There’s a chance for people to get their hands on a free e-book from P’kaboo publishers simply by ‘liking’ one or more of a choice of seven of their books on Facebook, Go here for details. There’s also a chance to win an autographed copy of a book by writing a review of it.
Also on line today is a reading by a fan from New Orleans of Marie Marshall’s poem ‘Plain Jane $3.99’, from her 2010 collection Naked in the Sea. Listen to it here.
The long-awaited results of the Aval-Ballan Poetry Competition are now published. Congratulations to the winner and the runners-up. We’ll keep you posted about events relating to this competition (prize-givings, exhibitions, etc), and it would be a good idea to ‘follow’ the competition web site in order to read the winning poems.
Wandering around Auld Reekie on his own personal Bloomsday, wielding two golf clubs like trekking poles, singing his rock songs, declaiming his poetry, letting wind noise drown him out, stealing fruit from a greengrocer, is Edinburgh’s own Damo Bullen. His voice betrays that he wasn’t born in the city (nope, North West of England) but as a poet he’s wedded to the place, lives it, and has dedicated to it a whole collection of modern/traditional, old/new, familiar/weird sonnets – The Ediniad. An hour’s worth of this has been made into a film which you can see here – the film is wonderfully unpolished, the camera shake tastes like salt on your chips! I also have a longer review of the film on the Mumble web site, courtesy of Damo.
The following isn’t a list of dos and don’ts for you, but rather it’s an explanation of a few things we look out for, and our attitude to them.
Firstly, when we take on a client’s book as a project, we don’t simply flood all the UK publishers with its details. We start by looking through publishers’ details on firstwriter.com or in our 2011 copy of The Writer’s Handbook – that’s the last year it was published, but it still contains interesting information – or through a few other handy sources we know of. We make a selection of likely publishers and prepare an approach to them. Amongst the hundreds of publishers out there we find:
Publishers who say “We do not deal with agents”.
This is okay in the case of small poetry presses. We’ve always said that agents tend to get in the way when it comes to poetry submissions. However, in the case of mainstream fiction publishing, for example, obviously we won’t contact someone on your behalf who states specifically that they don’t want to hear from us. We do have our doubts, however, about why they would encourage an author not to have someone to look after his or her interests. Go into deals with such publishers with your eyes open, and if there is anything about the deal they offer that doesn’t strike you as being 100%, don’t let them put you off seeking impartial advice, or from bringing in an agent at that stage.
Vanity publishers.
We will not deal with them at all. There are so many of them with listings at firstwriter.com but most of them can be filtered out in a search. However, they are good at disguising themselves, and it’s often necessary to read the feedback to find them out.
Publishers who offer packages which include author-subsidised ones.
Many smaller publishing houses do include such packages, in order to finance wider publishing; if they also offer outright commercial contracts then that’s fine by us – we consider such publishing houses to be legitimate, and in fact we have a good ongoing relationship with one such publisher. However, our prime concern is to get commercial contracts with for our clients, and that’s what we’ll push for.
Publishers who charge ‘reading fees’.
Again, many publishing houses do offer other clearly defined services, such as reading agency or editorial services – that’s fine. For a publisher to charge simply for reading a submitted manuscript is another matter. It’s not something we like to see, even though some perfectly respectable publishing houses have been known to do it.
Publishers with genuine bad feedback from authors.
firstwriter.com gives authors the opportunity to comment on their dealings with any business that has an entry. We always look at those. It’s easy to dismiss those that simply display pique at rejection – many rejection slips are curt and that’s that, it goes with the territory – but other comments are very valuable in pointing out both problems and good points. It’s amazing how many ‘publishing houses’ there are out there that exist in name only, that seem to offer the chance of a commercial contract, but then send a rejection along with a suggestion that you try their ‘sister company’, which will always be a vanity publisher!
Publishers who expect authors to be pro-active in marketing and promotion.
This isn’t unreasonable, particularly for smaller presses. However it’s a matter of degree. Disabled authors, including one with ‘unseen disabilities’, or someone living remotely, are unlikely to be able to do much direct selling themselves. A few book-signings and readings are fairly standard, but we would discourage a client from committing to widespread travelling at his or her own expense. There’s nothing unreasonable about being asked by a small publisher how many of your own books you would be prepared to buy; being expected to buy a minimum, particularly if that ‘minimum’ is fairly large, is almost tantamount to vanity publishing, and should be approached carefully.
Publishers who reply to an email enquiry with an automatic “We do not accept submissions by email” message.
Yes, we get some like that, even were we to put “THIS IS NOT A SUBMISSION” in the subject box of our initial email! We make a note of publishers who don’t even read the first line of what they’re sent.
