Why I commissioned… RAW BLUE

Twitter-style summary: Carly lives her life on the surface, not getting involved or noticed. Only when she surfs does everything else drop away – even her past.

This is me dipping my toes into commissioning a book with strong crossover appeal – it’s a YA novel, but the protagonist is 19 years old and this is a very personal narrative about how she lives her life in Australian coastal town Manly. There’s swearing and there’s sex, both of which can sometimes bring a gatekeeper out in hives, but are nonetheless important for teenagers to read about in a responsibly published setting. (Yes, I know that sounds pious, whatevs.)

I first heard about this by reading a post on The Crooked Bookshelf, where Carla raved about an Australian book that I’d never heard of. I’ve always felt a strong connection with YA from that corner of the world, finding the voice to sit perfectly between US polish and UK grit (to talk in sweeping terms) and I started doing a little investigating…

The result of which is Catnip acquiring the rights to publish this emotionally engaging, beautiful piece of contemporary writing by Kirsty Eagar.

Kirsty has Voice. In her intimate first person narrative the reader is balanced on a knife edge: you’re really getting to know a person yet all the while sensing that they’re pushing you away. This book is not ‘about’ anything; I don’t view it as an issues book (the issue that Carly is dealing with is hard to read about but it’s presented as part of her history, not the focus of her story); I don’t see it as a ‘coming of age’ novel (living on her own and working a late shift at a kitchen to support herself I’d suggest Carly is already of an age); it’s not even about surfing itself, although when Kirsty Eagar writes about it, I can feel my bare feet on the board and taste the salt on my lips. It’s a snapshot into a life that isn’t yours and it’s painful to read at times, a note of melancholy tempered with the possibility of hope that in time all things will fade, that whilst your past shapes you, it doesn’t own you…

This book feels real – emotions are complex, forging friendships can be hard and when connections are made they may not work out perfectly. I didn’t know where the book would take me, but Kirsty Eagar’s writing led me onwards, sucked me in and left me moved. I feel very strongly that there should be more books like this in the UK market for teens to read, books that neither protect the reader nor push an unrelentingly harrowing agenda.

I am desperately proud to be in a position to publish this one.

Nice jacket?

I read a really interesting blog post from Lynsey over at Narratively Speaking on the decision publishers make to change jackets halfway through series and what effect this decision has on the most important people in the chain - the fans who have already supported an author (and therefore publisher) in buying the first book(s) in the series. Without these readers, there'd be no scope for further books in that series at all and publishers bank on fans buying the next in a series from the same author, so why are we forcing them to buy books that don't match - or worse, encouraging them to buy books they already own in a different design?


It gots me thinking. I sympathise with the desire to have a neat collection of books in the same design on a shelf - and as a publisher, when I brief a jacket for a book I know will be a series, I brief with a series look in mind, so that readers will be pleased with the view of lots of perfectly co-ordinated spines on their shelf, like so:

BUT... 


Sometimes you need to rethink your covers. And here's why.


1) The market moves on. We published DRAGON RACER by Margaret Bateson-Hill in 2008 and in 2011, we published LEGACY OF FIRE - second in the series. A jacket that was competitive in 2008 isn't so strong in today's market - we wanted something that cashed in on the excitement a reader would feel when flying through the skies with our heroine on the back of a dragon and I think it works. We're poised to brief a rejacket of book one to bring it in line with the new series look.

2) Booksellers. Booksellers have a massive influence over jacket design. I mean MASSIVE. There are stories of books whose covers have been redesigned solely on the feedback gained at one key accounts meeting – and that could have been one (very important) person's opinion. Booksellers have the best overview of what covers are coming out and they know which ones look too samey, or too dull before a publisher might. Plus they know what consumers go for by looking at what shifts on the shop floor. So if a Head Honcho at a Big Bookselling Place indicates that your series would be doing much better if you brought it more in line with a different bestselling series, then you will listen.


3) A second bite at the cherry. Giving your books a new look? Then you have created a chance to re-sub 'backlist' books to booksellers as if they were new. The speed at which a book becomes backlist is scary and sometimes, you really really want to be able to give a book another chance and since booksellers don't really have time to look at exactly the same book twice, a new cover is one way to do this.


4) The law of diminishing returns. Book 1 sells better than book 2. Book 2 sells better than book 3. Book 3 sells better... you get the idea. There's a drop-off rate of fans and it's hard to hook in new ones if you stick to the same formula all the time. If you want to boost some seriously sagging sales, then a series overhaul is a good way of reaching a new audience and gaining a new swathe of fans.


5) Sometimes you made a mistake. I have no idea what the sales of Divergent were like in the UK, but I do know that I didn't hear enough people talking about it outside of the blogosphere and the grapevine tells me that the wonderful gender-neutral cover didn't appeal to UK readers. The mistake HarperCollins made was to trust the UK audience, who I think were damn fools not to pick up the original jacket – the Catnipper's daddy loves this book but made gagging noises at the new jackets. But still, this is a series pitched to rival The Hunger Games and I believe it's teen girls who made that one work, not 31-year-old publishing husbands, so the new jackets target this audience more accurately.

