Am I selling books or cornflakes? - Lynn Michell

I first heard about Lynn Michell and Linen Press when artist, writer and friend Susie Nott-Bower's debut novel, The Making of Her, was published in 2012. Lynn and I recently found ourselves part of the same virtual conversation and, happily, she accepted my offer to write a personal post about the world of publishing from an independent perspective. I think this thoughtful piece adds to the great publishing debate and I invite you to both add your opinion in a comment and to check out the Linen Press, whether you're a writer or a reader. 

Am I selling books or cornflakes? Lynn Michell

As the director of Linen Press I’ve seen the book trade change over the last ten years from an open space for experienced, emergent and experimental writers to a closed shop in which only the famous, the celebs, the major award winners and writers with a golden gift for self-marketing can be confident of ending up on the shelves of Waterstones, W H Smith and Tesco.

The language of publishing reflects those changes. I’m hearing online presence, marketing, niche, social media platforms and branding. Reporting from a recent writers’ conference in Brighton, Sally-Shakti Willow of the Contemporary Small Press writes: ‘branding’ was definitely the buzzword of the day with every speaker stressing ‘the importance of marketing yourself like a packet of cornflakes.’ Writers were told ‘your novel is a piece of fruit’ so make sure publishers know to place you with bananas or kiwis.’ Sally concluded: ’what I saw through that shop-window was not bananas or kumquats or cornflakes but something rotten, and potentially toxic.’ (https://thecontemporarysmallpress.com/2016/03/15/small-presses-worth-much-more-than-money/).

So authors need to market themselves like cornflakes. They must build websites, set up Twitter accounts, give talks in libraries to three people sheltering from the rain, and push a copy of their book into the few remaining indie book shops. I hate to force this on Linen Press authors, not because for many it goes against the grain to chase the limelight but because I’m not convinced that their efforts will bring them recognition or sales. All the evidence from six years of Linen Press’s strong social media presence suggests that there is no correlation between activity on our social media sites and sales. Here’s the reality check. UK publishers released 184,000 titles in 2013. Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown described the figure as “either a sign of cultural vitality or publishing suicide. Of course, it is utter madness to publish so many books when the average person reads between one and five books a year.’ Jamie Byng at Canongate agreed: ‘I think we publish too many books, Canongate included, and I think this impacts negatively on how well we publish books as an industry. It is very easy to acquire a book. Much harder to publish it successfully. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/uk-publishes-more-books-per-capita-million-report). So it’s from inside this avalanche of yearly publications that an author must carve out a niche for herself. How many niches remain?

And published authors have to shout over the sales pitches from the self-published book mountain. It’s hard to find recent, accurate figures but between 2014 and 2015 self-published titles rose from 16% to 22% of the digital market. http://www.thebookseller.com/news/self-published-titles-22-e-book-market-325152 

In 2009, 76% of all books released were self-published although the average financial return was only £500. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-publishing). As Derek Thompson says in an email to me: ‘Much as self-publishing has democratised the route to seeing work in print, it has opened the flood gates without a quality filter.’

It may be that the sheer volume of published and self-published books sends readers to the security of the Top Ten in Waterstones and the other chains. They can sit on public transport reading the same novel as the person next to them. Call it Girl on a Train syndrome.

My authors ask why their books aren’t in Waterstones. The Big Five can throw £100,000 of marketing budget at a few chosen titles leaving the rest to fall by the wayside. Waterstones takes a minimum of 60% of the RRP which makes it prohibitive for small presses who work with costly small runs. We’d be paying Waterstones to sell our books.

As a small indie publisher, it’s a growing challenge to sell the books on our list. Ten years ago Childhood’s Hill by Marjorie Wilson, Linen Press’s first publication, was accepted by Blackwells in Edinburgh and sold so well that for one week it beat Ian Rankin in their Top Ten. Later books also managed a toe in the door because managers, not central sales offices, still decided whether or not to take a risk on a book. 

