The company needs to sell roughly £45,000 worth of books to keep afloat for the rest of the year. Publishing director Chris Hamilton-Emery said the company had not wanted to repeat the initiative “because we thought it was unrepeatable, but we have just reached crunch time this week”. He added: “We realised if we didn’t get some sales, we would probably go bust very shortly.”

Hamilton-Emery said a number of factors had contributed to Salt’s financial woes, including the recession, the World Cup and the demise of Borders UK late last year. “They were a good customer of ours, so that was a real blow,” he said.

The Crafty Writer’s guest poetry tutor, Andrew Philip, is published by Salt.  He says:  “It’s harder and harder these days for authors – début authors and mid-listers in particular – to find publishers. The big houses are taking on fewer writers and concentrating their marketing power on certain titles in their lists. So writers need publishers such as Salt more than ever. Publishers who don’t simply bend to the howling winds of celebrity memoirs. Publishers who will take a risk on writing they simply believe in. Publishers who believe in you and give readers the chance to let your voice enter their hearts and minds. If Salt goes, we all lose.”

Writers and book lovers are being asked to buy just one book to help save Salt, Andy recommends:

• Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story, ed. Vanessa Gebbie
• The White Road and Other Stories by Tania Hershman: wonderful science-inspired short and flash fiction (read an interview with Tania on Andy’s blog)
• The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob A Mackenzie: lively, imaginative, inventive new poetry from Scotland
• Off Road to Everywhere by Philip Gross: children’s poetry from the recent TS Eliot prize winner
• Lions in Winter by Wena Poon: vivid, engaging stories that capture the true urban sophistication of New Asia

Related posts:

1. The Ambulance Box – getting your poetry in print
2. Independent publishers – an author’s perspective
3. Christian Speculative Fiction – a ‘lost’ genre?

Related posts:

1. Writer’s Market UK 2009 – Review

RG: When I began writing, many of the poems were based on my background, growing up in a village in Co.Tyrone, N.Ireland. As I developed as a writer the themes widened to encompass ‘literary greats’ of the 19th and 20th centuries. The majority of poems conveniently fell within these two categories when thinking of publishing a collection.

TCW: What first attracted you to the theme?

RG: As a Christian I specifically targeted writers who have a Christian or spiritual dimension within their work or lives. I was interested to find out how they lived, as a kind of parallel with my own life.

TCW: How did you go about selecting the title? While it certainly alludes to the ‘literary’ nature of the poems, it suggests a volume of love stories, which isn’t the case. Do you think readers might be misled by this? And if so, does it matter from a marketing perspective? 

RG: It took a long time to finally decide on a title. A friend read through the collection and suggested that the literary lives were the ‘strongest selling point’ of the collection, and advised beginning with these poems. As the Tolstoy poems predominate within the first section, it seemed logical to choose a title containing the name.  Some people might be misled by the title, but I felt that many readers will be  attuned to the idea that a poem from a collection, used as a title, may not necessarily be representative of the whole collection.

TCW: Did you consciously play on a reference to Shakespeare in Love?

RG: No, but one or two people referred to the Shakespeare connection when I had published the work.

TCW: For me the most satisfying thing in reading this volume was the way you get right into the skin of your characters. Do you have any tips on how developing poets can do this?

RG: A very helpful book is, Writing Poems, by Peter Sansom. It includes a number of useful exercises which get the reader to examine a subject from varying points-of-view. [I can also recommend this book - Ed]
 
TCW: I loved the way you play with point of view, shifting between subject and viewer. In ‘Tolstoy in Love’, for instance, the great man tells us of his love for Sonya. Then in the next poem, ‘Sonya Tolstoy’, you shift to her POV which is very different from that of her husband’s. We then feel compelled to re-read the first poem in light of the second. Is writing from a poetic character’s point of view something that has always marked your work or is it distinctive to this collection? What interests you in playing with POV?

RG: For many years I used to write only from my own perspective. However, on finding the possibility of writing from other viewpoints, I was able to write through Tolstoy’s voice, his wife’s or other characters. This can, if successful, give a multi-layered picture of the main character, his strengths and flaws, his inconsistencies.
 
TCW: When changing POV you also change the ‘voice’ of the poem. Could you explain to new writers what an editor means when they refer to ‘voice’?

RG: I suppose each person has a unique voice, but there are certain characteristics which we have in common with other people, background, job etc. A medical doctor, for example, has to sound authentic, particularly if you place him in a medical situation. You don’t need a doctorate in medicine to get the voice right, but it does require some background reading and research if you propose to speak in his voice.  

TCW: The second section of this collection is entitled ‘An Emotional Map of Belfast’ and while similar in style is very different in subject – your personal reflections on your own life and relationships in Northern Ireland. In a sense you become the ‘writer’ as subject and viewer. Why did you decide to have what John Wakeman describes as ‘two books for the price of one, both worth having.’? Did you ever consider that they should be separate collections and whether or not readers would feel the two should not be together?

RG: I suppose I could have waited and developed the work into two separate collections. However, as I was trying to get a full collection accepted for thirteen years, this did not seem an option. Writing about characters, at a distance, in the first section, perhaps allowed me to address the reader through my own voice in the second section.
 
TCW: You started gaining attention as a poet through winning competitions. How important are compeitition wins? Should new writers enter them? Can you recommend some competitions to Crafty readers?

RG: The winning, or in most cases, being short-listed or commended in a poetry competition can help to promote your name in writing circles, but I would always look to see the judge of the competition. Is he a recognised poet whose judgements you can respect? For example, last year I entered a relatively small competition held in Wells, because the judge was Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate at that time.

I think new writers might try small or local competitions first, but the small press magazine is a better option at the start to help build a good CV of publishing credits to eventually work towards being published in pamphlet or book form.

