Arja Salafranca’s collection of stories, The Thin Line is due out in April, 2010, just in time for the London Book Fair. Arja’s has received many accolades and prizes for her poetry and short fiction since the mid 90’s. She is currently the editor of the Sunday Independent’s Lifestyle section.
This is what Hamilton Wende has to say about the collection:
These are wonderful stories. They chart a new direction in South African fiction, where each line, each page – each story unfolds subtly, reaching deeper and more intimately into the tender spaces that exist in all our lives between love and doubt. Reading them kept me up late at night, wanting to know more about the characters’ lives. I was enthralled by the clarity and compassion of her insights; and moved by her obvious love for our fragile country and the fierce power of our unrelinquished hopes.
Here is the blurb:
‘Words grow up and reverberate … they come back’
The short stories in The Thin Line show what happens when a writer casts a thin line into a pool of character and situation. Characters assume position, while readers see the lines they have drawn around the selves in the stories. As readers we are lucky – we can then step over these lines and watch from inside the story. We see characters draw battle lines and retreat behind them, mark out their territory with boundary lines and dare others to cross them. We notice as story lines escape from one story to resurface in others, sometimes the merest thread, sometimes a bolder and more definite intrusion. And sometimes we watch story lines loop back on themselves to form circles, or sharply curved ellipses. Some stories are cross-hatched with many lines – webbed and netted – and we watch the people inside these struggle to escape from situations, often of their own making – and often because they didn’t draw the line when they should have. Lines create boxes and keep people lonely and separate from each other. And sometimes, lines fade, are erased, or can be crossed, with happy and satisfying effect.
Whatever may happen inside these stories the reader is hooked from the first one, reeled in on that thin line. And they don’t leave you alone. You get up to make some toast, or check the mail and as you’re walking back to your desk, you’re thinking about the woman artist, or Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, or Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, or poor skinny Mark, seeing his love teeter away from him.
“Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” Carmen Herrera (Artist)
Last week about 20 publishers/ book trade people spent 3 days at Roodevallei, north of Pretoria, getting into gear for the London Book Fair. Jane Henshall, the South Africa Market Focus Co-ordinator, organised one of the best training experiences I have ever had. The venue was fabulous, comfortable rooms, with free wifi access, the food was divine, in fact too delicious and it was quite hard to eat in a restrained fashion. I don’t think we could have had a better facilitator than Sheila Lambie, of Oxford Brookes University Publishing Studies, a wonderful woman with years of experience in the UK book trade. Sheila worked us very hard, into the night on the Thursday night, but every minute was worth it. (The only thing that wasn’t absolutely spot on was the weather, it was like Cape Town in winter, only worse.)
Amy Webster, of the London Book Fair was there too, to give us hands on advice about the logistics and practicalities of what we need to do to get ourselves to the Fair. I learnt so much from Sheila, Amy and the other participants, that I felt very full and a little overwhelmed after the workshop. But now that I am back at my desk and have started to tackle some of the tasks, and to think strategically about the LBF, I’m feeling really excited.
I’m planning to select the publishers I want to meet very carefully to pitch rights sales to them. I’m going to pore over the professional seminar programme and choose a few key sessions to attend. Cory Doctorow is a presenter, I certainly won’t miss his session if I can help it. I plan to meet Alexander Leborg of Minuskel forlag who has bought the Norwegian rights to Whiplash by Tracey Farren.
The London Book Fair, a focused trade fair, seems to me to be quite different – tougher, more demanding, but also a giant step into making Modjaji Books sustainable, than our Cape Town Book Fair, a selling fair. The LBF needs careful planning, and I need to set my agenda, my strategic goals and stick to them as far as possible, allowing a little room for serendipity. Before the Roodevallei experience the LBF seemed very far away, now it seems all too soon.
I still can’t quite believe how lucky Modjaji Books and I am to have this once in a lifetime opportunity to be sponsored to go to the London Book Fair, and to be given a stand too, when South Africa is the Market Focus country and when South Africa is on people’s minds because of the 2010 soccer world cup.
