Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother read novels considered important in America of her era. She wanted to be an actress, and one of my earliest memories is of hearing her perform as a singer. She had a remarkable voice. My father used to read us Civil War history at bedtime. He was not literary, but his parents’ ancestors included “the first American poet”, Anne Bradstreet. Continue reading Interview | Chip Martin, Starhaven Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Category: Indie Publisher of the Week
BookBlast® celebrates independent publishing, publisher interview
Interview | Kit Caless, Influx Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mum has always read books, there were lots of books around her house when I was growing up. But as a child and teenager I didn’t read all that much – I was too busy playing football, cricket and skateboarding to bother sitting down to read. I started to take reading seriously when I was about eighteen.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Hell no. Have you seen the people that work in publishing? I never thought it was a place for me. I’m joking, but not joking at the same time. I’ve met lots of great people in the industry but from the outside it appears to be a very elitist, English Literature Graduate kind of place. That’s not my background, so it wasn’t something I ever considered. Starting Influx Press with my school friend Gary Budden was kind of a way of (very slowly and ineffectively) knocking down those closed doors. Continue reading Interview | Kit Caless, Influx Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Interview | David Henningham, co-founder, Henningham Family Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My Mum is a big reader of Crime Fiction. It helped her solve a real life crime while she was working in a Kenyan orphanage a few years ago. They were both “people of The Book,” hosting Parish Bible studies. This made them more learned than the average parents. The Church was my first exposure to people with higher education. I read a lot from a very young age, I had a box of those cassettes with ding turn the page books. I would put the headphones in myself and read for hours. I remember making a zoo out of envelopes. Each one contained a different animal.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start? If not, why now?
No, but something I wanted to do as a Writer was understand every dimension of books. I studied Sculpture because I thought this would teach me about composition in a more general sense than doing English or Creative Writing. I went on to become a master bookbinder and printer too. I became a publisher partly because I wanted to understand, and maybe undermine, distribution and bookselling. It’s another extension to my writing. I guess that’s what it means to be a Modernist in an industrial, networked world.
Why now? We were invited in by big publishers a few times to consult, using our publishing methods. We also worked on several print commissions in our studio for Independents. One title we illustrated is almost at the Million Copies mark. We realised we had an extraordinary range of expertise and there were so many good manuscripts I knew of being turned down for bad reasons. The Poets made me do it! Continue reading Interview | David Henningham, co-founder, Henningham Family Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Interview | Elizabeth Briggs, editor & marketing manager, Saqi Books | Indie Publisher of the Week
Meet in person the indie publisher, Elizabeth Briggs, from Saqi Books, at the BookBlast 10×10 Tour event, Waterstones, Birmingham, 24-26 High Street, B4 7SL @Bhamwaterstones 6.30 p.m. Thursday 25 October. Theme: The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write with reference to the anthology edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. With poets Nafeesa Hamid and Aliyah Holder. Book Tickets
Where were you born, and where did you grow up?
Worcester, where I lived until I left for university in the North East of England at seventeen. Determined as ‘Britain’s most average constituency’ by the BBC last year, it’s not bad coming from a city whose place on the international stage is thanks to a great sauce and Edward Elgar.
What sorts of books were in your family home?
All sorts. I was very lucky. We had these incredible encyclopedias of animals from around the world, which I used to spend hours pouring over and copying the pictures. They were shelved alongside an illustrated bible, which I didn’t think at all odd at the time. It never occurred to me as a child that people took stories from the old testament as gospel: I thought they were wild and strange fantasy at the time – violent and bloody, the kind of things I wasn’t allowed to watch on TV. My dad also has an astonishing collection of moldy orange Penguin original paperbacks, bought back when they cost 85p each. I used to read a lot of Agatha Christie. I also have two older sisters so could borrow their books too. I read The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst when it first came out (I was twelve at the time), which was eye-opening. Continue reading Interview | Elizabeth Briggs, editor & marketing manager, Saqi Books | Indie Publisher of the Week
Interview | Charles Boyle, author-publisher @CBeditions
Charles Boyle is the quintessential self-published author who also publishes books by other authors (similar to Virginia and Leonard Woolf who set up the Hogarth Press in 1917 and published works by key modernist writers as well important works in translation). CB Editions publishes books that are enticing, witty, essential reading. His blog is at Sonofabook.
