I am sitting at breakfast in the Scandic Hotel in Tromsø, Norway. Out there, across the sound, rugged peaks with names I do not know stand tall and proud and eternal. They dwarf the building work going on below to improve the Jekta shopping centre, and make even the amazing endeavour of human flight, represented here by the Tromsø Langnes airport, insignificant in the face of the reality of the earth, and moon and sun and stars.
And yet, last night as I stood in the car park, a steaming coffee in hand, gazing at the ineffable play of the northern lights across the panoply of a sparkling universe, my thoughts were not lost in space, or contemplating the grandeurs of existence. Instead they were back in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, running through over and again everything that had yet to be done before publication of My Daughter was an Astronaut, and hoping my colleagues in our venture were not suffering too much stress in my absence. This may seem to you the tiniest of endeavours but for now, for us, it’s enough.
It began for me when I joined Write Now! the Bury writers’ group in November 2009. I’d been writing for years, small poems and vast fantasies, but hardly ever bothering to submit my work for publication. There had been a few well merited rejection slips along the way, but finally I decided the time had come to change the game. After years of selling other peoples’ books I wanted to sell my own.
George Wicker founded the group five years before my arrival. He’s an inspirational man though he would most likely deny it. A Taoist, a vegetarian, a poet and novelist, he’s happiest cycling through the lanes of Suffolk or playing his guitar. Like me he’d reached a tipping point. He’d published a volume of poetry, and completed a fantasy novel, but knew he needed to go one step further.
So, here we are: a group of twenty-five or more members – a diverse gathering of teachers, those retired or un-retired, engineers, doctors, salesmen, lawyers, students, actors and indeed the odd professional writer. We meet every two weeks in a small room in the Woolpit village hall. There is perhaps a hard core of ten members but others come and go as life dictates. Our duty is to bravely read out our work, and then try not to flinch as the brickbats of critique fly across the table. I make this seem a fierce process, and it is certainly not for the faint hearted, but there is a world of encouragement in that room, a kindness of common purpose, a finding of feet. At every meeting we entertain each other hugely and then offer reaction and feedback for no other reason than to help each other achieve something better. Bruised sometimes but buzzing, we return to our desks to repair, rework, rewrite and we feel privileged to have found such company.
One of the tenets of the Write Now! constitution is that members must actively seek publication. I became a member shortly after an idea had been mooted that, as part of this drive to fulfilment and to encourage the uncertain, it was time to put together an anthology - a celebration of five years of solid hard work and fearless invention. At my very first meeting submissions were sought.
What sort of book would we produce? From the start we agreed it would be the sort of book Penguin or Harper Collins might sell through a proper bookshop - nothing less than that. Well, there are many paths to publication these days if you are prepared to pay someone to do the work for you – the cover design, the typesetting, organizing the print run, buying the isbn, registering the title with Nielsen and so on. But we wanted to do as much of this by ourselves as possible. We wanted Write Now! to be the publisher. We were encouraged by the fact that George was a typesetter by trade.
I remember that a lack of confidence set in almost immediately. Could we trust ourselves to pick the right material? How would it be if some members of the group rejected the work of other members? And did any of us have the slightest notion of book design and cover art. We collectively decided to seek help. First of all we asked the writer David Pescod to cast his eyes over the submissions and select only the best of them. And we co-opted the help, through a little paternal pressure, of graphic designer, Oliver Kemp, to come up with the cover art.
It wasn’t long after that the trouble started.
Were we happy with David’s selection? Yes and no. “Why has he picked my worst story and ignored my best?” and “There aren’t nearly enough poems!” were two of the less contentious remarks. The first jacket design came in: a ruined house with a rocket ship parked alongside, under the garden turf a grubby doll and a spaceman’s helmet. It came with a choice of fonts. It is astonishing how quickly the meeting room divided.
The book was to be called My Daughter was an Astronaut. When the first selection of stories was made we each browsed through the work seeking some inspiration on a title that might unify the whole project. The stories and poems were diverse in genre, style and purpose. No help there then. Picking a title to indicate that the book was in fact ‘a bag of bits’ produced efforts ranging from the trite to the bizarre. I myself tried to promote the word salmagundi, a dish of many elements, but thankfully I got nowhere with that one. And so instead of seeking some common denominator or a synonym for the word anthology, we plumped for using the title of one of the chosen contributions. It was a democratic process: nominations were made and votes counted. The Astronaut title narrowly beat The Flint Wall.
