The campaign to publish continues to develop in unpredictable ways.
I have lost three publishers, through no fault of their own. One of them does no real marketing, but saddest of all is the fact that Giles de la Mare, grandson of the poet, is not taking on any more titles whilst he seeks a new owner for his firm. He is a superb publisher of biography, with a distinguished record at Faber before he retired, and I have always thought Giles de la Mare Publishers would be ideal for my book. Incidentally, Walter de la Mare was greatly encouraged at the beginning of his career by Henry Newbolt and the latter’s mistress Ella Coltman, which means he may well have met George Calderon. I confess that I tried every blandishment with Mr de la Mare, including the mantra 80 is the new 50, but I do understand his resolve to retire in earnest.
Simultaneously, an excellent publisher has responded to an approach I made on 5 May attaching Synopsis and three chapters…unfortunately, they have now asked to see the ill-fated Introduction, so I have had to set about ‘improving’ it yet again in the light of swingeing recent criticisms.
The interesting thing about this initiative is that it has taken two months to come about. Since the last approach I made to any of the 31 publishers on my A list was 1 June, I am inclined to think I should wait until at least 1 August before giving up with commercial publishers. I don’t want to do this, as I intended to take a decision about self-publishing by 15 July, but I’ll compromise by making that the 25th.
So at present I am being ‘read’ by only two publishers. I am tempted, therefore, to get on and approach some publishers on my B list. The trouble there, however, is that the best are ‘academic’ publishers and my book has deliberately been written without footnotes, which I compare to caltrops, i.e. those spikey iron things thrown down to stop the progress of horses in WW1. I admit that the book is neither academic nor fictive, so it is possibly too fictive for academic publishers and too academic for commercial ones.
Altogether, the present plan must be to attack on all fronts at once: A list, B list, and self-publishing. As I have said before, the latter isn’t new to me. Three friends of mine have run their own presses since the late 1970s and I have been a partner in the samizdat Anglo-Russian press Sam&Sam since 1980. I am therefore beginning to make plans for a small print run of the book in hardback, like many produced in Russia by Sam&Sam. I won’t say that the reason I don’t want to go down that route is that it takes up so much time and energy, since in my experience dealing with commercial and academic publishers can be just as time-consuming and draining. As many, many people have said to me, if you want the book to come out as you have written it, publish it yourself. If I sold the hardback satisfactorily, I would prefer to sell the paperback rights to someone to coincide with the publication of a fresh edition of my Brief Life of Chekhov (2008).
Thank you, all who emailed me after my last post on this subject. Your advice, recommendations and encouragement are hugely appreciated and all go into the equation. I also thoroughly agree with Ian Strathcarron in his Comment that marketing is the problem for the self-publisher. I thank him again for putting this to me with all the force of his publishing experience. It’s true that we couldn’t get much of a head start with the marketing, but if I went for a Sam&Sam production I would at least get it out before Christmas and could perhaps relaunch for the 150th.
On with the job, then, and I shall next report on 25 July.
For those – like myself – unfamiliar, Sophie Elmhirst’s New Statesman piece conveniently explains the term “swingeing” (…or does it?).
As usual, Google provides a shorter route to understanding: {adjective} [BRITISH] (severe or extreme in size, amount, or effect).
“It’s a real word; deal with it” …I tell myself, before making a record of the preceding in the ol’ cranial wax tablet.
Regarding footnotes, I don’t wish to suggest that they ought to feature in this book, but David Foster Wallace did believe them useful as a general tool, and employed footnotes liberally [even – indeed especially – in his fiction]. A trademark was his “nested” footnote, wherein the reader is taken on a [wild goose] chase delving further away from narrative and more closely to the direct authorial voice1.
1 Or, perhaps, further from it and closer to a second, meta-voice2.
2 Or not, depending on your point of view, of course3.
3 Obligatory nested nested footnote.
Thank you indeed. A Comment of this brilliance, however, demands a reply from master rhetoricians of the order of D. Grant. I hope Damian and others are watching!
Being archaic myself, I used the word as the present participle of the verb ‘swinge’. I don’t understand why Sophie Elmhirst doesn’t tell her readers what that ‘very archaic verb’ means. It means to tear strips of flesh off, lacerate, excoriate. Personally, I think it’s an all too visual verb: the torturers ‘swing’ the lash, then it bites deep with the addition of the ‘e’…ghastly.
I totally agree with you, and David Foster Wallace, about the use of footnotes. My trouble before writing this biography of George was that in practically every piece of non-fiction (‘academic’) prose I’d written I had HAD to employ footnotes and was fed up with the disease. George’s biography was a heaven-sent opportunity not to use them, as it is basically a narrative of his, Kittie’s, their friends’, Edwardian Britain’s lives, hence should be read more ‘fictively’. I’ve justified this in the swingèd Introduction thus: ‘Every fact presented has its material source. Letters quoted are held by the collections named in my Acknowledgements. Books and authors quoted are to be found in the Bibliography.’
There are some sparing, but hilarious ‘authorial’ footnotes in Chekhov’s early short stories.