The new writer is probably best advised to steer clear of poetry competitions which offer prizes such as £5,000 to the winner. An example would be the annual National Poetry Competition, organized by the Poetry Society. As it attracts upwards of 10,000 entries, many by established poets, your chances are virtually zero. (You might be better putting the exorbitant entry fee on the 3:30 at Wincanton!)

There are dozens of competitions each year, some specialist (focused on a particular form or line length) or perhaps on a theme. It might be best to research these and see if your poems fulfil the criteria, such as ‘poems under 30 lines’. Two of the best online guides to competitions (and poetry magazines) are: The Poetry Kit and The Poetry Library.

TCW: Thanks Ray. We wish you well with the sale of your book and strength to your pen for the next collection.

Related posts:

1. The Ambulance Box – getting your poetry in print
2. Atrocious teenage poetry
3. Poetry: are you listening carefully?

It’s not vanity publishing

Well firstly, let me say that it is not vanity publishing. In fact, since the self-publishing revolution, brought on by Print on Demand (POD) technology, the charlatans who preyed on desperate writers seem to have scurried back into their holes (although I fear, some of them may have re-emerged as ‘co-publishers’). Vanity publishers will print anything.  They claim to be ‘real’ publishers but there’s no editorial input and, apart from a post on their website, no marketing or distribution either – and you of course foot the whole bill. In addition, you have to buy your own books from them, albeit at wholesale discount or ‘cost’. For more information see this article by the Society of Authors.

Disadvantages: no bookshop will touch a vanity published book with a bargepole, you will never recoup your money, you will be bitterly disappointed and possibly be turned off publishing for life.

Advantages: errrrr none.

It’s not self-publishing

Self-publishing is what it says on the can. You become the publisher. You arrange the editing, design, printing, distribution and marketing. You may use a publishing service to assist you in this, but they should not ‘pretend’ to be a publisher. See my article on authors Sue Brownless and Eleanor Patrick who used a publishing service to help them self-publish. Sue and Eleanor still had to edit the book themselves, but the publishing service arranged for the printing and warehousing of the stock, plus handled orders and payments. Sue and Eleanor still have to market the book but they’re doing an excellent job. 

Other publishing services include the online giants Lulu and Lightning Source who use POD technology, which means you don’t have to warehouse stock, This, on the surface, appears to bring down the costs; beware though that postage cost per unit is very high and this will need to be added onto your cover price, which may turn off potential buyers.  It is still cheaper, per unit, to go through a conventional printer. The problem is though that you may be stuck with 1000 unsaleable copies.

Advantages: you can potentially make more money than with a mainstream publisher, as you get all the profits. If you thrive on the business side of writing, you will find self-publishing deeply satisfying.

Disadvantages:  You need to do everything yourself. If you don’t have the requisite skill set, you could be biting off more than you can chew and losing a lot of money in the process. It’s hard to get self-published books into mainstream bookshops as there are legitimate concerns about  ‘quality control’. The feeling is that if the book was not ‘good enough’ for a mainstream publisher, it’s not good enough full stop. This however is not always the case, but it’s a preconception you will have to deal with.

So what is co-publishing?

Co-publishing is when the writer and the publisher ’share’ the costs. This is usually done by a compulsory purchase order ie the writer has to agree to buy a certain number of units before the deal can go ahead. They do not (or should not) ask for payment for their editorial services up front, as this would taint them with a vanity publishing label at worst, or a publishing service tag at best.

However, this isn’t always the case. I entered a co-publishing partnership with Vineyard Publishing for my book Donovon’s Rainbow.  Vineyard offer both conventional publishing contracts and co-publishing deals. They usually offer the co-publishing option to new authors.  They edited, designed and marketed the book like any publisher should. We split costs 50/50 – a contract that I negotiated as I wasn’t happy with the initial compulsory purchase model. To me, that suggested that I, the author, took all the financial risk. We printed 2000 copies and I took 50% of the stock to market and distribute myself; they took the other 1000 to distribute through their chain of world-wide bookshops. I was free to distribute anywhere apart from Vineyard bookshops. I have made back my money and am now in profit – as are Vineyard.

But most co-publishing deals these days are financed by compulsory purchase orders alone. The problem is, I fear the writer is footing the whole bill.  I am also concerned that some co-publishers are either pretending to be ‘proper’ publishers or are in fact ‘proper’ publishers, using co-publishing models, but hiding the fact (unlike Vineyard who were very up-front about it). Three case studies that have recently come to my attention will illustrate this:

Case study 1: An established non-fiction author, to whose e-newsletter I subscribe, sent out a request for people to pre-purchase his next book. When I asked for more details (ie what it was going to be about) I was told that this couldn’t be disclosed as a contract had not yet been entered into. The author’s publisher was not prepared to go ahead with the book until the author could provide x-amount of sales up front. They blamed the ‘current economic climate’ for their new methodology. I recently got another email from him thanking everyone who had pre-ordered because now they could ‘cover costs.’  It’s very troubling when an author now has to guarantee sales before he or she can get a publishing deal.  I also sincerely doubt that this publisher will admit that this is in effect a co-published book as the definition of a conventional publisher, according to the Society of Authors, is that they take all the financial risk.

Case study 2: A non-fiction author whose work I critiqued some years ago through The Crafty Writer Critiquing Service emailed me to say that her book had now been published and was about to be launched. Would I be prepared to interview her and feature the book on the site. I had a look at the publisher’s website and saw that it was a co-publisher – although it didn’t say so overtly. As I’d had a positive experience of co-publishing myself, I wanted to promote it and suggested the interview deal with that subject. The author said it wasn’t a co-publishing deal, but a ‘proper’ one. I asked her for the terms of her contract and she told me she ‘only’ had to buy 800 copies of the book at 60% discount. I then pointed out to her that effectively she was financing the whole print run and then some. She didn’t disagree with me, but said the publisher would not like to be involved in an interview that dealt with co-publishing as they were not co-publishers. Really?