Jump to 2016. Sometimes A River Song, one of the best books on our list, received a dozen rave reviews and its Costa prize-winning author, Avril Joy, attended three book fairs shortly after the launch, yet still we struggle to sell copies and Waterstones won’t look at it. I sense a further seismic shift towards a limited diet of mainstream-published crowd pleasers.

The three routes to publishing have split and gone their separate ways. Think cornflakes, brand yourself, find a vacant niche and you may hook a mainstream publisher. Go down the self-publishing route if you know how to stand head and shoulders above the self-marketing crowd. Or go with an indie press which occupies the space between the other two. This year three out of six books on the Booker short list come from indies, one a tiny Scottish press. Success is possible. And, as Sally-Shakti Willow says, even without the rainbow end of best seller status, small presses are ‘committed to freedom of expression, artistic risk, literary innovation, and championing new and exciting writers.’

Excuse this final bit of branding. Linen Press, the only indie women’s press in the UK, does read unsolicited manuscripts and we are looking for beautifully written books. Send us your manuscript. www.linen-press.com

Interns: opportunity or exploitation? Guest post by Lynn Michell, Director of Linen Press Books

This recession is taking a heavy toll on students as graduates search in vain for jobs. In September 2011, BBC News reported that 28% of UK graduates who left university in 2007 were still not in full-time work three and a half years later.

Worse, I sense a growing climate of blame and diminishing sympathy, as if young people are not doing enough to help themselves. Claire Rogers, writing recently in The Independent, strikes me as naive and out of touch: ‘There are several different ways a graduate can fight off the depression of being unemployed while simultaneously improving their chances of landing the right job. One thing that all disenchanted graduates should certainly do is get work experience, even if unpaid.’ So off you all go - take what’s going, don’t expect any pay, don’t complain and don’t get depressed.

So, by taking on interns, am I buying into this growing acceptance of unpaid work? I run Linen Press, a small publishing house for women writers. It is a one woman band with no publicity department and no funding. I live on my passion for beautiful prose, optimism and determination. And fresh air. I have four interns. The question is: am I exploiting them in an economic recession or am I offering them useful experience which may help them if they find the right career job?

Instead of telling students to get on their bikes, I want to acknowledge how tough life is for them. One of my interns, Lauren, describes her current passage through university:
‘Undergraduates and graduates are under enormous stress. My case may not be the norm but I have spent the past three years studying at university while working 5 nights a week, as well as keeping a house and looking after a child. At the moment, I am in my final year, juggling family life while working on my dissertation and taking an additional module. We are encouraged to find a job related to our degree so I also work in a library. Experience is essential for pursuing your career choice so I chose to work with Linen Press. I am also a member of the Children's Panel, gaining further skills and experience. There is an extremely intense pressure on graduates to have something extra, to show initiative, to demonstrate their work ethic but even with the number of things I do just now, there is no guarantee of a job.’

Even rubbish holiday jobs are hard to come by. When I was their age, and paying my own way through university, I walked into a temporary job at the end of every term. I was a fruit picker, a factory welder, a film company’s Girl Friday, an Avon lady and a model advertising bath plugs. Every summer holiday I pushed an ice-cream trolley round Bognor’s Butlins for twelve hour shifts that ended in the theatre with a tray of tubs and choc-ices round my neck. A Whiter Shade Of Pale is forever etched into my memory.

If I were making a handsome profit, of course I would pay my interns, but I have invested all my own royalties into this small business and have not paid myself a bean for three years. I made a couple of expensive mistakes but now each book published by Linen Press outsells the previous one. It’s been a steep learning curve for a mere writer but Linen Press now feels a good place to be.

