​EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL BOOK FESTIVAL
Baillie Gifford Theatre

Mark Haddon has written all sorts of stuff, it seems – plays, poetry, children’s fiction and, of course, some adult fiction including the celebrated The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. (The latter, we’re told, has sold 10 million copies, which must make him a reasonably wealthy man.) Now he’s turned his hand to some very dark short stories into a volume called The Pier Falls.
 
Here in the Baillie Gifford Main Theatre at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Haddon was interviewed by publisher and editor Lennie Goodings. He came across well and is a good speaker with a wry sense of humour, and – prompted well by Goodings – he kept the audience fully entertained for the allotted hour. Goodings asked him about the persistent darkness of the stories, which feature death throughout, it seems. Haddon didn’t really argue, or give any reason why: they just came out that way, it seems. He read briefly from one, Wadwo, a modern retelling of the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, then talked about where these stories came from – it was interesting to hear that several began as abandoned plays. As a result he informed the audience that he has permanently put aside his playwrighting amnitions, but we’ll see if that really proves to be the case.
 
As a writer, publisher and editor myself, I found his section on writing technique by far the most interesting. He claims he doesn’t set daily targets – he’s wealthy enough not to have to – and he’s pretty obsessive about redrafts of his manuscripts. Even his wife doesn’t get to see anything that hasn’t been re-written twenty times or so; how I wish all authors shared his sense of pride in their work.
 
The hour closed with a few audience questions, none of which seemed to relate to the new book. One questioner harked back to The Curious Incident and seemed to be desperate to make a point about a celebrated court case involving an autistic Scot found guilty of a financial crime in the USA; Haddon patiently waited, then answered by saying that he didn’t really know enough about autism to make a comment, a response so impressively adept that it probably drew the biggest round of applause of the entire hour. The (for the most part) poor questions didn’t spoil the event, however, which was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting hour spent in Charlotte Square. 

Gordon Lawrie

Permit me to set off again on an favourite topic of mine: sequels.

​When an author writes a successful book – or at least one that washes its face in terms of costs – it’s terribly tempting to write a sequel, a follow-on ‘what happened next’ novel. The author wants to develop the characters and develop the settings, and it’s entirely natural to want to turn that enthusiasm into a sequel.

The trouble is that, commercially, it’s not a good idea. That might sound a bit strange: you’d think that if the author has acquired a following, a sequel should sell. But if you give it a little more thought, only those people who have read the first book will be interested in reading the second, which immediately limits your book’s potential sales. You already know what the first book sold, and I’d guess that only 30%-50% of that would read volume 2. That’s not an attractive prospect for booksellers, which in turn means it’s not an attractive prospect for the publisher. That sort of sequel is only ever going to work if the first book was such a massive success that 30%-50% of the first sales is still a lot, and not everyone can be J.K.Rowling.

On the other hand, if the second book in your series can be read before the first without containing any spoilers, you’re OK – a second book might even kick-start the sales of first. Unfortunately, that’s an incredibly hard thing to do. Crime novels generally work, though – the whodunnit aspect of the book is usually more important than any ongoing narrative. Read the Harry Bosch or the Inspector Montalbano books in order, though.

If you really must revisit old ground, then one possible compromise is to use some of the minor characters from your first book and make them central ones in a new book. Readers might welcome familiar territory, but it does mean that the novels can be read in reverse order.

So what do we at Comely Bank Publishing recommend writers do instead? Actually, we always encourage writers to write a completely new, unconnected story. Good writers surely have more than one storyline in their heads, and being obsessed with a sequel rather advertises how good you think your own first book was, doesn’t it?

Gordon Lawrie

Creative Director Emma Baird and I were chatting the other day about typesetting manuscripts. Typesetting is the process which puts all those words, perhaps as many as 100,000 or more, into a form that looks like a book and ready for printing. Modern printers expect that the interior text of a book is supplied to them as a pdf file, the same kind as you fire off from your computer to your ink-jet at home when you ‘print something’.

We do our own in-house typesetting at Comely Bank Publishing. What that involves is creating a blank document of exactly the same dimensions as the final page of the book, working out suitable margins allowing for chapter headings at the top and page numbers at the foot, and quite possibly different margins for left and right pages throughout. That’s because, when you open a book to read it, the ‘tightness’ of the binding means that it feels more comfortable if the text is very slightly nearer the outside than the inside of the page. But every printer is different: our current one needs the the text to be slightly more offset than previous ones – there’s a degree of trial and error involved.

We also have to think about fonts, or to be exact, typefaces. We want the text to look good and be easy to read, which means using a good serif (those little bits at the foot of letters) font such as Garamond Pro or Minion Pro. These two are free; there are are others that cost more, and sometimes it’s worth buying one. Fonts can look fine until you start using figures, or italics, or bold text. Incidentally, the choice of font can considerably shorten a book and make it cheaper to produce. On a 400 page book, Garamond is around a dozen pages shorter than Times New Roman, and apparently uses 16% less ink.

And then there are ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’. It’s bad form to end a chapter with one single line on a page on its own, and it’s also wrong to start a new section with a single line right at the foot of a page. We might ask the authors to make some alterations, but I do some editing myself a lot of the time – take out a carriage return, re-order a sentence, simply re-write something slightly. Authors are invited to approve, of course, but they never notice. That’s something an outside typesetter could never do.

