Publishing the Underground launch

Last week, I was at Manchester's Anthony Burgess Foundation, at Dead Ink's new website launch. Their new initiative, Publishing The Underground, connects readers and authors by running on a subscription & membership model. You can become a Dead Ink member by pre-ordering one of the great books coming out this year, or by buying a Dead Ink tote bag or t-shirt. It's a pretty sweet way of running a modern publishing company, and you get to have a hardback book, from one of their exciting new authors, for £12 as well. What's not to like?

Here's the speech I gave at the launch.

"Many thanks to Nathan for inviting me to speak tonight.

My novel, Brick Mother, was published by Dead Ink Books last year as part of New Voices 2014. It has been described as 'a kitchen sink thriller', 'thought provoking and terrifying, a thrilling page turner' and 'one of the best novels ever written about work.' It was accepted for publication in June 2013, and was published a year later.

After being published, it was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Not the Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Gladstone Writers in Residence Award. It was also, for one very exciting day, a number-one bestseller in the Amazon Literary Thriller subgenre.

Having my book published has allowed me to go 'out on the road' as a real author. I've been to book festivals, literary festivals, been a featured writer at live lit nights, and appeared at book groups where my novel has been discussed. I should stress that none of this would have been possible without Dead Ink.

My experience publishing with Dead Ink made a big difference to me. I didn't go to University to learn to write. A writer like me, completely self-taught, and without any access to editors or creative writing tutors, doesn't have any expert help to improve their work. Publishing with Dead Ink gave me the chance to work closely with Nathan, an experienced editor, who helped me improve my book. And in the run-up to the novel's publication, I also got to work closely with the graphic designer who made the book's cover, to say how I wanted the book to look. Many writers don't get the chance to be so intimately involved in a book's development, at every stage of the process, from start to finish. The experience was a very meaningful one, and one which may not have been possible with a larger publisher. 

So - why are publishers like Dead Ink important?

Tonight, you've heard three great new authors [Lochlan Bloom, Harry Gallon, and Wes Brown] read excerpts of their work. Well, big publishers take fewer and fewer risks all the time. You are not going to see a big publisher take a punt on new, great writers like these.

Independent publishing is important, because it dares to publish work nobody else dares to back. Work that is daring - work that breaks new ground. Work that is weird, and unconventional, and sometimes defiantly uncommercial. Independent presses blaze a trail that others later follow, and give authors that important first step in developing their work and getting it out into the world.

So, I hope you'll support this important work, and this new way of working for Dead Ink, by pre-ordering the books and becoming a Dead Ink member at tonight's event."

Currently reading

The Year of the Flood Margaret Attwood 

Publishing: Independent & "Indie"

It's been a couple of months now since my book came out, on the excellent Dead Ink Books. It has been such a fun few months. The guys behind the press - Wes and Nathan - have done so much great stuff that I could never have managed to do by myself. I've been on a book tour with my Dead Ink cohort Richard Smyth. Both of us have been to Manchester, London, Leeds, and Wakefield, on promotional events. We've been in the paper and in magazines. It really has been a great experience and I'm massively grateful to everyone at Dead Ink for everything they've done, and to Richard for making the book tour so enjoyable.

My friends will attest that I'm a big fan of Independent Things. Independent shops, independent cafes, independent music, independent clothes, the newspaper The Independent. Basically if you put the word "Independent" in front of it, there's a fair bet I'll find something to like about it.

You see, the thing about independent things is that they're INTERESTING. In independent record labels, and in independent press, you find fanatically driven people putting out the things they love with few resources, and doing it because they love it. That's the sort of thing that's exactly up my street.

Dead Ink have been running as a press now for several years, and they're pretty well established. They started out as a digital only imprint, and now do 'actual' books. (With pages, and everything.) I had always hoped to have my book come out on an independent press, so I was really excited when they got in touch and said they wanted to publish my book.

Because I'm such a fan of Independent Things, people often ask me what I think about self-publishing. (Confusingly, people who self-publish also often call themselves "Indie Authors".) I've got an opinion about it, just like I've got an opinion about everything.

Lots of people are self-publishing these days. It's so much easier than it used to be, and as a consequence loads of people are doing it. A lot of the people I've talked to who have self-published, end up doing it because they haven't been able to find a publisher for their work. Nothing wrong with that, if that's the way you want to do it. But one thing that I've found in working with an independent press is, that even working with a small press you have so many more resources and reach than you would have putting something out yourself.

