We have a problem in Hebden Bridge. Angry poets. They hang round street corners hurling stanzas at you and if you don't divvy up the necessary, they come round your house at night and hurl haikus through your window. Here's why.
To a generation who had turned on, tuned in and dropped out in the late 1960's, the lure of dark satanic mills and cheap property was ideal. And so they came, the bearded sons and daughters of the Beat Generation, eager to live their idyll and commune with Mother Nature. Now some balding gents with spaghetti-like ponytails think they are linked, double helix style, to Ted Hughes. They smoulder and rant and put on slams at pubs, run into the 19 cafes and lob poems at innocent latte drinkers here to buy Yorkshire soap.
Despite the guerrilla front of Erato, there has been a convergence of writers in this upper Calder valley town. You only have to turn on the TV or radio and hear plays and dramas written by its many writers. Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale all have writers who reside here. You can throw a net in Coffee Cali and capture two or three Radio Four playwrights. Get me out of here I'm not a writer will be filmed in Hebden in 2012.
Is the collective noun for a bunch of writers a Lexicon? I don't know, but when I started Bluemoose Books five years ago, as a riposte to all the Celebriture and to the London-centric nature of publishing, I knew I was in the right place. The first book which we sold on a national basis was The art of being dead by Stephen Clayton, which is now a set text on the MA Contemporary Literature course at Leeds Metropolitan University. Apparently it is a modern gothic novel. Of course the literary reviewers in London didn't pick it up. Their thinking seems to be literature from small presses can't be good. If it was good enough it would be agented and published by the big six publishing houses or larger independents.
How wrong they are. Agents are the cause of many of the problems in publishing today. They will only take on writers who will secure them a decent income and editors will only take on writers that will sell 20,000 copies and more, which given the dominance of only two high street bookstores and the supermarkets leads to generic and formulaic publishing. They are only publishing those genres that they think they know work. The business model for traditional publishing, due to the discount structure on the high street and the internet has changed everything. Now the most important people in publishing are the marketing are sales directors. If they can't shift a gazzilllion, new writers won't get a contract. That's why they have gone down the orange headed, sleb daytime TV sofa - surfing route.
The future King's sister-in-law has trousered £400,000 for her 'party book' because the suits have realised that royalty sells. But I think we already know what the party attire of choice is for certain Windsor princes, don't we? Think about that figure. Instead of giving 40 new writers £10,000, they have siphoned off 400K from the pot for a book on how to down a bottle of Crystal Champagne whilst debagging the butler as the rest of us gnarl on a turnip or two drinking Corporation Pop.
But here at Bluemoose we have proved that you can be commercially as well as critically successful. We have sold the foreign rights to three of our books, Falling through clouds, Gabriel's angel and King Crow. Hollywood is reading one of the above and King Crow has just won The Guardian's Not the Booker. We regularly have our writers on the radio both nationally and locally. Why? Because we are a team of readers and writers who love stories. Find great stories and let booksellers and librarians know about them and they will sell them for you. If it wasn't for the likes of Ian Oldfield at Leeds Waterstones or James and Joe at Deansgate, Manchester Waterstone's, we wouldn't be here. Great librarians like Anna Turner at Calderdale, Jane Mathieson and Libby Tempest at Manchester along with Pamela Taylor- Bramwell at Rochdale and Jane Brooks at Blackpool, have all championed our writers, put on events and lo and behold people have bought the books.
Simple. Start locally with great stories and they travel, from Hebden over the border to Todmorden and even down to London, Moscow, New York and Sofia. Three of our books will be translated into Russian and Bulgarian next year. Penguin and Random House are reading our titles with a view to publishing and our writers have been helped and reviewed by great writers like David Peace, Melvin Burgess and David Nobbs. Those three are all writers who reside or have resided here in the north, but most of all they have been generous with their time in guiding new writers. You don't have to go to the metropolis to get your book published. If you can dodge the angry poets, come along to Hebden and find a publishing house that offers more than just a makeover.