Case study 3: I recently had a manuscript for a non-fiction book rejected by a conventional publisher. In fact, it is one of the leading Christian publishers in the United States. So I was surprised when I received an email from them a month later asking if I would like to re-submit my book to their new co-publishing wing. They, like Vineyard, were now going down the two-pronged route. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as they are up front about it. And it seems that they are.  They will edit, design and market your book just like their ‘conventional’ books and you have the advantage of having a ‘big name’ behind you. There’s also a conventional royalty agreement that comes into operation after your advance copies have been sold. So what’s the catch? Well, again, the author has to finance the lion’s share of the deal. I would be asked to buy 1000 – 2000 units. I asked the publisher how many they would buy and she said 500. Could I sell 2000 copies of the book using my own resources? Probably not, particularly because the publisher’s own marketing will be selling their ‘own’ copies. However,  if you were going to be self-publishing anyway, maybe it’s worth it to get the extra benefits.  But that’s for you to decide.

Related posts:

1. Independent publishers – an author’s perspective
2. An e-book story
3. Co-authoring: when two become one

Lullaby

this is the arm that held you
this is the hand that cradled your cold feet

these are the ears that heard you
whimper and cough throughout your brush with light

this is the chest that warmed you
these are the eyes that caught your glimpse of life

this is the man you fathered —
his voided love, his writhen pride and grief

(By Andrew Philip, reproduced with permission.)

TCW: The Ambulance Box is a very personal collection of poetry, largely in response to the death of your first child. Many people write poetry to help them psychologically ‘process’ their lives. What is it that separates a poem that is purely personal to one that is fit (dare I use the word) to enter the public domain?

AP: Craft. And the indefinable something that brings the language alive. The quality of the poem as a poem – however you measure that – must be paramount. Even if that isn’t the case at the outset, it must become the case at some point in the drafting process. In fact, if there is a drafting process, it probably means you’re thinking more poetically than therapeutically as it is.

That’s not to decry the value of writing as therapy. The poems about Aidan were certainly part of my grief work, and I was always conscious that they might not make the grade for publication. I assumed nothing in that respect, but it was probably impossible for me not to work on them as I would any other poems. I was relieved and delighted when it transpired that other people found them worth hearing and reading.

TCW: But The Ambulance Box is not just about grief. What criteria did you use to select poetry for this collection?

AP: First and foremost, I wanted to include my best work, but that’s not necessarily easy to define. I took account of what was best in the opinion of people I respect, but it had to come down to my instinct in the end. Thematic considerations came after that and influenced the order rather than the content.

TCW: Did your editor at Salt Publishing influence the final ‘cut’?

AP: No. I’d spent a considerable amount of time polishing up the manuscript before I submitted it. My friend Rob A Mackenzie was putting together a collection at around the same time. We swapped manuscripts, as readers of my blog will know well. That was extremely helpful. Chris Hamilton-Emery, my editor at Salt, made no changes. In fact, when he accepted the book he said, “There are no duds.” Chris tends to be a pretty hands-off editor anyway, but his comment was very gratifying, as you can imagine!

TCW: Are there any poems you regret didn’t go in?

AP: Not really. Some good poems from Tonguefire, my first pamphlet, didn’t go in because they didn’t seem to be quite good enough or to fit with the rest of the work in the book. If any of those had been top-drawer pieces, I would have found space for them. I also like the fact that people who own the pamphlet – which is sold out – still have something more worth reading in its own right.

TCW: About a third of the collection is written in Scots. [a tip to Crafty readers: if you read it out loud, you can just about understand it in English with a Scots accent! - Ed]. What marketing challenges does this raise when targeting an international readership.

AP: This is a funny one, because non-Scots speakers sometimes like the Scots poems best. It could actually be a marketing advantage because it helps to distinguish the work from other poetry coming out of Britain, even out of Scotland. The Scots diaspora is considerable, after all. The overseas market for things Scottish is generally interested in writing in Scots.

Writing in Scots is quite widely accepted in the UK poetry scene now. Some of the best-known Scottish names in the generation above mine – WN Herbert, Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie, for instance – have written work in Scots. Even John Burnside has turned his hand to it for a recent anthology, New Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

TCW: Would you ever bring out an entirely Scots / Gaelic collection?

AP: It’s unlikely I’d ever publish an entirely Gaelic collection, simply because I doubt whether I’ll ever reach the fluency necessary to write a book entirely in Gaelic. I’m more interested in bringing the three languages – Gaelic, Scots and English – together in different ways within poems. It seems to me that the aesthetic possibilities of that approach haven’t been fully explored.

That said, I could envisage myself bringing out an entirely Scots book. It just depends on having enough material. That’s something that feels like it’s beyond my control to an extent because it’s a matter of which language the poem wants to be in. For instance, “Berlin/Berlin/Berlin” started out in English but I soon felt that it would work better in Scots. It quickly became clear that that was the case. “Waukrife” and “Coronach”, on the other hand, were in Scots from the earliest drafts.

TCW: In terms of sales, what would constitute a commercial success for your publisher?

AP: It takes 400 sales in the UK over three years for Salt to break even on a book, so I suppose anything above that would be a success. The Ambulance Box is already into its first reprint. The initial run was, I think, 250 hardback copies and the reprint 100, so here’s hoping we hit the magic number!

TCW: Salt Publishing has recently gone public to announce that it is in financial difficulty. It has launched the Just One Book campaign to try and kick-start sales. What impact does this have on you and other new writers?

AP: It’s obviously very worrying. Chris and Jen [the owners - Ed] assured everyone that the backlist was safe, but it looked very much at one point like the frontlist – the books planned for publication for the rest of this year and beyond – would have to be to abandoned. I’m glad to say that they found a way round that.

I’m even more glad to say that they have started commissioning again. However, things are still pretty precarious and the Just One Book campaign continues. Griff Rhys Jones has thrown his weight behind it and my cover, as well as a few others, appeared on screen in Newsnight Review!

