Diary Archive

We’ve just finished the voting for the latest Fiction Desk Writer’s Award, which covers the stories in All These Little Worlds. I’ve not written much about the award before, but it’s quite an important part of what we do.

The Fiction Desk Writer’s Award is a cash prize for the best story in each volume, and it’s judged by the contributors themselves. The idea is that the stories are judged by the people who write them; as editor, even I don’t have a vote.

The amount of the prize and the exact voting method will vary from time to time, as we fine-tune it: for the first two volumes, it’s been a special prize of £200, and each contributor has had two votes (the second to be used in case of a tie).

Ben Lyle won the award earlier this year for his story ‘Crannock House’ in Various Authors, in a very close competition: we eventually had to bring in John Self from The Asylum to break the tie.

I’ll be announcing the winner for All These Little Worlds at the end of next week. The news will be here on the blog, and in our newsletter.

Above are the first volumes in our Christmas gift subscriptions, wrapped and ready to go out to their lucky recipients.

The paper we’re using is from The Paper Place in Rye (their site is still under construction). Their paper is handmade in India using traditional techniques and materials, and it’s beautiful stuff.

The wrapped books are volumes one and two, which we’re shipping out in time for Christmas; volumes three and four are also included in the subscription, and will be sent out on publication next year.

If you know somebody who’d love this for Christmas, you’ll find all the details, along with last order dates for Christmas delivery, over on our special Christmas subscription page. (You’ll need to order within the next couple of days for delivery outside the UK…)

Like many people, I first noticed Roast Books when they published A.C. Tillyer’s collection of short stories, An A-Z of Possible Worlds. It was a highly entertaining read, but also an exciting piece of publishing: the elaborate production, involving a boxed set of 26 booklets, was both eye-catching and perfectly suited to the material.

While An A-Z… might be Roast Books’ most elaborate volume, it’s be no means the only one: they started with a series of paperback novellas and short story collections called Great Little Reads, and more recent publications include Nik Perring’s collection of flash fiction, Not So Perfect. Their most recent book is Dogsbodies and Scumsters, a quirky collection of short stories by Alan McCormick with illustrations by Jonny Voss. Here’s the trailer:

With such a diverse and interesting selection of publications, I decided it was time to find out more about Roast Books and their plans, so I got in touch with their publisher Faye Dayan…

For a young publishing house with relatively few titles, you’ve managed to create a wonderfully diverse range: from the Great Little Reads with their textured covers, to the simple square of Nik Perring’s book, through to the extravagant A-Z of Possible Worlds, I’m not sure that you’ve tackled any two projects in the same way. What made you decide to take this approach?

Each book of short fiction Roast Books has published has deserved its own approach because we try to match form to content. I think it’s important that the shape and character of a book can reflect and relate to the stories inside.

Will you be revisiting the Great Little Reads series?

The novella is such a great genre, and often overlooked I think, so I would love to revisit the Great Little Reads series, although for the moment Roast Books is focused on short story collections.

Is it challenging to create a strong identity for Roast Books when you’re using a variety of formats? As opposed to, say, Peirene Press, who have one very distinct look to their titles.

You are right, this presents a challenge in creating an image for Roastbooks, but it is the philosophy of production, rather than the production itself which is consistent across all our books. The creative process of working with an author and collaborating on the design is very rewarding and something I would like to believe that our readers acknowledge and appreciate.

I’m sure they do. Your list is very focussed on short stories and novellas—a focus I can strongly identify with! I can see how short stories would be a logical choice for an experimental publisher like Roast Books, because the reading experience of shorter works can be more flexible than that of longer novels, where the book perhaps needs more to disappear more behind the writing. What’s the attraction for you in publishing short stories?

The genre of short stories is extensive, and there are fewer accepted publishing traditions associated with them. So firstly, as you said, as a new publisher, it gives more flexibility to experiment. Secondly many short stories are appreciated as they provide light bites of entertainment and stimulation, and the book format can be something which enhances this rather than detracts from it.

Do you see Roast Books moving into ebook publishing, or would you prefer to focus on the physical reading experience?

It’s interesting because the physical aspect of the book is intrinsic to Roast Books, so we will not release digital books without their physical counterpart. Having said that, we are developing an exciting little e-project which will give users the ability to self publish and distribute.