Here are the things I've really enjoyed in my experience working with Dead Ink Books.

1. Editorial input.

In summer 2013, I handed Nathan Connolly what I thought was the final draft of my novel. I'd got things as far as I could myself, and had already sent the book around a few trusted writer-friends for critique. But what the book really needed was an editor's eye: somebody experienced, who could look at my work fully objectively (let's face it, your writer-friends are never going to be as savage as you need them to be) and tell me where I was going wrong.

Nathan had a few suggestions about the structure of the book, and about where I could work a bit harder to improve things. Many of his suggestions were extremely good and changed the book much for the better.

If I hadn't had access to an editor through working with Dead Ink, I can categorically say that Brick Mother would have been a much worse book.

2. Graphic design.

I cannot draw for toffee. I have friends who can, but if I'd been self-publishing, I would have had to pay a friend to make the cover. And yes, drawing a cover is a service you should pay for - because good design and artistry costs money, and I wouldn't feel great about asking a friend to do it for nothing.

In addition, because they're my friends and I don't want to hurt their feelings, if they'd done a not-quite-right version of the cover, I wouldn't have felt able to say. Working with the fab Estelle Morris (who designed the cover both of Brick Mother and of Wild Ink), I was able to email suggestions back and forth, and choose from an impressive array of images which she'd given to me to choose from. It was a very good experience and I think the cover looks ace.

3. Publicity & distribution

Now this is a big one. I like socialising and I like a good chat, but a salesperson I am not. Could I go around book fairs convincing a distributor to pick up my book so it would make its way into shops up and down the country? I could not. But Wes and Nathan can: they've got all the Dead Ink books distributed, in shops throughout the UK. To my knowledge, there isn't a distribution company in the UK that will distribute self-published titles into shops.

And as for publicity: we've been in various blogs, magazines and papers. Some of the blog stuff, I sorted out myself - but I do also think that many of the blogs wouldn't have touched my book with somebody else's bargepole if it hadn't had a good cover, good content (see above) or been published by reputable small press.

In addition, I've appeared at two literature festivals and two book parties now, all publicity events which were organised by people at Dead Ink. It's crucial to me that that kind of organisation stuff was sorted out by somebody else: it left me with more free time to write.

4. Infrastructure and organisation.

Every time you sort out a book review, a goodwill copy, journalistic requests, etc, somebody, somewhere, has to get down the post office and send books out. Somebody has to warehouse the books somewhere, whether it's a sort of modest warehouse that also doubles as a spare room or a box under the kitchen table.

Who has done this for me and my cohort Richard Smyth? Wes and Nathan. Yes, I've got a box of books in my house, but they're my books, for me to take around events and sell. They're not books that I have to use to fulfil orders through the website - Nathan and Wes do that. Again, leaving my hands free from organisational stuff, in order to have more time to write.

It is true that alongside this I manage my own social media account (Twitter! Facebook!) - but thanks to the input and doings of Dead Ink, I don't need to use my own accounts to spam my followers / friends with exhortations to buy my book. I hate it when authors do that and, thanks to Dead Ink, who will do some of it for me, I don't need to do it all myself.

Toro - a new short story

[Image courtesy of Dead Ink Books]

My new short story, Toro, is now available to read for free on the Dead Ink Books site. Many thanks to Nathan at Dead Ink Books for all his help with this! 

An Announcement

I'm 10000% stoked to announce that my novel, Brick Mother, will be published early 2014 by Cinder House and Dead Ink Books.

Brick Mother is a literary thriller set in a locked psychiatric ward.

As yet, we don't have a release date set, so keep checking back (or follow me on Twitter @bradleybooks). All the same, this seems like a good time to thank everybody who's supported me over the years - old housemates for putting up with me keeping odd pieces of paper all over the house, friends for putting up with me never going out anywhere, the Fictions of Every Kind crew (Mason & Ian in particular), my long suffering boyfriend, and of course Nathan & Wes for taking an interest in my work.

More soon.

Currently reading

The Secret History Donna Tartt

Switch off One-Click ordering

Last week, a kind person at work pointed out that there are only 6 weeks to go until Christmas. Crikey on a plate!

