This Bed Thy Centre is a novel about sex...

"This Bed Thy Centre is a novel about sex. Set in a south London suburb - down-at-heel, but up-and-coming - in the 1930s, it is a reminder of why a permissive society, whatever its drawbacks, is better than the other kind," writes Zoe Fairbairns in her introduction to the new Five Leaves' edition of Pamela Hasford Johnson's first novel, published in our New London Editions imprint. The book will be available later this month, but meantime you can read Zoe's full introduction on the London Fictions website: http://www.londonfictions.com/pamela-hansford-johnson-this-bed-thy-centre.html.

August 12 1952, advance notice of memorial event this year

Happy birthday, Charlie Dickens

Hi Charlie, we've not been in touch since I was a teenager when I read a lot of your books, but I do promise to read Bleak House this year. People tell me it is terribly good. I hope you don't mind, on this, your birthday, telling you that we're doing a big book on London fiction next year and, well, there's no easy way of putting it - you're not in it. Yes, yes, I know you know London like the back of your hand, all those twelve mile walks and everything. It is just that you are a wee bit early for us in time, and possibly a teensy-weensy bit over-exposed. Anyway, what could we say that Simon and Claire haven't said already? Did you see Simon, by the way, on The One Show? He did look embarrassed.
You will know some of the contributors though, as we start with George Gissing, and he wrote a book about you. What did you think of it? His novel Nether World is the earliest book we discuss but I think you'd recognise your London pretty much in other material from that century, Child of the Jago for example.
I don't know how much you keep up with modern London literature, have you read Brick Lane or White Teeth? They were pretty big a few years ago. I'll let you know later when we have a publication date. And good luck with all your events this year.

States of Independence 3

INDEPENDENT PRESS DAY
Free of charge 10.30am - 4.30pm Open to all
Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester LE1 5XY
Bookstalls Workshops Readings Panels Seminars Book launches
Independent presses Regional writers Literary agents
Fiction Non-fiction Poetry Plays Artist books Magazines Journals
25+ events, cafe, all day book fair

Independent publishing, independent writing, independent thinking

http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/

Organised and funded by Five Leaves Publications and the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University

The shock of the new (bookshops)

Here's a few new bookshops of various kinds, all within the Five Leaves orbit, and all recommended. The first is a specialist internet supplier for print and eBooks related to Spain. Book4Spain stocks our Spanish/Catalan list, being only a small selection of their specialist and popular books on all things Spanish:http://books4spain.com/. The latest radical bookshop, Hydra in Bristol is now open. Not been there yet, though met some of the organisers a couple of times when they were planning the shop. Definitely in the radical sector - http://books4spain.com/. I've felt for ages that Glasgow did not have enough bookshops, so good luck to Oswald Street Bookshop (http://oswaldstreetbookshop.co.uk/). The shop specialises in all things Scottish, including Yachting Pilots for the whole of the country (now there's a specialism), and has just ordered copies of all our books by Scottish writers. Finally, in that other Celtic country, the Penrallt Gallery Bookshop is now open in Machynlleth, run by a couple of old friends from Nottingham.

This week in books

Like any job, publishing is full of small bits of unexciting detailed work that builds to a fulfilling life at the cutting edge of literature. That, at least, is what I keep telling myself when doing those bits of unexciting, detailed work. Not that I mind packing parcels for Amazon, a task so skilled that it can only be done by senior management at Five Leaves PLC. This week, however, has been exciting. On Tuesday I spent seven or eight happy hours on trains working on the first edit of Russel D McLean's next, third, novel, Father Confessor. We've already announced the book, signed a contract, designed the cover... and it is always a relief when manuscripts live up to their expectations. No slashing and burning required. In an earlier McLean manuscript I'd had fun tracking the route of every gun through the book as a shoot-out at the end seemed to have one firearm too many. No superfluous firearms in this book but it's still bloody dangerous to live in Dundee. McLean fans will be happy.
On the journey back, David Belbin's forthcoming Student lasted from Carlisle to Alfreton. This was my third read of the book, following some editorial changes by the author. There had been an interesting issue as one, now changed, chapter had previously included a lot of action around Second Life. How do you manage to make a novel about students read as current, when aspects of their behaviour pass so quickly? Nobody now uses MySpace, how many people have even heard of Second Life? Whatever students do now, or terms they use, will be out of date by publication date, which is challenging for authors and publishers.
The big local news is the new book of short stories by Jon McGregor, reviewed everywhere the last few days - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. One of the stories appeared earlier in the Five Leaves' anthology, Sea of Azov, so we can marginally bask in the acclaim. At the launch Jon revealed that if he'd had his way the book would have been called (I think it was) "I Bought You a Shovel". His publisher, Bloomsbury, thankfully squashed that idea, but wittily and usefully sent him a snow shovel as a present on publication day, so that the sender could add a note saying "I bought you a shovel".
The same evening author Rebecca Buck and editor Victoria Oldham from the American-based lesbian and gay publisher Bold Strokes were giving a talk at Nottingham Writers Studio on their experience writing for and editing a mid-size publishing house. It was hard not to regret the loss of so many of our lesbian and gay publishing houses, Sheba, Brilliance, GMP, Oscar's... when hearing how successful Bold Strokes are, and how mainstream they are too, being stocked in major bookstores. Here there is no discrimination against lesbian and gay writers being successful - think Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, Carol Ann Duffy - but outside of Gay's the Word you will rarely see lesbian and gay books in any quantity or labelled as such.
Bold Strokes will be at our States of Independence day in Leicester on March 17 and this week the programme went on line at http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk/. I'll post later about States, but if you are withing striking, or stroking, distance of Leicester do make a date. In short it is a free book festival in a day, with seventy writers taking part, with its roots in the independent publishing sector.
This was the week the programme had to be finalised for Lowdham Book Festival's winter weekend, held over the first weekend in March. And it has, though it is not yet on line. The theme of the winter weekend is Local Heroes, and it includes an evening with the film-maker Billy Ivory as the highlight. Lowdham's winter weekends have always been on a more intimate scale than the summer festival (intimate being code for smaller), which suits us just fine. The date, for those who follow all things Lowdham, is, however, the usual date for our Flicks in the Sticks film weekend. Well, after ten years Flicks has gone dark. It may return, we hope so, but ten years was a good run and frees up some time to develop our winter mini-festival in the future. Lowdham also now runs a "First Friday" lecture series, with one of our regular speakers, Mike Wilson, yesterday having to cover the whole of Dickens' life and work in a hour. Easy, given his last challenge was to cover the whole of English Literature in an hour...
The week closed with National Libraries Day. That is something. Last year there were dozens of protest actions (including one organised by Five Leaves and UNISON) about library cutbacks, but the day has morphed into a day to celebrate libraries - and protest where necessary. Our local Nottingham Post included a good article in support of libraries, with short interviews with me from Five Leaves and our writers David Belbin and John Stuart Clark (the cartoonist Brick), together with some national figures including the ubiquitous Stephen Fry.
Except the week is not over yet. There are many emails to get through and - hurrah - tomorrow night the next order from Amazon arrives, telling me exactly which books I'll be packing on Monday morning. I'm looking forward to it already.