That’s interesting. More traditional publishers seem to be getting involved with self-publishing projects these days. It used to be very much a no-no, causing issues with credibility and conflicts of interest, but that certainly seems to be changing. How do you plan to reconcile the two very different types of publishing with Roast Books?

I agree it is changing. The type of self publishing where publishers put out a physical book in return for a hefty fee isn’t the only model any more. With ebooks, authors can create and distribute their own book online, in a speedy and cheap process, and this is something which part of our e-project will facilitate. Aspiring authors can bring their ebooks to the attention not just of potential readers but also potential publishers. There won’t necessarily be any overlap between this and our physical books at all.

How have you found the experience of entering the publishing industry? Do you think it’s a receptive world for new independents? Have you had any particular frustrations or pleasant surprises?

As you know things are changing very rapidly in the book industry and there is a lot of speculation about where it’s headed. But i have been certainly met some people within the industry who are extremely supportive and genuinely want new independents to succeed. It’s undoubtably tough, but you just have to keep going and see what’s around the next corner. We have just sold the film rights to My Soviet Kicthen by Amy Spurling, to Tailormade productions, which was an unexpected but welcome development.

What kind of team do you have? Do you work with a lot of people, or are you largely self-sufficient?

I work with the same designer, editor and publicist on each book, so its a very small operation, but I think this has its benefits! We work quickly, and it’s a lot of fun.

Are there any other emerging independent publishers that you particularly admire?

lol The Fiction Desk! Various Authors introduces a really interesting spectrum of new talent and I’m really enjoying it.

Thank you! I wasn’t fishing, I promise… Finally, what’s next for Roast Books?

We have some great projects planned for 2012, all collections of short stories, and also the development of our self publishing platform.

Find out more about Roast Books at their website, www.roastbooks.org.

Here’s another interesting publishing project that I’ve come across recently.

Broadsheet Stories print a monthly broadsheet—a single short story on one side of A3 paper—and distribute them to a selection of cafes and bookshops, mostly in south-west England, where customers are free to read them on the spot or take them home. (The photo above was taken in the Martello Bookshop in Rye.) Each venue begins with the first story and moves on one month at a time, meaning that there will be a different story available to read depending on where you are.

The stories are all necessarily short, coming in at just under 2000 words. Since starting in 2009, they’ve printed stories from a wide range of authors, including our own Matthew Licht.

Most of the stories can also be downloaded from the Broadsheet Stories website, but I think that takes away the fun of it: if you’re in the right part of the country, drop by one of the venues (listed here) and see which story they’ve got available this month.

I’ve been meaning to post something about Slightly Foxed for a while now, but something kept getting in the way. Since getting Various Authors off to the printers, I’ve had a little more time, and finally found the chance to open their Spring 2011 issue, no. 29.

Literary publications can approach their content in one of two ways: they can provide a range of essays, fiction, and poetry (Stinging Fly, The Paris Review, Granta etc.), or they can specialise, aiming to do one thing well. For The Fiction Desk’s anthology series, I decided to focus only on short stories. On the other hand, Slightly Foxed prints nothing but concise, personal essays about old books, both classics and forgotten gems.

Volume 29 contains 17 essays on titles as diverse as The Phantom Tollbooth and On The Origin of Species. They’re very well crafted, personal essays, of the sort that we encounter (and in my case, write) all too rarely on book blogs. The editors actually describe the content very well on their own website:

Slightly Foxed is more like a bookish friend, really, than a literary periodical. Companionable and unstuffy, each quarter it offers 96 pages of personal recommendations for books of lasting interest, old and new. It’s an eclectic mix, covering all the main categories of fiction and non-fiction, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too. Some of them are names you’ll have heard of, some not, but they all write thoughtfully, elegantly and entertainingly.

The cumulative effect is that of visiting the best kind of used book shop, where you spend all day hanging around, talking to everybody that comes in and leaving with an armful of books. In fact, the publishers of Slightly Foxed do also have a bookshop, Foxed Books. I was in there once, a long time before I’d read the quarterly, and liked it very much.

The books themselves are beautifully produced, with very nice paper used throughout: the feel of each edition is more than enough to justify the relatively high price tag (a four-volume subscription costs £36). As you can see from the picture above, they also put a great deal of care and thought into the packaging.

