Cover Designers the Unsung Heroes of Publishing

I'm wondering if it is cover designers who are the greatest unsung heroes of the publishing world.

I have two new books out this month from the fabulous young publishing house, Tonto Books, (see illustrations above), and both have had their covers designed by Elliot Thomson from www.preamptive.com in Newcastle.

Obviously I'm biased, but is seems to me that work of this calibre should make Elliot extremely famous.

My Brave Losing Face

Hang on a minute - a little while ago I was blogging kindly about a certain Dr. Andrew Sharp and his wonderful book "The Ghosts of Eden". I was cheerily passing on the news that the book had won the Waverton Good Read Award (www.wavertongoodread.org.uk).

Blow me down if I haven't now discovered that my own recent novel "The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride" (www.steffimcbride.com) was also nominated for the same award!

I feel that should make me like Dr. Sharp and his book a great deal less, but annoyingly it doesn't. Still would have liked to have beaten the b***** though.

Must remember all those brave losers at the Oscars and similar ceremonies, applauding wildly as their opponents walk off with plaudits and statuettes which they all know should rightfully be theirs.

clap ... clap ... clap ... crap.

I am now a Merchant of Culture

Just completed a first class degree course in trade publishing and the “making of a bestseller” – at least I feel like I have after reading an advance copy of “Merchants of Culture”, by John B. Thompson, which is due out next month from Polity Press.

Don’t be fooled by the everyman sound of his name, this is an author with some seriously heavyweight credentials – a sociology professor at Cambridge, a fellow of Jesus College … a quick glance at his Wikipedia entry is enough to assure you that this is a man who does his research very thoroughly indeed and knows a thing or two about communicating the complicated stuff that’s in his head to the rest of us.

Brilliant title apart from anything else; I really like the idea of being a “merchant of culture”. I don’t know if the Prof came up with it himself or whether it was the result of a brainstorming session at Polity Press, but I bet it was one of those joyous “eureka” moments either way.

From now on whenever anyone asks me how they can get published or get a job in publishing I’m going to tell them to buy this book because it is simply perfect at summing up how the whole messy business works and explaining why it very frequently doesn’t work. I guess it is going to have to be updated fairly regularly, (the edition I received must have been sent to the printers too early to be able to mention the arrival of the iPad for instance), but even once it is a year or two out of date it will still teach a careful reader as much as any three year degree course on the subject.

Green Shoots in Publishing Landscape

Due to visit Uganda for the first time, I wanted to do some background reading. On Amazon I typed in the word “Uganda” and the great machine suggested a number of titles that I had not heard of. I did a little more googling on each title that looked possible and made a selection. I did not have particularly high hopes, which is why it was all the more wonderful to find I had accidentally ordered a masterpiece.

“The Ghosts of Eden” is a novel by Andrew J.H. Sharp. A doctor who obviously knows the country and its people extraordinarily well. It is a beautifully written, life-affirming, thought provoking story and if only it had fallen on Richard and Judy’s doorstep instead of mine Dr. Sharp would by now have a best-seller on his hands.

A little further googling found his website (www.theghostsofeden.com ) and I emailed him a fan letter while still only half way through the book.

His path to publication, it seems, is a classic one. Unable to get any agents interested he read an article about a new young publisher, Picnic Publishing. He sent the book directly to them and they accepted it.

This is the second time I have heard someone speaking highly of Picnic. They recently published “Empires Apart” by Brian Landers, an intriguing study of the historic parallels between the American and Russian empires, which has now been picked up in the US by Penguin. Brian had also been unable to get an agent to take him on and so went directly to Picnic.

I relay this story because it seems encouraging in a number of ways. Firstly it shows that it is possible to stumble upon something new and brilliant on Amazon in much the same way as one might once have hoped to in an old fashioned book shop. Secondly it shows that an enthusiastic reader can make contact with an author almost instantaneously and thirdly it demonstrates that there are young publishing companies out there that are actually reading the manuscripts sent to them and then publishing them for no other reason than they like them and want to share them with the world.

