How I got published: Marian Perera

I am very fond of Marian Perera: she is a knowledgeable and prolific member of Absolute Write, has supported How Publishing Really Works ever since it first appeared, and runs an excellent blog of her own. She studies medical laboratory technology when she isn’t writing, or blogging about writing. Her debut novel, Before the Storm, is a fantasy that combines steam engines and a steamier romance. You can read an extract of it here.

She works tirelessly at her writing, and puts a huge amount of effort into helping other writers improve. I was so glad when I learned that she'd sold her first book: here's how it came about.


170,000 words.

That was roughly the length of my first manuscript, and it was the first in a projected four-book series. Even for fantasy, it was… ambitious.

I’d meant it to be a grand Tolkienesque epic: traditional in story, sweeping in scope. Selling such an opus would not be easy, but among the polite rejections was a request for a full from Tor.

That turned out to be a mixed blessing. It kept me persevering through more rejections, but I also took it as a sign that the epic was good. Even when the full was rejected I kept writing sequels – sequels which, of course, couldn’t be submitted anywhere.

It was disappointing and began to wear down my interest in the epic. So I started playing with a quirky idea for an unrelated fantasy. Since that wasn’t the start of a doorstopper series, I thought of it as a small, self-contained story that took second place to the epic.

But it was surprisingly fun to write. Because it wasn’t a strict fantasy in the tradition of Tolkien, it could involve science as well as magic. I’ve always been interested in chemistry – well, in blowing things up – so the characters used calcium carbide cannons and steam engines in a battle. And there were also some steamy encounters that didn’t involve the engines.

At that point, I realized the little project had grown into a standalone novel. Leaner and better-written than the epic, it stood more of a chance of meeting agents’ and publishers’ submission guidelines as well.

So I sent it out, revised, resubmitted and signed up with an agent.

That turned out to be a mixed blessing too. The agent’s advice improved my manuscript, and I learned something else in the process – what writers should and shouldn’t do when searching for representation. But in the end, the steam engines were spinning their wheels in that particular situation.

By then I’d also learned to reconsider anything that didn’t further my career, whether that was a grand epic or an agent. It helped that steampunk was increasingly popular, and I decided to submit the manuscript myself. I looked for a publisher that didn’t require representation, such as a small press.

This time around, I did the research before submission, rather than after acceptance. Some writers recommended Samhain Publishing for speculative fiction with romantic elements, and there are independently compiled sales stats and royalty figures on Samhain and other romance e-publishers at Show Me The Money and EREC.

Samhain had a thread over twenty pages long on the Absolute Write forums and I read through that. Given the choice of sending a manuscript to a general submissions address and targeting someone in particular, I picked an editor who said she liked strong worldbuilding and characters from different cultures. She responded a month later, accepting the manuscript.

There isn’t too much mixed about this blessing, maybe because I finally started doing things right. My first novel, Before the Storm, has just been released by Samhain and I’m very pleased with its design and production. My editor expressed interest in a sequel, but while I’ll start that very soon, I’ll also query agents about another standalone fantasy with a scientific twist. This time it’s dragons and clinical psychology.

Yes, I figured out what I do best – which isn’t to write like Tolkien, it’s to write like me.

What Happens When An Agent Gives Up?

It can seem, sometimes, that agents make too little effort on behalf of their clients—particularly their newer, unpublished ones.

There are relatively few major fiction publishers in the United Kingdom. If an agent can’t place a book after ten or fifteen submissions, they might not try further: chances are there won’t be any other good-enough, big enough publishers which they think would “fit” the book well. So it might seem that an agent has made only a handful of submissions before advising their disappointed clients that the book has failed to sell, and that they should move on and write a new, more commercial book. In this situation writers are often left feeling that there’s not been nearly enough effort made on behalf of their precious books—especially when they consider the pages and pages of publishers that are listed in the Writer’s Handbook. To make it worse, it’s almost impossible for a writer to then find another agent to take their book on, as the highest-earning routes for it have already been exhausted.

But all is not lost. There are some wonderful smaller presses which fall beneath most agents’ radars because of their lower (or non-existent) advances. These presses usually accept unagented submissions, so there's nothing to stop a writer from making submissions for themselves if their agent gives up on their books.

