The end of Unbound Publishers

 A sad moment in my writing life happened when I turned 35 and could no longer be eligible for the Betty Trask Award, one I’d often daydreamed of winning. Another one happened recently when I found that the crowd publishers, Unbound, have gone bankrupt and gone under.

I got on the Unbound train quite early, being on of the funders of one of the earlier books, The Gin Lane Gazette by cartoonist, Adrian Teal. It was right up my alley, a compendium of an imaginary Grub Street magazine, reporting news from the 1750s-1800. My copy was lucky number thirteen and I had my name in the back of the book in the subscriber list.

I was very excited about Unbound, and subscriber publishing in general because it seemed like a really eighteenth century way to fund a book. I knew, however, it wouldn’t be a platform I’d be able to fund my book on. Many of the authors, especially the earlier ones, were people who already had some degree of celebrity. There were quirky books by people like Stephen Fry, novels by Kryten actor, Robert Llewellyn, and book by people with large Twitter followings like Ade Teal (which is how I first heard of the project and publisher). I was no great shakes as a Twitterer, I’ve had a couple of minor successes on Youtube and this blog, though pushing two million hits now, has never set the internet ablaze. I’d have to wait before Unbound became my publisher of choice.

I was accepted by another subscription publishing scheme, Britain’s Next Bestseller. They are defunct now and, as far as I am aware, only published a handful of books - none of them bestsellers. During this time, I tried to ramp up my social media output, put some effort into Twitter, set up a new Youtube channel with daily videos, I even handed out cards outside the big Waterstones in London. I wasn’t successful, coming a fair bit under the minimum number of subscribers needed to go into publishing.

This turned out to be a good thing. The book would have died a death had it come out under that imprint, and the process of crowdfunding gave me impetus to have the book edited, which lead to a whole new set of drafts and a hugely improved novel. I ended up publishing that book,. Death of a Dream Pedlar, through the Amazon self-publishing arm, where it’s died a death, but one wholly on my terms. I’ve sold less than a hundred copies, but I achieved my aim, which was to put that book to bed so I can work more wholeheartedly on other projects without that in the back of my mind. (Though my recent house purchase and renovation has rather eaten up my writing time and energy recently.)

I feel this new book will be acceptable in traditional publishing and, if it finds its audience, will do fairly well - but I always think that.

There was one other Unbound book I helped fund. This was a project by Shandy Hall, the museum of Laurence Sterne and experimental writing. This was Cain’s Jawbone, a detective book that is also a puzzle. There are a hundred un-numbered pages and the puzzle is to put them all together in the right order to make a coherent murder mystery. It’s fiendishly difficult and although I’ve read all hundred pages, I only have some vague notion of what the ordering (or even the story) might be. 

The copy of Cain’s Jawbone I recieved came in a box, with all the pages printed on separate cards to be reshuffled and re-ordered at will. The book that went out to the bookshops was a bound one and caused a small storm on Tik-Tok when someone bought it, ripped all the pages out and tried to solve it. As a result of the popularity of Tik-Tokkers taking, tearing and re-ordering the book, my review of it on Goodreads is probably one of my only real social media hits. 

But now Unbound has gone the way of Britains Next Bestseller and, from the grumbles and rumours I’ve heard, have pocketed subscriber money without remunerating the authors - I may have misunderstood this grumbles though. I also found out that, while in business, Unbound would make heavy editorial choices with the work and be quite strict about using their own in-house designers. As I say, at least Death of a Dream Pedlar flopped on my terms, with my design, my cover and my editing. Who knows, maybe the next book won’t flop.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum of London

On the 17^th of April 2018, the Samuel Johnson Reading Circle went behind the scenes with the Museum of London’s curator of fashion, Timothy Long. 

Having filed in and shown security several copies of the same book (we’re all reading The Age of Wonder in readiness for the next session) failed an initiation test involving blank metal coins and lockers – eventually we were sorted into some sort of order, ushered to the bowels of the museum and through all the signs not permitting us to enter- always a thrill.

