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
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