Lee Thompson, who designed the cover shown above for Humdrumming, has some interesting things to say about book cover design:

Book covers these days have to fulfill a great many tasks, and this can result in a struggle over the author’s vision and the publisher’s bottom line. For most authors, the whole joy of writing comes from others reading and benefiting from the author’s words, and money is often secondary. If authors were only interested in money, most of them wouldn’t write!!

The dichotomy comes in that publishing houses are, at the end of the day, a business. A business that’s part of a £16bn ($30bn) industry in the UK, with lots of competition and a broad marketplace for potential sales. When you look at the business structure and costs behind printing, storage, distribution and promotions, each title needs to sell well not only to earn back the advance paid to authors but also to recoup the thousands (in many cases hundreds of thousands) spent on getting the book into stores. I think there are few authors out there who have a full appreciation of these processes and that can often lead to frustration on their part.

It’s an irrefutable fact that everyone “judges a book by its cover”. As much as we’d like to think the merits of the book will shine through, if the cover is appalling, the sales will reflect that. So on that business level, the cover has to stand out in a book store. Recent research (published in this week’s Bookseller magazine) has shown that most readers are becoming less and less influenced by general cover quotes, so the art has to be distinctive.

Read the rest of his piece at Celebrity at Work.

Colin Wilson (left) and Richard Perceval Graves at Glastonbury Tor.

Colin wilson has long been one of my favourite authors. From The Outsider to Beyond the Occult, his work is never less than engrossing and highly intelligent.

He is Syntagma’s celebrity of the day over at Celebrity at Work, where I asked him about his original view of living to be 300 and solving the meaning of the universe.

Read the interview: Link to blog. Link to post.

They said it couldn’t be done. A new novel that would challenge Dan Brown’s ultimate bestseller. A book of such startling plausibility that it must surely be true.

The Syntagma Code.

The publishing world is abuzz with rumour and counter-claim. Does The Syntagma Code throw real light on the greatest danger facing mankind today: the Algorithm?

Only time will tell.

There’s a lot of good writing being done on the network by Syntagma Media writers, so I’m starting to assemble some of the best into what I call our SynBin.

When we have enough posts I’m going to string them into a book called SynBin: The Best Writing from around Syntagma Media, and publish it under our Dial Publishing imprint.

We have some very good writers and writing here at the Towers. Just take a look at Adelle’s Fifty-Something Women, which has a New Yorkish edge and humor. And there’s a lot more too.

I’m trying not to include myself in this book, but I may have to make up some numbers at the end.

We’ve reorganized the distribution of book and publishing assets at Syntagma Media, so that what was “Publishing Corner” has now been moved over here.

The reason for this is that the three book blogs will not be active until just prior to their publication — people tire of hearing about a book for months before it’s published. Because these sites are not updated regularly, they lower the average traffic metrics of the whole of the network.

So, I’ve decided to separate them off to this quiet corner, where they can be themselves without jeopardizing the advertising revenues of the main network.

As an author and a publisher, I often find myself in an ambivalent position. I know the problems publishers face in a crowded marketplace. I also recognize the gripes of authors against their publishers.

So I’m posting this little cri de coeur I found on the web. It’s written by a publisher, obviously, who shall remain anonymous, largely because I’ve lost the reference. But it does provide some insight into the always tortuous relationship between author and publisher :

“Authors really don’t like publishers. They don’t like us because we change their work ~ or force them to. We reject their titles. We dress their books in jackets they hate. We take custody of their manuscripts and refuse visitation rights. We don’t let them see or comment on marketing plans. We spend very little money or time promoting their books. Our royalty statements might as well be Aramaic. We don’t return their voicemail or e-mail. We don’t communicate and we don’t care. Sure, that’s an over-generalization, but it’s too close to the truth for comfort. It should concern us that so many authors feel this way about their publishers. And it’s our fault, really, for not communicating better about exactly what we do, and why.”

Shouldn’t all publishers have these insights?

The British judge, Peter Smith, who presided over the recent Da Vinci “plagiarism” trial in London, has secretly embedded a coded message in his ruling on the trial.

The New York Times spotted this and writes: “LONDON, April 26 — Justice Peter Smith’s 71-page ruling in the recent ‘Da Vinci Code’ copyright case here is notable for many things: the judge’s occasional forays into literary criticism, his snippy remarks about witnesses on both sides, and his fluent knowledge not only of copyright law but also of more esoteric topics like the history of the Knights Templar.’

