aroused.

He's created a market, in other words.

Frank O'Connor Long List

Regular readers will be familiar with my complaints about the invidious aspect of literary prizes: the fact that choosing some books over others for long lists and short lists inevitably bestows negative associations on the books omitted. Well, now my own book is on a long list, but I don't have to swallow my words (well, I wouldn't anyway!) because this long list of 39 books for The Frank O'Connor Short Story Award - an international prize set up specifically to draw attention to the short story and to publicize collections which have appeared within the year - is deliberately inclusive.

This list is a thermometer showing the robust health of the re-emerging short story, a map of its geographical growth and an indication of the areas of publishing in which it is blossoming. As last year, it shows that it is within independent publishing that the short story is thriving, and this year that Britain is now the great home of the short story. There are 8 collections here from the US, 5 from Ireland, 4 each from Australia and New Zealand, 1 each from Singapore, Taiwan and Nigeria and a whopping 14 from Britain, including 8 from Salt, who are thus announced as the most committed and successful publishers of the short story world-wide.

Literary Magazines and Online and Print Literary Communities

Daniel Green at The Reading Experience reacts more negatively than the Bitch, to say the least, to the news of Laurence Johns' new literary venture. He concentrates on a point the Bitch skipped over, Johns' statement made in answer to the question, What on earth would possess anybody, in the age of user-generated content and online communities, to engage with the expense and practical difficulties of a print magazine?: 'Reading is not something you do in front of a computer'. Green pours scorn on such a statement, pointing out that plenty of us are doing that just now, engaging in debates about literature at our computers.

Well, this last is true, of course, but one would hope that To Hell with Publishing will include a substantial element of online activity, as do US McSweeney's and innovative UK publisher Salt. Green says:

If Laurence Johns was truly interested in bringing readers to writers, he'd save himself money, and inevitable failure, by publishing those stories in a form accessible to readers who do spend at least some of their time "in front of a computer" but are nevertheless "people who love reading."

My reactions to this are mixed. Having once published a print literary magazine (in the days just before literature took off on the web) I have always said precisely that, that I would never do it that way again now that there is the web. But then, as Johns says, people do like a book to hold (and take to the bath), don't we? And how much of what we read online is literature, the primary thing, as opposed to debates about literature? And isn't it actual books which are generating discussion online? And as for community: well, I love this online literary community, but isn't it primarily a community of readers, rather than of Johns' concept of readers and writers interacting - and isn't it in the main reacting to the output of the mainstream publishers which, as we have established, are instrumental in suppressing our writers' most innovative and challenging work?

In the midst of all this comes news today of the possibility of an Arts Council-funding threat to one of our longest-running print literary mags, the London Magazine, which DJ Taylor, echoing Johns, claims 'prints work of genuine merit that would otherwise have difficulty finding a publisher'. Well, again, I have mixed feelings. Having once been published by the London Magazine I have a reflex reaction of loyalty, and I'm with Taylor when he points out that it's outrageous that such a project should suffer - nay, be killed off - for the sake of the Olympics. On the other hand, I have to say that the story I had printed there, and indeed any of the stories I have had printed in traditional print lit mags, have never had the kind of international attention given to those I've had published in an online magazine.

I can't help thinking that there has to be a new model (which maybe the London Magazine could embrace), a blending of the virtual and concrete literary worlds. I suppose it remains to be seen whether Johns' venture will be one answer.

Hellish Good Writing Gets an Alternative

The Observer reports an interesting and potentially exciting answer to an author problem discussed here recently, the difficulty of getting one's most innovative or challenging work published in an era of rampant commercialisation.

Rare book dealer Laurence Johns, Faber editor Lee Brackstone and Kevin Conroy Scott of the Wylie literary agency have launched a new project, To Hell with Publishing, which will embrace a limited edition traditional print literary journal, events with music and readings, and independently published books. The mission behind it all is, according to Johns, to create a literary community and to 'make it easer for writers and readers to communicate', as well as to allow authors to 'wrest back their creative freedom from the accountants' and to 'show work that ordinarily trade and mainstream publishers wouldn't publish', all beside finding 'space for new writers.'

This sounds great, and as far as the Bitch is concerned is truly innovative, at least in concept, since up to now, as I have pointed out previously, most alternative 'new writing schemes' have been concentrated on new writers, rather than on writing, and there has been no outlet for the work by more established writers which mainstream publishers, in their wisdom or folly (Who knows? But we should get a chance to judge for ourselves), deem uncommercial.

As the Observer points out, there's a clear precedent in the activities around Dave Eggers' US McSweeney's magazine, but there are already moves in this direction in the UK. My own publisher, Salt, is using innovative techniques to sell poetry and short stories and is about to begin a similar series of events in London's Whitechapel Gallery.

On Friday a standing-room-only Salt reading in Manchester provided the opportunity for several of us Salt authors to get together and plan further events, and seemed to prove that there are audiences eager to interact with writers in creative communities of this kind. (And it's not that it was non-commercial: a fair number of the authors' books were sold.)

A Triumph in Spite of it All

This morning all Bitchiness melts away from your blogger and she looks out at the sun-filled world and thinks: Here be justice.

Why? Because last night she had an email telling her that Tamar Yellin, a writer she considers brilliant and whom she once published in the short-story magazine Metropolitan, but whose subsequent novel was roundly declined by British publishers, has won with that very novel a major US-based international prize, the newly-inaugurated Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, 'the largest-ever Jewish literary prize given and one of the largest literary prizes in the nation.'

The independent US Toby Press should be congratulated for taking up Tamar's novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, after a British literary agent failed to sell it to British publishers. (And today the Bitch and her erstwhile co-editor Ailsa Cox are patting themselves on the back for having published two of her early stories).

