Salt Publishing

Internships at Salt, to provide design and publicity support in Fulbourn, Cambridge UK

Salt is opening additional offices in London this month, and we are offering two internships from June onwards to support our UK sales and editorial team during this exciting expansion. The two positions are for a graphic designer to work on books, covers and Web projects and a book publicist to complement our expanding marketing and sales team. Both positions will be based in our Cambridge sales office in Fulbourn.

- The positions are for work experience in a busy, developing literary publisher with an international list and with a substantial Web presence.

- We prefer graduates with a good first degree or equivalent, and a demonstrable interest in publishing as a career.

- Only first language speakers of English need apply, unless you have impeccable spoken and written skills.

- Designers must have experience of QuarkXPress. Publicists must have extremely good interpersonal skills and preferably have some media experience.

- You must come for a minimum of eight weeks, we will plan your hours to suit you and the business. We are happy to consider applicants for longer periods after this eight week period.

- You will learn about the business of publishing and gain an overview of most functions, as well as get to know our writers, people in the trade, and how publishing works.

- We will pay your travel expenses to Fulbourn from within the Cambridge area.

If you are interested please contact Chris Hamilton-Emery at chris@saltpublishing.com

JustOneBook its origins and aftermath

Thank heavens there’s no consensus on how one runs a literary press, the diversity of approaches can be quite staggering. However, I’ll make one distinction at the start of this note, I’m going to talk about those publishers who live off their literature publishing and are dependent on its sales. It’s an important distinction, because the trajectory of one's work as a marketer, publicist, sales representative, editor, all change with respect to whether one earns one’s living from publishing and selling books; whether you pay your mortgage and car loan with those sales. It changes your entire experience of literature and especially of what it is possible for you to publish: your view of what constitutes great literature lies within the boundaries of what you can effectively sell and profit, or make a surplus, from.

Of course, revenue streams in publishing are often mixed, involving sales revenue, public funds and private patronage — whether you’re big or small, you may well at times be dependent on the funds of patrons or the public. The balance can shift significantly between those different sources of income, too.

Over the past three years, Salt has benefited from a grant in support of our publishing, with a specific programme of development based around building sales through our Web site, and with the plan of maximising this source of income against all others, and with the grant paid in decreasing amounts, aimed at leaving us solvent and self-supporting by 2010. The plan, borne out of some Arts Council consultancy was bold and challenging. The targets were aggressive, based on achieving over 40% growth year on year and taking our income from £72K in 2007 to roughly £400K by 2013 (the targets extending over six years, and the grant for three). This was largely to be achieved through accelerated growth, taking the annual publications from 30 to 80 books per year and to increase sales of each title: finding books which had commercial as well as inherent literary value.

Over those three years, the commitments list grew dramatically as we built up the forward load and worked flat out to get books in print, market and sell them. It was a dramatic and difficult experience and, I have to admit, at times, not entirely pleasurable, but it has been intellectually engaging and mentally demanding. There have been many, many lessons. You learn to spot what customers want, but you sometimes get that spectacularly wrong. Books you know, absolutely know, are good writing may make for terrible sales. The divide between writing and publishing can open in to a gulf and a great deal of misunderstanding can emerge from publishing for profit and publishing for virtue. A great deal of clarity, too. Poetry does sell. Serious, high-level poetry sells. But it largely comes down to gambling around writers and their readership.

Of course, we didn’t make last year’s sales targets and the resulting shortfall in sales and the end of our grant combined to drive Salt into a dark and troubling place. A significant backlist, a significant commitments list, poor cash and substantial manufacturing costs, it all looked disastrous.

Over the last decade we’ve sunk just about everything into our business: savings, inheritance, everything was invested, but most importantly, time. Money you can often find, but time expended is gone forever. Lesson one: How you spend your time is the irrecoverable substance of life.

Like most committed arts businesses, the cash profile of Salt was always troubling. Over the past three years we’ve taken annual pay cuts, cut costs to the bone, but invested in new books, new writers and taken offices to finally free ourselves from a life spent actually ferreting about amid the book stocks piled like cardboard towers around the house, the garage, everywhere there was a foot of free space.

When the recession hit us in June 2008 we began to see our growth decline. The previous year had seen sales revenue grow by 72%. Gradually, that growth began to slip, at first we thought it was a minor adjustment, until we reached our peak selling season and saw sales all but disappear. Finally, things came to head just over a month ago and on the fateful afternoon of May 20, it all unravelled. All unravelled in spectacular fashion. The end of our grant, a cluster of bills, a tax demand and that was it.

I can’t quite explain what that feels like, not without an element of melodrama. We were about to lose everything: the business, our home, an entire way of life, a decade of fantastically hard labour. It wasn’t an issue of prospects, projections, likelihoods, possibilities, it was a visceral, ‘here and now’ moment of factual comprehension. It was all over. There were plenty of tears. We were in shock. Jen left for home to pick up Cameron from pre-school. I stared at my Mac and could not believe that it had come to this, so suddenly it seemed.

