Just One Book: latest bulletin

Here's Salt director Chris Hamilton-Emery's latest Facebook note about the Just One Book campaign: the low-down on the amazing success so far, and the reason the campaign needs to keep going:

Sunday, May 31 2009

It's been impossible to think. Just over a week ago we were facing oblivion, the backlist would have sold on, but the business as a going concern was all over. I was job hunting. Stress had left me deaf. We were about to lose our home and it seemed everything had fallen off some precipice and was hurtling down into the frozen dark. We began cancelling the list and preparing for the worst. Nearly a decade of effort was being lost.

Then our viral campaign led to an extraordinary sequence of events. Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of blogs all covered the story of Salt's Just One Book offer. The media picked up on the story and suddenly over a 1,000 orders poured in, supporters arrived in virtual droves and the goodwill and great ideas became emotionally overwhelming; we had support from Foyles and Waterstone's in the UK, from independent bookstores around the globe, The Bookseller and The Guardian covered the story, the BBC wanted to cover us. The office changed from its usual focus on editorial, marketing and publicity to become a non-stop postal service, sending thousands of books off around the globe.



Alex Pryce had arrived to do a week's work experience as a Salt intern (part of our widening programme to support those wanting careers in literary publishing), what began as a project surrounding audio developments was swamped as she was drawn in to picking, packing and despatching order after order. Beside Alex, the Salt team grafted away. Charlotte and Tom, Jen and I, still haven't caught up with it all. But we're working hard, all day, all night, and still the orders are coming in.

Last week was half term, and most of my days were spent at home with the kids, sometimes reassuring them that there was going to be a future and that we would get paid at some point. I was spending as much time as I could helping make those sales. Just over a week later and we've now raised £24,000 or our £55,000 target. There's still some climb ahead, a big climb, but the enormous support of our friends and customers has bought us all time; it's all about time. What we hope most of all, is that we can keep our new customers, and that we've shown them that there's something wonderful and fulfilling about our list and our site, something exceptional about our authors.

I need to keep it all going, I need your support for one more month. So here's an offer for everyone and we hope more customers will come and join the campaign to buy just one book:

A THIRD OFF ALL SALT TITLES THROUGHOUT JUNE

We're now giving you a huge 33% off ALL books till the end of June. Use the coupon code G3SRT453 when in the checkout to benefit. Don't forget if you spend £30 or $30 you get free shipping too.

Please continue to spread the word, and spread news of this offer. Please don't let up. It's been extraordinary, but we're not out of danger yet. Every penny goes into developing Salt's books and services. We want to start a new children's list, and offer more resources to teachers and schools. We want to extend our publishing in new areas including our translations programme, we want to offer you more free magazines online. We want to help develop more support for debuts with the enhancement of our Crashaw and Scott prizes. We're planning audio books, ebooks and new videos for you. We only want to move forward, to develop and expand what we do and deliver great books in new ways to you and yours.

We need your support throughout June. We'll try and organise more readings and promotions with our authors. Virtual book tours. More launches. We'll work with bookstores to bring you short story and poety evenings. Stick with us throughout June and we can do something astonishing. That's the power of Just One Book — we want you to be a part of it. Follow us on Twitter look for #SaltBooks and #JustOneBook. Join our Facebook Group.

And have a giggle at the vid, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdcTqXaOD2s

Oh, and one last special offer — Catherine Eisner’s magnificent crime novel, Sister Morphine for £7.50 plus P&P, simply enter coupon code EISNER in the UK checkout http://bit.ly/8rHDa

Watch out for more special offers throughout June.

Thank you.
Chris

Brave or foolish

So often when I come here to the family house in Wales, I'm busy helping with the never-ending work on the house, or I'm here to write. And so often the weather is so wild or wet or both that when we go walking we are all togged up in our waterproofs.

But this time the weather is so beautiful we've been out walking all day every day - until today when I'm having an experience I haven't had here for a long time: I'm sitting under the trees with a wonderful view of Nantlle Ridge and beginning to feel a new story forming. And I need to, my legs are aching so much!

Look where we went on Thursday: after walking the length of Newborough sands on Anglesey we did something I have never dared do before: we crossed Traeth Abermenai while the tide was out and still receding (above). It's a huge bay which empties completely when the tide is out and fills right up again when it's in, the tide coming in very fast in these parts. It must be safe (as long as you know the tides) because there's an official 'track' across it, marked on the map, but John has never persuaded me to do it before. You set off from the lightpost at the end of the spit on the western side of the bay and make for the centre back onto the dunes. I can tell you I was pretty scared setting out across that great expanse which looked slick with water, and indeed was, although it was never enough to wet much more than our boots, and the sand underneath was firm all the way. In the event it was easy, and what a wonderful feeling when we got to the other side, from where I took the above photo, looking back the way we had come.