Here is a selection of CB Editions’ top reads: Jennie Walker (one of Boyle’s pen names), 24 for 3 which was picked up by Bloomsbury; Jack Robinson (one of Boyle’s pen names), Days and Nights in W12, Robinson, By the same author, An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.; Gabriel Josipovici, Only Joking; Andrzej Bursa, Killing Auntie & other work; Gert Hofmann, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl; David Markson, This is Not a Novel ; Lara Pawson, This is the Place To Be; Diane Williams, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine; Will Eaves, The Inevitable Gift Shop.
Charles Boyle has given us an exclusive interview, so here he is in his own words: Continue reading Interview | Charles Boyle, author-publisher @CBeditions
Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother was a voracious reader: she kept a diary of everything she had read since age about thirty. I reckon at least a book a week for fifty years +! However love for books came equally from an inspired English teacher at Shrewsbury, F. McEachran who used to make us read T. S. Eliot out loud (as well as Goethe in German), and constantly wept with emotion when he read Shakespeare to us. Bless him.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
If you define “start” as post university, then yes.
Has your vision from when you started Galileo ten years ago changed?
Not really. My interest has always been to make books which personally interest/inspire me rather than books which are just commercial. One hopes that one day the two will coincide. But I’ve been in trade book publishing (prior to Galileo) long enough time to know that for the vast majority of us, profitability is the elusive butterfly.
What was the book that made you fall in love with reading?
I suppose the first book that I remember as being truly influential was Wind in the Willows, though “falling in love” may be too strong a term. Continue reading Interview | Robert Hyde, founder, Galileo Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week
Interview | Andrew Latimer, co-founder, Little Island Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
No, neither. My parents are more interested in the business side of things – as in, “does it make money?” I’m running out of synonyms for “not yet”! Instead, I have an incredible English teacher to thank for my impecuniosity. He went through the entirety of Paradise Lost with me, line-by-line.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I think so, although it took me a while to realise it. I went around the houses first – journalism, academia, writing – but found that publishing was a good fit for my temperament.
Has your vision from when you started Little Island Press two years ago changed?
In that we now publish fiction and essays – yes, in a big way. I started Little Island with only poetry in mind, but could not pass on some incredible projects, and our purview gradually widened. Yet, in another, more fundamental way, nothing has changed. We’re still committed to bringing together the best in literary innovation, design and production. “Real books,” as some have commented. Continue reading Interview | Andrew Latimer, co-founder, Little Island Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Interview | Rosemarie Hudson, founder, HopeRoad Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
No, I only started my career in publishing twenty years ago; previously I spent most of the time in the film industry.
Has your vision from when you started HopeRoad 7 years ago changed?
No, in that I still want to continue to publish authors and writings from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. It’s a big, rich vision that will last my lifetime.
How do you balance originality and profitability?
Our remit is to publish books of quality – to add a third word – that would otherwise not see the light of day. Profitability is something one can depend on when selling shoes, for instance – but book sales are mainly a gamble. Perhaps most publishers would agree with this! However, I believe in every single title we publish and gain great satisfaction from seeing these books in print and also from working with talented writers. We are still looking forward to that “big win”, but in the meantime, with occasional help from Arts Council England, along with grants for our translations, we are able to keep going, and to keep our standards high.
Interview | Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, founder, Istros Books | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I actually come from a working class family, and my parents didn’t even have bookshelves when I was growing up. But there was a good library nearby and at some point in my childhood I realized that books are one of the best things about life on this planet (at least in the man-made world).
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Despite the fact that my tutor at university predicted I would go into publishing, it wasn’t something I considered until later on. In my twenties I wanted to travel and worked a variety of menial jobs in order to fund that. Afterwards, I trained as a teacher, but my main subject was always literature. When I decided to found Istros, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world: a coming together of the disparate strands of my life into a meaningful whole.
Interview | Carolina Orloff, co-founder, Charco Press | Indie Publisher of the Week
Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My father owned and ran a large bookshop right in the centre of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I am from originally. It was a bookshop that had been in the family for three generations, and where the likes of Borges, the Ocampo sisters and Bioy Casares had current accounts. Both my parents were and are great readers and I grew up surrounded by books from a very early age. No doubt my love for literature grew from that. I even started writing at an early age, and had a book of poetry published when I was thirteen.
Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Definitely in literature, in some form. I’ve always studied and worked with literature. I did an BA in Literature, followed by an MA in Translation and a PhD in Latin American Literature. I then lectured on literature, translated literature, examined literature papers and even wrote articles and books on one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers, Julio Cortázar.
Continue reading Interview | Carolina Orloff, co-founder, Charco Press | Indie Publisher of the Week