In my defense, I encourage my interns to take ownership of a project which interests them so that they see it through from start to finish.
• Rhona is the Linen Press Bodyguard. Where I am computer-chaotic, she is organised. Where I am impulsive, she is considered and protects us from my wilder ideas. She does a lot of the back-stage work, maintaining and changing the web-site and running facebook. I consult her on major and minor decisions, moan at her on bad days and joke with her on good ones. She takes it all in her stride. If I had the funds, I would employ her tomorrow.
• Bea joined us a few months ago after a chance meeting in The Feminist Library. She is a voracious, intelligent, intuitive reader with experience in scientific publishing and a true understanding of the ethos of our company. Already a contributor to several literary blogs, she volunteered to help vet the submissions that pour in at the rate of 10-20 a week. She also runs the Linen Press Twitter account with a professional yet quirky assurance. Thank you, Bea!
• Lauren arrived a few months ago and is building a library of resources so we don’t re-invent the wheel every time we publish a new book. She has researched prizes and awards, made lists of media contacts, and hunted down events that would be good matches for my authors. She has taken on tedious tasks and done them with competence and cheerfulness.
• Jac is our newest intern but has settled right in. I’ve been sending her submissions too, and back they come with coherent comments. This saves me a huge amount of often unproductive time. She is helping with the editing of a novel we have just signed up and with her background in art, I’ll be turning to her about design and presentation.

My interns are not standing in a queue at the PO with parcels of books. They are not making coffee or phoning every editor in the land to beg for a review of a book. They are dipping into real, varied jobs within a publishing company and finding out where their skills and interests lie. They know that their contributions are valuable - even necessary - and they are contributing to the growing success of a young company. And I will say that in their references.

Lest I should forget it, Rhona reminds me now and again that she is working for nothing. No doubt the others will too. But she also acknowledges the usefulness of the experience and the satisfaction she gets working for a small, committed publisher. My aim is to make Linen Press feel like a small literary family with authors and interns and my dog all part of the team. Or is that a cop out?

So why can’t I pay these willing, gifted young people? I’ve blogged before about the arithmetic of buying and selling books but I’ll briefly recap here. My books are expensive to produce. I pay an excellent designer and copy-editor because I want beautiful covers and no typos. I am restricted to shortish print runs of about 400 copies which takes the cost per book way up. Our next publication - a 90,000 word novel - comes to £8 per copy plus author’s royalties. Amazon would take 60% of my RRP and I would have to pay the postage to replace the book. On a book selling for £8.99, Amazon would take £5.40 plus £3 p & p. You do the sums. I don’t sell Linen Press books on Amazon.

One day I may stumble on that best-seller and do a run of 500,000 and have Hollywood directors on the phone. Then I pay my interns. Until then, I offer them hands-on experience, heartfelt gratitude, an excellent reference and the occasional meal in a Glasgow veggie cafe.

Thank you, my interns! You are invaluable.


Lynn Michell is Director of Linen Press Books, Edinburgh.

The making of it

I’ve just heard that my novel, The Making of Her, will be published this Friday. Even as I write this, it’s at the printers being turned into A Real Book. I’ve never had a baby, but I guess this is the nearest I’ll come to it. So please bear with me, because I’m going to blog about its story. Not its plot, but the story of how it came into being.

I began The Making of Her waaaay back in August 2006, on a How To Write A Novel course at University College, Falmouth, run by the redoubtable Jane Pollard. I came clutching the beginning of a novel, but my bright-eyed optimism was soon dashed. Jane told us to discard any novel we’d begun and start again from scratch. In new-age circles, Letting Go is said to be a good thing, because it creates a vacuum into which something new can be born - and this proved to be the case: that night at the kitchen table an idea came to me. I sat and scribbled, and by next day the basic plot was there. I drew on my own experience as a television director, many years in therapy and my position in society as a middle aged (aka invisible) woman.


Little did I know that this was only the beginning of what would turn out to be a six-year project, with much heartbreak - and a few highs. The first draft took about a year, although I stopped for four months in the middle: I lost faith after an incisive critique on the first three chapters. Like most beginning novelists, I was very resistant to changing my ‘baby’, partly because my skin was still too thin. Over the years, the skin thickened and the resistance was gradually dismantled. And I was lucky to be a member of three different writing groups, as well as WriteWords, a brilliant online writing community, and received invaluable critique from them. I began subbing to agents in 2008.