Here are my companions, John and Matthew, getting ahead of me on the way:

Latest in the Just One Book campaign

Just two little fluffy clouds this morning, the mountain seeming a different world from usual - something like Greece - and four out of six bands on my internet connection!!

The latest in the Salt Just One Book Campaign is that they have now raised £24,000 of the £55,00 target - soon be half-way there. A wonderful response from poetry and short story lovers. Please help to keep up the momentum by passing on the message, and do take advantage of the wonderful offer of 33% off all Salt books until the end of June.

Here's Jen Hamilton-Emery's latest Facebook message:

JUST ONE BOOK

As a thank you for your support of us this first week of our Just One Book campaign we're offering you a huge 33% off ALL books till the end of June.

Simply use the coupon code G3SRT453 when in the checkout to benefit.

The offer applies to our UK & International and USA shops.

We have now raised £24,000 or our £55,000 target. Do please continue to spread the word about the campaign and this offer. Thank you for everything you're doing to help us save our business and continue publishing.

Best from everyone at Salt
Jen x

Foyles and bookshops take up the Salt Just One Book campaign

Well, it's a glorious day on the mountain today - soft fluffy clouds in the valley down below when I woke, now burned off by the sun, and the internet is working a fair bit better! (I see that yesterday's post got posted twice in all the confusions and lost connections!).

Anyway, here's the latest fantastic news in the Salt Just One book campaign from the Bookseller blog:

Chris will be on BBC2 "Newsnight" tonight (29th May). Foyles will shortly be running a benefit to help raise funds for Salt for the summer. Bookshops around the country are putting on displays of Salt's latest titles. http://www.saltpublishing.com.

Well, wow. This is just wonderful news for everyone involved with Salt, everyone who loves poetry and short stories, and needless to say for me, as the publication of my novel Too Many Magpies depends on the success of this campaign!

Don't forget to watch Chris on Newsnight tonight if you can. We've got a meal booked in Caernarfon tonight, and I'm hoping to get back up the hill by 11 to watch it on our tiny portable battery-powered camping telly. I'm also off now to wait half an hour while the pages load to find out if I'll be able to watch it later on iplayer.

Then we're off out for a day walking!

Salt Just One Book Campaign goes on apace

I'm up the mountain in Wales at the moment, so I may not be online much for the next few days - it's always worst in bad weather, and it took about 5 mins for this page to load!

I wanted to blog this, though: the Salt Just One book campaign goes on apace (Please scroll down to my previous posts for the link: it would take me no end of time to put it in here!). Apparently there were 800 orders in the first 4 days, bringing in 17,000 pounds. Today the campaign hit the Guardian books blog with an article by Shirley Dent (that's a link I prepared earlier!), and it seems that at this very moment director Chris Hamilton Emery is in London in an interview being recorded for BBC 2's Newsnight Review this Friday at 11pm!

Thank you so much to everybody who has bought Salt books. Salt isn't out of the woods yet, though, so if you fancy some more or if you haven't yet bought one, please do. Their website here.

Cross-posted with Fictionbitch.

Salt Just One Book Campaign goes on apace

I'm up the mountain in Wales at the moment, so I may not be online much for the next few days - it's always worst in bad weather, and it took about 5 mins for this page to load!

I wanted to blog this, though: the Salt Just One book campaign goes on apace (Please scroll down to my previous posts for the link: it would take me no end of time to put it in here!). Apparently there were 800 orders in the first 4 days, bringing in 17,000 pounds. Today the campaign hit the Guardian books blog with an article by Shirley Dent (that's a link I prepared earlier!), and it seems that at this very moment director Chris Hamilton Emery is in London in an interview being recorded for BBC 2's Newsnight Review this Friday at 11pm!

Thank you so much to everybody who has bought Salt books. Salt isn't out of the woods yet, though, so if you fancy some more or if you haven't yet bought one, please do. Their website here.

Cross-posted with Fictionbitch.

Hooray and thank you

My book, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and Tania Hershman's The White Road and Other Stories still on the Amazon UK Bestselling short story list, as a result of the Salt Just One Book campaign! Thank you to all those people who are buying Salt books!

Not just one book!!

Latest in the Salt Just One Book campaign: the website hits have gone through the roof and 643 new orders are in process.