The Fashion and Textiles department itself reminded me of secondary school technology classrooms; with high benches and high stools, rooms lined with bookcases containing box-files marked ‘Fashion 1984’ and ‘Youth Tribes 91-94’. There were partial mannequins dotted about and a piece of metal I recognised which had once served the place of a grand lady’s wig.

It was explained to us that the Museum of London had just finished a relatively major reshuffle of their sight/sound presentation of Vauxhall Gardens. A 15 minute show, with access to seating and changes in lighting, it was originally designated as a way of breaking up museum-fatigue and show off some of their extensive eighteenth century fashion collection. The previous pieces having been shown off for over five years, it was time to take the strain from them and give other outfits a chance to shine. We were shown some of those items before they were put to bed for a while.

The first was a relatively simple dress, with red and white stripes and little bushels of wheat embroidered on. Timothy explained how, in designing the Vauxhall Gardens exhibit, the team had created ideas of characters. This character was a relatively poor person who had saved up to go to the pleasure gardens and having spent a day there was preparing to leave before the richer, rowdier set arrived. The dress had been altered a number of times, as had almost all the dresses in the collection. Dresses were even cut to leave room for alteration as the dress was worn for different occasions and passed on to different people.

There are two broad approaches to keeping and displaying fashion and textiles. One is to focus on the fashion/art element of the piece, in which the item displayed is altered to bring it back as close to it was originally. The other is the historical approach, where all the alterations and even the dirt tells a story. We were told about a flapper dress that had a huge stain on it - which was left on the dress because it came from the original wearer smudging it when fixing her new car - an oil smudge as a sign of independence.

We were shown a man’s suit in a shiny green colour with cream cuffs and cream sleeves. These cream parts were heavily (and brightly) decorated in flowers and peacock feathers. We were asked to describe who the wearer might have been. We thought they may have been rich, perhaps someone who’s wealth came from the East India Company (hence the peacocks) and obviously someone who doesn’t mind showing of a little. All of which could have been right, but not necessarily. The lack of tailoring (shaping of the cloth to alter shape) and the way the embroidery occasionally went under the buttons showed it to be something of a kit. An expensive kit nonetheless, but still a broadly off-the-shelf look.

The last piece was a very striking court dress in a deep green. It was threaded throughout with silver cloth and had puffy bulbs at the front and clusters of metal and silk slivers in little pom-poms. Almost square at the bottom, triangular at the top and presenting bosoms front and centre, it would have been a very striking outfit. Peering underneath (because how couldn’t you?) the dress was structured with about four rigid frames, leaving the bottom half to be rather free underneath, even if the top was all squeezed and pulled about.

- Oh, and the deep green colour. Although awaiting tests, it is very possible that the dress was dyed with an arsenic based dye called Scheele’s Green, which could cause a person to foam green at the eyes, ears and mouth before dying. Alison Matthews David has written a book about such things called Fashion Victims, containing more deadly clothing.

Finally, we learned about displaying fashion pieces. The most common way is invisible display, in which a piece is placed on a mannequin without a head or any accessories. Often, these mannequins need to be radically altered to fit the body shape expectations of the time. This is the cheaper, easier method of display; accessories don’t need to be created or found, there is no problem with strange head shapes on mannequins or the expense of wigs and hats. However, the Vauxhall Gardens exhibit took this harder path, for which Timothy Long turned to the public and crowdfunded by £13,000.

The Johnson Reading Circle had a wonderful time peeping behind the scenes of one of London’s best museums and it was a lovely bonus meet-up, one which of course lingered with pizza and wine.

If you wish to follow Timothy Long and his work at the Museum of London, his twitter handle is @Fashion_Curator . He’s a man who obviously loves what he does and was very good company.

-And the photos were thanks to Dr Jane Darcy, 'cos I never have a camera.

Washington Irving's Goldsmith Biography

I’m now back in blighty and sorry to say that the crowd funding of my novel, ‘Death of a Dreamonger’ did not succeed. I put this mainly down to the fact that I was in France for a big chunk of the pre-order time. My time in France was not wasted though; I had a lovely time travelling around seeing stuff, eating gorgeous bread and reading.