At that point the novel had an unfortunate title – The Change – and involved rather too many menopausal references. It was also unrelentingly downbeat. Six form rejections came back. I entered some competitions – no luck. I sent the first three chapters and synopsis to the Hilary Johnson editorial service: they were encouraging and I realise, looking back, that there are a few events in writer’s lives which act as markers or milestones – where someone ‘gets’ what you’re doing and says ‘keep going’. This, together with being shortlisted in a Cornerstones competition, renewed my faith and energy to continue. One agent asked for the full – and rejected.


But some progress was being made. I rewrote passages. I edited and revised. I changed the title to The Making of Her. I worked on making it more upbeat and changed one of the main narratives to first person. I subbed to another handful of agents. The rejections continued to come in, but now some of them were personal, and encouraging. One agent rejected, but asked to see the next one. A couple more asked for the full. There were moments of hope, but many more moments of despair and dejection. One agent ‘loved’ the first 50 pages and asked for the full, then hung onto it for many months before sending a pretty brutal rejection.


At this point I was ready to throw in the towel. As a final shot, I decided to submit directly to a publisher. My friend Derek had told me about Linen Press Books, a women’s press based in Edinburgh, so I sent off my synopsis and first chapters. To my utter amazement, since I was feeling battered and bowed, they asked for the full and, within a week or so, had read it. They asked me to make some revisions and after seeing the preliminary changes, offered me a contract.


This was in January 2011. The year that followed felt like a miracle. I had a fabulous editor who worked with me over many months like a mentor, meticulously going through the novel chapter by chapter. I rewrote the beginning (again), added a couple of sub-plots and rewrote a middle section. I could see the novel improving with each change. And because Linen Press is a small publishing house, I was fully involved at every stage, including the cover design.


So here it is. Or will be, on Friday. Now I’m immersed in marketing and asking for reviews, which feels rather like subbing to agents – lots of rejection/ignoring but a few ‘yesses’ or ‘maybes’. It’s been a long and often painful process to today, so what I’m long-windedly wanting to say is: It is possible. You can do it. Keep going. Have faith. The Making of Her will be available from www.linenpressbooks.co.uk from 27th April.

very small is very beautiful

One of the joys of being published by a small press is the sense of involvement and collaboration throughout the process. Not just the writing and editing process, but the whole business of producing and marketing and selling the book. Some may argue that it is the writer’s job to write and the publisher's job to publish - a simple division of labour. I disagree. I have no wish to hand over my novel to someone else and forget about it. I find the whole publishing process intensely interesting, especially since this is my first (and quite possibly only) chance.

First, the editing. All publishers will offer some editing - most with a great deal of commitment. I am lucky enough to have an editor who also happens to own the company (Linen Press Books), so between us we are pretty focused on creating the very best ‘product’ we can. The first stage focused on the manuscript as a whole. My editor suggested a number of structural revisions: a new beginning; bringing in a character earlier; writing new scenes to create empathy for one character; working on making another character more spirited. And in the process I discovered two new sub-plots which needed to be written. Once these were done, we began going through the manuscript, chapter by chapter, by email. My editor tidies up a lot at a superficial level (I’ve discovered various writerly ‘ticks’ which I was barely aware of) and makes suggestions for rewriting some whole sections. She is very good at putting her finger on the issues that need addressing, making appropriate suggestions and then letting me address them in my own way. This process will take months – the novel is about fifty chapters and we get through two or three per week. Simultaneously, she is working with another writer, Sophie Radice, whose novel, The Henry Experiment will be published early next year, so it’s all go. Mine is due to come out around the same time.

Then there’s the cover. As a painter, this has been one of the most exciting bits so far. I have heard of writers who feel upset and angry because their covers do not reflect the content of their book. I was directed to a wonderful photographic images site (Arcangel-Images) where I browsed for many happy hours, finding photographs which reflected the atmosphere and themes of my novel. My editor did so too, and there was quite a bit of to-and-froing until we found an image we both loved. This was then handed over to the designer to create the cover design.