Ailsa and I set up Metropolitan as a deliberate attempt to counteract the loss of platform for short stories due to the increasing commercialisation of fiction publishing. We are very proud of the writers we published, both known and unknown. One of these was Russell Hoban, to whom Susan Hill recently drew attention in her 'underrated writers' series of blog posts.
So why did we jump on Tamar's stories the moment they came out of the envelopes when we were editing Metropolitan from my back room? Because they are written in the most beautiful prose, precise and spare and telling. They are utterly serious and political yet entirely accessible and filled with a wry humour and humanity. We just LOVED them!! How could she not have got published in Britain?? And it's not that she ain't young and attractive (re Kate Kellaway's recent depressing Observer article) (just look at the picture on the Jewish Book Council site).

Ee, British publishers, eh?

Big and Little Publishers and the Myths of Publishability

During the autumn there was a skirmish in the litblogs about whether or not it's hard to get published. Susan Hill upset struggling-writer bloggers by stating that if a writer is good, he or she will get published, and that all that publishers are looking out for is good books. Susan also argues for people to be realistic about the fact that publishing is a business, and that publishers need to be able to sell their books, so presumably her definition of good books includes saleability. Anyways, for her it seemed to follow - although I'm not sure she ever actually stated this - that if writers were failing to get published, it must mean that they weren't producing good books. In any case, she called for blogging writers to stop whingeing and claiming that publishers don't look at their slush piles and that you need contacts just to get read.

Susan's 'talent will out' argument is an old and familiar one, and has been trotted out by Robert McCrum in the past, but by last spring even Robert McCrum appeared to be taking a different view, and it seems to me that these issues need unpacking.

Today, the Guardian reports that the winner of the Costa awards, Stef Penney's first novel The Tenderness of Wolves, was turned down by 'many publishers' before it was taken by the new independent publisher Quercus, and that Brian Thompson's shortlisted memoir, also from a small independent publisher, was rejected by ten others. I keep coming across such examples: the brilliant writer Tamar Yellin (whom I am proud to say we published in metropolitan) is now winning American prizes with her novel The Genizah at the House of Shepher which a British literary agent failed to sell and which was eventually published by the American Toby Press. You could say that talent did out in the end with these authors, but it is easy to imagine authors losing heart and giving up earlier than this, and that without the existence of those small publishers even these novels might not have seen the light of day.

It is the small publishers who prove Susan Hill's argument that 'all you need do is send your manuscript off to an editor' - as the Bitch can testify with her own recent success with the independent publisher Salt. But it really is not the same with mainstream publishers. To begin with, big publishers seldom look at unagented work. To counter this notion Susan Hill quoted the phenomenal success of Marie Phillips, who had indeed dubbed herself Struggling Author, and whose forthcoming debut novel Gods Behaving Badly was picked up overnight by Cape director Dan Franklin without the mediation of a literary agent. Later, however, Marie, who worked in a bookshop, revealed on her blog that Franklin was shown the novel by the Cape rep. People who pointed this out were seen as crying sour grapes, but as far as the Bitch is concerned - well, a Cape rep once also offered to show her novel 'round the office' (though that was before she'd even written it, and by the time she had he was no longer repping at the bookshop she frequented - shucks!) and although of course it's not to say that anyone in 'the office' would have necessarily picked it up, if they had, the Bitch would most certainly have felt that she'd had a leg-up.

And it's not that easy to get an agent even to look at your submission (the Bitch, though previously published, has standard rejection cards), and when you do get an agent to take you on, well, as the Bitch can vouch again, it's all about marketing and hype and not the book - this is not my fantasy, those are the words of an agent - and the agent tries to set up an auction, and if he fails, if there isn't a scramble for the book within four days, well, in the current state of affairs, where a book has to be 'hot', where there has to be a big buzz going round about it, he's just not going to sell it, and he has to give up on it, however great he thinks it is as literature, and however well he thought it would sell.

Susan Hill says publishing is a subjective business, and as an ex-publisher of a literary magazine the Bitch can agree that on the independent publishing level it is. But now, with the big publishers, editors' decisions can't just be subjective: as Miss Snark has indicated, however great an editor thinks a book is as literature, however much he or she loved it personally, she can't publish it if she doesn't think it will sell enough to recoup the advance for which an agent is angling.

But who knows what sells? As I've pointed out before, current marketing philosophy has its huge blind spots. To knock on the head the notion that otherwise good books turned down by mainstream publishers must inevitably lack the saleability factor, here's the Guardian quoting Simon Robertson, Waterstone's fiction buyer, and Foyles' Kate Gunning respectively on the Tenderness of Wolves: 'Will be a monster paperback'; 'Broad commercial appeal'.

An Extra Large Slice of Cheer

Something today to sweeten a bitch's whole outlook on the world:

In a comment on my post 'Big Slices of the Literary Tart' Susan Hill alerts us to that fact that 1,200 copies have now been sold of the first novel by Helen Slavin, The Extra Large Medium, recently published by Susan's press, Long Barn Books - when apparently 400 copies is normal for a first novel. On Monday I went out to buy it, and found it on a 3 for 2 offer in Waterstone's, which as far as I know is no mean feat for a small publisher. Yesterday I sat down to read it. I could not put it down. The dishes went unwashed, the writing I'm supposed to be doing went unwritten. I did not stop until I had finished, and when I looked up my eyes could no longer focus, literally, on the real world. This is some sassy book, written in a spare, witty and streetwise style, packed with word play, yet managing to tackle the serious issue of the nature of loss with the kind of interiority I value most in novels.

A small press, but an extra large, not medium achievement...