Strangely, publishers seem to be split evenly between those who don’t accept submissions by email and those who don’t accept hard copy. Each group has its own reasons (and they sound similar!), but when it comes down to it we wish those who don’t accept submissions by email would realise that this is the 21st century.
There are, of course, exceptions to all the above, and some set-ups suit some authors but not others. Mainstream publishers can’t afford to take on every hopeful author – probably less than 2% of everything submitted is published – and the other businesses are there to accommodate the 98%. Many authors decide to self-publish, and some do so quite successfully, which brings us on to another topic.
Do we represent books that have already been self-published?
We tend not to. That’s not an absolute, but by and large we see that a self-published book brings along its own problems. Most publishers, if they’re taking on new work, will prefer that it is entirely new. The sales figures from your self-published book are a two-edged sword. If they have been meager, then that is sometimes seen as an indication that the book is unsellable; if they have been comparatively large, then that is sometimes seen as eating too far into potential sales. It can be a lose-lose situation.
So please don’t expect miracles from us if we take on your work as a project, and don’t assume that if we report back to you that we’ve met with no success that means we haven’t been doing our job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Above all, be very proud of the fact that you have produced a book – a work of art, if you like.
__________
firstwriter.com publish a couple of very interesting articles on how to spot a scam literary agent, and how to choose a good one. We don’t appear to tick any of the boxes in the first article, and only miss a few in the second, mainly because we’re not a ‘big’ agency. So far so good.
Warm sunshine and the Highland Games half a mile away meant that Day 2 of the Opening at Balbirnie was bustling and well-patronised. Added attractions were face-painting, an impromptu poetry-reading, and music on ukelele and guitar.
A visitor checking out books at ‘Reading Corner’.
A study in concentration and serenity – painting the faces of the leaflet posse.
Instrumental break.
The day dawned grey and drizzly, but soon the sun came out and visitors started to arrive, along with press photographers. It turned out that we had been allocated more space than I had anticipated – a whole bookcase revitalised by Aval-Ballan as it happened – so I sent for more books. At the moment we have Erica Emdon’s Jelly Dog Days plus Lupa and I am not a fish by Marie Marshall, as you see in the photograph below. As we have the loan of this space for as long as we like, I shall be moving some more books in as soon as I can, hopefully on behalf of P’kaboo Publishers.
The space at Balbirnie Craft Centre could be put to all kinds of uses. Some of the artists run workshops, but the Collective would probably consider requests from people who wanted to run an event of their own (exhibit art, stage poetry readings, etc.).
To start our web site rolling we thought we would interview someone. This is something we might do on a fairly regular basis. The interviewees won’t necessarily be clients of ours, just writers who catch our eye for one reason or another. First up is Steve Rushton – we owe him a favour because we promised to publicise the recent re-launch of his book, Sweet Sex Education Teacher from Chichester, but forgot…
So hello Steve Rushton. Tell us a little about yourself and your background.
© Lorrain Baggaley
Ex grammar school, ex art school, ex potato picker, ex potato and egg door to door seller, ex drummer, ex milkman (brief but formative period), ex book packer to the aristocracy, ex picture hanger for Royal Societies, ex performer in country house scenarios, ex curriculum area leader for arts and science, artist since 1983, art and design history lecturer since 1993, poet since 2003.
When did you start writing and when did you first take yourself seriously as a writer?
As an adolescent I loved writing stories, but chose art instead of literature after sixth form, went to art school, and that was it for the next twenty years, until as a cash strapped artist I retrained as an art history lecturer. Studying for my MA I realized I was no researcher, as my essays were more a way back into painting, and writing stories, and poetry. Thinking back on the way literature was taught at school, with an emphasis on study rather than making work – as art was very much about – I’m sure that influenced me. At one point I was going to do a dual degree in art and English at York, but think the jack of all trades master of none argument persuaded me otherwise.
What else have you written apart from Sweet Sex Education Teacher from Chichester?
Sweet Sex Education Teacher from Chichester is my first book. However, I have a project where I’m writing a series of four poetry collections and three verse novels, the first of which – sex, love & boring poetry, a comedy about a country house tour with a difference – is just finished. I like working in series. If I have lots of things going on, I can compare them more easily, work out what works and what doesn’t. It’s what I do when I make paintings, and I’m now using that method with poetry too.
…Teacher is such an eye-catching title. Tell us about the work, where you got your inspiration from, how it developed, and so on.
I wrote the following poem to answer – to myself – this very question
Who Is The Sweet Sex Education Teacher From Chichester Anyway?