Some of these presses produce beautiful books, and achieve sales that the bigger presses envy: Sarah Bower's The Needle in the Blood, from the consistently good Snowbooks, and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (or try this edition, with a much-improved jacket design), from Tindal Street Press, are prime examples.

Writers have to be careful: there are plenty of vanity publishers out there masquerading as small presses. And I'd still always advise a writer to find an agent to check and negotiate any contract before they signed. But if an agent is unable to place a book, that doesn't mean it's unpublishable.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Publisher’s View

Salt Publishing is a tiny independent press which specialises in publishing strong literary fiction and poetry. As is so often the case for independent presses, Salt has struggled to remain in business: but, thanks to the determination of its proprietors and their incredible ability to find exceptional authors, Salt Publishing now has an established and growing reputation for publishing beautiful, exciting books which people actually want to read, including Tania Hershman's collection of beautiful short stories, The White Road and Other Stories. My thanks to Jen Hamilton-Emery, Salt Publishing’s co-founder and publisher, for this piece.


For eight years I did, quite literally, conduct my life from within a small press. Salt, which both me and my husband run, lived in a room off our living room. During this time the walls in the hall took on the colour of cardboard, and our garage and shower room were redesignated as warehousing space. Our every waking minute was spent in the office – before breakfast, last thing at night, in between dinner courses, we juggled sending emails, typesetting, packaging and franking books. Salt was as intimate a part of our daily lives as our children were, though they got less of our time by far.

In June 2008, Salt moved to an office two miles down the road in the next village. We have our house and back and our sanity restored. But I do think there’s something to that old adage ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps’ that keeps us going as a small press. Life at Salt is challenging yet rewarding in ways that most conventional employment isn’t. And quite possibly in ways that working in a large publishing house isn’t.

For a small press to survive and thrive, it has to find its niche. Forget trying to compete with the big guys; many of them happily sell shed-loads of books at a loss, aiming for quantity over profit and instead making their money on the selling of TV, film and translation rights. Small presses however have to think smart. They have to become known as the best in their chosen field, and some have done this extremely well, becoming the leading expert in areas such as welding (Woodhead Publishing) and autism (Jessica Kingsley Publishing). For literary publishers however, things are that bit tougher.

Go to any newspaper and look at the book reviews section. Chances are that at least 75% of literary reviews are of books published by corporate publishers or large independents. That is the power of employing a team of publicists with entertainment budgets. At Salt we have a small board and a team of commissioning editors. Two of us run Salt’s operations (Chris and me), we both decide which books are to be published, negotiate contracts with the author or their agent, pull together all the bibliographic data and manage its flow through the various book systems around the world to ensure that every book shop and on-line retailer knows about it, copy edit, typeset, proof, design the cover, liase with the printer and work with the author to promote and market the book. We are lucky that we now have a part-time member of staff who packages, franks and sends orders and review copies – until recently we also did this ourselves and you wouldn’t believe how time consuming or problematic getting books from point A to point B can be. We have a couple of interns who now help us phone bookshops and other places we think would be interested in stocking or promoting our books, as well as working on converting texts into ebooks (all this too used to be us). We load and manage our website, plus our on-line shop and our blogs, Facebook Fanclub (over 3,000 members), as well as do our best to answer emails. And we have three children, ages three, ten and twelve, all at different schools.

All of this is good fun. And a lot of work. It’s work that we hope pays off through people buying our books and bringing in the income we need to keep going. So far, this hasn’t been the case, and although our sales have been growing (until the credit crunch set in, when they dropped by 12%) we have had to rely on various grants from the Arts Council England, as well as odd pots of money from the Department of Trade and Industry, the Australia Council and overseas governments for translation grants. Our particular areas of publishing – poetry and short stories – do not lend themselves to huge rights deals that the big players can negotiate with film companies. We have had several stories and poems on the radio and in anthologies, but not to the extent that we have the luxury of not keeping an eye on the profit margin of our book sales.

Despite this however, we remain positive. Positive that our sales will grow again, once people get over the fear of spending money and we won’t need to rely on those hard-to-get grants. And we continue to be proud of our publishing. Basically, we love our books. We love that we can publish work that we feel deserve to be shared with the world, without having to concern ourselves with whims and fads that the big players have to. Salt’s niche is two of the trickiest areas of publishing but because they are genres that matter to us personally, we are on a mission to make them count. It’s hard to describe the feeling we get when we come across a manuscript that knocks our socks off, or when books arrive in the office, freshly printed, or when an author first gets their book in their hands and loves it. Or going into a bookshop and seeing Salt books on the shelf. Or hearing that one of our authors has been shortlisted for a prize, or, as happened recently, publicly commended by judges of a major award (Tania Hershman by the Orange Prize judges). All of that is why we do it.

