Green pages

Things are hotting up over at The Green Press who are gearing up to launch their first book in about 10 days time…It is great to see as new small press come online, full of ideas and enthusiasm. If you are in or near north west London, why not mosey over to the launch event on 28 May. See their site for details.

Chocolate, fiction and chance

Apparently the publishers of ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ discovered by chance that it’s no bad thing in sales terms for a book to have a thematic link with chocolate. This was not uppermost in my mind when I wrote a story — part fiction, part travel memoir — set in a squatted German chocolate factory. Had I been thinking sales, my story might not have contained dodgy, going-off chocolate  – unlikely to have such a positive impact! 

The curious can find an extract over at Identity Theory. But to what extent  a writer should be thinking sales is another story… When commercial appeal comes naturally, great — but it’s a hard thing to fake. Lots of good writing would never have been published — might never have been written, in fact — if all writers and publishers chose their projects on the basis of sales predictions.

Predictions can only apply to cases where there’s a precedent, hence the copycat trends you see in fiction. (Which incidentally operate in spite of common-sense factors like boredom: just because a customer bought X book, does not mean they’ll buy X + 1. They might actually have got bored with the whole subject of X.) In cases where the writing is genuinely new, then chance is the operative word. Chance, or risk-taking, may not be very fashionable in an overly spread-sheeted economy, but this is what what the publishing industry was built on.

Book party in Soho

Saw a copy of Punk Fiction for the first time at the launch in Soho the other night. Guess what? It’s a hardback. A first for me. Publisher Portico has made a smart-looking book, and a wild time was had by all  -  the only way to clear a path to the bar was to shout out that you’d just got off a plane from Mexico and needed a hot whiskey for your throat. Here’s a few of the assembled literati at Dick’s Bar, editor Janine Bullman, and one more outside on the Soho streets.