Publisher Feature: Two Ravens Press

Two Ravens Press is an exciting new publisher of literary fiction – recently named by The Bookseller as one of the imprints to watch in 2008 – and one of the founders, Sharon Blackie, kindly agreed to answer some questions for us. The following interview is very long indeed as the interviewer (ahem) got ever so slightly (ahem) carried away with her questions, but the topics discussed are diverse and Ms Blackie’s answers fascinating – so do read on…

For Two Ravens Press, publishing seems to be a very personal venture, and the husband-and-wife team rather reminds me of Hogarth Press. When and how did you and David Knowles decide to start a small press? Was it something you’d always wanted to do – or did your own experience as writers inspire you to do so?

I decided to set up Two Ravens Press when I was trying to figure out how my MA in Creative Writing (from Manchester Metropolitan University) was going to help me make a living! That was the first impetus. The other was my frustration at the current state of publishing in the UK which, with a small number of exceptions, seems to me very boring indeed and intent on producing the same books over and over again. I was frustrated because I couldn’t find the kind of books I wanted to read. I was tired of seeing books about the same old stuff, written in the same old way. I wanted books that were going to make me see the world in a different way, to challenge me. When I told David what I was thinking about he decided it was exactly what he wanted to do too – which was just as well as at the time I had absolutely no idea what was involved and never would have been able to do it by myself!

The press is very new – set up in 2006. What have you learnt in this year or two, and would you do anything differently if you could start over? Have your aims and ambitions changed at all during this time?

What we’ve learned … is that it is incredibly, horribly hard to get books into shops. That, especially if it’s a literary novel by a new writer, so many just don’t want to know. We’ve learned that even good reviews don’t necessarily sell books, and maybe one of these days we’ll figure out what does We’ve also learned what I long suspected – if you put innovative and challenging work in front of people, so they can actually see it, some of them will buy it. So, for example, our most innovative book today, Auschwitz, is on a 3 for 2 promotion in Waterstones Scottish stores. And it is selling extremely well. So the idea that people want the same old books about the same old stuff really isn’t necessarily the case. I’m convinced there is a large population of readers out there who are also bored out of their minds. We want them to find us!

Not sure we’d do anything different … we’ve been running as fast as we can and anything we’d change would be with hindsight, which we couldn’t have had then … And our aims and ambitions are about the same. To bring good, challenging innovative work out and to show that it can sell. That reading literary and innovative fiction isn’t a minority sport. That there are other ways to write, other than straight out of a ‘how to do bestsellers properly’ book.

You’re probably right about the large population of bored readers, though it’s surprising that not even good reviews necessarily sell a book. But the problem is, I think, that – depending on how you look – there’s either too little or too much choice. Personally I find it increasingly difficult to choose between new releases, and often find myself gravitating to a publisher first and foremost. If I see the logo of a ‘favourite’ publisher – Hesperus or Virago, say – I know the book is more than likely to be good if the blurb intrigues me. I don’t know if this is a good thing or bad, but do you think creating a strong Two Ravens ‘brand’ might be the best strategy?

I absolutely agree that a brand is critical and what you say is interesting. I certainly, like so many people, found it with Virago back in the 80s when they had those wonderful green books and a focused quality list to go with it. I still have my Virago collection. I think if you’re looking for work that is highly literary you know you’re going to find it with a handful of imprints and so when I’m browsing, for example, if I see something published by Faber I’m more likely to pick it up than if it’s by Headline. Because it’s more likely to be my kind of book. I think a lot of new independent presses – even some of the bigger ones – aren’t necessarily doing that as well as they could because their lists aren’t very focused – and so they run the risk of becoming just a smaller version of Random House, say, even if for some reason they get a lot of attention doing it. I admire Salt, for example, for having got it just right in the poetry field. They have a very clear image.

I see that you’ve got some established, well-known names on your list: Alice Thompson, for instance (I’m a big fan of hers myself). What do you think it says about Two Ravens Press that you’ve been able to attract these names, despite your being so new and still small?

I think it’s because we’re out there saying things about literature and about what publishing should be about that reflects what they believe too. Because the reason why those authors are no longer published by companies they’ve previously been published by, is that the bigger companies (in general) are just not willing to publish work that has an audience but that is never going to hit the bestseller charts. The mythical ‘midlist.’ And because we don’t want commercial bestsellers – in fact, I’ve turned work down for being too commercial. We want literature. So these authors are exactly the ones we want, not the ones we think we can do without. And most authors like that. That we value their work – that they are our first priority, not our last.

