Comments on: Just One Book

By: Anne-Françoise

Anne-Françoise — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 07:42:49 +0000

It’s obvious that a publisher is a businness, but it’s far more than that. The reader has a responsability too, especially when the concerned publisher takes risks to provide this kind of books. I heard too many people complaining about mercenary publishers : here, in France, we don’t have many poetry book houses. Poets (even great ones) often choose auto-publishing, as they don’t have any other possibility. That’s not fair, neither for the author, nor for the reader who has no real choice to discover contemporary poets. Pitiful!
So we, readers, have to participate in this endavour. I bought just two books (Imagination Verses and Empires and Holy Lands), and I’m looking forward to reding them.

By: shigekuni

shigekuni — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:12:40 +0000

I might be biased, as someone who spends a good deal of the day to write or read about poetry (and as an economy school dropout), but I think it’s a good thing that they publish so many titles. Blau DuPlessis? They gave me the opportunity to buy and read affordable books by poets like that, that I might have otherwise missed. The list above could have been much, much longer. They publish books by Henry Hart, Robert Archambeau and many many more. From the statements that Hamilton-Enery puts out these days, I get the impression that they publish many books because the profit margin per book is slim so they try and get many published to increase the sum. Does that make sense?

As for the erotica: don’t they sell reasonably well? The large book store in Cologne Main Station has a whole shelf of well-selling erotica.

By: John Self

John Self — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:19:16 +0000

I’m going to sound a controversial note here, but Salt have issues that cannot be solved by buying Just One Book (and I did support the last campaign, buying three or four).

The main thing is that they publish far too many titles. No doubt these are all deserving of attention, and the ones you cite, Marcel, are tempting. But a publisher is a business, and has to be able to make money on the books. I looked on Amazon and Salt have some sixty titles listed for publication between July and December of this year. That’s ten a month! The cost of publishing these – particularly with the high production values Salt books have – must be considerable, and it’s unlikely that they can give so many titles a fair push in terms of publicity.

They publish predominantly short stories and poetry, both notoriously hard to shift, but I heard last year that they were going to move into longer form fiction. I breathed a sigh of relief at that, until I read this in the Bookseller last week about their plans for expanding the range later this year:

The new focus includes an all-new romance list, called Embrace Books, which will be edited by Jane Holland. It will focus on two strands; Red Velvet, which features “feisty heroines and believable Alpha males within contemporary, historical and paranormal lines”; and After Dark, which comprises “unusual storylines within contemporary, historical, paranormal and same sex categories. These will include explicit sex, which in some cases may be central to the plot”.

As Eric Morecambe would say, There’s no answer to that.