My own order arrived yesterday, and it's hard to describe the relish when those beautifully produced books emerge from the jiffy bag. I'd ordered Chrissie Gittins' newly-launched book of poems, I'll Dress One Night as You and Matthew Licht's stories, The Moose Show. I loved Chrissie's story collection, Family Connections, which was one of the first story collections Salt published - wry, vivid stories about 'ordinary' lives which make them anything but ordinary, so I know I'm going to love her poems. I bought Matthew's stories for John: we heard him read at a Salt event 18 months or so ago, and they seemed to me amazingly tough, dry yet moving stories, set mainly in New York, I think, and we both thought then: we've got to get those stories. But you know what, we didn't buy them that night. We thought: Oh, we'll get them another time. And guess what, we didn't get them, we just kept on thinking, Oh we'll get them sometime. This is what happens. And in the meantime the recession hit just as Salt's grant ran out and all their books looked in serious danger... This is what happens when people don't actually get round to buying the books.

So please, if you haven't yet bought Just One Book from Salt, do so: you won't just be helping Salt, or just helping to keep short stories and poetry alive, you'll be doing yourself a great big personal, life-enhancing favour, I promise. All their wonderful books here.

Matt Bell's Short Story Month and my story 'Daniel Smith...'

I'm really thrilled that Matt Bell has written about my story 'Daniel Smith Disappears off the Face of the Earth' for his 15th Short Story Month blog. This story appears in my collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World.

The Bookseller picks up on the Salt Just One Book campaign

Bookseller article here about the Just One Book Campaign. Chris Hamilton-Emery says that there were 400 orders in 24 hours. How wonderful!

(And Balancing on the Edge of the World has been up to No 21 on the Amazon UK short-story bestseller list - and Tania's The White Road is currently at No 4!)

Believing in bestsellers

Do you think maybe I need psychiatric help? You see, I find it really hard to believe sometimes when I hit a bit of writing success. Like the fact that since last night my book Balancing on the Edge of the World has been on the Amazon short-story bestseller list - up to no 36 this morning.

There are three other Salt books on the list, Tania Hershman's The White Road, Vanessa Gebbie's Words from a Glass Bubble and David Gaffney's Sawn-Off Tales. This is obviously down to all the wonderful people who have responded to the appeal to save Salt by buying their books, and it's a great big thank you to all those of you who are doing so, and who are spreading the word on the web.

Last night Jamieson Wolf generously weighed in on his blog, and said this:

...why not try the incredible Balancing on the Edge of the World by the lovely Elizabeth Baines, one of the best short story collections I have ever read.

And I'm thinking: What? Eh? The best he has ever read? Hasn't he read many short story collections, then? Or is he just one of those people given to overstatement?

Or maybe do you think someone needs to have a word with my mother?

As for the sales: well, one brief flash in the best-seller charts does not a whole future create, so please, please if you haven't yet done so, buy a Salt book - they're fabulous!!! Go to the website and see the wonderful array of books on offer.

Lilac all the way

Does this ever happen to you? Sometimes I go into a room and there are two people wearing the same colour and standing in a configuration that makes the whole scene look as if it has been designed. And today, I was in the post office with a bundle of envelopes under my arm - magazines for some wonderful people who had bought Salt books today - and the woman in front of me was wearing a silk pale lilac mac. And the guy in front of her was wearing a pale lilac shirt. And the woman standing at the counter was wearing a patterned skirt with grey and lilac splotches. And then I noticed that the woman behind the counter was wearing a pale lilac jumper, and that this was actually the post office uniform colour because the guy to the left of her behind the counter was in another pale lilac shirt, and the woman on the right of her in a uniform blouse of black and lilac blots. And the only people in the place not in lilac were a girl in head-to-foot black and me in my jeans and black leather jacket, only when I got home and took my jacket off I realized I was wearing my puce-coloured T-shirt.

You couldn't paint it, or write it, unless you were making something surreal. Perhaps you could dream it...

What does it mean?

Thank you book buyers!

Well, tonight my book Balancing on the Edge of the World is on the Amazon bestseller short story list at no 49, and Tania Hershman's The White Road is no 10 - someone has been buying Salt books today, and thank you so much to them!

Salt spoof - but serious too

Shed some Salty tears at this:

Just one book: save Salt. And an offer

Although they have worked wonders in the present climate, Salt Publishing are facing a financial crisis, and have put out an appeal asking for people to buy just one Salt book. If enough people do that - just buy one book - the crisis can be averted.

Go on, you know you want one of those wonderful, beautifully produced, superbly written Salt books, or even two...

And if you buy one Salt book today from anywhere I'll send you a free copy of the now defunct but acclaimed and collectable short story magazine metropolitan. Just email me at e dot baines at zen dot co dot uk.