TCW: The schools market is obviously the biggest money spinner for poets. How does a poet go about getting into school anthologies?

AP: Good question. How does one get into any anthologies? My only appearance in a school anthology was the Scots-language book The Smoky Smirr o Rain, which came about because I was working with one of its editors – Matthew Fitt – on something else and showed him some of my Rilke translations. He also suggested me for 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. So I suppose the answer is that you have to be known to whoever is editing an anthology. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to know them, but it obviously helps if you know lots of poets and they know your work.

Probably a bigger source of income than anthologies is doing workshops and writing projects in schools. That, too, is about visibility and building relationships with teachers. Word of mouth is a powerful tool. If you do good work, people will recommend you.

TCW: You published two pamphlets before The Ambulance Box collection. What is the difference between a ‘pamphlet’ and a ‘collection’?

AP: Size, price, binding and visibility. That’s all, really. Full collections get noticed more, but pamphlets have become much more visible in the past six or seven years.

TCW: Would you advise new poets to try their hand at self-publishing?

AP: Self-publishing isn’t something I’ve any experience of, although I considered it at one point. ‘Tonguefire’ and ‘Andrew Philip: A Sampler’ were published by Helena Nelson’s HappenStance Press. Publishing with a small press means you have the validation of someone else sinking their time and money into your work, as well as the benefit of an editor’s input and another person working to sell the publication. Self-published pamphlets don’t have that.

I can see that self-publishing is particularly useful if you’re doing non-mainstream work that more commercial small presses won’t touch. For instance, Stephen Nelson self-published a pamphlet of visual poems, The Faithful City, which uses colour, layout and fonts in ways that would put off most small presses.

Helena’s pamphlet guide How (Not) to Get Your Poetry Published includes a good discussion of this topic. There’s a lot of good advice in there.

TCW: What other advice would you give to new poets trying to get their work noticed?

AP: Read, read, read poetry and write, write, write it because that’s how you’ll get as good as you can. Read as broad a range as you can, historically and stylistically, but you must read contemporary poetry. Seek out informed criticism, take it on board and learn to sift out what elements of it are right for your writing.

Once you’re into the swing of all that, send out your work to good print and online magazines. If any editors take the trouble to give you notes of advice – or any notes at all – pay attention to what they say and keep sending to them. Magazine publication is still crucial to building a reputation in print. Look at the acknowledgements in your favourite contemporary poetry. Where do these poets publish? Aim for those magazines. In addition:

• Go to poetry readings. Become involved in running them. Read and comment on blogs.
• Maybe even write a blog, but don’t put all your poems on it. (Why would an editor take them if they’re all online?) [For advice on how to start your own blog see the Crafty Writer's Beginner Blogging for Writers series - Ed]
• Read at open mike sessions.
• Write reviews. In other words, become a player.
• In addition to Helena Nelson’s pamphlet guide mentioned above, there is excellent advice in Chris Hamilton-Emery’s book 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell.
• Claire Askew’s blog One Night Stanzas , which is where this tour stops next (on 23 June), is a good source of advice too. It’s aimed at new and, particularly, young poets.

TCW: Thanks Andy, and good luck with the tour (follow the rest of The Ambulance Box Tour here).

Related posts:

1. Poetry: Tolstoy in Love
2. Atrocious teenage poetry
3. Creative Writing – poetry

TCW: What exactly is Christian speculative fiction?

JG: Christian speculative fiction is a fancy way of saying “science fiction and fantasy written from a Christian worldview.” There are many popular genres in Christian fiction, just as there are in the wider publishing arena. But unlike in secular publishing, where fantasy and science fiction are extremely popular, Christian publishing has not always appreciated the kind of fiction I affectionately call the weird stuff.

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term to include the sub-genres of science fiction, fantasy, time travel, supernatural thriller, horror, alternate history, modern magic, urban fantasy, vampire/Goth, and other wonderfully weird kinds of fiction. And Christian speculative fiction is a term that designates all of those same genres when they arise from the Christian perspective. (Yes, there really are Christian vampire novels and Christian horror – we call them “chillers.”)

TCW: So what kind of market is there for this sort of fiction?

JG: It’s fairly easy to identify the demographic that loves regular Christian fiction. In North America, at least, it’s white, Evangelical women of child-bearing through empty nest ages. It’s the delightful ladies who populate our churches.

Understanding who they are goes a long way toward comprehending why speculative fiction often sells poorly when published by Christian publishers. These wonderful women love their prairie romances and Amish stories and cozy mysteries and mom-lit. They don’t especially appreciate stories about mutant alien vampires who will eat your brains. Go figure.

Likewise, defining the audience for Christian speculative fiction may sound fairly easy. For one thing, it’s simply not the audience I’ve just described. So we know where Christian speculative fiction readers aren’t, but it’s harder to find where they are.

TCW: Could you describe your typical Christian speculative fiction reader?

JG: I like to describe the core readership as Christians who love The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Lost. Or even Christians who would go to a fantasy or comic book convention if given half a chance.

Such a definition gives us a quick idea of who we’re talking about. But where are those people? We know where they’re not, but where are they? There’s no Christian speculative fiction magazine. There’s no convention for it. There are no stores that cater specifically to them. Nor are they of a narrowly defined age, economic, or social status. They come in all ages, sizes, races, genders, and professions.

TCW:  Then how do you reach them?

JG:  The best way to find this group is to go online. Many of the core readership has self-identified and found each other in forums, blog alliances, and online e-zines. Here’s a starter list:

• Where The Map Ends
• The Lost Genre Guild
• Marcher Lord Press
• The Anomaly forums
• The Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blogtour
• Raygun Revival
• Mindflights e-zine

This hits the hardcore fans. It doesn’t include the many other fans who would join these groups if they knew about them or had the time. These are the people who love Ted Dekker’s novels but didn’t realize anyone else had written books like his. Finding those folks is harder.