Becoming a Five Leaves writer

Five Leaves is pretty clear on unsolicited manuscripts. Our website says we are not looking for submissions. Despite this, we receive one, two or three pitches a day. Several hundred a year. Of these, some are clearly sent, scattergun, to every email address the sender can find. Others are from people who've carefully examined our list (although not noticed the note on submissions) and even some who have read some Five Leaves' books (we are grateful). A few have seen the submissions note but write "I see from your website that you don't normally accept unsolicited submissions, but..." Sorry, no buts.
Why don't we look at unsolicited manuscripts? Bloodaxe does, for example, and in consequence it receives - according to the firm's website - getting on for 100 submissions every week from new writers, say 5,000 a year, only one or two of whom will be taken on. God knows how they manage to check through them. And that is one reason we are not keen - we do not have the staff to go through the unsolicited work.
How then do we recruit new writers? Are they all friends, a clique? Well, we could survive happily taking on no new writers. Existing writers on our list have a habit of writing more than one book. We don't, contractually, tie people down and some of our writers have gone elsewhere, somewhere bigger, or somewhere more appropriate with their other work. Good luck to them. But some writers are now on their second, third... eighth book with us and that leaves little room. Most of the books we publish are commissioned. We might think of an idea, and find the right person to right it. Thus we commissioned Mark Patterson to write Roman Nottinghamshire - we'd been looking for a writer, and luckily for him he wrote a piece in Nottinghamshire Today, which had just the right tone. We approach writers whose work we like. We'd noticed that Naomi Jaffa had been publishing some good poems over the years in good poetry magazines but had not published a pamphlet or a book. We asked her. I attended a talk by Michael Billig on Jews in rock'n'roll - I asked him if he would write a book on the subject for us... and so it goes on. Our historic reprints are another matter as we usually ask around for suggestions, from people expert in the areas we are interested in. Beat material, working class fiction, utopian social history, London novels. Sometimes things just develop. Some years ago we published an anthology of East Midlands' young adult fiction writers... one of the stories by Berlie Doherty became the novel A Beautiful Place for a Murder, published by us, another story by David Belbin will form part of his book Student, due out this year and we have republished a novel by one of the other contributors, with another pending. Our next poetry pamphlet, Oxygen Man by Joanne Limburg, is by someone who appeared some years ago in our anthology Passionate Renewal, where we printed substantial sections of her work. Later this year we are picking up a book by Bali Rai, whose agent represents several of the young adult writers on our list, and through them we've got to know Bali. But our favourite anecdote was that J. David Simons joined our list through my starting reading his first novel in an in-law's bathroom. This led to a mention of the book in a blog entry, then to some correspondence, then to attending a reading by him, and a conversation where he was encouraged to write along a particular line, and the consequent book, and his first one, are now Five Leaves. The in-law is now thinking of putting in a special shelf. Two of our writers this year - both writing on jazz - came to us by recommendation by another publisher, but we knew Peter Vacher and Chris Searle's work already. And so it goes on.
Getting on Five Leaves' list is the most inexact science. It's not fair, but publishing a book is a bit investment of our time and our money, which will often result in much more time being spent and a loss of money (in publishing, the story goes that 80% of books make a loss) so it seems to work best when we have, somehow, built a relationship with a writer, or admire their work, or have come to them by serendipity. Wading through submissions does not do it for us.
So my advice to all potential writers is to get out more; get yourself noticed, write for small magazines, turn up at readings, give talks, don't be a hermit. But also, don't scare off publishers by being demanding or needy. Don't forget to stay in more too - reading the books you have bought or borrowed. Good writers are good readers.