As well as the quarterly, there’s a series of attractive limited edition reprints of lost or forgotten works, known as Slightly Foxed Editions.

All in all, Slightly Foxed is a must-read for literature lovers. Try it at least once, or you’ll never know what you’re missing out on.

Here’s a stack of copies of Various Authors, photographed shortly before being sent off to the first eager readers.

Look! It’s available to buy now!

I tried several approaches to the introduction for Various Authors. I wanted to avoid the clichéd manifesto-style rant and focus instead on the quality of the stories, but I kept winding up with rather dry catalogues of the contents, essentially repeating what I’d written in the introductions to each individual story.

At the last minute, I found myself writing something a little more personal, which I hope explains a little more about what I’m doing here, and why I’m doing it. Here it is in full:

Back in the late nineties, just around the end of the big boom in alternative British music, I worked for a while as a DJ. I’d moved to a new city and hadn’t found much going on there in terms of good music, so one evening I wandered into a club and somehow talked them into letting me run their Monday nights for them. For the next year or so, I played records from bands like St Etienne, My Bloody Valentine, and half the back catalogue of the 4AD label.

The club wasn’t up to much: the beer was stale (but cheap), and they rarely replaced the bulbs in the lights, so there were times when the dance floor was lit for the entire evening by one meandering purple spotlight and an occasional burst of strobe. Both the turntables were broken and one of the CD decks skipped, so I’d put a long instrumental by Mogwai in the skipping one and use it to fill the silence while I quickly changed songs on the other deck. The crowd got used to hearing fifteen seconds of grinding guitars between each song, and occasionally losing half a Pixies chorus to a skipping disc. If there were complaints, a simple press of a button—under the decks, more or less where you’ll find the panic button in a shop—would make the complainer, the dance floor, and most of the club disappear in a cloud of raspberry-scented smoke.

On some nights the club was packed, while on others it was so empty that I’d put on a compilation CD and sit down for a drink with the regulars. It lasted for around a year, before collapsing during a particularly quiet summer. It had never been a huge commercial success (one night we managed a door take of minus fifty pee), but it had a loyal following, got people listening to new music, and sold quite a few records. A few bands formed among the regulars, and some of those went on to record albums of their own.

Then, a couple of years ago, I started a book blog where I do my best to talk about new fiction. It’s been a bit irregular, with some quiet months and some busy ones, but it’s sold a few books, introduced a few readers to new authors, and given me the opportunity to meet some interesting people.

I like to think that the club night and the blogging both came from the same place: a desire to seek out new and interesting things, the worthwhile but perhaps overlooked, and to share them with as many people as possible.

One advantage that the music had over the blogging is that it was more direct: it was a case of ‘listen to this’ rather than ‘let me tell you about this,’ sharing experiences rather than simply reporting them. Much as I enjoyed rambling to people about why they should like The Magnetic Fields, I found that it was better just to put on the CD.

It’s my preference for that directness that has led The Fiction Desk from blogging about fiction to publishing it: instead of boring you with why you should read Charles Lambert, or telling you to seek out Lynsey May’s stories, or how funny the new one from Jon Wallace is, I’m just going to show them to you.

So go and grab yourself a bottle of out-of-date beer, find somewhere comfortable to sit (not too close to the toilets, if I were you), and get ready to hear some things worth hearing.

Oh, and please bear with any odd noises you might hear: it’s not the music, just the CD player warming up.

Various Authors is available now. You can buy it from us (postage free), it’s available through bookshops in the UK, and there’s also a Kindle version. I hope you give it a try, and if you do, please come back and let me know what you think. Oh… and you can also download a pdf sample by clicking here.

Books aren’t always the most likely material for computer game adaptations. Classic (and public domain) characters sometimes make it across, like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes, but more direct book adaptations tend to be limited to speculative fiction titles: I remember playing The Hobbit on my rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum, and there have been a series of games based on Lord of the Rings and the Discworld series. Games like Blade Runner probably owe more to the film adaptations than to the source material.

A tongue-in-cheek exception to the rule is this new video game adaptation of The Great Gatsby, produced in the style of an old-school NES platformer. Level one involves battling your way through Gatsby’s party, picking off waiters and flappers with your incredible boomerang hat; level two is a train chase sequence climaxing in a battle with the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (see right). I can’t tell you what happens after that, because Eckleburg got me (see right again).