Some of the people who were at the training included Debra Primo of UKZN Press, Tim Richman of Two Dogs, Jane Henshall, Amy Webster and Karen Brodie (British Council).
I get a lot of emails and questions about how to get a book of poetry published. Firstly not many publishers do it. (That is publish poetry). It is not a financially sensible thing to do. So as a poet think about it from the publisher’s point of view for a minute.
You don’t stand a chance of getting your collection published unless you have a name as a poet, or are a well known writer who also writes poetry. Or you are a well known rugby player or have some other claim to fame and also write poetry. So how do you become a more established poet without having a collection?
1. Buy and read the work of poets who have had their work published. Do this regularly. See what is hot and happening. Subscribe to at least one literary magazine.
2. Attend live poetry readings – Off the Wall in Cape Town, launches and readings. Poetry Africa in Durbs. Jozi Spoken Word Festival.
3. Send your work to the literary magazines. Google the following names – New Coin, Litnet, New Contrast, Carapace. As far as I know Gary Cummiskey of Green Dragon invites submissions from particular writers and doesn’t have an open submission policy. There are other literary magazines and perhaps those who are reading the blog can add names and thoughts.
4. Before you submit your collection to a publisher – ask a published poet whose work you like/admire to read your manuscript. You will have to pay them to read it and tell you if in their opinion it is publishable. You could do a Creative Writing course either at a university or a short course. Get feedback on your poems.
5. When you have reached this stage, I can recommend people to edit your work (once again you will have to pay for this). It will cost about R2000 or so (Sept 2009).
6. If you can say Yes, to all the above steps, then you need to go through your collection and choose the ones that fit together in some way. A first collection that will comfortably be published as a thin volume, needs to be about 56 or 64 pages. But remember that the book will be typeset and remember that you need at least 7 or 8 pages for front matter and end matter.
If you can’t find a publisher, it is OK to self-publish. It is harder work and a bit less prestigious, but at least you get your work out there and you will find your readers or they will find you. Don’t leave out any of Steps 1 to 6 above, or your book will not be as good as it could be.
Other publishers who publish poetry – Deep South, Botsotso, Aerial (if you are part of the Creative Writing group in Grahamstown). For most other publishers you either have to be as well known as Gabeba Baderoon or Antjie Krog. Or you have to be a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at UCT.
Please read the comments at the bottom of this post too, I am going to get all the knowledgeable people I know to comment and add their wisdom if they would.
At last Whiplash face out in an Exclusive Books - Dec 2008
As a new small publisher, Modjaji Books, I have found the internet invaluable in meeting some of the difficulties and challenges that I face. Creating a name for the company, limited resources, unknown authors, new titles, being outside of the mainstream of publishing and the book world are a few of the challenges.
Ben Williams of Book SA has kindly let me host a micro-site for Modjaji Books within the Book SA site. As a fledgling publisher I aim to make small resources stretch as far as they will go. I know In the future I plan to develop a Modjaji Books website as well, where I can list my books, sell them even, but for now, which has been almost two years, http://modjaji.book.co.za is a good place to be. The blog is an excellent forum to post reviews, news, questions, and information. Because of the blog I have received wonderful letters from possible new authors and people in Book development in other African countries.
I have used the internet to maximise Modjaji’s presence online and to multiply the effect of any PR that my books have received. For example, any time there is a review or an honour for one of my books such as Tracey Farren’s Whiplash being shortlisted for the Sunday Times Award and getting a White Ribbon Award from the Women Demand Dignity advocacy group or Megan Hall winning the Ingrid Jonker prize for Fourth Child – I blog about it on Book SA, and then I put the link to the blog onto my Facebook profile and I paste it to the Modjaji Books group on Facebook. I also Twitter about things I want to publicise like events at the Cape Town Book Fair.
