A love of books

Do publishers ever make millions? I actually suspect not, though one must envy Bloomsbury the Harry Potter books. Or should we? Bloomsbury now has something to live up to. They have had to expand. Can they keep up with that expansion? They seem to be doing well but is this a case of having to do well?

Certainly most publishers who have offices in London have to have a very commercial attitude to the book they publish. Will this book sell enough to cover the overheads? Even here, though, there is a love of books involved. Editors proudly keep copies of books they have worked on on their shelves, near their desks. Most involved in the industry work long hours but it doesn’t matter because they love their work. I’m pretty convinced that if they put the amount of business energy into almost any other sort of enterprise they’d make a lot more money.

The small presses have a little more freedom, fewer overheads and make little money at all. They are careful with their money and work in such a way that they don’t go under. Well most of them don’t.  A few do.  The people who work for them love books and thus spend their time doing what they enjoy. Of course they should be paid fairly for what they do and as long as they are, they’re not bothered about not making millions.

I work with texts all the time, yet many a time I’ve gone clothes shopping and come back with even more books. They’ve made me very happy.                      

The editing tutorial

Two of my former students have decided to set themselves up as publishers. They want to publish a collection of short stories. I’ve given them quite a bit of advice as a publisher and they’re now going ahead.

Except that there was a sudden wobble.

Could they edit? They asked me for help but between duties for the university, my own writing and the editing duties I have for the various publishers with whom I work I don’t really have a lot of time. However, I have offered them a two hour tutorial – that will happen tomorrow. So as I have to get something ready for them I may as well share it more widely.

Bridge House’s Next Anthology

Excitingly we already have a name and some quite concrete ideas for the cover. So now we just want the submissions to flow in.

‘Snowflakes’ is our theme. This may be literal but it can also be metaphorical. In fact, it’s probably likely to be. Obviously, though, given the time of year, your story may well feature snow.

So, what do we mean by this? 

Well, let’s just think about the quality of snowflakes for a while:

·         Each snowflake is unique

·         And perfectly formed

·         Possibly / probably beautiful

·         Is one of a variety of kinds (some research into the properties of snowflakes might be interesting and inspiring here)

·         Snow melts and turns into water – a life-giving force. Maybe the story has a face value and as we take it in and as it stays with us a while it gathers a deeper meaning. We always want our stories to make people think. That’s one of the things about short stories anyway.      

Did any of you watch the One Show about photographing snowflakes? There were some amazing photographs. That too is inspiring.

Again we have the Advent Calendar form. We’re looking for 24 stories – one a day for 1 to 24 December. We’re not looking for children’s stories, though.

We’re open for submissions until 31 March. The book will be out by 15 November. Full submission brief here. Happy writing!  

Win, win, win on the sale or return issue

The perils of sale or return

This can be a real sticking point for small publisher and book sellers. It can upset a very carefully designed financial plan that otherwise means the publisher doesn’t   pay any upfront production costs until the book is sold. It can leave the publisher out of pocket and can prevent the writer from receiving royalties.

If publishers don’t offer sale or return, they are not attractive to the book seller. The book shop only has so much shelf space. They can’t keep books that are not selling there forever. They need to sell books.

What return actually means

Usually if books are indeed returned they are not sell-able. They may have had stickers put on.  They may have been man-handled. They will have traveled around quite a lot.  It’s relatively common practice for the bookseller to remove the covers and return just those to the publisher as proof that the book has not been sold. If mass printed conventionally, that’s probably 20p per copy, so perhaps bearable. However, if the publisher is using print on demand as many small publishers now do, the unit cost is considerably higher – pounds not pence. In both cases, it’s also common practice to set this loss against royalties earned. The author is not charged for the loss but shares the loss with the publisher. 

The Joy of Editing

The author’s dilemma

It’s tough for writers sometimes. They spend months, maybe years writing, then editing, polishing, and perhaps sharing with critique groups and beta readers. They may send their work out several times and have it rejected. Perhaps they look at it again before it goes out the next time. Then finally comes the day that the work is accepted.

And then the serious editing begins.

Yes, it’s tough for the author. Fortunately, though, by the time we go into full editorial mode, we’ve usually had the script a while and the writer has gained some distance. They’ve also grown as a writer, so it leaves some space for negotiation. 

Creative editing     

We’ve just finished a cycle of publication and I’m now about to settle down to the editing of the next batch. I’ve kind of missed it. Yes, sure it’s great getting your hands on a finished book yet one of the most creative acts for the publisher is working with an author to make sure the book is the very best it can be.

Small Press is not Vanity Press

I was rather dismayed recently to have one of our authors say to me. “I’ve never worked with the vanity press before.”

None of the imprints I work with are vanity press. In fact, they’re pretty traditional because:

·         We don’t charge authors to be published

·         We don’t publish everything that is sent to us.

·         Everything that is published goes through a rigorous editing process.

Fool proof?

Never.

Proof-reading

That final stage before we upload to the printers is so crucial. We’ve edited three times at least: the structural edit, the line edit and the copy edit. Now we proof read and we do that after the text is camera ready. Some odd mistakes can creep in at the end.

Here are a few examples of what we’ve found recently:

·         Some formatting jumped and some strange line-throws appeared as a document was changed from Word into a PDF. We think that this was because the original document had been written on a Mac and paragraph breaks were forced.

·         A couple of words collided into each other. We had to put the spaces back in. 

·         One story was written as a letter. We used a special font for that. Every other paragraph reverted to our Normal style.