The Sandstone Blog
Sandstone Press: Publishing from Highland Scotland
A new book festival, Reading and Writing in Ross-shire, had its first running on Saturday 7th November 2009. Entitled ‘Homecoming’, it took place in the Lecture Hall of the new Dingwall Academy, which also contains the new Community Library. Local writers Jacqueline Liuba, winner of this year’s Neil Gunn Writing Competition, Christina MacDonald and Catriona Tawse read from their work. Following them Daily Mail columnist and author John MacLeod spoke of his new book ‘When I Heard The Bell’ and in the afternoon Andrew Greig read from his forthcoming ‘At the Loch of the Green Corrie’ and from his New and Selected Poems. Sandstone Press Managing Director Robert Davidson closed the event with the following paper.
SANDSTONE PRESS: Publishing from Highland Scotland
Right at the start the title of this talk poses a few questions and speaks of changed times. Taking first the questions:-
I have never believed in the concept of the bad word, in fact I say that there are no bad words, only bad usage. If I had to name a candidate for irredeemable evil in the world of words though, it would be the preposition. Lots of human misunderstanding comes from the use of prepositions. The word in question here is ‘from’ in ‘publishing from Highland Scotland’. That is not ‘about’ or ‘to’ Highland Scotland, or not necessarily. It infers a sort of global ‘otherwhere’, a collective term I use meaning many other places inhabited by readers who are in turn inhabited by thoughts and feelings, and by curiosity, just as we are.
‘About’ would imply that we are speaking of ourselves only, our history and present condition. This is valid and acceptable of course, but if it is our exclusive interest we are in danger of removing ourselves from the world. ‘About’ is the province of our friends the teachers and especially the geographers and historians.
The preposition ‘to’ would imply a limited readership, defined by place and of course, that route leads pretty directly to ‘about’. ‘To’ is the province of our great friends and colleagues the booksellers.
‘From’ implies that the subjects of our books, and indeed their authors, are without limit and our outreach is limited only by technology and our own abilities, subject to further limitations placed on us by the commercial world and by a changing political environment. It is only through experience that we can accurately define that envelope and only by pressing carefully on its sides that we can expand it. Since there is a great mass and inertia of ‘ayebeen’ out there the expansion is bound to be either a slow process or a destructive one. Take it that it’s going to be slow.
‘From’ also implies a base for reaching out to that otherwhere. It is ‘Highland Scotland’, not ‘the Highlands of Scotland’ or someplace carrying a vague idea of ‘northness’ or ‘isolation’. Some years ago I wrote an essay, published on the Hi-Arts web site Northings, titled City of the Highlands exploring the idea, by no means a new one, of a city centred on the inner Moray Firth that will reach round the coast from Invergordon to Nairn including the Black Isle and Inverness. One of the great mistakes of modern times was to make Inverness a city just as it stands. This future city, which is already well advanced in its making because the people who live here are making it simply through the processes of their lives, should have been recognised with local and national arrangements created to help form and direct its growth.
The requirements of this city are very different from those of the surrounding rural areas and, I dare say, the ambitions of the populations are different. The rural areas of the Highlands are also badly served by present arrangements, but it is this city in the making I am thinking of as our base. This city should really exist now constitutionally, and since it is already a larger idea than Greater Inverness I think of it as ‘Highland’. Looking into my crystal ball (programmed by MicroSoft Highland) I see towering glass fronted buildings, wide expansive parklands with great rivers flowing through, a world respected University, Highland International Airport, magnificent libraries staffed by industrious, efficient, totally committed librarians dedicated to the furtherance of thought and feeling through literature (much as this one is), successful sporting institutions such as Highland Rugby Club and Ross County FC (North Atlantic League Champions 2022), with an internet aware, satellite connected, multi-lingual, highly plural population.
