Modern Narratives and Getting Back to Talking About the Work
Detritus
Talking to an advertising copywriter friend years ago, I always remember he told me that the news media aim to complicate things. He’s one of those people who sometimes seems like a prophet and at other times you’re not sure, and I knew that this assertion went against the popular wisdom of the time.
Surely life is complicated and nuanced and subtle, but like a media magnate climaxing to the ooze of a populist politician, don’t the press get all frothed up trying to oversimplify these messy truths with soundbites and easy answers where there are none?
Is this not the way that ‘we’ are all led outrage that somehow makes another billion for a tech platform? His assertion seemed to contradict all of this agreed wisdom about the lure of easy answers and slogans to get behind, that these days fuel social media slanging matches as much as populist politics.
Yet over the last fifteen years I have thought about this conversation many times. In being bloody minded enough to contest a driving penalty notice last week I was reminded how many forces in life, and not just the media, work hard at overcomplicating things. Ten pages and three council IT system crashes later I patted myself on the back for being tenacious enough to register my appeal, fearing neither the labyrinthine website nor threats of escalating penalties. I once kept Camden council locked in an argument about my partner’s collection of parking fines for several years, and I also work in higher education, so I fear no bureaucracy.
Yet it made me reflect on whether my friend was right and that life is actually quite simple, but that the layers of complication from the media, bureaucratic regimes, and now the use of technology are the real thing tripping us up and preventing us thinking clearly? As a society, I wonder what gains there are to be had from keeping people in a fudge of frustration and inaction.
Remembering We All Need to Breathe in the Arts
Human beings are in theory quite simple; we need to eat, breathe, drink water, rest and we don’t deal with extremes of temperature too well. Yet for humans who make a living in the creative sector there is a lot more to it all. For the most part we not only have to do the work, but also be our own marketers, accountants, business coaches, secretaries, managers, recruiters, teachers, publicists, lawyers. There are applications to prepare, interviews to attend, complicated conversations about VAT and tax allowances, reviews, purchases, contracts to review, insurance to arrange and ever changing funding goal posts.
One thing I would recommend for anyone wanting to uncomplicate the industrialised creative life is to be honest with yourself, and it was forcing myself into a position of honesty about having owned a publishing company for coming up to a decade that got me thinking about the purpose of publishing writing in the first place.
Ditching the How To and Just Doing
There is a lot that has come from the above pondering that I hope will lead to an interesting year in publishing for me, and it has already led to the hiring of a new powerhouse team member. Proof that a little creative industry agonising and navel gazing can actually pay people above minimum wage more successfully than many other traditional industries manage. (As always, it is good to remind anyone listening that creative pursuits are not just essential for living life, but that the industry makes a lot of money for the UK economy).
In the meantime, I watched a YouTube podcast discussing publishing and I so wish I had managed to bookmark it because they were discussing the prevalence of ‘how to’ creative writing programmes, and that in the sea of coaching people to publish and sell their book nobody is discussing the content of the writing any more. (If anyone knows what this podcast was, please do tell me as it was from two young people and I would love to listen to it again).
Running a publishing company, this very much resonated with me, in particular because we do aim to provide some education, and because not that many companies make money from selling books alone, so you always do plenty of other things. (Pudding Press used to make commissioned badges alongside selling the one book we had back at the start).
I never wanted to start any type of writing school, coaching service or other how to write / publish / become and author programme with the company, even though these are so prevalent in the creative industries at the moment and sold as a money spinner. I suppose we are all aware of struggles, living in a low-wage economy in the UK at the moment, and while much has democratised access to creative careers there is a lot more work to be done on feasible business models. Unfortunately, instead of doing that work on business models, there is indeed a lot of advice out there swearing that you can make the old models work if only you posted on social media more frequently and signed up to a 9.99 course.
The nameless podcast really helped me to feel comfortable with the fact I do not want to leverage my publishing company into a coaching school for writers and potential self-publishers. Knowing that despite numbing online constant content and creative coaching oblivion, some people still do just want to read and discuss stories, is a reminder that there are still audiences out there to reach. This is heartening for anyone writing or selling books.
I see the hijacking of talking about the work on social media, where my Instagram feed is often filled with ‘how to sell your art’ in between the kind of content we are all told to generate to get people interested in you. You can’t help but thinking that you have the equivalent of a worldwide classroom here that could form the most wonderful group crit but social media has never quite reached that potential.
Being reminded again of my copywriter friend, I also do wonder if all of these sold business systems tailored to us ‘creatives’ who are apparently not capable of following normal business advice, are just operating by complicating some of the simple facts of the creative industries. I might think some more about this later, because I am convinced that the business models are to blame and not the people, and also that most people making paintings just want to sell a painting. Either way, I am coming round to thinking he was right about the media complicating things all along.
She Can Certainly Write but the Subject is Weird
Having some direction about what you don’t want to do can really help, and so can great team members as it turns out, so we have finally managed to launch Detritus. We were looking to sign a new writer but more than that, we’re hoping to be able to read lots of new writing. Everyone who enters with their 20 pages will get some promo, so we’ll also be encouraging people to read new writers too and I really, really hope this does something towards starting a conversation or two about what people are actually writing.
In terms of business success, as a writer, I can confirm that all you really want is for people to read your writing. Someone buying your work or paying for it, so that you can pay your bills through writing, is another desire but setting up complicated marketing funnels and posting constantly on a range of socials only works for some. If anyone wants some business advice now they have written something, we do put info and tips on our blog for free, so you can always look at the website for that.
Otherwise, here’s to a renewal of talking about the work. Reading the work, talking about other stories we like, writing more stories and being able to put new work out fearlessly. Detritus is so called because Pudding Press likes to publish work by writers who can’t seem to get big publishing deals. I know this because I originally set it up so that I could publish my own work within an editorial structure.
I had worked in commercial writing but my creative work always got mixed feedback from agents and publishers that I could certainly write but the subject matter was just plain weird and not commercial. I have continued to get this feedback from reviewers but I’ve also had the odd person head over heels with what I’ve written, which is all I ever hoped for. New York Times best seller had luckily never been a label I was interested in, but I suppose I just always wanted to get the work written and out. Hence I decided to start a company and learn through mistakes rather than taking a course about how to promote myself.
If you know anyone who writes what we publish, which is horror, YA and philosophy and may have struggled with the publishing part, do pass it on. We rarely accept new submissions due to the size of the company but are gearing up to do a lot of reading before the end of the year. I am genuinely excited to find some other ‘can certainly write but the subject is weird’ authors. I also hope that by the end of it all there will be a lot of talking about the stories.