Everyone fails. Failing is an important part of life and business. Most books fail in commercial terms. But this failure stunned me. I was actually embarrassed. I’ve seen businesses make a loss, and some go to the wall, but to see my own business implode was crushing. I felt like I was falling from a tall building and hurtling to the ground, empty and vacant and with all that inevitability of soundless imminent ending, yet feeling that the fall was taking forever. It sounds clichéd writing that, but it was terrifyingly banal.

Of course, it wasn’t the end. I came up with a simple, very simple idea, that rather than petition for funding, or patronage, I’d try and sell one book to each of our fans. If they bought one book, we’d find enough money to take us through to the end of December. Quite what the business would have to do to change its profile after that point was and is still hidden from us; we still haven’t worked out what we need to do beyond the end of 2009 to develop a profitable business capable of supporting our staff and the publishing programme. Perhaps a business like ours will always need some form of additional patronage. But we have some good ideas for taking things forward, and we're going to start a children's list. We’ve never been short of ideas.

The Just One Book idea began as a Facebook note, shared with our friends and Salt’s fan club. On the afternoon of day one we took 122 orders, on day two we took 260, then things began to slow, we took 157 orders on the 22nd, 107 on the 23rd. The note quickly became a campaign, and from Facebook the news spread to Twitter and from there to scores of blogs. Within a week hundreds of blogs were reporting on the news of our Just One Book campaign, through Twitter the activities gained a hash tag and #JustOneBook, tweeted and retweeted, filled my inbox with notes of support.

There were a few who were worried. Some saw it as a trick. Some as a scam. Some just didn’t want us to succeed and blamed things on our incompetence as publishers, or the withered prospects of our chief genres. But most, a vast wave of customers and supporters, escalated the plight of our business into a worldwide phenomenon. I was at home looking after the children and planning my repping trips, too. I decided that a little bit of humour would go a long way, so I came up with a spoof of a WWF advert about polar bears aimed at young children on UK day time television. A press release later and the story was picked up by The Bookseller, then The Guardian — both had a terrific effect. Then the BBC rang to film me for a round up on poetry on Newsnight, a national news programme, after struggling for many hours to reach Hackney (surely the public transport black hole of London): all five seconds of my televisual debut whistled by the following night. The campaign drifted away, spiralled away, into thousands of well-wishers. The simple idea caught everyone’s attention and soon Gryff Rhys Jones stepped in to support us. I began to lose track of events.

Whilst all this was happening, Alex Pryce had arrived to take up an internship and her help and Charlotte’s and Tom’s working with Jen kept the authors and customers informed as the orders tumbled in. A week after Alex had left, one of our authors, Jay Merill booked herself into a bed and breakfast and started working for us for a week to help with all administration.

Foyles and Waterstone’s supported us. The ICA bookshop and the LRB bookshop. Independents around the country. CEOs of major and minor publishers emailed with suggestions and business advice. Some offered financial support. Editors from a wide range of other poetry and short story presses emailed with ideas. It was humbling. I had absolutely no idea of the strength of feeling Salt’s little business had engendered.

Another week on and the orders continued to roll in, dropping to around 17 per day, but the collective impact had been tremendous. We’d raised over £30K of direct orders. Then the trade figures began to come in, and we’d had an enormous month. Booksellers began to ring to support us. The calls became overwhelming. We’d spent three years with our heads down driving targets as much as enjoying the job and the people we worked with. For the first week we were wondering who on earth all these people were? Where were they coming from?

Orders appeared from Kazakhstan, Japan, Denmark, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, America. Many gave donations. Some ordered every other day. Some ordered one book, most ordered four. Soon 1,500 orders had arrived. The office was in chaos trying to keep up with picking, packing and despatching books, ordering new stocks, drop-shipping titles from other distributors. Customer queries were coming in chasing orders, just as Salt staff chased printers for delivery dates on urgent reprints and the books kept flying and flying. I kept talking and thinking. We made some mistakes. A Twitter splurge about the perceptions of the poetry world upset some.

Five weeks on and we still haven’t digested the events, we’re still catching up. Whilst I was focussed on sales, over 500 author enquiries poured in. The publishing programme came to a halt and now we have a tremendous backlog of titles, titles we’d cancelled at one point, and then revisited as the campaign grew. Last night our annual Web hits topped 21 million, for those who prefer page views, that’s 2.4 million.

Right now, we’re exhausted. Jen is recovering from the sudden impact of stress, I’m in bed with a summer vomiting bug. It all feels as if the past frenetic five weeks have finally had their physical impact upon us. We need a break.