Here's the message which Salt director Chris Hamilton-Emery put out on Facebook yesterday:

As many of you will know, Jen and I have been struggling to keep Salt moving since June last year when the economic downturn began to affect our press. Our three year funding ends this year: we've £4,000 due from Arts Council England in a final payment, but cannot apply through Grants for the Arts for further funding for Salt's operations. Spring sales were down nearly 80% on the previous year, and despite April's much improved trading, the past twelve months has left us with a budget deficit of over £55,000. It's proving to be a very big hole and we're having to take some drastic measures to save our business.

Here's how you can help us to save Salt and all our work with hundreds of authors around the world.

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

Short Circuit: A Salt Publishing Guide to the Art of the Short Story

Ah, time to announce this, I see: Short Circuit: A Salt Publishing Guide to the Art of the Short Story, edited by Vanessa Gebbie, due September 1st. It looks fantastic, and I'm really proud to have contributed alongside so many fabulous short story writers. Vanessa has done a stirling editing job, which she writes about on her blog, having got the final manuscript off to Salt. Can't wait to read all the other contributions!

Short is beautiful

An article I wrote for the Writers' Guild magazine, UK Writer, on the rise of the short story has just gone online.

Reading group: The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm

Hans suggested this book, which we all very much liked, after a German friend had recommended it to him: we hadn't heard of it, but in fact it's a bestseller and something of a modern classic in Germany. It's short, a novella, and is told by a narrator who, like that of Austerlitz which we read last, seems very close to the author. Returning to his native Hamburg, the narrator sets out to prove that the popular dish of curried sausage sold on German street-stands did not originate in Berlin in the fifties as is generally accepted, but was invented by his aunt's Hamburg neighbour, Mrs Brucker, who sold it on the local square immediately after the war. However, tracking her down to an old people's home and getting her talking, he learns far more than the answer to this question - which was yes, she did invent it - and the matter of how she came to invent it is withheld as her poignant wartime story unfolds.

With a husband and two grown children away in the war, Lena Brucker meets at the cinema a young soldier who, failing to leave her flat next morning, becomes a deserter secreted by her there. When the war ends very soon after his arrival, she can't bring herself to tell him and inevitably lose him, and thus he becomes her unwitting prisoner. It is only later, after this story has played itself out, and Lena sets about making a postwar living for herself, that the recipe for curried sausage comes to her more or less by accident.

Thus the search for the truth about curried sausage is a kind of device, or even a McGuffin, for the unravelling of a more emotionally complex tale, but, 'combining the farthest with the nearest' as the narrator says it does, it is also a kind of metaphor for that tale too: the coming together of two disparate people who would not under normal circumstances do so, a woman reaching middle age and a young man with a wife and new baby to whom he feels committed.

John suggested that it also operated as a way to make palatable and approach a subject which is of great sensitivity in Germany, since the denouement of Lena's wartime story, which I won't give away here, hinges on the revelation to her of what had been happening in the death camps. He said he also thought that the double-narrator device which this book shared with Austerlitz was connected with this: a way for the generation of Germans tackling this subject in novels to 'distance' it and make it possible to handle. He thought it was interesting too, and perhaps inevitable as a strategy, that both these novels and The Reader feature a younger narrator forging a relationship with an older person who had been involved to greater or lesser degrees in these events.

Everyone had good things to say about this book. People liked its depiction of the ways that the extremities of war disrupt convention, and in particular the portrayal of the tenderness yet toughness of the unconventional relationship. They loved the little touches, such as the two officers of the occupying British force turning out to have Hamburg accents (and to be Jews), and the portrayal of the postwar black market bartering. They were especially taken by the book's illustration of the fact the people you least expected turned out to be the wartime informers. Clare said that she was amazed when she realized what a short time the two had been together in the flat, as it had seemed to go on for ages, and everyone agreed that this was an achievement of the novel: recreating the suspension of time and reality for the two characters.

I said that I thought the book extremely well written, as far as you could tell from a translation, or maybe you could tell because the translation read so well. Clare then asked me what I meant by well written. I said I meant emotional acuity or truthfulness conveyed via apt language, and John summed it up better by saying that in well-written prose there isn't a false note, which everyone agreed was true about the prose of this book. I also said that one of the things which struck me forcibly about the double narrator device which seems to be a feature of these recent German books is that it serves to subsume the ego of the author: all the emotional and verbal acuity is handed by the author to a narrator, which I said struck me as an act of great authorial generosity, and John wondered if it were a function of the act of reparation which these novels may be seen as.

