>Would Bloodaxe be 'better' if it published less books and spent the subsidy
>on promotion and distribution?


Dear Group,

Don't you just hate multiple choice questions?

As A.N. Author, I'd certainly like my books to be more broadly distributed
and better promoted. As a Bloodaxe author, I have to say they're doing their
best. OUP, with greater resources, were very bad at getting books to places
they were meant to go by the time they were meant to get there, and dealing
with the paperwork afterwards; whereas Neil still frequently turns up in
some version of the Trotters' Reliant with a box of the relevant inky
artefacts. With poetry, as Roddy's survey showed, it's very much the case
that the people like what the people get. As the Stones ought to have sung,
"You can't always want what you get," and it's remarkable that so many of
them* are prepared to shell out on _The Nation's Favourite Railway
Sandwich_. If only they could sample the many further delights which appear
to have already jaded the palates of some list-mambas.

But while I'd vote for more marketing (and then more marketing still. And
after that, some more marketing) I still think an editor's taste should
drive a press, and given Neil's gargantuan catholicity of taste, Bloodaxe
will continue to produce many books while, given the carefully-tightened
Calvinist sphincter of an editor like Don at Picador, he will publish less.
That the less will be of an almost uniformly high standard while the more
will be variable is part of their respective characters as poetry presses.
I'm as sure someone helpful will be able to explain to me how this is a bad
thing as I'm confident this is what Roddy was implying by his use of quotes
on 'better'.

What would be nice -- though I also don't know if this would _help_ -- would
be a media which doesn't behave as though even the simplest poetic gestures
all have to be explained to us however eloquently by Ruth Padel (while
Robert Potts can find Tony Harrison's ear defective by criteria his audience
presumably cannot appreciate). At the moment it is difficult for a general
audience to perceive that very diverse communities of poets exist in their
very midst, whereas there is, I think, a greater sense that sets of
novelists, playwrights, visual artists do occur, albeit mainly in London,
together with celebrity chefs, interior designers and gardeners with their
many forthright, pithy views. Some part of this, as with the broadsheet
focus on between the sheet Plath-on-Hughes type action, is to do with an
insecure inability to get to grips with the subject of poetry, which
translates into the apparent conviction that readers too won't understand
it, together with the condescension of those journalists who think that they
do.

Strange recent phenomena relating obliquely to the above: creative writing
courses being advertised on TV. I've spotted two now -- emphasis on
novel-writing, of course. The author appears to be dead in the sense that
the public and the businesses have cut him/her out as an unnecessary
middleperson. DIYature. How long until _Can't Write Won't Write_, featuring
celebrity course tutors, hits those extremely broad screens? The author is
also dead in the sense that TV adaptors can fuck about with their books
because they're dead and it was all a long time ago. But this is just a
grump about Madame Bovary. And Shakespeare in Love. And Randall and Hopkirk
(Deceased).


Best,

Bill (Emma Bovary, c'est Bridget Jones, pas Gustave, pas moi, pas Bob
Mortimer)

*People, not Stones, though the Stones are arguably people. Of a sort. Sort
of.



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