The Great Gatsby game is a free-to-play Flash game: go over to greatgatsbygame.com and give it a try. You’ll probably do better than I did.

From the creators of Smoke: A London Peculiar, comes this new board game, which is possibly the first board game with a literary magazine theme.

The players in Soho! each take on the role of editor of a literary magazine, and must make their way around the board (representing Soho), collecting pieces of prose from half a dozen recalcitrant, boozing writers. Obstacles and aids come in the form of plastic counters and two decks of playing cards – one representing Soho’s pubs, the other a ‘Bloody Writers!’ deck. The editors can attempt to reach the writers by foot, by taxi, or by Boris Bike. The winner is the first editor to collect all six pieces of prose, thus completing their magazine.

‘Soho’ is being launched on Wednesday 8th December at the Blue Posts, 22 Berwick Street, in Soho, which will presumably lead to Jumanji-like levels of boardgame-themed meta-reality.

I’m delighted to announce some big news from The Fiction Desk.

We’re relaunching as a publisher, with a list dedicated to promoting new fiction.

Our first project is a quarterly anthology of new short stories, featuring a wide range of stories from both new and established writers. We’re excited – this series is going to be a great platform for a variety of writers, and a great way for readers to get a regular fix of quality short fiction.

Subscriptions are available now, and more details of the first volume, Various Authors, will follow over the next few weeks. (For now, there’s the cover on the right.)

We’ll also be increasing new content here on the blog, reviewing new titles from other publishers, and sharing news from across the book trade.

If you’d like us to keep you updated with our plans, sign up for our newsletter here.

White’s Books first appeared a couple of years ago, when they launched a series of attractive hardcover classics with decorated cloth. It’s a project run under the art direction of David Pearson, an ex-Penguin designer who worked on projects like the Great Ideas series, and the cheap green Popular Classics.

The latest from White’s is a new series of Pocket Classics. (more…)

Amazon has launched its latest branch in Italy, and from the looks of things, they have a unique advantage, thanks to the remarkably complex laws regarding book pricing in Italy.

According to a publication from the Federation of European Publishers (download the .pdf here), bookshops in Italy are limited to offering a maximum of 15% discount from the publisher’s recommended price.

There are exceptions: old stock can sometimes be discounted, as can books sold to schools. Unusually, though, they also allow unlimited discounts for books sold online.

Effectively, this means that Amazon’s Italian store will be able to sell books at an unlimited discount, while their bricks and mortar competitors will be limited to – at most – knocking 15% from the price of their books.

This may be a unique example of a case where price protection laws could actually work against the independent bookshops, and in favour of Amazon.

Each year I try to do a rundown of the Booker longlist according to the book blogs. (Here’s 2008 & 2009.) I’m running a little late this year – don’t look at me like that, I’ve been busy – so let’s get straight to the Booker shortlist, 2010:

Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s first Booker winner, Oscar and Lucinda casts a shadow over several of the reviews of his new book. Jackie at Vulpes Libris can’t help noticing that one of the characters shares Oscar’s dishevelled red hair, while Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes finds himself revisiting Carey for the first time since reading that book (having skipped Carey’s other Booker winner, The True History of the Kelly Gang).

Kevin from Canada read this one with some reluctance, not being a huge Carey fan, or being familiar with Alexis de Toquevillle, whose journey to the USA inspired the book:

Carey is a competent and talented writer and he carefully and deliberately unfolds that story in a reader-friendly fashion. He has obviously researched his material thoroughly — too thoroughly for this reader, because long sections of the book are taken up with explanations of the obvious that left me wanting only for them to end. While I appreciate the author’s determination to chronicle the “American” story, he does not have much new to add — his respect for the obvious history is so great that it comes to dominate the book

See Kevin’s full review, and the subsequent discussion in the comments, here.

Room Emma Donoghue

John Self kicked off his review on The Asylum by measuring it against his initial hopes…

Room has an intriguing premise: it’s narrated by a five-year-old boy who lives in a room twelve feet square and doesn’t know the outside world exists. This immediately set my reading glands salivating: I imagined an allegorical, philosophical novel, a European-style confection that provided an analysis of all our lives by an extrapolation to the extreme, something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. So my disappointment with Room is partly unreasonable, denouncing it for not being a different book entirely.