What has characterised this campaign is the global outreach of our business, publishing as we do in the UK, USA and Australia. Salt has developed a significant Web presence and our voracious commissioning is global, too. The years of building up that international profile meant that there was a wide-ranging base of customers and supporters, people who have come to us over the past decade, people who have felt some sense of stake in Salt and its trajectory and values as a business, many of whom may not have had a chance to make a purchase. But this campaign drew upon that diaspora. It was not the emergence of a single global poetry community, but the sewing together of highly disparate often tiny communities, each with their own commitment to a discrete part of our list, whether that be short stories, or the US avant-garde, or British mainstream writing or indigenous writing, the JustOneBook campaign is about breadth: breadth of publishing, the diversity of our editorial vision (good books and no camps), eclecticism, and the aggregation of these vital areas of writing all of which has led to a broad, uncannily broad, reception.

How do I feel about it? I feel that I now understand that our customers have a larger stake in Salt. I feel an even greater sense of commitment to the business and to make it succeed. That means responding as eclectically as our customers have: to continue to invigorate the list with new writers from all areas of poetry and short fiction and to begin to diversify again into other areas to build a more stable operation. That’s going to need some heavy investment, and Jen and I need to work at preparing that new vision of Salt, which will take us forward for another decade. With the support of our customers we'll carve out a profitable and sustainable niche for a more general literary trade publisher, one which will remain known for its innovations and bold attempts to bring truly great books to the widest possible range of audiences. Watch us grow. Come along with us, it’s still a very marvellous journey. You're part of our future now.

tags: #JustOneBook

Lisa Jarnot reading a poem from Ring of Fire, in a wonderful animation by Chris Amhaus

Native American Poets on UK Tour

Acclaimed Anishinaabe poets Gordon Henry, Jr. and Kimberly Bleaser will be reading from their work at the venues below. Both poets, enrolled members of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, have published their most recent collections with Salt Publishing’s exciting ‘Earthworks’ series.



Thursday 25th June 2009 19.00-21.00
Liverpool Poetry Café, The Bluecoat

Monday 29th June 2009 18.45-20.30
Meeting Room 4, British Library Conference Centre [£3 /£2 conc. Please book in advance]
This event is co-sponsored by the University of Kent and the Eccles Centre for American Studies

Thursday 2nd July 2009 12.00-13.00
Manchester Central Library

Saturday 4th July 2009 19.00-21.00
Michaelhouse Café, Cambridge [£3 /£2 conc. Please book in advance]



For further information or advance tickets for any of these events, please contact David Stirrup at d.f.stirrup@kent.ac.uk

For further information about the poets’ recent books, visit the Salt website pages:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/ewk/9781844713264.htm
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/ewk/9781844712816.htm

Next Poetry Bites, With Luke Kennard, 21st July 2009

Luke Kennard is a writer who lectures at the University of Birmingham. His first collection of poetry The Solex Brothers was given an Eric Gregory Award in 2005 and his second, The Harbour Beyond the Movie, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2007, making him the youngest writer ever to be nominated. His fiction and criticism has been published all over the English speaking world, especially the bit that is actually England. His third collection of poetry The Migraine Hotel is out in April 2009. His novel probably won’t be finished for ages. The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent have all described him as “brilliant.” That means it’s news.

7.30pm, 21st July 2009, The Kitchen Garden Cafe, York Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham. Food available 6.30 to 7.15 pm. £5 (£4 concs). Pay at the door. Arrive early to sign up for a floor spot or contact Jacqui Rowe jacquirowe@hotmail.co.uk in advance.

A message to you from Griff Rhys Jones

Griff Rhys Jones says:

“Support the good work here. Don’t let Salt fall. If the recession is going to take things down, let it be motor manufacturers, let it be bad banks, let it be chains of fast food restaurants. We can lose a few of them, but we don't have enough small independent and daring publishers like Salt. I think I can be a little more forthright than Chris and say ‘Just six books’. Buy dozens why don’t you? It’s a great list. And apparently you will help the economy in many subtle ways too complicated for studious folk like us.”

Join Salt’s campaign #JustOneBook on Twitter.

Read more on Facebook.

Chrissie Gittins finds inspiration in South London

Greenwich and Lewisham Mercury, May 13th

tags: chrissie Gittins, south london

Just One Book — just over one week on

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


tags: Just One Book

Powell’s Books of Oregon choose Shaindel Beers for their summer reads

I heard Beers read several poems from her book and was astounded by their frank honesty and contemporary themes. In recent years I have grown incredibly tired of obtuse and gutless poetry and there is nothing obtuse or gutless about Beers' poems.

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Salt on The Bookseller Blog

I've never faced bankruptcy before. While I was a director at CUP I never felt a personal connection with business performance. It wasn't my home, my children's futures on the line.

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