TCW:  So you’ve got a market and you’ve got a product – why isn’t anyone (or hardly anyone) publishing for them?

JG: Most Christian publishing companies have basically written off the niche audience I’m describing. These houses do a great job of reaching their primary reader – the ladies I talked about above – and they are most interested in continuing to reach them. They’re not motivated to explore new markets, especially ones as hard to locate as this one.

TCW: Where would you advise writers of this kind of fiction to go?

JG: It follows that writers of this kind of fiction do not find a ready welcome at Christian publishing companies. Most agents won’t even represent a novel if it’s in a speculative category. They know they won’t be able to place such a book with any mainstream Christian publishing company.

That’s disappointing for many authors – but it’s great news for me. I launched my own small indie publishing company, Marcher Lord Press, to publish the finest in Christian speculative fiction and get it to this underserved niche audience. So when these authors get turned away by the regular Christian publishers, they come to me – and I get to cherry pick the most wonderful Christian speculative novels you can imagine.

I should point out that there are some Christian speculative novels that do get published through mainstream Christian presses. There’s Frank Peretti and Jerry B. Jenkins (Left Behind) and Ted Dekker, and more. There are even some new Christian vampire novels just releasing. However, by and large, such things are considered long shots. And when you understand what I described about the core readership these publishers reach, you can see why they’d think so.

TCW: There are many unpublished Christian writers who are told their work is not ‘Christian’ enough. Can you comment on this?

JG: I know that some Christian novelists struggle with finding balance in their fiction. Sometimes they find themselves too Christian for secular publishers and too secular for Christian publishers. That’s a real dilemma.

We’re currently living in a publishing revolution. Soon there will be no dilemma. Marcher Lord Press is an example of a small, agile publisher that can operate with low overhead to successfully reach a niche audience. Other presses like mine will pop up soon, now that the Internet and other technology allows publishers to bypass the traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore model and sell directly to the consumer.

TCW: Does this mean you don’t apply the same ‘moral’ yardstick that mainstream CBA (Christian Booksellers Association) affiliated publishers use? (For more on this see Simon Morden’s essay  Sex, Death and Christian Fiction)

JG: In Christian publishing in North America, whatever standards are applied to fiction in general are applied to speculative fiction. Perhaps more so. Christian speculative fiction is on thin ice anyway, as far as traditional Christian publishers are concerned, so if a speculative novel contains even a modest amount of sex, violence, or foul language, it can become a convenient reason to simply say no to the whole project.

Violence usually gets a pass in Christian novels, even in mainstream Christian publishing. I have a friend who jokes about the body count in my own (Jefferson Scott) novels. It’s a strange kind of arrangement for these books: you can kill people left and right but can’t say a curse word.

So to be accurate, I should maybe say it this way:

1. Sex – almost none is allowed in CBA fiction
2. Profanity – almost none is allowed in CBA fiction
3. Violence – just about anything goes so long as it’s not gratuitous or too disturbing (for whoever is in charge of determining such things at any given house)

TCW: Do the same standards apply at Marcher Lord?

JG: My standards at MLP are not quite as strict as at mainstream CBA houses, but are more or less the same.

TCW: There is also a sense that only the ”right kind of Christian” gets published? What kind of Christian worldview is acceptable? Who becomes the arbiter of that?

JG: Most CBA houses are evangelical Protestant and reach an audience that is primarily evangelical Protestant, so that’s the determining factor there. These publishers are looking for Christian fiction that arises from the evangelical Protestant worldview and will be familiar to their readers.

That doesn’t mean that Christian fiction from these houses can’t talk about Catholics or Muslims or whatever else. And it doesn’t mean they don’t challenge readers to consider other viewpoints on the Christian spectrum. It just means that the thrust of the story and of the author need to be supportive of that evangelical Protestant tradition.

Note that these publishers aren’t saying that they’re judges of what Christian worldview is acceptable. They’re saying they reserve the right to publish novels they agree with and that their target audience will agree with.

TCW: Back to the new wave of Christian speculative fiction. What kinds of books might now get published?

JG: Books that don’t fit the traditional classifications, that’s what. This is great news for those authors of Christian horror, fantasy poetry, off-brand comic books, and more. It will also give rise to a certain lawlessness where you’ll be able to find any kind of depraved wackiness for sale, but that’s the nature of the Internet anyway, so I think we’ll be okay.

We’re seeing the dawning of the age of publishing in which authors can successfully find smaller and smaller niche audiences. And for fans and writers of Christian speculative fiction, that’s a very good thing.

TCW: Thanks for visiting The Crafty Writer, Jeff.

JG: Thanks for having me!

Related posts:

1. Christian fiction
2. Niche markets: Christian ‘chick lit’
3. Gay literature: separate genre or marketing niche?

TCW: You won the Fay Weldon section of the BBC’s End of Story competition in 2004. Would you say this was your major break?

RSD: It was a huge stroke of luck. It was what spurred me on to finish the book, although not in the way you might expect. The BBC were thinking about making a follow-up, so they interviewed the winners about their writing plans. Somewhat desperate, I blathered on about a Roman novel I’d started. ‘Great,’ they said as they packed the gear away, ‘We’ll come and see you in three or four months to find out how it’s going.’

What I hadn’t dared tell them was that in the long gap between sending off the competition entry and finding out the results, I’d decided to give up writing. The novel was hopelessly stuck – but if I didn’t do something with it before they came back, I’d have to admit how useless I was on national television. So I dredged it up and for the next three or four months, I wrote like crazy. By the time I realised the BBC had changed their minds and weren’t coming at all, I was three quarters of the way through.
 
TCW: So Ruso wasn’t written before you entered the comp?

