The Fiction Desk Blog

It’s not really possible to start a new publishing house.

As a small press, if you want to be sold through the big chains, you’re going to be selling your books through a distributor, which cuts further into your rapidly diminishing profits. Amazon will buy directly from you, but they charge you for the privilege of selling to them, meaning that most of your sales will earn you no more than 40% of the cover price. So, if your book costs £6, that’s £2.40 to pay for printing, author royalties, book design, advertising, administration, delivering the books to the distributors, getting the ISBN number, sending out review copies, mortgage payments, rent when you lose your house, telephone calls to your wife’s mother, hiring a divorce lawyer, the bus fare to go and visit your children, and paying somebody to pulp the unsold copies of your books.

Charles Boyle has started a new publishing house. (more…)

A couple of months ago, somebody shoved something called Monocle under my nose. Some kind of style magazine, it didn’t really interest me until I found its tiny books section. (Sadly, I mean a tiny section about books.)

One of the titles mentioned was The White Room, from the new independent publisher, CB editions. It was unusual to see a small press book mentioned in a glossy magazine (or anywhere else, for that matter), and so I looked online and started to find out more about them. What I discovered was very interesting…

More about CB editions in a future post; for now I want to talk about one of their books, Days and Nights in W12 by Jack Robinson (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before.

They were paperback novels, printed wide rather than tall, with two columns to each page. Maybe six titles in all; I bought Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and a volume containing Typhoon and The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad. Perhaps American readers of this blog will be familiar with these editions, but the Brits I’ve spoken to haven’t seen anything like them (more…)

Peanuts is something you come back to. You revisit it in progressive stages, as you would an elderly relative; when you’re a child, they’re just a warm, friendly hug and the biscuits. When you’re a teenager they’re somebody who complicates family gatherings and about whom things are said in the kitchen, and then later they become an incredibly fascinating person with a unique life and a hundred stories…which you’ll never hear, because they’ve just passed away. (more…)