Life in a small press? I wouldn’t change it for the world.


Last week we heard how Tania Hershman has promoted her book, The White Road and Other Stories; and next week Sara Crowley reveals how a good bookseller can make all the difference to the sales of a book.

If you'd like to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to Tania at tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: Self-Promotion

Tania Hershman is a former science journalist who has recently been commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. Her first short story collection, The White Road and Other Stories, is published by Salt Modern Fiction (and has been very favourably reviewed by Sally Zigmond, who comments here regularly). Her short stories have been widely published in print journals and online, and she is the founder and editor of The Short Review, a site dedicated to reviewing short story collections and anthologies. She has generously offered to give away a signed copy of The White Road to one of my readers: you'll find the details at the end of this piece. My thanks to her for contributing.


My first book, The White Road and Other Stories, was published in September 2008 by Salt Publishing, a small press based in the UK. I was delighted when they offered me a book deal. After having had an agent for several years with no result (she dealt only with mainstream publishers and they all told her, "come back when she's written a novel,") I decided to take matters into my own hands and submit stories myself to Salt. The agent and I have now parted ways amicably.

Being published by a small press has meant for me that I have a personal connection with my editor, Jen Hamilton-Emery, rather than feeling lost in a large publishing house. I made suggestions about the book cover, and Salt came up with what I consider the perfect cover. I chose what stories to include and proofed the manuscript several times, but apart from that didn't have any other input into the process, which was fine by me. I was thrilled when the book was published, I think it is beautiful.

Jen made it very clear to me, and to fellow Salt authors I am in touch with, that Salt doesn’t have the resources to do much promotion and that I would need to be very involved in this. Before the book came out I was given a long author questionnaire to fill out listing potential reviewers, competitions the book could be submitted to, author events I might appear at, and other ideas for promotion.

I wasn't quite prepared for how much work promoting a book would be and in some ways it has been overwhelming. I had experience building websites, I built my own site and the online review journal I edit, The Short Review, so I always planned to build a website for the book. This has links to excerpts of the stories, videos of me reading at a short story conference, some of the stories which having been broadcast on BBC Radio and podcasts, and it also has some background and "added value" material about the book. Half the stories in my book are inspired by articles from the weekly UK magazine New Scientist so I created a page explaining my concept of "science-inspired fiction", with links to other books and websites that I see as fitting into this category. Another page explains flash fiction (which is the other half of my book), with links to many online literary magazines that publish flash fiction. I get a lot of hits to the website from people searching for "flash fiction", so I am doing more than just selling my book, I am providing resources for writers.

Another good idea was my partnering with Eco-Libris, a company which "balances out" the trees used to print books by planting a tree for every book. I pay them a small sum per copy printed, and they plant a tree. They are very active online, they took part in my Virtual Book Tour (see below) and they publicised my book on green websites far and wide. I joined forces with them because I hated to think of the amount of paper involved in my book, and our partnership has exceeded my expectations!

In terms of reviews, Salt has been fabulous, sending out review copies to anyone I've asked them to send to, wherever in the world, and this, together with my nudging of the reviewers, has resulted in quite a few reviews. Because of the connection to their articles, I was very eager that New Scientist see the book, and hoped they would review it. Getting them a review copy was a struggle, the books kept getting lost, but Jen persevered and I kept in close contact with them to ensure they remembered who I was. This paid off: not only did they reprint the title story, The White Road, on their website, with a link to the article that had inspired it, they reviewed the book in their Christmas Books Special: Best of 2008! I sold two hundred copies in one week at Christmas and was for a time in Amazon UK's Top Ten Bestselling Short Story Collections, and I believe this was down to the New Scientist review.

Reviews are vital, especially for short story collections which get far less attention than novels, and this was why I set up The Short Review eighteen months ago to focus exclusively on reviewing short story collections. I now have over forty reviewers worldwide reviewing ten books, new and older, every month. In the end, I decided I couldn't commission anyone to review my book for the site, this smacked too much of nepotism, but I have received a lot of attention because of The Short Review, which was wonderful yet unexpected, and this has definitely had a positive effect on my book, with reviewers asking for a review copy of my book to "return the good karma".

