How New Publishing Led To Fleur De Lys Publishing Ltd

Above: Impressionistic portrait of "Julia", the pen name I'm using for Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law.
© Jude Calvert-Toulmin

As a rock climber, I would rather climb than talk about climbing. As a writer, I would rather write than talk about writing. As a publisher, I would rather spend hours in Adobe InDesign, typsetting, or hours in Photoshop, designing a book cover, or hours researching the fundamentals of running a small business, rather than talk about publishing.

So if you want to find out what's happening in the publishing industry, go to Publisher's Weekly (the hot topic at the trade shows has been Print on Demand.) I won't be endlessly droning on about publishing, or banging on about writing. I won't be griping about customers or publishing anyone's emails. I won't be bitching, sniping or sneering. I'll just be posting every couple of weeks about whatever fluffy little cloud is drifting across my horizon. Some of it will be rude. There will be swear words. Some of it will be completely irrelevant to "the publishing industry." In fact, the next blog entry on here will be some shots of me sprawled across the bonnet of some classic cars wearing a very short skirt, from a 1970s issue of Custom Car magazine.

However, as this is my inaugural and introductory post, I'll start with a bit of background.

The publishing industry is in the middle of a revolution. Old publishing is dying. New publishing is here to stay. Digital printing and Print on Demand (POD) are completely revolutionising the industry; machines are being installed on four continents as we speak which will allow customers to order any book online and choose how they want the book to look, and in minutes it will be printed and there for them to buy and hold and read. In fact some bookstores already have these ATM-like machines already installed...

For many years, the UK publishing industry has been dominated by a handful of large companies whose only concern is profitability, rather than quality. An author wanting to be published by one of these dinosaurs has to go through a literary agent.

Due to the fact that the agents have to sell the work they take on, quality is not important to them either, only marketability. This has led to many spurious submission hoaxes, where journalists from the broadsheets have submitted (with name and place changes only) best selling and Booker Prize winning books to dozens of agents who have then all flatly rejected them as being "not for us." My favourite is described in this article from The Times online, Booker winners need not apply. Top novels in disguise rejected by publishers in which the manuscript for V J Naipaul's 1971 Booker Prize winning novel In A Free State, is turned down by twenty agents and publishers.

This is due to the fact that agents and large publishers do not have a viable quality control system, because they don’t need one. The only books they want to deal with are ones which they know will sell, such as celeb bios or books from already marketable, known authors.

After submitting my debut novel, MY ADVENTURES IN CYBERSPACE to forty agents, I realised that my work was marketable enough to be viable for publication, as two agents asked for full manuscripts (agents request "fulls" very, very rarely.) One of the top agents in the country wrote to tell me that parts of the book were "brilliant". But, it wasn't for them. Then I realised that I was barking up the wrong tree trying to get an agent.

After having spent over a year researching how to get an agent and then trying to get one, I went back to the drawing board to do more research.

I discovered that all the large publishers do, apart from taking most of the book’s profits, is publish. That's because they are publishers. They do what it says on the tin. They are not marketing companies. So, unless you are already a superstar author like JK Rowling, they're not going to be sinking a great big wad of cash into publicising your work once it is published. They do not promote your book. That is up to the author.

So, I figured, what the fuck was I doing begging to be accepted by an agent who has no quality control system, who will take 15% of the book’s profits, and then sell my book to a publisher who will do no more than publish the book whilst taking most of the remaining profit. It simply isn’t good business sense.

And I am not writing books in order to skip down the garden singing "Tra la la I'm a writer doncha know" to the birds and bees. I am writing to get published, to get books in hands, by beds, on aeroplanes, by seas, on rockets, one day, long after I'm gone. I want my books to live. And that means business.

Then I realised that the entrepreneurs, the renegades, the cutting edge writers are forming their own small presses and publishing their own work via Print on Demand.

Many writers in the past have published their own work, here's some of the more well-known ones:

James Joyce
Rudyard Kipling,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Virginia Woolf,
D. H. Lawrence,
E. E. Cummings,
Deepak Chopra,
Benjamin Franklin,
Stephen Crane,
Zane Grey,
Thomas Paine,
Ezra Pound,
Carl Sandburg,
George Bernard Shaw,
Upton Sinclair,
Gertrude Stein,
Henry David Thoreau,
Walt Whitman
Mark Twain.

Yes please, I want to be in their gang.

When I say "self-publish" I am not talking about vanity presses, where you pay a stack of money to have a company like Authorhouse or Lulu publish your books. Vanity presses similarly do not have quality control systems; give them the money and they will publish any old shite.

When I talk about self-publishing companies, I mean proper independent publishing companies which are interested in quality as well as profitability.

Now, the nuts and bolts of setting up your own publishing company are very cheap nowadays; the expense comes from hiring graphic designers, photographers, cover artists, typesetters and marketing people. But as I’m already a reasonably experienced photographer with a degree in graphic design, learning new software (such as Adobe InDesign, for typesetting) is a passion of mine, and I poo self-publicity, I realised that for me, this is the right way forward.

Simultaneously to all this realisation and research, I noticed that the most popular of my performances on YouTube were the ones containing the word "sex" in the title. I also noticed that the people arriving on the personal blog I set up in 2006, Jude Calvert-Toulmin were doing so split 50/50 between googling my name and googling the key words mother in law son in law sex.

At the time, there were no articles about mother in law son in law sex on my blog, but the word "sex" had been mentioned a few times, and there was a separate article about my son-in-law's rock climbing abilities.

However, now I knew there was a market for the subject of sex between mothers-in-law and their sons-in-law.

So I thought, OK, I'm going to give the public what it wants, and knock off a book about this particular niche topic, and it can be the guinea pig for my new publishing company. I realised that I was bound to make mistakes, so I figured I would learn lessons with this new book which is not based on my life and isn’t my precious darling goo goo baby like MY ADVENTURES IN CYBERSPACE (MAIC).

And then I discovered that writing about something that isn’t so personal is actually a lot more enjoyable than wrenching my heart out as I have done with MAIC, which had me in fits of tears after writing several of its chapters.

In the space of a month, I had written 40,000 words of the new novel, Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law, designed the cover and obtained permission from the Californian photographer David Winge to use one of his photographs on the cover. (I will be interviewing David for the blog in the near future.)

I finished writing the book in two months. Over the summer my partner and editor, Brian Trevelyan, has been editing the book, whilst I focused on forming Fleur De Lys Publishing Ltd, which has meant working fifteen hour days, every second of which has been gripping. Brian, incidentally, is also the assistant film programmer for the prestigious Kendal Mountain Film Festival and the up and coming Sheffield Adventure Film Festival.

So in the space of a few months, I've gone from enduring the joyless and mind-atrophying task of desperately seeking an agent, to being an excited, enthusiastic company director with one book about to go on sale on Amazon, and another one due for publication in Spring 2009.

I could not have done this without the encouragement and support of many different people, but the most thanks has to go to James Benstead of Tallis House, publishers for the estate of Booker long-listed author Michael de Larrabeiti. His help and encouragement have been pivotal to my having the courage to set up my own publishing company.

Thankyou James.

Recommended listening:

James Benstead interviewed by Rose de Larrabeiti about Print on Demand and New Publishing.



Recommended reading:

Aiming at Amazon by Aaron Shepard, originator of the term "New Publishing".
Print-On-Demand Book Publishing by Morris Rosenthal
Real World Adobe InDesign CS3 by Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner