A Writer’s Love Song to the Indie Publisher - by Johnny Rich

A guest blog by Johnny Rich, author of The Human Script

Writers have wild imaginations, but, even in their wildest imaginings, small independent publishers are rarely the outlet for their work that they pictured when they sat down to write a novel. I know I didn’t.

Instead I may have imagined a creaking building in Soho, floor after floor of wooden steps, books lining every surface like treasures in a magic cave. Earnest, affable people potter about between long lunches with authors. The commerce of it all is tucked under a stack of manuscripts – something unseen, something that bothers only those without enough instinct to sniff a hit. They are engaged in making art, but only art that doesn’t lose too much money. And that, they will tell you, is an art form in itself.

Publishing was like that once. Maybe not. Certainly, it isn’t any more.

Nowadays writers are encouraged to pen their work for a ‘market’, a ‘demographic’, a ‘genre’. They imagine their publisher as an open-plan hive. Buzzing with computers and strip-lighting, it could be mistaken for a financial trading floor were it not for the occasional branded ‘dump bin’, some point-of-sale collateral or tie-in merchandise. There’s barely a book to be seen: they are stacked high in faraway warehouses, fresh printed in China, bulk shipped to Amazon and Walmart.

Here, it is all commerce: the publishing industry, manufacturing a literature not of stories, but of units sold, investment returns and spreadsheets. Decisions are made not on merit, instinct or novelty, but on algorithms, risk analyses and established formulas.

Occasionally, they do produce or support books of literary merit, of transcendent beauty revealing universal truths … but only because it’s a niche from which there’s a buck to be made.

I know I sound contemptuous, but I’m really not. The fact that publishing is an industry is no worse than the same being true of television, housing or food (and probably better than banking being operated in the same way). Without books making money for someone, there wouldn’t be so many books. In the past 50 years, modern publishing has stopped making any pretence to be for the purpose of art. Why should it be?

As a writer, this puts me in an awkward position. You see, what I want and what publishers want are not the same thing.

I struggle to get on board with the book factory mentality. Just like I prefer bread that goes hard over bread that goes green, I try to produce work that is nearer the artisan end of the market.

I did have my brush with that white sliced world. When I first completed my debut novel The Human Script more than ten years ago, I found myself being wooed by three of London’s top literary agencies, all vying to represent my book. Flattering indeed, and, of course, my imagination started running off to literary lunches, festival stages and awards ceremonies.

But each publisher’s rejection that followed brought me crashing to earth like a bouncing bomb. I wasn’t an established author, they said. The novel wasn’t easy to categorise. It might be hard to market the film or translation rights. Eventually, the trail ran dry. Another unknown writer’s manuscript went under another bed.

As the years went by, the book went sour in my imagination, like a lovely and blameless ex whose only crime was to be the object of too much hope.

In the last decade, though, a new kind of publisher has emerged. Neither fusty Faberian nor faceless megacorp, the small independent publisher has arisen out of new technologies – such as ebooks and print-on-demand – that allow low-cost publishing. When the cost is low, the risk is low. And when the economic risk is low, the literary risk can be higher.

This is how, more than ten years after I’d completed my novel, it found a publisher. Red Button was set up by two escapees from corporate publishing who were doing it for the love of good books. They were hunting for unpublished manuscripts, overlooked by the mainstream, but which deserved a readership.

They published The Human Script as an ebook and that first flurry of readers, all so full of praise, breathed new life into the book for me. I read it again myself, which I hadn’t done for years, and found my sourness sweetened.

The reviews started to flow. Without exception, they ranged from generous to fanatical and, this month, Red Button has launched the novel as a paperback.

It’s been a long journey and it has left me understanding that, while the trappings of big publishers may still hold their attractions, for writers like me who want to create challenging and innovative work, small publishers like Red Button offer more. They have the time, the enthusiasm and the love of books to want to nurture their writer’s talent.

Sure, they don’t write big cheques, but anyone who writes to get rich might as well be an accountant for the adrenalin rush.

Besides, some small publishers are earning dividends for themselves, for their writers and most of all for readers: independent imprints like Salt, Legend, And Other Stories, Dedalus and Galley Beggar keep stealing places from the megaliths in the prize and bestseller lists.

In some ways, this has always been true. Nearly a century ago, Joyce’s Ulysses, arguably the greatest novel ever written, was published by a tiny independent publisher who dared to take a risk on quality when the mainstream presses of the day had dismissed it.

And next year the first books will arrive from another new indie publisher cast from this same mould. Dodo Ink is the brainchild of Thom Cuell (of this very blog), author Sam Mills and publishing whizz Alex Spears. Watch this space for more books born out of the shared passion of writers and publishers working together and wanting the same thing.

Johnny Rich is the author of The Human Script, published by Red Button Publishing, available now in paperback (£9.99) and eBook (£2.99) formats. To celebrate the launch of the paperback the author will be reading extracts from the novel followed by a Q&A on 17 November 2015 at the Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. To find out more and to book tickets, visit: http://bit.ly/humanscriptlaunch.