Being a small press with limited resources, Salt have seized the opportunities the Internet provides, and are very dynamic and active on their website, blogs and Facebook pages. I have also been one of Salt's "guinea pigs" for their Cyclone Virtual Book Tour program: I found eleven blogs willing to host a stop on my tour, and was interviewed by a blog a week over eleven weeks, about various aspects of my writing, my reading, my life — anything and everything. This was wonderful, yet exhausting, even though I didn't have to travel anywhere! I am not sure how much this translated into direct sales, but I strongly believe it created a buzz. I used my websites, my blog, Facebook, MySpace, RedRoom (a website for authors), and various online writing communities (WriteWords, Zoetrope), to publicise every leg of the tour, as well as any reviews the book receives. I also signed up to be an Amazon author, and blogged on Amazon.com's page for my book. A recent review on Amazon (by someone I don't know) mentioned "the hype on the internet and in New Scientist", so I guess something is working!

It's been six months and while the Virtual Tour is over, book promotion goes on and several reviews have just been published, in an Australian print magazine and two book blogs, with others forthcoming in the US, Canada and the UK, I hope. I was recently in the UK and took part in the launch of a short story anthology at Jewish Book Week, and although that wasn't about my book, they stocked The White Road and Other Stories in the festival bookshop, and I talked about it during the event. I also went back to my high school in London and spoke to a group of 14-year-olds about writing. I was trying to think "out of the box" about book promotion and had seen from their website that they had a creative writing society so I wrote to them and offered to come. They were thrilled, it was a wonderful experience — and I was amazed when three of them bought books! They have invited me to come back and do a flash fiction workshop next time I am in England. I also alerted the universities I studied at and the mentioned me in their alumni newsletters, from which my websites have had a number of hits.

So, to sum up, promoting a book is hard work, and not, I believe, just for those published by small presses. Authors have to do a lot these days, whoever the publisher is and whether it is a short story collection or a novel. I expect to be promoting my books for many more months, if not a year or two. I put all the time and effort into writing the stories, Salt put all the time, money and effort into producing the book, the least I can do is try and do what I can to get copies sold, from the point of view of my royalties as well as readership. I am trying not to let this interfere too much with my current writing, but it does, there is no getting away from that. That is part of having a book, and I wouldn't have it any other way. However continuing to write and publish new short stories, and enter into short story competitions, also serves to publicise my book.

Next week we hear from Jen Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing, when she discusses the difficulties involved in running an independent press; and the week after it's Sara Crowley's turn, when she reveals how a good bookseller can make all the difference to the sales of a book.

If you'd like to be in with a chance to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

In Search Of Perfection

Heston Blumenthal's latest book, The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, has a cover price of £125 and is, by all accounts, an exquisite work (I can't comment on it directly as I've not seen it: but if his publishers would like to send me a review copy I would be very grateful indeed).

I can't help feeling that Heston missed a trick here. With his obsessive attention to detail and his constant search for perfection (I love that book), he might have been better off approaching the Ivory Press to publish this particular book.

Ivory Press’s books are exquisite. Each title is an individual work of art, and is produced in a strictly limited edition. I have only ever held one of its titles in my hands and the quality of production and design was outstanding: it was in one of my favourite independent booksellers, Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock. I saw Blood on Paper: Artists and Books on a shelf and when Anna Dreda (whose shop it is) noticed me looking at it she sat me down and lifted it into my hands and the two of us gazed at it, enraptured.

I won't spoil the experience for you: go to Ivory Press's website and look at the books for yourself, and make sure to read the descriptions carefully. The books are beautiful: every single one.

Snowsales

The rather lovely independent publisher Snowbooks is now publishing details of sales and returns on its new(ish) Snowsales blog.

Do you want to know how many copies of each title Snowbooks sold in December? How many returns bookshops made the following month? Or which bookshops return copies of a book one day, only to reorder them again a few days later (and what the environmental and business implications of this silly shilly-shallying really are)? It's all there. Each blog post takes the form of an overview with a spreadsheet attached, which you can download and examine at your leisure

All you have to do to read all this fascinating stuff is email Emma Barnes and ask for a password, so she knows who has access to her sales information. You can find out everything you need to know here.