Artisan Publishing

Week 15 – in which we get our priorities straight

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Your book is about to be published. As publication day approaches, what is your single most wished for outcome? Riches? Fame and recognition? Or just satisfaction at the fulfilment of some artistic vision or personal goal? I know, I know. You want them all! But, for the purposes of the thought experiment, you can’t have them all. And we’ll have none of that “but they’re all equally important” shenanigans. So, choose only one:

  • Money
  • Recognition
  • Creative fulfilment

You may be tempted to quibble, here. If I have recognition, you say – glowing reviews, awards and prizes – then won’t that lead to sales? Well, it might do, but not necessarily. Search Amazon or Goodreads, and you’ll find lots of books that were well reviewed by traditional media, even won awards, but judging by their ratings simply failed to ignite such appreciation in a general readership (and thereby failed to sell in significant numbers). Conversely, a book targeting a popular genre might have no traditional press coverage at all, but sell by the truckload. So, critical recognition and financial recompense don’t always go together.

But what about recognition and creative fulfilment? If I win the Booker Prize, isn’t that a stamp of approval in terms of creative quality and artistic vision? Well, potentially it is, except for the fact that people frequently disagree as to the merits of the winner, and over the years many works now considered classics have failed even to make the shortlist. Which means that artistic merit and public recognition are sometimes distinct things too.

So, for now, let’s keep these three things separate. 

Have you chosen? OK, now let’s take a minute to think about what your choice would mean for your book.

If you chose money, then lots of the creative decisions made during the writing of the book will have been overridden by financial concerns. You will have had to write to market (as received wisdom has it), chasing trends and popular genres, embedding fashionable tropes and themes. Your book will have been shaped not by the muse, but by the need for it to fit a commercial template.

If you chose recognition, then your task is even harder. At least with commercial success there are some strategies that you can follow (even if they don’t always pay off), but being worthy of an award, or a reviewer’s praise, is a purely subjective matter. It’s not really something you can set out deliberately to acquire. Yes, you can try to write something of prize-winning calibre, enter competitions, and you can take part in book giveaways or submit to book reviewers, but at the end of the day how others value your book, or whether they even read it, is completely out of your hands.

Which leaves “creative fulfilment”. This might sound like the booby prize – “Well, at least you enjoyed writing it!” – but is actually I think the most important one. For a start, it is the only outcome that is under your control. Admittedly, it’s hard to take creative pride in something that on publication doesn’t sell a single copy and is universally panned by everyone and their gran, but even here, if you’ve been diligent in your efforts – the manuscript has gone through multiple drafts and revisions, received feedback from fellow writers or beta readers or editors – then you can at least take solace in the fact that you’ve done everything possible to make your book the best it can be. And of course, your creative standards will change over time. So, what creatively fulfils you or holds personal meaning for you right now may not do so in a few years’ time. But that doesn’t mean that this is not a legitimate standard to judge your work by. It just means that creative standards evolve – and that’s a good thing.1

I should point out here that “creative fulfilment”, as I’m using the term, doesn’t necessarily imply “high art”, such as those avant-garde works of literary fiction dedicated to exploring the metaphysics of belly-button fluff.2 Popular and accessible books can still have serious artistic merit, or just be very well crafted. All this just means that you enjoy what you create, it has meaning for you personally, and you put your all into making it meet whatever artistic standards you subscribe to. In this sense, if you put creativity first, without allowing commercial considerations to dictate what you make, then you are an artist, whether or not your “art” wins prizes.3

OK, so let’s develop the thought experiment, and rank the three criteria in terms of importance to you. If I were to do this for WoodPig Press, it would look something like this:

  1. Creative fulfilment
  2. Money
  3. Recognition

Having put creative fulfilment first, it may feel a little odd putting recognition below money. However, aside from the difficulty and unpredictability of garnering literary praise and awards, and the subjectivity involved in all that, focusing on recognition doesn’t really mean very much in practical terms. This isn’t to say that reviews aren’t important, and I certainly wouldn’t turn down an award if someone really insisted, but either they happen or they don’t, so best not to worry about them.