Now we are approaching the marketing stage. This is where the big difference between the small independent publisher and the ‘big boys’ becomes clear. If you are published by one of the large houses, you may be assigned a publicity person and there may be some money in the pot for marketing. This might include your novel being sold in a prominent position in the bookshops (although not for very long, unless it turns out to be a best-seller). The publicity for The Making of Her will be entirely down to myself, my editor and her hard-working intern, as will persuading bookshops to stock it. This feels like a mountain to climb – but a fascinating and challenging one. As someone who is happy (ish) spending vast amounts of time alone with her computer, the thought of going out there and talking about my book is daunting, to say the least. But it’s also exciting. It's bringing out my latent extravert. I’ve drawn up a marketing plan. I am planning to take some evening classes in public speaking and I’m learning how to write a press release. Hema Macherla, Linen Press author of Blue Eyes and Breeze from the River Manjeera has been really helpful in answering my questions about how she approaches bookshops. I’m going to have postcards printed to hand out to everyone I know or meet. I'm researching literary festivals, book groups and libraries, local papers and magazines. This is the easy bit. The hard part will be making myself go out and talk to people. I suspect it may be like my search for an agent: a lot of knocking on doors and a lot of No, thank you.

Recently Linen Press have withdrawn their books from Amazon because every sale costs them £3. Yes, that’s right. Amazon takes 60%. So The Making of Her will be available through the Linen Press website, through Gardners and in chain stores like Waterstones if we can persuade them to take it. The indies may stock it but their turnover is generally small. An individually tailored marketing package and a personal approach seems to be the best, and only way forward.

Of course, the likelihood of selling a large number of copies is small and we don't know whether it depends on good reviews, articles in magazines, the grape-vine or just good luck. But you know what? After years and years of rejections and knock-backs, I consider it a huge privilege to be involved in the process of creating and selling my book. It may never happen again. So I'm going to do my best to enjoy every minute.

REVISION, REVISION, REVISION

The title says it all. Well, nearly all.

The other bit is that I’m still trying to take in the fact that I’ve been offered a contract with this wonderful women’s press:

http://linenpressbooks.com/

- and I have a few months to revise my novel.

I thought my book was 'finished' - or as finished as I could bear it to be. Which, I suppose, is the point. There comes a time when you just cannot - or will not - stand to go through it all yet again, and so you tell yourself that it's done. My novel's been written, critiqued, revised, reported-on, and line-edited (dozens of times). The title's changed, one of the main characters has gone into first person, themes have been de-emphasised, attempts have been made to 'lighten it up' and a new beginning has been written.

Linen Press have asked for more changes - some of them changes which others have suggested, but which I didn't know - or told myself I didn't know - how to do. And the more I enter into the spirit of revision, the more there is to do. I'm discovering themes I wasn't aware of. My characters have other, deeper, stories which send reverberations through the novel. The clues were there, but only now, as I dig deeper, do I 'get' them. New characters are appearing. Even the title is throwing up fresh symbols and meanings. And I'm discovering the steps to a new dance (as well as the Happy Author dance): the dance between micro and macro - from the tiny word-or-phrase edits that subtly change the emphasis or trajectory of a sentence, to the plot overview where whole swathes are being reordered and rewritten.

And then there are those passages that have always niggled, somewhere inside me, but which I've never addressed head-on. There are always more darlings to kill, more purple prose to send packing. It's scary - I hope this work is improving the novel, but I can't really know. I'm too close to it.

What am I learning? That every book contains many versions, all hidden in different clefts and crevices of the original. Books are like people. They're much bigger - and deeper - than they may appear. They contain more potential than we're ever aware of. There's always more to discover, more to learn and we can go on being surprised by ourselves, and by our writing, as long as we live.

Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright puts it perfectly:

A successful writer did not write the book you open in the shop. The successful writer wrote about sixteen crap books, and kept working them, and rearranging them until one less crap book was born. Never look at your work and despair - this is hard, it takes nerves of steel - look at your work and then work at it.