Many moons ago, we used to have a blog related to our publishing company, Two Ravens Press, instead of this one. We blogged about our thoughts on publishing and books. We were pretty outspoken on it, but it was quite a fine blog, with guest posts from our authors and all kinds of other stuff that we thought was interesting. We’d had a lot of press when we started publishing, partly because of our (then) location on a croft in the remote north-west Highlands, and partly because we were looking for innovative and challenging work, especially fiction. Newspapers like The Herald called us ‘a quiet publishing revolution’; Publishing News called us ‘the most talked-about publisher in Scotland’. Heady days. But finally we stopped writing the blog because, the more we learned about the traditional model of publishing that we’d automatically adopted when we first set up the company, the less we had to say that was positive. Publishing is not the fine business that I’d once naively imagined it to be as someone who had considered books to be sacred all her life. It’s a bizarre, frequently unpleasant business, like so many are – in its own peculiarly idiosyncratic ways. And so the blog ran the risk of turning into an ongoing rant, and for our own sanity we stopped it. And turned to blogging about things that seemed to matter more, like crofting, and finally our lives here and all the things we care about.
Along with the disenchantment with blogging about publishing came a disenchantment with publishing itself. Small publishers always struggle to make a living; in spite of lots of paper successes (plenty of fine reviews in all the major newspapers and literary mags, lots of prize nominations …) we were finding it incredibly hard to sell books – especially fiction. Partly this was because we were intent on publishing challenging and innovative work, rather than the type of stuff that might become bestseller material, and so by definition we had limited our audience, but partly it was because of the general doldrums hitting the publishing business like all other businesses as a consequence of economic challenges throughout the world.
The general disenchantment wasn’t helped by a lot of hype about e-books, and article after article (articles which still appear to this day, still saying the same sort of things, blah-ing away constantly …) about the ‘death of the book’ and why nobody needs publishers anyway because anyone can self-publish now and be done with it. I’m not going to bore you all with one of my best rants about why all that is nonsense, but when you’re struggling day after long day to publish books that you think matter without earning so much as a penny from it all, it for sure doesn’t help your state of mind.
Then, to cap it all, we had a joint midlife crisis (I’d already had a couple before, so was really on a roll by the time I got to my third …) and decided to move away from friends and a croft we loved and head off into the wilds of the Outer Hebrides. That’s a move, as those of you who’ve followed this blog from its beginnings will know, that has been extremely positive for us – but the renovation of the house and reconstruction of the croft was a huge amount of work, and involved a great deal of psychological as well as physical dislocation, and Two Ravens Press had to take a bit of a backseat for a while.
Eighteen months on from that move, and our values (which were never exactly … shall we say … mainstream) have shifted and strengthened, and the land and alternative, meaningful ways of living on it have become even more critical to us. If we were going to continue publishing books, something had to give. There were always aspects of the publishing business that we didn’t like (if you care to know what they are, have a look at an article entitled The Real Story: Publishing, Four and a Half Years on, on our website) and now we find ourselves hardly able to tolerate them at all. It was time for another revolution: maybe just as quiet, maybe not. Who knows.
Anyway: we’ve looked long and hard at ourselves, at the world, at the books we want to inflict on it (there are so many words out there already …) and we’ve decided that we can only bear to publish books that reflect all of that. What are those books? Here’s how we describe it on our website:
Two Ravens Press came into existence in November 2006 and since then has gone on to publish an impressive list of contemporary literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Our focus always has been on work that was challenging, innovative, and full of new ideas. Five years on, in November 2011, we have refocused the company to take into account what we have learnt about publishing, about the power of some books and the impotence of others, and to reflect world events which have seen the dominant narratives of western culture begin to dissolve and lose their relevance. We plan now to publish books – whether fiction, nonfiction or poetry – that face head-on the new certainty that ‘business as usual’, as a society, is not going to hack it. We’re looking for books that are wilder. Books which reflect the fact that the division of the world into the human versus the natural was always a dangerous fiction. Books that explore ways of living and being human outside the paradigm of growth-addicted consumerism. If we have to put a label on it, we’re looking for ‘eco-books’ – ecofiction, ecopoetry, ecophilosophy and ecopsychology. But really we’re looking for something much broader than that. We’re looking for books that are capable of challenging and unpicking the status quo, of shifting the worldview of their readers away from the creed of ‘Progress is Growth is Consumption’.
If you’re interested in all this, take look at the website (the home page, About Us page, Submissions page) and if you care to see how we evolve and are on Facebook, join our Facebook page and you can keep up to date there. We still don’t intend to have a publishing blog! – though that probably won’t stop us talking about the occasional new book from time to time here, if it fits and seems relevant.
Sharon
