It was a bright cold day in April.

First there was Nicholas Lezard's great review in the Guardian - in print on Saturday, on line now at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/24/1948-andy-croft-review, and then there was the book launch last night at Bookmarks in London. 52 people crammed into the shop to hear Martin Rowson talk about political cartooning and to read from his Smokestack book The Limerickiad (volume one) and Andy Croft read from 1948. Martin had sent out an email to his friends reading "This is going to be in the form of a performance with me and Andy talking about the book, the Olympics and anything else that comes into our heads, rather than a piss-up. IT WILL INVOLVE THE READING OF POETRY OUT LOUD. This may well affect your decision. You have been warned!!!". Despite the absence of the piss-up, a whinge of cartoonists (Martin's collective noun) turned up as well as poetry fans, Orwellians, editors from Tribune, 3am and Red Pepper and a group of authors and editors from the Five Leaves stable, mostly those with forthcoming books, including Peter Vacher (his jazz book is due in the autumn), Andrew Whitehead and Cathi Unsworth (both involved in our book on London fiction) and Lesley Acton (currently writing a social history of allotments). It was also good to catch up with Peter Lawson who edited our Passionate Renewal anthology of Jewish poetry. The laughter at one of Rowson's rhymes ending in "shiksa" indicated that Peter had a lot in common with many of those in the room.

It was a good night for 1948 and there was a lot of networking too. Bookmarks flies the flag for socialist and trade union books in central London, and is well organised and friendly. I always enjoy our book launches there and the shop finds that new visitors often come back.

New from Five Leaves, Dark Thread by Pauline Chandler

Kate is a weaver, like her mother. When her mother is killed Kate is convinced it's her fault. Tiredness, grieving and guilt come together in a visit back in time to the mill, where Kate must learn to weave the dark thread in her life into the overall picture and make sense of her life. A moving time slip story, alternating life in the 18th century and today. The setting is Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, which is still standing, part of the Derwent Mills World Heritage Site.

Pauline Chandler has published several books set in different historical periods. These include Warrior Girl, set in the France of Joan of Arc, Viking Girl and The Mark of Edain, in which Aoife (Ee-fa) a Druid princess, kidnaps a Roman war elephant. She lives in Derbyshire, the setting for Dark Thread. Pauline was one of several East Midlands young adult fiction writers who appeared in our anthology In the Frame who have ended up with a book or two on our list.

Copies are available from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/dark-thread/ for £5.99/

New posters from Five Leaves Towers

72p

What can you buy for 72p? A Mars bar and a bit, just over half a Guardian, a third of cup of coffee... or the ebook of Stephen Booth's novella, Claws. Claws is one of our best-sellers, now in its third printing, with a new cover. We'd not got on top of e-books when our techie author had, so we foolishly let him do his own e-book, which has been a great success for him. Good for Stephen! Amazon sells the ebook at 72p, and the author describes the book as 96 pages, a short novella. Despite this, one reviewer on Amazon commented that it was very poor value, being a "condensed" book. It isn't condensed. It may not be very good (though we beg to differ) but it is hard to imagine how anyone can think a 96 page book is poor value at 72p. What would represent good value? 37p? 17p?
I'm not here having (too much of) a go at the reviewer (and certainly not criticising Stephen!) - but thinking about the value we, collectively, now give to books. We've done a few e-books at 99p, many other publishers are doing likewise. Are we undervaluing our products? Have we now given the impression to people that all books should be so cheap, that if a full length book is 99p a novella should be cheaper than chips? And what will that buyer think about the price of the printed copy being £4.99 (or £3 something from Amazon...)?

The Man Who Likes to Say No

One of the nice things about Five Leaves is that it provides endless opportunities to offer voluntary labour to partnership projects promoting books. I have this notion is that if we promote others, somehow it will lead to others buying our books and we all go home happy. This blog often mentions those projects - Lowdham Book Festival, East Midlands Book Awards, States of Independence, Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing - are the four that come to mind immediately. Unfortunately the last few months have been a bit difficult. Since November, save for two weeks, I've spent part of every week in Scotland on family business. I've managed - this is when email comes into its own - but recently I had to unexpectedly spend about ten days in Scotland. I've not minded the expensive public transport, or the long journeys, though a late-running bus caused the journey from Borders General Hospital to Nottingham to take nine hours a couple of days ago, and once I was stuck in sleet next to a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere, unable to cross the road to catch a connecting bus. Good for proof-reading - the train parts of the journey, not the buses. But the long block of time up there forced me to make decisions... with great regret I've had to withdraw from East Midlands Book Award and Lowdham Book Festival, end my writing commitment to Southwell Folio, leave Bread and Roses to others and abandon another big project that had not even been announced. I've also refused to give advice to some local people on publishing issues, pulled out of lectures, and am turning into a social hermit. But I might catch up on outstanding Five Leaves work.
Save for the mysterious unannounced project, everything will survive without me, and I hope to be back at full strength later this year in time to plan Lowdham's winter weekend and the next States of Independence. I feel bad about Lowdham Book Festival, leaving my colleague Jane Streeter from The Bookcase to organise the Festival single-handed this year. It will be a great festival, as anyone who knows Jane would expect, though there will have to be some temporary changes. I hope she'll give me a comp or two.
Meantime, if your group would like me to talk about independent publishing, or you are offering me a free lunch, or if you have this marvellous idea... the answer is no!

