Latest ebook from Five Leaves, The Open Door by Alan Sillitoe

The Open Door follows Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as the final volume in the Seaton series. 

Returning on a troopship from Malaya in 1949, Brian Seaton (Arthur's brother) comes back to a Nottingham world of rationing, the black market, a wife he no longer loves and a child who does not recognise him. He is full of life and lust, but he has tuberculosis, forcing a long stay in a military hospital where he falls for first one nurse, then a second, while carrying on a relationship with another TB sufferer back in Nottingham. In the background, this partially autobiographical novel reveals that Seaton is starting to write, meeting others like him as he realises there is a wider world than the back streets of his Midlands home.
The book is available as a £12.99, published by Five Leaves/Bromley House Editions or in our Kindle edition at £5.99 on http://tinyurl.com/sillitoe-opendoor. Available on other platforms soon if not already.
Dunno what Alan would have thought of ebooks, though I can imagine.

The price of fish

Douglas Houston

I was sorry to hear of the death, earlier this week, of the poet Douglas Houston. Douglas was Welsh but also spent time in Scotland and Hull. It was Hull where he researched poetry and became one of the contributors to the influential book 1982 Bloodaxe book A Rumoured City which included so many important Hull poets or poets from Hull who would later become important. Douglas's last collection was Beyond the Playing Field: Selected Poems (Shoestring). He appeared in the Five Leaves successor book of Hull poets, Old City, New Rumours (2010) and is of course included in our forthcoming 2013 book of Yorkshire poets edited by Ian Parks. His 'Sunday on the Cuillin' in Old City ends 'Better for knowing you, poised on the sense / That we'll never meet again, / Though tracks and chances might allow we will, / Some other day, some other hill.' Our condolences to his family.

In memory of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, by Adrian Buckner

For CMJ

 

It started for me in '71: rumours

of an Indian with a withered arm

running through England at the Oval -

"Chandra" , the conjuring, chantable

abstract of Bhagwat Chandrasekhar.

 

The following June,

my ear to a radio with batteries wearing down -

Boycott taking Lillee's first over after rain delay.

I ran back to school, wondering

about bad light, an early lunch, a seamer's paradise.

 

From that moment, it was all epic to me.

You confirmed it on the page:

 

England Expects you wrote

when Boycott stepped out again

to open at Port of Spain

 

and when he mis-hooked Boyce

with only six on the board

the ball hung in the air for half a page.

 

"The book I refer to in line 13 is Testing Time which CMJ published in 1974 after England's tour of the West Indies. I was 12 at the time and read that book at least a dozen times." AB

'For CMJ' was published in Adrian Buckner's Contains Mild Peril (Five Leaves, 2008)

First Five Leaves London events of the year

Books of the year, not published by Five Leaves

This is the third year I've posted my top ten books of the year. This has no particular link to Five Leaves as, of course, our own books are excluded but, in the welcome absence of a personal blog this site will do. Having said there is no link to Five Leaves, I doubt I'd have read so many books to do with Soviet Jewish history this year if it had not been for the Five Leaves' commemoration of Soviet Yiddish writers held in the summer. Top ten out of how many? I have, this year, read 61 books (compared to 64 last year and 61 the previous year). I'm not sure if that is a lot - back in bookselling days I would read about 100 books a year but reading, editing, re-reading, second editing, proof-reading etc Five Leaves titles takes up a lot of time out of reading for pleasure, in addition to what sometimes appears to be an unstoppable flow of magazines and newspapers coming into the house and office. I exclude short collections of poetry from the numbers as I do book length spined journals though each can take as much time as a "normal" book. But what the heck. Here's the list. They are not in order of preference and most were not published in 2012.

The Heather Blazing, fiction by Colm Toibin (Picador)
Adrian Mole - the prostrate years, fiction by Sue Townsend (Penguin)
Soviet and Kosher: Jewish popular culture in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 by Anna Shternshis (Indiana)
Heavy Sand, fiction by Anatoli Rybakov (Viking)
Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland by Jack Jacobs (Syracuse)
The Old Ways, travel meditations by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)
Moscow 1937 by Karl Schlogel (Polity)
Autonomy, the cover designs of Anarchy magazine by David Poyner (Hyphen Press)
Singing Men, short stories by Derek Gregory (Iron Press)
Jerusalem: chronicles from the Holy City, a graphic travel/politics book by Guy Delisle (Chatto)

Eight out of ten this year were by male writers, half were from independent presses. There were a few books I read that disappointed, including the most recent Ian McEwan. I don't think I read enough fiction this year but I will give an hon mensh to Anne Zaroudi, Stephen Booth and Sam Bourne for their latest crime/thriller novels and Alison Moore whose The Lighthouse was the small press success story of the year.

Five Leaves year so far

Since the Mayan calendar got it wrong about the end of the world it is worth writing an end of year report from Five Leaves Towers. OK the year is not ended but all that remains is to read, correct and edit a pile of manuscripts for next year... Appropriately the last act dealing with current books was to pack up our last ten copies of Maps for the London Review Bookshop and order another reprint of our surprise best seller from 2011, which continues to run and run, not least at the LRB. This year's journal, Utopia, is selling, though not in such quantities but we know of some reviews coming up that will help. Not that we're dissatisfied.