It will have dispensed with the idea, prevalent in this place for many years, that ‘we need jobs for our children or they will have no reason to stay’. The population will have confidence enough to understand that people come and go. As a corollary to that we should really get used to the fact that holding on to our children is a bad thing, not just in the family but also in the wider community, an understanding which, as a very substantial side benefit, will open up that possessive pronoun ‘our’ to include those who in the present city might be seen as different or ‘other’. What we need, right here, is industry and a strong economy and, in the 21st century, a great mixing of peoples.
So, there is an idea of place that attaches us to this end of that preposition ‘from’. Among the many things such a developing place must have is a great international publishing house. My ambition for Sandstone Press is that it will be that publishing house but, believe me, if it is not us, if we fail, it will be someone else. The time is on us, but before we get to that point we have more immediate ambitions to fulfil such as premises and staff. It is an ironic thing that we can achieve international quality and outreach before we reach a level of turnover sufficient to achieve even modest local ambitions.
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To look at changed times, or conditions, let me step out of the context of our locale, having carefully avoided the trap of localism, to look at the publishing environment that Sandstone Press (publishing from Highland Scotland) has slowly entered and is more deeply penetrating, and to which we must adapt.
This last point ‘to which we must adapt’ is an important one. Entering it as we might think it is and waiting patiently for it to accommodate us would be a mistake. This is not to gainsay the adapting that publishing must make in the light of the same changing technologies and altering politics that I mentioned earlier.
Let me emphasise this: in changing times we must learn and adapt and the ends to which we at Sandstone Press Ltd must address ourselves are the making and selling of books. I am now talking about the environment in which the books we make are sold.
A few years ago I was at the London Book Fair and since we were sharing the stall set up by our colleagues at Publishing Scotland (of which Sandstone Press is a full member), I was free to roam. In my roaming I passed the Canongate stall. Canongate, as you know, is the most successful of Scotland’s literary publishers although I am not sure how it stands in terms of turnover against Birlinn/Polygon, substantially a heritage publisher local to Scotland, or Geddes and Grosset, who handle the DC Thomson franchise and much else with great aplomb and success.
I feel obliged to make a brief aside here, to mention that the Geddes and Grosset principals, Mike Miller and Ron Grosset, are among the most positive and helpful in any industry. I have on several occasions sought their advice. Not only has it never been found wanting but they have often gone the extra mile. I acknowledge this with gratitude.
The Canongate Managing Director, easily discerned by his mane of shaggy hair, was taking guest after guest as editors scurried back and forth in a scene of energetic and constant movement before a backdrop poster advertising a coming book. This book was titled The Audacity of Hope and it was by a man named Barack Obama. I was already aware of Barack Obama as a possible US presidential candidate and had heard his Illinois speech on You Tube and been particularly impressed that he referenced ‘a tall young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln’ rather than my own great hero Martin Luther King. This placed him in a context of constitutional law rather than civil rights; but constitutional law, of course, includes civil rights. It also extended a certain line of democratic thinking and made Doctor King something less of an island. My view was that Barack Obama had little chance of becoming President but I was hardly alone in that. Quite simply, I underestimated Americans.
A few years before, Canongate had won an award and that award was ‘Small Publisher of the Year’. Having some idea of the weight of this author, still well short of what it has since become, I thought to myself, ‘Well Mr and Mrs Canongate, you’re not a small publisher any more.’ Back at the Publishing Scotland stall I put this point to Liz Small, who has now left us I am sorry to say. Liz did a quick mental calculation and said, ‘Turnover less than twenty million; nope, still a small publisher.’
With an annual turnover of twenty million GBP you become a medium sized publisher. There are quite a few, although not so many as you might think given that many of the house names you would recognise have been subsumed by multinational colossi such as Bertelsmann, who own Random House (who in turn own Hodder, Sceptre and many other household names), Hachette and Scholastic. The biggest earners, incidentally, are technical publishers such as Pearson, Reed Elsevier, Thomson Reuters and Wolpers Kluwer and I would guess that even a knowledgeable audience, such as the one I address now, will not have heard of any of them. The largest 15 publishers in the world have a minimum annual turnover of one billion euros each.