Poly put the kettle on

Just catching up with the Guardian... The colour supp of a few days ago had a long article about polyamory, about those who are involved in multiple relationships. This subject appears pretty regularly in the press. I notice this because, in 1995, the book Breaking the Barriers to Desire: new approaches to multiple relationships appeared from Five Leaves. The firm grew out of the old Mushroom Bookshop Publications - the publishing imprint of the radical bookshop in Nottingham. Mushroom had a strong interest in sexual politics, so when Five Leaves took over the shop's advance publications list this, and one or two other sexual politics titles came out, before the new imprint moved away, or possibly to safer ground. Barriers - which had probably the worst cover design ever (I plead guilty) - sold reasonably, then stopped selling, and the remaining stock was eventually sold at a big discount to the American magazine Loving More. We should have held on to some copies as it is a book referenced in many articles on "polyamory, polyfidelity and non-monogamy". But the real interest is within the press. We know this because towards the end of the book's life Angela Neustatter wrote an article in a newspaper about polyamory, citing the book. I'd been away for a couple of days and returned to find my answering machine entirely full of messages from journalists wanting review copies or to interview the editors, Kevin Lano and Claire Parry, with whom I'd lost touch. Journalists continued to ring for days (admittedly, I never returned the calls from the Sun). I could not contact the editors. I had nothing to say on the subject personally as I know more about Polyfilla than polyamory, but assumed that Angela's article would see off the remaining stock. Well, we sold a couple more copies, maybe half a dozen, and gave out many more review copies than that. I think there was a subsequent big feature in the Sunday Mirror, which resulted in maybe another sale or two. For years aftewards we'd get excited calls from journalists desperate to write on this subject and in need of source material. In other words, the public in general is not that interested in polyamory, but journalists are. Including from the Guardian, obviously. Tidying my office recently, I found one forgotten copy of the book. I only need the existing file copy, so a single copy of Breaking the Barriers to Desire is available from us at info@fiveleaves.co.uk, with a cover price of £5.99. If anyone buys it I'll send the £5.99 to a suitable charity - Relate maybe, or the journalists' benevolent society.

New edition from Five Leaves, Beneath the Blue Sky

Dominic Reeve is one of the few authors we publish that I've not met. We have long phone conversations and he bashes out letters on his old fashioned typewriter, the keys clearly having seen better days. He's a self-confessed cantankerous old man, still living as he has for decades, selling compost from door to door. His Smoke in the Lanes was a classic of the old days of the horse-drawn "waggon years" and was an enormous commercial success when it came out, and is now available in a trade edition from the University of Hertfordshire Press and a mass market edition from Abacus, taking advantage of the current popular interest in Gypsies. Not that Dominic is thrilled by that, raging (correctly) about some of the Big Fat Gypsy Wedding coverage. After Smoke, Dominic wrote two or three fairly derivative books which sold less, before returning to Travelling life with his partner, the successful Romani artist Beshlie. After a forty years break he returned to publishing with Beneath the Blue Sky with Five Leaves. This covered the 1960s and onwards, the less "romantic" decades when Romanis moved from four legs to four wheels, yet tried to remain self-employed, tried to retain a Travelling lifestyle and tried to hang on to their culture in the wake of their traditional trades and stopping places vanishing.

Trucks are of less interest than the old bow topped waggons, and the book was therefore less commercial but nevertheless we sold 1,000 or so. After a gap we've tidied up the book, inserted some better photographs, included some drawings by Beshlie and it is again available. There will be a mass market edition from Abacus sometime, without the illustrations and photographs, in a supermarket near you, but meantime you can buy our edition at http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/beneath-the-blue-sky-four-decades-of-a-travelling-life-in-britain/.