Keeping it pro, yo.

So here's the thing:

I've noticed of late that my twitter feed has entirely degenerated into whimsical musings about the Hot Postie, photos of cats, updates of what children's book character my small child is currently obsessed with, and far too few tweets of a professional nature.

I'm pretty sure that many of the people who come to follow @catnipbooks have done so because they want to know about how a small independent publishing house works and really, I owe them a bit more than the occasional bit of publishing opinion. (And a lot fewer of the Ryan Gosling links...)

Although Catnip used to consist solely of me – and therefore my thoughts – we've recently expanded to include another member of staff. The fantastic Liz Bankes (blogger over at Books, bonnets & full frontal blogging and author of the excellent YA debut Irresistible, published by Piccadilly Press) joined in February as an Assistant Editor. Since then, we've been working hard divvying up Important Editorial Duties and hatching Awesome Publicity Plans in a way I've never been in a position to do until now.

This marks a new era for Catnip – we've DOUBLED the workforce – and we're taking it up a level. On every level. Including our facebook page, this blog and twitter. These things will happen piecemeal, because despite DOUBLING our workforce, there's still a huge amount for two people to do. But I think a first, easy step is for us to change the way @catnipbooks is used.

From now on, the twitter feed will be focusing on the things we think people really want to know about:

• Insight into editorial life
• Tips on submissions and writing
• News on exciting new projects
• Opinions on The State of Publishing
• Sharing interesting links from other publishers, editors, writers, illustrators and bloggers (and anyone else, really – you don't have to be connected to books to be interesting!)

It might be me behind the tweets – or it might be Liz. We're still people with personalities and we'll happily banter with other users (in which case, we'll make sure you know who you're talking to!), but we'll try and keep it focused on books, rather than buff postmen.

(And for those of you who will be devastated by a lack of Hot Postie updates, who want to know some of my more shouty opinions on publishing and books and who might be interested in my writing as well as my editing, you can follow me over on @NonPratt.) 

MUG SHOT #4 (or #7... if you see what I mean)

It's been a while since I did one of these posts... But it was my birthday the other day and I received this little beauty from someone who knows me very well indeed. For anyone out there as yet unaware of the awesome that is Friday Night Lights then get thee to a DVD-vending place and purchase seasons one-five immediately. Go on, do it, I'll refund you the cost of the DVD if you don't fall in love with everyone and everything in Dillon, Texas within the first episode*.

There's a lot of talent in this show – both euphemistically and truthfully – and it's hard not to fall in love with one of the characters. For me, it will always be Matt Saracen. Always and forever – not least because of the way he says 'football'. And he can draw. And he looks like this:

So pretty.

Clear eyes, full hearts... You really cannot lose.

Guess who's back?

Yo. I’m back, y’all.

Communicating, like most things, requires regular exercise and working largely alone, my communication muscles are less the toned sixpack of Taylor Lautner and more the… well, they’re more like my own abs. A bit, ahem, lacking. So when I took a sabbatical from Catnip duties, I didn’t really announce it very well.

But now, having enjoyed a refreshing break from all things editorial/marketing/publicity/production, I am back and raring to go.

I know the new year has become a bit old, but for the record, here’s what 2013 is going to mean to me:

• Focus. I’ve enjoyed my downtime – I’d like more of it in future, which means making my working hours count harder than ever before.
• Discipline. I will not procrastinate (as much – let’s be realistic, this is an intrinsic part of my character inherited from my father and I’m not about to have a procrastinatectomy). This means I will tackle at least one ‘unwelcome’ job a day, that way they won’t all pile up on me to deal with before I next go on holiday.
• Anticipation. The world of publishing works further ahead that I currently do and in order for Catnip to defend and develop its place in that world, then we’ve got to get out there the same time as the bigger houses. Because we are that awesome and everyone else needs to know this.
• Perspective. As in not worrying that the purples in my sales presentation font have slightly different CMYK mixes and saving the worry for covers, that other people will actually see.
• TELL PEOPLE STUFF. Like blogging more than once in a while, emailing people and making sure the authors I work with know how much I love them* and generally exercising my flabby communication muscles.

So here's to being less lonely and more badassier in 2013. Whoop!

*(If you’re a Catnip author reading this, then know that I love you LOADS.)