During the course of our emailing, Dr. Sharp heard that he had won the Waverton Good Read Award (http://www.wavertongoodread.org.uk) for best British debut novel of the previous twelve months. Probably not in Richard and Judy’s class when it comes to generating sales, I grant you, but another sign that there are always green shoots to be found if you hunt for long enough in the rubble.

Gatsbys Arriving like Buses

Damn! Having used my Gatsby analogy for Peter James’s Brighton Pier party I now can’t think of another one for the party John Blake threw on Saturday to celebrate twenty years in the publishing business. Is it really only twenty years? What a torrent of water has been under the bridge in those two short decades.

So, how to describe a champagne party held on the riverside lawns of the Blake Mansion which included a Rolling Stones tribute band, a barbecue for hundreds and fireworks at midnight. The crowd was a glorious mix of the villainous, the glamorous and the downright mysterious with the great circus master himself at the centre.

You see what I mean about the ‘Gatsby thing’- Mr. Fitzgerald knew a thing or two when he created that character.

Brighton's Own Gatsby

Peter James is a phenomenon.

He threw a launch party for his latest detective novel, “Dead Like You”, at the end of Brighton Pier the other night and during the speeches his publisher announced that the book had gone straight into the hardback charts at number one.

Record numbers of translations and foreign sales and other mind-boggling statistics were also being bandied about. In an age when everyone is bemoaning the state of publishing and the decline of the book Peter is glowing evidence that people still want to read well told stories if they are marketed to them with enough energy and enthusiasm.

The most extraordinary aspect of that warm summer’s evening was that despite Peter’s enviable success, not one of the several hundred guests could be heard breathing the slightest criticism of the man himself. No one, it seems, ever has a bad word to say of this extraordinarily kind, amiable, generous and talented man. He simply defies cynicism. Anyone who has ever helped him on his way, right back to the English master who inspired him at school and up to the man who is going on Mastermind with Peter’s detective, Roy Grace, as his specialist subject, had been included in the celebration.

Twenty years ago Peter was one of the few people actively prophesying the inevitable approach of electronic readers. He was the first serious author I know of who actually produced a book on disc and became involved in the launch of an internet server. Since then he has produced films, raced cars, become a virtual member of the Brighton police force as well as visiting others all round the world. He is the Jay Gatsby of our time.

The Holy Grail of Word-of-Mouth

The British publishers of “Sold”, which I wrote for Zana Muhsen some twenty years ago and which has sold around four million copies worldwide, have just re-designed the book's cover. The image of the sad, beautiful and frightened girl’s eyes peering out of the burka remains but there is more black in the surround which, coupled with the new red lettering, brings to mind the vampire books which have come to dominate the shelves of book shops in recent years.

I have an enormous affection for “Sold”, partly because it was one of the first books I ghosted and partly because hardly a day goes by that I don’t receive at least one email from a reader. Sometimes they start by saying it is their favourite book of all time, (always an endearing thing for any writer to read), and that it has left them unbearably moved. They all then go on to say that they feel an overwhelming need to know what happened to Zana and her sister, Nadia, after the close of this book, and its sequel “A Promise to Nadia”, which we wrote about ten years later.
As far as I know the book has never been advertised or reviewed in any media, apart from readers’ comments on sites like Amazon. So its steady sales of around 200,000 copies a year must be solely down to word- of-mouth. People simply like Zana’s story and tell their friends about it.

Zana and Nadia were two Birmingham sisters who thought they were going on holiday to Yemen when they were fourteen and fifteen but found once they got there that their father had sold them into virtual slavery as child brides. “Sold” is the tale of how Zana managed to escape after eight years and then started a campaign to free her sister and their children. The main platform of her campaign was the writing of the book.

It is wonderful to see a refreshed cover coming out in the country where the whole thing started twenty years ago.