RSD: Not really. I had completed a couple of other novels which weren’t very good. Some of the early ‘Ruso’ material was created for a Historical Novel Society competition to write the first three chapters of a historical romance. I didn’t have anything suitable, so I drew out two characters from the backstory of one of the failed novels. On reflection, they were always more interesting anyway.  The ‘start’ was printed in the magazine and I was a bit taken aback when people seemed to think it was worth finishing.
 
TCW: Did you have an agent at this time?

RSD: An agent got in touch when she read it and, bless her, she stuck with me over many unproductive years until I finally finished something saleable.

TCW: Would you advise writers to enter competitions? What are the benefits?

RSD: Definitely! Working to a deadline and a specific word count is a good discipline. The occasional win of either money or kudos helps to convince your family that you aren’t just hiding behind the computer to avoid the washing up. Even if you don’t win, the worst you usually get is a long silence. Very rarely do you hear the depressing thud of a rejected manuscript on the doormat.

TCW: Did Penguin approach you or did you approach them?

RSD: I’m a complete wimp and rarely approach anybody. No, the good folk at the agency did all the selling. The people who say you have to be brave and tough to be a writer obviously haven’t met me.
 
TCW: Was Ruso always going to be a series?

RSD: No! I couldn’t imagine getting one book finished and published, let alone several.
 
TCW: Why historical fiction?

RSD: I did History to A level but it  never occurred to me to base any fiction in that period (1815 to 1939). Oh, apart from one very bad Western. I don’t know where it is and with luck nobody will find it in a drawer after I’m dead.

I wasn’t grabbed by the past till much later, when we took the children to Hadrian’s Wall. The discovery that Roman soldiers weren’t allowed to marry, but they were allowed to have relationships with local women, sparked all sorts of questions for me. What happened to the women if the men were moved on? What about the children? My parents are of the generation that can remember the GI’s being here in the War, and there seemed to be lots of parallels.
 
TCW: Was your decision to do a Roman detective novel based on market awareness or was it simply something you wanted to do?

RSD: I wanted to do something set in Roman Britain, using the tension between the occupiers and occupied. To be honest, I had no clue at the time what would sell or what other people were writing.

Later on, of course, I discovered that Lindsey Davis had been writing a fabulous Roman detective for years (the Falco series) and there were several others. Then, having half-produced a love story, I was firmly told that my novel had to have a crime in it. I thought very hard about that one, partly because other people were doing it and partly because crime wasn’t something I would naturally have chosen to write about. However, it seems to have worked. Having a mystery to solve helps to ground the plot and curtail its tendencies to meander about.

TCW: How important would you say market awareness is to as yet unpublished writers?

RSD: I know you’re supposed to study the market, but I think it’s crucial to fall in love with your subject first, because it will be renting a room in your head for months or probably years to come. I’m lucky in that both the Romans and Crime seem to have had a long spell in the sun recently. I managed to miss the Gladiator boat completely, so I was very surprised when my own novel sold several years later.

Maybe you do have to be a bit clued in, though. I work in a library, so I have some idea of what’s being read, and I do love to wander round bookshops (whilst trying to restrain the urge to see if they’ve got Ruso). From this I conclude that you’d have trouble selling a Western right now – but if it was utterly brilliant, who knows?

TCW: The Ruso novels are historical crime fiction. How important is it to have an awareness of the appropriate genre conventions when writing?

RSD: You probably need to know them even if you don’t intend to adhere to them. I’ve suggested having the bad guy get away with it or the good guy commit the murder for a change, but so far this hasn’t met with resounding enthusiasm from editors and agents. On reflection, I can see why. I think if you want to do that sort of thing you have to be either very well established or you have to decide to call it ‘literary fiction’.
 
TCW: What would you say about the statement: ‘If history doesn’t serve the story, change the history’?

RSD: There’s not much known about Britain during the period in which I write, but I do try and construct the stories around the documents and the archaeology we have. I think I’d say be very, very careful. It worked for Gladiator, but for people who knew that the Emperor Commodus didn’t die that way, the end must have been seriously strange.

Besides, sometimes when a story doesn’t go the way you want it to, facing the problem head on means that a new and better idea will emerge to solve it. On the other hand, I think you do have to choose what to use and what to leave out. The truth is invariably complex, and rarely leads towards the sort of satisfying conclusion you want for the end of a novel.
 
TCW: I’ve read many historical novels that are weighed down by too much historical detail. How do you achieve a balance between plot and background?

RSD: Hm, so have I! Perhaps coming to Roman Britain from a position of total ignorance wasn’t entirely the disadvantage that it seemed. I try not to use words that I wouldn’t have understood when I started. I don’t want people to have to pause during a chase scene while they try and remember what a Praetorium is.

I guess I try to give a few details that offer a flavour of a background and set the reader’s imagination working, rather than going into lots of description, because it’s boring to read and frankly, it’s boring to write, too. But I never really know whether the balance is right. Something what seems fine when you write it can look terrible the next day.
 
TCW: By the end of the novel, it’s clear that you are making parallels between ancient and modern sex trafficking. As a writer, do you believe it’s appropriate to impose modern morality onto a historical period? Why or why not?

RSD: That would be like going to somewhere that has an exotic cuisine and insisting on eating your own tinned soup, wouldn’t it? Obviously there are plenty of things about the past that we find unacceptable (witch trials, bear-baiting, hanging a child for stealing a sheep, etc.), but that’s part of its fascination.

I try not to put 21st Century views in the mouths of 2nd Century characters. But of course we all write from our own perspective and we don’t necessarily see the distortions we make. Fortunately not many people are offended by Romans who make racist remarks about the Ancient Greeks. I do slip in the occasional anachronistic joke, but I’m not sure if anybody notices. There’s a medic in the second book who’s heard that you can cure people’s problems just by talking to them – but as Ruso points out, that’s nonsense.