“The key to solving the conundrum posed by this judgment is in reading HBHG and DVC,” the judge writes in the 52nd paragraph of the ruling, alluding to his code and referring to the two works at issue in the case — “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” and “The Da Vinci Code” — by their initials. (In the United States, the book is called “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”)

If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, says the NYT, you find that the first 10 spell “Smithy Code,” an apparent play on “Da Vinci Code.” But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.

Read the whole article. Login required.

Some internal projects at Syntagma Media are going out to trade publishers. Two have recently done so: Naked Tales and The Nirvaneans.

Naked Tales: Stories By Writers Who Blog, is to be published by Humdrumming in early 2007. It has its own website within the Syntagma network: NakedTales.org.

The Nirvaneans: The Natural history of Nirvana and Those Who Attained It, by John M Evans (otherwise known as “me”), is also being published by Humdrumming in 2007.

Dial Publishing will initially concentrate on spin-offs from the network, which might not otherwise attract a mainstream publisher.

Other publishing models are also being tried out. For example, we are republishing my earlier book on technical and business writing on a blog: Tech Biz Writing, supported only by advertising. This will eventually form a comprehensive free course on these crucial subjects.

Dial will also produce eBooks which will be sold off the websites, and will utilize new technology in the production of its print books. No specific projects have been decided on as I write, but some will be announced soon.

The Hogarth Press was a phenomenon. It was launched in 1917 to produce LITERATURE. Nothing less would do for Bloomsbury. Surprisingly, it was a very modest affair to start with. Its proprietors, Virginia and Leonard Woolf — after months of procrastination — visited the Excelsior Printing Supply Company where they purchased a small hand press with enough type to set up two pages, and an instruction booklet. Their total expenditure was £19 5s 6d. From these unremarkable beginnings the Hogarth Press was born.

The first publication from the press was to be a very slim volume, comprising two short stories, one from Virginia, The Mark on the Wall, and one from Leonard, Three Jews. Each character of type was laboriously set by hand and 150 copies were produced. The sheets were also hand bound, with a few woodcuts by Dora Carrington providing the ornament. Sold by subscription at 1/6d, it must have seemed an amusing trifle, even to the friends, like Lytton Strachey, who bought them. Were the copies well preserved, however, their descendants would be holding a few small sheets (thirty-one pages) worth upwards of £5000 today. They managed to sell 134 copies and reportedly made £7 in profit, through this did not take into account their own labour or royalties. Nevertheless it was a credible performance for the first title from a small press.

Their next effort was more ambitious: a sixty-eight page story by Katherine Mansfield, called The Prelude. Realizing that the labour involved in setting this up would be daunting, Leonard decided to put the work out to a “proper” printer, who produced 300 copies to be sold at 3/6d.

Now Hogarth Press was beginning to take off — artistically, if not yet financially. More titles followed, including poetry by T.S. Eliot, and a sixteen-page story, Kew Gardens, by Virginia. When the latter sold out at 2/-, and a new print run of 500 had to be ordered from a commercial printer, the press was in business as a publisher of note. Today, apart from Penguin, Hogarth Press is the only really collectable imprint on the bibliophile circuit.

John Ruskin also became a self-publisher, using one of his own employees, George Allen — later founder of George Allen & Unwin — to handle the whole business for him. Thus many of Ruskin’s works were published under Allen’s name from his cottage in Orpington, Kent. This approach alienated many booksellers, and even readers, who found his books difficult to obtain. But Ruskin was ever his own man, and in 1887, George Allen announced a profit of £4000.

In our own day, self-publishing by recognized authors is still a feature of the book scene. Jill Paton Walsh and Susan Hill are surprising examples. Indeed, Susan Hill publishes a literary journal from her home in the Cotswolds and has published a volume of her own short stories.

