Category: Indie Publisher of the Week

BookBlast® celebrates independent publishing, publisher interview

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.

Continue reading Interview | Rosemarie Hudson, founder, HopeRoad Publishing | Indie Publisher of the Week

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.

Continue reading Interview | Susan Curtis-Kojakovic, founder, Istros Books | Indie Publisher of the Week

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

Interview | Sam Jordison, co-founder, Galley Beggar Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
Yes, my parents were very encouraging. Always recommending books and passing things on to me, reading to me as a child, finding new things for me to read, feeding my Roald Dahl habit . . . My Mum was a librarian too.  

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Depends how you define start!  I started out writing books and working as a journalist (mainly writing about books) – and those experiences led me into publishing. But I’ve wanted to be around books ever since I realised I couldn’t sing and would never be Mick Jagger.

Has your vision from when you started Galley Beggar five years ago changed?
Not really. Our hope has always just been to publish the very best quality books we can. I guess the thing that has changed is that we now hope to really be able to nurture our writers and keep publishing them, and keep doing the best editorial and production jobs we can for them . . . So we’re looking at careers as well as individual books. But that was something we aspired to quite early on. I suppose the change is that we have a track record now, so don’t have that element of surprise or coming from nowhere. But I still feel and hope we offer something different. Continue reading Interview | Sam Jordison, co-founder, Galley Beggar Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Cécile Menon, founder, Les Fugitives | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
My mother was a reader. Of modern classics mainly. She used to go with her father to the local library in our small home town. There weren’t hundreds of books in the house as I grew up, but enough to spur my interest.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
Yes, I wanted to work in publishing, and in England, after obtaining my degree at Sorbonne Nouvelle. I had no connections whatsoever, I was a complete outsider. My MA tutor told me right away it’d take me 10 years to get anywhere in that milieu. I didn’t believe him but he was right. After 10 years, even after I had somehow managed to get hired by the venerable John Calder, Judy Daish and Clive James, I was nowhere near a proper start in publishing. Having said that I was never really good at holding down a job! Working for Clive James was obviously a unique experience with a long-lasting influence on me. Continue reading Interview | Cécile Menon, founder, Les Fugitives | Indie Publisher of the Week

Interview | Michael Z. Wise, co-founder, New Vessel Press | Indie Publisher of the Week

Are (were) your parents great readers? Tell us a bit about yourself.
I’ve enjoyed reading since I was a child — yes, my parents encouraged me to study and explore books. After studying French in high school and living for a summer with a French family in Clermont Ferrand, I have loved reading in other languages.

Did you want to work in the publishing industry from the start?
I’m relatively new to the business of publishing, although I’ve written a book (Capital Dilemma: Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy) I only co-founded New Vessel Press with Ross Ufberg in 2012. We’re both passionate about literature and foreign literature in particular — I read French and German and Ross reads Russian and Polish — but neither of us has prior experience in publishing. We’ve been learning as we go along which has made building a new house a challenge but great fun. Nowadays the publishing world is changing so rapidly that I’d venture that we have just as much of a clue as to where things are going as more traditional, established houses. Continue reading Interview | Michael Z. Wise, co-founder, New Vessel Press | Indie Publisher of the Week