These facts demonstrate the scale of the environment that any new publisher enters, with its huge boulders, its sky blackening canopy swept aside by leather backed monsters with thunderous footsteps, and the terrifying shrieks of other small creatures as they are killed off. I would like to say it is a different world, and in a sense it is, but it is the world we have to adapt to.
Since then the author Barack Obama has been exceptionally good for Canongate whose previous high watermark in terms of annual turnover was about eight million GBP. This year they had grossed almost that figure after six months thanks to Mr Obama, but if they do so well as to double that figure they will still be a small publisher. This is to say that, in world publishing terms both Canongate and Sandstone are small publishers. I would not like to contend that we are the same, although Sandstone has long since advanced from the status of ‘small press’.
It follows that in Scotland, indeed in the UK outside of the giants with one scaly foot in London, the other in New York and their long reptilian tails resting in Frankfurt, we have to think in different terms. The difference between them and us (with ‘us’ including Canongate for this purpose) was brought home more graphically that same afternoon in Earl’s Court when I went upstairs to look down on the plastic encampment of publishers. The difference in scale, in sheer space taken up and numbers of staff hurrying around, between Allan Lane (Penguin) and Random House and others, even such as Canongate, was marked.
This is worth dwelling on not only because it describes the creatures that hunt and consume in the present publishing environment, but also the culture of giantism that prevails. The multinationals survive on a Tyrannosaurus share of the market because they must, huge sales rapidly turned over. We all understand that a financially limited public requires low unit prices and the sum of this is a diminishing number of independent book shops and a focussing on sales through large chains (supermarkets are increasingly important to medium and large scale publishers) and the internet. Amazon in particular takes an increasingly large share of the book market.
However, locations taken by book seller chains are generally central and loaded with high overheads. Logistical costs are subject to many variables, storage, post and packing, returns. To achieve those low unit costs, that both buyer and multinationals require, suicidal discount rates are applied. I say ‘suicidal’, but less so if you are printing in huge numbers with risk reduced to a minimum by expensive marketing mostly tagged onto cinema, television, games and other franchises.
As you can imagine, the chances of any small or medium publishing company growing so far in that environment as to become visible to the dinosaur’s eye without being consumed are slight. Publishers, like authors, being very individual there is little safety in numbers. This means that small, or for that matter medium sized publishers are unlikely to achieve such a critical mass as to change the environment.
It sounds hopeless but perhaps not so. Evolution also happens in this environment. It has natural selection. Natural selection is adaptation by the species to the environment. The fittest, for that environment, survive and just now that means the dinosaurs and their meat eating culture. This brings us back to my first sentence and its allusion to changing times. Let us remember that the dinosaurs were eventually replaced by a small, rodent like creature that was more capable when the meteor struck.
I say there is a need among discerning readers for informative, entertaining books that take risks and that the multinationals cannot meet that need by dint simply of what they are. Small and medium sized publishers can, by accepting the environment as it is but keeping costs low and with them turnover requirements.
In these circumstances our great challenge is to get in touch with that readership and establish credibility. This has ramifications on the choice of books and on editorial, design and production quality. Four roads lead through the forest from this point, none of them either safe or assured, and they are personal author contact, the Trade, the internet, print and broadcast media.
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Let me turn now to the third element in my title: Sandstone Press, publishing
‘Learn and adapt’ are among the company’s unofficial watchwords. So are ‘long-termism’ and ‘everything we do today is preparation for what we do tomorrow’ and ‘professionalise’. I’ll correct that, it should have an exclamation mark: ‘Professionalise!’ Everyone around the company, fellow Directors, authors, designers, typesetter, printers, by now just about pass out when I tell them, yet again, that ‘most setbacks are for the best’.
Here are another two of my favourites that apply both to the writing process and the business in general, ‘It’s the fish John West reject that make John West the best’ and ‘it grows under the knife’. Those last two sort of fit if you look at them the right way.
