Stories that make sense
I’m very excited (and a little bit apprehensive) to be attending the London Book Fair today. If you’re going, you can see me…
… talking about The Self-Publishing Experience, where I’ll be on a panel with some of the other authors on The Selfies shortlist, at 9.45am.
… discovering who’s won the first ever Selfies Award, at 4.30pm.
Both those events are in the Author HQ.
Outside those times, I’ll probably be wandering around bemusedly or looking for a cup of coffee.
Indieathon is back! This time it’s being organised by Ninja Book Box, who have a Youtube video about it here, and takes place over a week (8th-15th March) rather than a month. (Last time round I only found out about it halfway through March, so this is less of an adjustment than one might think.)
Anyway, I’m planning to join in, in a somewhat desultory way – by which I mean that I’ll be reading a little bit more than usual for a not-writing fortnight, and what I read will come from independent publishers and self-publishers, and will appear in due course as an #indiechallenge review.
The picture might look like one of those carefully curated TBR piles, but it’s really just a collection of books that I’ve been meaning to get around to reading that happened to be in an accessible place on the bookshelves. I need to check some of them to make sure that they really are independent publishers, and not just some imprint of one of the Big Five. And of course The Art of Lent is going to take me rather more than a week, otherwise there isn’t really much point to it.
Also in the middle of that week is the London Book Fair, which I will be attending courtesy of my Selfies Award shortlisting. The awards ceremony is in the afternoon of Tuesday 12th March, and I may also be appearing on a panel in the morning, talking about ‘the joys and perils of self-publishing’, in the morning. Both events are in the Author HQ.
*Now is probably not the moment to confess that I’ve always found the term ‘indie’ insufferably twee, is it? Oh well. There isn’t really anything else that covers ‘self-publishers, plus independent-but-not-necessarily-small-presses’, and ‘independent’ would sound insufferably pompous.
Well, after a winter that I’ll freely admit has been a bit of a slog in terms of writing, I’ve got three pieces of good news to share this week.
I’m very pleased to announce that A Spoke In The Wheel appears on the first ever shortlist for The Selfies Award. Self-publishing can get you second-guessing yourself and your work, and it’s such a delight to have the quality of your work recognised. Kudos to BookBrunch for establishing this award.
I’d also like to say how good it is to be part of the self-publishing community. All eight women on the shortlist seem to be as pleased for each other as they are for themselves! I’m really looking forward to meeting them at the awards ceremony.
My short story Stronger Than Death appears in Rainbow Bouquet, a Valentine’s anthology from Manifold Press.
Cecily Strangways could never see ghosts – until she became one herself. Now, three hundred and fifty years later, she’s got to find some way of saving the family home from being turned into offices – and persuade the Grey Lady to help her.
The other stories in the anthology also look like a lot of fun! You can pre-order it at Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, and Smashwords.
You’ll have to wait a bit longer for this one, but I’ve also got a short story lined up for the Lesbian History Motif Podcast’s fiction series. Again, the rest of the table of contents looks very intriguing as well.
In The Mermaid, a farmer’s daughter on the treacherous south-west coast of the Isle of Wight finds unexpected treasure in a shipwreck. But someone else thinks it belongs to him…
I remain committed to my principle of reading whatever the hell I feel like, but I liked the look of this challenge and I think it’s compatible with it. It will be interesting to see what the balance between books from small presses and self-published books ends up looking like. My instinct is that I’ll pay more attention to self-published books, for fear of being bitten by imprints; on the other hand, I’d like to put less business in the way of Amazon this year, and more in the way of independent bookshops.
I’ll be posting brief write-ups on this blog, but if I don’t have anything nice to say about a book I won’t say much at all.
There’s a bingo card:
It would be very poor business practice not to point out that I have two books that are eligible for this challenge.
I can potentially help with the following squares:
I also have a short story in Supposed Crimes‘ Upstaged: an anthology of queer women in the performing arts, which is:
There’s only one of me, and I’m a woman, so you could make a case for my being both:
and:
If you’ve never heard of me, I’m:
And, if you’re not from the UK, I’m:
Finally, of course, there’s the old favourite:
Now to see what’s already on my bookshelves that will count towards the challenge… Whatever you’re intending to read, I hope 2019 has many good books in store for you!
Today the blog tour takes us to Literary Flits, where Stephanie says,
I read the whole book in a couple of days and actually felt quite bereft at the end when I closed the cover on these friends.
‘Pudding’ is a lot more polite than what I actually said when I took my first look at the proof copy of A Spoke in the Wheel.
The front cover has come out beautifully; it looks rather better in real life than it does in that photo. The inside… not so much. The text on about half the pages had been misaligned, and came out an odd shade of purple.
The photo below shows (bottom right) one of the offending pages, (bottom left) one of the pages that was just about all right, and (top) a spread from Speak Its Name for comparison.
Since then, I’ve been engaged in correspondence with Lulu, who have been very apologetic and promise that this is very rare. I do hope so. There was an article in the latest edition of The Author by a man who prints his own books, but I feel that this is taking things a bit far even for a control freak like me.
Having said all that, I’m feeling a lot better about the whole thing than I was this time last week. The cover looks good, the ebook looks good, the interior of the paperback will look good when it’s printed properly, and we are on track.
Well, considering I didn’t find out about #IndieAthon until two weeks in, I didn’t do too badly…
As it happened, I’d already got two down: I’d had to spend a day in bed with a horrible cold, and The Comfortable Courtesan and Rustick Exile made for excellent, well, comfort reading. The characters are old friends now, and it was lovely to go back to the beginning of everything and remind myself how it all started.