The sex trafficking thing interested me because there’s evidence that although abolishing slavery would have been unthinkable, the Romans were constantly tinkering with the system to make it more humane. One of the adaptations made by Hadrian (who was in power during the time I’m writing about) was to restrict the rights of an owner to sell a slave to a pimp or to a gladiator trainer unless they had been shown to deserve it. If Hadrian were around today he’d have no time for sex traffickers either.
 
TCW: How does this affect your characterisation and plotting?

RSD: I suspect most historical novelists reach some sort of compromise whereby the worst tendencies of the past tend to be displayed by minor characters while the hero looks good by comparison – less misogynist, racist, violent, cruel to animals or whatever.

My lead character is an Army doctor so he’s usually trying to stitch up the wounds rather than inflict them. If I’d given him the job of being the man who trains lions to eat Christians, I’d have had a worse problem. But of course he does have to face the ruthlessness of his age, and when violence erupts between the British and the Roman Army, both he and his British partner Tilla have to face up to the cruelties that their comrades are prepared to inflict. Both sides, of course, think they’re ‘right’, which provides for the sort of tension that writers love to play with.

TCW: How many more Ruso books will be in the series?

RSD: There are contracts in place for four. I’m currently proof-reading the third and writing the fourth. After that, it’s up to the publishers!

Well we’ve enjoyed having Ruth here so much that we’ve invited her to do a ‘how to’ series on writing historical fiction in April. So sign up to our RSS feed to keep informed. In the meantime, she’s offering Crafty readers an opportunity to buy a limited number of signed hardback copies of the first Ruso book at paperback prices.  Contact her via her website for further details.

Related posts:

1. Writing historical fiction 1 – creating your historical world
2. Writing historical fiction 2 – doing the research
3. Writing historical fiction 3 – using fact in fiction

Eleanor Patrick

Sue Brownless

TCW: Why did you decide to co-author a book?

Sue: We both wanted to write a children’s book around a mix of fantasy and reality. When we met at a course and found we could spark ideas off each other, it was a natural step to try and use that. In the midst of a ‘well why don’t we’ moment we decided to write a book for a competition Eleanor had just read about. It gave us a deadline. That book was ‘Farlkris’ and it was joint runner-up for the Kelpies Prize in 2005.

Eleanor: We had the idea jointly while drinking coffee and hearing workmen outside opening up the pavement, from where the sound of dragons lurking in the depths seemed to emanate. There didn’t seem to be a problem about writing a dragon story together – though of course, we hadn’t tried at that stage, so it could have seemed rather a naive decision in retrospect. Luckily, it wasn’t.

TCW: What are the advantages and disadvantages of co-authoring?

Sue: The main advantage is that there are always more ideas, someone else to ask, the story isn’t just in one person’s head, and it helps you through those writers’ block moments. One of us always came up with a line of thought that tweaked the plot and solved the problem. Having someone waiting for the next bit to arrive is good, too. No dodging deadlines or slipping out of tricky bits. The biggest disadvantage is the logistics of getting two people to write together. We don’t live near each other and it was all done electronically.

Eleanor:  The advantages are clearly two heads instead of one on the tricky business of inventing a good plot. Out of lots of options at each stage there are two people coming up with possible additional ways to deal with the event or a better alternative to brainstorm on. That has to be good, so long as you have respect for each other’s abilities, which we do. The disadvantages were mostly technical – sending sections back and forth for reading, agreement, correction and editing; making time in busy schedules to meet together for planning and decisions; agreeing the way forward for marketing and other post-publication dilemmas.

TCW: Which one of you came up with the Scordril concept?

Sue: Scordril was a character in the first Lothian Dragons outing, ‘Farlkris’. He was such a great character, with personality, he just had to have a central role in the next one.

Eleanor: It was a joint idea at the time of the other Lothian Dragons book, which we wrote first. The Kelpies Prize for a book set in Scotland had a deadline about five months after we were discussing the ‘dragons underground’ idea, so we set the book in East Lothian and proceeded from there to meet the deadline. Those Scottish visits fuelled the plot ideas for both ‘Farlkris’ and ‘Scordril’.

TCW: Did you do some preliminary work to see whether or not you could create a single voice?

Sue: We’d had a try at it with ‘Farlkris’ so it was easier and more intuitive with ‘Scordril’. We’d considered the need for a single voice that time and we even had a style sheet of things we had to remember, such as the mind speech and ‘tone’ of the dragons being different to overgrounders. But it gelled quickly and we didn’t need to keep that. The characters found their own voices and that helped us enormously.

Eleanor: No, but most of the teething problems were sorted for the first book, which is being published second, as it follows on chronologically from ‘Scordril’. For that, we wrote a style sheet to make sure we were in agreement about certain things – all stuff we do automatically now.

TCW: Is the ‘voice’ closer to Sue’s or Eleanor’s ’solo’ voice or is it a new creation?

Sue: It is a new creation. Naturally, there will be elements of each of us in there as we write, but by the time we reached the editing stages we realised we had forgotten who wrote some of the individual passages, and genuinely couldn’t tell, so the answer to that must be no.

Eleanor: To start with, you might have deduced who wrote what – though this was not divided between “dragon” and “human” as some thought it might be. We both wrote our fair share of both events. But after editing together, there was no difference in the writing anyway. I was always staggered by Sue’s good ideas (we only had the plot outline on cards) and she was always impressed with my bits. I guess our individuality might show in which ideas we thought of as we wrote, but that isn’t a style thing so much as content.

TCW: How do you actually work together?

Sue: We look at plot – talk it through, bounce the ideas around, and a structure forms. Once we have a plot summary for the whole novel we write it on cards (full set each) so we can rearrange the order if needed and write it separately, bit by bit. We take turns throughout and both write dragon and human bits. One of us would write and then email it on for review and mark-up on screen with coloured text, then suggestions would be made where we differed or had an idea. We’d meet up with our hardcopies in hand to discuss it over a coffee, somewhere, and reach an agreement. One of us recorded the outcome in the master copy and then it was safe for the other to set away writing the next bit. That took a lot of controlling.