Aside from these, most of my analogies come from either sport or civil engineering. Referring to the processes of growth, or ‘learning and adapting’, I like this from Sir Jackie Stewart, formerly world champion F1 racing driver, ‘The aim is to win as slowly as possible’.
In any journey you have to start from where you find yourself and I had been involved in literary Scotland for many years. Sandstone Press therefore started in literary Scotland and published poetry pamphlets. There was never any intention to remain in that area so when an invitation arrived from Highland Adult Basic Education and Highland Adult Literacies to enter the world of Adult Literacy by developing the series of books we would come to name the Sandstone Vista Series, we leapt on it. To me the potential seemed obvious. We could contribute socially and at the same time open up a seam of earning and learning.
This proved to be the case and the lessons learned on print and distribution rested on top of lessons learned from a pre-Sandstone phase when I was Managing Editor of Northwords Magazine and turned it from New Writing into a general arts magazine with commercial intent. Let me tell you there were some very hard lessons learned through those processes.
Eventually we would publish twelve books in the Sandstone Vista Series and three Teaching or Ideas Packs. In addition we contributed new thinking to the field. On that new, and apparently successful, base we looked around for areas to diversify into. Back to literature, to poetry and fiction, was the most obvious. On the lessons learned from all this experience it was apparent that poetry, my unrivalled favourite art form, was not a commercial possibility. Neither, as it proved, was fiction.
In the interests of research I asked many people (which included quite a deep self-examination) what they were reading and why. The number who were reading authors who had not been published before were very few. A further probing, that included the readers examining the biblio pages of whatever books they had on the go, revealed that not many (actually, none) were reading books that had been produced by print-on-demand methods.
This thinking took us into non-fiction because, for example, we may not be able to sell you an excellent novelist whom you have not heard of, but we can perhaps sell you a book on a topic, such as asylum seekers and refugees, or Shetland, or mountain rescue, or a narrative that has all the qualities of a novel but is entirely bound up in a much-loved place, such as The Kerracher Man in West Sutherland.
The difference between Print on Demand and conventional web offset, in addition to higher quality with web offset, is in the minimum print run. Not using PoD methods meant a commitment to selling which, though demanding, I think was for the best.
About this same time we changed the strap line of our logo from ‘Scottish Literary Publishing House’ to ‘Contemporary Quality Reading’. A small change that went mostly unnoticed but that was, in fact, quite profound.
So we went into non-fiction and quite quickly it became apparent that we could excite and satisfy interest with narrative non-fiction. Not only that but we could also ‘take on’ and develop the authors and, in fact, we are now working actively with three of our first time authors on their second books.
This diversification and expansion was well timed because the adult literacy field was about to alter under our feet, for reasons I will not go into, and we were obliged not so much to leave as to withdraw our interest. We wait patiently for the literacy environment to change again, keeping the Vistas turning over as we do.
Now on the basis of a successful non-fiction series the time has come to diversify and expand again. With what I hope is careful timing we are entering general fiction. I almost wrote ‘at last’. In fact the move has been longed for.
On the basis of an increased credibility with the UK High Street and on the internet, an increased credibility with authors and agents, an increased credibility with, I hope, the Scottish Arts Council and the Gaelic Books Council, and the beginnings of international outreach with representatives in the US and South Africa as well as across the UK, we have made our move and at the year’s turn (2009/10) the company will cease to style itself as an ‘educational and non-fiction publisher’ and become a ‘non-fiction and fiction publisher’.
Please note the first place given to non-fiction. In time it may change and become equal, but not quite yet. First we, that is our whole establishment of authors (whom, yes, we have chosen), other contributors and logistical partners, have to prove ourselves. I need hardly say the High Street and the reading public must also respond, but I believe that our achievements to date have included the opening of minds.