Your mention of ‘midlist’ reminds me – how would you describe the parameters of the kind of fiction you publish? When I think of ‘midlist’, I usually think of the kind of fiction that’s intelligent, elegant, but unfashionable nowadays; quiet and restrained in its elegance, not flashy enough. Is there room for something like that on your list, or do you define yourselves as experimental and cutting-edge?

Eek – I hadn’t meant ‘midlist’ in that way! I meant literally, mid list i.e. those authors in a biggish publishing concern who sell well (who usually happen to be literary authors) but whose sales are average – not blockbusters or bestsellers, but steady. I didn’t mean to associate the word with any particular kind of writing. I’m not a big fan of quiet and restrained writing (in general) – I like flashy writing – lyrical highly poetic writing, full of images, like Michael Ondaatje (as long as it’s not overdone), or raw poetic writing, like Dexter Petley, who we publish. Or Alice Thompson, whose prose is very sparse in many ways but immensely precise with it – which gives her a very distinctive voice – and I know now, from having worked with her, exactly how much care Alice gives to every single sentence! Not all of our work has to be experimental (I like the word ‘innovative’ better – it implies something new or original about the structure, style etc) but the language has to sing. I think, for both of us, that’s what makes the difference between wanting to publish a work and not – something in the language, the style, something new in the voice. It has to be married with an original subject matter but it is language that we are both passionate about. On the other hand, we have some writing that isn’t especially flashy from a language perspective but where the premise of the work is irresistible.

Going back to Hogarth Press for a moment – the Woolfs famously turned down Ulysses… You say about the works you publish that ‘each book is a person we like being around’. Would you publish a book whose merits – even greatness – you can see without its being personally appealing to you? Something groundbreaking, worth publishing, and potentially successful, but something you’re not passionate about?

Gosh, that’s hard. I’d love to say yes but the truth is we are so small that by the time the average novel gets to publication I’ve read it in depth about 6 times! So I have to be able to find something in it that makes me feel that would be a valuable and worthwhile use of my time to do that. I need to deeply love something about it – a storyline, a character perhaps – but most of all a way of writing and a use of language. That’s what I’m looking for when I choose a book. It doesn’t mean that everything we publish is something I would pick up myself if I were in a bookshop, but I suppose it does mean that I personally have to see the value in it and think the world would be a better place with that book in it!

You are very passionate about challenging, innovative, clever literature… art for art’s sake. This makes me wonder, to what extent do you suggest revisions? Do you prefer to interfere with the integrity of the work as little as possible?

If I am offered a book that needs lots of revisions then it’s not good enough to publish. If you can’t write your own book ‘properly’ (whatever that means) why should I write it for you? I know that probably sounds harsh – I don’t mean it to – it’s just that to me a book is a work of art identified closely with the writer. It would be like saying someone had to touch up Picasso’s paintings because he really wasn’t very good at drawing … I only mean big revisions here – of course copy-editing is a different thing – I ‘touch up’ punctuation and grammar all the time. But to suggest that the writer changed an ending, for example? That’s sacrilege, for the kind of work I want to publish I believe that you can learn a lot while you’re writing a book from other people’s comments and that other writers can help you in a big way. But by the time a book comes to me for publication I expect it to be structurally sound, at least.

Do tell us something about the design process. This is an area one hears so little about: all the work that goes into the making of the actual, physical book – and how difficult and important the decisions are on the level of detail.

Right at the beginning we selected our format – paperback and demy (216×138mm) which we believes lends itself well to literary works. Our typesetting is generally quite standard house style – we aim above all for legibility, but elegant legibility I hope. We don’t want the type to interfere with the words (unless we’re talking about a typographical novel, like Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing). So generally speaking with don’t mess with that aspect of book design a whole lot unless a book needs it. But we are careful to make it look as interesting as we can without shouting. The cover exercises a lot of thought. Generally what happens is that as I’m reading, I form a strong image of something about the book – that’s very vague but that’s the way it is! – a scene or something – and I decide what I’d like the cover to represent and then we work hard at putting it together with our own level of Photoshop skill (David’s is much better than mine!) We can’t afford designers right now but also I don’t want them – what book designers always seem to want you to do is learn how to make your book look like everyone else’s books so that you fit in nicely in the bookstores and don’t stand out. That’s the last thing we want! We don’t want to just ‘blend in’ anywhere! Obviously we want the book covers to work – we want them above all to be atmospheric – and we find that generally speaking readers (and bookstores) respond well to our book covers.