TCW: Did you employ an independent editor? If not, how do you maintain editorial quality control?

Sue: No, we didn’t need to. Eleanor is an editor with years of experience, so I was happy to let her have main editorial control on the grammar and such. Also, our process meant that by the final editing of the draft anyway there’d been two pairs of eyes to pick up typos our spell checks would miss and inconsistencies in plot, say, as we went along.

TCW: Is Kelsey Drake going to write other books?

Sue: Well there is ‘Farlkris’, which Kelsey wrote! We’re hoping that will be book two. Now that we know the dragons really well we’d need to tweak that a little for publication. We’ve also ensured the underlying characters/plot are pointing to a third book, with a working title of ‘Yordis’.

Eleanor: Book 2 was written first and just needs revising and editing. After that, who knows?

TCW: Are either of you working on solo projects?

Sue: I’m working on a children’s novel. It is very near to completion of the first draft. I started it when I did my MA Creative Writing at Northumbria University and it is another blend of fantasy and reality. No dragons though!

Eleanor: I am plotting a book for children set in Seahouses – I like locations that readers can visit. That’s why we wanted Lothian Dragons set in places that exist, rather than writing a pseudo-medieval fantasy. This mix of reality and fantasy does make it harder for agents and publishers to see which slot it should occupy on the shelves of bookstores – though Borders does not seem to have a problem, now Scordril is published.

TCW: From a business perspective, who handles what?

Sue: We share the publicity. Eleanor handles school visits and arranging book signings. I tend to liaise with the publisher about ordering print runs and quantities, keeping an overview of the financial aspects, and book numbers. (FYI, Sue is a qualified accountant and internal auditor - Ed)

TCW: With author percentages already so low, is it financially viable to co-author a book and split royalties in half?

Eleanor: Some years ago, Hamish Hamilton published one of my children’s books called ‘Splat!’ which was illustrated by Paula Martyr. I’ve always been sad about the splitting of proceeds (royalties and PLR) but recognise that the book was not viable without the illustrations. With Scordril, the book would not exist without the impetus of both our ideas, so yes, income is halved, but better half of something than all of nothing. We are more concerned with breaking even and getting the book out there and enjoyed than becoming millionaires at the moment. That can come next.

TCW: You’ve chosen to self-publish through Matador. This of course will give you a higher author percentage than with a mainstream publisher. Was that one of the motivating factors?

Sue: It was a conscious choice to self-publish with someone that Writers' and Artists' Yearbook were prepared to recommend; we liked the look of them and their process. The higher author percentage was a factor but that is offset by the cost and risk that we as authors have to bear, and may be eroded anyway by the route the book takes to the reader.

Eleanor: No. We simply didn’t like the constant “this is a great book”, “I love the characters”, “I’d love to take this on but the market is so difficult at present” kind of replies that we were getting from agents and authors. Time was passing inexorably without us getting the deal we wanted and felt the book deserved. And it’s much more acceptable to self-publish nowadays, though it’s harder work. In retrospect, there was the plus of commissioning our own cover – most publishers consult but overrule. In one bookshop, the events manager took one look and said, “At least you’ve got a brilliant cover.”

TCW: What marketing campaign do you have planned?

Eleanor: We have done all the usual things: leaflets, flyers, phoning, showing, contacting bookshops, libraries etc, telling people with whom we’ve had connections in the past, and arranging to give talks and author visits. To keep track of all this, we set up a shared Google document, which we can both add to and comment on as we go. We also have a website and blog.

TCW: What criteria will you use to judge the success or otherwise of the Scordril project?

Sue: We’re already getting good feedback from readers and that has to be one criteria. We’re also selling well and have had to have more books printed, twice! We aim to at least cover our costs.

Eleanor: Oooh, that’s a difficult one. From my point of view, that’s writing a book that people read and enjoy as we hoped they would. In which case, even to date, that’s what we’ve done. Finishing the writing of a good book is definitely a success not to be pushed aside. So is publishing it, if you don’t lose money you can’t afford to lose. But actually connecting to readers who say how much they loved it, well that’s the fire in the dragon’s mouth. For a short time, the readers have lived what we’ve lived, and seen what we’ve seen – and that’s something you can’t put a price on.

TCW: What would you tell Crafty readers who are considering either self-publishing or co-authoring a book?

Eleanor: If that’s what you need to do for any particular project, go for it and solve the problems as you find them.

Eleanor will be signing books on Saturday 20 December at Borders, Fort Kinnaird, Edinburgh; and Sue will be joining her on Saturday 17 January 2009 at Borders Silverlink in North Tyneside, 12-4pm. Drop by and say hello. Apart from a great read, you might just pick up some tips on how to market and promote your own book.

Related posts:

1. Legal thriller by name, but not by nature?
2. Book Club: The Book Thief
3. Independent publishers – an author’s perspective

I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

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2. Cape Town workshops – September 2008
3. Tynedale Writers’ Festival

A covering letter should be no more than one side of an A4, use a business letter format and include:

• Your address and contact details
• The date
• The publisher / agent’s contact details
• A salutation (Dear …)
• A summary sentence (Re: …)
• A paragraph that sums up the main genre, market and theme / concept of the book
• A paragraph about your writing credentials
• A concluding paragraph.

For example, if Beatrix Potter was going to write a covering letter for The Tale of Peter Rabbit it might go something like this:

You can use this form for any fiction query letter. If you are submitting a novel, you would simply say ‘I have attached a synopsis and sample chapters for your consideration’. With a picture book you submit the whole text.

If you would like some help crafting your covering letter and synopsis, visit The Crafty Writer services page. Next week we will look at how to write a synopsis.

Related posts:

1. Children’s writing competitions
2. My First Poem competition
3. Non-fiction – how to write a proposal