But really, all the above points are the same point: publishers rejacket books to make more money. Not from ripping off the lovely lovely fans who already support us and our authors, but by attracting new ones whose eye we didn't catch the first time round. 


So, bookfans, publishers really do appreciate you taking one for the team and having a higgledy piggledy bookshelf. Believe me, we are on the same team because the only reason publishers want to make as much money as possible from each book we publish is to allow us an excuse to spend it on commissioning new ones.

So all the exciting things happen when I'm not looking. I missed a BBC Breakfast debate between GP Taylor and Patrick Ness, although I have managed to get the gist of it from The Guardian. Dammit, I love a censorship discussion!

Oh well, better late than never...

So, the pros and cons of age-ranging children's books is a wide and muddled conversation, one that inevitably brings out a bit of table thumping and tutting. And there are so many tangents to follow that an impassioned, involved party could write A WHOLE BLOG POST that veered off the topic they aimed to cover. (I deleted it.)

This is the blogpost I aimed to write and it is not about the desire for age-ranging in an age of  internet booksellers. It is about self-censorship.

Ness is quoted as saying that "Children are great self-censors: they know what they can read and they know what they want to read". This is something I've been saying for a very long time - possibly since I was someone who might have been censored at, if I'd had that kind of upbringing. 

I believe that, unlike adults, children only read what they actually want to. If it's not of interest to them, they stop reading. That, essentially, is self-censorship, and it is grounded solely in the power of boredom. Underestimate it at your peril.

"But," you might say, "we're talking about YA books that may contain SEX, SWEARS and VIOLENCE." Then you pause and whisper that other headline-grabbing concept, "Books that might contain... DARKNESS."

My argument that teens read adult books containing such things holds no water here because we're talking about books that are specifically marketed to a teen audience. Books that court the attention of teenagers may well contain all of the above to a greater or lesser degree, partly because these things, treated well, are of interest to this age group. Surely external censorship measures should be taken to ensure that an over-eager eleven-year-old doesn't happen across a sex scene, or a bout of unadulterated, potty-mouthed violence, or WORSE STILL some... darkness?

Well. No. Because you did not heed my warning and you have failed to take into account the Power of Boredom.

People who call for books to be censored do not believe that a precocious reader can encounter a sex scene that they're too young to understand, and that the reader simply... finds it boring. Or that a child whose nose wrinkles at violence in a computer game could easily accommodate a passage of a pitched battle between two cage-fighters because they'll skim it if they don't like it. Too many inappropriate swear words? Then the narrative/dialogue will start to drag for that reader, and they'll phase out the words they don't want to listen to. And the darkness? Well, darkness is pretty sophisticated, something created by the space between the words. If you're not interested in it, then the writing will seem a bit... dull. And if any of it is too much, they'll simply put the book down and not bother to pick it up - after all, all us publishers are forever fretting over all the other distractions fighting for a potential reader's attention.

The child you're worried about reading this stuff is not the teen who falls squarely within the intended age bracket, but the pre-teen who reads up. And why on earth would you want to deter such a voracious reader (or their parents) by slapping a warning on the books that he or she might get the most from in terms of language and concepts? These kids are smart. Trust them. They won't tolerate being bored.

The people who have the most searing and exciting voices in today's YA are the ones who don't hold back, who aren't thinking 'this is for kids'. They are the ones who trust the audience.

Slap an explicit warning on YA and you'll lose that trust.

Happy Canada Day!

July 1st is Canada Day, a holiday traditionally – ritually – celebrated in my house by inviting friends to visit dressed in vaguely Canadian outfits and eat vaguely Canadian food, whilst drinking beer that's as close to Canadian as we can get from our local Tesco. There's no particular reason for this – our household is about as Canadian as Yorkshire pudding, but any excuse to don my "ironic" Celine Dion tour T-shirt...


So, as I celebrate with Celine, here's a list of five things you can blame/praise Canada for:


RYAN GOSLING: Hottest man on the planet? Maybe... y'know, if you have EYES. Also, Canadian.

(picture courtesy of Typographer Ryan Gosling - check it out, font nerds!)


THE CANADA GOOSE: No, not an antecedent of Mr Gosling, but those black-hooded, big-winged birds that decorate the sky with pretty flying-V formations. 


DUE SOUTH: According to the Catnipper's daddy everyone likes the TV series Due South, so, by definition, you must. Even if you haven't seen it.


CANADA DRY: This was the only soft drink available in my grandparents' house circa 1987. As far as I'm concerned it is best appreciated when lapped from a saucer to the opening chords of The Archers whilst pretending to be a cat. Go on, try it...



