SnowBlog

24 Aug 2006: Update on submissions

This post is for all those people who so kindly think of Snowbooks when embarking on the road to publication. Er, we are in a bit of a spin, submissions-wise. We have hundreds of manuscripts to read, dating back to 9th May, and are already at maximum work capacity. We really don't want to close the door on submissions, even temporarily, but this is an apology to those who've already submitted, and those who are about to, because it's going to take us a while to read through all the scripts. It's heartbreaking because we're pretty sure that, nestled in the hundreds of emails, are one or two gems, twinkling away. I just hope we get to them before their owners give up on us... so again, a plea to bear with us and an apology for it taking so long. You wouldn't believe how much work a publisher has to do... given that we don't write the books, physically distribute them (thanks to our distributor LBS) or run the shops that sell them, you'd think it would be pretty straightforward. If you're interested, the greatest drains on our time are cover design, editing, rights and permissions, proofreading, typesetting, marketing, sales (so much activity can be condensed into these two words!), data maintenance, image manipulation (that sounds bad, doesn't it), printer management and all the dancing that needs doing when a book comes back from the printer/sells well/gets a good review.

posted on August 24, 2006 08:43 AM | | Comments (0) | Leave a comment

20 Aug 2006: Rich

Two weeks ago my friend Richard died. He and his wife Roni, who we're all thinking of, founded White Ladder Press about the same time as we founded Snowbooks and Hazel founded Accent Press. We were the three muskateers, challenging the industry with our little pointy swords and flashy feather-topped hats. He died at 56 of a heart attack.

On Friday it was Rich's funeral. No quiet shuffling off for him: a 20 foot blazing pyre with a pirate flag sticking out the top; shrieking late afternoon fireworks and Leonard Cohen playing in the idyllic stream-bounded field that makes up their front garden in Devon.

Dealing with death is a deeply personal thing and I have found that time is the enemy for me: as the days have passed I've found the image of Rich slipping in my mind from a life-filled man with huge warmth and generosity of spirit to someone who's gone, who's passed on, and that cold feeling, that fear of forgetting him and letting him die is awful. So it was of huge comfort to hear some out-takes at his funeral from his own recording of the audio book for his Rules of Life book, and then to read this weekend a couple of his books. His warmth, voice and spirit live on! What great legacy writing is, if you can do it - a comfort to those who knew you, a way of leaving your mark and affecting other people after you've gone. Good old books. Good old Rich. I'll miss you, but I'll visit you in your writing.


posted on August 20, 2006 05:18 PM | | Comments (0) | Leave a comment

09 Aug 2006: Veering between the straightforward and the bizarre

The Edgier Waters is picking up some fine reviews from some excellent critics (of course, we would say that, but hey: judge for yourselves...):

In the August 2006 issue of The Hastings Trawler (out next week, GBP3.00 inc. p+p), John Barker discusses the various contributions, particularly enjoying "HP Tinker's The Morrissey Exhibition which, with a light touch has the singer's miserabilism and fame set out as any other exhibition in which a new exhibit will be "the small earthquake experienced personally by Morrissey himself on 3rd July 2002" and which says more about celebrity -- the capitalist version of the Cult of the Personality -- than a whole genre of novels with this theme. It's a real achievement to make something of satire which nowadays is so easily soggy. Better still is the sharpness under the apparent whimsy of Ben Myers' The Missing Kidney." You can read the whole review over at 3:AM.

Meanwhile, over at the peerless Bookmunch, Peter Wild writes: "It's rare, a book like Edgier Waters... Just ask yourself how many books you've bought and read this year that suffer from a surfeit of ideas. Not too many I'll warrant. This is the kind of book we should cherish. This is the kind of book we should all have on our shelves, to show the world that we're not afraid of being challenged, not afraid of thinking. In point of fact, I feel sorry for the average reader, the he or she who can't deal with a book that reads like a thrilling magazine (and you have to ask yourself how they deal with life and all the things that life throws at them, if their tiny brains can't deal with the shift between a story and a poem and a piece of non-fiction). They’re missing out. They're missing out on so much. But most of all they're missing out on Edgier Waters..." Full review here.

Can't say fairer than that, really.

posted on August 9, 2006 10:36 AM | | Comments (0) | Leave a comment