We did find some false notes on other levels, however. While the narrator reports Lena's story indirectly, thus giving himself room for interpolation, it is nevertheless the story as told to him by Lena, and on one or two occasions the novel swerves unconvincingly from its own convention when we are presented with the interiority of other characters. Some people said they had found themselves wondering if it really were believable that the soldier, Bremer, didn't guess that the war was over as he watched the road from the window all day long. I said I had a slight doubt about the novel's treatment of the business of the informers and people's knowledge of the death camps: the novel seems to imply that people like Lena were completely unaware of what was happening with the Jews (Lena thinks back to a Jewish neighbour leaving with her case and how nothing much struck her about it at the time), yet Lena lived more or less in the Jewish quarter, and also, the novel seems to indicate, people knew that there were informers informing on the Jews.

Doug said that the worst false note was right at the end, indeed the very last word, when the narrator comes upon a scrap of paper on which is one of the crosswords which Bremer whiled away his time doing. One of the words filled in by Bremer is 'even though nobody will believe me - novella'. Everyone cried out in horrified agreement, and Doug said he'd thrown the book down at that final point.

Even so, we liked the book enough to forgive it any of its faults, including this.

Our archived discussions can be found here, and a list of all the books we have discussed here.

Awards big and small

I am so flattered: the wonderful Sue Guiney has given me a Kreativ Blogger award - which comes with a sting as I have to list 7 things I love, and if you think I'm going to tell the whole truth about my lusts and obsessions, you've got another think coming!!

Here are some things I love which I don't mind confessing, though:

1. My partner, John (soppy, moi?)

2. My kids (mumsy, moi?)

3. Finishing a piece of writing and thinking it's OK (self-satisfied, moi?)

4. Being with actors, which I have been this week, and who are some of the most open, generous, stimulating and witty people in the world, even though those who don't know think they're just show-offs.

5. Walking in Snowdon.

6. New shoes (or rather, charity-shop shoes in outrageous impractical styles I'd never buy new) (Fetish, moi?)

7. Cabbage. Yum.

And now I have to make this award to 7 creative bloggers I love. I know that many of my favourite bloggers have already received this award, but here are some who may not have, though I could well be wrong: Charles Lambert, Caroline Smailes, Keeper of the Snails, The Volatile Rune, Barbara's Bleeugh!, The Richard Madeley Appreciation Society, Maitresse.

And a fabulous piece of news. The longlist has been announced for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award: a stunning 57 collections are on it and thus receive the international publicity which this award was set up to provide for a form which generally gets little attention. And alongside authors such as Ali Smith and Kazuo Ishiguro, there are eight Salt authors :

Tania Hershman, The White Road

Sue Hubbard, Rothko’s Red

Alex Keegan, Ballistics

Charles Lambert, The Scent of Cinnamon

André Mangeot, A Little Javanese

John Saul, As Rivers Flow

Mark Illis, Tender

Robert Graham, The Only Living Boy

Launch of The Real Louise by Ailsa Cox

I love Liverpool. It's this kind of place: last night at 6.15 John was parking the car near Lime Street Station and I was studying the parking meter, and a chap who was crossing the street several hundred yards up took the trouble to divert towards me and call, 'It's free after six, love!' And I love the way the roads swoop up hills and round bends and the wind whips off the Mersey and round your shoulders - well, it was doing that last night.

We were on our way to the Bluecoat Gallery and the launch of The Real Louise (Headline Publications), a first collection of stories from Ailsa Cox, with whom I once edited the short story mag metropolitan. Ailsa is a wonderful writer: her acuteness with language casts an immediate spell, transporting you instantly into place and psyche. There's gratifying surprise in her stories in the way they get under the surface of experience, yet they also make you want to say, 'Yes, that's how it really is!'

As Ailsa's publisher Gladys Mary Coles said in introducing her, Ailsa has played a large part in the recent renaissance of the short story, through her own academic works and the founding of the prestigious Edge Hill Prize for a published collection, this year's shortlist for which has just been announced. Ailsa gave a wonderful reading and then she and Gladys Mary held an interesting discussion with the audience about the short story.

I had a great time: there were several people I knew and hadn't seen for ages, and I was very pleased to meet once more Robert Shearman, whose own great collection, Tiny Deaths, was shortlisted for last year's Edge Hill Prize and went on to win the World Fantasy Award. Afterwards some of us went out for a Portuguese meal, and it was pretty late by the time John and I made it back along the M62. Even so, I couldn't sleep until I'd had a couple of paracetamols, and you know why? Because even though I vowed not to wear high heels any more after my accident last year, I went and wore them again, and halfway along Parker Street I went right over on my ankle and was in agony by the time I got into bed.

Vain, moi?