Last but not least...

SCAREDY SQUIRREL: Catnip's very own, very special Canadian import is definitely the best thing to come out of Canada since, well... all the above.


I hope I haven't missed out your favourite Canadian thing? If so, feel free to share the love in the comments below!

Smooth with the rough

I've had a fairly pants week workwise. You don't want to know, trust me.

So I'm going to think about the very best possible thing that happened instead and note it here for posterity:

I opened some fanmail for Patricia Leitch, she who writes the Jinny at Finmory series. Pat gets fanmail with horses drawn in the margins, horses that look a lot like the ones I used to draw when I was 9, with short necks, big heads and saddles that are nothing more than semi-circles on a straight-backed bean of a body. I look at the fanmail before passing it on and I read things that make me tear up with joy and catch my throat with happy-sadness. Pat's fans tell her how much they love her books and ask her which is her favourite, they tell her which bit they like best and her how much they love her writing. One girl wrote so lovingly of Pat's writing, finishing the letter by saying that she wishes she could write like Pat, but knows that she will never be as good. (From the subtle, nuanced longing conveyed with her letter, I suspect this girl has a lot more potential as a writer than she thinks.)

Obviously Pat's not the only Catnip author who recevies fan mail, but to me, hers means so much because I see myself in those letters, someone in love with a world created by another person's imagination, someone who sees a kindred spirit in the characters - or the writer. And then I think of where my love of her writing has taken me and I feel immensely honoured to be a part of bringing her books back into the lives of a new generation of readers.

So, on balance, I can take the odd really crappy week, just to be a part of something so important.

Books I could Eat for Breakfast... LOSER

This book is LOSER by American author Jerry Spinelli. It’s lovely in every single way.

The cover is plain blue with a matt finish and the figure depicted in the centre in white (it has a spot UV varnish on the line). Both the title and the author’s name are in a recessive shade of blue. The design is all about the crazy little dude in the middle. And that’s exactly what the book is about: a crazy little dude called Donald Zinkoff.

The thing is, I’m not sure I should really be shouting too much about the design of this HarperCollins edition when all credit should really go to Orchard who published STARGIRL with a similarly bold design and, in fact, did it first (did they? I'm not sure what the US cover was... feel free to correct me on this, if you're in the know). The simplicity of both covers reflects the simplicity of the stories contained within. Both are about outsiders, people (children) who couldn’t conform if they tried and who stand out... like, erm, white figures on a plain background.

Loser is my personal favourite because of Donald, someone ignorant of his own innocence in a way Stargirl isn’t. Donald really is a loser, the kind of child even the weak would pick on. But there’s something comforting in true innocence; you can’t be hurt by others’ cynicism; your love for life is straightforward and unashamed; even taunts can pass you by if you really are innocent through and through because you won’t see the intended slight.

I find something very liberating in thinking about innocence. I’m jaded adult these days, but this book had me yelling “I can spell tintinnabulation!” (and then failing miserably) for days. If you read it, I reckon you’ll be doing the same.

Why I commissioned… THE VANDAL

Twitter-style summary:

Paul will commit today’s event to the Memory, drink the Drink and when he wakes the Memory will tell him what he needs to know. Or will it?

Part of the foundation of Catnip’s list is the strand of prize-winning reissues we publish: Granny was a Buffer (Carnegie); Song Quest (Branford Boase); MapHead (Guardian). So it makes sense to keep my eyes open for past prize winners that have dropped off the grid. The Vandal is one such gem – this 1980 Guardian prizewinner should never have been out of print. The writer, Ann Schlee has had an adult novel (Rhine Journey) shortlisted for the Booker and her insightful, intelligent writing is something that suits the sophistication of today’s YA market.

The Hunger Games might have softened us all up for combative dystopias, but The Vandal presents an altogether more insidious, disturbing society in which the population entrust the day’s events to their own personal Memory before they go to sleep at night after drinking the Drink. The next morning the Memory delivers them the information required for them to go about their day. So simple. So chilling.

The story follows one boy, Paul, after he commits an act of vandalism – setting fire to a local sports centre – and his interaction with the Father, his own family and the consequential punishment that follows this indiscretion. I’m loathe to go into more detail about the plot as part of the enjoyment comes from the ignorance with which you approach it. There’s a sense of claustrophobia in the setting, a subtle mistrust as you find yourself knowing more than Paul, yet knowing the past doesn’t mean you can predict the future…

Reading The Vandal felt a lot like the first time I read Lord of the Flies or 1984, the feeling that there are myriad ideas at play in what seems to be a simple set-up. Like those well-remembered classics, this sparked a desire to really think about the themes that come into play, of identity, free will, crime and punishment…

A perfect book for the burgeoning teen mind that hungers for the exploration of the boundaries that this (non-dystopian…?) society places on them.