So, in practical terms, what does it mean to put art before money? Many of history’s greatest artists have struggled with this question. Leonardo and Michelangelo both worked within the constraints of patronage and commission, striving to realise a higher, creative vision whilst straitjacketed by the self-serving dictates of popes and princes. Shakespeare not only had to flatter and entertain the monarch and the court, but also put in enough bawdy humour, ghosts and witches, blood, gore and knock-about comedy to get sufficient bums on seats on a Saturday afternoon to keep the Globe in business. The irony now, of course, is that while modern writers and artists have much greater political and social freedom to follow their own muse, they often feel pressured to bend the knee to the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, tailoring their output in the service of capricious algorithms in order just to get noticed and earn a living. And this is as true of traditional publishing as it is of indie and self-pub.

But need it be?

By revamping the traditional submissions process, WoodPig Press is trying to push back against the negative effects that commercial pressures have placed upon publishing. By making submissions anonymous, by dropping the requirement for a synopsis, a hook line, a list of competing titles, and just asking authors to submit whole manuscripts, we ditch the publishing filter that only seeks slight variations on what’s currently selling. Instead – we hope – we’ll allow books to speak for themselves, and receive the sort of original, quirky, and downright weird things that are commonly rejected.

Last night I watched Genius, a film about the relationship between the editor Max Perkins and the writer Thomas Wolfe4. It explores the editor-author relationship, and also provides an interesting contrast in terms of the way things have changed since the 1920s. At one point, Wolfe shows up at Perkins’ publisher Scribner with his latest manuscript in three large boxes, a mixture of typed pages and hand-written notes, all loosely bundled together with string, and the patient Perkins and his staff immediately set to work arranging and transcribing the unwieldy offering. Few were prepared to work with such a wild talent as Wolfe even then – his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, had already been rejected by various publishers before it found a home at Scribner – and it’s estimated that 60 or 70,000 words were cut to make the final book, which still leaves almost a quarter of a million in the published edition. I suspect that few editors would now have Perkins’ courage or patience. 

But the pushback mustn’t stop with submissions. If creativity and quality are your bottom line, then that should also be reflected in terms of design, production and ethics. I’ve spent a lot of thought recently trying to work out what commitment to these values would mean in practical terms. Firstly, it should involve high quality production values – cover design, typesetting, editing and proofreading. It also should entail not using generative AI for any of these tasks, and treating each person involved in the book as a human being deserving of respect and fair financial recompense. Obviously, this makes things difficult for a small, penurious publisher such as ourselves. Aside from finding the money to pay freelancers, there is the investment in the quality of the physical book. Printing has come a long way since Perkins’ day, and it would now be much cheaper to publish Look Homeward, Angel, but it still wouldn’t be cheap. If we received a huge manuscript like that, what should we do? Cut it even further? Reduce the font size and squeeze the page margins? Or screw the cost and make it a deluxe or multi-volume edition, with a price tag to match?

There are also the various ways in which a book can be fancified – French flaps, embossing/debossing, spot UV, deckledor sprayed edges, and so on. The growing popularity of such refinements is in part driven by the continuing digitisation of products and experiences, and the cheapening of image and word by AI. As the musician and singer Kate Bush puts it on her website:

“In a virtual world where no-one knows what’s real, there are people out there who want to feel the music in their hands”

Recognising this has inspired Bush to reissue beautiful special edition vinyls of her albums, and I think the surprising resurgence of vinyl is part of the reaction against the virtual and the automated, and a desire for a return to the physical, the unique and the artisanal. So, I thought, why not apply this philosophy to publishing? Can’t we make WoodPig Press an artisan publisher, making quality books, inside and out?