If you're anything like me, you prefer to do your Christmas shopping the non-hellish way; i.e., completely online. This way, you can shop in your pyjamas, and without needing to sharpen your elbows before attempting to go through any doorways.

For Christmas 2011, I took myself to Amazon.com. It was cheap and sold everything I could possibly want, and I got presents for everybody (including the cat) for less than £100. What a bargain, eh?

This year, knowing what I do now about their frankly shonky business practises and general global evilness, I won't be doing it again. The creeping reach of global corporate supervillains is bad for our economy, and will eventually come to be bad for writers and the literary scene in general. Let me explain.

Like other globalised corporations, Amazon is committed to aggressive expansion and market domination. Driven by a need to generate exponentially increasing dividends for its shareholders, it does whatever it takes to generate billions.

Everybody likes a bargain, myself included, and Amazon's bargain-basement prices attract shoppers by the million. Like the supermarkets, Amazon works with an endgame in mind. Driving prices down will eventually kill its competition - and after that, book-lovers' choices will become limited. You will only be able to buy from Amazon, and nowhere else. We have no way of knowing what this will do to prices, or to what kind of books you'll be able to buy.

For many publishers, deciding whether or not to deal with Amazon is a non-choice. It's the world's biggest bookstore, and many readers don't shop anywhere else. If your books aren't on Amazon, you miss out on selling to those who only shop there. One of the ways Amazon operates is to flatten the supply chain, buying at wholesale prices from publishers, and selling at retail price to customers. This generates a healthy profit for itself, and little for the publisher. It's no stretch to see that operating on such narrow margins could drive some indies out of business. A day may come when Amazon demands exclusivity from its publishers - that they sell only through its storefront, and not through their own. Little publishers, often the houses who publish the most exciting and innovative work, may be forced to the wall; and all will be left will be the big publishers, churning out the kinds of books they know will be a hit. Laugh now, while you may; you'll be crying into your library cards when all you can buy are Katie Price biographies and shit books about vampires.

There are many nefarious strings to Amazon's bow when it comes to cheap pricing. These include (but are not limited to) union-busting, using precarious or temporary employees to avoid providing employment rights, and bullying publishers into breaking anti-trust laws. These tactics alone are good enough reason to stop giving them your money.

But for British writers, the biggest reason to boycott Amazon must be for its tax-avoidance scheme. Last year, Amazon generated sales of more than 3.3 billion in the UK. It paid no corporation tax. Let me repeat: into the UK tax system, Amazon - despite having generated enough sales to build six hospitals and a dozen schools - paid not one penny.

With an austerity drive in full effect on our public services, and the axe swinging over our libraries, we should be concerned about this. The narrative in the mainstream media is that the UK is in debt, and that there's no alternative but to cut back. Yet single-issue protest group UK Uncut suggests that corporate tax avoidance has cost our state up to £95bn a year. In crude terms, you could say that if Amazon paid its taxes, our libraries wouldn't be closing their doors.

Writers working a day job in the public sector might find themselves doing the work of two people due to cuts in their departments, and coming home at night too exhausted to work; they may be appealing a benefits decision, for themselves or somebody else, with all the attendant stress and man-hours that such a thing takes; or they might find that local NHS or social care services have closed down, leaving them bearing the brunt of caring, and thus with less time to write.

These things aren't isolated from the tactics of corporations like Amazon. They're very much intertwined. Were Amazon to pay their taxes, perhaps we might be subject to fewer cuts and less stress. And for that reason, I'll be going independent this Christmas. Why not join me?

Currently reading
The Country of Last Things Paul Auster
The Quiet American Graham Greene

Where to buy Cutaway Magazine

(image from Cutaway Magazine blog)

On Thursday, it was a real pleasure to come home from a busy seven hours at the day job to find the first issue of Cutaway Magazine on the doorstep. Aiming to "blur the boundaries between literary and genre fiction", the magazine publishes work by writers and poets who write "the slightly weird but well written". There aren't many British magazines publishing high-quality work that treads the narrow line between genre and speculative fiction. Editors Dave Schofield and Craig Pay have identified a much-maligned gap there, and I take my hat off to them.

The first issue contains one of my stories, I Want You Around, as well as work by Claire Massey and Max Dunbar.

Cutaway magazine is available through Lulu here and, should you wish to order it through a book shop, the ISBN is 9781471647758.