Indie Novella Alternative Book Fair

 

The four books I purchased at the Fair

I confess my writing room is a complete mess, but my beloved laptop is back home and I am overjoyed. Finally, I can to send out submissions (all poetry so far) and access everything easily and quickly. Despite its quirk of black screen now and then (not done it once so far), it is intermittent and will recover from any crash. It's now up to me to keep everything saved elsewhere as backup.

In other news I attended the Indie Novella Alternative Book Fair a couple of Saturday's ago. Held in Islington Central Library, there was a lovely hall for talks (a theatre with staged seating) and a room upstairs where indie publishers were around to chat to and where they had books for sale. I came back with four!

The first talk was by Andrew Hayward from Penguin (retired). His talk on the History of Publishing from 1399 to the present day was fascinating. He was full of facts and figures as well as anecdotes. He said that we had lost 20% of libraries by 2010/11 and 85% of buying loss. I made copious notes during the talk, if I can understand them!  

By 1399, people spoke English as we would recognise it today, but it wasn't standardised until 1490 and was known as Chancery Standard. The Caxton Press was the beginning of book printing in 1477. Nine thousand copies of the Bible were printed by Thomas Cromwell and these were chained in churches so they wouldn't be stolen. Other important books that came early were The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, The Iliad by Homer and Revelations of Love & Devine by Mother Julian.

Back in the day, Paternoster Square (by St Paul's) had booths selling books and pamphlets. The Cambridge University Press is the oldest publisher, followed by Oxford University Press. Shakespeare added 1500 new words to the English Language. The emergence of the English novel was around about 1675-1750 with Robinson Cruso and Gulliver's Travels. Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary was published in 1755, but I can't think of that without remembering Blackadder when Baldrick threw the pages of the dictionary on the fire!

Publishers in those days were John Murray (Shelley, Bryon & Jane Austen), Collins, Thomas Nelson, A & Black, Constable (Sir Walter Scott) and Lutterworth. The best seller in 1806 was a cook book by Maria Blundel - A New System of Cooking. In the 1800's popular reading came in the form of Harper's and Ladies Treasury, as well as Penny Dreadfuls. 

Penguin Books were established in 1935, and they were the first people to see the mass market. These days most books shops have disappeared. Waterstones is owned by Daunt Books, but in turn have a Germany media company behind them. Everything has been swallowed by Amazon. 21% of all books are e-books, non-fiction represents 43.5% of books sold, 23% is fiction and 22% is children's books. Penguin is still top publisher and tops £3.8 billion.

So, there is a very brief history which I hope you find interesting. It was a mesmerising talk.

I didn't attend every talk, but I did attend the next one with three debut novel writers. They talked about their journey into writing and how they found publishing. Most had been on writing courses and found their way in through that. They talked about their books and then answered questions from the audience. Much as I would have liked to buy at least one of their books, I'd already spent my quota.

The final talk I attended was the publishing panel. Reps from Weatherglass Books, Dead Ink Books and Renard Press spoke about their companies. Whereas the Big Five publishing companies won't take any risk with publishing, this makes room for Indie Presses, who will. There was a discussion about what people are prepared to pay for a book. The correct price, said one on the panel, should be £15 for a paperback because that is what it is worth. He compared it with what people are prepared to pay for two hours sitting in a cinema. I guess he had a point there when you think how many hours an author spends writing their book. It's a tricky one because we all want to buy as many books as we can (well, I do). 

The different Indie Presses are getting together to showcase their books and they often work together. It was said that they need to sell 1500 copies of a book for people to talk about it. Life is difficult in the world of Indie Presses. Since Brexit it has become costly to send books to Europe and this hasn't helped. Sales for Indie Presses is critical. That's how they survive. On a more positive note, they do not have to sell big numbers of your book to publish another by you, like the Big Five do. 

There feels to be a much more personal relationship here between Indie publishers and writers and we should do our bit to support them. Yes, the big publishers flood the market with books they feel we should be reading, but there's a lot of good books published independently and I would urge you to seek them out. Start by visiting their websites (links above for those I mentioned) and looking at the books they publish and purchase one. 

Upstairs, I spoke briefly to the man from Weatherglass Books. He was due to talk on the panel, so it was all a little hurried. I also spoke to a couple of other publishers. I came away from the fair fired up. It was a brilliant day and thanks to Indie Novella for organising and running the event.