Haunting all these dilemmas is the spectre of pricing. The typical price of a paperback in a UK bookshop has long been artificially suppressed, to the point where a paperback book over £9.99 is almost taboo, and must justify itself in some way.5 This has not been the case on the European continent, where book prices have risen more in line with inflation. All this is now changing slightly, but even so, a small press is going to struggle to match the pricing strategies of big publishers, whose deeper pockets allow them to benefit from economies of scale: a big print-run can reduce the unit print cost by a lot.

With all this in mind, I decided to ask authors what they wanted. Would they rather their book were priced competitively, and that they received maximum profits? Or would they like the book to be as beautiful and unique as possible? Of course, this isn’t either/or. A compromise could be made whereby the author received more than they normally would andthe book was decent print quality, perhaps with the occasional French flap or bit of spot UV. And maybe for not too much more than everyone else was charging. Whether that’s all achievable is tricky to say, but I asked anyway – and the results were quite interesting. Of the 30+ respondents, 55% favoured money and 45% leant toward quality. That’s not a huge sample, I know, but it’s perhaps heartening that it was so close, which would seem to suggest that there are enough authors out there who are willing to forgo profits in order to make beautiful things. But what do we do about the ones who prefer profits? Discuss the option with prospective authors?

And then it occurred to me why this would be a mistake.

We’re a niche publisher, specialising in speculative fiction and non-fiction. It’s not our job to please all readers, some of whom may not like speculative books. But also, by that logic, it’s not our job to please all authors. Many fledgling writers don’t realise just how little power they have in a traditional publishing relationship. Aside from all the editing changes (if Wolfe had resisted Perkins’ suggestions, Scribner would not have published Look Homeward, Angel), there are the marketing decisions, cover design, whether to do an audiobook edition and which narrator to use. The author typically has some say in some of these decisions – no publisher wants to foist unwelcome choices on a disgruntled author – but their input is far less than many unpublished writers would assume. So, it might come down to questions like, “Happy with this cover? Or this one?”, or “Which of these two narrators do you prefer?” And in all such questions, while they don’t exactly enjoy throwing their weight around, the publisher’s decision is final.

I’d like WoodPig Press to be more accommodating than that, but the ultimate decision still rests with our editorial and production team. This is because we fund publication, and we are looking for authors who will embody our values. So, the question of whether we should favour quality over money is actually non-negotiable. If you’re the sort of author who says, “Forget the French flaps. Show me the money!”, then perhaps we’re not your sort of publisher, and you’re not our sort of author.

Obviously, there are hard choices to be made, and money is still the second of our priorities, remember. So we won’t insist on deluxe editions that hike up the price and ensure that few copies sell. But if we’re faced with a decision between beauty and profit, and we think that beauty might help us stand out, we want to know that you’re on board with that risk. We won’t beat the big publishers on price, but we can maybe match or surpass them in originality, quality and design.

This is what putting “creative fulfilment” first means.

This – for us – is artisan publishing.

  1. It’s amazing to me that David Mitchell admits that he can’t read any of his books before Black Swan Green, which includes the amazing Cloud Atlas (which also didn’t win the Booker Prize, incidentally – though it should have done).  ↩︎
  2. Although it could do – actually, the metaphysics of belly-button fluff sounds quite interesting… ↩︎
  3. For more on this, see Johnny B. Truant’s wonderful The Artisan Author. ↩︎
  4. It’s based on the book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg. Unfortunately, in ditching the subtitle, the film loses a nice ambiguity: is Perkins a genius editor, or an editor of geniuses? (He also edited Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.) ↩︎
  5. This is a complicated and fascinating issue, but it goes back to the collapse of the Net Book Agreement, which stopped booksellers from heavy discounting (see https://internationalpublishers.org/fixed-book-price-explained/). The NBA protected author income and forced publishers to pass rises in publication costs to the consumer. With its collapse, the rise of costs and inflation were not passed on to the customer, but ate away at author royalties and advances, staff and production costs, etc. There’s also evidence that in countries where some equivalent of the NBA is in place, there is greater diversity of publishing, because the income of smaller publishers is more stable and protected, and the big publishers can’t dominate the market through their greater ability to offer discounts. ↩︎