She’s everybody ever tempted by something, who secretly dreams that
repercussions could change their over-regimented lives
She’s an embodiment of space, between town and country,
London and Chichester (“somewhere near Crawley?”[1])
She’s a manifesto for a new art – minimalism with sex,
Lichtenstein inside the bubble, cubist collage without the collage,
modern art without the art
She’s a manifesto for a new poetry – Dylan Thomas without the words,
Charles Bukowski off the booze, bawdy seaside cards but not,
children’s’ books with only a few words to a page. “Look said Jack”
She’s an art and poetry meeting, neither an illustration of the other
She’s “a perfect format for a witty poem”[2], a cliff-hanger,
not a first person singular (like so many other poems)
She’s a Ramones record, but shorter,
a Chuck Berry song without guitar breaks
a Beethoven sonata without the sonata
She’s “reviving the 7 inch single in book form”[3]
She’s someone starting as object, but finishing as subject, like us all
She’s tangible and lovely, single, and waiting for you[4]
Price £4.99p, from Shop 33, amazon .co.uk
And selected booksellers
This relationship between art and poetry is important for me – that a poem can be something else – an object, 
for sale, a shape surrounded by white space, a manifesto, lots of things, without limit perhaps.
Also, and most importantly, the Sweet Sex Education Teacher From Chichester is my wife, and the events in the poem are extrapolations from our early romance of train journeys between very different cities.
Sex education is one thing, but do you think it is possible to learn ‘creative writing’ as an academic subject?
Again, the relationship between art and poetry is interesting with regard to this question. We all use language – words, sentences – everyday, in a way that we don’t draw, or paint, or sculpt, to live our lives. So I think we need to study art more to become an artist, but this doesn’t apply as much to using writing creatively, because we are doing this everyday already, often without realizing it. And sometimes, before reading a poem to an audience, there is a preamble, which on reflection sounds more interesting, with its complicated rhythms, nuances and unforced intonations, than the actual poem that follows.
In your opinion, what is the purpose of literature? How would you define ‘literature’ anyway? Does it seem to you to have any obvious limits.
Literature, like art, is evidence of culture. I think that is its main context. The interesting thing for me is whether good literature, art, exists independently of context – and that is certainly an aim, whether it is achievable or not. And as for limits, no I don’t think so. The one limit that often gets talked about is the relationship with society – that society can change art and literature, but not the other way round. While I agree that society is the dominant partner in this, we have no way of knowing what future art and literature might be like, so how can we say it can’t change society?
Also, I like the idea that even if artists/writers who believe their work can change things are wrong, their work is better for their misbelief.
When you read someone else’s work, what qualities do you look for? What thrills you and gives you delight when you find it in someone else’s work?
I want imagination, intelligence, sex, a sense of humour
And not just a longing
For something that’s over
Give us your take on self-publishing. Is conventional publishing (along with literary agencies) doomed?
No, there will always be a need for benchmarks, hoops, barriers, agencies helping both the traditional and the non traditional, just as their will always be – and this is a terrible word – “creatives” who seek for whatever reason new ways to reach audiences.
The ‘Sue Lawley’ question – I’ve marooned you on a desert Island, you have the Bible and Shakespeare, should you need either, what one other book would you like to have by you?
I suppose my answer to this question would change every week, but in this week I would say, what I’m reading, looking at, at the moment – the complete etchings of Goya. Although I now write more than I paint, and however many favourite poets I have, will have, my first love will always be visual art, and I think – if there is anything slightly different in my work, it is down to that. And the great thing about this book is – the works are reproduced in their original size, and they’re black and white – so there are no bad colour reproduction problems, and all the images have accompanying original text, so this complex relationship between word and image that I’m fascinated by is played and replayed on every page of the book. And also, Goya is such a great drawer, with such a powerful vision, and sense of composition, and perhaps because his vision is so dark, it would cheer me up on my desert island – things can’t be that bad.
If you could meet one literary person past or present, real or fictional, who would it be?
I think Dylan Thomas, probably because he was the first poet I loved, because I still love him now, although a lot of his stuff I don’t, but I see him as an artist whose work – some of it – is trapped by context – his time, and doesn’t resonate today as much as perhaps it used to, perhaps as much as it used to when I first read it as an adolescent, and also, because I think a few of his works definitely do escape context, have become, free of context, good, great, whatever – Poem in October for instance, or Under Milk Wood – and also, because, I like a drink in a pub, as he did, albeit with some moderation, and prefer that to a dinner table conversation, apropos the who would you have round for dinner question, to which my answer would be – no one, I’m off to the pub.
Thank you Steve. Mine’s a pint. Straight glass.
[1] Hugh Baggaley
[2] Venetia Vyvyan, Heywood Hill’s Book Shop, Mayfair
[3] Jan Noble, Not Your Average Type
[4] New version of poem published in Nazar Look, Nov.2012
__________
The agency waives its right to insist on the terms shown at the foot of the contact page, in the context of this interview.
Bookseeker Literary Agency 