Anything that deviates from standard paragraphed text causes problems, and sometimes we have to print something like an email, a letter or a notice on a door in a different font. Those chapter headers are tricky, too – the document has to be formally divided into ‘sections’ to allow that to work, and often the book needs different headers on left and right pages – the book title on the left, say, the chapter title on the right.

Finally, some text is very difficult. Anything using strange mathematical formulae causes trouble because some of the characters simply don’t exist in very many fonts. Diagrams, maps and any sort of picture is a challenge. It all takes time.

We can, and do, typeset some books using Word. Word is limited, but that can be a good thing if all we’re trying to do is typeset a straightforward novel. Failing that we have to use the industry standard Adobe InDesign, but that unfortunately costs £17.00 per month. Either way, what we then produce is that pdf file for the author to approve. We’d never let the author near anything other than a pdf at that stage, though – authors can ruin hours of work by making one or two ‘innocent edits’.

It’s an in-house secret how much we charge, I’m afraid. I have considered outsourcing the process, but the standard fee – for a less flexible service – seems to start at well over £1000, and we do it for a bit less, that’s all I’m saying. £1000 plus is a lot of money.

Gordon Lawrie

I’m not a great one for reviewing poetry. I’m not sure it’s very valuable to pick over such tiny fragments of the english language, because good poetry should come from the heart and speak to the soul. In any case many of the best poems are encrypted like emails to withstand hacking by critics.
 
But Bert Flitcroft – whose performance at Blackwell’s Writers At The Fringe I reviewed on this website yesterday – was kind enough to send me his as yet unpublished poem Over The Water, and I reprint it here with his permission. Like the rest of his work, it’s extremely accessible, and it brought back memories of holidays in Orkney with my wife Katherine over forty years ago. I'd like to share it with readers so that they can see why I like his stuff.
 
Orkney’s a flat and exposed series of islands, but Over The Water at first focuses on its western cliffs – Hoy, Yesnaby, Marwick Head, perhaps – and the relationship between land and sea. Not for the only time, Flitcroft sees the action of the sea on the rocks as a metaphor for marriage: ‘Like a long-married couple, without knowing, Sea and Rock have come to mirror each other."
 
Then, after a nod to the farming heartland of the islands, he turns to Orkney’s ancient atmospheric history, its atmosphere, its seals. Finally, Flitcroft takes the listener to “the edge of the world, where the Rock succumbs and slips below the waves like a drowning man.” There, we stand in silence as we “Breathe in big skies, the isolation, that sense of separateness that comes with islands.”
 
It all makes me want to go back again for real.

Gordon Lawrie

Bert Flitcroft's has two collections of poems, Singing Puccini, and Thought Apples.

By Roland Tye

How on earth can giving away free copies of my book boost sales? I know, it seems bonkers doesn’t it? Let me explain further…
 
Years ago, I wrote a book, Weekender. When it was still a rambling, sprawling opus hiding in the recesses of my hard drive, I launched a guerrilla marketing campaign to get it noticed. I had tried and failed to elicit the support of agents and publishers by conventional means.
 
It was time to rally the troops and go underground...
 
I set up a website with videos, music, samples from the book and, of course, a synopsis. Then I printed off flyers, thousands and thousands of them, promoting the website. These were distributed in clandestine fashion around the city of Edinburgh during the Festival.
 
The trouble was the flyers and the website weren't really selling anything. All they did was highlight to people that some guy had written a novel and couldn't get it published. Needless to say the campaign was a disaster. Most of the flyers ended up in the gutter. Many more remain in my hall cupboard to this day. Weekender remained unpublished and in obscurity.
 
With that chastening experience in mind, I am now embarking on another campaign that will cost me even more money. The difference this time is that, thanks to the lovely people at Comely Bank Publishing,  I now have something tangible to offer. A real, physical book. Something that people can touch and feel, and maybe even read.
 
I plan to leave secret copies of Weekender around the city in the coming weeks. Each will have a message inside congratulating the finder and asking them to read the book and then leave it somewhere that someone else will find it. A coffee shop perhaps, or on a bus or train.
 
In this age of social media people will be able to log and track Weekender on its journey. The aim is to get Weekender travelling around the world – although to be honest if one copy gets across the river to Fife I will be happy.
 
The self-published novel is a delicate flower. Neglect it and it will die very quickly. Indeed, the only thing that will keep it healthy is publicity. Lots and lots of publicity. I think Weekender is a cracking read, but it has to find its way into the right hands if it is to truly bloom. I want it to make the leap from local tale to global phenomenon, so its name (and mine) needs to embedded in the consciousness of as many people, in as many places as possible.
 
Like any successful, self-published novel not only must it be visible, it has to constantly shout and jump up and down waving its hands manically above its head. The biggest arts festival in the world would seem an appropriate stage for it to do so.
 
The campaign will run over a weekend (obviously!) as follows:
 
Friday 19th August 2016 – Leith
Saturday 20th August 2016 – West End/Gorgie
Sunday 21st August 2016 – Edinburgh City Centre
 
So look out for secret copies of Weekender on those dates and remember – a lot can happen in a weekend...
 

Weekender is available to buy at Blackwell's, South Bridge; The Edinburgh Bookshop; Elvis Shakespeare's and also on Kindle.
 
Roland will be posting occasional updates on the campaign here.You can also get involved on Twitter #discoverweekender @weekendernovel and @comelybankpub