One of the books I read was Washington Irving’s ‘Life of Goldsmith’, largely cribbed off Forster’s immense book, which is on my shelf and I will get to reading when I find a table strong enough to hold the weighty tome.

Whereas later writers on Goldsmith want to reach the man, Irving was content to print the legend and I, for one, was grateful for it. Having only read revisionist writing on Goldsmith, it was a joy to hear all of the anecdotes and silly one-liners pour forth. I particularly liked his reporting the following lovely Goldsmith nugget;

‘The public will never do me justice; whenever I write something they make a point to know nothing about it.’ 

A quote that met very well with my experience of two months (I thought) intensive crowd funding. 

My favourite element of the book was Irving’s dismissiveness towards those who dismissed Goldsmith, particularly Boswell who he calls an ‘obsequious spaniel’. At one point he tells the story of Goldsmith having a sulk because the crowds in a French town were more interested in the pretty ladies Goldsmith was with then the writer himself. Boswell cites this story as an example of Goldsmith’s astonishing vanity but gets the following rebuttal from Irving;

‘It is difficult to conceive the obtuseness of intellect necessary to misconstrue so obvious a piece of mock petulance and dry humour.’ 

Irving’s last remark on Boswell is to paraphrase a letter where someone threatens Lord Charlemont ‘to bring over the whole Club, and let him loose upon him to drive him home by their particular habits of annoyance - Johnson shall spoil his books; Goldsmith shall pull his flowers; and last, and most intolerably of all, Boswell shall - talk to him.’

What can I say? I love a bit of Boswell bashing.

Irving’s summary of Goldsmith’s character is that he had a gift for beautiful writing and in following this gift he took, ‘no heed for the future, lays no regular and solid foundation of knowledge, follows out no plan’, and just mooches along to death.

I can’t say I’m completely convinced in that reading of Goldsmith’s life, nor can I say the biography was utterly involving but it gave me a few pleasurable hours; is short, is fun and is free as an ebook. 

As such I recommend it to all.

(Coming up, big announcement about Death of a Dreamonger, sneaky peeks at my new novel and a lecture on Johnson's Rasselas as part of the Gresham lectures.)

Hello from Rouen...and two more videos.

Bonjour mon amis.

I am in Rouen at the moment, having taking a month(ish) away to finish my eighteenth century blockbusting novel and then do a little sightseeing.

Unfortunately for all those eighteenth-century-philes out there, there hasn't been a lot of our favourite hundred years to look at, but I have had fun nonetheless. I have seen 13th century clockwork; stood to hear the bells ring from inside the belfry walked along a route of 15th century waterwheels, seen a few impressive churches and the final resting place of some Dukes of Normandy.

As for writers; I had a visit to Arras in rather better circumstances then when Cyrano de Bergerac visited (he was besieging it), I have visited Pierre Cornielle's place and today went to Flaubert's childhood home, which was also a hospital (because his dad was a doctor).

I'm halfway through (and enjoying) Marx's translation of Madame Bovary and have read Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, so I have a small idea about him and his work. What impressed me most was the medical part of the museum, mainly the funny or icky stuff that appealed to the eight year old inside.

Included in the museum are; an eighteenth century do-it-yourself enema stool, some badly stuffed severed heads, a toy guillotine, a stuffed parrot, a cuddly toy, a collection of fake used baby's nappies to aid the doctor in diagnosing from the poo and some lovely old books.

The cuddly toy is an eighteenth century forceps training doll, designed to help trainee doctors to safely navigate a baby out. It looks like this.

As for the writing, I have been making some good breakthroughs and this massive, complex, intertwined novel I am working on will be finished before the year is out...honest.

As for the book I am trying to sell, here are two videos about the processes I used to try and shape the piece from all the disparate elements and how I tried to get into the role of Eve Lewis.

Until next time... A Bientot.

Locations..Locations...(you know the rest).

Hello all.

Crowdfunding keeps on going, yesterday my Dad and I buttonholed people outside of Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus where we got a lot of nice comments and not all that many sniffy ones.