A. M. Leibowitz‘s Anthem, from independent publisher Supposed Crimes, was my next #IndieAthon read. Leibowitz is one of the few authors who’s interested in the intersections between religious and LGBTQ identities. This one is particularly entertaining for anyone who’s ever had to stifle a snigger at the unintentional suggestiveness of much worship music.
Firebrand by Ankaret Wells was a re-read – it’s a steampunk fantasy romance. In between the first time and this I’ve read some of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia, so was able to pick up a lot more of the allusions and appreciate the setting. Having said that, I didn’t feel that I was missing that last time around – this was more of an added bonus!
Another book that came from a small press, rather than being self-published, was R. V. Bailey’s Credentials. With some dating from before U. A. Fanthorpe’s death, and some afterwards, this collection of poetry spans all sorts of emotions and experiences. I think my favourite was Suddenly, but Hard Work has a poignant kick to it.
I finished the month with How I Broke Bath, and other stories, by The Hunter. The man behind that name died earlier in March. I met him a couple of times, not enough to say that I knew him well, but he was a good friend to people that I consider good friends. He had an ear for a pun and a knack for telling a story: both are evident in this collection of blog posts.
I’ve very much enjoyed #IndieAthon – reading, recommending, and generally hanging around on the hashtag. I hope it runs again!
Still no proofs. Well, no, that’s not fair – they’ve almost certainly arrived by now, but I haven’t had the opportunity to go and pick them up. I’ve been away for the last week, so I haven’t been fretting too much, but I am very aware of how much I just want to be done already.
That’s normal for this stage in proceedings.
Other things which seem to be normal for this stage in proceedings:
I have this idea that I’m a very patient person.
One of the things that I’ve discovered over the last four years or so is that writing involves an awful lot of waiting. Waiting for agents and publishers to get back to me. Waiting for editors to finish reading the latest draft and tell me what they make of it. Waiting for myself, to get the perspective that I need in order to make any meaningful decision about what to do next.
Self-publishing cuts out some, but not all, of that waiting. I’ve talked before about the fact that I have to do absolutely everything myself. At least that means that I have something to be getting on with while I’m waiting.
Waiting for emails. Waiting – as I have been all this week – for the proof copy to be printed. Waiting – as I will be tomorrow – for the thing to arrive.
The thing about waiting for the proofs is that I can’t do anything else to the book. There’s no point reading through, because I might have to change something. And there’s no point in changing anything before the proofs come back, because then I’ll only have to order another set. And I can’t approve the book for distribution because something might need changing.
And actually it turns out that I am terrible at waiting. I’ve spent all week refreshing my orders page, waiting it to flip from ‘Fulfilling’ to ‘Shipped’. That happened today, and now I don’t have anything to refresh.
Maybe the book will turn up tomorrow. And if it doesn’t, well, there’s not much I can do. Except wait.
On Monday my mother texted me to say ‘Looks like ASITW is very timely’. I texted back to say, ‘Haha, it always is’, and felt slightly smug about being with it for once.
Yesterday I looked at Twitter and discovered that I’d missed a good thirty per cent of an initiative that’s very relevant to my interests, as they say, and now I feel less smug.
#IndieAthon is a month-long celebration of self-published authors and small presses. The organisers have this to say:
Throughout the month you can read however many books you want, not all of them have to be for the readathon of course, but the goal is to read as many indie-published or self-published books as you want! The only limitation to what you can read is that it has to be either self-published or published by a small or independent publisher to count for the readathon. The books can be old, new, popular, unpopular, fiction, non-fiction, anything!
We also would really like you to post reviews of the books you read on Goodreads, Amazon and wherever else you want to post it! Reviews are so important for authors, and especially for smaller authors it can make a huge difference!
There’s a bingo card and everything!
So, hello, #IndieAthon, here I am, sneaking in through the back door, hanging my coat over a chair, grabbing a drink from a tray, and pretending I’ve been here all along.
Um. Er. Yes. Hello. I’m Kathleen Jowitt, and my book Speak Its Name* was the first self-published book ever to be shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize. I’m in the middle of preparing my second novel, A Spoke in the Wheel, for publication, and that’s my excuse for not having looked at Twitter properly all month.
I’m self-published and very glad of it. Why? One word. Freedom. Self-publishing gives me the freedom to do my own thing, and to do my own thing at my own pace. I’m only answerable to myself. I don’t have to worry about whether anybody actually wants to read a book about a Christian lesbian university student finding her way out of the closet, or, if they liked that, whether they’ll then be interested in a disgraced professional cyclist.
I don’t have to please other people to get my book into print. I just have to put the work in myself. I’m free to experiment, to tell the stories that nobody else tells.
And I’m free to do my own thing at my own pace. I’m the only person who gets to set me deadlines. If I decide that something needs an extra six months’ work to get it really good, I’m free to put those six months in. Conversely, if I have a spare couple of hours and I want to get going on the back cover copy or the front cover design, then I can do that. I don’t have to wait on decisions from anybody else.
Sometimes it’s a scary thing, this freedom. It means taking responsibility for every little thing. Every word that makes it into the finished book is there because I put it there, and it stays there because I didn’t take it out. I can – and I do – ask other people to read for inaccuracy and insensitivity, but the decision whether or not to respond with changes remains with me. The cover, typesetting and formatting, are exactly as good as I can get them.
Any errors or infelicities remaining, as it says on my acknowledgements page, are my own. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Kathleen Jowitt 