The other bloggers on Book SA act as a kind of support group, most of them are writers. I am a writer and publisher. I see that most publishers don’t blog on Book SA themselves, they use Book SA for PR. Louis Greenberg (who was at Exclusive Books when I wrote the article) is also an author, who blogs on Book SA – he kindly sent me the Exclusive’s Homebru call for submissions for 2009. I found out about them last year, but somehow slipped off the mailing list. I was delighted to be able to submit Whiplash for consideration, it was ‘long-listed’, which means that all the Exclusive Books managers will be looking at Whiplash as a serious contender for Homebru. Sadly it wasn’t selected, but a great many more managers will be aware of Whiplash.
Although I’ve been fairly successful in generating awareness of my authors and their books, I don’t have the resources to market directly to booksellers to the extent that I might like. I did use Bookmark to advertise Whiplash towards the end of last year and I use a distributor. But unfortunately for Modjaji Books my distributor sells over 200 other books, so their reps don’t focus on my books in the way that I would like them to. Direct communication with bookstore staff and managers is a key challenge and one that I haven’t been able to overcome yet. I hear that managers are overwhelmed with emails, so that is not necessarily a good route to go. I wish I could get bookstore managers to visit the Book SA site regularly. The internet doesn’t solve the problem of meeting managers personally and developing a relationship. If anyone has ideas about how to meet this challenge I would love to hear about them.
The internet is also useful for doing research, finding out about trends, authors, issues, making valuable connections with people, sending out information about calls for submissions. Once every couple of weeks I search for reviews of Modjaji’s books for example, I recently came across the African Writing Online review of Megan Hall’s Fourth Child.
Facebook is a useful place to publicise reviews, news, new books, prizes, events. Modjaji Books has a Facebook group of 259 at last count and it continues to grow. I post all my blog entries onto my Facebook group. In January this year I used Facebook, BookSA and direct emailing to advertise the Modjaji Subscription Offer. In this way I have been able to build up a modest cash reserve to offset some of the production costs of my books in advance. The discounts which one has to pay to one’s distributor and to bookshops, and VAT on production costs even when one isn’t VAT registered make the margins very narrow for a small publisher. So doing some direct selling is hugely helpful as here the margins are much higher.
As a new small publisher I have had to think creatively how to make my books visible and to be patient. For example, I published Megan Hall’s book in October 2007, she wanted the book out before she had her baby, due towards the end of November. I knew she wouldn’t be up for major PR, but it was good to launch the book and Modjaji Books. In August 2008 she won the Ingrid Jonker prize for Fourth Child and after that the PR was intense, and then she got invited to Poetry Africa in Durban when her baby girl was almost one. Megan has also now been invited to be on the Poetry International website.
So in summary, I use the internet to build networks, to pass on useful information, to share information and ideas and to ask for favours where necessary. Essentially I see it as a two way street – an opportunity to build up awareness amongst the book buying public and amongst the industry about Modjaji titles and authors, but also a wonderful opportunity to pool resources and to learn, connect and work with others.
In June 2009, Bookmark – local Bookseller’s magazine A slightly older version of this article – the brief asked me to write about how I use the internet as a small independent publisher. I wrote the article in January 2009 and the publication was delayed till now. I’ve just updated the article where necessary for re-publication here.
Cedric Sissing from Adams Campus Bookshop let me know that Lindsay Slogrove reviewed Whiplash in The Mercury last Thursday 24th July, 2008. What a review – short and very sweet.
“Aish! This is mos a good one.
Tess is a prostitute trying to get out of the life and battling with demons in her past.
She’s white and living in a coloured world – a pained reaction to the bitterness of being separated from the best friend she ever had by her racist parents. (more…)
Arja Salafranca’s collection of stories, The Thin Line is due out in April, 2010, just in time for the London Book Fair. Arja’s has received many accolades and prizes for her poetry and short fiction since the mid 90’s. She is currently the editor of the Sunday Independent’s Lifestyle section.