I had do buy a new laptop, the old one served me well but gave up the ghost, I am typing this on a laptop I have nicknamed 'The Major', due to the goggly eyes and moustache I have fixed to it.

Tomorrow is my birthday, It'd certainly be a better one with a few orders to perk things up.

The last batch of videos have all been about the locations used in the book, they start of very short and plain but get longer and more complicated culminating in a lovely little song. I hope you enjoy 'em.

The Horse's Mouth

So, I launched my little barque upon the seas and the seas have been fairly kind. Five days in and I approach fifty. I am worrying a little in case this is the rush as sales have slowed right down in the last two days.

Before I started this process I made a number of videos as something new to show every few days. This is video number two, a plain affair where I just read the first few paragraphs. I was going to be especially jazzy with the words all bouncing around but it took me so long to do the ones you see here that I mixed in me reading with it. Given the subject matter, I pull some pretty coquettish faces.

 Are you sitting comfortably? This is how the story begins....

https://britainsnextbestseller.co.uk/index.php/book/index/DeathofaDreamonger

Here it comes!

Much of the eighteenth century emphasis of this blog is going to be on the back burner for a little bit as we prepare for a proper Grub Street party to celebrate the publication of my mystery/thriller 'Death of a Dreamonger'.

But that is not all, the possibility of the book's publication will rely on securing 250 pre-orders, so head over to britain's next bestseller and get pre-ordering.

Here is a little video about the main characters in the book. New videos will be uploaded each week.

Happy pre-ordering.

https://britainsnextbestseller.co.uk/index.php/book/index/DeathofaDreamonger

Review: Gin Lane Gazette

Last time I talked about subscription and a book I helped crowdfund called the Gin Lane Gazette. It was written by Adrian Teal, a political cartoonist who also worked on Spitting Image and a number of newspapers. 

He was funding the book through Unbound, one of the new crowdfunding publishing outlets that are starting up to fill the gaps in the popular market. Adrian Teal is a very entertaining presence on Twitter and I was very keen to sign up. When the pre-order time was over and the book successfully funded, I waited a few months and was extremely excited to receive my copy of the Gin Lane Gazette (lucky copy number 13) and read it straight through, and have dipped into it many time since.

It takes the form of a compendium of articles from an imaginary magazine published between 1750-1800 under the watchful and increasingly jaded eyes of Nathaniel Crowquill. 

The jokes are frequently brilliant, from the in-your-face bawdy to the subtle. My favourite subtle joke takes place on the title page. The compendium was published by ‘A Cully’, a name that mixes both the notion of a cully; defined by ‘The Dictionary of the Canting Crew‘  defines as ‘a man that is easily drawn in and Cheated by Whores or Rogues’ but it also plays with the name of Edmund Curll - the ultimate Dunce publisher. 

Sort of like a grown-up Horrible Histories (in the best possible way) the book is absolutely crammed with as many fascinating anecdotes and stories from the latter half of the eighteenth century, liberally loaded with brilliantly observed caricature. Johnson turns up a number of times, William Beckford and loads of Charles Fox. The level of detail is brilliant. The text makes extensive use of the long s, the costuming and style of the characters change as the years go on.

A Cartoon about Johnson's review of Hanway.

What I most enjoy is the running soap throughout the book, just behind the text is the life of Nathaniel Crowquill, his frequently drunk etcher, his spy on the ground and all the other people who help create the magazine. This ties everything together and makes it more than a selection of fragments and hints at an almost lovely muppet show element that I love.

Of course the Gin Lane Gazette is about intriguing the reader and making them laugh, it’s not the place to look in any depth at the stories within it but to enjoy them and maybe go off and find the sources of the stories. There is a bibliography at the back to do this.

It is now available of all good bookshops and indeed, it is possible to tell if it is a good bookshop if it has some copies. Put it on your shelves between TH White's 'Age of Scandal' and Vic Gatrell's 'City of Laughter'.

Check Adrian Teal out on www.tealcartoons.com

Subscription: Then and Now.