Utopia was one of fifteen new titles this year, and there was a new edition of Beneath the Blue Sky, our memoir of Traveller life in the 1960s. This has not been an easy year for me, personally, having to spend a lot of time in Scotland on family business which has put pressure on the firm. Despite that - and a big addition to our workload because of the rise of ebooks - we had only one casualty for the year with Chris Searle's jazz book Red Groove being held over until next year. Sorry, Chris! Of all our writers he's likely to be the most understanding as he has a long history of involvement with the small press world. The work is written, only needing editing and picture research (and typesetting and design...).

Ebooks have been the big story of the year nationally and parochially. Our worker Pippa Hennessy has turned twenty of our titles into ebooks. Indeed she has become something of an expert in this, giving talks and workshops to other groups. Our ebook of Michael Malone's Blood Tears became our best-selling title, with around 5,000 sold as an ebook, with a further 1,000 in print. As an experiment we offered the ebook free and 18,000 copies were downloaded with interest continuing as the book was priced. It is now obvious though that only some books will sell at all in ebooks. NOT poetry, which we knew really. Genre fiction does best - but we are very interested in the new Kindle Fire and have plans to exploit this as much as possible with some books in due course, with video, high definition colour, hyper links. This will certainly be part of the future for, for example, our books on landscape. But that's coming.

The tie up with Kindle - ie Amazon - is not one we are too pleased with, given Amazon's reluctance to pay tax. Save for some good young adult fiction sales through the American company Overdrive near 100% of our ebook sales have been through Kindle. Though Kobo, Sony and Nook are trying to get into the market we can expect Kindle/Amazon to dominate for some time to come. But hey - look what happened to Starbucks! This has also been our first full year supplying Amazon direct following complaints about availability. The terms are awful - 60% discount - to secure good availability, but now one third of our trade sales are through Amazon and sales continue to rise. We would prefer people to buy from their local independent bookshop, but we are realistic. But if you do buy online try Foyles. They often beat Amazon on price. Our current best seller at Amazon - Talking Green - is £7.19. Over at Foyles online the book costs £5.99. And Foyles is an independent.

The other full year of... was of central buying by Waterstones. By central buying we mean one or two people being the buyers for subjects, for every shop in the country. We have benefited from this in Scotland where the chain has really backed Michael Malone and our other Scottish crime writer Russel McLean (his third book, Father Confessor did well this year) but elsewhere we can find a book is a great seller for us but Waterstones buy in a handful or even no copies whatsoever. In the past some of their shops did well for us, some OK, some badly - fine, that's how things should be as locally the staff know their customers and vary in their interests. All gone. Such concentrated power is not good for publishers, for writers, for readers - or for Waterstones. On the other hand there are some great independents out there, and we need to do more with them. Meantime we've struggled a bit with young adult fiction, not least due to cutbacks in school and public libraries. We've produced three great books this year by David Belbin, Bali Rai and Pauline Chandler - none exactly unknown in the young adult world - but sales have not been great.

Two books have been reprinted within weeks of publication, Andy Croft's 1948 (our contribution to Olympic mania) and Colin Ward's Talking Green. Why? In both cases they were Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week in The Guardian. We bow down in front of him. Actually, the day Ward was in the paper every paperback under review save one was from an indie publisher. We were thrilled that five out of six books on the Booker list this year were from indies, three of them being from small independents and one being from a Nottingham author. Well done indies, well done Alison Moore for her book with Salt, The Lighthouse.

I won't list all the books we have published this year - the blog would be too long, but all appear on our website at www.fiveleaves.co.uk and have been covered in earlier postings on the blog. Those writers not mentioned have not been confined to oblivion and we appreciate them (so don't get grumpy if you have not been mentioned).

Outside of straightforward publishing it was a busy year, as always. Because of family commitments, though I mostly programmed Lowdham Book Festival's winter weekend, I had to drop out of organising the main festival. Five Leaves main contribution was in Pippa designing the programme and other publicity material. Our other projects were not affected - States of Independence in Leicester (a one day celebration of independent publishing) was a great day, and there is now a set of such events - Birmingham, Sheffield, the Poetry Book Fair in London. We had stalls at all, with our many writers appearing too. The Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing was duly established, with the winner being David Graeber's book Debt. Bread and Roses has been well covered in this blog, as have our Teenage Kicks Derbyshire event for young adults and young adult writers, and the international commemoration of the Yiddish writers murdered on August 12 1952. 150 people came to our half-day event of speeches, readings and music and the launch of our From Revolution to Repression: Soviet Yiddish writing 1917-1952. Finally, unless I have forgotten something, Pippa took the lead in relaunching Beeston Poets with Jackie Kay, Neil Astley and Andy Croft as readers for the first season. All our projects are with outside partners - The Bookcase in Lowdham, the Creative Writing Team at De Montfort University, the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, Derbsyshire Libraries, Jewish Music Institute, Nottinghamshire Libraries and Nottingham Poetry Society. Best friends.

It will never be easy being a small publisher. But in the year that Random merged with Penguin, that Tindall Street merged with Serpent's Tail/Profile that we are still here, still publishing and still enthusiastic is worth mentioning. 2012 has been a tough year financially and personally but there are some things to be proud of. But we won't be publishing any Mayan calendars - their fact checkers are so poor.