These achievements include three titles nominated for the Saltire Awards, a fourth Shadow Behind the Sun, short listed not only for the Saltires but also the SAC Awards, and Cairngorm John short listed for the Boardman Tasker Award. Shadow Behind the Sun is the book that has made the greatest political and social impact with two page spreads across many Scottish papers, a commendation from the floor of the Scottish Parliament and powerful words of appreciation from the Director of the Scottish Refugee Council and others. I continue to believe this is the most important book to come out of Scotland so far in the 21st century.
Eight of our titles have gone to reprint with The Kerracher Man now working through its fifth print run and Cairngorm John its third in hardback.
Our great challenge of the recent past has been, first, to publish books that can sit beside the books published by any publishing house of any size from anywhere in the world, indistinguishable in editorial, design and production quality, and in interest, delivered at the right price. The second great challenge was, and continues to be, to fit these books into the Trade and its systems. As said earlier, all this has to run beside a steady communication to and with a growing readership. This we achieved through time with our non-fiction and will achieve, but from the first book, with our fiction.
At last we are able to look far enough ahead to plan a publishing programme and this has been done for the first six months of 2010 when we anticipate publishing eight books in English and possibly two more in Gaelic.
I should say we are looking now at the year following next June and have already committed to one, extremely exciting and important book, of such importance, I believe, that it will match Shadow Behind the Sun. That is all I can say on that particular book at the moment. Sorry to leave you in the dark, but I do believe in cliff-hanger endings. There is another development I am going to hint at, but I will come at that from another direction.
From early in Sandstone’s history the internet has been viewed as a crucial element not only in outreach but also in exploring what we are as we develop. The present generation of our web site has become quite a place to visit, including one of the liveliest blogspots on the internet, twitterfeeds and a regularly edited News Section. In the early days we ran a quarterly online arts magazine called Sandstone Review. Work load eventually meant that was no longer possible but not before we had established standards and the beginnings of a world-wide outreach. Gaelic was part of this and from this came our commitment to Gaelic literacy which continues with increasing strength.
We were at the forefront of commercial downloads, ebooks in an early form, first to do them in Scotland by several years, commissioning novellas in English from Ron Butlin and Suhayl Saadi, poetry from Anna Aguilar Amat translated by Anna Crowe, and Gaelic language novellas from Michael Newton and Floraidh MacDonald. As experience proved we were rather too early on the scene.
The downloads were not commercially successful, although all the commissioned work has since gone into print. The Gaelic novellas, in particular, went into our series for Advanced Learners, an idea that has now been further developed by editor Donald John MacLeod, the most recent authors being Catriona Lexy Campbell and Iain MacLean. It seems likely that the Gaelic Learning Community, world wide, will be receptive to these books in download form.
Since that early artistic success, but commercial failure, we have been looking at ways of managing downloads, of making them work. In a sense we have been waiting for the industry to catch up and I have published on the subject at least twice. The industry, now, is agreed that downloads will take an increasing share of the book market in coming years but is only now stabilising in terms of methods and contractual rights.
Internet sales, at low unit price, and downloads, will indeed take an increasing share of the market, in my opinion, and downloads may well alter the environment I described in the second part of this talk. It is even possible that they may render the present, dominating culture of giantism obsolete. My fear though, is that they, together with direct internet sales, might complete the job of eradication of the local book shops that the multinationals have begun.
I had hoped to make an announcement on downloads at this Festival, in fact I would have loved to do so. We are not yet quite in that position though, and so I am going to have to leave you with another cliff-hanger. Other than that I hope this talk has given you some idea of the challenges of publishing from Highland Scotland, and the prizes that might be attained. My view is that, difficult as it is now, our location will become an increasing asset as we gain in expertise and credibility by providing a unique sensibility and sense of identity. Other than that I will leave you with the mission statement you can find on the Home Page of our web site.
‘Sandstone Press is a publisher of non-fiction and fiction books. Based in Highland Scotland, the company is characterised by high editorial and design standards, internationalism, and a strong engagement with the contemporary world using modern methods.’