Gay writes

So the lovely Louie (@louiestowell) tweeted a link to the Guardian article about the acquisition of Stranger, the book that caused a bit of a storm when the authors indicated that a literary agent had asked them to straighten a gay character (link here). Viking Penguin have picked it up without such a change.

In linking to the article Louie asked for "Moar gay YA please".

And here is my response:

SOMEBODY HAS TO WRITE IT!!!

I do not necessarily see all the manuscripts. Of course I don't. But I do see some - and I often see the ones that other (bigger) houses might have deemed unsuitable. So, in my unique position as Commissioning Editor for a small publishing house, you might think that I'd be seeing some of those gay manuscripts that everyone (except Viking Penguin) are so scared of publishing.

Well I don't.

I think there are two reasons. The first is short and speculative:

1) I don't think bigger houses are actually scared of publishing YA featuring gay characters at all. For instance: James Dawson's Hollow Pike. A MASSIVE title for Indigo and a hotly sought after manuscript - I don't think I'm spoiler-ing to say there's some gay characters in there. Cat Clarke's new book Undone (Quercus) - the blurb tells you that one of the main characters is gay. That's just two examples (who also happen to be two of the biggest names in UK YA at the moment).

Which leads me to my main point...

2) No one is writing them. By which I also mean, no one is writing them well. Featuring a gay character should not be a 'thing', they should just be. I don't want a writer to stand above their character with rainbow lettering and a giant arrow saying THIS ONE'S GAY! Sexuality is not a character trait any more than having brown hair, or eyes or skin is. A raging crush on your mate's sibling, a constant need to change your hair colour, wearing eyeliner to attract attention to your eyes, pride in your family's heritage - those are things that tell you about the person. Knowing someone is gay only tells me that they fancy someone of the same gender. This isn't news. Teen readers want subtly nuanced, clearly drawn, real characters whether they're L B G T or S. The requirements are the same across the board.

I don't have a diversity quota that needs filling and I'm not going to commission a badly written book because I have an agenda. I am waiting - desperately, desperately waiting - for a manuscript to drop on my desk that will help me demonstrate that publishing really doesn't need any straightening out.

All you have to do, is write it.

Thoughts provoked by the Bookseller Children's Conference

I went to the Bookseller Children's Conference yesterday – if you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed my sporadic (lame) attempts at live tweeting. (In my defence, I was mostly trying to write notes with an actual pen on actual paper… 70% of which I can actually decipher today!) It’s the first time I’ve been in a position to go to this particular conference and I found some of it informative, some of it funny, some of it irrelevant. But most of all (and I think this is the point of an industry conference) it got me thinking.

Here are some of the things I’ve been thinking about:

• TIME
• MONEY
• GENDER
• ENGAGEMENT

On the matter of MONEY

Crap. You need a lot of it. We don’t have a lot of it… WE’RE DOOMED!!! But hang on – remember you old adage, Non – you don’t need money to have a good idea. You don’t even need to have the good ideas when a whole platter of them have just been laid out for you by some of the best in this, and other, industries. Sure those guys laugh at a budget of £20,000 for app development (*gulps*), but you don’t need a big budget to adapt the concept of a style guide for branding the identity of a book beyond the physical object…  

On the matter of TIME

Crap. You need a lot of it. We don’t have a lot of it… WE’RE DOOMED!!! OK. So this is a real problem for me. I barely have the time to edit the manuscripts I’ve commissioned inside/outside of my working hours, brief the covers, provide the sales material, prompt the publicity & marketing initiatives, answer emails, meet with agents, read submissions, write the POs, check the proofs... I’m going to have to think about this one (but quickly, because I don’t have much time!). Right. Got it. I am going to copy some of those clever things that other people do ergo avoid spending time learning by making my own mistakes. That’s basically point one again isn’t it? (Yes.)

On the matter of GENDER

Well. You can’t fight this one – here are Bowker’s findings on the gender/genre reading habits of children:

And although I’d like to say the quote of the conference came from the witty and entertaining Chris Riddell or the presentation perfect Sharna Jackson from Tate Kids, the one that sticks with me is Nickelodeon’s market research video where a little boy is asked why he prefers one website to another: “Dora’s for girls.”

Although… Dora is for girls. It’s targeted at girls, it presents information in a way that appeals to girls and well, perhaps this gender-bias is a self-fulfilling prophecy... *stares off into middle distance stroking chin thoughtfully*

Maybe there is room to fight the bias after all?