“I see, cried he, you are unacquainted with the town, I'll teach you a part of it. Look at these proposals, upon these very proposals I have subsisted very comfortably for twelve years. The moment a nobleman returns from his travels, a Creolian arrives from Jamaica, or a dowager from her country seat, I strike for a subscription.”

...And so George, the Philosophic Vagabond in Goldsmith’s ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ was introduced to the idea of subscription and the ways to abuse it. 

Subscription was a solution to a problem that faced writers in the early to mid eighteenth century, how to make money from writing without a system of court patronage in a time when the buying public was not yet robust enough to support the massive (over) abundance of people wishing to write.

In a lecture by Jerry White (author of ‘London: A Great and Monstrous Thing) one of the key points was that although literacy was surprisingly high, especially in urban centres, and although books were becoming an important topic of polite conversation, the number of writers outstripped the number of readers and that the key for a writer was to be a varied and enterprising as possible.  

One of the eighteenth century’s most enterprising writers, Alexander Pope, created his secure foundation (and cool grotto) by the publication of a translation of ‘The Iliad’ by subscription. Instead of creating the work under the auspices of one patron or on spec for potential buyers, he sent a proposal for the work to a large number of people who pre-ordered copies. They would pay part now and part on receiving the book and the first part of money secured the author in his position and paid for the creation of the book. In this way, Pope gained about £9,000 which gave him an autonomy to write what he wished and how he wished it. 

Of course, this system was open to the abuse that Goldsmith mentioned. It was possible to have a wonderful proposal, occasionally reprinted to keep it fresh and to go about securing that first sum of money without having to put the graft in to finish the book. Johnson was accused in print of playing the same trick, it taking nine years between his proposal of the plays of Shakespeare and its completion. 

Charles Churchill ribbed him with the words, “He for Subscribers baits his hook, and takes their cash—But where’s the Book?” 

Johnson is interesting because although his his Shakespeare did have an element of subscription, he was more often commissioned to write (especially his larger works) by conglomerations of booksellers. Goldsmith too was given most of his projects by Newbery, a bookseller and it was only for his poems (like ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’ that he presented off his own initiative.

One writer who started his writing life by writing on commission to a bookseller but ended it by selling almost wholly by subscription was Christopher Smart. As a young, hip writer he was commissioned to write for ‘The Student’ his own ‘Midwife’ and later for the absurd 99 years contract for the Universal Visitor. Shortly afterwards he was committed for eight years in various mental asylums where he emerged with a number of works and a burning wish to write.

In his collected poems by Norman Callan, the book of poems after his incarceration far exceeds the one from before. In that time he published his ‘Song of David’; ‘Psalms of David’, ‘Hymns and Spiritual Songs’, ‘Parables,’ ‘Verse Horace’, ‘Phaedrus’ and the ‘Hymns for the Amusement of Children’ - each by subscription. Smart died imprisoned for debt. 

Obviously then, subscription had it’s flaws for both writer and reader but it did prove an invaluably flexible and potentially lucrative way to fund books and new work, especially when combined with other methods.

In some ways the position of the writer today is similar to how it was in the early and mid eighteenth century. The patronage system of grants and arts funding is being savagely diminished and although there are many readers available, the demand is outstripped by those with something to write. More recent media formats have edged the book (and particularly the novel) from the centre of popular discussion and debate. In response the publishers are falling back on the safe option of a number of relied upon authors and famous names. 

No wonder subscription is back but this time it’s called crowdfunding.

I am not normally on the forefront of modern technology or process but I’ve been a big fan of crowdfunding, having been involved in the funding of a play; two CD’s and a book. I have had great pleasure in participating in a small way to the creation of things and I feel some measure of satisfaction when I hold those things in my hand.

The book is particularly special. About a year ago I took part in crowdfunding a book called ‘The Gin Lane Gazette’ through the company Unbound. It’s a joyful ride through the mid to late eighteenth century through the lens of a Grub Street journal. One of my favourite pages was not written by the author, it’s a list of names from those who subscribed and near the bottom (with a long s) is the name Adam Stevenfon, and I smile whenever I see that.

It’s about time I reviewed that book - coming soon.