We insist on quality printers and quality production, within the print budget that we have of course. A book to me is also an object of beauty. I love old beautifully-bound books, for example. I want to make a book that I want to read – that feels good in your hands. I like to stroke our books

Now, poetry. I know very little about contemporary poetry, but whenever I see a poetry section in a bookshop it seems to be filled with (a) classics, and (b) titles published by Faber & Faber. How do you go about marketing poetry? Is it possible to make profit from it, unless your name is Faber?

It is very hard to sell poetry into bookstores, unless you have an established poet. It’s easier to get local bookstores to take local poetry but getting it into the chains is nigh impossible. Unless you’re Faber, Picador … and maybe Bloodaxe or Salt … Not surprising: there is a huge amount of poetry out there, published by all kinds of little presses and not all of it is good!!! And there’s a lot that’s perfectly fine poetry, too. So no bookshop could conceivably stock even a selection of the available range. We do reasonably well out of poetry, though, because we sell a lot of books at author readings. And I think poetry readers are more likely to go looking, to buy online at specific poetry outlets. It’s unlikely ever to make us rich but it generally makes us a good steady profit and there are very few marketing costs and high-discount sales associated with it.

How do you think your own work as a writer affects your work as a publisher? Does it make you a more sensitive editor, perhaps, or pose its own problems? Are there any particular difficulties about publishing your own work?

I think it’s really important that we’re both writers. It means we don’t see books just as commodities, just like any other product to be marketed and milked and distorted. We have a genuine reverence for good honest literature and we don’t ever want to sell it short or twist it or over-hype it. Strong words, I know – but I have a horror of so much of what goes on in the publishing world. I read The Bookseller every weekend and I come out in spots! This doesn’t mean that we’re impractical, by the way – we have to be very practical, as we have to make a living out of this – we have no other one! – but it means we treat our books and our authors with respect. We may not achieve the same level of sales that a big publisher will but we make up for it in other ways that are important to authors who are writing because of a love of writing, not because they want to be a writer. That’s a critical thing to us. Too many people just want to be published – they don’t care what they write. Sorry, I’m off-subject…

It was a hard decision to publish my novel but I frankly didn’t want to give it over to anyone who would ‘distort’ it in any way (I’m entirely with Virginia Woolf on that, going back to Hogarth again!) and there are so few publishers I would have been comfortable submitting it to. I make no apology for it – our own books are also subject to a rigorous editing process (external as well as internal). But it does mean that it’s viewed differently. For example, Radio 5 live were considering my novel for February Book of the Month and decided then not to include it on the short-list because it was ’self-published.’ If it’s published by a reputable publishing house that is a member of key trade organisations, if it is edited scrupulously, if that publishing house has shown that it can attract well-known respected authors and if that book can be reviewed in respected literary journals like The Scottish Review of Books … why should it matter? So there are downsides, but we fully intend to keep doing it. It’s what we’re about. We are writers and we are publishers – we can’t split the two inside ourselves and so we’re not going to split them artifically in case someone turns their noses up at us. The quality of the books ultimately ought to speak for themselves. David has a collection coming out hopefully in autumn on his experiences as an RAF Tornado pilot over the past 25 years, including Iraq, and we fully intend to publish it ourselves.

These ‘Book of the Month’ and other promotions, book clubs, book awards… they seem to sell a lot of books and often bring deserved attention to ones that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, but it would be interesting to get an insider’s point of view. Realistically speaking, how important are they? Does a publisher have to pull strings and play some games behind the scenes to get recognition?

To be honest, on book awards and most promotions I don’t have a clue yet – we don’t have enough experience and actually we see very little of other publishers. For the Waterstones 3 for 2s it seems to be a simple enough process – we submit all of our new titles to Waterstones on a monthly basis and out of all the submissions they get from all the publishers they deal with, they select a few for 3 for 2 promotions. They make you an offer with discount levels/ any fee and you decide whether or not you want it. But bear in mind that we’ve only had experience of Scottish 3 for 2s. We’re also in discussion with Borders about a possible Scottish Book of the Month and it seems to be equally simple – they go for something they like the look of that they think will sell.