On the matter of ENGAGEMENT

The marked difference between these games and TV types and these bookish types is that the former do an awful lot of market research. As far as I’m aware (and correct me if I’m wrong), publishers don’t do this. And, do you know what? I don’t think we should. Online games, TV etc… these are meant to be pure entertainment forms, their sole purpose is to give children what they want so that they come back again and again and again. These industries have to do this because they rely on advertising for their revenue, and if they can’t gurautnee a large audience, advertisers won’t pay the money.

Free from the bonds of advertising (I say 'free' because I am putting a positive spin on the difference in revenue directed towards the industry I love so much), children’s publishing has a different agenda. It’s not solely about giving the children what they want. It’s about getting them to expand their minds. It’s a feeling of being ‘in this together’ across the whole industry: we just want one book – any book – to cause a child to want to pick up another, and another, and another. Obviously if you’re getting the commissioning right you want them to pick up ones you’ve published, but really, we just want them to become voracious readers of all the books. And to nurture the reading habit requires giving a reader a challenge that they might not know that they’re willing to rise to meet, so that they start reading different books from the ones that they’ve already mastered. So they move around the smorgasbord of books on offer and become more engaged as they evolve as readers. They aren't just candyfloss for the brain.

Eric Huang (@dinoboy89) from Penguin finished the conference on a fantastic statement about curating stories and encouraging children to go out into the world and find their own. Or something like that. (It's in the 30% of notes I can't read, sorry.) And if there’s one thing that I took away, above all else, it is that stories matter.

Slow Non

I am struggling a bit at the moment.

I say "at the moment" but the moment feel very long - especially if you are someone I'm struggling to find time for. It's a lot of factors - too boring, too long and too time-consuming to list - but if I weren't working largely on my own, then some of the pressure would be alleviated.

Of course I don't work completely alone. I have the support and enthusiasm of a great team of reps and marketeers at Bounce Sales and Marketing who recently launched this amazing website. (Check it out, there's a world of information there that makes my mind boggle when I think of how much work went into creating it.) And I work with some great freelancers - one publicist working one day a week, one editor working one day a week and another who has taken a whole book on board to develop with the kind of consistency of care that every book on our list deserves.

But teams of freelancers do not a workforce make. I am the workforce, and I work four days a week producing 22 books a year - not to mention the reprints and the special orders that don't get the same fanfare as a new title. 

Sometimes - frequently - I feel that I am not doing enough. I should be faster, stronger, more amazinger. "Look at the great books we publish!" I say. "These books deserve everything I can give them. Give them more, Non. MORE I SAY."

But I am finite and I get frustrated at how slow I am all the time. Can't I just be much faster? At reading? At editing? I'm getting faster at emails to the point that my brevity borders on rude - unfortunately I don't think anyone will forgive me one-word answers in the subject line alone.

And then, just now I read this blog over at Brooklyn Arden and it made me feel a lot less rubbish. Because it turns out that there's a reason why I'm slow. And that's because I'm actually doing it properly.

I love this blogpost, because it made me feel better about myself. So, check it out, and you'll see a life an editor's life in publishing:

Six Reasons Why Everything in Publishing Takes So Long

And for anyone wondering how I found the time to write this blogpost, it took me 8 minutes between replying to my last email of the day and before the Catnipper emerged from bathtime ready for me to read her three stories and kiss her good night.

The art of losing

Some <insert favoured noun for idiot here> wrote a thing in the Guardian about why non-gold-medal-winning Olympic competitors should not be applauded. It's an opinion piece on why athletes should not be heralded as successful without succeeding and that we should not cast the achievements of non-winning competitors as being anything other than failure.

I don't have a problem with someone earning a living by pitching up to an athletics track and coming in last each time, if they do it with all the commitment and professionalism of the person who crosses the finish line first. Without losers, you don't have winners. Fact. If there weren't any silver or bronze medallists in the Olympics, then there wouldn't have been any competition in the first place. And without competition, there'd be no reason for the winner to be that good. Without worthy opponents, what's the point in upping your game?

This doesn't just speak for sportspeople but for all awards, all businesses, all industries, all governments. Competition breeds a better quality of competitor all round. So we should celebrate the losers for trying every inch as hard as the winners. Today may not be their day, but tomorrow might be if they keep up that commitment and professionalism that got them there in the first place.

On behalf of not-yet-winners everywhere: go team.