… before coming to the conclusion that ‘it’s clear that Room aims at the heart rather than the head, and for many people the emotional heft of the story will be enough to recommend it.’

If Room didn’t find its natural reader in John, it fared better with Jackie at Farm Lane Books, (more…)

Got a historical thriller in an urban setting? Well, nobody will know what you’re talking about unless you give it a sepia-toned cover in which a man in a hat (and preferably a cape or swishing frock coat) is walking away from the camera:

(Actually, is the guy on the cover of The Alienist walking towards us? Oh, and take note of the man on the cover of The Interpretation of Murder – you’ll be seeing him again in a moment…)

Sepia may be a bit old hat now, so you could always go with blue instead: (more…)

Last year, publisher Gallic Books formed a partnership with London bookstore Big Green Bookshop. I loved the idea of a bookshop and publisher teaming up, which used to happen all the time (John Murray, for example, started as a bookseller / publisher), and the partnership between Gallic and the Big Green Bookshop seems to be still going strong today.

Now, Gallic Books have come up with another smart partnership, this time for their new novel, The Baker Street Phantom. They’ve partnered with a hotel, the Park Plaza Sherlock Holmes Hotel on Baker Street. Through September, anybody checking in at this “Holmes away from home”* will receive a complimentary copy of the novel.

It’s a nice concept, and another bit of smart promotion from Gallic.

*Sorry.

Here’s a question: What happens to eBook collections when the user dies? I’ve asked this a couple of times over on Twitter, but nobody seems to know.

Avid readers (or bibliophiles, or bibliomaniacs) can accumulate quite a collection of books over a lifetime. They’re sometimes dealt with separately in a will, sometimes fought over by descendants, and sometimes sold off as a job lot before the earth has settled on the grave. (more…)

On Tuesday, Legend Press will launch a new online bookshop dedicated to independent publishers.

The project, entitled IndieBooks, will be selling a range of just fifty titles from a variety of independent presses. Each month, the twenty-five lowest selling titles will be replaced with new titles, while the other half are carried over to the next month—in effect, creating a situation where half the stock is editorially selected, and the other half determined by sales figures. (more…)

Charles Lambert’s first collection of short stories, The Scent of Cinnamon, contains a story called ‘All Gone’. A collection of unsettled, occasionally disturbing impressions of a displaced upbringing, it feels a little like notes for a potential memoir. I’d happily read a book’s worth of that writing, I tell him.

‘Thank you,’ he laughs, ‘but I’m not sure I’d want to write any more of it.’

Well, never mind. With three novels in the works, he probably has enough writing to be getting on with.

We’re having lunch in Sardi Due, a seafood restaurant in Garbatella, Rome. Nearby is the university where Charles Lambert teaches English, one card from the deck with which Anglophones in Italy pay their way. (He also works as an editor for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, and has previously taught political science at the American University of Rome).

It’s the combination of Lambert’s expatriate experience and the fish-out-of-water upbringing described in ‘All Gone’ that together led to his debut novel. Little Monsters contrasts the protagonist Carol’s experiences as a child, growing up with an unloving aunt after a family tragedy, with her later life as an adult, when she’s living in Italy and helping at a centre for asylum seekers. There she tries to connect to another lost child.

Among other things, Little Monsters is about the reconciliation of the past and the present, power and helplessness, and the way we define ourselves in concert with, or opposition to, the people who surround us. (more…)

This summer saw the publication of The Seven Lives of John Murray, Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of that great independent publishing house. It’s a terrific read all round – of which more below – but something particular that struck me was its description of a publishing model common during the late 18th century, when the first John Murray arrived in London and started his business.

Most likely, you’d start by opening a bookshop. With this as your base, you’d then begin to acquire copyrights and print books, either by yourself or with other publishers, each taking a percentage share in the project. You’d sell these through your own shop, and at a discount to other shops – meanwhile buying their books to sell yourself. The result was that the industry across London functioned as a kind of loose cooperative, with shops selling their own books and each other’s. (more…)

A while back, I wrote a piece on The Fiction Desk about the kinds of books that I thought made ideal fodder for book blogs. Something that struck me then, and has become more important to me since, is the length of books.

While there’s no point in talking about some kind of ideal length for fiction (Q. How long should a book be? A. Exactly as long as it takes), I do wonder whether novellas hold a certain appeal specifically for book bloggers. (more…)