Getting the books noticed is one thing, but in our interview with Catheryn Kilgarriff she also mentioned the acknowledgement of peers. What have your experiences been of the publishing industry/book trade circles? How hard are these circles to break into?

We don’t have a whole lot to do with other publishers and that’s partly because of our location and the fact that we would rather spend the time with writers, generally It’s not any kind of snobbishness or unfriendliness but the approval of other publishers matters much less to me than any other of our potential ‘audiences.’ Not that I have anything against fellow publishers but I think our model is very different and often they don’t really get what we’re about or understand why we want to do some things very differently. We are members of trade organisations like Publishing Scotland and last year were members of the Independent Publisher’s Guild so it’s not at all hard to break into the circles if you want to attend their meetings or social events – but we don’t really see ourselves as part of the industry in that way. And I don’t mean that to be in any way judgmental: just a statement of fact.

Unfortunately I haven’t read your novel (yet!) so I can’t ask any specific questions, but can you tell us something about The Long Delirious Burning Blue and how you came to write it? (Also – did you write it pre-Two Ravens and do you think being your own publisher affects the writing process in any way?)

Being my own publisher was a decision that was taken long after the novel had been completed and after I’d already drafted my letter to agents! – so no, it didn’t affect the writing process at all nor really can I see how it would in future – which I hope is a good thing. The novel was peer-reviewed in a whole bunch of different circles – fellow aspiring writers, established novelists, editors … so I’m quite comfortable with the quality control process and would always do that again if I chose to publish my own work again. The Long Delirious Burning Blue was written as part of an MA in Creative Writing that I did online at Manchester Metropolitan University, so it took me about three years to write – the full length of that course. But the genesis of the novel was a five-year period I spent in America when I made a lot of life changes and as a part of that changing process decided to learn to fly – something utterly inconceivable for me – I’d always been a very nervous flyer – ad it was such a wonderful adventure. I wanted to write about that and also bring in themes around the work I was doing as a psychologist with ‘narrative therapy’ – storytelling and creative writing in health and therapy settings. It’s written in a style that in some ways I’ve outgrown – my latest work is quite different – but as I suspect is true for all first novels, it means a lot to me in many ways and I’m glad I got it out of my system

I was intrigued by your mention of the MA in Creative Writing because I used to be under the impression that creative writing courses tend to stamp out a writer’s individuality – or at least try very hard to do so! But some of the most original writers I’ve read in recent times have MAs or either teach creative writing themselves, so I think I’ve been proven wrong. How do you feel about this and how would you personally go about mentoring a writer? What do you think can be taught?

I have mixed feelings about MAs and they’re quite complicated ones! Mine didn’t actually teach much about the process of writing – which is what I think they should be for – the way it should work is that you should go to do an MA already having some talent, but the MA then helps you hone the craftsmanship of writing – which is a very important thing and does have to be learned, like the practice of any art. My MA did that teaching very badly; I think others do too. I also don’t think it’s possible to develop or create talent in someone who doesn’t have it to begin with and again, like all arts, ‘talent’ is a critical part of it. So is having something new and unique to say, and not everyone who writes well does, frankly. But yes, many of the MA courses, to the extent that I can comment, do seem to want you to fit into a particular box that will lead to you getting published – or at least, producing a ‘publishable manuscript’ and that means that they don’t always seem to encourage innovation and experimentation. But I do think it’s possible to teach or mentor a writer in ways that do so – in fact, one of our authors, Angela Morgan Cutler, who wrote the wonderful and very innovative novel Auschwitz, runs a writing group in Cardiff and I’ve seen some of the work that comes out of that group and it’s fantastic – very real, very raw – because she encourages them to find their own voice and to play with that voice, rather than write in the way that everyone else writes. That’s also my approach to teaching/ mentoring – don’t constrain people. Help them find a way to find a voice before they lock themselves into the kind of work they think they want to write.

Two Ravens Press also offers services for writers: editing, tutoring, proof-reading… Are there any potential pitfalls in being both a publisher and an editorial service? How do you keep the two ventures separate?