We sought a more cheerful jacket – the first attempt obviously having more to do with psycho killers than the general content of our book. The next offering presented a midnight blue sky with stars and a golden rocket ship, the silhouette of a young girl on a dark hill in the foreground, her hands reaching up to the heavens. “But it looks like a children’s book!” came the cry. “I like it!” came another. Our anthology is really not for children so we needed to be wary. “Can we lose the Borrower?” I asked. The child became a regency woman prancing through dark grass.
We began to lose hope. There was no agreement on content, strong opinions on the merits or demerits of each cover design. I’ve spent so many years in publishing that I knew arguments over design are to be expected; for those less used to such considerations the disagreement seemed insurmountable and enthusiasm for the project drained away. It was now half-way through 2010 and thoughts turned to the easier matter of our biannual Write Now! short story competition. To me this seemed a distraction, for others it was a blessed relief. The anthology was shelved for several months.
In the end the break was exactly what we needed. Over the course of two years while some people dropped out of the group, along came new members. Their energy and intelligence put fresh fire in our bellies. In a spirit of rejuvenation the anthology committee met again in February 2011. I laid on crisps and wine only – we didn’t want too many distractions. The meeting proved pivotal. We rededicated ourselves to My Daughter but determined that things had to change. From now on executive decisions would be made with little reference to the wider group. We would re-open submissions to new members, and allow extra submissions from the rest. We would make the final selection of content entirely our own choice, with the committee deciding what was to go in and what was to be rejected. George set out to address production questions. Carolyn and Eleanor began to consider the opportunities for marketing and publicity. I was tasked with sorting out the cover.
It’s a tight space my dining room but even so there was a stonking great elephant in it. “So, how are we funding this?” David asked. Bear in mind that at Write Now! we are not in the business of making pots of money out of the members. We each pay a small membership fee at the beginning of the year, while the £2 a meeting sub is taken only to pay for refreshments. Our bank account wasn’t exactly groaning after we had awarded the prizes for the short story competition. Some few hundred pounds was surely not going to be enough.
You may not be familiar with print processes. Essentially the main choice lies between printing a short run digitally, or going for a longer run where the costs work out best with good old fashioned lithography. 250 - 300 copies digital might cost, just for the printing, say £700, where the same quantity litho more like £1100. But if you increase the quantity the digital cost goes up with each extra copy while the litho figures barely alter. We plumped for 750 copies litho at a cost of £1600.
Barry delineated our options. “As I see it there are four possibilities,” said he gravely, “We may be able to get funding, say from the Art’s Council or a similar body; a local company may be able to offer sponsorship; we could, if pushed to it, explore the notion of advertising within the body of the book, or,” and here he paused to fix us one by one with a steely eye, “we could just pay for it ourselves.”
Well, although David went off to explore several of these avenues, we all knew there and then that if the book was to be made real, the funding would have to come from our own pockets. As far as I’m concerned that is how it should be. A friend of mine recently reminded me that John Murray risked everything to print all those copies of Byron’s Childe Harold. Well ours is no great work of literature, merely an entertainment, but the principle is the same. In the end it was not so hard to finance the book. We found that, with a little jiggery-pokery, if each contributor of content also put in a portion of the cost then the price of production could be met. Write Now! Publications is an entirely self-funded operation. We contributors have spread the risk among us, but yes, we all stand to lose our deposit if we can’t make the book work.
Which is why, while I spend my Saturday morning writing this little piece, for want of being able to help otherwise, my friends in Suffolk are slogging away preparing for publication day. I hope someone will send me a picture of the Waterstone’s window display advertising our launch party on the 16th November and perhaps also a shot of the pile of books within the shop. Work, the daily grind, will keep me in Norway for another week but I’ll be back in time to do my reading when called upon. We expect more than 100 attendees, including the Worshipful Mayor of St Edmundsbury. I hope they’ll be in a Christmassy mood.
I’m hoping too that they will like the cover I eventually produced. No silhouettes now but a quirky picture of a young girl, full-face, apparently wearing a spacesuit; the stars and rocket ship are still there but the aching, swirling greens of the northern lights now add a little magic to the image.
The countdown has begun. Lift-off will carry our precious cargo up through the lights and on into the stars. Who knows where it will end up.