The name that most readily springs to mind, however, is that of Alfred Wainwright, a rather stolid borough treasurer, whose love of the fells bore strange fruit in a long and somewhat isolated life. Wainwright was a one-off’s one-off. His many works, some of them simply maps, explored and commented on the wild hill country of the British Isles, especially Lakeland, where he lived. Contrarily, he developed a caligraphic method which, like Blake’s, completely bypassed the need for typesetting and the compositor’s skills. His particular method, however, was made possible by the advent of offset lithography, which created the printing plate largely by photographic techniques

The plates were far too detailed and complex to be amenable to the hand-work required for each of Blake’s printed sheets. Wainwright’s hand-written spreads employed justified text, roman and italic lettering, as well as a range of heading weights which give a quaint but professional feel to his pages. Naturally, Wainwright was a self-publisher, at least in his early career. Later he was published by Michael Joseph.

Hunter Davies, Wainwright’s biographer, self-published his own guide to the Lake District in the early 1980s. True to form, he collected additional funds by writing and broadcasting about the experience, so the raw data he gives does not present the whole picture of the enterprise.

The cost of printing 10,000 copies of the 200 page title was £6000. A major publisher distributed the book and, presumably on the Davies “brand-name” alone, obtained advanced orders of around 9000. From the gross receipts, however, the author–publisher retained some 13%, or £4000, to cover his own efforts. A poor reward. I suspect even so, that Hunter had a lot of fun doing it.

By John M Evans

It was the Chiswick Press which reinvented the book as a work of art in itself. The Private Press Movement, as it was called, was taken up by such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, whose contributions to the Arts and Crafts Movement in the 19th century remain a wonder to this day. Others followed: the Dove and and Ashendene Presses were most notable, while the Nonesuch and Golden Cockerel Presses specialized in high-qualty limited editions.

The true heart of the movement, however, has always been the small trade press, producing less than comercial books — more often booklets, or chapbooks — from spare rooms, sheds, barns, and even bedsits. Here surely is the Western equivalent of the Soviet samizdats (the subversive fax publishers of pre–perestroika Russia). They come in all shapes and sizes, from tiny poetry presses using photocopiers, to political pamphleteers — mostly left-wing — some with their own bookshops.

Small they may be, but condescend sniffily at your peril, for their numbers include some of the great names of literature. William Blake, for example, unable to find a publisher who would meet his precise standards, and suffering from a chronic lack of funds, developed his own process for printing his extraordinary illustrations and text.

He went on to hand-produce his great works, helped only by his wife. Bypassing the typesetting and printing trades completely, both for economy and artistic freedom, he developed a method of relief etching — as opposed to the intaglio, or scratching, treatment of the printing plate — which allowed him to etch text as well as illustrations onto a single plate.

The copper plate was painted with a stopping liquid, probably pitch and turpentine, and nitric acid poured over it to eat away the remainder of the surface. He, and his wife Catherine, then arduously printed the individual sheets and bound them, often in elaborate covers. Very few were sold, the best to a handful of wealthy collectors.

Blake’s first book, a visionary expression of his spiritual communion, failed ignominously. His persistence, however, ensured that the next, Songs of Innocence, a small volume of poetry, measuring some 4¾“ x 3”, was published in 1789 with his own hand-made engavings. It did little to improve his financial situation, which was always dire. Far from put him off, though, adversity seemed to energize rather than defeat him.

Blake was the ultimate self-publisher, handling every aspect of the process, from concept to finished book, himself. He even made his own inks, grinding and mixing in a fury of apocalyptic impatiance. It’s a surprise that he didn’t make his own paper as some small presses have done.

Not unnaturally, modern collectors will pay fortunes for rare copies of these strange little books, and bibliophiles handle them with awe.

A more recent example of the little presses of England is The Quince Tree Press, run by the late J.L. Carr from a modest house in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Carr began as a self-publisher after becoming increasingly alienated from the big boys of the book world. His own works included the very individal A Month in the Country — often regarded as his best novel and recently brought out in a handsome edition by The Folio Society.

Later, he took to publishing scores of pocket-sized volumes that readers could easily carry with them to a cricket match (a passion of his). or read on a train journey. His favourites were Extraordinary English Cricketers, printed in two volumes. Carr’s most successful title, however, was a reprint of Jane Austen’s History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian, which she wrote when just 16 years of age.

J.L. Carr was a precise, school-masterly figure, and a reading of his books reveals an extensive, even fastidious knowledge of architecture, as well as cricket. He proved that self-publishing at it’s best is indistinguishable from trade publishing.

In Part 2, we’ll look at Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, John Ruskin and Alfred Wainwright, the Grand Old Man of the Cumbrian Fells.