Commentary Arts Council funding

Today’s Scotsman newspaper carried an article about the abolition, in the financial year 2008-2009, of ‘block funding’ for Scottish publishers by the Scottish Arts Council. The publishing block fund enabled the Scottish Arts Council’s Literature department to provide sums (generally in the region of £15,000-£20,000) to a variety of Scottish publishers to help them develop their lists.

Two Ravens Press was quoted as follows:

David Knowles, a co-founder of Ullapool's Two Ravens Press, a new company that has been earning rave reviews for its pioneering book list, said it was told not to apply for a grant.

"It doesn't mean we are going to shut down, but it would have been a major change to our whole financial profile," he said.

He and his partner funded Two Ravens with £25,000 of their own money. "Had we been able to get £15-20,000, we would have been even more adventurous than we already are. We are going to have to be financially cautious."

This news item throws the spotlight on a number of really difficult issues relating to public funding for the Arts as a whole, and more specifically for businesses operating in an Arts environment. When we established Two Ravens Press in 2006, we were determined that we would do it on our own, with no bank loans to worry about and no unhealthy reliance on public funding of any kind. We were given a small ‘start-up’ loan by the local Enterprise Company, for £2,500. We were also fortunate enough to be able to lay our hands on a reasonable amount of cash to fund the company’s overheads and the cost of printing the books that we’re now selling. We were also quite clear that over a very small number of years we would not only need to make that money back, but we’d need to start making a living – at a minimum, part of a living – from the publishing business. Over the course of the next year we were given a total of around £8000 by the Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of four specific titles that we (and they) believed were worthy of publication but that were unlikely to make much, if any, profit. So: a total of around £10,000 public funding to create an entirely new business and a very risky literary/innovative list of 33 books in the first two years of operation.

In a sense, this suits us fine. We’ve always had the view that if a business isn’t sustainable financially then it isn’t viable and you’d be well advised to go and find something else to do. If people won’t buy your books then maybe they don’t want them – maybe there’s no market for them and you should just leave the publishers of celebrity autobiographies to do their thing. In some ways, then, we wonder about whether public funding for private businesses on an ongoing basis is really a good thing. Especially when a good deal of that funding goes to businesses that are already making a clear profit.

But here’s the problem: when the best you can hope for from the average book that you might publish as a small literary press is a profit of £500 (and that’s not counting the ones that don’t ever make a profit) then you have no wherewithal to take risks. Example: we were recently offered the opportunity to translate from the French an innovative novel from a highly-regarded French writer and philosopher. She’s unlikely to make the bestseller list, but there is interest in her work from both academics and selected readers. She would be a coup for the Two Ravens Press list. Problem: this is a very difficult, innovative piece of work and would cost around £5000 to translate. It simply would be impossible for us to find that kind of money when the chances are we’d never make it back. Right now we have yet to make a profit at all, and it’s difficult to envisage what it would take to make as much as £5000 profit in an entire year! So, without Arts Council or other funding we would have to turn that book down. There are very few publishers of innovative literature out there, and the chances are that a major and ground-breaking piece of work would never get translated into English.

And that’s the kind of thing that, sceptical though we are, Arts Council funding is good for. It enables you to take risks; it means you don’t always have to play it safe because ultimately you have somehow to pay the electricity bill. It can help a small publisher like us, in the first very difficult year or two of operation, not to line our pockets but to build a strong list and a strong voice and a rare home for literary and innovative fiction. After all, where else in this conservative and homogenised book market are you going to go for Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing, for category-breaking work like Angela Morgan Cutler’s Auschwitz?

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Note: since we first wrote this article, the debate has continued to rage.

In Sunday 4 May's Observer newspaper there was an article by Brian Morton that we believe is the most reasoned and articulate yet to appear about the issue of why cuts in block funding to small publishers matter. He says:

'...the block grant affords publishers a ... kind of creative 'space' to develop a strong literary list. There is no doubt that the branch of writing which will suffer most under the new - or temporary - remit is literary fiction. Developing a history, (auto)biography or other special-interest list doesn't involve the same level of investment of risk. Such books sell; they don't need to be sold in the same way.'

To read the entire article, click on this link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/04/scotland