© vivvenne tuffnell 2010 all rights reserved
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I am reminded of a very old Punch cartoon in which a very nervous young lady and an arrogant young man are seated on a sofa and the young man declares; “tell me all about yourself. I can give you three minutes.”
Introductions are a delicate art; you tell the salient points while trying to intrigue the listener into enquiring further.
I have been writing pretty much my entire life, starting to write before I could read;
I used to “borrow” my father’s typewriter and bashed out the stories in my head. It was rather disappointing that I couldn’t read them afterwards. It’s all about stories, really; we no longer live in a society where stories are told round the fire but that’s where the art began, the art of creating and transmitting tales. These days we have pod casts and websites as well as the good old-fashioned book and that’s not even thinking about the media of film and theatre!
I wrote my first novel when I was about ten or so, taking eighteen months to finish and almost immediately began rewriting it.
Fast-forward some eleven or so years. Skip university, marriage and motherhood and stop the tape at a day of heavy snow, lying in bed dozing while the baby had an afternoon nap. The house lacked central heating so the warmest place to be was in bed, which is where I spent as much of that winter as the baby would allow. I woke abruptly after a vivid and disturbing dream and the conviction that the story I had seen unfold within the dreamscape had to be written down. Using a laptop borrowed from my husband’s work, I wrote the story in a day or so and felt somehow very flat when it was done. That story later became a novel and triggered some of the hardest times I have ever experienced.
You see, there's a popular misconception that writing a book is the hard part. Sorry to disillusion you if you share this idea but writing a book is EASY; easy, that is, in comparison with the rest of the process. The assumption among the general public and with new writers is that you write a book and it gets published. After all, look at how many books there are on the shelves of the bookshops... The second assumption is that if you can’t get it published, then the book must be rubbish.
Both of these assumptions are wrong. There are a lot of writers out there; some are brilliant, some are so-so and some are indeed downright awful. If you are an unknown writer submitting to a publisher for the first time, your work will land in a pile of other unsolicited manuscripts on the desk of the publisher’s reader. The reader’s job is to go through this pile and see if there’s anything worth looking at properly. There are certain rules about presentation: what fonts, spacing, how the manuscript is held together. Fail these and your manuscript is dumped. It doesn’t matter how good your writing is, if you don’t submit it in the format demanded by the publishers you won’t even be read. Use staples and you are dumped.
Assuming you’ve got these complex basics right, then the trouble starts. The publishing industry is an INDUSTRY. This means its sole function is to make money; so the biggest question about a new manuscript is no, is it any good, or can the writer actually write, but WILL IT SELL? The book-buying public have been manipulated heavily over the years to buy what the publishers tell them they will like, based on what has already sold well. So the question is: does this book resemble in any significant way something already on the market and if so, is it something they have already published or are about to publish?
Basically , if something in that genre has sold very well, and is published by another company, then you are in with a chance. Remember the plethora of Da Vinci Code look-alikes? If the public likes something, they will buy more of it; that’s the assumption, which I’ll come back to later.
In the early nineties, I began submitting my novel and started getting letters back from publishers. I had a number of them ask for the full manuscript having read the first chapter and synopsis. Something writers need to know is that since it’s an industry, publishers do not write kind little notes on rejection letters unless they actually mean them. They simply don’t have the time or the inclination or the motivation to be kind; it’s actually a bad idea to give consolation or advice to aspiring authors because it means they’ll come back to you and try again and if you didn’t really, REALLY mean every word you wrote to them you’re just storing up trouble and sooner or later you’ll have to hurt them even more. So anything a publisher writes to you beyond the standard rejection is real treasure. I’ve got a stack of such letters telling me how much they like my writing etc, etc and how I mustn’t give up writing but why don’t I try so-and- so at such-and -such a publishers. One novel actually got to committee stage, having been through several readers and was put to the board for consideration. I spent an anxious afternoon waiting for the results. Ultimately, rejection again and rejection based on probable/possible sales. They couldn’t guarantee that it would sell well enough to justify taking a risk on an unknown writer. Not surprisingly I gave up after this.
Fast-forward again to the present. History, with some alterations, repeated itself. The same plethora of letters telling me how much they liked my work, how good my writing was and so sorry but since we’re not utterly 100% certain of immense sales, we can’t make you an offer for your book, please try so-and-so etc, etc. Grim, isn’t it? I mentioned earlier about how the publishers seem to dictate what the public want to buy, how established genres spawn copycats and look-alikes to spur the public into buying the books the publishers think they want. Bookshops have been reporting falling sales now for some years; Borders is in administration. How often have you walked into a bookshop to see shelves full of books and come away without buying anything, or been unable to find the third book for the buy two get one free offer, how often have you bought a book and found it tastes stale and used and simply over- familiar? Don’t you just crave something fresh and original but not pretentious and impossibly trendy and cult-ish? I don’t buy books very often any more, even though I am a great reader; it’s too disappointing. You buy something and read it and think, well that was a waste of a few hours!
I moved house house three years ago and in that time, I came again to the end of trying to get a book through the publishing system. It’s too hard on the soul. They tell you that you need to be tough but you can’t be that tough and write well, or write from the soul. I had a kind of a sabbatical from my usual winter activities last year and took stock of where I was going and I came to a few startling conclusions. First was that the publishing industry is going to decline for lack of real vision, second was that my vocation in life is as a writer, and third that while I still wanted more than anything to have a novel published, the traditional route was becoming less and less viable.
In April I met up with one of my oldest friends and we put together the idea of doing it ourselves, of setting up our own company. I had always said I’d never self-publish, but that was based on the old idea of the vanity publishers, who flattered and cajoled writers into parting with pretty vast amounts of cash for some badly printed copies that no one would buy. I was out of date in my thinking; the advances in technology mean that print-on-demand is a very real option, whether you want to print a dozen copies of Grandma’s recipes for the family or launch a whole new genre of novels.
The idea was left to lie fallow for a while and in the meantime a new friend came on board and by the late summer, we’d begun to put together lots of ideas and possible plans for launching our own company. The illness of my old friend meant that some of the ideas are still on hold until she’s well enough to get them going again, but we decided to go ahead and test the waters using a print-on-demand format to get a book out there and available for people to enjoy. We’re all learning as we go and it’s both scary and exciting at the same time. We’d love it if you came along with us for this ride and see what comes of it.
Viv