At the moment we don’t do very much of this work simply because we haven’t had time to develop it. We don’t advertise it and so it’s only people who find us on the website! – but we do have authors who work with us who can take on some of the load of editing and tutoring and manuscript appraisal, and we ourselves hope to have more time to run courses etc in the second half of the year. Up until now there’s only been me full-time at Two Ravens Press, with my husband/business partner cramming whatever he can into weekends and holidays. But from end March he’ll be full-time too, so that should open up more possibilities to think about how we really want to develop the business. I don’t think there are pitfalls in doing both; we try to make it clear that even if writers get back positive comments it doesn’t mean we’d be the publisher for them because we have a very clear focus for our list and what they send through might not fit at all.

I don’t know if this is just a foreigner’s uninformed point of view, but when I think of Scotland, Scottish publishing and Scottish writers, ‘literary’ and ‘edgy’ are the first words that spring to mind. What does Scottishness – and Scottish writing – mean to you?

I don’t get too hung up about Scottishness – my father’s family is from Edinburgh and still live there, but I was brought up elsewhere and so was David (who’s from South Wales). We do hope to continue always to be able to publish Scottish writers but our focus is international. Scotland has a long history of publishing and yes, has certainly produced a lot of literary and edgy writers – I think it’s different from the rest of the UK simply because, with obvious exceptions like Irvine Welch and Ian Rankin, it’s very hard for some reason to sell Scottish authors south of the border. There’s a perception of an enormous cultural divide that can’t always be bridged and is often illusory. So the Scottish writing community is quite small and heavily interlinked. Is it really more literary than the rest of the UK? To be honest, I don’t know – there are very few Scottish publishers publishing fiction (Canongate, if you still count them as Scottish, Birlinn/Polygon, Luath and ourselves).

What advice would you give to someone who’d like to follow in your footsteps and start a small press?

Oh, boy. Don’t???!!! The range of skills that are required is enormous. David and I between us have a whole bunch of different skills – I’ve been in a few different careers throughout my life and the skills I’ve developed are very different from his so between us we cover a lot of ground. You need to be able to do everything yourself at first or it’s not financially viable – unless you can drum up lots of funding, but that has its own pitfalls as it’s hard to make enough profit to pay it back. You need to be able to edit, proof, develop author relationships, typeset, design your own covers and produce your own covers, run the very complicated accounts, build relationships with booksellers, buyers, do publicity and marketing and … If you don’t have those skills, do a masters in publishing. There are a few available now and they seem to provide a really good background. It is a very tough business to break into and a very tough business to make a profit in. You have to have a very clear vision and be very very tenacious indeed. And maybe a wee bit bloody-minded too

Lastly, this is something I always ask… Please recommend five books, and tells us a little about your choices.

These aren’t necessarily brand new books as it’s so hard still to find current books that I’m really passionate about. I’ve picked five of my all-time favourites, of which there are many so this was a hard choice!

The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital. Read her in the late 80s; she’s not very well known in this country (originally from Australia, then lived in Canada and now in the US) but her books are wonderful – full of disappearances and dislocations and stories … very hard to describe but beautiful haunting novels. Read anything she wrote (except for the last one about terrorism, which I didn’t rate – can’t remember its name).

Lovesong by Nikki Gemmell. This woman writes the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read. Read this or Cleave or Shiver – they’re all wonderful. Another Australian author…

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Streets above her other work and if there’s anyone left out there who hasn’t read it I’d recommend it very strongly. It has everything and the ending section is unbearably lovely and poignant.

A Brief Stay With the Living by Marie Darrieussecq. Again, it’s all about language for me. An inventive, innovative honest raw voice of the kind that the French seem to specialise in (see folk like Hélène Cixous, Chantal Chawaf) but we never seem to produce. Or maybe do produce but just don’t publish, I don’t know.

David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. Better for me than Cloud Atlas – much deeper, much more exciting and original. I’m a bit behind the times reading this one, but I love it. I love the way he pieces bits of the mystery together and I love his style. Interesting that he’s the only British author I’ve selected Perhaps because in the UK we publish work that is very like other work because it is such a very tough market out there, and the literary work that seems to sell is generally quite tame and genteel.

Many thanks to Sharon Blackie for the interview! Visit the Two Ravens Press website for more information about the publisher and their books, and we’ll be reviewing some of their titles here on Vulpes Libris in the future.

Related posts:

• Review of Prince Rupert’s Teardrop by our own Lisa Glass
• Interview with Lisa
• Review of Sharon Blackie’s novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue